William Davis's Blog: Dr. Davis Infinite Health Blog, page 51

Ten ways to reduce or eliminate heart disease risk

You won’t hear silly, ineffective nonsense like “cut your saturated fat,” or “move more, eat less,” “everything in moderation,” or “take a statin drug” around here—you know, the advice that keeps heart disease the #1 killer of Americans and keeps doctors and hospital busy making plenty of money.

Here are the strategies that I used for many years in thousands of patients based on published (but often under appreciated) science that achieved reversal of heart disease in the majority.

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Why you should get a CT heart scan

A CT heart scan is a crucial test to have done at low cost, relatively modest radiation exposure, that tells you whether or not you have coronary heart disease. It’s the only test that tells you with confidence whether or not you have atherosclerotic plaque in your heart’s arteries. It is quantitative and can be used to track progression, regression, or stabilization over the years.

Sadly, there is a lot of misinformation floating around about heart scans, so be armed with better information.

Transcript:

Hi, Doctor William Davis here, author of Wheat Belly and Undoctored books. I want to talk about why I think you should get a heart scan. Now I got involved with heart scanning over 20 years ago, when I brought Wisconsin’s first heart scan device to Milwaukee. I did that because my mom died of sudden cardiac death after a successful two-vessel coronary angioplasty she underwent in New Jersey.

I was practicing in Milwaukee, just starting out, and I was doing lots of heart procedures. My mom died, ironically, of the disease I dealt with, or I thought dealt with every day. That event shook me, and it made clear to me that we needed to do a better job of looking for heart disease years before something bad happens, like a heart attack, or sudden cardiac death. Well, how do you do that?

Can you look at your cholesterol and say “Oh, my cholesterol is 240. I must have heart disease.”? No, of course not — cholesterol is virtually worthless when it comes to predicting heart disease. I don’t even think we should bother measuring it. It’s stupid, but nonetheless, that’s the prevailing attitude.

Or you have a stress test. Well, stress tests are uniformly useless in people without symptoms. If you’re having chest pain, you can’t breathe, maybe a stress test in some form would be helpful. But if you’re just going to work, or going to school, feeling good, a stress test almost never tells you anything. Because stress tests become abnormal very late in the process, when you’re about to have a heart attack, or you have a very serious blockage in one of your arteries. But for the decades that precede a heart attack, a stress test will not detect it.

Some of my unscrupulous colleagues, of which there are many, would say things like “Well, we do the real test; a heart catheterization”, right? … an invasive procedure. Well, no; no. I’m talking about the people who are just going about their business, feeling fine, often exercising, right. They do not need an invasive procedure. You’d be shocked how often that’s done, though.

Okay ,what are we left with? You’re left with a CT heart scan. It’s just a CT (a CAT scan device), and it’s set in a specific way so that you get very low radiation exposure — it’s about 10 chest X-rays worth of radiation exposures — it’s come down over the years, and it’s trending downward, even now. But it’s about 10 chest X-rays equivalent.

You have to pay for it yourself in most cases, but you can typically get it for about $100-150. Any more than that, you can shop around. You might have to call some places that do heart scanning. Hospitals do it for cheap; you know why? They secretly hope you have a really high score, so that you “need” more procedures: a stress nuclear study (for $5,000), a heart catheterization (for $38,000), a bypass operations (for $150,000). That’s what they hope.

So they view the heart scan as a loss leader. But you don’t care about that. Don’t pay any attention to that, and do not let them up-sell you to a CT coronary angiogram, without a very thorough discussion of why, because that’s how they make money, you see. They try to tell “You have a high score” (that’s how heart scan results are reported) “You need a CT coronary angiogram”. Almost never should that be done, okay.

When you get a CT heart scan — very easy, it’s really fast. These devices are very fast nowadays. Then typically, in a couple of days or so, you’re given a score. What that score is, is the volume of calcium in your heart’s arteries. People go “Why are we measuring calcium?”

