William Davis's Blog: Dr. Davis Infinite Health Blog, page 42

The next Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Challenge begins Wed July 17th!

Put it off no longer: We are planning our next Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Challenge that starts on Wednesday, July 17th. This is your opportunity to seize control over health and weight, maybe even turn the clock back 10 or 20 years, look and feel better, be freed of numerous, if not all, prescription drugs.

In addition to our Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Private Facebook page that provides videos, success stories, and plenty of feedback and answers to your questions, the next Detox Challenge will also include:

1) LIVE Facebook sessions with Dr. Davis and April Duval, our main Facebook page administrator. Dr. Davis will personally kick off the Detox Challenge on July 17th. And because April is herself an example of a fabulous Wheat Belly Detox success, she knows the ins and outs of this lifestyle like the back of her hand.

2) Free access to the Suggestic smartphone app for the first 7 days of the Detox— The Suggestic iPhone app helps you navigate the Wheat Belly Detox with even more recipes, daily suggested recipes, a net carb counter, a restaurant locator to identify eating places consistent with our lifestyle with suggested menu items, all personally customizable. It is your chance to get acquainted with the useful Suggestic app while helping you succeed on your Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox.

Here’s what you do:

Visit wheatbelly.suggestic.com by July 17th, but preferably sooner!
Sign up to get 7-day free access to my challenge on the Suggestic app
On July 17th, go to the app’s homepage and tap “start program” so we can start the challenge together!

Our goal: to help you succeed in turning around your life and health and achieve all your health goals including weight loss, getting off prescription medications, and turning back the clock 10 or 20 years.

Why the Detox Challenge?

Through my New York Times bestseller, Wheat Belly, millions of people learned how to reverse years of chronic health problems by removing wheat from their daily diets. But, after reading the original Wheat Belly or the Wheat Belly Total Health book, or even using the recipes from the Wheat Belly Cookbook and Wheat Belly 30-Minute Cookbook, people still said: “I’ve read the books, but I’m still not sure how to get started on this lifestyle.”

That’s why I wrote the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox  and now help readers along in this Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox CHALLENGE. This is the quickest, most assured way to get started on regaining magnificent health and slenderness by adopting the Wheat Belly lifestyle.

We are kicking off the next Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Challenge on Facebook LIVE on Day 1: Wednesday July 17th, 8 pm EDT/7 pm CDT/6 pm MT/5 am PT. (I’ve changed the time to allow people who work during the day to join us.) Come join us on the private Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/52751...

You will also be given free access to the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox Suggestic smartphone app for the first 7 days of the Detox!

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox supplies you with carefully designed meal plans and delicious recipes to fully eliminate wheat and related grains in the shortest time possible. Perfect for those who may have fallen off the wagon or for newcomers who need a jump-start for weight loss, this new addition to the Wheat Belly phenomenon guides you through the complete 10-Day Detox experience. And we will kick off this next Challenge with a live Facebook session with Dr. Davis on the evening of Day 1!

In addition to this quick-start program, I’ll teach you:

How to recognize and reduce wheat-withdrawal symptoms,
How to avoid common landmines that can sabotage success
How to use nutritional supplements to further advance weight loss and health benefits

The Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox also includes:

Inspiring testimonials from people who have completed the program (and have now made grain-free eating a way of life)

Exciting new recipes to help get your entire family on board

To join the Detox Challenge:

Step 1

Get the book. And read it (at least the first 5 chapters).

Detox Challenge participants should be informed and active in order to get the most out of the challenge and private Facebook group. READING THE WHEAT BELLY DETOX BOOK IS REQUIRED TO PARTICIPATE. PLEASE DO NOT PARTICIPATE IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK or else the conversations will not make sense and you will not enjoy full benefit. It is a very bad idea to try and piece the program together just from our conversations. (Note that the Wheat Belly Detox program is NOT laid out in the original Wheat Belly book.)

Amazon: http://amzn.to/1JqzMea

Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/wheatbelly10daygraindetox-bn

Indiebound: http://bit.ly/1KwcFTQ

Step 2

Come join the Private Facebook Group.

http://bit.ly/WheatBelly-PrivateFBGroup

Step 3

Head back to the Private Facebook Group starting Tuesday, July 16th (the day before the official start of the Challenge) and onwards for tips, videos, and discussions to help you get through your detox and reprogram your body for rapid weight loss and health. Dr. Davis and site administrator, April Duval, will be posting video instructions and answers to your questions. Or just join the conversation now, as we discuss the ups and downs, share recipes, and just have fun every day!

