If you’re reading this post, it means I survived eating one of the new Double Down sandwiches from KFC.

After learning a few weeks ago that KFC would begin offering the Double Down nationwide on April 12, I made plans to try one. But first, given the hysterical health warnings prompted by KFC’s announcement, I put my affairs in order: I made sure my life insurance was paid up and placed a copy of the policy on my desk. I had an attorney update my will. I called my mom to tell her she was a great mother. I also tucked away a note for my wife, telling her I’d understand if she remarried after a reasonable grieving period — say, 25 years.

If you’re not familiar with the Double Down, here’s a KFC commercial introducing it:

Bacon, cheese, and fried chicken … not exactly new ingredients in fast-food restaurants. Apparently the impending rise in fatalities will be caused by — egads! — serving a sandwich with no bread. That probably explains why Michael Jacobson of CSPI isn’t already throwing a public hissy-fit about the Double Down: he can’t use his trademark “heart attack in a bun!” line. I picture him in front of a mirror somewhere, trying out alternates: “Heart attack in a breast! No, dangit, that doesn’t work! Heart attack NOT in a bun!”

Jacobson aside, I’m sure you can imagine the reaction among the usual anti-fat hysterics. Actually, you don’t have to imagine the reaction, because I found plenty of headlines and quotes:

On April 12, KFC’s Double-Down Sandwich Will Bear Down Upon Us Like a Train Without Brakes

KFC’s Bacon Sandwich On Fried Chicken “Bread” Starts Killing People Nationwide April 12

The Double Down Proves Once Again That KFC Wants Us All Dead

The KFC Double Down: One Sandwich To Kill You All

KFC’s newest “sandwich” is a heart-stopping creation that seems literally to die for.

Well KFC has heard your demands, and has started facilitating quite possibly the food equivalent to a WMD.

Corporate America has officially lost its buns. Fresh off the signing of the historical Health Care Legislation, Corporate America decides it’s time to ‘Double Down.’

Excuse me? What does forcing other people to pay for your health insurance have to do with improving health? If you can name one provision in the “historical” health-care legislation that will actually make people healthier, please share.

Why pay one angel’s hair of attention to what Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver, and those killjoys at the American Heart Association are telling you when KFC keeps giving us moist, crunchy ways to kill ourselves, one bite at a time?

I can come up with plenty of reasons not to take health advice from Michelle Obama or the American Heart Association, but I’ll just mention one here: they have no flippin’ idea what they’re talking about.

KFC has helpfully posted both a countdown clock and nutritional content on its website, which is a little like being given the chance to see exactly when and how you’ll die. With any luck, the primary ingredient in the Colonel’s sauce is Lipitor.

Ah, yes … replacing white bread with extra meat will give you heart disease, but Lipitor will save you. As far as the grain lobby and the pharmaceutical companies are concerned, that last reporter would fall into the category of journalists that Josef Stalin referred to as “useful idiots.” (He used the term to describe western journalists who actually believed what he told them.)

As the useful idiot noted, KFC has added the Double Down to its online nutrition menu, so I looked it up. Here are the calories and macronutrient values for the fried-chicken version, which is the one I tried:

Calories: 540
Fat: 32
Saturated Fat: 10
Protein: 53
Carbohydrate: 11

Hmmm … seems to me we’re looking at a high-protein, high-fat, low-carbohydrate meal without too many calories. Compared to a lot of other fast-food offerings out there, it’s actually a pretty good choice. Here’s the nutrition info for a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, for example:

Calories: 510
Fat: 26
Saturated Fat: 12
Protein: 29
Carbohydrate: 40

The Double Down provides a bit more fat, a lot more protein, and barely one-quarter of the carbohydrates. So this is the sandwich that proves KFC wants us all dead? You’ve got to be kidding me. I think it just proves KFC wants us feeling satisfied. In fact, according to one of their executives, that was the whole point:

Javier Benito, executive vice president of marketing and food innovation at KFC stated that in consumer studies young men said they were still hungry after eating chicken sandwiches served on conventional buns. “They told us they were looking for something meatier,” he says.

