For the love of sugar!

You've heard it all:

Carbs are bad. Carbs may cause diabetes. Carbs should be avoided. Carbs are healthy for you. There are different types of carbs. Stay away from the bad carbs.

I can see where all the confusion comes from - the abundance of readily available healthy-eating “facts” and information has conquered every form of media today, from lifestyle magazines, to nutrition columns in newspapers, to bloggers, cookbooks, and the like. You’ll notice a different answer to almost every nutritional issue-it is hard to know what to believe anymore.

I came across an article titled “Is the Food Pyramid Upside Down” published in the Well Being Journal. In a nutshell, it criticized the recommendations made in the current American Food Pyramid, a diet that is consisted mostly of carbohydrates (45-65% of total daily calorie intake), some proteins (10-35%), and fats (20-35%). According to the authors, “For many, following a diet as recommended by the Food Pyramid can lead to … a metabolic situation predisposing one to diabetes and heart disease”.

I was appalled. Not just by its unfounded, blunt statements, but how this stance is against everything that I have learned in dietetics and been trained for. It was also written by two Ph.D’s & a registered dietitian, and presented in a widely circulated health journal targeted at members of the public like you and me. How many of us will read unfounded articles like this and alter our eating patterns once again, only to find ourselves more confused about the contradictory, so-called expert opinions?

In this article, the authors argued their point by using a non-representative, single patient case where Bob failed to lose weight and lower his cholesterol level when he was following the conventional low-fat advice. He did however achieve results when he switched to a diet of reduced carbohydrates, increased protein, and a moderate amount of fat. The article further suggested the need for “A new food guide that removes the restrictions on valuable foods as animal protein and natural saturated fats and reduce the emphasis on carbohydrate-based food products”.

My first question arose: what was Bob’s usual dietary patterns before he took on any nutritional advice and how long had he been following an eating pattern as suggested by the Food Pyramid before he decided that it wasn’t helping him shed pounds?

Carbohydrate is a collective term not only for grains and starchy foods but also fruits and vegetables (complex and natural sugars), as well as added sugars found in soft drinks, candy, fruit drinks, and desserts (refined sugars). We know that the types of carbohydrates matter in weight loss management and for adopting an overall healthy dietary pattern. So could it be that Bob had been consuming more of the refined type of sugars as his carbohydrate intake when he followed the Food Pyramid, as opposed to the complex (such as intact whole grains), which provides a rich source of fiber, vitamins (including antioxidants), minerals, and phytonutrients (ahha! antiangiogenic factors) that help battle against a number of chronic diseases, boost your immune system, and promote healthy body weight? - We wouldn’t know because the article presented no further details other than claiming that Bob was on a high-carb, low protein & fat diet. In reality, high-carb could mean many different approaches to carbohydrate consumption (high complex-carbohydrate intake vs. low complex-carbohydrate intake), some of which are healthier than others.

My second take on the article’s view is that weight loss is often not immediate in people who follow a moderately restricted eating pattern. It can take up to a year or two depending on your initial weight, food intake and level of physical activity. Furthermore, the more weight that has been lost the harder and slower you will be losing an additional pound. This rather unfortunate trick of nature can be discouraging to many people who want to maintain weight-loss on a consistent basis and make us question whether our dietary plan and daily exercise have stopped working. The answer is: No, they are working just fine! And it’s because we’ve lost weight that it’s become harder!

Some other questions that we need to ask ourselves is “Did Bod lose weight on the high-fat and low-carb diet because he was also being more active?” “What else did he do differently in combination with a change in his diet?” With many critical pieces of information missing in Bob’s case, we simply cannot contribute his weight loss and cholesterol drop to his higher fat and protein consumption.

An anatomy of the Food Guide Pyramid

Before jumping to the conclusion that the Food pyramid provides scientifically unsound guidelines, let’s at least go through it and see what it has to say.

The rainbow of colors, vertical stripes represent the five food groups plus fats and oils.

Orange - Grains
Green - Vegetables
Red - Fruits
Yellow - Fats and Oils
Blue - Milk and Dairy products
Purple - Meat, beans, fish, and nuts

The first message from the official website of MyPyramid.gov is that “one size doesn’t fit all”. This is saying that there is no one healthy diet that will work for everybody. Considering the social, cultural dimensions of food that affect our eating and lifestyle habits and our different genetic backgrounds, there can be significant individual variations in determining what makes a healthy, appropriate diet for each one of us. That being said, however, there are trusted guidelines, such as the Dietary Reference Intakes and Canada’s Food Guide that most of us could follow to meet our nutritional requirements.

