In my family medicine practice, I hear this more than, “My throat hurts.”
Bread has become an every day staple in American homes, but it really isn’t what it used to be. It used to be made by hand. It was locally grown, whole grains that people milled into flour. It may have had a very small amount of sugar or honey to help with leavening, but was usually flour, yeast if available, and water.
It was then eaten with a meal, used to sop up gravy. It was also commonly used as a filler – protein is more expensive so starches such as bread and potatoes (and historically in other countries rice and pasta) were used to fill more people for longer periods of time.
Now, bread is usually purchased at the grocery store, and is generally over-processed grains (with the good stuff taken out and then vitamins added in to “enrich” the flour, labeled “healthy” “whole” grains), with high fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, as well as the unpronounceables:
Take a peak in the bread aisle, I did. I looked at every single hot dog bun in the grocery store, and I couldn’t find one without high fructose corn syrup in it.
It is a wonder that people feel like they cannot give up bread. Studies have shown that eating one, single, piece of white bread, can light up a brain scan the same way as heroin.
If you are one of those people, here are a few recipes that can help you with those cravings.
I was looking through my Facebook page this morning and saw a great editorial about our Birthday cake culture and how it is one of the most dangerous things for our health. I have similar discussions every single day and I completely agree!
How many of you try so hard to stick to an eating plan and goal, only to have a celebration at work or home derail you? Someone’s birthday deserves cake. Celebrate end of summer – root beer float day. Great job this week – cookie day. Just for the heck of it – ice cream sandwich day. There is always an excuse to eat – how can anyone survive without gaining weight? In the holiday season it is even worse, especially when people start bringing tins of cookies or candies to work. SML
It is difficult because we celebrate so many things with food! It is the easiest, cheapest way to reward a group of people. Most people don’t care for a plate of cheese or olives, or a veggie platter as a way to say congratulations. Nuts for reward? Salami sticks? Sound really great, don’t they? Probably not to most people.
We need a change in culture! But until that happens some strategies for this are: 1. change the way you think about foods – think of the cake or cookies as things that are not healthy but instead as toxic substances; 2. buy coffee or tea as a treat instead of sugary drinks or foods – add some cream with or without sugar free syrup to make it very satisfying; 3. avoid the room at work that the party is going on or where the food is sitting so you aren’t tempted to eat the addictive foods; 4. go into the party with the attitude that you will say no and just enjoy the company and find the table with cheese, meats, veggies and nuts; 5. don’t eat it just because the others want you to – you can either ignore the peer pressure or tell them that you are sugar/carb intolerant – all of us are; 6. teach your friends or coworkers how to eat more healthily – this takes time but is worth it when everyone starts making better choices.
I know it is very difficult to say no and to avoid these foods, but try to remember that these foods taste good and make you feel good for just a few minutes, and then make you feel bad for a whole lot longer. Work on remembering this when you are tempted at a work party or at a dinner party because there is always an excuse to eat… we need more excuses not to eat!
Inflammation is something we have heard about a lot lately, but what exactly is inflammation and why is it so important?
Inflammation is a process in which the body tries to fight off harmful stimuli. It is an attempt at self protection involving immune cells, blood vessels, and molecular mediators. The aim is to eliminate the initial stimulus, remove any dead or damaged cells, and begin the healing process. Inflammation is very complex and can involve any part of the body.
Inflammation is not the same thing as infection, although infection can cause inflammation. Think about the swollen red nose, sore throat and wheezy lungs you get with an upper respiratory infection; these symptoms are not caused directly by the virus, but instead by the body’s response to the virus.
www.inflammation2011.com
Inflammation can be due to almost anything – foreign bodies (sliver), uric acid (gout), infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi), and sometimes is the body attacking itself (autoimmune diseases). The body can have acute inflammation – a rapid response of the body that can become severe. Examples of this include acute appendicitis, tonsillitis, sprained ankle, ingrown toenail, skin infection, acute gout, and exercise response. Chronic inflammation is long term resulting from failure to remove the stimuli, a low intensity chronic irritant, or an auto-immune response. Examples of this include vascular inflammation, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohn’s disease.
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Obesity is also a pro-inflammatory state. Studies have been done which show that people who are obese have higher blood inflammatory markers, and the levels of all of these markers increase with increasing fat mass. One theory is that expanded fat has outgrown its blood supply causing too little oxygen to cells.
