William Davis's Blog: Dr. Davis Infinite Health Blog, page 93

Madeline’s Wheat Belly success . . . in a real world

Madeline shared her story on our Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox private Facebook page. Her experience highlights many important aspects of this lifestyle, but especially how health can be transformed by sticking to this lifestyle and not being confused by “gluten-free” foods, the misguided advice of doctors, and overcoming stress that is inevitable in everyone’s lives.

Her reward? Magnificent transformation in her health and appearance, all achieved by rejecting conventional dietary advice.

“I’m posting to show that not everyone looses at the same speed–don’t be discouraged. I lost 10 lbs almost immediately, then stalled for months. I was raised in my Greek father’s diner surrounded by my mother’s big Italian family. Food is love. Both my brother and my sister have had great success with weight reduction surgery… I refuse to go that route.

“I read the original Wheat Belly Book in August, 2011 while on vacation and had great success giving up gluten and soy. But it wasn’t until February, 2016 that I started my grain-free and sugar-free journey.

“I started this plan with an excellent blood pressure 118/72, a pre-diabetic A1C of 6.1, and a fasting blood glucose level of 140. Taking no prescribed medications at all, I was the picture of health if you overlooked my pre-diabetes and my severe obesity. My mother had her first heart attack at the same age I am now, at 53, from a blood clot caused by undiagnosed diabetes. My doctor warned me I was at risk to follow her footsteps. Something had to change.

“My digestion had me ‘running’ to the bathroom, my joints hurt, my legs were swollen like tree trunks and my right lower leg throbbed. I awoke tired after a good 8-hour sleep. I took Musinex and Zyrtec every day to keep allergies at bay. Prevacid was also part of my daily routine. Not to mention all the Tylenol and Asprin I was taking. I kept an asthma rescue inhaler in my purse for emergencies. My skin was thick and dark in creases around my neck, elbows, knuckles and behind my knees. My upper arms were bumpy like chicken skin. I often got face acne, more like a teenager than a woman my age. My ears itched and the tinnitus ringing in my left ear was deafening.

“I travel often for business and fast foods kept me company on my 5+ hour car rides. When I started in Feb. 2016, the first six months were difficult and stressful. New job, very sick parent, his passing; then grieving. I cheated a bit, until I realized I was just cheating myself. I had only lost 10 lbs that first 6 months. And my health was no better.

“In September 2016, I dedicated myself 100% to this WOE. I buckled down, taking supplements and carefully counting net carbs in everything. I became a good detective and when traveling for business often treated dinner like a scavenger hunt; looking for compliant foods. I have spent an evening in a strange town I call ‘fast food alley,’ wandering the grocery store. Sometimes I wound up with a small container of cultured full fat sour cream, a 1/2 pint of raspberries and some nuts.

“My non-scale victory? In the last six months, I feel great and I am getting healthy. My IBS is gone. My allergies? Gone. My acid reflux? Gone. Leg pain? Gone. My inhaler expired, I have not used it since September. My skin is clear, I no longer get acne, by joints are no longer dark in color and my upper arms are smooth. My legs are not as swollen and the pain is gone. I no longer take OTC’s for anything. My tinnitus is almost gone. My blood sugar is also much better. Waking blood sugar is 108 (dawn phenomenon) and stays below 90 at almost all times, even after a large meal. Last weeks blood work showed an A1C of 5.7 and fasting BS of 85.

“Additional NSV? I lost many inches. I went down two dress sizes. My clothes fit better. I started intermittent fasting. Eating all my food in an eight hour time slot 16:8. This allowed me to lose the second 10 pounds for a total of 20 (so far). I’m now working to determine how much protein I need and I suspect I need to eat even more fats.

“I’m planning on continuing this WOE for the rest of my life. So much good information and thoughtful posts. I’m looking forward to the rest of my grain-free, sugar-free life!“

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Who’s smarter: You or the doctor?

In previous years, it was safe to assume that your doctor was the most informed person about health in the room. In today’s world, this is simply not true. Hear what I have to say about this here. Given the new tools of the Information Age, you can be smarter than your doctor.

No living human can keep up with the information load coming at us like a fire hose and hope to provide up-to-date healthcare, no matter how hardworking, how fancy their equipment, or how many degrees they have.

Dealing with this boom in health information requires new tools to organize it all, put it to practical use, and extract maximum benefit.

In this modern age of information exchange, collective knowledge is at your fingertips, and you need to be your own best health advocate. The key to health is information collaboration, not relying on the presumed expertise of a single practitioner. The Undoctored approach is based on information collaboration and reaches very different conclusions from the advice of the doctor, billboards and ads from hospitals, different from the drug industry and different from other healthcare insiders who stand to profit from your health gone wrong.