 

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What’s the best diet for type 2 diabetes?

Let’s first discuss what the goals of a diet should be when you have type 2 diabetes. After all, if this disease that now affects tens of millions of Americans is simply allowed to progress, it means a future of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, peripheral neuropathy, amputations, failing eyesight, gastroparesis, and an average of eight years taken from your lifespan.

So let’s agree that a diet for type 2 diabetes should:

Reverse insulin resistance—i.e., the process that leads to developing diabetes in the first place.
Reduce blood sugar and HbA1c (the long-term gauge of blood sugar)—that reflects a reduction in insulin resistance and less reliance on drugs and insulin
Reduce the potential for diabetic complications—stalling or avoiding heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, etc.
Reduce weight—People with type 2 diabetes are virtually all overweight or obese or have an excess of visceral fat that drives insulin resistance and inflammation.

Does the American Diabetes Association (ADA) diet that reduces fat/saturated fat, encourages grains, and does not limit sugar accomplish this? Absolutely not. In fact, the opposite typically occurs. This is because the ADA diet is crafted to increase blood sugars to allow prescription medications and insulin to be administered without causing hypoglycemia, low blood sugar. But the ADA diet does not reverse insulin resistance, does not reduce blood sugar or HbA1c, does not slow the development of diabetic complications, nor does it lead to weight loss. It does, however, allow you to take your diabetes medications and lead to progressively increasing reliance on medication to reduce blood sugar.

Does a low-fat diet do any better? Low-fat diets mean higher carbohydrate intake, typically from grain-based foods. As with the ADA diet, insulin resistance is not reduced, blood sugar/HbA1c are not reduced, diabetic complications are not slowed. There can be modest initial weight loss, but typically insufficient to make a big difference in diabetic measures.

Low-carb diets in their various forms—paleo, ketogenic, Atkins’, Wheat Belly/Undoctored—do indeed reverse insulin resistance, reduce blood sugar/HbA1c, reduce potential for diabetic complications, and allow substantial weight loss. It is not uncommon for type 2 diabetes to be completely reversed such that no medications or insulin are required with restoration of all diabetes measures back to normal.

But the best solution of all is to start with diet, then address the common deficiencies and health disruptions that plague people with diabetes and thereby stack the odds in favor of full restoration of  health that includes weight loss back to normal, full reversal of insulin resistance, relief from joint pain and skin rashes, more energy, better mood, restored libido, increased muscle mass and strength, greater bone density, freedom from heart disease, reduced potential for dementia. To achieve these more ambitious goals, we begin with diet, then correct nutritional deficiencies of nutrients that serve intrinsic human need such as iodine, magnesium, and vitamin D. We also address the substantial dysbiosis (disrupted bowel flora) that all diabetics share, including addressing small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) and small intestinal fungal overgrowth (SIFO).

This is what we do in the Wheat Belly and Undoctored programs.

 

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Should you eat cholesterol lowering foods?

The short answer: No, absolutely not.

You’ll find no lack of conversations, however, that tell you to consume more oatmeal, nuts, garlic or soy to reduce total and LDL cholesterol, perhaps thereby avoiding statin drugs. Or add more fiber to your diet or take red yeast rice.

These foods and supplements do indeed reduce total and LDL cholesterol . . . but who cares? Don’t waste your time and energy on this useless exercise, especially efforts to reduce the absurd, outdated, imprecise calculated LDL cholesterol.

But doesn’t reducing LDL cholesterol, the “bad,” in particular reduce risk for cardiovascular events? It does to a minor degree, not to the degree doctors and Big Pharma tell you, wildly exaggerated benefits that are misleading statistical manipulations. But that is not the right question to ask.

