Apparently the great Dr. Oz found out what many other people already know. Anyone who eats the Standard American Diet is basically in the middle of a crap-shoot. A game of chance.

“The only thing holding me back from a terrible outcome is the dumb luck that I checked myself out for the show.”

Is that the belief out there, that all a healthy diet does is decrease your odds of catching a disease? Of course it is. Everything is based on risk and risk factors. They don’t know what causes these diseases or how to stop, cure or prevent them so they basically urge the public to hedge its bets on what they believe to be the best practices. No science involved. That stuff gets ignored. Instead, they rely on faith and luck. Why would a person eating a healthy diet have to worry about colon cancer? After all, isolated populations who eat very little to no carbohydrates (under 70 pounds per person per year) suffer no colon cancer. There are a couple of populations that appear to eat more than that yet have no colon cancer, but perhaps they rely on Oz-ian luck or we don’t really have the full details of what exactly they eat and in what quantities they eat it. Be that as it may, just as Dr. Weston Price found when he toured the sub-Sahara, the healthiest tribes had the least amount of vegetable matter.

“Patients who smoke, eat diets high in red and processed meats, drink too much alcohol, don’t exercise, and are obese are at increased risk of colorectal cancer,” he wrote. “So Mehmet’s healthy lifestyle may actually have protected him from having a bigger polyp – or even colorectal cancer by now.”

That’s one way you could look at it. But the use of the word “may” clearly indicates that this is not foolproof. It’s also fair to say that there are multitudes who do eat diets high in red and processed meats, drink alcohol, don’t exercise, are obese yet don’t get colon cancer. And so it goes with all chronic disease. When chronic disease enters a population (very easy and very plain to see, especially when there was none heretofore), all of the diseases appear within an extremely short time. Not everyone gets the same thing, but they all get something and the entire spectrum of chronic disease is observed. Each generation manifests chronic disease even quicker than their predecessors. One cannot out-exercise a bad diet. It must be changed. When you do it correctly, you can skip the exercise and you’ll be just fine.

So what does cholesterol have to do with non-stick pans? Not too much really, except that it was merely present among the variables in a study where people’s cholesterol went up after eating food prepared in non-stick pans. The findings do not prove exposure to these chemicals, called perfluoroalkyl acids, caused the higher readings, but they show a link and suggest the need for more study, Stephanie Frisbee of West Virginia University and colleagues wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

I’ve written many times in this space about the importance of understanding cholesterol and blood lipids. What factors and numbers are important and which are not. This study has not affected any of the information I have previously written about. Many foods raise total cholesterol but any short term cholesterol rise is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on which subcomponent was raised and how that rise came about. If it was because the LDL particles got bigger and fluffier, then a person should rejoice. If a food lowered LDL, then the question is how. If it did so by taking formerly fluffy particles and making them small and dense, that’s a problem.

The researchers studied perfluorooctanoic acid or PFOA and perfluorooctanesulfonate or PFOS. They make their way into people through drinking water, dust, food packaging, breast milk, cord blood, microwave popcorn, air and occupational exposure, according to the researchers. Studies in animals suggest perfluoroalkyl acid can affect the liver, which could result in changes in cholesterol levels. Frisbee and colleagues examined cholesterol levels in blood samples taken from more than 12,000 children in the mid-Ohio River Valley who had PFOA in their drinking water. Children and teens in the study had more PFOA in their bodies than the national average, and a PFOS concentration about the same as the national average.

Children and teens with the highest PFOA concentration had total cholesterol levels that were 4.6 points higher and LDL levels that were 3.8 points higher than those with the lowest PFOA levels. The team said the findings suggest an association between the compounds and higher cholesterol, but it would take more studies to prove chemical exposure was the cause. It also takes an understanding of LDL cholesterol. Two people may have the same reading but one of them could be at risk for heart disease and the other could be fully protected. It all depends on the size of the particles on the LDL. A simple cholesterol test would not indicate which was which and these irresponsible researchers should know better. I wouldn’t expect some lay person to know, but certainly one who makes their living doing this stuff.