Insulin resistance is also an inflammatory response. Ever present (toxic stiumli) sugar causes increased insulin levels which in turn supplies surplus sugar to the cells; this prompts the cells to shut down the gateways that allow additional sugar into the cell. When this happens, any additional sugar present outside the cells is stored as fat (for an excellent, easy to read description of this, see Dr. Jason Fung’s“Insulin Resistance is Good?”).
When insulin resistance occurs, the immune system becomes more alert (read: more inflammatory). The results are more joint pain, more risk of heart disease and stroke, more gout, more irritable bowel, and more chronic pain.
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The deposit of fatty streaks in blood vessels is also an inflammatory response. Why do we get fatty streaks? The most plausible answer is because of oxidative stress to the small LDL particles. LDL particles are necessary (not bad as we’ve been taught) and are useful in cell functions and a necessary part of cell membranes. When they become oxidized, they are no longer recognizable except to white blood cells (a large player in inflammation) which cause them to form fatty streaks in the blood vessels. These fatty streaks eventually become plaque and can rupture causing an intense inflammatory response that can progress to block the vessel, resulting in a heart attack or stroke. What causes this oxidative stress to the LDLs? One of the main causes is oxidized polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), and the biggest source of PUFAs is vegetable oils. The most common cause of oxidation of PUFAs is heating them. What do you do with vegetable oils? Heat them and use them to cook other foods. This plus the overall increase in inflammation due to insulin resistance increases risk of heart attacks significantly.
What is the root cause of all of this disease? Inflammation? No – inflammation is the protective response of our body. One major root cause is the Standard American Diet (SAD), high in sugar, refined highly processed carbohydrates, and vegetable oils (just look: soybean oil can be found in just about everything!). The cure? It goes back to eating real, whole food (see How to LCHF), getting enough sleep, quitting tobacco if you use it, and exercising regularly.
Many times I see patients and talk about changing their lifestyle with LCHF eating, and I will feel like I’ve done a pretty good job getting them started with handouts, internet links, books, and access to me through Facebook and this website. However, when many people return they will tell me they cut out the carbs, but when I ask about their fat they will admit they still eat low fat…that they are still scared to eat fat.
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Fat was unjustly vilified, starting in the early 1950s. At about that time doctors started recognizing and diagnosing heart disease and heart attacks. Then in 1955 President Dwight Eisenhower had his first heart attack, while in office. Because of some flawed research and what seems in large part to politics, fat, especially saturated, started to get a bad name. Add in that Crisco and Margarine were much cheaper than lard and butter and that several doctors who recommended eating these vegetable oils were sponsored by the oil companies – we all started decreasing our natural fat intake, and started increasing our intake of unnatural vegetable oils (see The Big Fat Surprise for full timeline and history).
This was all done despite not a single study showing a link between saturated fat and heart disease, and many studies showing increased risk of dying and disease when diets decreased in fat (and increase in vegetable oils of any kind).
More terrible politics occurred (remember, it is not WHAT you know, but WHO you know) and the first Dietary Guidelines were created in 1980 with the first food pyramid and the recommendations to cut fat and cholesterol out of our diets.
And you know what happened? We did it! We followed the guidelines quite well! And after that? We all became fatter and sicker – more heart disease, more diabetes, more dementia, more inflammation, more fatty liver, more sleep apnea, more cancer. Why? Mostly because we increased our intake of vegetable oils (polyunsaturated fatty acids that are easily oxidized and increase inflammation in our bodies) and increased our carbohydrates and sugars! (If you take the fat out of food it tastes terrible unless you add more sugar or other carbohydrates).
Highly processed easy foods also played a part as they became very convenient in our busy lives. Prepackaged snacks are easier to give to kids. We all became completely obsessed about calorie counting and increasing exercise that we downed diet soft drinks, ate 100-calorie no fat snacks, dry toast and cereal with skim milk, plain rice cakes with no toppings, dry chicken breasts with potatoes (no butter – remember low fat butter powder?), pasta (never alfredo sauce), vegetables (steamed with no butter) and diet desserts that were non-fat (low fat frozen yogurt). We starved ourselves, exercised hard and rarely succeeded in losing weight and then keeping it off.
How many of you have done this? How many are still trying to do this? It doesn’t work and there are many reasons why. The first being that when you decrease your calories significantly, your body fairly quickly decreases it’s expenditure of calories (by up to 40%) in order to match what comes in. This decrease in metabolism makes us feel tired and actually keeps us from being successful. The second reason is that your body hormones work against you to make you have difficulty with keeping weight off – you decrease your food and your Ghrelin (hunger hormone) goes up. You lose weight and decrease fat and Leptin (feel full hormone produced by fat) goes down. Most people who try to lose weight plateau significantly at month 6 and then it starts coming back on. Not to mention that exercising significantly increases your appetite and doesn’t actually help with weight loss (see What About Exercise?)