The reason for recommending 45-65% of energy intake from carbohydrates is based on its role as the primary energy source for the brain. Similarly, it is a source of energy that feeds muscles during exercise and maintains your body weight. The long-term impact of a low-carb diet, as suggested by the article will result in feelings of fatigue (because your brain is starving and your glycogen storage is depleted), muscle loss (due to depletion of muscle glycogen), and weight gain (due to a decrease in your basal metabolic rate and consequently burning fewer calories/day). Sometimes people might find themselves lose weight on a high-fat & protein and low-carb diet and say “hey, it work!” This is possibly the result of losing a significant amount of your muscle mass, as opposed to fat storage. With the high-fat & protein and low-carb diet, weight gain (in the form of fat storage) later in life is almost guaranteed once you pass the initial stage of muscle loss. It is for these reasons I can assure you that a high-fat & protein and low carb diet will not bring you optimal health and sustain your weight-loss goals.

We will boast far better results by sticking to the Pyramid recommendations and finding ways to integrate healthy carbohydrates into our meals (choose complex and enjoy from a variety of fruits, vegetables and whole grains!)

Lessons learned:

1. Be aware of whether the information you are reading is fact or opinion-based.

2. Interpret nutritional studies conducted in free-living humans with caution. This is largely because these studies have limited control in the environment and people’s behavior and self-reporting are unreliable.


What is your relationship with carbohydrate? What are your favorite sources of carbs?

Curing Cancer Through Eating

This has been a pretty exciting week for me, I learned of two pieces of news that really opened my eyes to the quickly changing fields of nutrition and medicine:

For one, an article was published about an English patient who has seemingly been cured from his HIV infection.

Another, was a theoretical cure for cancer, as proposed by William Li at a recent TED talk.

Whereas the first discovery was more of a miraculous success in a single patient case, the latter has been tested clinically and has proven to be effective in many cases of cancer. My main focus today is on the prevention and treatment of cancer, as it is one of the most devastating diseases in our society, the onset of which often seems to be coming out of nowhere. Or does it?

It is not an uncommon notion that the most common causes of cancer are genetics, that it’s somehow implanted in your genes and you’ve either got it or you don’t.

This, fortunately, is NOT the case. Genetic causes only account for 5-10% of cancers, while the rest stems from environmental factors. In this remaining 90-95% of cancer-causing factors, diet constitutes 30-35%. So the question becomes, how and what should we eat to prevent and treat cancer?

The is often referred to as “Culinary Medicine”

First of all, let’s briefly look into the mechanism behind cancer. What does a tumor look like? Under the microscope, it is a growing mass surrounded by hundreds of blood vessels or capillaries that feed it with oxygen and nutrients. “But cancers don’t start out with a blood supply like this. In fact, they start out as small, microscopic nests of cells that can only grow to one half a cubic millimeter in size and can’t get any larger because they don’t have a blood supply to provide with enough oxygen and nutrients.” At some point in time, with enough triggers either from the environment or inside the body, they mutate and secrete factors; proteins called angiogenic factors that stimulate new blood vessels to sprout and bridge to cancer cells. It isn’t until then that cancers become harmful. “This process of new blood vessel formation, termed angiogenesis, is therefore the tipping point between a harmless cancer and a harmful one. The major medical revolution is a new approach to treating cancer by cutting of the blood supply.”

Here is when diet comes in, to prevent the process of angiogenesis in cancers. “We can eat foods that are naturally antiangiogenic and beat back those blood vessels that are feeding cancers. In other words, we can eat to starve cancer!” Foods such as cooked tomatoes, grapes, soy, garlic, berries and tea all have properties that can reduce angiogenesis in cancer. What’s more interesting is that obesity, another highly prevalent chronic condition shares the same angiogenesis pathway as cancers. Like a tumor, fat grows when blood vessels grow. So, weight loss can be achieved by cutting off the blood supply through the same healthy dietary regimen. As many areas in the world lack the resources to put into place clinical treatment through antiangiogenic therapy, a healthy diet of foods that are rich in antiangiogenic factors may be one feasible way to successfully combat cancer.

Source
This amazing discovery was presented by William Li, a researcher under Harvard Surgeon, Dr. Judah Folkman’s mentorship.

Please check out http://www.ted.com/speakers/william_li.html for William Li's speech on "can we eat to starve cancer" at TED.