My ex-mother-in-law’s been diabetic for years and her doc put her on insulin finally because she couldn’t control her blood sugar. Then she complained she was gaining weight. But she “couldn’t” low-carb because she couldn’t see giving up all those yummy carb foods. Here’s your sign.

Before we had insulin shots for type 1s, they ate low-carb diets to control their glucose. It wasn’t perfect, which is why they had shorter lifespans than most other people who lived to adulthood, but it bought them some time.

Re: LDL and low-carbing–Another reason LDL goes up when you low-carb is that they don’t count LDL directly most of the time. They use an equation and they plug in the total cholesterol, the HDL, and the triglycerides. If your triglycerides get too low, it skews the equation. They can count LDL directly, but it’s expensive, so most of the time they don’t do it. You usually have to ask.

I don’t know whether we could sustain the livestock, at six and a half billion people, that would feed us all. Anthropology is as rife with mythology as the nutrition field is, and for a long time it was believed that people developed agriculture because they needed more food to eat. The absurdity of the notion that Neolithic humans buried seeds in the ground instead of eating them when they were facing starvation apparently escaped most of the experts’ notice. Now it’s turning around, and more and more of them are arguing that population is a function of food supply. Well, duh. That is how it works in every other species and there’s no reason it wouldn’t work that way in ours.

So essentially, at this point, I think the population surplus we’re seeing is there only because the grain was there to feed them. Most of the world ISN’T consuming large amounts of meat because they don’t have the money to buy it. So one of two things is going to happen. One, we’ll stop wasting perfectly good land on grains and pulses and turn it all into pasture to feed enough animals to then feed the human population. Two, the “experts” will keep telling people they need to eat vegetarian diets and eventually the Green Revolution will crash, there won’t be enough petroleum to feed the grain fields, and lots and lots of people will starve and die.

I think I know which is going to happen. I bet you do too. And the folks who have the best chance of coming out on top will be the ones who own land and raise critters on it, and maybe the ones who work for them, if a sharing arrangement can be made. No population that had access to a cow ever suffered from malnutrition unless the cow was starving too.

True; type II diabetes is more about insulin resistance than a lack of the stuff, although the beta cells can start dying off when they’re overworked.

My girls listened to Jack and the Beanstalk during our trip. Jack went to sell the family cow because they were starving. I was thinking, “So eat the @#$& cow, already!”

If he was a raving maniac what do you think it might be blamed on the junk food, rather than the fatty meat? He writes as if those two were synonymous.

Or the woman defending the article with:
“This is exactly how diabetics are told to eat. The author is a nutritionist are any of you? As an RN, we teach this ALL THE TIME! However not all diabetics listen”

Yeah. I’m a diabetic too. Many of us don’t listen because we don’t wanna DIE! And eating this way is generally a good way to an early grave. I think it’s almost a criminal offense that this is exactly the way diabetics are told to eat!

Anyway, good luck with the move to Tennessee.

I read the comment by the goofy vegetarian. I believe we can sustain the livestock. Someone once wrote about watching a buffalo herd go by in the old west. It took three days for the herd to pass by.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/153837.php

According to Spurlock’s wife, their sex life went south during his McDiet because the saturated fat was blocking the … uh … in his … uh … I don’t want to repeat it; it was stupid enough the first time. Truth is, saturated fat raises testosterone in men. So cutting the fat and eating more carbs is a double-whammy.

The reason is simple: our insulin levels change through the day, rising high in the morning and mid-afternoon in expectation of taking in lots of food, and falling in the evening in expectation of hibernating for the night. They remain very low during our natural sleeping hours.

When we’re asleep, we can’t eat anything, so we must burn fat to keep our required bodily processes running. If insulin were high, we couldn’t do that, so our insulin levels are designed to stay very low in the evening and early morning.

If we mess around with that by eating carbs in the evening, our insulin levels will be too high while we’re sleeping, the body won’t be able to burn fat for basic processes, and we’ll feel stress — nightmares — and have the urge to get up and eat something to give us some energy.

Having fruit early in the day is fine, but having it in the evening, let alone late at night, is asking for it.

Good points. I’ve also read that people on calorie-restricted, high-carb diets tend to feel cold at night. Most likely, they can’t burn enough fat for fuel, so the body responds by lowering body temperature.

Dave Dixon has read some of the college texts on nutrition and metabolism, and he told me it’s amazing: the metabolic processes are right there, all spelled out, and then the authors jump through mental hoops to conclude that we should be eating carbs — exactly the opposite of what the metabolic processes would indicate. I wonder how many students get bad grades for questioning the conclusions in class.

Not that there’s ever a good time for a blood sugar crash, but eating carbohydrates just before bed is a good way to cause one and interrupt sleep. For me, eating carbohydrates just before bed is a guarantee for a night of poor sleep.

Late-night carbs have that effect on me. Back in my grain-eating days I also had restless legs at night. I never have restless legs anymore, unless I have my once-in-a-blue-moon pizza night.

Why should we need these statements? Are these people pseudo-anti-Darwinists?

So far we have:

a) The body has evolved hunger to mess with us and make us fat.

b) The body has evolved to make cholesterol to clog our arteries to make us die.

c) The food type that is most nutritious to us (carbs) is also lethal when the level of it in our blood gets too high.

Therefore, evolution is wrong because our bodies are too flawed to be the work of selective pressures. I prefer to think we were put here by a creator who wants us to suffer.

FTR: I don’t think religion and evolution are necessarily mutually exclusive.

That’s what really struck me when I started doing the research: Mother Nature isn’t stupid.

I don’t believe religion and evolution are mutually exclusive either. I believe in a Supreme Being … the human body is an engineering feat beyond comprehension, and I don’t believe it happened by accident. Whatever Grand Poobah Force underlies the Universe could well have made evolution part of the plan. Must be fun watching it play out.

Yup. Mike Eades explained the math to me during our first interview. If you eat 300 carbs, the recommended intake on a 2,000 calorie diet, it turns into a cup and a half of blood sugar. But the average American consumes closer to 500 carbs, which is two and a half cups. No wonder a quarter of our senior citizens are diabetics. Imagine all that damage over the years.

“Eat Do not eat at carbs at every meal. Believe it or not, this is a healthier approach because you will stabilize blood sugar and prevent the urge to binge later. Skipping Including carbs at a meal almost always leads you to make up for it later; usually in the form of late-night cookies.”

And re the article’s quote: “Your body isn’t a cash register. It doesn’t add up your total at the end of the day.”

Mine seems to be, if I’m not eating carbs or sweet things, of course. If I eat in one meal what I eat in an average of one day, I’m done eating for the day, typically. I don’t get hungry again. I found this out when I ate a bigger than normal steak early in the day and input that info into FitDay. Then, later on, when I normally would start to feel hungry for dinner, I realized that I had absolutely no desire to eat dinner, or even hours after that. Looking in FitDay, I discovered that I had already eaten the same number of calories that I normally would have eaten across a whole day. Likewise, just right now I finished fasting for 24 hours, I just ate a 3/4 lb ribeye, and now I’m hungry again 20 minutes later. Side effect of fasting or result of my body not having gotten its daily allowance of calories yet?

Good fix. And yes, I believe hunger is driven by the need for fuel. If you eat a big meal without carbs, the fat remains available for fuel all day. If you eat carbs, the fat gets locked up and isn’t available for fuel, so you get hungry again sooner. I’ve never done a fast (not voluntarily, anyway), but I would guess what you experienced afterwards is also a fuel issue.