One, it’s easy to see on a CT scan, so is thereby easy to quantify. Think of it this way. My friend Dr. John Rumberger, when he was at Mayo Clinic, did much of this research — very brilliant research. Calcium occupies 20% of total atherosclerotic plaque volume. So it’s a gauge, a dipstick, for the amount of plaque you have in your arteries. It doesn’t tell you about blockage, okay, that’s different kind of perspective.

Think of it this way: think of your arteries as being a foot long iron pipe. A heart catheterization would tell you stuff like: there’s a blockage halfway down, that’s blocking 70 percent of flow. That’s kind of information you get on a heart catheterization. A heart scan tells you something like this: in this 1 foot long piece of iron pipe, there’s 273.85 cubic millimeters of rust — two different perspectives on the same disease.

A heart scan gives you a score, a calcium score. Normal is zero. The higher the score, the more plaque you have, and the more likely it is that can lead to heart attack and abnormal symptoms. There’s no specific cutoff. You can’t say “at a score of 500 you likely have a 70% block”. You can’t say things like that. Though, the higher it does go, it does indeed suggest greater potential for a blockage, that blocks flow.

But your primary concern here is not to detect blockage. It’s to quantify the amount of plaque, because the more plaque you have, the more likely it is to rupture. That’s what heart attacks are. It’s when plaque has inflammation in its walls, and it ruptures, and the exposure of the underlying contents of that plaque trigger blood clot formation. That’s what you’re looking for. But you want to know this years before that kind of stuff happens, right?

Let’s say you have a score of 500, what now? Well, those of you who have been following along my programs, know that all the things that I do: the Wheat Belly Total Health program, the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program — all those programs, the prescriptive part of the programs, came from my efforts to reduce heart scan scores, or at least stop them from increasing.

Because if we do nothing, if you have a heart scan score, say, of 500, and you do nothing, the score goes up

25% per year.

It’s horrifying. If you allow that to happen, you’re getting closer and closer and closer to death, heart attack, those things.

What if you take a statin drug, an aspirin, and cut the fat in your diet — cut the saturated fat, and exercise? How fast does your heart scan score go up?

25% per year

… does nothing. Those conventional solutions do nothing to prevent plaque from growing.

So what do you do you do? You do the programs, okay — Wheat Belly Total Health, or now the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program. Those strategies that I put together over the years, and we showed that you could reduce heart scan scores, or at least put a stop to the continual rise. But it’s not uncommon for heart scan score of say, 700, to drop to 300, 400, something like that.

You can actually see on the heart scan images, you see can see the plaque has shrunk (at least the calcium part of it has shrunk). Now some people say “aren’t you measuring only hard plaque?” No, the calcium score is an index of total plaque and all its varied components: calcium, fibrous tissue, inflammatory cells, soft plaque, everything. It’s an index of total plaque.

So don’t let my colleagues — who often don’t understand heart scans, because they don’t care about prevention; they care about heart catheterizations and defibrillators, and those kinds of high ticket items — if they say “that’s a stupid test”. No. It’s been over 20 years, this test is actually good. It took a long time to gain acceptance among most of my colleagues, but it has happened. Now if it was $10,000 a scan, and the professional fee was $3,000, you bet they’d recommend heart scans. But they’re $100 or so, and there’s virtually no professional fee — there might be a few dollars for a reading of the scan, but hardly worth their time, so they call it stupid.

That’s how health care operates nowadays. It’s based on money, and revenue returned on your effort. So if you have a positive heart scan score, you engage in the program. That’s that’s as good as it gets. There is no other program that reduces your heart scan score. So, Wheat Belly Total Health | Undoctored program.

What’s better than one heart scan score?

two heart scan scores

Let me tell you why.

Let’s say you have a score of 500, and the report says your risk for heart attack is about 7-8% per year, and it’s gonna go higher as your score grows, right? Well, what if you engaged in the program, the Undoctored program, the Wheat Belly Total Health program a year ago, and your score a year ago was 700, and it’s been reduced to 500? Well, your risk for heart attack is not 7 or 8%. It’s zero, because you reduced. Now, you won’t know that, because you didn’t have a score perhaps a year ago.

What if the score a year ago was 300, and now it’s 500? Now your heart attack risk is higher than 7%.