A better question to ask: How can you reduce or eliminate risk for cardiovascular events? Answer: By quantifying, then correcting the factors that cause heart disease such as small LDL particles, excessive very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particles, postprandial (after-meal) lipoproteins, inflammatory factors, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and the accompanying inflammation, insulin resistance, endogenous glycation, vitamin D deficiency, omega-3 fatty acid deficiency, iodine deficiency, and others. All of these factors can be quantified, then corrected—NONE require prescription drugs to do so. If, for example, a person’s LDL cholesterol (calculated–yes, LDL cholesterol is not measured, but calculated) was 133 mg/d (the average value for most people not on statins) and then we were to run a NMR lipoprotein analysis, the LDL particle number could be something like 1900 nmol/L. A NMR LDL particle number of 1900 mol/L is the equivalent of a LDL cholesterol of 190 mg/dl—much higher than the calculated value. This sort of discrepancy between the calculated LDL cholesterol and the LDL particle number is exceptionally common, the rule rather than the exception. Of that 1900 mol/L of total LDL particles, perhaps 1400 mol/L are the abnormal small particles that are oxidation-prone, more likely to adhere to the artery wall, are much more inflammation-provoking, and last 5-7 days in the bloodstream, rather than the 24 hours of large LDL particles. A calculated LDL cholesterol of 133 mg/dl suggests little risk for heart disease, while the NMR panel suggest substantial risk for heart disease. And that’s not even factoring in all the other factors that lead to heart disease such as insulin resistance and postprandial abnormalities.

Take a statin drug or eat foods that reduce cholesterol and you can reduce LDL particle number to, say, 1500 mol/L, reduce small LDL particle number to 1000 mol/L—small LDL particles are persistent and still comprise a similar proportion of total LDL particle number.

Eliminate wheat/grains and limit net carbs; restore vitamin D, magnesium, omega-3 fatty acids, and iodine; take efforts to cultivate healthy bowel flora—i.e., all the strategies we follow in the Wheat Belly and Undoctored lifestyles—and LDL particle number drops to something like 1200 nmol/L, small LDL drops to zero or other low value. While foods that reduce cholesterol and statins do little else to improve the other factors that lead to heart disease, the strategies we use address ALL of them: reduces VLDL particles, reduces the magnitude of postprandial lipoproteins, reduce inflammation, reverses insulin resistance, reduces endogenous glycation, corrects vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid deficiency, etc.

In other words, consuming cholesterol reducing foods or statins do indeed reduce total and LDL cholesterol, but they do very little to address the constellation of phenomena that more powerfully drive heart disease risk. Follow the collection of strategies we follow in the Wheat Belly and Undoctored lifestyles and dramatic transformation of the entire landscape of factors that lead to heart disease are transformed. So eat more oats to reduce cholesterol? I hope you now appreciate how lame that is.

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Eat, Pray, Push

Here’s an excerpt from chapter 4 of Wheat Belly Total Health, Your Bowels Have Been Fouled: Intestinal Indignities From Grains:

“A condition as pedestrian as constipation serves to perfectly illustrate many of the ways in which grains mess with normal body functions, as well as just how wrong conventional ‘solutions’ can be. Constipation remedies are like the Keystone Kops of health, stumbling, fumbling, and bumping into each other, but never quite putting out the fire.

“Drop a rock from the top of a building and it predictably hits the ground—not sometimes, not half the time, but every time. That’s how the bowels are programmed to work, as well: Put food in your mouth, and it should come out the other end, preferably that same day and certainly no later than tomorrow. People living primitive lives without grains, sugars, and soft drinks enjoy such predictable bowel behavior: Eat some turtle, fish, clams, mushrooms, coconut, or mongongo nuts for breakfast, and out it all comes that afternoon or evening—large, steamy, filled with undigested remains and prolific quantities of bacteria, no straining, laxatives, or stack of magazines required. Live a modern life and have pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, instead. You’ll be lucky to pass that out by tomorrow or the next day. Or perhaps you will be constipated, not passing out your pancakes and syrup for days, passing it incompletely in hard, painful bits and pieces. In constipation’s most extreme forms, the remains of pancakes can stay in your colon for weeks. The combined effects of impaired CCK signaling, reduced bile release, insufficient pancreatic enzymes, and changes in bowel flora disrupt the orderly passage of digested foods.