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Is there HEALING in healthcare?

Has the idea of healing people back to health been lost from modern healthcare?

Have you seen all those billboards and ads luring you into hospitals, surgeries, and other high-ticket medical procedures? Why run ads for electrophysiologic studies, implantable defibrillators, lap-band/gastric bypass, and cancer chemotherapy?

Easy: Because that’s where the money is.

If healing were truly the driving theme behind today’s healthcare, then the whole approach would be different. Conversations with health care providers would focus on prevention and identifying and reversing causes instead of expensive procedures.

The truth? The healthcare industry is focused on profits, not healing. The enemy of healthcare is not sickness; it’s healthy people. I want YOU to become the enemy of the predatory, profit-drive healthcare system.

I explain all this in my new book, Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You and How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

You can also sign up for my new Undoctored mini-course to get better acquainted with this liberating message.

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Modern healthcare: Spend more, die earlier

You would guess that, the more money spent on healthcare, the healthier people get—but no, that’s not true at all. Plenty of research has shown that, the more money spent on healthcare, the more doctors and hospitals available, the HIGHER the mortality rate and the sicker people become. Contrary to hospital billboards and TV ads, more doctors, more hospitals, more drugs, more procedures = higher mortality rate.

This is part of the reason that becoming Undoctored sets you on course for health: to set you free from the health-impairing effects of misguided healthcare. Most doctors and hospitals want to see you consume more drugs and more procedures, not achieve greater health.

But achieving high levels of health and slenderness is actually quite easy—but don’t count on your doctor to show you how. This is why I wrote the new book, Undoctored that shows you how, using six essential strategies, you can distance yourself from the predatory practices of our healthcare system.

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Health should be FREE

Imagine that you receive a notice in the mail stating “In order to maintain your freedom of speech, you will be billed $10,000 per year.”

You would be—understandably—outraged. Freedom of speech in America is precious, something Americans have fought wars to defend. We view free speech as a basic right, no big check to write in order to maintain it. It should be free and available to everyone regardless of religion, color, political leanings, or income.

I believe that same principle should apply to health.

Being healthy means living free of common chronic health conditions such as high cholesterol, high blood sugars, acid reflux, migraine headaches, skin rashes, joint pain and hundreds of other health conditions. While such conditions are typically not catastrophic or immediately life-threatening, they are exceptionally common and consume the majority of healthcare dollars. Most money spent in healthcare is not for transplanting hearts or treating cystic fibrosis; it’s spent on much more common, though less dramatic, “diseases of lifestyle.” Think of the $23 billion spent every year on statin cholesterol drugs, or the $20 billion for stomach acid-blocking drugs, or the $11 billion for injectable inflammatory drugs. It is a trillion dollar, $10,000 per American per year burden, growing every year, and is unsustainable, now consuming an unprecedented 17.5% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

But there is a little known secret here. As crippling as expanding healthcare costs have become, industry insiders privately work to grow their share of the GDP pie to 19%, 20%, or more. Healthcare is a growth industry, growing at the consumers’ expense.

Healthcare is an industry that is not primarily focused on providing inexpensive, accessible solutions for individuals to achieve health; if that were true, doctor visits would consist of a detailed assessment of a person’s eating habits, lifestyle, chemical exposures, nutrient deficiencies, emotional status, and other real health issues. Just recall your last doctor visit that likely focused more on your apparent “need” for drugs, scheduling a procedure, or referring you to a specialist for more detailed assessment. Healthcare is a system created to maximize revenues to healthcare insiders. This includes doctors, hospital systems, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical device industry, and other big players, all hoping to grow their piece of the healthcare pie.

Even if a health condition has a known and proven solution that can be administered by an individual safely, inexpensively, in the comfort of her living room or kitchen, doctors and other healthcare insiders virtually never seek out or pass this information on. If a service does not generate substantial revenues to healthcare insiders, it is simply not sought nor passed onto the healthcare consumer.

The modern epidemic of type 2 diabetes is a perfect example, a largely man-made phenomenon that cannot be blamed on genetic defects, viruses, or bad luck. Despite numerous clinical studies demonstrating that dietary carbohydrate restriction dramatically improves blood sugars, even reverses diabetes all the way to non-diabetes in many, if not most, people, this information is almost never shared with the 30 million people who have been prescribed various drugs to reduce blood sugar. Watch television and you will see why: diabetes drug treatment is booming and drives the conversation. Drugs like Toujeo, Januvia, Invokana, Farxiga, and Jardiance dominate TV and print ads, dominate sales pitches of a very clever and well-trained pharmaceutical sales force, and thereby dominate the prescribing behavior of physicians. And who makes generous contributions to the American Diabetes Association that advocates liberal intake of foods that raise blood sugar, i.e., carbohydrates? Diabetes drug manufacturers such as Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and AstraZeneca.

