At least every 5 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are required by federal law to issue Dietary Guidelines for Americans. According to the law, these guidelines are supposed to be based on the best available science. Yet some of their recommendations don’t seem to have any basis in science at all. In particular, I think that their recommendations about calcium intake will make the problem of osteoporosis worse, not better.
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Can You Get Too Much Omega 3 Fatty Acid?
Lately, many people have been claiming that fish is health food. The American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association urge people to eat fish. Yet if people follow that advice, they’ll still be at risk for heart disease and diabetes and they might increase their risk for cancer. The omega 3 fatty acids in fish oil can end up in the fatty deposits that clog people’s arteries. Like other fats, they promote insulin resistance. Also, eating too much omega 3 fatty acid could promote cancer by suppressing the immune system.
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The USDA’s “My Plate” Makes No Sense
If you’ve ever watched Sesame Street, you may remember the song about categories: “One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.” That song ran through my head when I looked at the USDA’s My Plate food group system, which features vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy, and protein. One of the foods groups isn’t like the others and just doesn’t belong. Can you guess which one?
The Cholesterol Wars: the Skeptics vs. the Preponderance of Evidence
Most of our major causes of death and disability in the United States today are a direct result of the standard American diet. It would be bad enough if people knew that their eating habits were endangering their health. What’s worse is that people are harming themselves unknowingly, by eating foods that they have been told are good for them and even essential to good health. This tragedy goes on partly because people don’t want to hear bad news about their bad habits. However, I think that a major part of the problem is that most Americans have had a poor science education and most of their doctors have had poor training in nutrition. As a result, they don’t know how to make sense of the scientific research that is now so easily available to them through the Internet. As a result, they are easily fooled by people who call themselves skeptics but really should be classified as deniers.
Continue reading “The Cholesterol Wars: the Skeptics vs. the Preponderance of Evidence”
Dyslexia Is Not a Brain Disease!
In school, I learned some important lessons about science. Two of the most important are these:
- If you don’t want to get confused about what something really is, think carefully about what you call it
- If you want to know why something happens, look at where and when it happens.
Recently, I read something that reinforced both of those lessons. It was an article by Samuel Orton, AM, MD, published in 1929 in the Journal of Educational Psychology about a problem that was being called “congenital word blindness.” It referred to children who were having trouble learning to read.
The term “congenital word blindness” immediately caught my attention. It made no sense. The word “congenital” means present from birth. How could an inability to read be considered a congenital problem? Aren’t all babies born illiterate? It’s illogical to use the word “congenital” to describe a problem that nobody can detect until the child is six years old.
Dr. Orton explained that the term “congenital word blindness” was being used to refer to a complete inability to learn to read. Physicians had been studying the problem for several years. Teachers and psychologists were also aware that many children were having much greater difficulty in learning to read than would be expected from their ability to learn arithmetic, their ability to learn from listening, and their general alertness. Orton wanted to know what was going wrong in cases where otherwise seemingly normal children were having so much trouble learning to read.
In his initial studies, he found that many children with reading difficulties seemed to have the same problems. They tended to reverse letters and words. For example, they’d mistake the letter “d” for the letter “b” or mistake “p” for “q.” They also tended to get confused between short palindromic words, such as misreading “was” for “saw.” They also tended to reverse parts of words, such as reading “tworrom” instead of “tomorrow.” Today, this problem is called dyslexia.
Under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Orton carried out an extended field study of this problem in communities in Iowa in 1926 and 1927. What he found was disturbing. The problem wasn’t equally common everywhere, and the problem seemed to result from the way the children were being taught to read.
All of the children were being taught to read by the “whole-word” or “look-say” method. This meant that they were taught to recognize whole words, as if English words were like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters. In the town where reading disabilities were more common, the children were given no other kind of reading instruction, such as help in sounding out the letters of a word, until they had memorized about 90 words. In the other town, where reading disabilities were only half as common, children were initially taught with the look-say method but were given special instruction in how to sound out the words if they started falling behind.
Orton concluded that the children’s learning disabilities were probably the result of using the look-say method to teach children to read. He also concluded that the problem could be remedied by giving children special help to eliminate their confusion about the direction and orientation of letters and words. Thus, Orton revealed that the cause of the problem was not a defect in the child’s brain but a defect in the educational system.
In general, if a disease is truly genetic, the incidence of that disease stays steady from one generation to another. It does not suddenly flare up within a population. The fact that dyslexia broke out when the schools stopped using phonics tells us that it is not a genetic disorder. There is no no excuse for using a teaching method that predictably causes learning disabilities. The damage done to a child in his or her first few years of schooling causes a great deal of suffering and can have lifelong effects.