Is it hopeless? Can we lose weight? YES!!
The key is to get fat back in our diets, and get the unnatural carbs and sugar out! There have been many studies that show that eating fat or even fasting (see fasting) do not decrease metabolism. Fat makes us feel full, and if we increase fat and decrease carbs we can actually enjoy the benefit of using our fat as energy instead of feeling hungry and eating more. Our blood sugars stabilize, our belly fat goes away, our energy goes up, our weight goes down…and even if we never lose a pound our health improves with decreased risks of diabetes, and all of the diseases that are caused by insulin resistance. Your HDLs will go up, your triglycerides will go down, and your fatty liver will decrease – all predictors for heart disease. (Fatty Liver No Innocent Bystander)
So, what should we do? Eat a diet of whole, real foods that are not low-fat. You can do this as a meat eater (see Getting Started on LCHF or get started with Diet doctor low carb challenge) or even as a vegetarian (How to eat low carb as a Vegetarian/Vegan). Avoid highly processed foods (try to eat as many one-ingredient low starch foods that you can) and cook your own meals. Eat butter, olive oil and coconut oil, and throw away the seed/grain oils and margarine. If you follow these few guidelines and avoid “food-like substances” you will get back on the path to Optimum Health.
Kids are eating sugar at an all time high! I’ve seen sugar for kids being compared to alcohol for adults (6 Hidden Truths About Sugar), and see highly processed foods given to kids all day, every day. Pop Tarts! or cereal with juice for breakfast, Mac and Cheese with chocolate milk for lunch, frozen chicken nuggets or frozen pizza for dinner, fruit snacks or granola bars for snacks. (Are You Overdosing Your Kids On Sugar?) This is a deadly trend, we need parents, schools, medical professionals, government and food manufacturers to work together to halt this freight train!
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I have 4 kids, age 4-10, all very busy and active. Do I feed my kids what I eat? I get that question a lot…and the answer is MOSTLY.
I give them more leeway than I give myself. I figure if I can teach them how to make good choices most of the time then they can have the occasional splurge on sugar.
I have been eating this way (LCHF) for only 4 years so it hasn’t always been easy to transition them. If I could change 2 things that I did with my kids it would be: never cereal, and never juice. We now shy away from cereal, but I might have a mutiny if I took it away completely, so we try to buy the lowest sugar kinds we can find. For years, we had orange juice every morning, especially the added calcium kind for my lactose intolerant daughter, but we no longer have juice.
So what do they eat? For breakfast they usually have eggs and sausage or bacon, steel cut oatmeal/flax with heavy cream and no sugar added. If you kids are used to the regular flavored oatmeal packets, add a bit of sugar free flavored coffee syrup. Another favorite is banana pancakes (3 bananas, 3 eggs, 1/2 cup almond butter, generous pour of cinnamon, 1/4 tsp baking powder all thrown into the blender and then cooked like pancakes) or cereal. They eat an orange instead of having orange juice. My youngest also really likes lox and cream cheese for breakfast.
For lunch they have a wraps made with a low carb tortillas, with cream cheese and meat or peanut butter and a banana, some fruit and some nuts. They do not eat school lunches.
Snacks can vary: full fat yogurt or cheese and nuts, Kind or Kashi bars (always make sure they are the ones that have 5g of sugar or less), fruit, or gluten free crackers.
For dinner they eat what I eat. We do not make pasta, rice or white potatoes. Occasionally we eat sweet potatoes baked into fries with olive oil and salt, or mash with butter and pumpkin pie spice. We always have meat and a vegetable, and like to have full fat cottage cheese, yogurt or cheese as a side. If we do have dessert we will have fruit or berries with whipped heavy cream. Very rarely we have a small dish of ice cream.
I work really hard to help them understand why we eat the way that we do, however, I also try not to let them feel left out.
They go to birthday parties and friends’ houses, and they eat what they want, but I have often seen them stop eating a dessert halfway through (which I love!) because they are done. We also have a rule that if any candy is sent home in a gift bag, it goes into the trash can in the garage and doesn’t come into the house. We had screaming fits at first, but now they accept that this is “how it is”. At Halloween we do Trick or Treat and will have a candy picnic right after we finish, but then the kids give up their candy to the “Halloween Fairy” and are left with a movie in its place.
There is no perfect way to get your kids to eat more healthy, but in general if you can reduce the sugar and highly processed foods they eat, they will do better and have less risk for disease.
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