Happy New Year
Well as the world returns to reality after our seasonal break ( well earned and much enjoyed) it was confusing to see the Marks and Spencer’s New Fuller Longer Range announced on the second of January. Surely it is not the first of April so soon?
At first I was delighted. Finally a big corporate has switched on to the fact that protein is a very critical part of the human diet and a key tool for fat loss. I then went on to read that the New M&S range also was carb controlled…whatever that means. Wow was my first reaction.
I then took the trouble to read what was in the new meals!!!! New being the operative word. Well very little was new. Protein had been increased on average by a couple of grams and in some cases the carbs had been increased. Poor old M&S. Do they think we are stupid and that we will simply read their press announcements and not actually check what is in the meals?
To suggest that these meals are significantly different, nutritionally, from any other meals they produce is misleading and to put it bluntly naughty. They also are confusing the whole high protein debate. Any shopper who thinks that the MS new range is high protein will be completely wrong. The piece de resistance was to compare these meals and this dietary programme to Atkins. Poor Dr Atkins must be rolling in his grave. I do hope his wife and the Atkins Foundation brings an action against M&S…I will drop her office a line on this.
Happy New Year!

Clearly it is a new year but the same old message …Mislead the public as much as you can and then flog as much as you can.

How many times a week do I hear a thin, fit person harp on about the benefits of exercise and that all fat people are fat because they don’t do enough? It must be at least once a week and often more. Then there are the people who you see in the gym every week hammering themselves on the running machine or pounding away on the step master machine hoping that being out of breath is going to really make a difference to the ever disappearing waistline.
The belief that exercise per se will make a difference is probably the most wicked of all messages ever handed out. Watching the overweight making themselves sweaty running, while feeling uncomfortable, is painful but knowing that they think the sweaty exercise it is actually helping them lose fat is heart breaking.
I have no idea where this myth about running around came from but there is no doubt about the science which was recently covered in a study published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine.
So if you want to use exercise as a tool in your fat loss programme then you need to know that:-
• Burning calories does not mean fat burn.
• The most effective heart rate for fat burn is 60 – 80% of maximum heart rate which means that you are often better doing lower impact sports.
• The key to using the body as a fat burn tool is metabolic rate and that is determined as much by the amount of muscle you have.
• Building muscle can get your heart rate up to the right fat burning level and then at the same time you can improve your metabolic rate.
Having said all this you still need to know that the fundamental key to burning fat is diet and most diets actually don’t discriminate between fat and muscle so whilst the pounds come off you could be losing the very tissue (muscle) that you need to burn the fat. What is also not often understood is that fat weighs less than muscle so measuring your progress by your weight loss can be very deceptive.
The very intelligent way to use exercise is to understand what it is really doing for you.

Last time I blogged I was really angry about the ridiculous publication of a piece of nonsense research apparently showing no benefit from reducing carbohydrates. The study was funded by the Sugar Board and the poor definition of a “low carb diet” highlighted the poor quality of the study. For god sake, if the Sugar Board is going to fund research designed to bad mouth low carb,it really should do it with a more professional approach.
Well, within days of this silly piece of nonsense there was another study published in Circulation ( the magazine of the American Heart Association ( the same set up as out British Heart Foundation) which showed that guess what …… a low fat diet might not be as good as a moderate fat diet! No way!
That in itself was a good read but the best bit about the whole thing was the comments made by representatives of the AHA.
A moderate-fat diet may work better than a low-fat regimen for people suffering from metabolic syndrome, a collection of conditions putting them at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, new research finds.
“This is a good study that essentially confirms that the current recommendations are appropriate,” said Alice Lichtenstein, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association (AHA). “Since 2000, the AHA has been recommending not a low-fat diet, but one that is low in saturated fats and trans fatty acids.”
Lichtenstein explained that people with metabolic syndrome are glucose-intolerant, meaning they can’t process blood sugar well. Low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets exacerbate this condition.
Now read the following which was also picked up in the US……………………………….!

Dr. Alfred Bove, president of the American College of Cardiology was not surprised by the findings. “This sort of falls within the boundaries of what we used to call the Atkins diet, which was a high-lipid and low-carb diet. Normally this kind of diet suppresses appetite, improves diabetes,” said “This diet looks like it does a good job of altering the negative metabolic effects of early diabetes or high carbohydrate stimulation,” he said.
Could it be that someone somewhere is finally bothering to read the research? Has some great mind suddenly put two and two together and work out that a high carb diet might be actually making the diabetes and obesity epidemic worse?

earliet this year a minor publication otherwise known as the New England Journal of Medicine chose to publish a study which apparently showed that regardless of mutrient content , all that mattered was calories in the fight agains flab.

The study in question discribed one of the diets as Low Carb but in facf the participants all had significantly more than 100 grams of carbs a day. Now whilst it was true that they had less carbs than the low fat group the actaully number of carbs was hurdly low. As there is no strict definition of low carb , nothing can be done in the public arena to explain why it is misleading to discribed that paritcular diet as low carb.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of reading in the journal Diabetes another study which apprently showed how low carbing made no difference wot weight out come and infact suggested that it had negative implications. Apart from the fact that the study was funded by the Sugar Board , that well known carbohydrate organisation it was also interesting to read that the low carb group were getting on average 300 grams of carbs a day.

Anypne with the most basic knowledge of human biochemistry would know that :-

To go into ketosis – (which is the unique state that allows the body to burn fat fast and brings with it many beneifts to CVD risk and Diabetes ) requires less than 60grams of carbs per day.

To control insulin , without ketosis it is usual to limit the intake of carbs to about 100 grams a day which means a diet rich in vegetables and fruit but not alot of starch.

How is it then that a journal like Diabetes can publish a report which is so misleading since most people will read the headline title and the summary and will not bother to read in detail the actual trial which happened to only cover a handful of people. Talk about being misleading.

