Month: September 2013

Harvard and Nurses Study on fats and carbohydrates

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Harvard and Nurses Study on fats and carbohydrates

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I read a lot of stuff about diabetes, and everything related. And I have a particular interest in food as it relates to diabetes, health and weight. Don’t we all?

“Fats and Cholesterol: Out with the Bad, In with the Good”, an article from Harvard School of Public Health, is one of the best articles I’ve read in a while on the topic – it’s easy to read – and it expresses what I think to a tee. 

Primarily, that America got fatter when we took fat out of foods and put sugar in. That we have become obese, not due as much to eating fat, as eating refined carbohydrates. And yes, bad fats like Trans fats found in most fried and baked goods, are bad for you, but good fats like avocados, nuts and olive oil are healthy and your body needs them to function properly.

This is relevant whether you have diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, want to lose weight or frankly, in my book, are just walking around on the planet.

Here are a few major tale-away messages from the article:

• Bad fats, meaning trans and saturated fats, increase the risk for certain diseases. Good fats, meaning monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, do just the opposite. They are good for the heart and most other parts of the body.

• When people cut back on fat, they often switch to foods full of easily digested carbohydrates—white bread, white rice, potatoes, sugary drinks, and the like—or to fat-free products that replace healthful fats with sugar and refined carbohydrates. The body digests these carbohydrates very quickly, causing blood sugar and insulin levels to spike. Over time, eating lots of “fast carbs” can raise the risk of heart disease and diabetes as much as—or more than—eating too much saturated fat. 

• It’s important to replace foods high in bad fats with foods high in good fats—not with refined carbohydrates.

It’s worth reading the entire article and if need be making some adjustments in your diet and see if they don’t benefit you.

 

Dr. Robert Lustig says fructose is poison, and I believe him

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Robert Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco who is carrying the charge that fructose kills. I’ve just spent the afternoon listening to a radio interview he gave recently, watching his lecture,“Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” and watching a series of YouTube mini documentaries he gives about obesity. 

In short, Lustig says sugar, specifically fructose, is a toxin given the way our body biochemically metabolizes it. That it actually turns to fat and that obesity is not the cause of metabolic diseases like Type 2 diabetes, hypertension,cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, but a marker of these. 20% of obese people will never get one of these diseases.

I agree with Lustig about sugar and refined carbohydrates being our undoing. If you read my new book, Diabetes Do’s & How-To’s, I emphatically say fat is not what makes us fat but sugar, or refined carbohydrate. Carbs cause the body to pump out excess insulin (a fat storage hormone) and carbs we don’t burn get stored as fat. Lustig will tell you the 6.5 ounce Coke that has morphed into the 44 ounce Big Gulp is the devil incarnate.

Twenty five years ago when America went on a low fat diet, people’s diets reduced in fat Lustig says from 40% to 30%. That doesn’t sound like much, but what happened is the carbohydrates we consumed skyrocketed. Take the fat out of food and it tastes like cardboard. Put sugar in and consumers won’t notice. In fact, they’ll like it so much, they’ll eat even more to it! Food manufacturers are not stupid. 

In fact, they are ingenious, and spend millions of dollars perfecting recipes that get us hooked on the sublime combination of sugar, salt and fat. But Lustig’s biochemistry lesson will help you understand why fructose is so especially causing our out of control obesity.

Lustig’s proposition is that we could not have, as a nation, and now as a global society – with American fast food now exported everywhere and the rise in obesity paralleling it – gotten obese merely from eating more and moving less.

No, he will tell you it is about what’s in our food and how the body uses it. “A calories is not a calorie,” says Lustig, yet he says they teach dietitians just the opposite the first day of school.

I am consumed (yes, pun) with this debate: what causes obesity, how are our modern day chronic metabolic diseases impacted by what we eat, obesity and how food is being reengineered and what role our environment plays. Where does personal responsibility figure into this and what responsibility does our government and food manufacturers have? A lot in my opinion, yet everyone’s hand is in someone’s pocket.

Personally, I believe if we cut refined carbs out of our diet, including sugared beverages, and ate real food – not processed or packaged – but things that grow on trees and in the ground, relatively untouched by human hands, and animals that are responsibly raised, we would not have an obesity epidemic.

Five life lessons turning 60!

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I turn 60 tomorrow. How did that happen? My mother’s probably asking herself the same question up in Connecticut. I’d say just putting one foot in front of the other every day. But the occasion does give me pause to think about what I’ve learned so far.