“We are given advice to include more fiber, especially insoluble cellulose (wood) fibers from grains, in our diets. We then eat breakfast cereals or other grain-based foods rich in cellulose fibers and, lo and behold, it does work for some, as indigestible cellulose fibers, undigested by our own digestive apparatus as well as undigested by bowel flora, yield bulk that people mistake for a healthy bowel movement. Never mind that all of the other disruptions of digestion, from your mouth on down, are not addressed by loading up your diet with wood fibers. What if sluggish bowel movements prove unresponsive to such fibers? That’s when health care comes to the rescue with laxatives in a variety of forms, some irritative (phenolphthalein and senna), some lubricating (dioctyl sodium sulfosuccinate), some osmotic (polyethylene glycol), some no different than spraying you down with a hose (enemas).”

We know that opiate drugs such as Oxycontin and morphine are commonly constipating. There’s even a new drug being widely advertised to “treat” the constipation side-effect of opiates, Relistor, or methylnaltrexone, an opiate-blocker that requires injection and costs around $700 per month. Recall that the gliadin protein of wheat and related proteins in other grains (e.g., secalin in rye) are partially digested to peptides that have opiate (“opioid”) properties, including binding to the opiate receptors in the human intestine. Wheat and grains therefore contain a disrupter of intestinal motility, slowing the normal rhythmic peristalsis, or muscular propulsive activity, that leads to retaining the digestive remains of food in your intestines for days to weeks.

Yes, you could take an opiate-blocking drug to block the effect of gliadin-derived opioid peptides . . . or you could simply not ingesting foods that yields such opioids: wheat and grains.

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Is it SAFE to be grain-free?

Listen to critics of the Wheat Belly lifestyle and you’d think that, by banishing all things wheat and grains from your life, you will be excommunicated from your church, tossed out of your club, ostracized by friends and family, and suffer dire health consequences like heart disease and colon cancer. After all, they say that you are eliminating an entire food group and will be crippled by lack of fiber and nutrients. Worse, our focus on increasing our intake of fats and oils will get you a heart attack, three stents, or bypass surgery and you’ll be obliged to take Lipitor and Repatha for a lifetime.

First of all, I challenge the notion that we are eliminating a food group. Recall that wheat and grains were added relatively recently (speaking anthropologically), around 12,000 years ago as einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent, millet in sub-Saharan Africa, rice from the swamps of Asia, and maize in Central America. I’ve previously discussed what happened to human health in each of those locales upon the consumption of these seeds of grasses: explosive tooth decay, a doubling of arthritis, iron deficiency, and other health effects. It means that we did NOT consume any seed of a grass plant for the preceding 3.5 million years. In other words, we have consumed wheat and grains for about 0.3% of our time on this planet and flourished. Just as we paid the price of acquiring zoonoses like tuberculosis and influenza upon the domestication of herbivorous ruminants, so we acquired a host of health problems with the incorporation of the seeds of grasses. Grains never belonged in the human diet in the first place—it was a mistake. If humans proliferated successfully for the first 99.7% of our time on earth without consuming grains, why would we need such a thing? There is no such need programmed into the human genetic code.

Will you become deficient in B vitamins with wheat/grain elimination, as many dietitians suggest? You would if you replaced wheat/grains with soft drinks and candy, as they often assume. But if you tabulate the intake of folate, riboflavin, vitamin B12, niacin, thiamine, etc. when you replace wheat/grains with avocados, salmon, eggs, spinach, legumes—i.e., real, whole foods, there is NO deficiency of B vitamins or any other vitamin. Typically, intake of these nutrients goes up with wheat/grain elimination. Increased control over appetite combined with the heightened taste perception of being wheat/grain-free also naturally causes you to gravitate back to real foods and away from synthetic processed foods.

And because you are eliminating the phytates of wheat and grains that bind minerals in your intestinal tract, making them unavailable for absorption, the levels of iron, zinc, calcium, and magnesium go up with wheat/grain elimination. This is why, for instance, even severe forms of iron deficiency anemia that previously required oral and injectable iron supplementation, even period blood transfusions, goes away within two weeks of banishing all grain phytates.

