I just finished reading Primal Body – Primal Mind by Nora T. Gedgaudas and I have to say it is a worthy read.

As well read on the subject of nutrition as I like to think I am, Nora really knows her stuff. Her chapter on carbohydrate metabolism is spot on and served to remind me that every single piece of bread we eat or every little sip of soda we take leads us down the path to premature cellular destruction, meaning, sugar ages us faster.

I've posted this before but I'll say it again - the normal level of blood sugar for the typical adult is about half a teaspoon or ~2 grams (can be slightly more for larger people, less for children). That's it. As Nora puts it:

"The body is literally obsessed with maintaining glucose within minimally normal levels."

A small bagel contains 20 grams of sugar – over 5 times the normal circulating amount. Think about what you eat in a typical day and see if you think you are glycating your way to premature aging and an earlier grave.

None of this is speculation by the way. Sugar is as caustic to our bodies as oxygen is. We need it, but very little of it. Too much and we die.

I urge people to become aware of the damage sugar causes especially for the sake of our children. Educate them. Explain to them why that bowl of Frosted Flakes is a bowl full of cellular death in disguise. And the low fat, homogenized, pasteurized milk that is added to these flakes of fire does not douse them. It doubles the heat by added damaged fats and proteins into the DNA-altering soup.

Most of us are eating in our sleep. Awaken by reading Nora's book.  

A reader commented on a post I did on fitness testing. He said:

Dear Fred,

Well, fitness testing is not the answer that's for sure. The timeliest test is none at all.

The real test for fitness for kids is general health and markers for inflammation as well as signs of obesity and metabolic syndrome.

If the child is lean, has no abnormal blood markers for inflammation, then all is basically well. Why test their fitness?

The BIG issue is food. FE: Whole grains are NOT healthful. Neither is low fat milk or low fat products. Carbohydrates contribute to adiposity, overeating, type II diabetes and inflammation. 

There is no need to test children for fitness. Kids that are healthy are fit by default. If a kid like sports, fine. If not, fine too. ALL kids who eat healthfully will sleep well and will have excess energy to play and play they will. They always have until recently as the bulk of our food has become laden with fructose which is stored as fat making the child hungry and hour after she eats.

Disordered eating leads to eating disorders.

Feed a child fat and meats, vegetables and some fruit only and everything else will fall into place naturally.

When two physicians give you two different answers to the same question, one of them is right and one of them is wrong.

In these situations, what do you do? Blindly accept the advise of one or the other?

No. You become a gumshoe. You read. You investigate. You become Columbo.

I have truckloads of sympathy for those who are hoodwinked and corralled into taking medications that not only do them no good, but do them harm. My dear mother in law is one of them.

Her doctor put her on statins after she had a heart attack last year. She's fine now and doing well but if the doctor bothered to read a smattering of the scientific literature on cholesterol and women, she would know that statins are useless and cause everyone who takes them liver and neuromuscular harm.

What did Hypocrites say again? Do no what?

It's a shame really. And I feel sympathetic towards the doctors too. But when there is conflicting evidence in a particular area of medicine, don't you think that the doctors have a responsibility to know both sides? So very often they don't. They are entirely clueless to the opposing evidence.

To me this is malpractice. It's certainly wildly irresponsible and disgustingly lazy. This medical malaise is hurting and killing people everyday. Our president wants to know how to fix healthcare. How about insisting that doctors educate themselves on issues that have conflicting evidence?

Sometimes when something breaks, you need to throw the item away. There's just no repairing it. Time for a new one.

Most of us have heard that the definition of insanity is doing something the same way over and over again all the while expecting a different result.

Adolescent obesity – once rare and uncommon is now not only common, but escalating. What we've been recommending for over a decade now to combat this epidemic is to eat a low fat/lower calorie diet and do more exercise. And that is precisely what many experts continue to recommend to this day.

It's not working.

Regardless, the same approach continues to be hammered home by health care professional and famous talk show hosts. The 'less calories in / more calories out' approach has become so ingrained into our societies thought process that alternative solutions are never considered. Far worse, alternative solutions are strongly shunned even when legitimate scientific research shows how effective they are.

The inability to think differently on a subject even in the face of scientific evidence (think Galileo) is commonly referred to as a 'paradigm paralysis.' The longer we remain paralyzed on the issue of adolescent obesity, the longer our children will suffer. Allowing children to needlessly suffer is criminal at best and at worst – I honestly have no word for it.

Obesity is an outcome of excess fat accumulation. What this means is, the obese person's body is storing more fat from the calories they are eating than a non obese person. But why? We know that the hormone needed to store body fat is insulin. In fact, it is one of insulins primary jobs. High carbohydrate diets cause large releases in insulin which sets up the scene for excess body fat storage. Fat does not. This is a fact of science – we don't get to vote.

