Laurie Endicott Thomas, Author at Where Do Gorillas Get Their Protein?

How Low Should Your Cholesterol Levels Be?

Ideally, your total cholesterol should be below 150 mg/dL. According to William Castelli, who was the medical director of the Framingham Heart Study for many years, people with a total cholesterol value of less than 150 mg/dL simply don’t get heart attacks. And once someone’s total cholesterol is that low, the ratio between the “good” and “bad” cholesterol simply doesn’t matter.

The total cholesterol value is the single most important clue to a person’s risk of heart attack. Once the cholesterol levels in the blood rise to, say, the mid-160s, then the ratio of good versus bad cholesterol (HDL versus LDL) really starts to matter.

William Castelli once explained, “Four out of five people on this earth can’t get their cholesterol over 150; they don’t get heart attacks. One out of five people can’t get their cholesterol down to 150. They do get heart attacks. And almost all of them live in affluent countries.” The “four out of five people” Castelli meant live in societies that eat a low-fat, high-fiber, largely plant-based diet. That kind of diet keeps blood cholesterol levels naturally low.

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.

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

Gorillas Eat Leaves!

Gorillas are leaf-eaters (folivores). Eating any other kind of diet makes them sick.

Photo by skuds

Color-Blind People May Not Notice That They’re Bleeding!

Unusual bleeding or discharge is one of the classic seven warning signs of cancer. Blood in the stool could be a sign of colon cancer. It’s also a common sign of diverticulosis of the colon. Unfortunately, people with red-green color blindness might not notice that they are passing blood with their bowel movements. Here’s an article about three color-blind men who didn’t notice that they were passing blood with their stool. One of them had colon cancer. Another had diverticulosis; he was bleeding heavily but mistook the blood for diarrhea. The third patient had bleeding from hemorrhoids. The men didn’t notice the blood because they can’t see the color red. Fortunately, their wives saw the blood and had them seek medical attention.

Red-green color-blindness is far more common in men than in women. That’s because men have only one copy of the X chromosome in each of their cells. If one of the genes on their X chromosome is defective, they don’t have a spare X chromosome to serve as a backup. Women don’t get red-green color-blindness unless they inherit a defective version of the gene from both parents. That’s why women rarely get red-green color-blindness, but even a woman with normal color vision can have color-blind sons.

Fortunately, the intestinal problems that these men had are preventable by diet. Colon cancer is rare in populations that eat a low-fat, plant-based diet. So are diverticulosis and hemorrhoids, which result from constipation.

Note: Since I wrote this post, glasses that correct for red-green colorblindness have become available!

No, It’s a Low-Fat, High-Fiber Diet That Keeps Gorillas Lean!

A recent article in the New York Times argued that gorillas stay slim because they eat a high-protein diet. While I’m glad to see someone else point out that a plant-based diet provides adequate amounts of protein, I’m annoyed to see scientists and journalists misunderstand and misrepresent the real significance of this fact. It’s as if they haven’t read the basic literature on nutrition and can’t understand arithmetic.

Yes, the gorilla’s natural diet is high in protein, as a percentage of calories. However, the gorillas’ natural food tends to be low in calories, because the calories are diluted by water and fiber. Gorillas have to eat an enormous amount of food every day to get enough calories. When human volunteers tried to eat a gorilla-style diet for a short period of time to see how it would affect their cholesterol levels, they had to spend more than 8 hours a day eating, just to get enough calories to keep from losing weight during the trial. Gorillas stay slim because of the high fiber content and low fat content of their food, not because of the balance of protein to carbohydrate in their food!

The biggest dietary challenge for a gorilla, as for any leaf-eater, is to get enough calories. When they eat a relatively high-protein diet, they just end up converting the excess protein to sugar and burning it for energy. Unfortunately, protein is “dirty sugar.” Burning protein for energy produces waste products such as urea and sulfuric acid.

People can stay very slim on a high-carbohydrate diet, if it is also high in fiber and low in fat. For example, when Chris Voigt of the Washington State Potato Commission decided to go on a potato-only diet as a publicity stunt, he figured that he had to eat 20 potatoes a day. In practice, he found it really hard to eat his entire potato ration, because potatoes are so filling. As a result, he lost a lot of weight. Even when he made an effort to eat his entire potato ration every day, he continued to lose weight. That’s because a starchy diet improves insulin sensitivity and thus revs up your metabolism. People who eat starchy diets burn more calories than people on fatty diets. Voigt lost 21 pounds during his 60-day potato diet. His cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, and even his blood sugar levels decreased!

According to the New York Times, Dr. Raubenheimer claimed that modern societies “are diluting the concentration of protein in the modern diet. But we eat to get the same amount of proteins we needed before, and in so doing, we’re overeating.” What nonsense!

Nutrition scientists have known for more than 100 years that human protein needs are modest and are easily met by any reasonable plant-based diet. Also, the societies with the biggest problem with obesity are also the ones with the highest protein intake! Modern societies are consuming too much fat and too little fiber. Animal foods are a big offender, because they contain fat but no fiber and usually no digestible carbohydrate. Refined foods are also a big offender, because they represent the concentrated calories from plants–with the fiber and other wholesome things stripped out.

