I haven’t had time to post on Paula Deen’s status as a new celebrity diabetic, but the Older Brother did a nice job over on his blog.

I’m busy tonight with a hairy data conversion for one of my software clients,  so this is a short post.

I don’t know if this is pathetic, funny, a positive sign, or a combination of all three:  The makers of Karo corn syrup would like you to know that their product doesn’t contain any high fructose corn syrup.

I found this photo while going over my collection from Christmas. My mom had a bottle of this stuff in her kitchen, apparently to put in some kind of Christmas dessert I didn’t eat.  (If memory serves, we used to put dark Karo syrup on our waffles during my sugar-laden childhood.)

In case you’re wondering about the difference, high fructose corn syrup undergoes an extra step in which enzymes convert more of the glucose from the corn into fructose to make it sweeter.

I recommend you avoid corn syrup of either variety.

Over the weekend, I happened to catch this news segment while nursing my morning coffee. Take a look:

It’s nice that the Senate is encouraging more people to be “aware” of Crohn’s and colitis, but I was already aware of them. I used to suffer bouts of colitis as a teenager and young adult.

I wasn’t aware, however, that rates of Crohn’s and colitis are on the rise.  After viewing this segment, I did a little online searching and found some articles on the topic.  Here’s one:

Inflammatory bowel disease on the rise in kids

The reason more children being diagnosed with ‘adult’ disease is a mystery

For 10-year-old Jacob Krause, getting ready for the new school year wasn’t a simple matter of back-to-school shopping. It also involved working out logistics for getting to the bathroom as many as 20 times during a single school day.

The Clarksville Elementary School fifth-grader has severe ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that increasingly, and somewhat mysteriously, strikes children.

The number of children afflicted by colitis and another inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, has increased 50 percent in the past decade, according to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America. About 1.5 million Americans suffer from colitis and Crohn’s, about 10 percent of them under the age of 18.

“We’re seeing younger and younger children getting it over time,” said Dr. Maria Oliva-Hemker, chief of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine’s division of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition.

The reasons for the increase are not clear. But many researchers believe something in the environment must be behind the surge in pediatric colitis, Crohn’s and other autoimmune diseases, which have been on the rise generally.

Hmmm … environmental causes … has anything in our environment changed significantly over the past 20 to 30 years?

One theory is that as the developed world has become more hygienic, the body has become less practiced at fighting off bugs — and more vulnerable to autoimmune diseases, in which the body attacks its own cells or tissues.

“Since we know [inflammatory bowel disease] is found in more developed countries, it must be something about the exposures that we are seeing in our day-to-day lives,” Oliva-Hemker said. “Probably the fact that we are a more hygienic society, the fact that children, even at an early age, are kept in very clean environments — not necessarily outside, playing in the dirt, being exposed to very low levels of routine viruses.”

Ahhh, yes, that must be it! Children are getting digestive disorders because we’re too darned clean. Thank goodness we just moved to a farm where my girls like to run around outside and return home dirty. Now if I can just talk Chareva out of insisting that the girls take a bath afterwards, they can avoid ruining their digestive systems through excess hygiene.

Here’s another article on the recent rise of intestinal disorders:

Baffling Rise of Intestinal Disorder in the Young

Crohn’s disease, a serious disorder of the intestines, appears to be increasing sharply among children, a trend that may reflect some unknown influence of Western industrial civilization, a British scientist said yesterday at a scientific symposium in Houston.

”It’s almost as if the infection-free environment of modern Western society could be a factor,” said Dr. John Walker-Smith of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, an expert on intestinal diseases of children.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Ferguson said that the excellent health records compiled through the National Health Service in Britain had allowed her to chart a dramatic and unexplained increase in Crohn’s disease among children in Scotland over 15 years.

Dr. Walker-Smith said it was possible that the decline of many childhood infections might allow children in the West to grow up without the vigorous development of their immune defense systems that such infections would ordinarily promote.

Dr. Walker-Smith admitted that this is speculation, but he noted that the increase in the disease among children was real and there was evidence indicating that something in the modern Western environment or experience might be involved.

Once again, the possible explanation offered is that our kids are so clean and so free of infections, they’re no longer developing immunities early in life to whatever mysterious bugs cause Crohn’s and colitis.

