Robert Paterson's Weblog

Why alcohol helps you cope with the bad effects of grains

How do we insure our recovery?

The two things that help to remove the big 4  “glue foods” from our villi and help them to heal are alcohol and vinegar. It’s great to know there is a non-alcoholic alternative for removing these alcohol-soluble glues. What do we use to get wallpaper glue residue off the wall? Vinegar and water. What is wallpaper glue frequently made from? Wheat gluten. Yes, these glues from casein, gluten, soy and corn are not water or even acid soluble. They are alcohol and alkaline soluble. That’s why they survive the digestive process of simple-stomached animals, leave that stomach, and adhere to the villi. But alcohol and vinegar will help get them off. Ruminants (animals with a forestomach, such as cattle, sheep, goats) are better equipped to handle these foods because they ferment their foods, a process that produces alcohol. But even they are not immune to the harmful effects of lectins, as illustrated by the negative effect that corn has on the fat in their muscles. We like the marbling of meat that corn-feeding produces, but this is a totally abnormal physiological event. (I explain this in the Obesity section).

via dogtorj.com

And
How have Italians survived as celiacs?
Understanding this principle gives us tremendous insight into how Italians have survived over the years being a pasta-based culture. They drink wine with their meals and eat their oil and vinegar-soaked salad after their meals. Their appetizers (antipasto) are usually high fat meats (e.g. salami, prosciutto) and those items marinated in olive oil or vinegar. The fat and oil protects the villi from the attachment of gluten and casein in their upcoming main course while the vinegar and wine washes clean what does manage to attach. The fiber from the salad then scrubs the villi clean. It’s like soaking a paintbrush in mineral spirits then wiping it clean. How cool is that?

This site is a great resource

Gluten-Free Foods Paying Off Big

Among the crowded ranks of healthy food trends — quinoa, farm-to-table, whole whole grains — one food category is growing into a genuine, industry juggernaut: gluten-free.

 

The Washington Post | Getty Images Gluten-free Rice Chex and Arrowroot Cookies marked Gluten-Free. From a Safeway store in Bethesda, Maryland.

Once confined to specialty health stores and bakeries, the category is fast becoming mainstream, with more gluten-free foods available at more retailers. Subway is road-testing a gluten-free brownie and roll for sandwiches at select Texas restaurants, with plans for a more testing in an Oregon city.

 General Mills [GIS  39.29    0.16  (+0.41%)   ] has expanded their line of gluten-free foods to include boxed cereals, such as Chex.

P.F. Chang's China Bistro [PFCB  40.54    0.31  (+0.77%)   ] offers an extensive gluten-free menu.

Whole Foods Market [WFM  60.57    -0.02  (-0.03%)   ] has a wide spectrum of packaged gluten-free products, including 30 varieties of baked goods made at a gluten-free facility in North Carolina, and then shipped across the country.

And the variety is expanding beyond baked goods and pasta, usually the most relevant gluten-free categories. Retailers sell baby food, condiments, desserts, pizza, and seafood entrees, all without gluten.

"More food companies are jumping on the bandwagon to label foods gluten-free. There's a groundswell," says Cynthia Kupper, executive director of the Gluten Intolerance Group of North America, a nonprofit group that supports people with gluten-related disorders including celiac disease. "When the low-carb fad died, this was the new product trend —the gluten-free market."

via cnbc.com

It is going to be a very good business to offer foods that do not make us ill. Have you noticed that many yoghurts now say that they DO NOT CONTAIN CORNSTARCH.

People are starting to read the label and if you have wheat - HFCS etc - in your product - then the informed are going to pass. But they will pay more too for a food that is healthy for real.

McDonald's and PepsiCo to help write UK health policy - The Fox is in the hen house

The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald's and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

In an overhaul of public health, said by campaign groups to be the equivalent of handing smoking policy over to the tobacco industry, health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five "responsibility deal" networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, to come up with policies. Some of these are expected to be used in the public health white paper due in the next month.

