Some months ago, I discovered that Stanford University has quite a few class lectures available for free on iTunes.  I enjoy listening to books and lectures during my long walks, while driving, while sitting on airplanes, and sometimes even while working on programming projects if I’m not in the middle of a real head-scratcher.  (Don’t tell my clients.) 

I’ve downloaded and listened to several lectures on subjects that interest me:  history, politics, science, economics and, of course, health and nutrition.  I had planned to transcribe portions of a couple of nutrition lectures so I could comment on them, but since I don’t like typing all that much, I kind of put that project aside.

Turns out one of the lectures I wanted to write about is also on YouTube, as I found out when I visited Mike Eades’ blog this morning.  I enjoyed it on iTunes, but it’s even better when you can see the visuals.  So in case you haven’t already seen it, here it is.  The speaker is Dr. Chris Gardner, a director of Nutrition Studies and an associate professor of medicine at Stanford:

 

A few things struck me as I listened to the lecture the first time, and again as I watched it today.  One is that all diets are difficult to follow to some extent — just look at the dropout rates for the other studies Gardner mentioned.  There’s no getting around that.  If your weight is going up and your health is going down, you’re on a bad diet.  To turn things around, you have to give up some foods you love.

I miss fettuccine alfredo and sourdough toast, but I’ve found it much easier to stick to a low-carb diet than any of the others I tried.  Low-fat diets, by contrast, made me feel lethargic and depressed.  I’d start cheating, then eventually give up.  (Good thing, in retrospect.)

Along those lines, notice what happened in Gardner’s study with the group assigned to the Ornish diet: on average, they began eating double the amount of fat Ornish recommends almost immediately and eventually moved up to triple what he recommends.  Ornish has complained that this wasn’t a fair test of his diet since most subjects didn’t stay within the 10% fat limit.  I think it’s more likely they couldn’t stay within the 10% limit … their bodies rebelled.

(Here’s how someone once described the Ornish diet:  put food in your mouth. If it tastes good, spit it out.)

To be fair, the Atkins group drifted back towards a higher carbohydrate intake as well.  If you do the math, it appears that by the end of a year, most of the women in the Atkins group were consuming something in the neighborhood of 150 carbohydrates per day.  They ended up on a restricted carbohydrate diet, but not exactly a low- carbohydrate diet.

But that actually makes their weight loss more impressive.  Remember, they weren’t told to count calories, as two other groups were.  And yet the Atkins group lost the most weight, even though they ate more carbohydrates than Atkins recommended.  And as their carbohydrate intake went up over time, so did their weight — again, they weren’t counting calories.  This would seem to confirm what Atkins said all along:  carbohydrates make you hungry.  You have to find the level of carbohydrate intake that keeps your insulin in check and your appetite stable, then stay there.

I also noticed that the Atkins group had the lowest dropout rate.  Once again, I’m not surprised.  Yes, you may miss your sugars and starches on a low-carb diet, but at least fat is satiating.  I never felt satiated on a low-fat diet, unless I ate huge meals.

What really perked up my ears the first time I heard the lecture was the comparison of the health parameters.  The Atkins group showed the most improvement in weight, blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol levels.  No other diet out-performed Atkins on any health parameter.  So much for the notion that a low-carb, high-fat diet will kill you.

Gardner even explains, in response to a question, that low-fat, high-carb diets tend to make triglycerides go up, HDL go down, and produce a higher proportion of small, dense LDL.  And remember, we’re hearing this from a guy who’s been a vegetarian for 25 years — not exactly a shill for the meat industry.

I also found it interesting the relative success of one diet versus another seems to depend on the dieter’s level of insulin resistance.  Now and then, I hear from people who swear they lost a lot of weight on a low-fat diet and felt fine doing it.  I believe them.  But I’m guessing those are people who aren’t insulin-resistant.  They can eat plenty of carbohydrates and lose weight by restricting fat and calories because they don’t end up with high insulin levels that command their bodies to continue storing fat.  Good for them. 

The problem is, the rest of us are told that if it works for them, it should work for us, too — assuming we just had the proper discipline. But it doesn’t work for us.  We produce too much insulin in response to sugar and starch.   We have to give up the carbs, or we’re setting ourselves up to fail.  And given the steep rise in metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes, I think most overweight Americans are probably insulin-resistant. 

