How carbs and insulin make you fat and/or ill!

[Wotan]

Excellent stuff! It is these little "one line" clues that I follow up as well. Its amazing where just a few words can lead you!

[NU_nutrition_TS]

This is from Karen De Coster's blog:

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South African Sports Scientist Inverts US Food Pyramid

A great conversion is taking place on South Africa. Professor Tim Noakes, an influential sports performance scientist, author, and long-time carb loader, has gone primal. Here’s a quote from an article in the Times Live.

Sports science expert Professor Tim Noakes has caused a stir in health circles by refuting his own nutritional advice, widely espoused as athletics gospel.

In an about-turn, Noakes is blaming food containing carbohydrates for the rise in obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Dr. Noakes, who is the Professor of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of Cape Town, writes this in an article titled “Against the Grains”:

It has taken me 61 years to suspect that bread and cereals – the biblical staff of life – as well as rice, pasta and refined carbohydrates may not be healthy for me personally as I had always believed.

My attention to this possibility was piqued by the release of the most recent 2010 US Dietary Guidelines. These guidelines promote the concept of the Food Pyramid built on 6-11 daily servings of bread, cereals, rice and pasta. Although Americans now follow these guidelines more closely than ever, obesity has become the single greatest medical problem in the US. Thus the question: is this epidemic linked in some way to this increased carbohydrate intake? I decided to investigate.

Chris Becker, a South African reader, pointed me toward researching Dr. Noakes and his shift from the carb-loading paradigm to a fat-based, low-carb paradigm. Here is the letter I received from Chris:

Here’s an update on the paradigm shift to paleo/primal nutrition from South Africa.

Dr Tim Noakes is the co-founder of the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town, South Africa, and is author of the book “Lore of Running,” amongst others. He is highly respected around this neck of the woods by both the medical establishment, nutritional ‘experts’, and the public alike. After reading Gary Taubes books, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and “Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It,” he has changed his mind regarding nutrition. Before, he was a big proponent of carbo-loading before marathons. Now, he says the section on nutrition in his book will be re-written, and if you own the book, you should rip that section out.

He writes in a Discovery Health newsletter – one of SA’s biggest private medical insurance firms – that after his own investigation and thereafter “rigorously avoiding all bread, cereals, rice, pasta and refined carbohydrates and replacing that nutritional deficit with healthy meats, fish, fruit, vegetables and fats, including nuts…Five months later, I am at my lightest weight in 20 years and I am running faster than I have in 20 years. For the first time since I ran heroic weekly mileages in training have I learned exactly how to maintain an ideal body weight without any sense of privation. And with only as much exercise as I want to do. Even my friends are impressed. They agree that not even the most expensive cosmetic surgery could have produced such a remarkable change.” The problem he cites, and even takes aim at the “very large industries, including the soft-drink, sugar and confectionary industries” who “do not want us to know this.” The rest of the article is basically Dr Tim Noakes reading from Mark Sisson’s playbook.

It’s kind of like Paul Krugman going Austrian. Okay… maybe not quite… but nevertheless exciting stuff happening down here! Keep up the great work at LRC, the word is getting out!

[Epp]

Nice presentation by Zoe Harcombe :- The Obesity Epidemic Lecture | The Obesity Epidemic

[NU_nutrition_TS]

I highly recommend people check out the latest post on Mark Sisson's blog, at Mark's Daily Apple, titled "Quitting Rice" and written by a young guy, of Asian descent, who has recently converted to a primal diet inspired by Mark's Primal Blueprint.

Some snippets that inspire me to recommend a full reading...

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Moreover, I don’t see many success stories involving my ethnic group, Asians, probably because of the importance of rice in our culture. One of the most common critiques that I hear is “look at all those skinny Asians who gobble down rice.” I wanted to show that there exist substantial benefits to toning down the consumption of rice.

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For instance, I discovered that high-carbohydrate diets have been linked to myopia. In terms of evolution, it makes no sense that I was wearing glasses by the time I was 7, and myopia among Asians is the norm. Perhaps, we don’t store fat the way Westerners do, but I sincerely doubt our carbohydrate-rich diet is harmless.

There are some extraordinary before and after pictures included in the full post - while not 'fat' before adopting the PB, the after pictures show a much leaner, muscular individual without the 'softness' apparent in the before picture. Facially, he looks like a completely different guy.

Perhaps something to give those eulogising over the healthy Asian consumption of rice pause?

[James]

Just want to comment o the above, I am in full agreement of the above, but it is actually neigh on impossible to not eat rice whilst here (Japan), as your main carb source, sweet potatoes/yams/white potatoes are so expensive and sold in small amounts I don't think it is feasible when on such a tight budget - upping meat consumption to make the extra calories from protein and fats is also pretty darn expensive

[NU_nutrition_TS]

Which is why I constantly refer to such foods as 'subsistence foods', 'fall-back foods', 'survival foods' or even 'peasant foods'! Rather than being some ultra-nourishing super-food - prized and sought out by the people that habitually eat them - they were a necessary fall-back food in the absence of anything more nutritious and were only eaten to stave off death by starvation. Unfortunately it seems that some cultures never recovered from a lack of readily obtainable nourishing, nutrient-dense foods (for various reasons including modern-day economic considerations) and those fall-back foods became staples, which became traditional foods and then became enshrined in the rosy glow of folklore!

[James]

Well let me tell you, rice ISN'T that cheap over here, either! Shocked! I am obviously soaking for a good 8-12 hours with PLENTY of washing (as per usual with my rice prep), found a shop today that sold cream and also KIND of cheaper potatoes... still having a job with finding cheese

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[NU_nutrition_TS]

It doesn't surprise me in the least. Now that rice is firmly established as a traditional national staple (and as a major internationally traded commodity) it is going to have its value/price manipulated for the best profit.

With regard to the lengthy preparation process, I think this illustrates how inefficient it would be - from an 'optimal foraging' point-of-view - for this type of food to have been a major staple by choice when much more nutrient-dense, anti-nutrient absent and easily processed foods were available. It also seems unlikely that all of these intricate preparation methods would have been arrived at without a lot of trial and error and generational, word-of-mouth dissemination of knowledge and experience. Probably because making the inedible edible became the necessity that is the mother of invention.

[James]

I totally agree, always makes me laugh; I have an ill-educated acquaintance who believes grains are superbly healthy, if sprouted and/or well prepared... again, I say to him why all the time and effort when you can just consume other foodstuffs that more readily available, then he goes on about this link - How humans are not physically created to eat meat

[NU_nutrition_TS]

LOL! The biggest clue of all that that website is full of unscientific woo-woo is the fact that it is entitled 'celestial healing'! Of course, this comparative physiology between true herbivores and carnivores, which supposedly 'proves' humans should be herbivores, has been demolished many times by people who actually look at the science. Only people who have a 'celestial' sensitivity believe this pseudo-scientific clap-trap!