Another 'Sponsor'

We have seen on this post that the American Dietetic Association has a lot of 'sponsors' that it has to keep sweet. I thought I'd see if I could find what sponsors the American Diabetic Association was keeping happy..
If we look at the bottom of this page, we see that a sponsor is Dignity Memorial.
Yes, they arrange funerals and cremations and, what's more, the American Diabetic Association kindly gives advice on their website about how to write a will and organise a funeral. I guess the ADA gives Dignity Memorial plenty of business.
You couldn't make it up, could you??

Diabetes Advice

I initially started eating low-carb several years ago to avoid diabetes. I was pre-diabetic and used to have very scary attacks of the shakes, sweats and heart palpitations.

Almost every day there is a newspaper report or magazine article about the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Today the warning is about amputations.
The number of people in England having a limb amputated because of type-two diabetes has risen dramatically, a study has shown.
Between 1996 and 2005, below-ankle amputations doubled to more than 2,000, and major amputations increased by 43%.
A charity said more early diagnosis was needed, as diabetes can go undetected for more than 10 years.
The number of people diagnosed with type-two diabetes had increased greatly in the past decade, which could partly explain the findings, the researchers said.
In the UK, 2.35 million people have type-two diabetes, which is caused by the body not properly responding to the insulin it produces, and is often a result of lifestyle factors such as obesity.

Yes, diabetes leads to some horrible, horrible complications and possibly an early death.
The article links to the Diabetes UK 'charity'. What advice do they give about what to eat if you become diabetic?

At each meal include starchy carbohydrate foods
Examples include bread, pasta, chapatis, potatoes, yam, noodles, rice and cereals. The amount of carbohydrate you eat is important to control your blood glucose levels. Especially try to include those that are more slowly absorbed (have a lower glycaemic index) as these won’t affect your blood glucose levels as much. Better choices include: pasta, basmati or easy cook rice, grainy breads such as granary, pumpernickel and rye, new potatoes, sweet potato and yam, porridge oats, All-Bran and natural muesli.

Cut down on the fat you eat, particularly saturated fats
A low fat diet benefits health. Choose unsaturated fats or oils, especially monounsaturated fat (eg olive oil and rapeseed oil) as these types of fats are better for your heart. As fat is the greatest source of calories, eating less fat will help you to lose weight if you need to. To cut down on the fat you eat, here are some tips:
Use less saturated fat by having less butter, margarine and cheese.
Choose lean meat and fish as low fat alternatives to fatty meats.
Choose lower fat dairy foods such as skimmed or semiskimmed milk, low fat or diet yogurts, reduced fat cheese and lower fat spreads.
Grill steam or oven bake instead of frying or cooking with oil or other fats.
Watch out for creamy sauces and dressings and swap for tomato-based sauces instead.

Eat more fruit and vegetables
Aim for at least five portions a day to provide you with vitamins, minerals and fibre to help you to balance your overall diet. One portion is, for example, a banana or apple, a handful of grapes, a tablespoon of dried fruit, a small glass of fruit juice or fruit smoothie, three heaped tablespoons of vegetables or a cereal bowl of salad.

Limit sugar and sugary foods
This does not mean you need to eat a sugar-free diet. Sugar can be used in foods and in baking as part of a healthy diet. Using sugar-free, no added sugar or diet fizzy drinks/squashes, instead of sugary versions can be an easy way to reduce the sugar in your diet.

Sucrose
People with diabetes used to be advised to avoid sucrose (as sugar and in sugary foods) and to eat a sugar free diet. It is now known that sugar does not raise blood glucose levels any higher than starch, provided the same amount of carbohydrate from sugar or starch is consumed.
The current advice from Diabetes UK is that sugar can be included in the diet for people with diabetes provided that it is used in the context of a healthy diet and does not account for more than 10% of the total calories.
The diet for people with diabetes is based on the same guidelines for healthy eating that apply to everyone; that is, a diet which is low in fat, salt and sugar and which contains plenty of fruit and vegetables, with meals that include some starchy carbohydrate foods such as bread, pasta, potatoes, chapatis, yam and plantain.