Studies have demonstrated that type 2 diabetes is readily reversible in many people. I have helped reverse this condition back to normal in thousands of people. I was a type 2 diabetic myself 20 years ago but do not have diabetes any longer and enjoy perfect blood sugar (and hemoglobin A1c) values. But what value do former type 2 diabetics provide to the healthcare system? None. Off drugs, with dramatically reduced risk for numerous complicating health conditions, reduced need for hospitals and procedures, former diabetics are worthless to a system interested in growing revenues.

Sickness is not the enemy of the healthcare system—healthy people are. If everyone was healthy, we would have no need for much of the for-profit healthcare system. Billion dollar hospital systems would disintegrate, seven-figure physician incomes would plummet, the bottom line of Big Pharma and medical device industries would shrivel—but their loss is your gain. We would, of course, continue to require healthcare for dealing with injuries and accidents, infectious diseases, and inherited conditions, essential functions of the healthcare system. But we would be freed of many common and chronic health conditions that dominate most healthcare activity. The resultant cost savings, not to mention freedom from the hassles and unintended adverse effects, would be considerable–not millions of dollars, but hundreds of billions of dollars.

Is such a level of health achievable without drugs or the supervision of a doctor? Yes, absolutely. I know because I’ve witnessed it countless times: people being freed of lists of prescription drugs, relieved of common health conditions such as acid reflux and migraine headaches, losing weight that was gained by following conventional nutritional advice, achieving health on a scale that they formerly thought unattainable, feeling and looking better than they have in years. And it was all achieved in spite of doctors, in spite of the misaligned motivations of a profit-driven healthcare system.

Healthcare has taken the for-profit paradigm too far, sacrificing health. This is why it is crucial that we take back individual control, taking advantage of the enormous bounty of science that has already shown us that health is a readily, cheaply, safely achievable goal, and apply the power of the coming wave of crowd wisdom facilitated by the tools of the Information Age. I call this movement Undoctored because it puts control over health back in the hands of you, not in the predatory, profiteering hands of the healthcare system.

The Undoctored book is scheduled for release May 9, 2017 but is available for pre-order through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Indie Bound.

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Why Wheat Belly . . . and what’s next?

Most of you are familiar with the Wheat Belly books and philosophies. I called it Wheat Belly because abdominal fat is the signature pattern of weight gain from a diet based on wheat and grains. It is the outward expression of the deep visceral fat encircling the intestines and other abdominal organs that is inflammatory, disrupts hormones, keeps you from wearing a size 4 bikini, and yields the unsettling sight of middle-aged men with protuberant bellies spilling over Speedos. Wheat Belly conveyed the same lessons that I’d originally learned in the world of heart health, now repackaged to appeal to mainstream interests.

And it worked. Millions of Wheat Belly books and cookbooks have been sold in 44 countries; the Wheat Belly message has been featured on popular TV shows, from The Colbert Report to The 700 Club; and it now has its own public television special. It infuriated the grain industry, which then budgeted large sums of money to attack the message and its messenger. It spawned pushback from people who misperceived the Wheat Belly message as just another plug for a gluten-free diet. Obviously Wheat Belly involves so much more than simply going gluten-free!

Not only did the Wheat Belly message meet expectations in food, weight loss, and sex, it helped thousands of people recover from common health conditions, such as acid reflux and fibromyalgia, within days of starting; relieved lifelong sufferers of migraine headaches and binge eating disorder; and allowed people to get off prescription medications. People experienced reductions in appetite and increased energy and deeper sleep, and they felt and even looked different. (Take a look at the Wheat Belly Blog, for instance, or the Official Wheat Belly Facebook page, and you will see the “before” and “after” facial photos: facial edema gone, cheek/chin redness gone, around-the-eye puffiness gone revealing larger eyes, all developing within a few days to weeks. Some of the transformations are striking.) In short, Wheat Belly works. This wacky-named collection of ideas that originated with efforts at heart health, subsequently embraced by millions while driving the grain industry crazy, simply works. It worked in showing that food choices entirely contrary to conventional wisdom yielded impressive weight loss, made you feel and look sexier while restoring a healthy hormonal status, and reversed a long list of health conditions.