Interesting hypothesis. Although I have to wonder: since Crohn’s and colitis are still rising in developed countries — where hygiene has been good and rates of childhood infections have low for many decades now –- doesn’t it seem likely that these digestive-tract diseases are caused by something kids in developed countries regularly digest … such as mutant wheat?

In Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis cites a study which showed that rates of celiac are four times higher now than 50 years ago. (That’s actual prevalence of the disease –- not diagnosis.) We also know that people who suffer from celiac are also more likely to suffer from other digestive ailments such as Crohn’s and colitis.  So we can reasonably speculate (but not conclude) that whatever causes celiac also causes or aggravates these other digestive issues.

Considering that kids are eating wheat products that contain both more gluten overall and mutant gluten with a protein sequence that never existed until around 40 years ago, I think it’s entirely possible that Crohn’s and colitis are on the rise because kids (and adults) are consuming glutens their bodies can’t handle.  These are, after all, auto-immune diseases.  It’s not unreasonable to suspect that when these strange glutens seep in our systems, our bodies attack them and end up attacking our own tissues at the same time.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard from quite a few people whose digestive ailments went away when they stopped eating grains – including the sound engineer for Fat Head, who told me watching the film changed his life.  He no longer needs a daily dose of Prilosec to get through the day.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to always keep a bottle of Pepto-Bismal in my medicine cabinet and carried the tablet version whenever I traveled. Now I haven’t had a dose of the stuff in years — not since cutting way back on grains.

In the newsclip, Dr. Marion mentioned that new molecules and new medications are being developed to treat Crohn’s and colitis. Fine, but treating a disease isn’t the same as avoiding it in the first place.  It would be nice if some of the research dollars chasing new medications were directed towards determining if the mutant grain we now call “wheat” is behind the rise in digestive diseases.

But I don’t expect that happen, not in a country where grains are big business and the federal government subsidizes wheat farmers. Look at what happened when school-lunch guidelines called for fewer fried potatoes.  Politicians from potato-growing states rushed in and demanded changes in the guidelines.

The Senate may want us to all be aware of Crohn’s and colitis, but I seriously doubt farm-state senators will want us to also be aware that modern wheat may be causing them. We’ll have to spread that message ourselves.

Two news article landed in my inbox recently that aren’t directly related to each other, but ought to be.  The first was about a company that’s going to start charging “unhealthy” employees more for health insurance:

Like a lot of companies, Veridian Credit Union wants its employees to be healthier. In January, the Waterloo, Iowa-company rolled out a wellness program and voluntary screenings. It also gave workers a mandate – quit smoking, curb obesity, or you’ll be paying higher healthcare costs in 2013. It doesn’t yet know by how much, but one thing’s for certain – the unhealthy will pay more.

In recent years, a growing number of companies have been encouraging workers to voluntarily improve their health to control escalating insurance costs. And while workers mostly like to see an employer offer smoking cessation classes and weight loss programs, too few are signing up or showing signs of improvement.

So now more employers are trying a different strategy – they’re replacing the carrot with a stick and raising costs for workers who can’t seem to lower their cholesterol or tackle obesity.  They’re also coming down hard on smokers. For example, discount store giant Wal-Mart says that starting in 2012 it will charge tobacco users higher premiums but also offer free smoking cessation programs.

I’m sure MeMe Roth would love the idea of punishing fat people for not being born naturally skinny like she was, but I don’t like seeing smoking and obesity lumped together.

Yes, quitting smoking is notoriously difficult, but people do it all the time.  Once the dangers of smoking were well-known and well-publicized, the rate of smoking in the U.S. dropped by half over the next decade or so.  Both of my parents – neither known for their iron wills – quit smoking in middle age.  That’s because, difficult as it was, they knew exactly what to do:  stop putting cigarettes in their mouths and lighting up.  (Like most people who quit, they quit cold turkey.)

You don’t quit smoking cigarettes only to find that two packs per day of Marlboro smoke is somehow finding its way into your lungs anyway.  But people go on calorie-restricted diets all the time and find (much to their chagrin) that they can’t seem to lose more than a few pounds … which brings me to the second article:

For years, studies of obesity have found that soon after fat people lost weight, their metabolism slowed and they experienced hormonal changes that increased their appetites. Scientists hypothesized that these biological changes could explain why most obese dieters quickly gained back much of what they had so painfully lost.

But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and put them on a highly restricted diet that led them to lose at least 10 percent of their body weight. They then kept them on a diet to maintain that weight loss. A year later, the researchers found that the participants’ metabolism and hormone levels had not returned to the levels before the study started.

