Big Lunches, Skinny Body

Back when I worked in an office, I’d some­times bring my lunch to work. My lunch­es were phys­i­cal­ly much larg­er than the lunch­es my cowork­ers brought, and it took my entire lunch break to eat most of mine. I still had food left over for a snack around 3 pm. So why was I skin­nier than most of my cowork­ers? It’s because my lunch was made of up of low-fat, high-fiber plant foods.

My typ­i­cal lunch includ­ed of a con­tain­er of rice pilaf or maybe a sand­wich with a spicy low-fat bean spread. I’d also have a cou­ple of con­tain­ers of cut up raw veg­eta­bles, such as car­rots, cau­li­flower, cel­ery, or broc­coli. Some­times I’d bring a big con­tain­er of sal­ad or coleslaw with non­fat dress­ing. I’d also have a few pieces of fruit, such as some cut-up can­taloupe or some apples or peach­es, depend­ing on what was in sea­son. Once in a while, I’d bring a few nuts, in the shell, along with a nut­crack­er.

My cowork­ers, on the oth­er hand, usu­al­ly based their lunch on some sort of meat or fish. Often, there was some sort of greasy dress­ing. They usu­al­ly had some sort of dairy food as well. Many of them had been through some sort of com­mer­cial weight loss reg­i­men that encour­ages peo­ple to con­tin­ue eat­ing ani­mal-based food but sup­pos­ed­ly teach­es them “por­tion con­trol.”

The fact that peo­ple are try­ing to learn “por­tion con­trol” tells you that they’re eat­ing an unnat­ur­al diet. Wild ani­mals nev­er try to lim­it their food intake. They nev­er count calo­ries. They nev­er sign up for step aer­o­bics. They eat as much as they like of their nat­ur­al food, and they do what­ev­er activ­i­ty they feel like doing. Their weight gets con­trolled nat­u­ral­ly by their appetite. The same thing also works for human beings if they eat a low-fat, high-fiber, plant-based diet.

Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes

What’s in a name? A rose by any oth­er name would smell as sweet. But when we are talk­ing about dia­betes, we should choose names that make sense. The French do. They use the term “thin dia­betes” (dia­bète mai­gre) to refer to a cat­a­stroph­ic dis­ease that results from fail­ure of the pan­creas. They use the term “fat dia­betes” (dia­bète gras) to refer to a milder, cur­able cause of high blood sug­ar. Fat dia­betes tends to occur in over­weight peo­ple, and it’s made worse by fat in the diet.

When peo­ple talk about dia­betes, they almost always mean dia­betes mel­li­tus, which is some­times called sug­ar dia­betes or just plain sug­ar. Dia­betes insipidus is an unre­lat­ed con­di­tion in which the body can’t con­serve water.

The most obvi­ous symp­tom of untreat­ed dia­betes mel­li­tus is exces­sive thirst and fre­quent uri­na­tion. The word dia­betes came from the Greek word for siphon, because water seemed to pass right through these patients. Their urine was loaded with sug­ar. Because they were los­ing calo­ries through their urine, they tend­ed to lose weight.

By the 1870s, doc­tors in France divid­ed dia­betes mel­li­tus into two cat­e­gories. Thin dia­betes was a rel­a­tive­ly rare but cat­a­stroph­ic, incur­able dis­ease that tend­ed to hap­pen in chil­dren and young adults who tend­ed to be thin to begin with. These patients rapid­ly went into a coma and died, regard­less of treat­ment. At autop­sy, it was often clear that some­thing had gone wrong with their pan­creas. In con­trast, fat dia­betes was a com­mon, rel­a­tive­ly mild con­di­tion that tend­ed to hap­pen in mid­dle-aged to elder­ly adults. It could be cured if the patient ate less and exer­cised more.

Eng­lish-speak­ing doc­tors didn’t like the terms thin dia­betes and fat dia­betes. Instead, they used the terms juve­nile dia­betes and adult-onset dia­betes. These terms are mis­lead­ing because “juve­nile” dia­betes can strike adults, and “adult-onset” dia­betes can occur in an over­weight child. After the dis­cov­ery of insulin in the 1920s, Eng­lish-speak­ing doc­tors start­ed to refer to thin dia­betes as insulin-depen­dent dia­betes mel­li­tus and fat dia­betes as non–insulin-dependent dia­betes mel­li­tus. Peo­ple with thin dia­betes would die with­out insulin ther­a­py. In con­trast, patients with fat dia­betes often respond­ed poor­ly to insulin ther­a­py.

Now that so many peo­ple with fat dia­betes are tak­ing insulin, it’s con­fus­ing to refer to their con­di­tion as non–insulin-dependent. Instead, Amer­i­can and British doc­tors now refer to thin dia­betes as type 1 dia­betes. Fat dia­betes is called type 2 dia­betes. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, these names are mean­ing­less to the lay­man.