Will you become deficient in fiber with wheat/grain elimination? Alright, here is one area in which you could indeed fall short. Let’s first dismiss the notion that cellulose fiber is somehow crucial to health, including gastrointestinal health; it is not. Prebiotic fibers are absolutely necessary, however, fibers that you are incapable of digesting, but bacteria can that, in turn, convert prebiotic fibers to a wide range of metabolites with beneficial effects on human health. The average American eating a garbage-filled diet of processed foods that includes grains obtains around 5-8 grams of prebiotic fibers per day. Eliminate the arabinoxylan and amylose prebiotic fibers found in wheat/grains and prebiotic fiber intake is cut in half—this is indeed not good. For this reason we include sources of prebiotic fibers in the Wheat Belly and Undoctored lifestyles and aim not just to maintain the average prebiotic fiber intake, but achieve the ideal intake of 20 grams per day. We do so by mimicking the behavior of primitive humans who dig in the dirt for roots and tubers with intakes of prebiotic fibers of up to 130 grams per day, populations that have NO colon cancer, NO hemorrhoids, NO diverticular disease, NO type 2 diabetes, NO heart disease, NO stomach ulcers, NO inflammatory bowel disease, and obesity is rare.

Lastly, dietary fat intake has nothing to do with heart disease risk. The science never showed that it did. (Observational data did indeed suggest an association between dietary fat intake and cardiovascular risk, but observational data are disproven 80% of the time, as they do not represent real clinical studies.) Yes, cholesterol values, total and LDL, go up with fat intake, but cholesterol is not a cause for heart disease; the lipoproteins in the bloodstream, for which cholesterol was meant to be a crude marker, one so imprecise as to be nearly useless, their composition, size, number, surface conformation, duration of persistence in the blood, etc. are what determine whether you will have heart disease in your future. Quantify and characterize lipoproteins—widely available, accessible, inexpensive—and you will quickly see that fats have positive effects on lipoprotein patterns, while consumption of grans and sugars is disastrous with provocation of small LDL particles, increased VLDL particles, a drop in HDL particles and a shift towards less protective small HDL particles, and exaggerated postprandial (after-meal) lipoproteins, not to mention rises in blood sugar, insulin resistance, and inflammation.

So the question “Is it safe to be grain-free?” is a lot like asking “Is it safe to quit smoking cigarettes?” It is not only safe, but puts you on the path to magnificent health and slenderness.

 

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How to Become Wheat-Free

People new to the Wheat Belly lifestyle are often overwhelmed when they discover just how ubiquitous this cheap commoditized filler can be. In addition to obvious wheat-containing foods like breads, pasta, rolls, and cookies, there are literally thousands of products that contain hidden wheat ingredients: salad dressings, seasoning mixes, frozen dinners, sauces, etc.

But get the process of eliminating all wheat—or even better, all grains—and you can be rewarded with magnificent control over weight and health.

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Autoimmune Disease: Start With Wheat & Grain Elimination

If you or someone close to you have an autoimmune condition such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, along with about 195 others, there are a number of steps you can take that reduce, even eliminate the autoimmune inflammation damaging your organs. (Unfortunately, some forms of autoimmune damage cannot be reversed. Autoimmune loss of pancreatic beta cells that lead to type 1 diabetes, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis that damages the thyroid gland, or autoimmune hepatitis that can lead to cirrhosis. for example, cannot be reversed even if the autoimmune process is subdued.)

I break down the factors that cause or promote autoimmune diseases into:

Initiating causes—factors that begin the process
Permissive factors—factors that allow autoimmune inflammation to proceed after started by an initiating cause

The most important and common initiating causes are the gliadin protein of wheat and related proteins of other grains, including the zein protein of corn, and the casein beta A1 protein of dairy. Among the most important permissive factors are vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid deficiencies.

Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, and small intestinal fungal overgrowth, SIFO, also enter the picture, acting as both initiating and permissive factors due to the marked increase in intestinal permeability with these conditions.

The Wheat Belly and Undoctored programs therefore address each and every one of these factors, tipping the scales in favor of minimizing or reversing autoimmune conditions and preventing the emergence of new conditions.

 

 

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Should L. reuteri yogurt be part of your weight loss efforts?

When the Wheat Belly lifestyle, especially the complete program as Wheat Belly Total Health or Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox, are followed, the majority of people experience weight loss, often dramatic.

Is there any additional weight loss advantage to adding our Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt? I believe there is.

This is because L. reuteri:

Has been shown in experimental models to prevent weight gain from unhealthy foods—meaning that backpedaling on weight loss is less likely to occur.
Boosts hypothalamic release of oxytocin that reduces appetite even further, the so-called anorexigenic effect, adding to the appetite reduction that comes from wheat/grain elimination and unrestricted fat intake.
Can make intermittent fasting easier—Even if you stop consuming yogurt in order to fast, the appetite suppression effect lasts 3+ days, as L reuteri bacterial counts remain high for several days after your last serving.

