Chapter 9: The Basic Food Groups, or Much of What You Have Been Taught About Diet is Probably Wrong / Read It Online!

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Perhaps the most curious fact about diet, nutrition, and medication is that while we can make accurate generalizations about how most of us will react to a particular diet or medical regimen, each individual will react somewhat differently to a given food.

The foods we consume, once you take away the water and undigestible contents, can be grouped into three major categories: protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Seldom is food from one of these major groups solely one type of nutrient. Protein foods often contain fat; carbohydrate foods frequently contain some protein and fat. The only foods that are virtually 100 percent fat are oils, butter, and margarine.

Since our principal concern here is blood sugar control, we'll concentrate on how the three major types of nutrients affect blood sugar. If you're a long-standing diabetic and have followed the standard ADA diet for years, you'll find that much of what you're about to read is radically at odds with the ADA's dietary guidelines—and with good reason, as you'll soon learn.

When we eat, the digestive process breaks down the three major food groups into their building blocks. These building blocks are then absorbed into the bloodstream and reassembled into the various products our bodies need in order to function.

Protein

We acquire dietary protein from many sources, but the foods that are richest in it are egg whites, cheese, and meat (including fish and fowl). Protein is available in much lower amounts from vegetable sources such as legumes (beans), seeds, and nuts, which also contain the other nutrients, fat and carbohydrate.*

As stunning as it sounds—and unbelievable, given the popular media's recent love affair with a high "complex" carbohydrate, low-fat diet—you can quite easily survive on a diet in which you would eat no carbohydrate. Furthermore, by sticking to a diet that contains no carbohydrate, but high levels of fat and protein, you can reduce your cardiac risk profile—serum cholesterol, blood lipids, et cetera—though you'd deprive yourself of all the "fun foods" that we crave most. We've all been trained to think that carbohydrates are our best, most benign source of food, so how can this be?

Protein is the second of our two dietary sources of blood sugar. Protein foods are only about 20 percent protein by weight (6 grams per ounce), the rest being fat, water, or undigestible "gristle." The liver, instructed by the hormone glucagon, can very slowly transform as much as 52 percent of the above 6 grams per ounce into glucose† if blood sugar descends too low or the body's other amino acid needs have been met. Neither carbohydrate nor fat can be transformed into protein.

In the 1920s, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson noted in his travels that Eskimos seemed to fare quite nicely on a zero-carbohydrate diet (the Arctic being not exactly the ideal climate for cultivating fruits, grain, or vegetables). Under the watchful eyes of physicians from New York's Cornell University Medical College and Bellevue Hospital, Stefansson and a colleague submitted themselves to a meat-only diet for a year. They ate 2,500 calories a day, of which 75 percent was fat. As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, on July 6, 1929, the two men finished out their year of a no-carbohydrate diet not only slimmer—each had lost 6 pounds—but with reduced (and completely normal) cholesterol. It's worth repeating that the men were eating a diet with 75 percent of the calories coming from fat. Current recommendations are to eat no more than 30 percent of calories as fat—which very few people can maintain—and there are some recommendations for even lower percentages than that.

This is almost precisely the opposite of the prevailing "wisdom," which says that if you want to lose weight and get your cholesterol down, you need to eat lots of fruit, vegetables, and grain products, and cut out meat as much as possible. Despite this prevailing "wisdom," many contemporary dietary researchers exploring this phenomenon have begun to arrive at the conclusion that a high-carbohydrate diet is not so benign. In fact, it has been shown—and it is my own observation—that such a diet can increase body weight, increase blood insulin levels, and raise most cardiac risk factors. Why?

The answer is really quite simple. The advent of our agricultural society is comparatively recent in evolutionary terms—that is, it began only about 10,000 years ago. For the millions of years that preceded the constant availability of grain and vegetable products, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and ate what was available to them in the immediate environment, primarily meat, fish, nuts—food that was present year-round, and predominantly protein and fat. In the summers they may have eaten fruits and berries that were available locally in some regions, but if they stored away fat during those seasons, that fat was quickly burned up during the winter. Although for the past two centuries, fruit, grain, and vegetables have, in one form or another, been available to us in this country year-round, our collective food supply has historically been interrupted often by famine—in some cultures more than others. The history of the planet as best as we can determine is one of feast and famine, and suggests that famine will strike again and again. The recent famines in Ethiopia and Somalia are examples.

Curiously, the genetic predisposition toward obesity, or what today seems in our society to be a predisposition toward obesity, functioned during the famines of prehistory as an effective method of survival. Ironically, the ancestors of those who today are most at risk for Type II diabetes were, during prehistory, not the sick and dying, but the survivors. If famine struck today in the United States, guess who would survive most easily? The same people who are most at risk for Type II diabetes.

You can take this knowledge and make it work for you rather than against you.
If you give it some thought, it makes perfect sense: If a farmer wants to fatten up his pigs or cows, he doesn't feed them meat or butter and eggs, he feeds them grain. If you want to fatten yourself up, just start loading up on bread, pasta, potatoes, cake, and cookies—all high-carbohydrate foods. If you are already obese, you know and I know that you crave—and consume—these foods and probably avoid fats.

In many respects—and going against the grain of a number of the medical establishment's accepted notions about diabetics and protein—protein will become the most important part of your diet if you are going to control blood sugars.

If you are a long-standing diabetic and are frustrated with the care you've received over the years, you have probably been conditioned to think that protein is more of a poison than sugar and is the cause of kidney disease. I was conditioned the same way—many years ago, as I mentioned, I had laboratory evidence of advanced proteinuria, signifying potentially fatal kidney disease—but in this case, the conventional wisdom is just a myth.

Nondiabetics who eat a lot of protein don't get diabetic kidney disease. Diabetics with normalized blood sugars don't get diabetic kidney disease. High levels of dietary protein do not cause kidney disease in diabetics or anyone else. There is no higher incidence of kidney disease in the cattle-growing states of the United States, where many people eat steak every day, than there is in the states where beef is more expensive and consumed to a much lesser degree. Similarly, the incidence of kidney disease in vegetarians is the same as the incidence of kidney disease in nonvegetarians. It is the high blood sugar levels that are unique to diabetes, and to a much lesser degree the high levels of insulin required to cover them (causing hypertension), that cause the complications associated with diabetes.

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