In the 1930s, a British researcher named H.P. Himsworth found that he could induce a con­di­tion that resem­bled fat dia­betes in healthy vol­un­teers by feed­ing them a high-fat diet for only a week. After a week of eat­ing a high-fat diet, the vol­un­teers were giv­en a glu­cose tol­er­ance test. This meant that they were giv­en a dose of glu­cose in water and had their blood sug­ar mea­sured every 15 min­utes for sev­er­al hours. When the vol­un­teers had been eat­ing a fat­ty diet for a week, they got a huge spike in blood sug­ar after drink­ing the glu­cose; but when they’d been eat­ing a starchy, low-fat diet for a week, their blood sug­ar lev­els stayed low and sta­ble after they drank the glu­cose. Himsworth’s review of these exper­i­ments was pub­lished in the British Med­ical Jour­nal in 1940 [1].

When I talk to peo­ple who have fat dia­betes, they typ­i­cal­ly don’t remem­ber whether their dia­betes is type 1 or type 2. Some of them have been tak­ing insulin at least occa­sion­al­ly, so the term non–insulin-dependent makes no sense to them. Most of them have been told that they have to cut back on eat­ing car­bo­hy­drates. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that means eat­ing lots of pro­tein and fat instead. Trag­i­cal­ly, that also means that they are injur­ing their already dam­aged kid­neys with the over­load of waste prod­ucts that come from burn­ing pro­tein for ener­gy. It also means that they are prob­a­bly mak­ing their insulin resis­tance worse, by eat­ing too much fat.

One solu­tion to this mad­ness is to start using the term fat dia­betes to refer to type 2 dia­betes. The sec­ond solu­tion is to shift the focus in the man­age­ment of type 2 dia­betes. Instead of telling patients to avoid eat­ing car­bo­hy­drates to avoid blood sug­ar spikes, shouldn’t doc­tors be teach­ing their patients to shift to a low-fat, high-car­bo­hy­drate diet to restore their nat­ur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty to insulin? As the results of Himsworth’s stud­ies sug­gest­ed, clin­i­cal stud­ies of a high-car­bo­hy­drate, low-fat diet have shown great suc­cess in help­ing peo­ple with fat dia­betes shed pounds, con­trol their blood sug­ar, and reduce or elim­i­nate their need for pre­scrip­tion drugs [2,3].

One warn­ing: If you have dia­betes or any oth­er health prob­lem or are tak­ing pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion, talk to a dia­betes edu­ca­tor, reg­is­tered dietit­ian, and your pre­scriber before mak­ing any major change in diet.

Ref­er­ence List

1. Himsworth HP. Insulin defi­cien­cy and insulin inef­fi­cien­cy. Br Med J 1940;1:719–722. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2177399/pdf/brmedj04143-0003.pdf
2. Barnard ND, Cohen J, Jenk­ins DJ et al. A low-fat veg­an diet improves glycemic con­trol and car­dio­vas­cu­lar risk fac­tors in a ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal tri­al in indi­vid­u­als with type 2 dia­betes. Dia­betes Care 2006;29:1777–1783. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/29/8/1777.long
3. Barnard RJ, Jung T, Inke­les SB. Diet and exer­cise in the treat­ment of NIDDM. The need for ear­ly empha­sis. Dia­betes Care 1994;17:1469–1472. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7882819?dopt=Citation


Note: You can find more infor­ma­tion about dia­betes in my book Thin Dia­betes, Fat Dia­betes: Pre­vent Type 1, Cure Type 2.

Behind Barbed Wire_Print

No Acne, No Body Odor

A while back, I told a new friend of mine that I was writ­ing about how peo­ple could make them­selves heart-attack-proof, just by eat­ing plants instead of ani­mals and cut­ting way back on their fat intake. I men­tioned, in an off­hand sort of way, that this same diet also cures obe­si­ty. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was in the “down” phase of a pat­tern of yo-yo diet­ing. She was very inter­est­ed and wrote down the Web sites I rec­om­mend­ed.

About a month lat­er, when we were talk­ing on the tele­phone, she said, “I switched to a plant-based diet, and I’ve lost some weight with­out feel­ing hun­gry. I’ve also noticed that my acne cleared up. Is that because of the diet?” I said that it prob­a­bly was. The fat in ani­mal-based foods and the huge dose of estro­gen that occurs nat­u­ral­ly in dairy prod­ucts, even “organ­ic” dairy prod­ucts, both con­tribute to acne. She said, “Well, why didn’t you tell me that? It’s a major sell­ing point!”

Anoth­er month or two went by, and we were talk­ing on the tele­phone again. My friend said, “Lau­rie, I’ve just noticed that I don’t have body odor any­more. I used to have to use heavy-duty deodor­ant. Now I don’t stink, even if I sweat heav­i­ly. Is it because of the diet?” I told her that it prob­a­bly was. Not only do ani­mal-based foods con­tain far more pro­tein than you need, but the pro­teins in ani­mal-based foods are par­tic­u­lar­ly high in sul­fur. Burn­ing those pro­teins for ener­gy releas­es stinky sul­fur com­pounds. She said, “Well, why don’t you tell peo­ple about that! Young peo­ple care far more about that than about their risk of heart attack!”

So there you have it. Switch­ing to a plant-based diet can make you look bet­ter and smell bet­ter.

Pho­to by Salu­da UdeA