If you haven’t already added the L. reuteri yogurt for all its health benefits such as smoother skin and increased dermal collagen, accelerated healing, increased muscle mass and strength, increased libido, etc., consider adding it for the weight loss advantages.

 

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H2 Breath Detection: Game-Changer for Gastrointestinal Health

Anyone who remembers the days before finger stick blood glucose meters became available to people with diabetes will recall how awful life was for diabetics. All they had was urine dipsticks which were sloppy, yielded only crude non-quantitative feedback on blood sugars, and gave you a gauge of what blood sugars were in the recent past, not the present. It meant that dosing insulin or diabetes drugs was grotesquely imprecise and accounted for many episodes of hypoglycemic coma and acceleration of diabetic complications. It was not uncommon in those days, for instance, for a type 1 diabetic to be blind and experience kidney failure in their 20s.

Then, in the early 1980s, finger stick blood glucose meters became widely available. Because they allowed more accurate tracking of blood sugars, this technology proved a game-changer for diabetics. Insulin and other drugs could be dosed more precisely. Low blood sugars could be identified before loss of consciousness developed, high blood sugars could be identified before dehydration and diabetic ketoacidosis took hold, better blood sugar control meant diabetic complications were delayed.

That same kind of game-changing technology is now available for gastrointestinal health in the form of hydrogen gas, H2, breath testing. While formal H2 breath testing has been available for a number of years, the test is cumbersome, most doctors know nothing about it, and costs around $150 to several hundred dollars each time you undergo the test (which is typically needed several times to assess response to treatment and identify recurrences).

Now a consumer device called AIRE made by the Food Marble company is available, a sleek and easy-to-use device that talks via Bluetooth to your smartphone. (By the way, I have NO relationship with the company. I have talked with the founders, but I have no reason to promote this device except that it’s exceptionally helpful and cool.) I’ve discussed how to use this device in an earlier Wheat Belly Blog post, especially tracking H2 levels (on a 0-10 scale) after consumption of a prebiotic fiber to trigger H2 release and determine time-response to determine whether small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, is present. The faster H2 is released, the more likely it is that you have SIBO (since bacteria have to be in the upper gastrointestinal tract to cause H2 release).

I’ve argued that SIBO is present at epidemic levels in the U.S. now, likely harbored by something like 100 million people, or 1 in every 3 or 4 Americans. If not identified and corrected, real health complications can be in your future such as autoimmune conditions, diverticular disease, neurological diseases such as Parkinsonism and Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s dementia, heart disease, and colon cancer. So this is not something to stick your head in the sand over. Once identified, you can take steps—even without the involvement of your doctor—to manage SIBO and thereby reduce or eliminate risk for all these health conditions.

If you have any of the telltale signs of SIBO such as intolerance to prebiotic fibers, fat malabsorption, or have been diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome or fibromyalgia, then consider identifying excessive breath hydrogen with this do-it-yourself-at-home device. For further discussion on how to manage SIBO once identified, you will find a detailed protocol, an in-depth 2-hour workshop, and weekly live video interactions in our Undoctored Inner Circle to help you craft a program.

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Is sugar causing you to AGE faster?

 

Americans consume the equivalent of 300 loaves of bread each year (representing enormous exposure to the amylopectin A carbohydrate that behaves like sugar or worse). They also consume 200 pounds of sugar. It is not uncommon for sugar alone to comprise a quarter of all calories taken in over the course of the day—some of it out in the open, some of it hidden.

To understand the adverse effects of sugars—sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and other fructose-rich sweeteners, such as agave, honey, and maple syrup—we need to understand two phenomena:

1. Insulin resistance

2 Glycation.

Insulin Resistance

When blood sugar rises, insulin is released by the pancreas. Repeated over and over again, the cells of the body fail to respond to the insulin; they become “insulin resistant.” This leads to further rises in blood sugar and inflammatory responses, failure to respond to normal appetite signals, and growth of visceral (deep abdominal) fat. The cells of the body—deprived of glucose for energy due to the failure of insulin (which allows entry of glucose into cells)—resort to fat and protein for energy, resulting in rises in blood triglycerides from fats released into the bloodstream, along with loss of muscle.