This lecture — recounting a study conducted by a committed vegetarian — confirms what I already knew:  the usual dietary advice given to overweight people who are developing metabolic syndrome is a load of bologna.  Hats off to Dr. Gardner for reporting his results with no apparent attempt to manipulate them.  We could use a few more researchers like him.

Tonight I served my five-year-old a big bowl of rat chow for dinner, then asked her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which she (supposedly) learned in school yesterday.  She couldn’t do it.  This was annoying, because she recited the whole thing last night.

So I fed her some fish food.  That didn’t work either.  I tried dried cat food.  No better.  Rabbit chow.  Nada.

I was experimenting because I’d seen several articles on … what’s that called? … the spider web … no… the tennis net … volleyball net … ah, the internet!  There were all these articles about how a high-fat diet can adversely affect your mammary.  No wait, that’s not it … your mummery.  Hang on, it’ll come to me … nope, I’ll have to look it up again.

Got it.  There were these articles about how a high-fat can adversely affect your memory.  I found this disturbing because as a performer, I have to memorize a lot of material.  When I act in plays, I memorize every line in my scenes - mine and everyone else’s.  That way I know if another actor forgot a line and I can cover. 

(Once, in a bad production of “A Shot in the Dark,” I spent more time covering than I did saying actual lines from the script.  Strange, because the actor who forgot half his dialog was a vegetarian.)

When I perform on cruise ships, I do two different half-hour standup shows … alone, with no teleprompter and no one to cover for me.  So I take memory seriously.  I also eat a lot of fat, and my memory is just fine.  I still remember the phone number my parents had when I was a kid in Iowa.  My dad used to call me “Total Recall.”  So when I saw the headlines, I smelled a rat.

Yup, it was a rat, all right.  For this study, researchers fed some rats a low-fat diet (7.5%) then tested their physical endurance and memory by having them run on a treadmill and find their way through a maze.  Later, they fed the rats a high-fat diet (55%) and repeated the tests.  Wouldn’t you know it, the rats didn’t do so well on a high-fat diet.

Let’s set aside the possibility that after eating all that fat, the rats became much more intelligent and thought to themselves, “Running a maze is stupid.  I’m going to just sit here until that dumb @#$%ing researcher gets tired of writing on his pad and gets me out of here.  I haven’t finished reading the sports section on that newspaper lining the bottom of my cage.”

The point is, a high-fat diet isn’t natural for rats.  I looked it up, and rats are listed as omnivores who will eat pretty much whatever is available, but prefer cereal grains.  (They probably like looking at that American Heart Association seal of approval on the box.)  When you feed an animal - or a human - an unnatural diet, you’re going to get negative results.

The Lipid Hypothesis became accepted partly because when researchers fed rabbits lard and cholesterol, the rabbits rapidly developed heart disease.  Well, go figure … rabbits rarely attack pigs and eat them.  When other researchers tried the same experiment on dogs, they couldn’t induce heart disease, no matter how much lard they fed them.  So they concluded that dogs don’t get heart disease.  But they do - if you feed them grains.

If rats eat a lot of fat and then become lethargic and stupid, that says nothing about how a high-fat diet affects humans.  We’ve been eating fatty diets for hundreds of thousands of years.  We didn’t become fat until we started eating grains.  (And we didn’t become stupid until we started feeding fat to rats and thinking the results mean anything.)

In another rat study that hit the news this week, researchers suggested that high-fat, high-protein diet leads to insulin resistance.  Once again, we’re looking at animals that aren’t eating anything close to their natural diet.  If a high-fat, high-protein diet had the same effect on humans, the Inuits and the buffalo-hunting tribes should’ve been plagued by diabetes.  They weren’t.  But after Native Americans were herded onto reservations and forced to live on flour and sugar, they became one of the most diabetic populations on the planet - more than 50% in some tribes.

Studies on actual humans don’t show these results.  In fact, they show exactly the opposite.  In one recent study, Alzheimer’s patients showed improvements in memory when they were given ketones.  The natural way to produce ketones, of course, is to eat a high-fat diet and skip the carbs.