Yup … a thin piece of low-fat meat on a bun can definitely leave a guy feeling hungry. This sandwich won’t. I slept late and skipped breakfast, then had a Double Down for lunch. I wasn’t hungry for hours. I had a small goat steak for dinner, and that’s it.

Is it a tasty sandwich? You bet. Is it health food? Of course not. But the biggest downside is that KFC fries their chicken in vegetable oils — which is exactly what the anti-fat hysterics demanded years ago. The polyunsaturated oils aren’t good, but at least a Double Down isn’t going to add insult to injury by jacking up my blood sugar. I know because I checked.

When I woke up this morning, my fasting blood sugar was 89 mg/dl. An hour after the Double Down, I measured the effect of those 11 grams of carbohydrate: 94 mg/dl. I checked again at the two-hour mark: 92 mg/dl.

Back in my young and foolish days, a typical breakfast for me was a cup of Grape-Nuts with a cup of skim milk — in other words, exactly the kind of “hearty-healthy” choice the experts recommend. Here’s what that meal provided:

Calories: 507
Fat: 2
Saturated Fat: 0
Protein: 21
Carbohydrate: 107

Low protein, very low fat, screamingly high in carbohydrates … a prescription for a blood-sugar joyride to Diabetes Land. I couldn’t find any testimonials about what Grape-Nuts do to a person’s blood sugar, but a couple of years ago, Dr. William Davis posted a reader’s experience with Cheerios — another low-fat, “heart healthy” cereal:

My BG started to rise very fast within 15 minutes after eating the cereal, peaked at about 250 mg/dL at 45 minutes, then slowly dropped. By about 60-75 minutes, I experienced strong hunger and carb cravings as the BG began to slowly drop, and by about 2.5 hours after eating, my BG had suddenly dropped quite low (in the low 70s) and I had developed a nasty hypoglycemic feeling (shaky, irritable, craving sugary foods, headache, etc.)

So let’s review: a sandwich consisting of bacon, cheese and fried chicken produces a blood-sugar reading of 94 mg/dl.  A bowl of Cheerios produces blood sugar of 250 mg/dl, at least for some people … but in a nation of type 2 diabetics, Cheerios are promoted as health food, while the sandwich denounced as the equivalent of a WMD.

If only the useful idiots in the media could comprehend that most of the major health problems we see these days are the result of runaway blood sugar. Now that would be “historical.” And perhaps we’d finally see some headlines like this:

Cheerios prove the American Heart Association Wants Us All Dead

I’m not exactly obsessed with checking my blood sugar, but I’ve certainly become more diligent about it since returning from the low-carb cruise.  As I mentioned in a previous post, Dr. William Davis gave an excellent presentation on why we should monitor blood-sugar levels.  Here’s a quote from one of his blog posts on the subject:

If you’re not a diabetic, why bother checking blood sugar? New studies have documented the increased likelihood of cardiovascular events with increased postprandial blood sugars well below the ranges regarded as diabetic. A blood sugar level of 140 mg/dl after a meal carries 30-60% increased (relative) risk for heart attack and other events. The increase in risk begins at even lower levels, perhaps 110 mg/dl or lower after eating.

We use a one-hour after eating blood sugar to gauge the effects of a meal. If, for instance, your dinner of baked chicken, asparagus brushed with olive oil, sauteed mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and a piece of Italian bread yields a one-hour blood sugar of 155 mg/dl, you know that something is wrong. (This is far more common than most people think.)

This makes perfect sense to me, for all kinds of reasons.  We know that high blood sugar damages organs and blood vessels, and yes, that includes the coronary arteries.  That’s why diabetics can lose limbs, suffer kidney failure, or go blind.  It’s why they have such a high rate of heart disease. We also know that glucose feeds cancer and accelerates the aging process by encouraging the formation of advanced glycation end-products, or AGEs. 

Dr. Uffe Ravsnkov, who believes heart disease begins with infections, pointed out in our interview that glucose competes with vitamin C and depresses the immune system.  Even if you don’t buy the hypothesis that infections cause heart disease, you don’t want your immune system depressed.  One source I checked online stated that when your blood sugar reaches 120 mg/dl, your body’s ability to swallow up viruses, bacteria and cancer cells is reduced by 75%.

