DrClydeWilson's NUTRITION BLOG

Death is "Free" as Low-Fat/Cal Dressing

I took Subway sandwiches to feed the medical students in my Food Pharmacology class yesterday.  Because no sandwich place on the planet gives you enough vegetables to slow down the bread digestion rate enough to optimize health, I asked them for several trays of vegetables so the students could max out on their own.  In the condiments bag was salad dressing in case anyone wanted to avoid the carbs altogether.  Little does the consumer (even if you are a medical student, and even if you are teaching them a nutrition class) realize, but the "Free" dressing, meaning fat-free, is loaded with the worst of all sugars.  Here are the ingredients: water, vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, more corn syrup, salt, and less then 2% of other things.  Instead of healthy fats from vegetable oils that improve metabolism and immune function, reduce cancer risk, the list of benefits goes on and on, this dressing is all marketing hype that taps into the publics perception of fat as bad, replacing it instead with sugar that forces our liver to turn against our own body, producing triglyceride and ultimately cholesterol as fast as when you drink alcohol.  The research is so clear on this, that I have to ask myself if the people who are in charge of the companies making these products have anyone on staff or consult with anyone who understands human physiology as it relates to nutrition before they start selling us things to put into our bodies.  If they do not, then they are incompetent, and if they do, their consultants are incompetent.  That leaves the consumer needing to get a PhD in human physiology to figure it out on their own, and until then consume things that only appear healthy on the surface.  Unbelievable.  To me, this is profoundly sad: we need to HELP each other, not hurt each other (through ignorance or otherwise).  Yes I have anger over what is happening to the public without their even realizing it as they make valiant efforts to be healthy, but even more than anger I have sadness and would like to reach out to the companies (like Kraft and their suppliers like Subway) with information so they can better help us help ourselves.  For example, lets put flax oil with extra virgin olive oil in these products and REALLY get something done in our bodies.  Yes the products will have a shorter shelp life, but our bodies will have a longer life!  I would rather trade longevity of food products in for longevity of me.  And in particular, I would like to avoid compounds (fructose) that instead of killing me directly makes my own body (in this case the liver) turn against itself and kill me from the inside out.  Our effort to turn healthy salads and other foods into desserts so we are willing to eat them, while cutting out critically healthy ingredients we incorrectly perceive to be unhealthy, has the opposite effect of making them "free".  They come at the ultimate cost: our lives.

Paleo Diet is incompetent to a new level: legumes are not antinutrients

The Paleo Diet claims that beans and lentils should be excluded from the diet because they contain antinutrients.  It is obvious that no one claiming this has done a simple "Google scholar" search using the key word "antinutrient", because if they did they would find out the potential problem is compounds called lectins, and doing a search for "lectins" takes you to research papers showing that cooking eliminates the lectins.  I did this search using Google Scholar with Paleo's own "antinutrient" term instead of more sophisticated search processes just to see if the Paleo incompetency was because the promotors are simply scientifically unsophisticated, or if it goes even deeper, meaning flat out laziness to not even bother checking the scientific literature at its simplest possible (Google Scholar) level.  Paleo then takes the laziness even further by promoting the incompetence as science based, which is unethical since they know people are looking for a diet to believe in.  Since peoples' physical health is hurt by following nutrition misinformation, those who try to help others eat healthier have a moral obligation to do their homework.  Saying that everyone should check with their doctor before doing any diet or that each person should do what they believe is best for them RIGHT AFTER telling them how to eat is just covering themselves legally while in their heart actually they care nothing for finding and sharing truth with others, instead sharing their unfounded beliefs.

Here is the truth:  Lectins are natural phytonutrients that plants use as insecticides to protect themselves.  The fact that lectins break down the membranes of cancer cells (reducing prostate, colon and other cancers), fungi, bacteria and viruses (even the HIV-1 retrovirus) is part of the reason that tomatoes, corn, whole grain rice, wheat, oats, nuts, sunflower seeds, peaches, mangos, grapes, cinnamon, citrus, berries, tea and most other plant foods are healthy.  All of these contain significant amounts of lectins.  When there are VERY large amounts of lectins in our food, we start to feel the effects of their hurting the membranes of the cells lining our intestine the same way they hurt cancer cells and bacteria.  As with everything in life, too much of a good thing is a bad thing.  We have known for over half a century that lentils and beans have the highest levels of lectins and therefore can make us sick if we eat them raw ["Toxicity of raw kidney beans", Jaffe WG, Experientia 5 (1949) 81]. We also know that cooking beans for 15 min at 100 C, 2 hrs at 80 C, or 45 min at 15 psi pressure cooking completely denatures lectins, and canning beans is nearly as effective, meaning cooked and canned legumes are not only completely safe but their residual lectin levels fight cancer and fungal / bacterial / viral infection [Thompson LU et al, J Food Science 48 (1983) 235; Dhurandhar NV & Chang KC, J Food Science 55 (1990) 470; Xia L & Ng TB, J Chromatography 844 (2006) 213]. Cooking at temperatures under 80 C does not denature lectins even after many hours.