So you get the point. Better than one score is two scores. It gives you an index, a rate of change. We can actually calculate the annual rate of change. But you want it to do this {declining trend gesture}. You do that by engaging in all my programs.

So if you, or someone close to you, is at risk for heart disease — now this [CT] is typically offered to men 40 and over, women 50 and over, but that’s kind of a soft cut off, depending on your mix of risk factors for heart disease. If you’re, let’s say, a guy, and your dad had a heart attack at 37, don’t wait till you’re 40. Or if you’re a woman, and your mom had heart failure and sudden cardiac death at age 43, don’t wait till age 50, right? Go probably in your 30s. Be aware of those kinds of modifying effects on when you should get a heart scan.

If you have a heart scan score of zero — if you’re lucky enough to have a heart scan score of zero, don’t get it done for at least 5 years. If you have another zero in 5 or 6, 7 years, your lifetime risk for heart disease approaches zero. That’s really good news. And by the way, if you have a heart scan score zero, do not let your doctor talk you into a stupid statin drug. Because your risk for heart disease is virtually zero. You can’t reduce it any further with a statin drug.

And also, if you have a positive score, whether it’s 14, 500, or 1500, don’t let the cardiologist or your primary care talk you into a statin drug. It does not have an effect. The only thing that a statin drug does is prevent plaque rupture — reduce the likelihood about 1% (not 36%, not 50%, like my colleagues quote; that’s BS; that’s statistical manipulation; it’s very deceptive), it reduces risk for plaque rupture about 1% over several years. That’s it. And those are in people who are doing nothing else, right. Going on a low-fat diet, and taking aspirin, hardly does anything.

It’s the program — the program, the Undoctored program, Wheat Belly Total Health. We eliminate the expression of small LDL particles. We raise HDL, reduce triglycerides, reduce blood sugar, reduce insulin resistance, reduce inflammation. We use high-dose fish oil. We use vitamin D restoration, iodine and thyroid optimization, magnesium, cultivation of bowel flora. Those are the strategies that have dramatic effects, so much so that you can reduce your heart scan store. Aspirin doesn’t do that. Statins don’t do that. A low-fat diet most certainly does not do that. So, know what a heart scan is. Use it properly, and it can be part, a crucial part, of a very powerful heart disease prevention program.

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The Yo-Yo Dieter’s Dilemma

People lose oodles of weight on the Wheat Belly lifestyle. Weight loss results rapidly on this lifestyle because we 1) remove gliadin-derived opioid peptides that previously stimulated appetite, 2) remove amylopectin A that previously raised blood sugar and thereby insulin to high levels, 3) remove other factors that add to inflammation such as wheat germ agglutinin. We have thousands and thousand of people who have lost 30, 50, 100, 130 pounds on the basic program.

But not everyone does. Some people fail to lose weight because they have hypothyroidism, fail to restore iodine, take prescription drugs that block weight loss, drink diet soda with synthetic sweeteners that disrupt bowel flora, have ongoing wheat/grain exposures, or other unresolved issues. (You can find a full discussion of such issues in the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox and Wheat Belly Total Health books. Also. follow the emerging strategies in the Undoctored Blog and Undoctored Inner Circle.)

But there is another impediment to weight loss that we have not thoroughly discussed: the reduction in metabolic rate that comes from previous efforts to limit calories. 

Here’s a common scenario: Someone wants to lose weight and does so by reducing calories. Weight loss of, say, 20 pounds results over a couple of months—success . . . ah, but it’s short-lived. Long-term, the weight is regained—even if the calorie restriction is maintained. This was vividly illustrated by study of the Biggest Loser TV show contestants: huge weight loss over several weeks achieved by slashing calories and engaging in extreme exercise, only to regain most of the weight while continuing to exercise and restrict calories. Why? Because metabolic rate drops by about 23% (about 500 kcal/day), meaning that your body has been fooled into thinking that you are starving and thereby tries to conserve energy by turning down your rate of energy burn. Oddly, while this phenomenon has been recorded at 30 weeks after the program, it persists even after 6 years. The majority of originally successful Biggest Loser participants were in the extremely obese category 6 years after being on the show. In other words, calorie restriction damns you to weight gain over the long run. 