How high is too high?  That depends on who you ask.  I’ve read articles that claim anytime your blood sugar is over 200 mg/dl, you’re being damaged — and by the way, it’s common for people to reach that level after a bowl of Cheerios.  Others put the number at 140.  Dr. Davis prefers to see post-meal blood-sugar levels below 125, and ideally closer to 100.

So after returning home from the cruise, I bought a blood-sugar meter to check my response to different meals.  There’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that most of the meals I now enjoy don’t have much of an impact.  I’ve checked my fasting blood sugar a few times in the morning, and it’s consistently in the 85-90 range.  A little lower might be better, but that’s where I’m at.  So with that as a baseline, here are the one-hour results after some meals:

• Chopped ham & three eggs scrambled in butter:  92
• Two burger patties with raw-milk cheese and sautéed onions, mustard, a dollop of mayonnaise:  101
• Homemade stew (beef, onions, carrots, red wine, beef bullion):  105
• Chicken and broccoli with pesto sauce:  109
• Protein shake with whey protein and heavy cream:  102
• Sausage with whipped cauliflower “fauxtatoes” (my low-carb version of bangers ‘n’ mash): 98

I was also pleased to learn that low-carb ice cream doesn’t produce much of a spike.  When I first switched to a low-carb diet, I consumed a bowl of Carb Smart ice cream or a couple of their ice cream bars at least a few nights per week.  Since then, I’ve lost much of my taste for desserts, so I rarely eat the stuff.  I’ve also read that sugar alcohols can produce a bit of a blood-sugar spike some people.

I don’t plan to become a regular ice-cream eater again, but as an experiment, I had a full cup of Carb Smart ice cream earlier today.  An hour later, my blood sugar stood at 112.  That’s not great, but it’s less than I would’ve predicted.  I’ve also found that iced tea sweetened with three packets of Truvia has virtually no effect on my blood sugar … the meter showed 93 mg/dl when I checked.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that I don’t seem to tolerate sugars and starches very well at all.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, on St. Patrick’s Day I added one small potato to my meal of corned beef, carrots and cabbage.  An hour later, the meter showed a blood-sugar level of 162 mg/dl.

I had an even bigger surprise a couple of days ago.  I was busy and didn’t feel like cooking, so I threw together a meal of Costco meatballs with a 1/2 cup of marinara sauce and a wee small serving of spaghetti left over from a meal my wife had served to my daughters and my niece.  (My niece doesn’t like most meats, but loves pasta.)  By “wee small,” I mean perhaps 1/2 cup of cooked spaghetti.  The meatballs also had a few carbs in them thanks to the bread crumbs.  Adding up the counts from the labels, I estimated that my meal included about 40 grams of carbohydrate.

The result:  an hour later my blood sugar stood at 174 mg/dl. Back when I thought meat and fat were bad, I used to live on pasta and potatoes.  No wonder I started showing signs of pre-diabetes and felt lousy so often.  I suppose if I hadn’t screwed up my metabolism with too much sugar as a kid and too much starch as a vegetarian adult, small servings of potatoes and pasta wouldn’t produce such dramatic spikes, but they do.  I just shouldn’t be eating them.

That’s why it’s important to test your own reactions to various foods:  we’re all different.  What’s right for you may not work for me, and vice versa. 

I saw an example of that last night.  My sister-in-law was in town to pick up her daughter.  Like my wife, my sister-in-law is naturally thin … if anything, she’d like to gain a few pounds.  She saw me testing my blood sugar, and it piqued her curiosity, especially since their naturally-thin father is a type 2 diabetic.  So an hour after dinner — which for her included chicken, a sweet potato, and a generous serving of pasta — I gave her the finger stick.  Her blood sugar was only 112 mg/dl.  Feed me the same dinner, and I’d probably be looking at something closer to 200.

So the bottom line for me:  no starchy foods.  And I’m perfectly happy living without them.

Last week I posted a review of Dr. Uffe Ravnskov’s outstanding new book, Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You.  This book and Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s The Great Cholesterol Con are the most informative and most readable works you’ll find on the shoddy science that led to the Lipid Hypothesis … and the bad science that keeps it alive today.