And with more people reading the books and following their advice, newer lessons emerged as larger numbers of people provided feedback. It became clear that efforts at health could not end with a shift in food choices, as crucial as they were. There were nutritional deficiencies remaining, for instance, some caused by wheat and grains, others not, that needed correction, such as magnesium and iodine deficiencies. People needed guidance on how to get off medications, as many doctors proved unhelpful or incapable of dealing with people who no longer had diabetes, for example, but were still taking insulin and diabetes drugs. As many of you have experienced first hand, Doctors struggle to deal with healthy people who no longer need drugs.

This is why I felt compelled to create the next step. The Wheat Belly experience provided a starting point for the concepts that are further advanced in my newest labor of love,  Undoctored: Why Health Care Has Failed You And How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

In  Undoctored, I will be discussing food, achieving weight loss, and talking about all aspects of this lifestyle, all while reversing or preventing hundreds of health conditions with little or no doctoring involved. What are you waiting for? Join me in the next step of the journey so becoming truly healthy.  It’s time for you to become Undoctored!

Yours in grainless health,

Dr. William Davis

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Unpotato Salad: A guest recipe from Dana Carpender

Dana Carpender is a prolific cookbook author who focuses on low-carb and, more recently, ketogenic, recipes. Among her most recent books is The Low-Carb Diabetes Solution Cookbook.

Dana is a whiz at coming up with quick, convenient, limited-ingredients ways to liven up your food choices, all while adhering to a strict low-carb effort (all recipes are 5 grams total carbs or less in this cookbook) that are also perfectly compatible with the Wheat Belly lifestyle. Here is one of Dana’s recipes from the book.

 

Unpotato Salad

You are going to be so surprised; this is amazingly like potato salad. I have seen people take two or three bites before they figure out it’s not potatoes. This is modeled on the old-school picnic favorite.

Yields: 12 servings

298 caloires; 33 g fat; 3 g protein; 2 g carbohydrate; 1 g dietary fiber per serving

1 large head cauliflower, cut into small chunks

2 cups (240 g) diced celery

1 cup (160 g) diced red onion

2 cups (450 g) mayonnaise

1/4 cup (60 ml) cider vinegar

2 teaspoons sea salt

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

12 drops liquid stevia (plain)

4 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

Put the cauliflower in microwavable casserole dish, add just a tablespoon (15 ml) or so of water, and cover. Cook it on high for 7 minutes, and let it sit, covered, for another 3 to 5 minutes. You want your cauliflower tender, but not mushy. (And you may steam it on the stove top, if you prefer.)

Use the time while the cauliflower cooks to dice your celery and onion.

Drain the cooked cauliflower and combine it with the celery and onion in a really big bowl.

In a separate bowl, combine the mayonnaise, vinegar, salt, pepper, and stevia. Pour the mixture over the vegetables and mix well. Mix in the chopped eggs last, and only stir lightly to preserve some small hunks of yolk. Chill and serve.

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Gluten and diabetes: The headlines get it wrong again

Another study was released recently that purports to “prove” that gluten-free diets are associated with increased risk for type 2 diabetes. As with many studies of this type, the findings were misinterpreted but fed into the media’s continual need for titillating headlines. I thought this hubbub would pass by now, but reports about this study (such as this piece of tripe from The Washington Post) seem to be gaining more traction than usual, fueling the misunderstanding and misinformation that plagues nutritional thinking. While I thought this would just pass, it looks like it will not and I’m therefore posting my comments.

First, a few words about epidemiological studies of the sort this group used, the Physicians’ Health Study population of health professionals. The participants were asked diet questions, then health status was tracked over several years. Putting aside the imprecision of such dietary recall questionnaires, we know that such studies simply cannot—no matter how large the study, no matter how meticulous the questions—establish cause-effect relationships; they can only suggest a potential association. The purported 13% difference in type 2 diabetes incidence is minor, given the dramatic imprecision of epidemiological studies; confident associations are typically much larger than this: 40% or 50%, for instance. This does not stop, of course, media people, who are journalists at best, paid marketing people for the grain industry at worst, to propagate their misinterpretations.