So if the studies don’t prove chemical exposure was the cause, then it’s very difficult to say that nonstick pans were the cause. It could have been any of these things. Not only that, but the change may have even been beneficial but the researchers did not perform the proper tests to know. Instead, they relied on oversimplified, easy-to-measure home cholesterol screening tests in order to report their findings. That doesn’t stop the media from giving the coverage of the study some controversial title in order to induce fear and get people to read it. If a person doesn’t understand, they might start throwing out all of their nonstick pots. We also have to be very careful of animal studies. Just because it affects an animal in a particular way, does not mean that same effect will be observed in humans. People do idiotic things like feed rabbits saturated fat. The rabbits get all fat and die and people say, “see, that’s what happens when you eat saturated fat.” Doesn’t occur to these geniuses that rabbits are herbivores….

Whenever I see that a nutritionist has seen the light, it’s truly a spiritual experience. I’m telling you, it’s quite an event. This goes against all their training and education. It’s even dangerous to take such a position because you can lose professional credibility among those of your religion. Yes, I said it. Modern nutrition is a science that functions like a religion. Science does not rule the day. Its advocates go on and on with religion zeal and fervor. Anyone who opposes them gets labeled a quack and finds it difficult to earn a living. It’s a sad state of affairs.

However, there are people like Linda Prout of the Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon who restore my faith in nutritionists. She wrote:

Eating fat actually may help you get thin. An honest look at the research shows fat is not a villain in the war on obesity, diabetes or other diseases of aging. It’s actually the cure.

She continues by relating how as a nutritionist, she had a hard time believing this at first. But in her own battle with weight, one of the biggest mistakes she made was to cut out fats. She eliminated all the butter, oil, fatty meats, nuts, cheeses and sauces she could. Her metabolism ground to a halt, her blood pressure went up, she grew fat and all she could think about was getting to her next sweet fix. Only by adding back beneficial fats did she find relief.

About 30 years ago, the National Institutes of Health declared fat the single most unhealthy component of our diet. University professors lectured us on its perils and insisted we cut back even further than the recommended limit that fat provide 30 percent of our calories. The research, they promised, was coming, but the government wasted no time launching a full-scale assault to get Americans to back off the butter.

Americans listened and cut back their fat consumption by 25 percent. Thirty years later, we are fatter than ever and diabetes is out of control. An incredible 65 percent of the population is overweight and the very thing that the anti-fat campaign was intended to affect, heart disease rates, have remained steady and even increased since the national intervention was put into place.

The proof that fat is fattening has NEVER came. Harvard’s Women’s Health Initiative, an eight-year study of 49,000 women, found low-fat diets do nothing for weight loss, nor do they prevent heart attacks, breast or colon cancers, or strokes. In fact, women with heart disease who switched to low-fat eating experienced a 26 percent increase in heart disease deaths. According to Harvard University’s website, this is “the final nail in the coffin” for low-fat diets.

Although it seems logical that fat would make us fat, it doesn’t. Butter and lard don’t turn to thigh bulges. The body is more complicated than that. It turns out to be the original suspect — carbohydrates — especially sugars, that turn the body into a fat-making machine. If you’re old enough, you remember diet plates of burgers, sans bun and cottage cheese. To get fat, you need the fat-storing hormone insulin. Without insulin, fat just doesn’t get into fat cells, even though you may be eating loads of it. Ask any diabetic what happens when their insulin shuts down: The pounds fall off, even on a diet of Big Macs and fries! When they start taking insulin, the body fattens up again. Insulin spikes when we drink soda or eat bread, pasta, cookies, candy and other carbs, not fat.

Storing fat also requires a special glycerol molecule, which you can only get from carbohydrates. Without glycerol, you just can’t get fat. Despite eating ladles of beurre blanc sauce on your marbled T-bone, you can’t get fat to store in your thighs — unless you eat the potato.

Bottom line? A steady diet of sweets may beef you up faster than drinking melted butter.