Afterward the review I sent Dr. Ranvskov a list of questions from readers, as well as a few of my own.  His answers are below.  He answered a few questions with “I’m not sure,” so I skipped those.

When I read your first book a few years ago, I was stunned to learn how little evidence actually supported the Lipid Hypothesis.  Did you ever believe it yourself?  If so, what changed your mind? 

I have never believed it. In my coming book (Ignore the Awkward! How the Cholesterol Myths are Kept Alive) I shall tell you why.

What kind of reactions did you receive from other doctors when The Cholesterol Myths was published? 

Nobody reacted.

You’ve submitted quite a few letters and papers disputing the Lipid Hypothesis to scientific and medical journals.  How many of those have been accepted?  What reasons do the journals give for refusing to publish them?

On average my papers and letters have become rejected by five medical journals before their final publication. Some of them have never been published, but I haven’t recorded how many. In my coming book I am giving many examples on the irrelevant, illogical and often ridiculing answers that I have received.

My impression is that in other scientific disciplines, such as physics, researchers consider it almost a badge of honor to dispute each other’s theories.  But in the health and nutrition sciences, there seems to be something more like a mutual admiration club.  Any idea why is this is the case?

Most human beings follow their leaders.  Even scientists do. It is much more comfortable, more secure, more profitable and more rewarding. To question them is dangerous.

It seems that at least once per month, I read about yet another study purporting to show that saturated fat is bad for you.  If saturated fat isn’t actually bad for us, where are all these studies coming from?  How do the researchers reach their conclusions?

The only argument that persists in the new FAO/WHO report published last year is that an exchange of saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat is able to prevent cardiovascular disease. People probably think that this statement is based on dietary experiments, but it is not. It is a result of complicated statistical calculations using the dietary information given by participants in follow-up studies. The fact is that at least 30 such studies have shown that the risk of dying from heart disease for people who gorge on saturated fat is the same as for those who follow the official guidelines, and the risk of dying from a stroke is lower.

When you point out the contrary evidence to supporters of the diet-heart idea, how do they reply?

In most cases they don’t. To ignore the critics is most effective.

It seems to me that we could vastly improve health if our governments would just admit that the anti-fat campaigns were misguided and we should be eating more fat and fewer carbohydrates.  There must be people in our governments who know this.  What’s stopping them from just admitting it publicly?

Government people can’t do that — only the so-called authorities at the American Heart Association and NHLBI could, and I assume that they would rather walk naked on Fifth Avenue than admit that they have been wrong.

I’ve been telling people for some time that the best predictor for heart disease you can deduce from a cholesterol test is the ratio of triglycerides divided by HDL.  In your latest book, you propose that triglycerides, like LDL, serve a purpose.  Are you saying high triglycerides shouldn’t concern us? 

Triglycerides are a normal constituent of our blood with many important tasks. They go up after every meal and it takes 8-10 hours before they go down to the fasting state which means that most of us go around with high TG most of the time. It is true that very high TG-levels may be a marker of diabetes, but that doesn’t mean that it is causing any harm by itself.

High HDL is associated with a lower rate of heart disease.  Is the HDL  protective, or do you think it’s a marker for something else that prevents heart disease?

It is definitely a marker, but it may also be protective by itself as well, because all the lipoproteins partake in the immune defense system.

A lot of researchers are now suggesting that it’s small, dense LDL that should concern us, not total LDL.  Do you agree with that position? 

It is correct that the number of the small dense LDL particles is the best predictor, but that doesn’t mean that they are causing heart disease.

What about fasting blood glucose?  Is that a significant number to you?  If a patient’s fasting blood glucose is 130, would you be concerned, or it is non-issue?

Elevated fasting glucose indicates the presence of the metabolic syndrome or diabetes and this is certainly something to be concerned about.

Since people with high cholesterol tend to live longer, should someone whose total cholesterol is 150 be concerned?  Should she be trying to raise her cholesterol?  If so, how?

Stop eating soy products, corn oil and sunflower oil and eat natural animal fat instead.