In another recent study, subjects who ate a Paleolithic diet - which means low-carb, consisting mostly of meats, nuts, vegetables and some fruits - showed a significant drop in insulin levels.  That hardly sounds like the path to insulin resistance.  Other studies have also shown dramatic improvements in diabetes symptoms when subjects went on a low-carb, high-fat, high-protein diet.

If you’ve seen these headlines, please, don’t worry.  You’re not a rat.  You won’t develop diabetes and forget where you parked your car unless you eat rat chow.

By the way, my daughter loves eggs, cream, meat, nuts, butter and cheese.  When we had lamb steaks last night, she begged - as usual - for some extra fat from my steak.  (She got it.)  Since she would just now be in kindergarten if she’d started school in Tennessee, her first-grade teacher had her come in for a reading test before the semester began.  Afterwards, the teacher told my wife, “Your daughter blew me away.  I can’t believe how many words she recognizes already.”

I’d say her memory is just fine, too.  And she actually knows the Pledge of Allegiance word-for-word.

In Burbank, I lived in a two-story townhouse and shared walls with neighbors on either side, so I was always self-conscious about making noise.  Not anymore.  I’m in a stand-alone house now, with plenty of yard space separating me from my neighbors.

So after getting my Mac set up in my new home office earlier this week, I waited until my wife and kids were gone, then fired up iTunes and cranked the Kplisch speakers all the way to seven.  Man, I was rockin’ out.

Strange thing, though … after an hour or so, I couldn’t hear the music quite as well.  So I cranked the speakers to eight.  That helped – for awhile.  Then, once again, the sound mysteriously began to fade.  So I cranked the speakers to nine.  Two hours later, the sound faded yet again. 

Dangit!  I’ve never had problems with my Mac before, but something was obviously wrong.  I could still feel the bass from the woofer thumping in my chest – my glass of fizzy water was also rattling across my desk – but the volume just wasn’t there.

So I cranked the system to all the way to ten.  That helped, but only for awhile.  Frustrated, I called the local Mac repair guy.  However, something was also clearly screwed up with my new Comcast phone system, because I could barely hear anything on the other end.  I ended up shouting into the phone, “IF YOU CAN HEAR ME ON YOUR END, I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU MY ADDRESS!  CAN YOU PLEASE GET OVER HERE NOW?!”

Well, apparently the phone could at least transmit sound, because the repair guy showed up an hour later, by which time I was really having trouble getting full volume from my Mac.  I told the guy what was wrong:

“I’M HAVING A HARD TIME HEARING MY MUSIC!”

“Geez, Pal, stop yelling at me!”

“WHAT?!”

“STOP YELLING AT ME!!”

“OH, OKAY!  I mean … oh, okay.”

Turns out the guy is what Seinfeld would call a low-talker.  His lips moved, but hardly any sound came out.  (I’m pretty sure I didn’t agree to wear a puffy shirt during my next standup show.)  I managed to explain that my sound was fading and I wanted it nice and loud again.  He listened to the system and mumbled something.

“WHAT?!”

“Your sound system is fine.”

“WHAT?!!”

“I SAID YOUR SOUND SYSTEM IS  FINE!  I THINK MAYBE YOU’RE GOING DEAF!”

“HOLY CRAP!  WHAT THE HECK COULD CAUSE THAT?!”

“MAYBE YOUR MUSIC WAS TOO LOUD!”

“WELL, IT DOESN’T SOUND VERY LOUD TO ME!  CAN YOU FIX THE SYSTEM SO IT WILL GO TO ELEVEN?!  NO, WAIT … I WANT IT TO GO ALL THE WAY TO FIFTEEN!”

“IF I DO THAT, YOU’LL BE CALLING ME NEXT WEEK TO MAKE IT GO TO TWENTY!”

“OH, I SEE … WELL, HOW MUCH DOES THAT COST?!”

“STOP YELLING AT ME!”

Okay, none of that actually happened.  I am a tad hard of hearing thanks to some nasty childhood earaches that caused my eardrums to tear, but the Kplisch system can still knock me across the room if I turn it up to five.  But I thought about the ever-increasing volume scenario when I saw an ad online for Januvia, a Merck medication designed to control blood sugar for Type II diabetics.

Most of you probably know this already, but diabetes comes in two forms.  Type I diabetes produce little or no insulin, often from an early age.  They usually need insulin injections to keep their blood sugar normal, and to keep from wasting away – without insulin, they can’t store fat.