Children today, thanks to the low fat approach to dieting supported by the ADA, AMA, RDA and other health organizations have shifted caloric intake towards more (a lot more) carbohydrate. Children are taught to fear bacon and eggs and opt instead for a bowl of breakfast cereal with skim milk, toast, a glass of OJ and a banana. This breakfast will spill over 70 times the amount of sugar a child needs to keeps her blood sugar normal. Bear in mind this is just breakfast. And we wonder why our children are becoming obese at an alarming rate?

If we really care about our children – if we really love them – we will snap out of our paralysis and instead embrace what research and basic biochemistry have been screaming at us for years – eat less carbohydrates and engage in exercises that build lean tissue, not burn calories.

Anything else is insanity.

A new study by a group of Austrailian researchers found that obesity in Americans is caused by overeating, not inactivity.

My friend Bill tipped me off via email to this unbelievable story. (Tongue deeply inserted into cheek.) Here's what Bill wrote to me in the email:

"Lovely." I replied.

This was found to be especially true for children. For my book Strong Kids Healthy Kids
I scoured the research and, lo and behold, I could not find a single
study that supported inactivity as a cause for adolescent obesity. In fact, research revealed that obese kids were just as active as lean kids.

Said Boyd A. Swinburn, a professor at the health faculty of Australia's Deakin University:

An online Slow Burn advocate sent this letter to me today. I though that her issues might be similar to many of yours so, I figured sharing it might be of help to some of you.

Her email:

Dear Mr. Hahn,

I am a
44-year-old white female. I started the Slow Burn workout about a month and a
half ago. I have just in the past week cut all grains out of my diet. Prior to
that, I was only eating whole organic grains.

Back in January when I started
working out, I weighed 380 lbs. I have only lost 7 pounds since January. I am
extremely frustrated because I workout three days a week. I do the elliptical
machine for 30 minutes and then do the Slow Burn technique on the weight
machines. I was just wondering when I will start seeing some results with the
weight loss. My clothes are definitely looser, and I am starting to see muscle
tone in my arms again. However, at some point because of how much I weigh, I
would think that I would see drastic results on the scales. Do you have any
suggestions or comments?? Thanks.

Jennifer P

Here's my reply:

Hi Jennifer –

Great that you
started the workout. Let me get right to the point and say that exercise is not
the answer to fat loss. Not even close. While I commend you for the effort you
are putting in, what you eat is the answer, not exercise. Since you just cut
out all grains last week, you will soon see dramatic changes pretty quickly so
long as you don’t go crazy with fruit as fruit, like all grains, are
carbohydrate. Give me a sample of your daily food intake so I can see if you
are on the right track.

 Also, you are
exercising a bit too much. Just do the SB workout twice a week (you don’t need
the elliptical either but if you want to do it do it AFTER the SB workout) and
follow my book as closely as you can.

Make sure to eat
a protein rich, low to no carb meal (or better a shake) immediately after your
workouts. Don’t skip breakfast on your training days (or ever for that matter).

Drink a gallon of
cool water a day and get at least 8 hours of sound sleep.

And remember, you
are building muscle too. If you weigh 370 pounds and after a month lose 5
pounds of fat but gain five pounds of muscle, you’ll weigh the same – right? Right. But your in much better shape.

Stay the low carb
course and you’ll see much faster results real soon. Just remember that what you eat
is 99% of the fat loss equation. Strength training adds muscle which
contributes.

 All the best,

Fred

A UK magazine called Healthy is doing a poll – is saturated fat bad or good for us?

Scroll to the bottom and vote!

Here is a promo video that everyone who is interested in low carb eating should watch. My Co-author Dr. Michael Eades as well as my friend Gary Taubes are part of the video.

We need more of this sort of thing to get onto the radar screen of physicians and registered dietitians.

More good info here.

Enjoy.

I have become interested and mildly fascinated by glyconutruents.

Here's a video describing what they are and how they work.

I am not a scientist so I don't know if this video is perfectly accurate or just physiological propaganda. To find out, I have asked the experts at the Metabolism Society if indeed it is or not. I'll send the answer to you when I receive it. Still it's worth the looksee. As far as I am aware, the sugars they talk about are made by the human body so you don't need to ingest them to create them per se.

But if it is accurate, this is an important message to eat real food. It's such a simple switcheroo to pick up an apple instead of a bag of Soy Crisps or a banana in favor of a Ring Ding.

It also has led me to think about the role of antinutrients found in most grains and beans and how these proteins called lectins disturb and trick our bodies into attacking the good proteins as well as the bad.

Leaky gut syndrome, the process by which foreign proteins seep into our blood stream via microscopic lesions in our intestinal walls, allows our immune system to get baffled and results in our bodies attacking what it shouldn't.

To learn more on this click here.

Putting the two concepts together, I realized that both increasing glyconutrients and decreasing the ingestion of lectin proteins could serve as a power packed method of improving and perhaps curing autoimmune disorders.

In sum, eat real foods and not processed foods and remove grains and beans form the diet. If you suffer form anything that your doctor calls 'autoimmune' first try this route before taking the drugs they suggest.

Hey, ya never know!

For those of you who missed the Eyewitness News clip here it is.

The people at ABC, especially Michelle Charlesworth, were extremely warm and friendly.