I’ve heard some doctors saying we should take Omega-3 supplements and others who say they’re worthless.  What’s your opinion on them? 

Eat more fatty fish instead. There is much omega-3 fat in food from birds and animals living in the wild as well, including sheep and goats.

How would you explain the success of Dr. Ornish’s very-low-fat program in actually removing plaques in the arteries? Why it’s bothering me is this:  I understand that it’s a lifestyle program including giving up smoking and starting meditation, which is the common answer I hear to this question. But this rather raises the even harder question if diet is important to this at all. If high-fat all by itself is helpful (and low-fat thus comparatively harmful), how come the intervention actually removed existing plaques?

If his method is able to change anything, which I doubt (see page 134 in my book), it is impossible to know which of the measures that work. Nobody has shown that his method removes plaques.

What changes in diet, if any, would you recommend to people who show any signs of heart disease?

As I consider atherosclerosis to be an infectious disease, I would recommend lowering the intake of carbohydrates, in particular if you are a diabetic. Vitamin D seems to be a protective factor, according to recent research. Vitamin C is also necessary. The concentration of vitamin C inside the leucocytes is about 80 times higher than in the blood and because glucose and vitamin C compete for transport by insulin and entry into cells, it is important to avoid high glucose concentrations and stimulate high ascorbic acid concentrations in the blood. Fred and Alice Ottoboni have written a good paper about that and they recommend 1-2 gram ascorbic acid a day, much more in case of an infection.

Your hypothesis that infections are the initial cause of heart disease is intriguing.  How are other doctors and researchers responding to it?

They do not respond at all. It is very difficult to promote new ideas in medical science.

I can see how this information benefits younger people who have time for their bodies to make changes, but how does this affect folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s and up who may already be on medication — some for years? Is there any danger at all in beginning a diet of eating healthy fats while at the same time slowly getting off the medication, if one wanted to do that?

Not at all.  Avoiding carbohydrates for example may have dramatic beneficial effects in patients with diabetes, for instance, and also for people who are obese.

Thank you, Dr. Ravnskov, for answering the questions … and more importantly, for writing a book that convinced two of my relatives to stop worrying about “elevated” cholesterol and to quit taking statins.

You may recall that in my wrapup of the low-carb cruise, I mentioned Dr. Mary Vernon’s presentation about the effects of different breakfasts on kids:  the kids who ate eggs maintained steady blood sugar for the next several hours, while the kids who ate instant oatmeal experienced a blood sugar spike, then a dip, then a return to normal blood sugar levels — but only because their bodies pumped out plenty of epinephrine, the “fight or flight” hormone.

I can rarely fall asleep before midnight, and it was probably 2:30 AM before my brain finally shut down last night, so I slept in this morning and missed the Great Easter Basket Hunt of 2010.  But according to my wife, my daughters and my neice found their baskets, indulged in chocolate and jelly beans, then spent a good part of the morning snapping and occasionally screaming at each other.  Glad I missed it.

We also got to witness the apparent wonders of vitamin D again this weekend.  My four-year-old woke up crying last night with a runny nose, a cough, and an earache.  Along with a small dose of children’s Tylenol for the pain, we gave her 20,000 IU of vitamin D.   She has no symptoms whatsoever today … although we’ll see if the morning sugar-fest brings them back. We keep the girls on a good diet, but we don’t want to be food Nazis, so my wife elected not to take away the Easter candy.

It’s only anecdotal evidence, but this is the third or fourth time this year one of us has experienced symptoms of an infection, then quickly recovered after a punch-out dose of vitamin D.  Sure beats relying on drugs.

Su Rollins, a fellow blogger, sent me a guest post on hypoglycemia and exercise.  Here it is:

What effect does exercise have on glucose levels?

Did you know that you can easily manage your diabetes just by engaging in exercise? There are exercises that have a good effect on the glucose levels of those suffering from type 2 diabetes. When you engage in exercise, you expend a lot of energy from the glucose found in your muscles. At first, the body simply uses up the glucose which is traced from your muscles’ glycogen. It is in your bloodstream where this glucose is found. Engaging in exercise means your blood glucose levels will not get lower. Additionally, your body also releases additional glucagon and hormones. These are important because they break down your liver’s stored fats, turning it into more glucose you can expend. Engaging in exercise means your body improves; it develops a better sensitivity when it comes to insulin, as well as allowing you to be more in control of your glycemic index.