Type II diabetes do produce insulin.  In fact, they tend to produce lots of insulin – but it’s not enough to keep their blood sugar under control.  Why not?  Simple:  they’ve become resistant to the stuff.  When the body’s insulin receptors are constantly flooded with insulin, they become damaged and stop working … just like the cilia in your ears can become damaged by too much noise.  Worse, the beta cells in the pancreas can become overworked from constantly cranking out the insulin and burn out.

So what do drugs like Januvia do?  Here’s a quote from official website:

JANUVIA works differently from other medicines to lower blood sugar in 2 ways. It’s a once-daily prescription pill that, as part of your type 2 diabetes treatment plan, helps your body

• Increase the insulin made in your pancreas
• Decrease the sugar made in your liver

Okay, let’s see … you’ve become insulin-resistant from eating too many high-carb foods that jacked up your insulin.  So what’s the obvious solution?  Well, you must need a drug that horsewhips your body into producing even more insulin.  You need to crank those speakers up to eleven.  Then twelve.  Then fifteen.  Then of course you’ll suffer all the effects of elevated insulin, such as a higher cancer risk, thickening arteries, high blood pressure, excess damage to billions of cells in your body, etc. – but at least your blood sugar will be under control.

I’m not blaming Merck.  They’re a drug manufacturer, so they produced a drug.  It apparently does what it was designed to do.  But if the high priests of The Holy Church of Accepted Advice For Living A Long and Healthy Life hadn’t scared people into cutting back on fat and eating more carbohydrates, a drug like Januvia wouldn’t be necessary. 

Dr. Mike Eades once described to me how people end up on these toxic drugs:

1. Patient goes to Well-Meaning Doctor with a variety of health problems:  elevated triglycerides, weight gain, insulin resistance, etc.
2. Well-Meaning Doctor puts Patient on a lowfat diet, as he was trained to do in medical school.  This of course means the patient will be eating more carbohydrates to satisfy his appetite.
3. Patient returns for a follow-up.  The symptoms haven’t improved or have gotten even worse.
4. Well-Meaning Doctor scratches his head and says, “Well, the diet doesn’t seem to be working.  We’ll have to put you on (insert wonder drug here).” 

The Well-Meaning Doctor probably learned about the wonders of the drug at a seminar sponsored by the manufacturer, by the way.

I referred to these drugs as toxic with good reason.  Here are the possible side-effects of Januvia, once again from their own web site:

• Hives
• Rash
• Swelling of the face, lips, tongue and throat
• Upper respiratory tract infection
• Stuffy or runny nose
• Sore throat
• Headache

Awesome!  Scratch your rash, wipe your runny nose, wheeze to your wife that you’d like another serving of mashed potatoes, spoon them over your swollen lips, and enjoy the flavor on your swollen tongue.  Swallow carefully, though, because that sore throat is getting serious.  Maybe the aspirin you take for the headache will help your throat, too.

Here’s another possible side-effect not listed on the site:  in rat studies, sitagliptin (Januvia’s chemical name) led to an increase in pancreatic cancer.  Gee, you’d almost think a body doesn’t like having a drug do a beat-down on its pancreas. 

There is, of course, a natural alternative:  stop forcing your body to smack down your blood sugar several times per day.  Then you won’t need so much insulin.  Many Type II diabetics have been able to stop taking insulin and any other blood-sugar medications simply by eliminating sugar and starch.  That’s how it worked for Dr. Jay Wortman, the medical expert behind the wonderful documentary My Big Fat Diet.

And here is the list of unpleasant side-effects from giving up sugar and starch:

• You won’t be able to eat sugar or starch.

That sure sounds like the better treatment to me.

A note about my hearing, by the way:  Sometimes people speak to me and I don’t respond because (duh) I don’t know they’re speaking to me.  This generally leads to one of two reactions:  1) They try again, with extra volume, or 2) they decide I’m aloof and give up. 

I’m not aloof.  I like pretty much everyone I meet unless they give me a reason to change my opinion.  If you happen to see me onboard Jimmy Moore’s low-carb cruise and I don’t respond if you talk to me, try again.  But don’t crank it up to eleven … I’m a little hard of hearing, not deaf.