The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises. Working alongside them are public interest health and consumer groups including Which?, Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health. The alcohol responsibility deal network is chaired by the head of the lobby group the Wine and Spirit Trade Association. The food network to tackle diet and health problems includes processed food manufacturers, fast food companies, and Compass, the catering company famously pilloried by Jamie Oliver for its school menus of turkey twizzlers. The food deal's sub-group on calories is chaired by PepsiCo, owner of Walkers crisps.

via guardian.co.uk

This is why we should not trust the "official" view on diet and health.

This capture is not confined to the UK or to Policy - look at the Diabetes and Heart Associations who have Heart Healthy Labels for food like Cheerios etc. Who funds these organizations?

Trust your evolved self - what food were you designed to eat?

Always follow the money - if someone is giving you advice - are they also selling you something or making money from this? What is the motive?

The Food Pyramid dies but the new Food Plate is still wrong

The Food Pyramid is about to die in the US - its replacement The Food Plate is better but it it still hangs onto the idea our problem is that we eat too many calories and that we eat too much animal fat. 

Here is a quick background

 

The new Food Plate claims to be based on the best science. But it is not - they get 2 things wrong that are now established as being wrong.

• That the first driver for obesity that we eat more calories than we consume. But we are not machines. We are complex systems. The issue is really how the calories we eat are metabolized. Taubes argues that, contrary to prevailing opinion, it is not excess calories and a sedentary lifestyle that lead to overweightness and obesity. Instead, it is the quality of the calories – their macronutrient origin – that is crucial. He says that the typical recommendation to lose weight – eat less and exercise more – is basically intellectual nonsense: the less we eat, the lower our metabolic rate, and the less fat we metabolize; the more we exercise, the hungrier we get, and the more we eat. The diet advocated by the FDA, USDA, NAS, and myriads of other ‘professional’ organizations actually leads to a semi-starvation lifestyle, where people are constantly hungry. 

How we metabolise sugars is how we get fat. Sugar and insulin resistance to too much sugar drive fat. This is how we get fat.

• They say we should limit our consumption of sugars and highly refined foods - that is good - but then they say eat more whole grains. But all grains are sugar. 
• Worse they then also say we must limit our consumption of fat and meat. But the science is clear. We get fat by how we metabolize sugars - and all grains are in effect sugars - meats and fats are not. Ironically low fat milk has more lactose that full. Lactose is sugar.

So they start right All the science shows how sugars in all their forms do make us fat and they should be avoided. But cannot help themselves and then add in that fat makes us fat and that whole grains are good.

Are they not trying to hold two opposing ideas - the Lipid hypothesis and the Fat Hypothesis at the same time?

So long as the Government holds onto the Calories and Fat ideas - we will make no progress.

Queen Street Commons is hiring/training a social marketer

Are you a self starting kind of person who wants to become a top flight social marketer?

You may be who we are looking for.

Details here

Carb Coma!

I have cetainly noticed a huge change in how I feel after a meal now. I also wake up in the mornign without feeling bloated as I used too. Finally, I don't feel hungry between meals either. (HT Dwight Towers for this)

How about you? Without carbs - how do you feel? And with carbs - do you feel like this?

 

Songs that sum a singer up #3 Johnny Cash - Hurt

Life is so different from the perspective of age - "Everyone I know goes away in the end" HT Jeremy Hiebert. What about you? Do you have a song and a singer in mind where the song sums up a key point for that artist?

 

The man who invented exercise

In the early years after the second world war, health researchers in Britain noticed a curious epidemic: people had begun dying of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. Nobody knew why, and so a scientist in London named Jerry Morris set up a vast study to examine the heart-attack rates in people of different occupations – schoolteachers, postmen, transport workers and more.

Morris is today a neat, bird-like man who uses a cane to get around. He turns 100 next May but still regularly makes his way to his poky little office at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It is here that he describes the day he saw the data that changed medicine. “The very first results we got were from the London busmen,” says Morris, in ­Glaswegian tones undimmed by seven-odd decades in London. “And there was a striking difference in the heart-attack rate. The drivers of these double-decker buses had substantially more, age for age, than the conductors.”