I encourage you to read the entire article and decide for yourself. Better yet, put it into practice. Try restricting the sugar and see if your health doesn’t improve.

Have you ever wondered why some people could smoke their entire lives and be just fine and some could get cancer from second-hand smoke? It was clear that when people stopped smoking for the most part, the rates of cancer decreased dramatically — at least, with regard to cancer of the esophagus.

It’s pretty clear to most observers that when a person stops smoking, they tend to gain quite a bit of weight and they have a sweet tooth that cannot be contained. They are used to the quick metabolism that nicotine provided them. Next to Fen-Phen, nicotine is known to be the best weight loss drug out there despite the gruesome side effects. I’ve long theorized that if a person were to go from smoking directly to a diet of meat and water, they would not have the weight gain, the cravings, and their bodies would stabilize much quicker than if they would turn to the standard American diet of processed and easily digestible carbohydrates.

Despite the improvements from the decrease in smoking, it seems that esophageal cancer is again on the rise. The Cancer Research UK figures showed that while in 1983, 9.6 in every 100,000 men in Britain were diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, now it is 14.4 — an increase of 50 percent. This rate of increase occurred in a single generation leading scientists to speculate that this was brought about by obesity and poor diet.

That would make esophageal cancer a disease of civilization, which it truly is. In other words, those populations that don’t eat according to the Western dietary ideas, don’t end up with these diseases. The researchers in this case want to blame a diet high in saturated fat, but we don’t find any cultures who ate diets high in saturated fat with esophageal cancer. However, we do find many populations with esophageal cancer who eat a diet high in carbohydrates, I realize that scientists tend to lump all saturated fat together such as the fat found in fried carbohydrates and the like, but this association vanishes when the carbohydrates are removed from the picture.

The US and England clearly have a well-known history but we have also mirrored each other in many areas. In the early 1900s, for example, we were both nations full of meat eaters who rarely if ever touched a vegetable. Cancer was pretty much unheard of and only the really aged among us came down with any form of chronic disease. We both had a sweet tooth which contributed to our declining health but during periods such as war years, we were deprived of our ability to indulge and our health improved dramatically.

We also suffer in societies where oversimplification can become the rule and serve to wreck many lives. I can think of no greater oversimplification than the idea of weight-loss surgery. If everyone became fat by merely having a big stomach, then a procedure to shrink the stomach might make intellectual sense because it would force them to eat less. However, we know this is simply an oversimplification since plenty of studies show that the obese really eat no more than the lean. Moreover, people tend to fatten differently which follows their genetic more than anything else. People in families tend to fatten the same way. Some people don’t appear fat in clothes, but a closer look reveals that they have many fat areas which genetically don’t get as big as other people. However, they are just as unhealthy.

Just look around as you go outside today and take a look at the various ways in which people fatten. Some have the belly flab but many others don’t. Some appear thin but have love handles around the waist. They may have large upper bodies and skinny legs or vice versa. Some are just big all over. Some are skinny, but they have no noticeable muscle and they still have cellulite on their legs and other places despite being relatively lean. So shrinking their stomach may help somewhat but what about all the fat on the arms, legs, face, upper torso, back, love handles, etc.

Yes, one has removed part of the stomach but they haven’t began to touch on the reason for the obesity in the first place. That makes this procedure similar to gastric bypass or any number of other procedures that only treat symptoms of the illness and do absolutely nothing to thwart the cause. Both of our nations, England and the US have become very good at treating the symptoms over the years but we’re both in the dark when it comes to cause.

I was said to see that weight loss surgeries in England have risen tenfold in seven years, according to a new study. Dr. Omar Faiz, a consultant surgeon at St. Mary’s Hospital in London and colleagues monitored the number of weight-loss surgeries done in government hospitals from 2000 to 2008. Overall, they found 6,953 such operations were performed, including three different types of surgeries, all designed to shrink the size of the patient’s stomach. In 2000, there were 238 weight loss surgeries, but by 2007 there were 2,543 such operations. The study was paid for by Britain’s National Institute of Health Research.