Perhaps the most improtant thing to do now is to have a proper definiton of low carb and stop this abuse.

Just last week another comparison trial was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and again the results showed that, whilst some experts would love to prove that low starch / high protein is less effective than the standard high starch/ low fat approach, the LSHP diet did better overall.

In particular the LSHP participants were able to maintain lower blood pressure after the weight loss period had ended and found it easier to stick to this form of dieting. It is really easy to follow a LSHP diet because you really dont need to count at all. As usual the HSLF group found it harder to follow and the added health benefits of low blood pressure did not last after the strick dieting ended.

What this trial did not test was inch loss and cholesterol profile and when these have been tested in the past , it is usual to find that the LS/HP group achieves a better cholesterol profile as well as improved inch loss.

How many more clinical studies is it going to take to get someone somewhere to tell the British Public that is possible to lose more fat faster, more efficiently and more sustainably following a low starch high protein diet.

SACN (Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition) an advisory panel to the government announced to day that we should increase our calorific intake guidelines. The guideline for men would rise from 2500 to 2900 and the female guideline whould rise from 2000 to 2400.

So while the Department of Health is busy telling everyone to eat less the so called experts have decided that we are not eating enough.

This is laughable but what is far more interesting but disconcerting is that our experts haven’t woken up to the fact that calorific intake is really a very small part of the whole nutrition equation. Infact it is really a big distraction. Anyone who simply views food as a pile of calories and our bodies as simply a machine that burns calories clearly fails to understand human bio chemisty which does not treat all caloires equally.

No wonder the average person is so confused and why 60% of the UK population is fat.

Could someone somewhere please remind the so called experts that counting calories whether you are fat or thin is pretty much a complete waste of time and energy? We have all been calorie counting like mad for 30 years but guess what …..it hasn’t worked!

Prof Feinman spoke at the 45th EASD Annual Meeting, Vienna, Austria to raise the challanging subject of the unfortuneate link between insulin and starch. It is not often that mere mortals like me get the chance to listen to this man so I thought I would share this link with anyone reading this Blog.

So:-

1 go to http://easd.conference2web.com/content
2 go to page 10
3 look down the list of speakers until you find Prof Feinman
4 Click on the link and listen to his talk.

I know it is a bit of a hassle but there is no other way to get there. Anyone interested in getting thin or worried about diabetes should listen to this Prof in Biochemistry. Find out why eating lots of starch is just not great for you and why the problem is not in the fats we eat but in the starch and the sugar we consume.

Over the past 7 years since I took an interest in low starch / high protein diets there have times when it appeared that no one seemed remotely interested in solving the obesity crises other than by repeating the same inadaquate message of Eat Less – Do More. All that has happened, over the past six years ,while we are getting fatter, is that the tone of audio level of that message has changed from a normal voice to a loud shout. This will remind us all of the classic comedy sketch when the British visitor overseas, speaks to the local in English and when they dont “get it” starts to repeat it again and again but starts to shout or repeat it loudly slowly.

The tourist unable to speak french or spanish will never improve his communication with the locals until he starts to accept that the language is simply not appropriate for them. Shouting Eat less fat and do more to people that have an insulin problem need to understand that it will never work.

Having despaired at times over the lack of interest in low starch high proteing I am pleased to see two more scientific studies published in October which point the finger of blame at high starch / low fat. One is a meta analysis of epidemiological studies throughout Europe which concludes that there is no evidence of a link between low fat and weight loss. The second is a study on the comparative benefits of reducing fat or carbs in a diet. No surprises on the outcome. Whilst weight loss was comparitively similiar lipid profile ( ie cholesterol profile) of the low starch group was better. This is a consistent message in all the comparitive studies but for some reason people find it hard to understand that the real culprit in the obesity and CVD world is insulin and insulin resistence and that the key to solving this issue is the way we eat carbs and not fats.

Two steps forward.

Follow this link to a great video of a lecture given at Stamford Uni by a professor in Nutrition who is reluctantly admitting that perhaps low carb does beat low fat.

It is certainly easy to follow and his humility at the end is charming.

What it shows is that whether you blame the results on insulin or water or satiety , low carb does better than low fat.

The reality is, whether we like it or not, our natural diet ( otherwise known as a caveman diet) is a great way to lose fat and sustain weight loss for life.

http://www.academicearth.org/lectures/battle-of-the-diets

Last week, Prof Feinman ( who has been a great help to golower and the low starch movement) spoke at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes Annual Meeting to present the case for low starch / low sugar diets in the management of diabetes.

Prof Feinman explained

“Keeping carbohydrates low would actually reduce the risk of CVD. In essence, fat in the presence of carbohydrate is where we find the problems, which is very different from fat in the absence of carbohydrate.”

He went on to explain that carbohydrates, either directly or through insulin, are control elements in the metabolism. “They determine the disposition of fat whether stored for obesity or whether having an effect on lipoproteins and vasculature. The metabolic effect of reducing carbohydrates is that it predisposes to oxidizing the fat rather than storing it, and in diabetes specifically, it prevents the metabolic state of high glucose and high insulin, which is detrimental across the board.”

Supporting this view were a number of other experts who agree with the desperate need to challange the current othodoxy that a high carb low fat diet is best for diabetics.

Naturally the usual low fat experts were there to argue the contrary. What is really encouraging though is that three years ago the arguement was that there was no evidence in favour of low carb. Now the arguement has had to move to the slightly dodgy arguement that we need more time to see what happens. In otherwords whilst the low fat fools cant ignore the ever increasing pile of clincial trials in favour of low carb they can sink back into the defensive position of ” we need longer trials etc” The longer this goes on the more people that are slowly but surely dying of carbs….which have never been an essential food to the human diet.