The essential first step that creates insulin resistance is, therefore, a rise in blood sugar. Any rise in blood sugar above fasting levels (90 mg/dL) will, over time, provoke insulin resistance: The higher the blood sugar and the more frequently it occurs, the more insulin resistance is provoked. Fructose worsens the effect: inflammation, growth of visceral fat, increased blood triglycerides and fatty acids, and fatty liver—all powerful blockers of insulin that worsen insulin resistance.

The conventional medical solution? Sugar “in moderation,” increased whole grain consumption, lots of low-fat foods—disastrous dietary advice, followed by drugs that come to our “rescue,” handily explaining why the diabetes drug industry is growing at unprecedented rates along with booming executive salaries.

The Undoctored solution? Eliminate foods that start the process in the first place. If we eliminate foods that send blood sugar and insulin to high levels, the entire collection of abnormalities reverse. We also slash fructose intake to only fruit—no high-fructose corn syrup or other sources. Yes, do the opposite of conventional dietary advice and eat no “healthy whole grains,” don’t restrict fats but increase their consumption, and never rely on low-fat or other fructose-containing foods.

While most people are able to reverse blood sugar and insulin levels back to normal, also undoing insulin resistance and diabetes, some people have progressed so far down this path and have irreversibly damaged beta cells of the pancreas that produce insulin (high blood sugars and high triglycerides damage the pancreas). People in this situation may not return to normal. This situation is suggested by failure to enjoy fasting blood sugars of 70 to 90 mg/dL after the ideal weight is achieved and despite doing everything else right. Drugs may indeed be helpful in this uncommon situation. The key is to, therefore, follow this lifestyle before pancreatic beta cell damage sets in.

Glycation

Glycation refers to the glucose- and fructose-modification of proteins that occurs when glucose or fructose levels increase, a reaction between sugar and body proteins. Glycation occurs at a natural low rate just from normal blood sugar levels, even while fasting, but it occurs at increasingly greater rates with any rise in blood sugar above 90 mg/dL.30 Primitive people had limited exposure to sugars: seasonal fruit, tropical fruit in some environments, honey. They certainly did not have around-the-clock, everyday access to sweetened foods and soft drinks, nor were they advised by government agencies to load up on amylopectin-containing grains. It means that modern sugar consumption, made worse by the grain domination of the modern diet, exposes you to repetitive waves of protein glycation.

Once it occurs, the glycation reaction is irreversible. Glycation alters the properties of proteins, making them nonfunctional, essentially creating cellular debris that gums up the function of whatever organ they reside in, much like rust interferes with the smooth functioning of the gears in a motor.

All of this has serious health consequences:

If glycation of the proteins of the lenses of the eyes develops, opacities accumulate, leading to cataracts.
Glycation of skin proteins gives you brown-colored “age spots” and wrinkles.
Glycation of cartilage proteins makes cartilage brittle, eroding and leading to inflammation and the pain of arthritis.
Glycation of kidney tissue leads to declining kidney function.
Glycation of LDL particles in the bloodstream makes them more likely to contribute to atherosclerosis (heart disease).
 Glycation of brain proteins contributes to dementia.

Those with diabetes experience high blood sugars throughout most of the day, therefore glycating more vigorously than the rest of us, explaining why, for instance, they have heart disease, cancer, cataracts, and dementia earlier in life than those without diabetes.

You may recognize the phenomena of glycation as sounding an awful lot like the phenomena of aging, reflected in the advanced glycation end-product, or AGE, theory of aging. Yes, to a substantial degree, aging is a consequence of diet that proceeds faster due to sugars and grains, regardless of whether they are “organic,” “sprouted,” or any other label designed to pull your attention away from the sugar.

Any time blood sugar rises above normal, glycation occurs at an accelerated rate. What foods raise blood sugar the most, triggering the greatest degree of glycation? Grains and sugar. Gluten-free foods made with cornstarch, tapioca starch, potato starch, and rice flour are guilty of the same. And whatever you do, don’t be tricked by talk of “low glycemic index.”

The Undoctored solution is to stop overstimulating the processes of glycation or fructation in the first place by eliminating, or at least managing, all the foods that are responsible for these reactions. Removing the appetite-stimulating effects of wheat and grains via gliadin-derived opiates also helps bring the feeding frenzy of sugar in all its various forms to a halt.

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