Surviving the Medical Meltdown (11 page)

8
DIET: WHAT SCIENCE REALLY TELLS US

T
here is nothing more important to your health than a good, “clean” diet. A good diet – and I am going to define this clearly – will give you the best chance of surviving the medical meltdown. I don’t want you to
need
a doctor who isn’t there. In this chapter, after explaining all the reasons
not
to eat in certain ways, I will give you a summary of a “clean,” optimized diet. But my advice is to read it all. This is probably the most important prevention chapter in this book. The more you understand the
reasons
behind dietary recommendations, the more you will be psychologically invested in eating correctly.

You literally are what you eat. Eat crap, become crap. Unfortunately, what we think of as food in many cases is so artificial it bears no resemblance to
real
food. Would your great-grandmother have recognized boxed macaroni and cheese as something to eat? Leave a Twinkie open in your car for six months and it won’t look much different from the day you opened the package. Why? Because even bacteria don’t recognize it as food! In my home state of Iowa, we joke about the traditional meat-and-potatoes diet. But in the days when my ancestors homesteaded on the prairie, they ate nothing from boxes. They ate all sorts of meat, with its fat, vegetables from
the garden, some corn, real milk from cows, butter, lard, and the few nuts and berries that grew wild here. And in my great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ generations, people who were not felled by childhood diseases routinely lived into their nineties. After World War II, enter agribusiness, donut shops, and hot dogs, and we think seventy-five years old is beating the odds.

WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN MOUTH AND RECTUM

When you eat any substance (I am avoiding calling everything we put in our mouths food), that material is broken down and absorbed by your intestines (gut). These particles are sorted by the very sophisticated cells in your gut to determine if they should be taken in or pooped out (excreted as feces). Once the particles are selected for absorption, they flow through the bloodstream and are deposited in various parts of the body, including the liver, the brain, and your muscles. Let me stop there. I want you to think about what I just said. Everything you eat ends up in your blood and your brain. Before reaching for that terrible, totally artificial, red dye no. 23–infused, sugarcoated, no-nutrition candy – consider that it is going to flow through your bloodstream and land in your brain!
We worry about polluting our water supply. Time to worry about polluting our blood supply
.

Back to the metabolic process: These food (and nonfood) particles are absorbed into the various cells and, through metabolism, are processed into the building blocks that become you. And you are constantly being updated and replaced. Every two years you are nearly a totally different person, as the old cells have been replaced by new cells. So if you are fat, diabetic, and out of shape, just remember the words of screenwriter and film director Cameron Crowe: “Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.”
¹

Now, the world of food and obesity is much more complex than “calorie in, calorie out.” Some foods produce fat, some raise your insulin and blood sugar, and some do not – even if they are
high calorie. When I eat sugar or wheat, I am eating pure carbohydrates at four calories a gram. When I eat a lean venison steak, I am getting almost pure protein and also four calories a gram, but there is a big difference. The sugar and wheat cause my insulin to shoot up. Insulin is a hormone that signals my cells to deposit the carbohydrate calories as fat. With prolonged ingestion of such carbohydrates, my cells will become insulin resistant, meaning the receptors on my cells reject insulin unless it is forced onto the cell in high concentration. As I become progressively “insulin resistant,” my body produces more and more insulin to compensate, and it is still never enough to keep blood sugar normal, so I become diabetic. Protein does not raise insulin, so rather than being stored as fat, it is metabolized to energy and helps me build muscle.