To further illustrate the problems inherent in epidemiological studies, let’s pretend that we want to establish whether a Toyota Prius is a safer car to drive than a Corvette. We therefore identify 1000 Prius drivers and 1000 Corvette drivers. We then ask the drivers every year whether they’ve had a car accident. What if we observe that people driving Corvettes are 30% more likely to have a high-speed car accident and 18% more likely to die in the accident? By these observations, should we conclude that Corvettes are far more dangerous cars than Priuses? Of course not. (I made these figures up, of course, just to illustrate, though I wouldn’t be surprised if such numbers approximate the real-life situation.) We can only say that there is an association between driving a Corvette and more accidents and fatalities. But we can most definitely NOT say that the increased dangers are due to the car per se, because it might be due to 1) the kinds of people who buy Corvettes (speed-hungry males), who are more likely to 2)  drive aggressively, 3) drink and drive, and 4) ignore laws not to text or engage in other risky activities while driving, etc. You get the picture–it may have nothing to do with the car itself, even though there is an apparent association. But outlets like The Washington Post and others can still make ridiculous headlines claims like “Corvettes found to kill drivers.”

So it goes with trying to track the consequences of consuming more or less gluten. Reduced “gluten” consumption can be a marker for:

Increased consumption of gluten-free foods made with cornstarch, rice flour, tapioca starch, and potato flour. I have discussed the dangers of these awful gluten-free replacements many times, as they are clearly associated with increased risk for type 2 diabetes, weight gain, inflammatory conditions, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Sadly, most people who reduce or eliminate gluten gravitate towards such horrible replacement foods that yields an apparent association that cutting gluten increases type 2 diabetes.
Reduced prebiotic fiber intake–Despite all the toxic components of wheat and grains, there is actually something good in them: prebiotic fibers. The average person obtains around 2-4 grams per day of the prebiotic fibers, arabinoxylan, amylose, and others, from  fibers in grains, in addition to inert cellulose fibers. Reduced gluten is therefore a marker for a reduction in prebiotic fiber intake. This is what happens to the majority of people on low-carb, Atkins, and paleo diets if they are not informed about the importance of including plentiful prebiotic fibers in their daily diet. Obviously, you can easily compensate for the removal of grain-sourced prebiotic fibers by increasing consumption of legumes, root vegetables, and other sources.  Because the concept of prebiotic fibers is so new, very few people have had a chance to take advantage of this strategy and it therefore will not show up in this epidemiological analysis, instead yielding the apparent low-gluten/more diabetes association.

Those two factors, in addition to other potential unidentified factors that can plague such study design and can only be speculated on, make it impossible to conclude that reduced gluten leads to increased type 2 diabetes or that increased gluten prevents diabetes. Yet that is what was reported.

If we believe the interpretations of the findings offered by the authors of the study, as well as by the generally naive media, then it appears that gluten or some other component of grains are therefore protective against developing type 2 diabetes. Of course, outside of prebiotic fiber intake associated with gluten intake, this is absurd—no such science exists.

The Washington Post, as well as the researchers themselves, were not the only people to misinterpret the findings so tragically. Fox News, ABC News, Boston Magazine and many others made the same absurd blunders. In fact, this silly piece of epidemiological semi-fiction received such favorable treatment in the media that it makes me wonder if there was some sort of financial catalyst, AKA the grain lobby, involved. I don’t know, but it looks and smells an awfully lot like a smoking gun.

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Undoctored: Giving back control over individual health

The new Undoctored book is scheduled for release this coming May 9th, 2017, a book that shows how you can be freed from the bonds of a predatory, profit-seeking healthcare system.  Here’s a bit more from the book, now available in pre-release.

 

Undoctored: An excerpt

Unquestionably, there are situations in which doctoring and the healthcare system are needed. If you are bleeding, injured, or struggling to breathe with pneumonia, some old-fashioned suturing, bone-setting, or antibiotics can still do the trick. Nobody around here is going to replace their own hip joint or treat a urinary tract infection with salves and tonics. There are also situations that are beyond our reach, such as childhood cancer, congenital defects, and lung disease from smoking cigarettes. There are even occasional healthcare professionals who, despite the biases of their education, understand their role as healers, not as cogs in this flawed, profit-seeking wheel. But I’m not talking about those situations. I’m talking about more common and costly (in total) health issues that plague modern humans, from constipation to migraine headaches, from eczema to erectile dysfunction, from acid reflux to plantar fasciitis, from acne to attention-deficit disorder. These are the problems that bore most doctors silly, certainly never portrayed on TV medical dramas. Doctors are more eager to see exciting, better paying problems like heart attacks, colon cancer, brain tumors, and kids swallowing peculiar objects. After all, in most hospital healthcare systems of the twenty first century, physician pay is tied to hospital revenues, a bigger end-of-quarter bonus, for example, for generating more MRI scans, surgical consults, organ transplants, and other big ticket services—regardless whether they are truly needed or not. (The Institute of Medicine reported that, in 2009 alone, $209 billion was spent on unnecessary medical services, $75 billion was lost to fraud, with many more hundreds of billions lost to inefficiencies, inflated pricing, and excessive administrative costs. The dollars spent on the unnecessary and dishonest in healthcare nearly match the total dollars spent by the U.S. military every year.)