The data were so telling because drivers and conductors were men of much the same social class. There was only one obvious difference between them. “The drivers were prototypically sedentary,” explains Morris, “and the conductors were unavoidably active. We spent many hours sitting on the buses watching the number of stairs they climbed.” The conductors ascended and descended 500 to 750 steps per working day. And they were half as likely as the drivers to drop dead of a sudden heart attack.

Morris found that bus conductors had fewer heart attacks than sedentary drivers

Today, almost everyone understands that physical exercise can help prevent heart disease, as well as cancer, diabetes, depression and much else besides. But on that day in 1949 when Morris looked at the bus data, he was the first person to see the link. He had inadvertently – “mainly luck!” – stumbled on a great truth about health: exercise helps you live longer.

That’s a truth even more relevant in 2009 than it was in 1949, because so few of us now perform vigorous physical tasks as part of daily life. If present generations are going to live longer, we must exercise. But if that depends on us getting on rowing machines in our spare time, it won’t happen.

via ft.com

A great piece - worth reading in full. But he never thought that we might re-model the workplace. Surely we can do this?

And what about school? How could school be redesigned with activity in mind?

New Clue in Obesity Epidemic Points to Workplace - Activity vs Exercise

But the new emphasis on declining workplace activity also represents a major shift in thinking, and it suggests that health care professionals and others on the front lines against obesity, who for years have focused primarily on eating habits and physical activity at home and during leisure time, have missed a key contributor to America’s weight problem. The findings also put pressure on employers to step up workplace heath initiatives and pay more attention to physical activity at work.

“If we’re going to try to get to the root of what’s causing the obesity epidemic, work-related physical activity needs to be in the discussion,” said Dr. Timothy S. Church, a noted exercise researcher at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and the study’s lead author. “There are a lot of people who say it’s all about food. But the work environment has changed so much we have to rethink how we’re going to attack this problem.”

via well.blogs.nytimes.com

The new focus on "Activity" is sharpening weekly. What I find so hopeful about this insight is that we can take action - the point is to think through your work or school day.

Here is the NYT conclusion.

“We need to think about physical activity as a more robust concept than just recreational physical activity,” said Dr. Brownson, whose 2005 report on declining physical activity in the workplace is cited in the PLoS One report. “In many ways we’ve engineered physical activity out of our lives, so we’ve got to find ways to put it back into our lives, like taking walks during breaks or having opportunities for activity that are more routine to our daily lives, not just going to the health club.”

Researchers said it is unlikely that the lost physical activity can ever be fully restored to the workplace, but employers do have the power to increase the physical activity of their employees by offering subsidized gym memberships or incentives to use public transit. Some companies have set up standing workstations, and marketers now offer treadmill-style desks. Employers can also redesign offices to encourage walking, by placing printers away from desks and encouraging face-to-face communication, rather than e-mail.

“The activity we get at work has to be intentional,” said Dr. Ainsworth. “When people think of obesity they always think of food first, and that’s one side of it, but it’s high time to look at the amount of time we spend inactive at work.”

BC start to help families take control of their health - Time for PEI too

The BC Government have just launched a $68 million dollar program designed to help families take charge of their health. Details here. 

The first thing they are going to do is to pay Dr's to get into health promotion itself. You may think that they do that but they are not paid to do that. They are paid to write you a prescription but not to take action say to change your diet. They are also going to screen their patients for signs of trouble. Most health systems merely react to a problem. They don't look at those at risk of diabetes, record that, set targets and have a prevention plan with the patient. This will make such planning a key part of how health care is delivered in BC.

Why this change? because medicine cannot help stem the wave of chronic disease that threatens our health and also the financial health of our provinces. In BC they are looking to save 2.0 billion in costs by doing this.

On PEI our healthcare costs will exceed our PEI taxes in 5 years and will be 2 times are taxes in 10 years. We have to also make prevention the centre of what we do.

I think that this is a great start.