So what happens when I eat fat? Well, as you will read later – a lot of good things. But for right now, just understand that fat has nine calories per gram, but it does not raise insulin and, by itself, does not get deposited as fat. The Inuit were a lean, mean, muscular people when they ate a diet consisting of 90 percent blubber (whale fat). Then the European explorers brought with them processed grains and – kablooey! The Inuit, who had survived thousands of years of bone-numbing cold and polar bears and whale hunting, were laid low by obesity and the diseases of modern civilization. Ancient man had a chronically low level of insulin because he was not surrounded by, and not eating, carbohydrate-laden foods. And as the science of nutrition progresses, we recognize that high insulin levels are at the heart of our metabolic derangements. Fat has gotten a terrible rap, but in fact, when you eat fat, the absorption of simultaneously ingested carbohydrates is slowed, thereby limiting the bad insulin spikes. This explains the counterintuitive fact that skim milk is much worse for spiking insulin than full-cream milk; ditto low-fat yogurt versus full-fat, Greek yogurt; low-fat ice cream versus the real deal. Another big advantage of fat – it fills you up. It makes you want to stop eating. And – witness French cooking – it is damn tasty! Put this together and it goes a long way to explaining
why, since Americans have been told to eat low fat, we have become fatter and sicker.

The point is, all calories are not the same. It is not just simple “input to output.” To optimize our health, we need to eat correctly to make the ancient metabolic process we inherited over the generations work properly. Think of your body as a Porsche that has been fine-tuned to perform perfectly on high-octane, water-free fuel. When the Porsche is fed good gas, it purrs along with power and keeps running with minimal preventive maintenance. In life, we see these “Porsche people” as strong, slender, active, and clear thinking. Think of the old Sioux or Apache warriors – muscled, lean, and standing fiercely and cleverly against the injustice they faced. Think of the natural body builders, of Jack LaLanne at ninety-two, doing fingertip pushups. That’s based on clean dietary habits.

What happens if you routinely “feed” the Porsche low-octane, poor-quality gas? It stutters and loses power, and you’ll be in for expensive car repair sooner than expected. Giving the Porsche bad gas is the equivalent of the Native American of today eating flour tortillas and cheesy puffs and white rice. The once-healthy Southwest Indians now have the highest rate of diabetes in the world and are generally dead by age fifty-five. Bad gas in a sports car can cause sludge to build up in the engine. When people eat a terrible, artificial, cheap-carbohydrate, Western diet, before their insulin shoots up they have spikes of relatively high blood glucose. During those times, they deposit sugar molecules onto their cells – in their brains, in their blood cells, and in their muscles. This process, called
glycation
, alters their tissues so that they cannot function optimally and ultimately fail early. Think of your healthy cell as a runner and your glycated cell as a runner dragging a fifty-pound weight behind him as he tries to run. Every glycated cell in the body is made less effective, including the cells that fight infection and the brain cells that think.

The second aging process caused by bad diet is “oxidation” – literally a rusting of the tissues. Oxidation is produced by the metabolic process of converting your food to energy. In the Porsche,
think of it as the exhaust from your engine. A little bit of pollutant exhaust is inevitable, and in the body, a little bit of free oxygen radical production is normal; but these potentially damaging radicals are neutralized by “antioxidants” produced in the cells. Eat a good diet and your antioxidant production goes up, your production of oxygen radicals is only moderate, and you have more than enough antioxidant capability to neutralize them. Eat a bad diet and the opposite happens: you produce too many free oxygen radicals for the body to neutralize, so they run free and literally cause the body to rust. Rusting of metal is oxidation; rusting of the body is aging. Outward manifestations of body oxidation (rusting) are age spots, sagging, and diminished luminance of the skin.

A bad, Western-style, high-carb diet also causes whole-body
inflammation
. We hear a lot about inflammation, mostly when discussing the term
anti-inflammatory
. But what is inflammation, really? Inflammation is an immune system process designed to fight infection. Get a splinter and you will see inflammation at work. In medical training we learn the four cardinal signs of inflammation are redness, heat, pain, and swelling. (Well, we learn them in Latin:
rubor, calor, dolor
, and
tumor
– because they rhyme and because it gives us yet another chance to sound erudite and pompous.) Inflammation results from your immune cells waging war against the foreign object or germ. The cells surround the invader and release chemicals that cause swelling, pain, heat, or redness (the four cardinal signs). This reaction is meant to be a local phenomenon of short duration. But a bad diet creates generalized, perpetual, never-ending, whole-body inflammation. The effects of this inflammation range from rheumatoid arthritis to dementia. The so-called diseases of modern civilization – diabetes, heart disease, dementia, and cancer – truly are a result of modern civilization – specifically our modern diet.