But it’s these less-than-interesting health issues for your doctor that are most amenable to us as individuals, health conditions that are eminently, wonderfully, and safely reduced, reversed, and—dare I say it—cured by a handful of simple strategies. You’ll be spared the annoyances and dangers of the healthcare system and, because you are obviously not trying to profit financially, you remove layer upon layer of unnecessary costs. You will also find personal health challenges far more fascinating to deal with since they involve you.

I got my first taste of the power of individually determined health 25 years ago when, despite being a faculty member at a teaching hospital and having been board certified in internal medicine and cardiology, I inadvertently made myself a type 2 diabetic with severe distortions of cholesterol values and triglycerides when I embraced a strict low-fat, vegetarian lifestyle dominated by vegetables and “healthy whole grains.” I have since reversed all of these dietary distortions by following a few basic health strategies, not a single prescription drug involved. And it was easy.

Let’s be absolutely clear: I propose that people can manage their own health safely and responsibly and achieve results superior to that achieved through conventional healthcare—not less than, not on a par with, but superior. Although you may find this proposal brash, if my experiences with thousands of people over the last decade are any indication, the great majority of people who adopt a handful of simple strategies can obtain health that is vastly superior to that obtained through conventional means with drugs and procedures, not to mention the awful message that passes for modern dietary advice. You will learn that, for an astounding and long list of health conditions, the code has been cracked. I propose that everyday people can achieve startling results without prescription drugs, without hospitals, without medical procedures, by largely sidestepping the doctor, using information and tools that inform, measure, and support self-directed efforts. And it’s relatively easy, inexpensive, safe, even fun.

It is something that was never before achievable, part of the rapidly changing landscape of technology. Such an idea would have been impossible, or at least hazardous, just 10 years ago. Only now is it becoming a reality. Empowerment of the individual in health is really just one aspect of broader waves of change that include self-driving cars and the celebration of non-celebrities through reality TV and YouTube. (Surely you’ve seen the “Evolution of Dance” and “Chewbacca mom”?) Computerized autopilot systems have been used to fly and land jetliners for years, technology has powered innovation in healthcare as 3-D modeling of drugs and remotely-operated robotic surgery, virtual nobodies perform for national TV audiences to show off impressive talents, but modern innovations have not yet been fully exploited to empower the individual in health. Well, the time has come: the tools of technology, coupled with a critical mass of new information and crowd interactive potential, have reached levels that now allow the everyday person to take back personal control over health.

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More about Virtue Sweetener

Because I wanted a benign and healthy way for followers of the Wheat Belly lifestyle to recreate dishes such as chocolate chip cookies, cheesecake, and pies with none of the health problems of grains or sugars, I helped Wheat-Free Market develop its Virtue Sweetener  product.

Yes, you could do without such sweeteners. But I learned long ago when I introduced Wheat Belly concepts to patients in my cardiology practice that having options while entertaining friends, during holidays, and pleasing kids was important for staying on course on this lifestyle. Before I understood how to use such natural sweeteners, patients would come back from, say, the Thanksgiving holiday 14 pounds heavier with disastrous changes in blood sugar, triglycerides, blood pressure, and small LDL particles that increased risk for heart attack. Given access to benign natural sweeteners, patients would come back with no weight gain, no change in blood sugar, no rise in small LDL, or any other measure—they would just enjoy the holiday with no observable downside.

It has also become clear in the last two years that synthetic sweeteners such as sucralose, saccharine, and aspartame have unhealthy implications, specifically adverse changes in bowel flora composition that explain why these sweeteners have been associated with weight gain and increased type 2 diabetes risk.

So Virtue Sweetener has emerged front and center because it allows you to end your wonderful grain-free meal with, say, a delicious German Chocolate Brownie  or Peanut Butter Fudge while not dealing with any adverse health effects. This remains true even if you are strictly limiting carbs on your low-carb diet or even ketogenic lifestyle.

There are two components in Virtue Sweetener: monkfruit and erythritol. Let’s talk about each one:

Monk fruit–More than a healthy sweetener?

Among our choices of natural sweeteners, monk fruit is the clear winner: zero calories, no weight gain, clean taste without bitter aftertaste, and—because of its concentrated sweetness—can slash cost when combined with other natural sweeteners like erythritol. But there are effects of this interesting non-caloric sweetener that go beyond its ability to just help us create healthy muffins or cookies. Scientific studies are now identifying important effects that add to health.