Wait, you mean losing weight isn’t just a simple matter of cutting 3500 calories from your diet to lose a pound of fat?

No, of course it isn’t.  The body adjusts to try to become fatter again.  Hormones drive people to accumulate body fat in the first place, and hormones drive them to regain the weight they lose.  Look at what happened to the people in this study:

In the study, Joseph Proietto and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne recruited people who weighed an average of 209 pounds. At the start of the study, his team measured the participants’ hormone levels and assessed their hunger and appetites after they ate a boiled egg, toast, margarine, orange juice and crackers for breakfast. The dieters then spent 10 weeks on a very low calorie regimen of 500 to 550 calories a day intended to makes them lose 10 percent of their body weight. In fact, their weight loss averaged 14 percent, or 29 pounds. As expected, their hormone levels changed in a way that increased their appetites, and indeed they were hungrier than when they started the study.

Okay, no big deal so far, right?  They were eating less than before, so we’d expect them to be hungry.  But by gosh, if they’d just stick to that maintenance diet …

They were then given diets intended to maintain their weight loss. A year after the subjects had lost the weight, the researchers repeated their measurements. The subjects were gaining the weight back despite the maintenance diet — on average, gaining back half of what they had lost [emphasis mine].

That’s not character at work.  It’s biochemistry.  Their bodies were slowing their metabolisms in an attempt to regain the weight and reacquire a state of energy balance.

One hormone, leptin, which tells the brain how much body fat is present, fell by two-thirds immediately after the subjects lost weight. When leptin falls, appetite increases and metabolism slows. A year after the weight loss diet, leptin levels were still one-third lower than they were at the start of the study, and leptin levels increased as subjects regained their weight.

Other hormones that stimulate hunger, in particular ghrelin, whose levels increased, and peptide YY, whose levels decreased, were also changed a year later in a way that made the subjects’ appetites stronger than at the start of the study.

Your body doesn’t kick up your appetite because it wants to torture you.  It kicks your appetite because it senses a fuel shortage at the cellular level.

The results show, once again, Dr. Leibel said, that losing weight “is not a neutral event,” and that it is no accident that more than 90 percent of people who lose a lot of weight gain it back. “You are putting your body into a circumstance it will resist,” he said. “You are, in a sense, more metabolically normal when you are at a higher body weight.”

Bingo.  It’s like I said in my Big Fat Fiasco speech:  from a biochemical standpoint, you’re as fat as you need to be.  Your body defends a higher fat mass as long as it needs that fat mass to supply your cells with fatty acids for fuel.  To lose weight and keep it off, you need to be able to tap your stored body fat more efficiently – and that requires a change in your hormonal balance.  It’s not just a matter of cutting calories.

Months ago, I bookmarked an article on similar study that looked at the biochemical changes among former contestants on The Biggest Loser.  Here’s what the researchers found:

In an abstract presented at the most recent Obesity Society Annual Scientific Assembly, Darcy Johannsen and friends reported that by week 6 participants had lost 13% of their body weight and by week 30, 39%. More interestingly they reported that by week 6 participants metabolisms had slowed by 244 more calories per day than would have been expected by their weight loss and by week 30, by 504 more calories

That’s basically a meal’s worth of calories a day that Biggest Loser contestants no longer burn as a consequence of their involvement. Effectively that means they’re eating an extra meal a day.

Is it any surprise that so many contestants from The Biggest Loser – including the season two overall winner – have gained back all the weight?  All the “eat less, move more” theory did for them in practice was slow their metabolisms – again, beyond what the weight loss alone would predict.

I’m sure the companies threatening fat employees with higher insurance rates expect those employees to become motivated, eat less, and lose weight.  Without understanding of what drives fat accumulation, I think it’s more likely those employees will become motivated, go on a diet, lose a few pounds, stall, regain, give up … and end up paying the higher insurance rates.

If the bigwigs at these companies knew better and truly wanted to encourage (or coerce, to be more accurate) their employees into making positive changes, they’d base their insurance premiums on their fasting glucose levels – then teach them how to bring those levels down.  If I’m looking at a fat guy with normal blood sugar and a skinny guy with high blood sugar and had to bet which one will run up more in future medical expenses, I’d pick the skinny guy to cost me more every time.