I recommend against eating more than a few tablespoons of raw legumes at a time, such as those that are sprouted to eat as snacks in some farmer's markets, since even as few as a half dozen raw red kidney beans (the legume highest in lectins; about twice as high as the amount in other beans and lentils) is linked to clinical symptoms in the most susceptible people.  HOWEVER, you SHOULD eat legumes regularly, ideally EVERY DAY, or even EVERY MEAL for the highest levels of health, weight loss, and performance. 

Since legumes are almost always eaten cooked, saying they are unhealthy makes no sense.  Paleo says to eat as much meat as you want, even though choking down a steak without chewing it could hurt you.  They would say "no one eats meat that way".  Well, no one eats legumes uncooked.  If they want to give us rules to follow, at least make it clear when the rules are almost irrelevant.  Drinking 3 galons of water all at once would kill you in minutes (dilutes electrolytes around neurons too much), but no one drinks water that way.  Eating a galon of spinach every day would give you kidney stones within 10 years (oxalic acid), but no one eats spinach that way.  So I don't tell people to avoid lentils, beans, water, and spinach, as well as every other food we could possibly eat, since the way we eat them (when we do eat them) makes us MUCH healthier.  On the flip side, I don't tell people to eat unlimited amounts of meat, which slowly kills you (over decades).  Any time you see a diet that completely eliminates a type of food and/or tells you that you can eat any amount of a type of food (the Paleo Diet does both) you should immediately think "The author of this diet is incompetent and looking to make a buck i.e. they are both mentally and morally deficient, so I'll take my chances elsewhere, even if that means just going it alone and using my own nutritional common sense...I'll be much better off." 

Medical Research Ignores & Duplicates Previous Research: Ignorance Can Kill

"Few principles are more fundamental to the scientific and ethical validity of clinical research than that studies should address questions needing to be answered, and that they are designed in a way that will produce a meaningful answer.  A prerequisite for either of those goals is that relevant prior research be properly identified."  This quote come from a paper published this month (click image) showing that about 1/4 of medical research cites NO relevant previous clinical trials done by other labs, another 1/4 cite only 1 previous trial, and on average researchers cite only 2 trials, when in reality there are anywhere from 4 to 60 previous clinical studies (average of 10) that they should cite. 

This paper goes on to say what we all know but do not follow: "Accurate representation of the prior cumulative evidence is necessary both to ethically justify a trial and to make proper inferences.  Studying prior research also can lead to designs more likely to fill evidence gaps.  Although the presence of a trial citation does not tell us how information from that trial was used, the absence of a citation almost guarantees that it was not."  It gets better:  "The findings here show not just that the prior evidence is understated but also that it is barely acknowledged."

And when you thought it couldn't get any worse: "Our finding of very limited citation is particularly concerning because it indicates that evidence is missing and because selection of the few trials that are cited is likely to have been biased." 

Ignorance leads to hubris as scientists believe their ideas and research are new and unique when they are not: "When we examined the introduction and discussion sections in the reports of 30 trials...we found that reports were not...integrating their findings with the trials they did cite, and several claimed to be the first trial even when many trials preceded them."  In other words, medical researchers completely ignore most published research similar to their work, select a few references that bolster their work, but even in that case do not integrate the results of the references they cite with their own, choosing instead to duplicate and interpret their work within the vacuum of their isolated mind.

Ignorant hubris leads to immorality: "An incomplete picture of preexisting evidence violates the implicit ethical contract with research participants [meaning patients participating as subjects] that the information they provide [as well as their time, effort, consumption of medications, and suffering they endure for the trial] is necessary and will be useful to others."

As you can read for yourself in the abstract (click image), the "potential implications include ethically unjustifiable trials, wasted resources, incorrect conclusions, and unnecessary risks for trial participants."  Put more harshly, if we worked together a little more by paying attention to each other's efforts (this is true for researchers and for all of us in most areas of our lives, including myself), we would not only get more done but maybe even live longer and be happier in the process.  With respect to medical research, wasted effort, resources and time obviously equates to lost years of life for patients.  Stupidity is not always harmless: It can be lethal.  As is discussed in a 2005 paper in the journal called 'Clinical Trials', this is "an ongoing scandal in which research funders, academia, researchers, research ethics committees and scientific journals are all complicit."