Why is the effect of exercise on glucose levels important to those with type 2 diabetes?

It was already mentioned that exercise will have a great effect on your glucose levels. This is very, very important, especially for people who are suffering from type 2 diabetes. There have been many published research pointing to patients’ better control of glycemic as soon as exercise becomes a regular routine for them. Meanwhile, patients who do not exercise at all or enough show no improvement. Again, there is an improvement in one’s insulin sensitivity through exercise. The benefit of this is in needing fewer doses of medicine for controlling and managing your blood sugar levels.

Should patients with type 2 diabetes exercise more often or differently than otherwise healthy people?

There are times when type 2 diabetes sufferers are prone to hypoglycemia, which is a condition that can develop out of exercise. This is both after as well as during the exercise routine itself. But at the same time, patients who exercise poor management of their diabetic condition may also be high risk when it comes to hyperglycemia.

What type of exercise is best for type 2 diabetes patients?

Usually, it is more about the frequency of exercise that comes into play rather than the type of exercise. More benefits may be gotten from aerobic activity and weight training combined.

When should patients be discouraged from exercising?

There are times when you one shouldn’t exercise, especially if you are at risk for cardiac conditions. It is best to start slowly and tentatively just to be safe.

How might a patient be encouraged to exercise?

Encourage patients to start with small changes to their normal routine, like taking the stairs and not the elevator. Suggest activities that the patient finds enjoyable and convenient. Participation in several different activities may keep patients from becoming bored and losing interest. Having a partner or personal trainer can also help patients stay motivated.

About the Author:   Su Rollins writes for reactive hypoglycemia diet, her personal hobby blog focused on tips to prevent and cure hypoglycemia using the right diet and nutrition.

Sorry this post was late.  While writing it, I kept stopping to run to the kitchen and fry up more bacon and eggs.  So far I’ve had a pound of bacon and 12 eggs.  And yet … uh-oh … I feel that irresistible urge coming on again.  Excuse me.

Okay, make that a pound-and-a-half of bacon and 15 eggs.  Dang, fatty food is so addicting.  Once you start, it takes real willpower to stop.  That’s why I’m always telling my wife not to buy more than two dozen eggs at a time; at least I know I’ll stop at 24.

If that sounds ridiculous, it’s only because it is ridiculous.  It’s a rare human being who goes bonkers eating protein and fat — unless the protein and fat are spiked with plenty of sugar and starch.  But you wouldn’t know that from reading the media stories this week about yet another badly-designed study:

Fatty foods may cause cocaine-like addiction

Scientists have finally confirmed what the rest of us have suspected for years: Bacon, cheesecake, and other delicious yet fattening foods may be addictive.

A new study in rats suggests that high-fat, high-calorie foods affect the brain in much the same way as cocaine and heroin. When rats consume these foods in great enough quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction, the study found.

So, it’s the fat that’s addicting, eh? 

Before we get into the science (and lack thereof) in this study, let’s take a moment and think about some real-world examples of binge eating.  I tried to find a list of the top binge-eating foods online and couldn’t, but my Google searches pulled up plenty of confessions by binge-eaters.  I kept seeing the same foods listed:  ice cream, cookies, mashed potatoes, pizza, cereals, chips, french fries, sandwiches of all kinds, and of course, soda.  Here’s one binge-eater’s list for her latest episode:

7 Clif bars, huge bowl of cereal, pb&j sandwich, 1 large fry, 1 medium fry, 1 hamburger, 1 whopper, 1 order of onion rings, 1 starbucks frapp, 1 lean cuisine pizza.

Thank goodness the pizza was Lean Cuisine. 

