Dr Robert Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at UC San Francisco, and has become well known for his 2009 YouTube video, Sugar: The Bitter Truth. This video has over 7 million views as of April 2017.
Here he is interviewed by CrossFit’s Rory McKernan to explain sugar’s toxicity, and how processed food—often loaded with refined carbohydrates and added sugar—is a huge part of the obesity and diabetes problem.
Another recognition of something we already know: the ‘low-fat’ dietary guidelines issued in the U.S. and the U.K. were not based on reliable nutritional science.
National dietary advice on fat consumption issued to millions of US and UK citizens in 1977 and 1983, to cut coronary heart disease incidence, lacked any solid trial evidence to back it up, and “should not have been introduced,” concludes research published in the online journal Open Heart.
Research article on the meta-analysis is published at the British Medical Journal’s Open Heart website.
Objectives
National dietary guidelines were introduced in 1977 and 1983, by the US and UK governments, respectively, with the ambition of reducing coronary heart disease (CHD) by reducing fat intake. To date, no analysis of the evidence base for these recommendations has been undertaken. The present study examines the evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) available to the US and UK regulatory committees at their respective points of implementation.
Methods
A systematic review and meta-analysis were undertaken of RCTs, published prior to 1983, which examined the relationship between dietary fat, serum cholesterol and the development of CHD.
Results
2467 males participated in six dietary trials: five secondary prevention studies and one including healthy participants. There were 370 deaths from all-cause mortality in the intervention and control groups. The risk ratio (RR) from meta-analysis was 0.996 (95% CI 0.865 to 1.147). There were 207 and 216 deaths from CHD in the intervention and control groups, respectively. The RR was 0.989 (95% CI 0.784 to 1.247). There were no differences in all-cause mortality and non-significant differences in CHD mortality, resulting from the dietary interventions. The reductions in mean serum cholesterol levels were significantly higher in the intervention groups; this did not result in significant differences in CHD or all-cause mortality. Government dietary fat recommendations were untested in any trial prior to being introduced.
Conclusions
Dietary recommendations were introduced for 220 million US and 56 million UK citizens by 1983, in the absence of supporting evidence from RCTs.
This two-minute clip from Dr Ted Naiman’s presentation is a brief explanation of the obesity epidemic. It is about the activity of insulin in the body. For most people, this is resolved through diet — not pharmaceuticals or exercise (although exercise is important).
Click the image below to view the video clip on DietDoctor.com. For the full video presentation, and a lot more great information, you can become a member of the Diet Doctor website for $9 per month. I am not affiliated with the site in any way, but I am a paying member and it is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to understand more about how a low carb approach can transform health. Highly recommended.
We need more young docs like Dr Priyanka Wali.
She saw that diabetic patients were not getting better with the conventional pharmaceutical approach that she had been taught. She started doing her own research and learned that a low carb ketogenic diet might be a better intervention, so she tried the diet on herself first and found that she felt much better, and knew that she could prescribe it as a therapy for her diabetic and insulin resistant patients. She now uses it in her practice and it is working.
The interview below was done at the Low Carb USA Conference in San Diego. Interviewer is the great Ivor Cummins.
I started treating patients with diabetes and the first thing I noticed was that the guidelines weren’t working. My patients weren’t getting better.
I started to look for answers that were outside what we had been taught in medical school, which was not very much about nutrition.
Physicians don’t understand what are the macronutrients that affect insulin levels. This is not common knowledge among the medical community.
[Our current prescription-driven model of medicine] is the result of business being a greater priority than human lives.
We are incentivized to prescribe medication.
I lived the [dietary] guidelines and I started to see that something wasn’t right.
Just look around you. Insulin resistance is rampant.
The first thing is changing the guidelines.
“PEOPLE have told me what I do is dangerous. They have walked away from me at meetings,” says David Unwin, a doctor practicing in Southport, UK. Unwin suggests to his patients with type 2 diabetes or who want to lose weight that they do the opposite of what official health advice recommends. He advises them to stop counting calories, eat high-fat foods – including saturated fats – and avoid carbohydrates, namely sugar and starch. Telling people to avoid sugar is uncontroversial; the rest is medical heresy.
But crazy as it sounds, Unwin has found that most of his diabetes patients who follow this advice are getting their blood sugar back under control, and that some are coming off medication they have relied on for years. Those who are overweight are slimming down.
This might seem like just another controversial fad diet, but a growing number of researchers, doctors and nutritionists around the world are backing it, and reporting their findings in peer-reviewed medical journals. Last month, the National Obesity Forum, a UK body for health professionals involved in weight management, made headlines when it overhauled its advice, telling people to ditch calorie-counting, low-fat foods and carbs in favor of fats.
Source: New Scientist
From a study by Forsythe, et al in 2008 — “Comparison of Low Fat and Low Carbohydrate Diets on Circulating Fatty Acid Composition and Markers of Inflammation” — link to study on ResearchGate.net
This study found that a low carb / high fat ketogenic diet showed improvements in markers of metabolic syndrome, including reduced inflammation.
How can this be? Because on a carb-restricted diet, the fat you eat does not metabolize into body fat. In the absence of glucose (from carbs), dietary fat is burned as energy — as is body fat, and several important health markers improve as a result.
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