Much of this research got underway because of monk fruit’s long history as an effective home remedy to relieve sore throat and cough. Research studies have documented an anti-inflammatory effect of monk fruit. But there are additional beneficial effects that have been identified, including reduced blood sugar, an antioxidant effect, blocking fat accumulation in fat cells, and anti-inflammatory effects. A number of studies have also pinpointed effects that reduce potential for cancer. To date, these observations have only been made in experimental models and not through any human trials, but those will be emerging near-future. A sample of the scientific observations that have been made are listed below.

In the meantime, enjoy your coffee sweetened with monk fruit, or cookies or pies in which sugar has been replaced by this clean-tasting, non-caloric sweetener. Perhaps you will also obtain some important health benefits from monk fruit, as well.

Monk fruit is labeled Siraitia grosvenori or Momordica grosvenori in scientific studies. The active components of monk fruit are called mogrosides.

Diabetes

Experimental animal models suggest that monk fruit mogrosides provide protection from developing diabetes and reduces blood sugar:

Qi XY, Chen WJ, Zhang LQ, Xie BJ.Mogrosides extract from Siraitia grosvenori scavenges free radicals in vitro and lowers oxidative stress, serum glucose, and lipid levels in alloxan-induced diabetic mice. Nutr Res. 2008 Apr;28(4):278-84.
Suzuki YA, Tomoda M, Murata Y, Inui H, Sugiura M, Nakano Y. Antidiabetic effect of long-term supplementation with Siraitia grosvenori on the spontaneously diabetic Goto-Kakizaki rat. Br. J. Nutr. 2007; 97: 770–5.
Suzuki YA, Murata Y, Inui H, Sugiura M, Nakano Y. Triterpene glycosides of Siraitia grosvenori inhibit rat intestinal maltase and suppress the rise in blood glucose level after a single oral administration of maltose in rats. J. Agric. Food Chem. 2005; 53: 2941–2946.

Weight control

Monk fruit-derived mogrosides appear to block the cellular changes that lead to fat accumulation:

Harada N1, Ishihara M1, Horiuchi H1 et al. Mogrol derived from Siraitia grosvenorii mogrosides suppresses 3T3-L1 adipocyte differentiation by reducing cAMP-response element-binding protein phosphorylation and increasing AMP-activated protein kinase phosphorylation. PLoS One. 2016 Sep 1;11(9):e0162252.

Antioxidative effects

Monk fruit is an antioxidant, including blocking oxidation of LDL particles that can lead to heart disease:

Chen WJ, Wang J, Qi XY, Xie BJ. The antioxidant activities of natural sweeteners, mogrosides, from fruits of Siraitia grosvenori. Int J Food Sci Nutr. 2007 Nov;58(7):548-56.
Takeo E1, Yoshida H, Tada N et al. Sweet elements of Siraitia grosvenori inhibit oxidative modification of low-density lipoprotein. J Atheroscler Thromb. 2002;9(2):114-20.
Wang M, Xing S, Luu T et al. The gastrointestinal tract metabolism and pharmacological activities of grosvenorine, a major and characteristic flavonoid in the fruits of Siraitia grosvenorii. Chem Biodivers. 2015 Nov;12(11):1652-64. doi: 10.1002/cbdv.201400397.

Anti-inflammatory effects

Monk fruit mogrosides are anti-inflammatory:

Di R, Huang MT, Ho CT.Anti-inflammatory activities of mogrosides from Momordica grosvenori in murine macrophages and a murine ear edema model. J Agric Food Chem. 2011 Jul 13;59(13):7474-81.
Shi D, Zheng M, Wang Y et al. Protective effects and mechanisms of mogroside V on LPS-induced acute lung injury in mice. Pharm Biol. 2014 Jun;52(6):729-34.

Cancer preventive effects

Akihisa T, Hayakawa Y, Tokuda H et al.Cucurbitane glycosides from the fruits of Siraitia gros venorii and their inhibitory effects on Epstein-Barr virus activation. Nat Prod. 2007 May;70(5):783-8.
Liu C, Dai LH, Dou DQ et al. A natural food sweetener with anti-pancreatic cancer properties. Oncogenesis. 2016 Apr 11;5:e217.
Matsumoto S, Jin M, Dewa Y, Nishimura J et al. Suppressive effect of Siraitia grosvenorii extract on dicyclanil-promoted hepatocellular proliferative lesions in male mice. J Toxicol Sci. 2009 Feb;34(1):109-18.
Takasaki M, Konoshima T, Murata Y et al. Anticarcinogenic activity of natural sweeteners, cucurbitane glycosides, from Momordica grosvenori. Cancer Lett. 2003 Jul 30;198(1):37-42.
Ukiya M, Akihisa T, Tokuda H et al. Inhibitory effects of cucurbitane glycosides and other triterpenoids from the fruit of Momordica grosvenori on epstein-barr virus early antigen induced by tumor promoter 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate. J Agric Food Chem. 2002 Nov 6;50(23):6710-5.