I used to eat entire large pizzas (not Lean Cuisine) by myself.  I’d buy the “party size” bag of Doritos and finish the bag, despite commanding myself to save at least half of it for another night.  At movie theaters that offered free popcorn refills, I’d go through two large bags during a two-hour movie.  I’ve also eaten huge bowls of ice cream, then gone back for more.  Marlon Brando, a famous binge eater, used to eat ice cream by the gallon.  He once ate so much ice cream so quickly, he froze his esophagus and had to be hospitalized.

Some years ago, my aunt had just finished making a big bowl of mashed potatoes when a friend dropped by.  The friend asked if she could try a spoonful of the mashed potatoes, and my aunt said okay.  As they were talking, the friend kept taking another spoonful … then another … then another … until she’d literally eaten the entire bowl.  She had to know she was doing it, and I’m sure she was embarrassed.  But she couldn’t stop.  Her brain was screaming at her to keep eating.

Now, you could point out that pizza, potato chips, mashed potatoes and ice cream are full of fat, and you’d be right.  But it’s not the fat that enables us to eat huge helpings of those foods without feeling satisfied; it’s the sugar and starch.  As Dr. Mike Eades pointed out in our first interview, if you give the average person a stick of butter and tell him to eat the whole thing, he’ll probably gag long before can finish.  But stir in some powdered sugar to turn that butter into frosting, and suddenly he can eat the whole thing — and ask for more.  That’s exactly what happened in this study:

One of the groups was fed regular rat food. A second was fed bacon, sausage, cheesecake, frosting, and other fattening, high-calorie foods–but only for one hour each day. The third group was allowed to pig out on the unhealthy foods for up to 23 hours a day.

Cheesecake and frosting?  Well, yes, those have some fat in them.  They’re also full of sugar.  I looked up nutrition information for The Cheesecake Factory and found that a single slice of their cherry or raspberry cheesecakes contain 25-30 grams of fat and 100 grams of carbohydrates — that’s the same sugar blast you’d get from drinking a liter of Coca-Cola. 

As for frosting, check out this nutrition label for Betty Crocker chocolate frosting.  Two little ol’ tablespoons give you almost as much sugar as an 8-ounce soda, but only five grams of fat.  If rats pig out on this stuff, I’m supposed to believe it was the fat driving them to eat?

If you’re busy spending grant money to find out if fat is addicting — for rats, anyway — then you should limit at least one group of rats to the bacon and sausage.  But that’s not what the researchers did.  In the full text of the study, they describe the diet:

The cafeteria diet consisted of bacon, sausage, cheesecake, pound cake, frosting and chocolate.

Bacon, cheesecake … same thing. 

I read the whole study, and nowhere did the authors specify which of these “high-fat” foods the rats preferred.  They apparently measured what the rats consumed very carefully, but didn’t bother to report if they ate more bacon or cheesecake.  I think I can guess.  And even if they ate plenty of bacon, their appetites would’ve been ramped up by the cheesecake and frosting.  As it turns out, their appetites were so overpowering, they would eat even if it hurt:

They began to eat compulsively, to the point where they continued to do so in the face of pain. When the researchers applied an electric shock to the rats’ feet in the presence of the food, the rats in the first two groups were frightened away from eating. But the obese rats were not. “Their attention was solely focused on consuming food,” says Kenny.

Well, yeah, Dr. Kenny, that can happen when your blood sugar is taking a roller-coaster ride.  I knew I was going to hate myself after eating that “party-size” bag of Doritos, but I did it anyway.  You could’ve shocked my feet and I would’ve just kicked at you between bites.

The researchers referred to the cafeteria diet as “palatable high-fat diet.”  (You are allowed at this point to picture rats loading up their trays in a cafeteria and then engaging in a food fight.)   In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes explains why “palatable” foods that provoke insulin spikes can make us hungrier even as we eat them:

Since insulin plays the critical role in our post-absorption responses to particular foods, it’s not surprising that insulin may play the critical role in our determination of palatability.  A little-discussed observation in obesity research is that insulin is secreted in waves from the pancreas.  The first wave begins within seconds of eating a “palatable” food, and well before the glucose actually enters the bloodstream.  It lasts for perhaps twenty minutes.  After this first wave ebbs, insulin secretion slowly builds back up into a more measured second wave, which lasts for several hours.  The apparent function of the first insulin wave is to prime the body for what’s coming…