WHO DO YOU TRUST?

The first step in eating correctly is to
absolutely forget any government recommendation you have ever heard about what to eat
. And don’t buy the nihilist argument that the recommendations change every day. Although your newspaper may be confusing, real science has been consistently zeroing in on an optimal diet for longevity and health. You just don’t hear about it in the government-controlled (or at least government-sympathetic and gullible) media. Real nutrition is complicated science, and it takes some education in science to be able to write about it intelligently. Regrettably, real “science writers” who can understand and separate the
probable truth
from the
random idea or fad
are few and far between.

Nor will you get truth from the companies that want to sell you junk food. And when there is a lot of money riding on an idea – even a bad one – it is difficult for the truth to be known. When I was in biochemistry at the University of Rochester in 1976, I remember a lecture on lipid membranes in which I was taught that
ingested cholesterol bore no relationship to blood cholesterol levels
. This turns out to be true. Nevertheless, until very recently the loudest voices, and the ad campaigns, were all against eating cholesterol because – they claimed – it would raise serum cholesterol, and that was bad with a capital
B
. So we have assiduously avoided foods such as eggs, which, it turns out, are just about the most perfect human food. (The cholesterol myth will be debunked later.)

And then there are the special-interest groups, such as PETA, who have their own agendas. The recommendations of such groups are colored by beliefs that put animal welfare above human health. And ironically, they don’t even understand animal nutrition correctly. In short, be very suspicious of dietary recommendations that are part of a political agenda or that promote an agribusiness’s bottom line.

And keep in mind that the “medical establishment” – the guys who speak with authority in the news – are usually way behind the freethinking leading edge of medicine, the doctors often reviled by the establishment. As a historical point, President Eisenhower was
essentially killed by his cardiologists’ recommendations to eat vegetable oils rather than natural oils, to avoid cholesterol, and to eat a low-fat, high-carb diet. I know this is the diet that was sold to you as “healthy,” the details of which you have probably heard all your life (unless you are lucky enough to know a doctor truly up on the science). But trust me: as we get into the details, you will see that such recommendations have killed countless people over the years and, in general, are to be ignored.

How about nutritionists? With all due respect to the good-guy “nutritionists,” in general, today’s nutritionists are not getting the latest science. My son, who is in medical school, showed me his online nutrition lecture. It was
so
out of date. In fact, its content in 2013 was out of date when I was in medical school biochemistry in 1976. Sadly, the nutritionists have drunk the government and groupthink Kool-Aid. How do I know I am right and they are wrong? In addition to reading the scientific body of knowledge from multiple sources, I also have an understanding of basic physiology. But mostly, I just need to observe my patients’ food to decide who is right. Every day, when I come upon a pile of pancakes, sugary syrup, margarine, and wheat toast on some hospitalized
diabetic
patient’s plate – a diet prescribed by the nutrition department – I see the world of nutritionists as the Flat Earth Society. Fortunately, my son, after showing me the abysmal nutrition lecture, said, “I know, Mom. I won’t eat that way – just gotta pass the test.” Smart lad.

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT – AVOID VEGETARIANISM

Although it is totally politically incorrect to attack the “sacred cow” (excuse the humor) of vegetarianism, I must do it. One of the diets that never seems to go away in spite of the overwhelming evidence against it is
vegetarianism
or the extreme form,
veganism
. While some people eat a vegetarian diet out of religious conviction, many do it under the belief that they are improving their health. Unfortunately, such a diet – no matter how carefully you micromanage your components
– simply is inadequate in both micro and macronutrients. Some of the unhealthiest patients I have had in my medical practice believed in eating no meat out of some conviction – either religious, a belief in not killing animals, or their mistaken understanding of the best path to health. It is not my place to question their religious or moral conviction, but I must point out the flawed belief that it is a healthy diet.