The take-home lesson from the gorilla story shouldn’t have been that people need to eat more protein. It’s that people need to eat plants. If people don’t want to spend 8 hours a day eating leafy vegetables, they can eat some nice, filling potatoes or other starchy staples along with plenty of vegetables and fruit.

Coronary Artery Disease Is Not a Mental Disorder

Many laymen and even many doctors like the idea that people can give themselves a serious physical disease just by having bad thoughts, unpleasant feelings, or annoying personality traits. Yet it’s hard to find any scientific evidence that these psychological phenomena have any real effect on health. Nevertheless, the attempt to “psychologize” physical illness persists.

Although many people like the idea that their thoughts can influence their health, people can be amazingly resistant to the idea that their food choices matter. If I were a psychologist, I would use my training to figure out why our doctors in the United States ignore the overwhelming evidence that the standard American diet is the underlying reason for our major causes of death and disability. I’d try to figure out ways to help people realize that they’re eating their way into an early grave. I’d try to find ways to help people improve their diet, so that they can improve their health. Instead, psychologists have been trying to prove that coronary artery disease is a mental disorder. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic!

By the end of World War II, anyone with common sense and access to the scientific literature should have realized that coronary artery disease results from the foods that people eat, not from the kinds of thoughts and feelings that go on in their minds. For example, heart disease became rare in Norway after the Nazis stole their farm animals and the Norwegians had to switch to a low-fat, plant-based diet. Rich, fatty foods were also in short supply for the civilian population in Germany during the war. As a result, German civilians stopped dying of heart attacks, despite all the stress and terror of Allied bombing raids.

After seeing these data, Nathan Pritikin realized that heart disease results from the foods people eat, not from the emotional stress in their lives. When he got a diagnosis of coronary artery disease, he cleaned up his own diet and encouraged others to do the same.

Nevertheless, Americans still clung to the idea that heart disease is a mental disorder. First, people thought that the cause was “emotional stress.” Then they blamed “type A personality.” Then they blamed “pessimism.” It’s all a crock. Lots of people in China had emotional stress, type A personalities, and pessimism. Yet research showed that they weren’t dying of heart attacks, because their average cholesterol was shockingly low by American standards, thanks to their low-fat, high-fiber diet.

Where There’s E. Coli, There’s Poop!

A large and deadly outbreak of food poisoning in Europe has been linked to a “super-toxic” new strain of Escherichia coli bacteria. The outbreak seems to be linked to the consumption of fresh vegetables. Yet whenever I hear of an outbreak of E. coli, I wonder, “Where’s the poop?”

The natural habitat of E. coli is inside the intestines of warm-blooded animals. Since vegetables are not warm-blooded, and they have no intestines, how can they be a source of E. coli? The answer, of course, is that E. coli can survive outside of their host for a short time. That’s how they can spread from one host to another. It’s also why “coliform bacteria counts” are used to evaluate how badly a body of water has been contaminated with raw sewage. If vegetables are spreading E. coli, it’s because they’ve been contaminated by the droppings of a warm-blooded animal.

Some strains of E. coli are normal inhabitants of the human intestinal tract. However, if you find ordinary E. coli you might also find other, more dangerous bacteria and viruses that can spread from one person to another by the “fecal-oral route,” which is when people swallow something that has been contaminated by someone else’s poop.

The E. coli strains that are commonly found inside human intestines have learned to live inside a human host without causing any trouble under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, the E. coli that normally live in the intestines of other kinds of animals, such as cattle, can make people really sick. Even more unfortunately, E. coli bacteria can swap genes with other strains of E. coli, and even with unrelated bacteria. Thus, bacteria can learn bad habits from each other. They may learn how to make a deadly new toxin, or how to resist antibiotics.

If history is any guide, this outbreak of deadly E. coli food poisoning resulted from the use of fresh animal manure to fertilize vegetables. Fresh manure is unsanitary. It should never be allowed anywhere near food that will be eaten raw!

Update, 6/6: At first, health officials suspected that the E. coli outbreak resulted from raw vegetables from Spain. Then, suspicion shifted to raw sprouts from an organic farm in Germany. Bean and alfalfa sprouts are a common source of Salmonella and E. coli food poisoning. That’s because they are often grown in moist conditions at a temperature that approximates human body temperature. However, sprouts aren’t fertilized and therefore should not have come into contact with cow manure. The E. coli would therefore have had to come from contaminated seeds, from contaminated water, or from one of the workers. The owner of the German sprout farm insists that there were no animals or animal products on site. It’s possible, but somewhat unlikely, for one of the workers to be carrying a dangerous bovine strain of E. coli. So far, health authorities have been unable to find any evidence of the E. coli strain in the sprouts or at the sprout producer’s premises. Of course, those tests can’t prove that the E. coli strain was never there. It’s possible that the source of the outbreak may never be known for sure.

Photo by Randy Heinitz

PCRM’s Plate Is Better Than USDA’s

The US Department of Agriculture has replaced its Food Pyramid with a plate and cup graphic, which is far better at conveying what they think people should eat. Unfortunately, USDA is still encouraging people to eat meat and dairy products, which contribute to the risk of heart disease, cancer, etc.

The Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine has a much better idea: a plate graphic that shows a truly healthy diet. They call it The Power Plate. It encourages people to eat a purely plant-based diet—the sort of diet that has been shown to be optimal for human health.