It means that people who have lost weight with calorie restriction, pushing the plate away, “move more, eat less,” etc. have ratcheted down their metabolic rate. And some people go up and down in weight repeatedly, so-called yo-yo dieters, for whom metabolic rate declines with each episode, making long-term weight control tougher and tougher with each cycle.  The solution is therefore not to further restrict calories, which is misery to begin with, but to increase metabolic rate.

How to achieve this? As with so many bits and pieces of information nowadays, you will find no shortage of easy-fixes that really don’t work, such as drinking more coffee (trivial effect), green tea (trivial effect), or consume more protein (minor effect). To break this weight loss/metabolic depression, you need more powerful strategies than what comes in an extra cup of coffee.

I won’t kid you: this will require work. One fairly effective solution, but one that requires time, effort, and commitment, is to engage in high-intensity interval training, HIIT. All this means is engaging in some form of exercise—stationary biking, walking a treadmill, elliptical, etc.—at moderate intensity for 2-3 minutes followed by a burst of high-intensity (in both speed and resistance) for 30-45 seconds, the cycle repeated four to six times for a total time investment of around 20 minutes. This has been shown to increase metabolic rate, as well as generate many of the same health benefits of traditional long-duration exercise, such as increased insulin sensitivity and increased muscle mass. The high-intensity phase of exercise should leave you breathless and sweaty, having exceeded your personal exercise capacity for a brief period. The formula of moderate- and high- intensity has many time variations–longer or shorter high-intensity bursts, longer or shorter moderate-intensity periods—and you can obtain greater effects by increasing the number of high-intensity cycles. Even without a ramp-up in metabolic rate, the high-intensity intervals also increase the body’s ability to mobilize fat considerably, accelerating weight loss even further.

Another strategy that increases metabolic rate is strength training. Strength training builds muscle: the more muscle you have, the higher the metabolic rate. This is especially true for people with a history of yo-yo dieting, as every bout of weight loss involves muscle loss. A weight loss of, say, 30 pounds achieved via calorie restriction means you lost around 10 pounds of muscle. Regain the weight and you have regained 30 pounds of fat, not muscle. Each cycle of weight loss/weight regain means you progressively lose more and more muscle, reducing your metabolic rate. Rebuilding the lost muscle helps reverse this phenomenon. To hugely accelerate rebuilding muscle, use our L. reuteri yogurt. (Personally, I have regained a huge amount of muscle and strength on the yogurt, so much that I now handle more weight than I have in 40 years and have gained 13 pounds of muscle.)

A simple strategy that I like to use that combines high-intensity training with strength training is to use high-repetition, high-intensity circuit training at the gym. This means lining up something like 8-10 different exercise machines at the gym: lat pulldown, bench press, seated or standing row, overhead press, standing deltoid lift, leg press, leg extension, back extension, etc. Focus on large muscles such as those in the thighs, latissimus, and lower back. (You cannot achieve the same intensity using such tools as low-weight dumbbells or resistance bands; you really need weights. Using machines makes the intensity and speed faster, rather than having to load up barbells and dumbbells, though they work fine, too, if you have the patience to change the plates.) Use a weight that allows you to start with high repetitions of around 18-20 repetitions for each exercise taken to exhaustion. Repeat the entire cycle a second time using a weight that allows 10-12 repetitions to exhaustion. By the end, you should be breathing hard and sweating. There are numerous variations on this theme, with every personal trainer with their own notion of how to best do this, but the key is to not stop between sets and to take each set to exhaustion. This is a big part of the reason CrossFit routines yield substantial benefits (which is another way to achieve these effects). Not only will you increase metabolic rate and accelerate fat loss, you will also build muscle. Combine this strategy with the L. reuteri yogurt, as well as the basic program, and you can obtain dramatic effects in a relatively short time.