Faiz and colleagues found that the majority of patients who got the weight loss surgeries were women and were from poorer areas. Most patients were in their 40s. The surgeries also appeared to be safe; the risk of dying one year after the surgery was about 1 percent. The study was published Friday in the medical journal, BMJ.

“It’s very alarming that people have been allowed to get so fat without anyone intervening in time. The fat are getting fatter and fatter and the gap between the healthy and the very unhealthy is growing. People have the idea that they can eat and eat and then get (weight loss surgery) to solve the problem. That will be disastrous both for the individual and for the state.”

said Tam Fry, spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, a British advocacy group.

He was not connected to the BMJ study. Hard to argue with Mr. Fry, but oversimplifications like this don’t really help. If it were just a matter of how much was being consumed, then he would be correct. Notice that the surgeries are highest among the poor which makes one wonder how they are eating so much more than the rich. That only makes sense if one considers what the poor tend to eat which is cheap, processed and easily digestible carbohydrates.

When you consider this that way, then we should not be surprised by the rise in efforts to do something about the inevitable weight gain that accompanies such a diet. The poor don’t understand the cause and treatment of obesity any more or less than our experts who oversimplify both the problem and what they perceive as the solution.

Say that five times really quickly….

To understand this headline properly, you have to understand the perspective that the researchers have. This is a new Swedish study that suggests that even after a person is successful with the accepted way to lose weight — diet and exercise, that a bout of overeating can coupled with sedentary behavior can cause weight gain even after the person has resumed their attempts at so-called healthier living. Even the writer of the article clearly reveals their religious zeal by writing words like this:

“even after the person has become an upstanding, healthy individual

So the person who has become fat is a glutton and therefore an unhealthy, baser element of society lacking self-control. Yet, if they can overcome their base instincts and semi-starve themselves and run a marathon, they can overcome and be thought of as healthy and “upstanding.” Don’t laugh. This religion pervades the thought patterns of many people. They think the cure to obesity is as simple as eating less and moving more. That’s it. So what if it doesn’t work for the majority of the population….They strain impossibly to find a link between health, starvation and exercise. They swear we are little machines that have to keep running at near full capacity in order to run at their best.

Eighteen healthy people of normal weight were given the arduous task of limiting their physical activity (to no more than 5,000 steps a day) and increasing their food intake for four weeks. The participants in this so-called intervention group ate 70 percent more food, for a total of about 5,753 calories a day, over the study period.
At the study’s start, the participants, whose average age was 26, had to be willing to gain between 5 percent and 15 percent of their weight in the name of science. The control group ate their normal fare.

The intervention group added 14 pounds on average but they lost 71 percent of this weight in the six months following the study. However, after one year, they still maintained more body fat than they did prior to the study. After 2.5 years, the intervention group gained 6.8 pounds whereas those in the control group did not gain any weight on average. The researchers interpreted the data to mean that the long-term difference in body weight in the intervention and control groups suggests that there is an extended effect on fat mass after a short period of large food consumption and minimal exercise.

I wonder what would have happened if they allowed the intervention group to eat 5,000 calories of meat while abstaining from carbohydrates. Would the results have been different? I’m positive they would have been.

We have many studies that show that low-carb dieters are able to lose significant amounts of weight while decreasing their caloric intake and even their activity levels after an initial period of eating a great deal more calories than they were used to. Why don’t they continue to gain weight even two or three years later? Indeed, I ate much more during my weight loss years than I do today yet I have kept my weight off rather effortlessly.

I think that what this study provides us with is the effect of sedentary behavior coupled with a poor diet. I would like to know more about what these individual actually ate but I would have to think that it was largely carbohydrate-based. The control group also ate their normal fare and went about their lives according to their normal way. So those in the intervention group had their metabolisms impacted upon in a powerful way and the only thing I can think of that can do that, not counting illness, are refined and easily digestible carbohydrates.