Orton wrote that many children had been referred to his clinic because they were having trouble learning to read. In many cases, the child’s teacher had thought that the child was feeble-minded or had complained that the child was misbehaving. In Orton’s experience, the children could be taught to read if proper methods were used. He also found that the children’s behavior problems typically resulted from the reading problem. The children’s behavior improved dramatically after they learned to read.
Orton’s warning that difficulty in learning to read is the predictable result of bad educational approaches fell on deaf ears. The people at the Rockefeller Fund provided the funding for Orton’s research, but then they ignored its results. Instead of advocating effective methods for teaching reading, they went on to provide substantial support for advocates of the “look-say” method, despite the evidence that it was causing learning disabilities. The look-say method became even more popular in the 1930s. It was part of the “whole language” approach applied systematically in the public schools in California in 1987, with disastrous results. Within a few years, California’s fourth-grade reading scores fell to practically the lowest in the United States, ahead of only Louisiana and Guam.
Today, we no longer hear the term “congenital word blindness,” but we hear a lot about dyslexia. We also have lots of other labels that are applied to children. I wonder how many of the children who are given labels such as ADD, ADHD, and oppositional defiant disorder are simply expressing frustration and anger at how badly they are being treated, and how badly they are being taught? If that’s the real problem in a particular case, I can’t see how drugging the child would solve it.
I decided to discuss Orton’s study in my nutrition blog, even though his study has nothing to do with food, because his study illustrates an important point about how people fail to use scientific knowledge. Orton provided evidence of the obvious cause and simple cure for a serious problem. He provided this information to people who had enormous influence on public policy, and yet they ignored what he had to say and went on promoting harmful policies. We see similar problems in the field of nutrition. We are told that diseases like coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes are genetic, even though they seem to cause problems only where people are eating the wrong kind of food. Although those diseases can easily be cured if the obvious cause is removed, the diseases are treated chronically with pills. Even though the scientific evidence provides clear lessons, these lessons are not being used to guide policy decisions or even being communicated to the general public.
Note: To learn more about why bad teaching methods have been used in our public schools, read my Web page on the Reading Wars. You can read more about this problem in my book Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free.
What is Diverticulitis?
A friend of mine recently had a brush with death. She was unknowingly carrying a time bomb in her large intestine, and when it went off, it nearly took her with it. She had a diverticular abscess, which burst and thus allowed the bacteria to get into her abdominal cavity. That caused a problem called peritonitis.
All things considered, she got off easy. She had to have emergency surgery to remove the damaged portion of her large intestine and clean up the mess in her abdomen. She may have a fierce-looking scar, but she’s alive, and she can still go to the bathroom normally, instead of into a colostomy bag on her side.
The problem started when part of the wall of her large intestine “ballooned out” to form a little pouch called a diverticulum. When you have these diverticula, the condition is called diverticulosis. Here’s what diverticulosis looks like, from inside the large intestine:
About half of Americans over 50 years of age have diverticulosis and don’t even know it. Diverticulosis may cause mild, intermittent symptoms of pain and bloating in the lower left side of the belly. It may cause bouts of diarrhea and constipation. It is a common cause of rectal bleeding in people over 40 years of age. Or it may cause no symptoms at all. If one of the diverticula gets infected, the condition is called diverticulitis. It’s just like appendicitis, except that the symptoms are worse on the lower left, rather than the lower right, side of the belly. If the inflamed diverticulum bursts, you can end up with life-threatening peritonitis.
Diverticular disease is common in the United States. However, it’s rare in places like Africa and Asia, where people eat a high-fiber, plant-based diet. According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the best treatment for most cases of diverticulosis is a high-fiber diet. Both soluble and insoluble fiber are helpful, because they retain water and make the stool softer and easier to pass. If the muscles of the large intestine don’t have to strain so hard, they won’t generate the high pressure that can cause a diverticulum to form.
Some doctors say that people with diverticulosis should avoid eating small seeds, such as those in tomatoes or raspberries. However, the NIDDK says that there is no scientific information to support that recommendation.
Dairy products increase the risk for diverticulosis by causing constipation. When dairy protein is digested, it can produce morphine-like compounds that slow down the muscles that are supposed to push food through the intestines.
To prevent diverticulosis, prevent constipation. Eat lots and lots of unrefined starches and vegetables. Avoid dairy products. A diet like that is also good for maintaining a healthy weight, controlling your cholesterol and blood sugar, and preventing osteoporosis.