(By the way, this picture was two years ago me shooting up before my meal. My friend P. to my right looks a little startled, but then I’m a teacher and this was a teachable moment.) 

It hasn’t all been easy. I was a shy and quiet kid. People would tease me by saying I was talking too much. Today I speak to all kinds of groups, small and large and love it. No one who knew me then would imagine me now. But my deepest desire always was to help others believe in themselves. Today I do it around diabetes which I could have never predicted.

I couldn’t ask to be in a better place on the eve of my sixtieth birthday. I am married to my true partner in life, in love and in work. My parents are still here. I have a treasure trove of dear friends, and acquaintances who bless me with their fellowship through diabetes. I love where I live, which was a lifelong riddle to solve. And I travel voraciously. To towns large and small across the States, as an A1C Champion, which I love and across the ocean. That’s what you get for marrying a European. How lucky he, and his frequent flier miles, fit right in with my wish list. And growing up a listener serves me well in the work I do today, as a health coach, writing on The Huffington Post, writing books and speaking at conferences and as a peer-mentor.

Turning fifty was a hard one. It was the first time I realized there was more time behind me than in front of me. But even though that’s even more the case now, I’m kinda tickled to be turning sixty. I think of all I’ve accomplished and where I’m so contentedly sitting in my life right now.

So tonight, looking back on six decades – true, I don’t remember the first several years, alright let’s be honest, the first decade – I realize maybe I’ve learned a few things worth passing on to my younger friends and colleagues.

5 Lessons I’ve Learned Along the Way

1. Don’t measure your success against anyone else’s. In my twenties I was jealous of how many people around me were clear about what they wanted to do, were on their path achieving so much. I felt I was floundering. Searching for what work I was meant to do, where, how. What cured me of that was when a friend I envied, got a tumor. Surprisingly, I nursed her through it. But I realized, you don’t know what’s on anyone’s road ahead, including your own, good and bad. Just be on your road.

2. Look for the silver lining. I got type 1 diabetes at 18. I’ve had it 41 and a half years. I was misdiagnosed initially as a type 2; after all only kids get type 1. The first decade I had it there were no meters to test my blood and we knew so little about food, etc. But having been there, I’m so grateful I’m here. And I see what I’ve gained from having diabetes – a commitment to my health. I’m convinced I wouldn’t eat as healthfully as I do, walk as I do or keep myself trim and fit if not for diabetes. And maybe I wouldn’t have fulfilled my need to find purposeful work. Most days I truly look at what I have, not what I don’t.

3. Be kind. If I do one thing passing this way in life I hope it’s that I’m kind. It’s selfish; I like making people feel seen, whether it’s my waiter or the girl who checks out my groceries at the supermarket. At my first job in public broadcasting a colleague taught me this lesson unknowingly. I would watch her make the guy who parked her car feel equally important to the President of the company. She talked to them both with the same regard. 

4. Savor the simple stuff. I think this is something that comes with age. When I’m cooking in the kitchen listening to Sade or Patti Austen, sipping a glass of wine, and my husband is working feet away in the living room (a tiny one bedroom city apartment) I am happy. These are the moments they tell you you will recall in the end. I believe they’re right.

5. Pat yourself on the back more. I think women especially are enormously critical of themselves. We’re not enough, we don’t measure up, if we fail, why did we even think we could do it in the first place? If we succeed, we got lucky. Fuggedaboutit! You are a gem, maybe a diamond in the rough, but a gem. Cherish daily accomplishments, and your efforts. Whoever made us think we were supposed to be perfect at everything?   

When I was 18 and diagnosed with diabetes, it was unreal. One pill a day and “don’t eat candy” kept it unreal for years. As it sunk in, I mourned the complications I would inevitably get and the 15 year shorter lifespan I was told I’d have. 

Hmmm, I haven’t got any complications, and I no longer expect my life to be any shorter than anyone else’s.  

When I was 54 years old my good friend, Deborah O’Hara, died from cancer. She was only 59, and my first good friend to die. Funny, she came from a small town in upstate New York but we met in Asia. She lived in Hong Kong and I lived in Tokyo and our work made our paths cross.  

We don’t know what’s on our path. But when my mother calls me tomorrow and says, “How can I have a 60 year old daughter?” we both know it all goes too fast. You’ll know this as you see more grey hairs. 

You may have to wait before these five lessons mean anything to you, I did. But, I just wanted to share. With that, I’m off to roast some cauliflower and broil the salmon. While listening to Josh Groban and sipping a nice bright white from Spain.