Safety

Marone PA, Borzelleca JF, Merkel D et al. Twenty eight-day dietary toxicity study of Luo Han fruit concentrate in Hsd:SD rats. Food Chem Toxicol. 2008 Mar;46(3):910-9.
Pawar RS, Krynitsky AJ, Rader JI. Sweeteners from plants–with emphasis on Stevia rebaudiana (Bertoni) and Siraitia grosvenorii (Swingle). Anal Bioanal Chem. 2013 May;405(13):4397-407.

 

Erythritol–A natural fruit sugar

Along with monk fruit, erythritol is one of the two natural sweeteners contained in Virtue Sweetener. Erythritol is one of the best choices among natural sweeteners because of its clean flavor, lack of effect on blood sugar or insulin, and even provides modest health benefits.

Erythritol is a sugar found naturally in fruit such as apples and oranges but is produced from glucose in greater quantities through a fermentation process using yeast.

Erythritol yields no increase in blood sugar even if as much as 15 teaspoons are ingested all at once. Unlike monkfruit that has no calories, erythritol has a small number of calories: less than 1.6 calories per teaspoon—90% less than regular table sugar. It also does not stimulate insulin release, unlike synthetic sweeteners such as sucralose (Splenda) and aspartame. Studies have demonstrated modest reductions blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c (reflecting the previous 90 days’ of blood sugars) in people with diabetes who use erythritol as their preferred sweetener.

Like monkfruit, erythritol is not just safe, but also has modest beneficial health effects. Erythritol yields protective effects on dental health, shown to reduce the number of cavities and plaque in several clinical studies, unlike sugar that, of course, promotes tooth decay.

Unlike most other sugar alcohols, such as sorbitol, mannitol, and maltitol, erythritol does not cause bloating, gas, or loose stools when used in the quantities specified in our recipes. This is because only a small proportion of erythritol passes through the intestinal tract.

Erythritol is about 70% as sweet as table sugar. It also has a slight “cooling” sensation, similar to that of peppermint, though less intense. It may therefore confer a modest cooling sensation to baked products and other sweets.

In Virtue Sweetener, we rely on a greater proportion of monk fruit, which is much sweeter than erythritol. Erythritol is thereby used to add bulk, or volume, to Virtue Sweetener, while the monk fruit with its intense sweetening power allows you to use far less total combined sweetener, thereby yielding a considerable cost savings.

References

Bornet FRJ, Blayo A, Dauchy F, Slama G. Gastrointestinal response and plasma and urine determinations in human subjects given erythritol. Regulatory Toxicol Pharmacol. 1996;24, part 2:S296–S302.
De Cock P, Mäkinen K, Honkala E et al. Erythritol is more effective than xylitol and sorbitol in managing oral health endpoints. Int J Dent 2016;2016:9868421.
Honkala S, Runnel R, Saag M et al. Effect of erythritol and xylitol on dental caries prevention in children. Caries Res 2014;48(5):482-90.
Ishikawa M, Miyashita M, Kawashima Y et al. Effects of oral administration of erythritol on patients with diabetes. Regul Toxicol Pharmacol 1996 Oct;24(2 Pt 2):S303-8.
Munro IC, Berndt WO, Borzelleca JF et al. Erythritol: an interpretive summary of biochemical, metabolic, toxicological and clinical data. Food Chem Toxicol 1998 Dec;36(12):1139-74.
Wölnerhanssen BK, Cajacob L, Keller N et al.Gut hormone secretion, gastric emptying, and glycemic responses to erythritol and xylitol in lean and obese subjects. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab 2016 Jun 1;310(11):E1053-61.

Putting aside taste, safety, and potential health benefits, how about cost? Here is a cost comparison I did recently: Virtue is the clear winner, costing as much as 80% less than other natural sweeteners. You can enjoy dishes naturally sweetened without destroying your grocery budget.

Given its natural sourcing, safety profile, potential health benefits, and cost, Virtue Sweetener is everything I intended it to be, an advantage to all of us following the Wheat Belly lifestyle to reclaim control over health and weight.

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