How to Cure Vitamin D Deficiency
According to my calendar, winter began just a few days ago. But as far as my ability to make vitamin D is concerned, winter actually began in October and will last until the middle of March. If I run short of vitamin D before March, I have three options for getting more vitamin D: take a tropical vacation, go to a tanning salon, or take vitamin D pills.
Vitamin D isn’t really a vitamin. It’s a hormone that is made when the ultraviolet light from sunlight hits your skin. Some of the sun’s ultraviolet light gets filtered out by the atmosphere, especially by the ozone layer. Where I live, the sunlight is at such a low angle from October through March that practically all of the ultraviolet light gets filtered out. Thus, we have a tanning index of zero even if there isn’t a cloud in the sky.
A light-skinned person in Boston can get enough vitamin D from getting only a few minutes’ worth of sun exposure on his or her face, arms, and hands at midday two to three times a week during the spring, summer, and fall. A person of African ancestry might need ten times as much sun exposure to make the same amount of vitamin D.
Natural summer sunshine is the best way to get vitamin D. Sunshine may have other important effects on the body besides producing vitamin D. Of course, too much sun exposure can cause skin damage and increase the risk of skin cancer.
Sunlamps or a tanning bed can also help restore normal vitamin D levels in the wintertime, especially in people who have an intestinal disease that makes it hard for them to absorb fat-soluble vitamins from their food. Tanning beds should be used cautiously because the ultraviolet light they produce is so intense.
You can also buy vitamin D supplements, but one nutrition expert warns that vitamin pills should be used as a last resort. Although low vitamin D levels have been associated with various diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, treatment with vitamin D supplements has not necessarily been shown to be useful in treating those conditions.
Peace on Earth, Even Though War Sometimes Cures Diabetes
During the Siege of Paris in 1870, a French pharmacist named Bauchardat noticed that the health of diabetics was improving while everyone else was suffering as a result of food shortages. That’s because the most common form of diabetes is type 2 diabetes, which the French call diabète gras, or fat diabetes. Type 2 diabetes represents the body’s attempts to resist gaining too much weight on a fattening diet. If the weight gain is solved by eating fewer calories, then the type 2 diabetes improves.
World War I provided insight into another way to deal with type 2 diabetes. Even though Denmark was neutral during the war, its grain supply had been cut in half by the Atlantic Blockade. To prevent the grain shortages from causing widespread starvation in Denmark, the Danish government developed a rationing plan. Instead of people feeding the available grain to animals and then eating the animals, the government decreed that most of the food animals should be slaughtered immediately and the grain be fed directly to the people. It also decreed that grain should not be used to make alcohol. The Danes could eat as much bread and potatoes and cabbage as they wanted; but their intake of meats, fats, and alcohol was severely restricted. Not only did this rationing plan prevent starvation, it improved the overall health of the Danish population so much that Denmark enjoyed the lowest recorded death rate in its history.
I don’t know how much of the lower mortality in Denmark during the war was due to a decrease in the rate of diabetes specifically and how much to a lower risk of heart attack or stroke among nondiabetics. All of those diseases result from the same cause, which is a rich, fatty diet. Fortunately, I do have data on how wartime rationing affected the risk of death from diabetes in England and Wales during the first half of the twentieth century.
Notice that the risk of diabetes went up during times of peace and prosperity and dropped like a stone during wartime rationing. It stayed low during the Great Depression, when many people simply couldn’t afford to overeat. The effect of dietary changes was so powerful that it completely obscured the impact of the introduction of insulin therapy in the early 1920s. That’s because the most common form of diabetes is type 2 diabetes, which results from eating a fattening diet. Less than 10% of diabetes cases result from failure of the pancreas to produce insulin.
Low-carb gurus keep telling me that a diet based on grains causes obesity and diabetes. It’s true that the low-carb diets seem to provide some short-term benefit for diabetics. Depriving a person of carbohydrates does make high blood sugar go down immediately, even if makes the diabetes worse in the long run. If the low-carb diet suppresses the person’s appetite enough to cause weight loss, the diabetes could improve. However, this improvement would be due to weight loss, not to eating fat and protein instead of carbohydrates. At the same time, the low-carb diets provide an overload of fat and protein, which is particularly bad for people with diabetes because they are so prone to heart and kidney problems. The heavy load of animal protein in low-carb diets would also promote osteoporosis and cancer, but those problems might not show up immediately.
The low-carb gurus ignore an obvious fact: diabetes and many other chronic diseases are rare in populations that eat a diet that’s heavily based on grains or other starchy staples, such as potatoes. Diabetes is common only in societies that base their diet heavily on animal products. When a population shifts from an animal-based diet to a diet based on grains and other starchy staples, such as potatoes, the rates of obesity and diabetes come tumbling down. Fortunately, there doesn’t have to be a war for people to make this change in diet. It only takes awareness and a new set of recipes.