Chareva’s birthday was Sunday, so her parents came down for the weekend to celebrate with us and get their first look at the farm.  Her dad is one of those “Tim the Toolman” types who can build pretty much anything he puts his mind to, so he had some good suggestions on ways to fix up the house without spending a fortune.  (He even built a riding train around his property near Chicago — the girls love it.  You can read about his train here. )

Sunday evening we all went to P.F. Chang’s for the big birthday dinner.  I tend to let my hair down (so to speak) when we go to ethnic restaurants, so I had two egg rolls, one fried crab wonton, and about half of the little cup of white rice the waitress brought with my sesame chicken.  It didn’t appear to be a major carb load, but an hour after dinner, I felt that buzz that I’ve come to recognize as the result of high blood sugar.

So I got out my meter and tested … 219 mg/dl.  Yikes.  I waited an hour and then tested again to get a two-hour postprandial reading … still pretty high at 169.

I know some people would see those results and immediately declare that my blood sugar went high and stayed high because my low-carb diet has made me intolerant to carbs, but I’m not so sure.  When I tested my one-hour reaction, both girls decided they wanted to know what their blood sugars were as well.  So after they successfully talked themselves out of the fear of having their fingers pricked, I tested their blood-sugar levels.  Sara’s was 189 mg/dl.  Alana’s was 176.

We don’t feed them sugar or flour at home, but their diets are nowhere near as low-carb as mine.  They like berries and full-fat yogurt for breakfast.  They usually take an apple or a banana in their lunches.  Chareva often serves sweet potatoes or squash with dinner, which they eat even when I don’t.  I don’t think it’s likely we’ve induced an intolerance to carbohydrates in them.  I think it’s more likely some people just don’t handle refined carbohydrates very well, period.

I also suspect intolerance to carbohydrates is largely genetic. When I first started testing my blood sugar a couple of years ago, Chareva’s sister Susan happened to be visiting.  When I grumbled about a small serving of pasta pushing my glucose up to 174 mg/dl an hour after eating it, Susan wanted to see what her glucose level was.  She’d eaten a bigger serving of pasta than I had plus a potato, but her one-hour glucose reading was only 112 mg/dl.  No wonder she (like Chareva) is naturally lean.  Those foods don’t spike her blood sugar.

But they definitely spike mine … and that’s why I rarely eat them anymore.

Chareva was out at the farm this morning while I stayed home to record a podcast interview.  When the interview was over, I took off my headphones and became aware of an odd sound coming from the living room, where the girls were watching TV.  It was a crunching sound.

Are they eating nuts? I wondered.  Nope, I went looking for nuts last night while watching Sons of Anarchy.  No nuts in the house.  Bacon?  Nope … there was no cooked bacon around when I grabbed a cup of coffee before the podcast interview, and the girls wouldn’t dare fry bacon themselves.

When I went to investigate the mysterious crunching, I found the girls eating from a dish of dry cereal.

What the heck?! We don’t keep cereal in the house.  Was Chareva persuaded by the wheat-promoting troll who left all those nonsensical comments on my latest post about Wheat Belly? Did she decide to conduct a blind wheat challenge?

Turns out our Sunday newspaper had arrived with three free samples of cereal, courtesy of General Mills.  Nice of them to give away free health food … and I know it’s health food, because as you can see, the words Whole Grain appear on each box.

Realizing they were busted, the girls began negotiations.

“Can we eat these?  They’re just little boxes.”

“Nope.”

“How about if we just eat one box every day?”

“Nope.  Cereal is junk food.”

“Uh … can we split one box a week?”

“Okay, you can split one box, once per week.  That’s it.”

They had already finished half of the Wheaties.  Here’s what they were splitting:

That’s for 3/4 of a cup.  Back in the days when I thought whole-grain cereals were health food, I ate the stuff for breakfast.  But I never ate 3/4 of a cup and then said, “Boy, I’m full!”  I probably ate more like two cups, so I was starting my day with around 130 carbohydrates by the time I added the milk (low-fat, of course), but only 16 or so grams of protein and not much fat.  No wonder I was famished by noon.

When Chareva came home, we went to the county recreation center, where she and I usually take turns lifting weights while the girls swim.  A cute little girl who looked to be about four years old was also swimming.  When she got out of the pool, I noticed she (like her father) already had a pot belly.

I’ll bet they eat whole-grain cereals for breakfast.