 

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Intensive 2-Hour SIBO Workshop

Join us Tuesday evening, March 12th, at 8 pm EST/ 7 pm CST/6 pm MT/5 pm PT for my Undoctored SIBO Workshop: A 2-hour in-depth exploration of SIBO that I shall present via live video broadcast. The cost to attend is $55.

An unprecedented number of people now have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, an intestinal condition that has reached epidemic proportions. SIBO causes or worsens numerous health conditions such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, restless leg syndrome, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. If you have any of these conditions or have diabetes (type 1 or 2), an autoimmune condition, unexplained skin rashes, food intolerances, intolerances to prebiotic fibers such as those in legumes, or fatigue, SIBO is something you should be aware of and, if uncorrected, can lead to irreversible health problems such as diverticular disease and colon cancer—it is well worth identifying, then correcting.

Problem: Because the science is so recent, the majority of doctors, even gastrointestinal specialists. remain in the dark about SIBO. But most people can take the reins on their own with impressive results.

I will discuss why recognizing SIBO is so crucial for health, how to identify whether you or someone close to you has it, how to manage (even without the doctor involved), and how to prevent recurrences. We will end with a live interactive Q&A session.

I will also discuss:

Why formal testing is not always necessary
What herbal antibiotic regimens are effective and safe, which are not
The benefits of rebuilding the intestinal barrier
Steps you must take to prevent recurrences.

The cost to attend the LIVE event with Dr. Davis is $55. Click on the Add to Cart button below to sign up, then click on the PayPal button to submit payment.

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Unwrinkled

Can you stop—-genuinely stop-—the progress, the ravages, of aging? Is it possible to arrest skin thinning and sagging, bone loss, muscle atrophy, impaired healing, hormonal depletion, i.e., all the trappings of aging and stay somewhere around 40 until you reach 100? Can you continue to ride a bicycle, dance the samba, remain slender, vigorous, energetic, smooth and unwrinkled well after peers have given into gravity and age?

Or, if you are already beyond age 40, can you turn the clock back 10 or 20 years and regain the vigor, strength, health, and smooth skin that you were misled into thinking you’d regain by eating well or applying wrinkle cream?

Can youth and life be resurrected or restored?

I believe we are seeing this happen. It starts with our basic prescriptive program, as articulated in the Wheat Belly Total Health and Undoctored Wild, Naked, Unwashed programs. These efforts alone—wheat/grain elimination, capping net carbs; restoring vitamin D to a 25-hydroxy vitamin D level of 60-70 ng/ml; omega-3 fatty acids; magnesium supplementation; iodine and thyroid optimization; efforts to cultivate bowel flora—get you off to a powerful start by reversing inflammation, reversing insulin resistance, restoring skin health, reversing hundreds of health conditions such as most instances of type 2 diabetes, acid reflux, and irritable bowel syndrome.

But you can take it even further. Among the additional strategies you can add is our Lactobacillus reuteri yogurt. Recall that the benefits have nothing to do with yogurt; yogurt is just a vehicle for amplifying bacterial counts. We also use extended fermentation in the presence of prebiotic fibers to increase counts even further. Much of the benefits of L. reuteri yogurt come from its capacity to boost hypothalamic release of oxytocin (via the vagus nerve) that, in turn:

Increases dermal collagen—This is a huge effect, one that explains why many people (though not all, oddly) experience reduced wrinkles within several weeks to months.
Accelerates healing dramatically
Increases strength and muscle mass (especially if you strength train)—If we view muscle mass as a biomarker for youthfulness, you regain lost muscle (atrophy of aging), turning the clock back considerably. I am far stronger today at age 61 than I was in my thirties.
Preserves bone density
Increases libido
Increases empathy and connectedness to other people

Take a look at some of the shared before/afters on the Wheat Belly Facebook page and you will see that people are looking younger and younger even if the “after” photo is 3, 4, or 5 years later.

I believe that the L. reuteri effect is just one among many more such insights that will emerge, many of them coming from study of the microbiome. If you have been consuming the yogurt and have before/after photos, please share with us. Or, if you are just about the start, take a “before” selfie, then again in 4-8 weeks and compare. Once again, please feel free to share with us on the Wheat Belly Facebook page.