The good news is that we don’t need to starve ourselves or suffer the horrors of war to cure type 2 diabetes. All we need to do is go ape, go wild, and eat plants. Peace on earth!
Photo by Kylie_Jaxxon
Note: In my book Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes: Prevent Type 1, Cure Type 2, I explain why a high-carbohydrate diet is good for people with any kind of diabetes.
Scientists Rediscover That Starvation Cures Type 2 Diabetes
Yes, you can reverse type 2 diabetes if you starve yourself. In fact, a medically supervised water-only fast can be a useful way to manage many different kinds of diet-related diseases. Fortunately, you do not have to starve yourself to reverse your type 2 diabetes. Instead, you could simply eat a low-fat, plant-based diet—like the populations that don’t get type 2 diabetes to begin with.
In June of 2011, some researchers from Britain published the results of a trial in which people with type 2 diabetes who went on a starvation diet (600 calories per day) ended up with normal fasting blood sugar levels. To me, that is not news. By 1841, a French pharmacist named Apollinaire Bauchardat was recommending that patients with what we now call type 2 diabetes should eat as little as possible and that they should fast occasionally to bring down their blood sugar. Since then, however, diabetes researchers have learned that it’s possible to reverse type 2 diabetes without such severe calorie restriction. In fact, I think that it’s better to teach people the diet that will enable them to cure their type 2 diabetes within a couple of weeks without limiting their food intake than to set them on a course of yo-yo dieting and possible eating disorders.
Bouchardat was one of the first clinicians to put patients in charge of monitoring their own diabetes. At first, his patients did this by keeping track of what they ate and tasting their urine to see how sweet it became. Later, Bauchardat worked out a chemical test to detect sugar in urine. From monitoring the sugar content of the urine, Bauchardat showed that when people with diabetes ate sugars or starches, large amounts of sugar passed into their urine. The sugar in the urine reflected high blood glucose levels. However, the problem in type 2 diabetes is not that the person is eating carbohydrates, it’s that the body has become resistant to the hormone insulin.
Starting in the 1930s, scientists started to realize that fatty diets made the body less sensitive to insulin, and that this insulin insensitivity was the underlying cause of the high blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes. People who went on a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet rapidly became more responsive to insulin.
Starting in the 1940s, Dr. Walter Kempner at Duke University reported astonishing success in reversing type 2 diabetes and diabetic complications with a diet based entirely on rice and fruit. Patients who found that they were losing too much weight on that low-fat diet were encouraged to add pure white sugar to get more calories. In Kempner’s report of 100 patients with diabetes who were fed his high-carbohydrate, low-fat, low-protein diet, most of the patients decreased their insulin doses and many discontinued taking insulin. (It’s likely that some of the patients had type 1 diabetes and therefore would need to keep taking insulin for the rest of their lives.)
The American Diabetes Association currently recommends that people with type 2 diabetes eat limited portions of foods from all of the four food groups. In 2006, however, a clinical trial showed that the people who were randomly assigned to eat as much as they liked of low-fat, unrefined plant foods (75% carbohydrate by calorie) found it easier to stick to their diet, lost more weight, and made faster progress in reversing their diabetes than did the people who were randomly assigned to follow the ADA’s recommendations.
Note: In my book Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes: Prevent Type 1, Cure Type 2, I explain the relationship between body weight and blood sugar. French doctors have always used the term fat diabetes (diabètes maigre) to refer to the relative mild form of diabetes that occurs in people who are at least a little bit overweight and that goes away if they lose weight. Fat diabetes is the body’s way to avoid storing too much of the fat from a fatty diet. If you have fat diabetes, it means that you are a naturally thin person. It means that your body is willing to sacrifice everything—your feet, your eyesight, your kidneys, and even your life—to keep you from gaining any more weight. The solution to this problem is to switch to a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-fiber diet. This diet reverses type 2 diabetes and is also good for people with thin diabetes (type 1 diabetes).
Scientists Know that Fatty Diets Cause Blood Sugar Problems
There’s a huge disconnect between what scientists know about diet and what ordinary people are being taught about diet. Most people seem to think that people get diabetes from eating too much sugar or starch. However, the scientists who wrote this article seem to think that it’s common knowledge, at least among scientists, that people get type 2 diabetes from eating too much fat.
Note: To learn how fatty diets cause blood sugar problems, read my book Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes: Prevent Type 1, Cure Type 2.