Le Magnen described this first wave of insulin as increasing “the metabolic background of hunger.”  In other words, this wave of insulin shuts down the mobilization of fat from the adipose tissue and stores away blood glucose in preparation for the arrival of still more.  This leaves the circulation relatively depleted of nutrients.  As a result, hunger increases.  And this seems to make the food taste even better…

As long as we respond to the carbohydrates by secreting more insulin, we continue to remove nutrients from our bloodstream in expectation of the arrival of more, so we remain hungry, or at least absent of any feeling of satiation.  It’s not so much that the fat fills us up as that carbohydrates prevent satiety, and so we remain hungry.

That’s how you can end up eating two large bags of popcorn … or a heapin’ helpin’ of cheesecake with a side of sausage.  But I double-dog-dare ya to sit down and eat 24 eggs fried in butter.

The references to a “cocaine-like addiction” come from observations the researchers made as to how all that cafeteria food affected the little rat brains:

Not surprisingly, the rats that gorged themselves on the human food quickly became obese. But their brains also changed. By monitoring implanted brain electrodes, the researchers found that the rats in the third group gradually developed a tolerance to the pleasure the food gave them and had to eat more to experience a high.

In previous studies, rats have exhibited similar brain changes when given unlimited access to cocaine or heroin. And rats have similarly ignored punishment to continue consuming cocaine, the researchers note.

First off, if you read the entire study, you’ll notice that the rats were something the researchers call “knockdown” rats.  There are a few paragraphs of scientific gobbledygook explaining the process, but what it means is that they gave the rats a little poke in the brain with a virus to make them more vulnerable to developing compulsive behaviors.

Secondly, as I noted earlier, they never told us how much cheesecake and frosting the rats consumed — and sugar has already been shown to produce a “cocaine-like addiction.”   (And we’re talking sugar here, not sugar mixed with fat.)

Cocaine makes you feel good by washing your brain with feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine.  That’s why Julia Ross, author of The Mood Cure, treats addicts with serotonin or tryptophan, a precursor for serotonin.  And guess what?  Refined carbohydrates can have the same effect.  Nora Gedgaudas describes the process in one of her blog posts:

Serotonin is manufactured throughout the body and brain (95% actually produced in the gut) from the amino acid L-tryptophan and vitamin B6. Iron, too, is needed for this conversion. It just so happens that L-tryptophan (devoid in grains, by the way) is the single most deficient amino acid in our diets. Faulty digestion in many people and poor hydrochloric acid production also very commonly lead to such amino acid deficiencies. Carbohydrate consumption (sugar and starch) create a temporary surge in serotonin and concentration of tryptophan in the bloodstream and brain–leading to a temporary improvement in mood. All this sounds good until you realize that carbohydrates do nothing to manufacture new serotonin and only serve to deplete it and perpetuate additional carbohydrate cravings over time.

Which means there’s another reason to keep eating sugar even if some guy in a lab coat is shocking your little ol’ feet … your is brain happy, even if your feet aren’t. 

Amazingly, the same news story that blames the addictive behavior on fat contradicts itself a few paragraphs later:

The fact that junk food could provoke this response isn’t entirely surprising, says Dr.Gene-Jack Wang, M.D., the chair of the medical department at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York. “We make our food very similar to cocaine now,” he says.

Coca leaves have been used since ancient times, he points out, but people learned to purify or alter cocaine to deliver it more efficiently to their brains (by injecting or smoking it, for instance). This made the drug more addictive.

According to Wang, food has evolved in a similar way. “We purify our food,” he says. “Our ancestors ate whole grains, but we’re eating white bread. American Indians ate corn; we eat corn syrup.”

White bread?  Corn syrup?  Does the writer consider those high-fat foods?  Were the rats fed purified bacon?  Add it all up, and I’d say we’re looking at some brain-altered rats going sugar-crazy.  The “high-fat” part of the equation had nothing to do with it.  It’s a bad study, badly reported.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are still six more eggs left in the refrigerator.  (It’s a “refriga-lator” according to my four-year-old.  I’d better get more fat into that kid’s brain.)