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Man Boobs, Muffin Tops and Bagel Bumps

Muffin tops, man boobs, and bagel bumps: These are among the varied and perverse ways that the hormonal distortions inflicted on unwitting humans who consume the seeds of grasses, i.e., grains, show themselves.

In our modern world filled with thousands of processed foods, there are plenty of landmines for health. Gummy bears and gumdrops will rot teeth, for instance. Indulge in a handful of dried prunes and you’ll have to schedule a substantial portion of your day on the toilet due to bowel irritants.

But only wheat and grains are associated with a wide swath of health problems that range from autoimmune disease to mental illness. Among the most striking outward manifestations of wheat/grain consumption are due to the hormonal distortions they inflict, disruptions of hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, insulin-like growth factor, and insulin.

Among the most striking outward signs of wheat/grain-induced hormonal distortions are:

Muffin tops — The ring of body fat that encircles the abdomen is not just a challenge to find properly fitting blouses, but also a confident sign that there is also excess visceral fat surrounding the abdominal organs, the inflammatory fat that increases risk for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. You don’t even have to be overweight or have a high body mass index, BMI, to have a muffin top. I saw plenty of people with this pattern of muffin tops on otherwise slender people in Paris, France, for example, the so-called “skinny fat people.” (There are plenty of obviously overweight people there, too, contrary to popular opinion.)

Man boobs — More properly called “gynecomastia,” or what I’ve previously called “the Dolly Parton Effect,” enlarged breasts on males is the product of the A5 pentapeptide, a specific 5 amino acid peptide breakdown product from the gliadin protein of wheat, that is a potent stimulant for pituitary release of the hormone prolactin. Pro + lactin = encouraging lactation, including growth of breast tissue in anticipation of breastfeeding. Prolactin activity is therefore natural and normal in a pregnant mother–but not in a male. Prolactin levels in grain-consuming males can be twice as high as non-grain consuming males.

Breast enlargement is also encouraged by the abnormal increased expression of the aromatase enzyme in the visceral fat of the wheat belly that converts testosterone to estrogen, resulting in low testosterone and high estrogen in males. This can also be responsible for reduced libido, weight gain, and emotionality.

Bagel bumps — In some people, the accumulation of visceral belly fat is not accompanied by an outwardly visible muffin top, but shows as the abdominal protuberance that looks just like an 8- or 9-month pregnancy, what I call a “bagel bump.” It’s not clear why some people have this form of weight accumulation versus a muffin top, but bagel bumps appear to be every bit as inflammatory and insulin-blocking as the muffin top pattern.

There are several other ways that the hormonal disruptions of wheat and grains show themselves, such as increased period pain in menstruating females, increased male-pattern hair growth in women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility for women, acne, skin tags, impaired erectile ability in males, reduced libido in both men and women.

My point in all this? Go to your next state fair, shopping mall, or nearest Walmart and you are going to be witness to the astounding commonality of these perversions of human physiology. While “official” sources of health information blame the individual for eating too much and moving too little, such simplistic advice completely dodges the issue of hormonal distortions that plague the public, much of it developing due to their advice to “eat more healthy whole grains,” an unnatural, inflammation-provoking, hormonally-disruptive way to eat.

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Dietary Blunders: Part II

I learned the hard way that not only are low-fat diets ineffective for heart and metabolic health, but that they are actually destructive.

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Dietary Blunders: Part I

How did I come to the conclusions that I’ve detailed in my Wheat Belly and Undoctored books? Easy: I started by making huge mistakes in my own diet.

Following a super strict low-fat vegetarian diet caused me to develop type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sky-high triglycerides, fatigue and incessant appetite. I reversed everything by no longer limiting fat, adding back meats and other animal products.

I’ve since done the same for hundreds of thousands of other people with similar spectacular stories of success.