Fructose
Naturally occurring fructose found in fruit and vegetables should not be avoided and people with diabetes should aim to eat at least 5 to 9 servings of fruit and vegetables every day.
Fruit sugar (fructose), when used as a sweetener, has no proven advantage over sucrose to people with diabetes. It contains just as many calories as sucrose, still affects blood glucose levels, and when eaten to excess can cause a laxative effect.

This advice is criminally stupid, is causing people to become diabetic, causing diabetics to get worse and causing people to die from horrible complications.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of food chemistry should know that all digestible carbohydrates are sugars. High blood sugar causes many of the complications of diabetes. Yet the 'experts' tell diabetics to eat pasta, potatoes, bread.. all packed with sugar.
Their advice is to eat at least five pieces of fruit or veg a day.. one fruit portion is a banana, an average banana has about 20 grams of sugar, so just the 'fruit and veg' part of this diet would include 100 grams of sugar, then add all the bread, pasta and cereals on top of that.... it is mind-bogglingly, criminally stupid to advise such a way of eating. It's like telling a drowning man to drink more water.
Then, they say you can eat 10% of your calories as table sugar!!!
What is worse, cutting down on healthy fats like butter means that all the sugar eaten will flood into the bloodstream even more quickly. Every single aspect of this dietary advice is stupid, damaging and deadly.
If you know anyone who is diabetic, they should read Dr. Richard Bernstein's books. Look for them on Amazon, and for God's sake ignore the dietary advice of Diabetes UK.
Their page on their 'position statement' on sweeteners is suspiciously similar to that of the American Dietetic Association. See this page for a list of their 'sponsors'. I suspect that Diabetes UK has the same 'sponsors'.

Pecan Cookies

My husband is a bit of a Cookie Monster so I sometimes make him cookies out of nuts. It's also nice to have 'normal' food around in case someone comes for coffee. If all you have to give them is pemmican, they'll think you're some bonkers health-freak. (I once had a vegetarian visitor and all I had in the house was fatty pork slices - embarrassing!)
Anyways - I had a 200g bag of pecans in the cupboard that I was intending to make brownies with. In the end I decided to make pecan cookies. I used my trusty hand blender to make 150 grams of the pecans into a 'butter'. I chopped the rest of the pecans to add a bit of crunch. I added 50 grams of softened butter, an egg white and a little sweetener (optional) and mixed it all really well. I lined a shallow baking tin with buttered baking parchment, put spoonfuls of the mix onto the tin and used a small spoon to make round flat cookie shapes. These then went into the fan oven at 175 degrees (I use this temperature for all my cooking and everything works fine!)
Take them out when they are brownish and let them cool on a wire rack. They are light, crispy, nutty and buttery. They'd be great to put in a lunch box for the kids or the spouse!

Vitamin D and Cancer

At the end of this post are a couple of youtube clips about the relationship between Vitamin D deficiency and cancer.
What do we know about this vitamin??
Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin.
Vitamin D is made in the skin by the action of sunlight.
Vitamin D is made from cholesterol.

Why are so many people deficient in Vitamin D??
Health 'experts' have made us paranoid about consuming fat.
Health 'experts' have made us paranoid about going out in the sunlight.
Health 'experts' have made us paranoid about cholesterol levels.
Low sunlight + Low fat + Low cholesterol = Low Vitamin D = Lots of health problems.

They have also been telling us to replace cancer-protective saturated fats with cancer-promoting vegetable oils and cancer-promoting carbs.
So, it would seem to me that the health 'experts' haven't been doing anyone any good where cancer is concerned..

The first clip is a quickie. It is a short interview with Cedric Garland.



Here's Cedric again giving a longer talk about Vitamin D and cancer.
The discussion isn't if Vitamin D has positive effects on most cancers - this seems to be a definite. The discussion is more what the dose should be.



Maybe if someone is getting adequate Vitamin D3 (>2000IU a day?), cuts out omega-6 oils and trans-fats, cuts down on sugars (ie carbs) and gets some butyric acid and conjugated linoleic acid from butter and a smidge of omega-3 from oily fish the improvement would be even better.

Your Doctor Is A Liar!