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Pepperoni and Sun-Dried Tomato Muffins

Here’s a savory muffin with the flavors of pepperoni (or substitute salami or crumbled cooked sausage), sun-dried tomatoes, oregano, and Parmesan cheese. I made this one day just playing around in the kitchen and was pleasantly surprised at how tasty it was on the first try. They make a terrific quick breakfast when you’re in a hurry or something to add to a portable lunch. They taste best, by the way, consumed warm.

I used sun-dried tomatoes in oil, as I believe they yield richer flavor than the dried variety.

Makes 12 muffins.

2 cups almond flour

1/4 cup ground golden flaxseed

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes, finely chopped

4 ounces pepperoni, finely chopped

2 eggs, whisked

1 cup coconut milk

1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

In large bowl, combine almond flour, flaxseed, oregano, baking soda, salt and mix. Stir in sun-dried tomatoes, pepperoni, eggs, coconut milk and mix thoroughly.

Line muffins tins with paper or silicone liners. Distribute mixture into 12 wells. Sprinkle Parmesan cheese on top of each muffin. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick withdraws dry.

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Five big nutritional mistakes I’ve made over the years

No question: I have made some huge nutritional blunders over the past 25 years since I began to become seriously involved in nutritional issues. My mistakes, however, have provided powerful feedback on how to get diet right, how to get diet wrong. The impact of diet is profound.

Among the huge mistakes I’ve made:

1) Reducing total and saturated fat, eating vegetarian—It made me hungry, never satisfied, and, along with mistake #2, made me a type 2 diabetic with fasting blood sugars of 160+ mg/dl, triglycerides as high as 390 mg/dl, a HDL of 27 mg/dl, oodles of small LDL particles, and high blood pressure.

2) Eating lots of “healthy whole grains”—This, of course, contributed to always being hungry, type 2 diabetes, and the above metabolic distortions. It also gave me irritable bowel syndrome, eczematous skin rashes, irritability, fatigue, and weight gain.

3) Believing that exercise was somehow an antidote for dietary mistakes—It is not. Yes, exercise is part of an overall health program as it reduces insulin resistance, helps control blood pressure, contributes to well-being, maintains flexibility, and protects us from dementia. But it cannot undo the effects of diet that can easily overwhelm benefits provided by exercise.

4) Neglect the power of prebiotic fibers—Sure, it helps to take a probiotic and consume lactate-fermented foods. But you must nourish bowel flora with their preferred food: prebiotic fibers. This is one of the big problems for people who follow a ketogenic diet: It is devoid of prebiotic fibers and likely accounts for the constipation, long-term metabolic deterioration despite upfront improvements, kidney stones, osteoporosis, diverticular disease, and increased risk for colon cancer. No prebiotics = marked reduction in microbial species diversity. Species diversity is a crucial factor in maintaining health.

5) Believing that health efforts can end at diet—Diet is powerful, there’s no doubt about it. But optimal health cannot end at diet. Let’s take reversing insulin resistance, for example, the process that leads to type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, increased risk for dementia, heart disease, and cancer. Diet by itself makes a major contribution to reversing insulin resistance, but it may not be enough. Address factors such as vitamin D deficiency, magnesium deficiency, iodine deficiency/hypothyroidism, abnormal postprandial (after-meal) lipoprotein responses, and dysbiosis and you further undo insulin resistance and obtain a broad and powerful panel of further health benefits. This is why diet trends only take you so far: They are not complete solutions to health, weight loss, and maintaining youthfulness. (This is why the Wheat Belly Total Health and Undoctored programs include additional strategies to address the deficiencies of modern life.)

We’ve all made diet and health mistakes. But we should learn from our mistakes. Having learned from mine, I now have no type 2 diabetes, have a HbA1c of 4.8%, fasting blood glucose in the 80s, triglycerides of 47 mg/dl, HDL 94 mg/dl, eat no grains or sugary foods, exercise for fun, include liberal quantities of prebiotic fibers, and address all the common deficiencies of modern life.

Oddly, however, we do this on our own because sources of “official” health and dietary advice don’t seem to learn from their mistakes and cling to ideas that were long ago disproven, such as the advice to limit fat and saturated fat, “move more and eat less,” and “everything in moderation,” awful and ineffective advice for anyone.

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