That's not me talking, it's the title of a book that I have just been reading. It is by James Roguski, it's 566 pages long and anyone can download it from HERE.
And I recommend that you do..
First let me thank Canibais e Reis (Top Blog!) where I got the link... (Sorry, but that will always sound like 'Cannabis and Rice' to me). It's such a good read, that the more people who advertise it the better.
Yes, it's basically a Big Rant from start to finish and it IS hellish long, but it is jam-packed with information, it's really well-written and easy to understand. And when a system is SO corrupt, then someone's got to rant. Most people aren't knowledgeable enough or brave enough. James Roguski is both.
The book includes information on studies into cholesterol and the Lipid Hypothesis, how vital cholesterol is in the body, what effects statins have on the body etc etc etc.. as I said, it's absolutely jam-packed with information.
I've read a lot books debunking the cholesterol scam, and this has got to be up with the best.

Lies, Damn Lies and Margarine Advertising

I came across a particularly nauseating website HERE called SatFatNav:Your Route to Lower Saturated Fat. It is pretending to be a nutrition advice site, but if you look at the top right of every page, you'll see the Unilever logo. This is the company behind Flora margarines. So, this site is just a margarine ad masquerading as an advice site. Sneaky? I can think of other words that describe this situation more accurately.
The site has its own qualified nutritionist who, of course, dismisses and ignores all the overwhelming evidence against vegetable oils and spouts the same dogma against saturated fats. Ignorant incompetence or dishonesty? Good question.
Here is some of their propaganda about margarine:
Margarine or spreads are made from vegetable or seed oils (e.g. sunflower oil), which contain good fats like monounsaturates and polyunsaturates. So compared to butter, which is basically made from cream (the fat of the milk), margarine naturally tends to have fewer bad fats (like saturated fat).
This means that switching from butter to margarine can be an easy way to cut down on your saturated fats – without a big change to what you're eating.
•Fat Fact: Margarine can be a great source of mono - and polyunsaturates (like Omega 3 and Omega 6), and a good source of fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E
•Fat Fact: Most margarines contain only trace amounts of trans fats (bad ones!), whereas butter typically contains 3% trans fats.
Whatever idiot wrote this is mixing up fake trans fats created when polyunsaturated oils are hydrogenated with the natural conjugated linoleic acid in butter and cream which is currently recognised as a potent anti-carcinogen.
How dim can anyone be??
Answer: Very dim.
Or very, VERY dishonest.

Omega-6 (again)

Here is a paper that discusses some of the problems with omega-6 polyunsaturates, which are found in sunflower, safflower, corn, soybean etc oils - ie those oils we are told are 'healthier'.
Diet and disease--the Israeli paradox: possible dangers of a high omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acid diet.
Author: Yam, D : Eliraz, A : Berry, E M
Abstract: Israel has one of the highest dietary polyunsaturated/saturated fat ratios in the world; the consumption of omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) is about 8% higher than in the USA, and 10-12% higher than in most European countries. In fact, Israeli Jews may be regarded as a population-based dietary experiment of the effect of a high omega-6 PUFA diet, a diet that until recently was widely recommended. Despite such national habits, there is paradoxically a high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus and obesity-all diseases that are associated with hyperinsulinemia (HI) and insulin resistance (IR), and grouped together as the insulin resistance syndrome or syndrome X. There is also an increased cancer incidence and mortality rate, especially in women, compared with western countries. Studies suggest that high omega-6 linoleic acid consumption might aggravate HI and IR, in addition to being a substrate for lipid peroxidation and free radical formation. Thus, rather than being beneficial, high omega-6 PUFA diets may have some long-term side effects, within the cluster of hyperinsulinemia, atherosclerosis and tumorigenesis.
SO, omega-6 polyunsaturated oils are implicated in hyperinsulinemia, atherosclerosis, insulin resistance and cancer.
This is not a recent paper, its date is 1996. The problems with omega-6 were known well over a decade ago, and yet vegetable oils that contain large amounts of omega-6 (linoleic acid) are STILL being advertised as healthier.
HERE is some propaganda about one margarine:
Flora spreads can help keep your heart healthy because they are:
High in essential polyunsaturates
Rich in heart healthy oils Omega 3 and Omega 6
Low in saturated fats
Virtually trans fat free

No, omega-6 is NOT heart healthy.
And if it's only 'virtually' trans-fat free, that implies it does have trans-fats.
Stick to butter. It's real food.