Crap Science: Dehydrate to Perform

This article (click image to enlarge; Br J Sports Med, 15 Dec 2010, epub ahead of print) shows that faster marathoners tend to drink less than slower marathoners when racing, but that fluid intake is all over the map, with high and low drinkers in both the fast and slow categories (no data is presented on fluid intake during regular training).  The principle investigator for the research, Tim Noakes, has long been a proponant of low fluid intake during exercise because excess fluids (gaining weight during a race!) can lead to hyponatremia.  But this study does not address what would happen to anyone's performance time if they drank more.  To do that, you would have to have the SAME ATHLETES run a marathon TWICE to compare their performance with two different levels of hydration. 

Imagine if you had a friend that told you his Ferrari was low in coolant but that it drove faster than his truck, so low coolant must make cars go faster, and he was going to drain out some of the coolant in his truck so it could go as fast as the Ferrari.  You would probaby suggest to compare the Ferrari's performance with low coolant to that same Ferrari with full collant.  Noaks has no such controls in his paper, instead showing simply (and ONLY) that faster runners tend to drink less, like showing that Ferrari drivers don't take the time top off their coolant as much as truck drivers during a race.  From his observation that faster runners drink less, Noaks concludes that losing coolant (dehydration) "during a marathon race may be ergogenic in those who drink according to the dictates of their thirst".  This is saying that dehydration magically gives you energy (it is the low coolant that makes the Ferrari go faster) without providing any controled evidence or even any theory as to why that might be true.  Low coolant (low hydration) lowers performance in controled studies of endurance athletes, backed up by the theory that fluids supply our bloodstream, which is (literally) our body's coolant and delivers oxygen to our muscles.  His statement also assumes that athletes drink according to their thirst, but nowhere in the paper does it say that athletes were even ASKED whether or not they drank according to their thirst.  Maybe faster runners simply ignore their thirst, pain, dizziness, cramping etc more than slower runners.  It is well known that the harder we focus on something the less we notice everything else: the limbic system i.e. emotion center in brain regulates what sensory inputs make it through the thalamus to the sensory cortex.

These researchers are ready to drain the coolant from all our cars and the reviewers for the British Journal of Sports Medicine are happy to let them announce that fact as if it is a scientific conclusion.  Noaks says that his results conflict with laboratory results, when they actually don't conflict with anything.  This is a study of marathon hydration patterns, not of optimal hydration for performance.  Nutrition is confusing enough when we use the scientific method.  It gets confusing beyond usability when you don't.  No wonder people feel like scientists go back and forth on the facts.  Thank you to my friend Mike, a triathlete, who forwarded the the Wall Street Journal article on this paper (click then scroll down), which simply regurgitated the unsubstantiated interpretations of the researchers.  So much for these scientists making their data usable to anyone, or the news media helping us filter through information so we can make better decisions in our lives.

New Year's Resolution: Daily Small Dose of Comfort Food After Healthy Meal

Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has said that being a better citizen of the world in the 21st century "requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions, rather than be captive of them".  I would argue that the same is true for us to improve how we take care of ourselves.  Ignoring our survival instinct for sugar, fats, and satiety leads to thinking that at the New Year or some other tortured moment in our lives we can simply start eating healthier.  The result is that every New Year we will repeat our annual pattern of failure in recognizing how powerful our survival instincts are.  Instead of working with our survival instinct by feeding it small doses of comfort foods after eating a healthy meal containing vegetables, our tendancy is to go cold turkey and then fall off the wagon.  Back and forth indefinitely.

Natural Trans Fats Are Good For Us

Most of the trans fats in the American diet come from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.  They are created by man to increase shelf life, and they are much worse for us than saturated fats.  On the other hand, trans fats produced naturally by bacteria in the rumen of ruminants (like cows) have never been linked to increased disease, and one has now actually been correlated to reduced disease risk (click on image to see reference): trans-palmitoleate in meat and dairy, primarily milk.  Since polyunsaturated natural trans fats are conjugated (double bond every other carbon pair) but synthetic trans fats are not, there is a clear structural distinction between natural and synthetic trans fats that can account for their very different effects on our health.  However, this particular trans fat is monounsaturated, so the issue of conjugation is mute.  People with less of this natural trans fat in their body have THREE times the chances of diabetes.  Grass-fed free-range cows will produce this natural trans fat AND in addition have a healthier fat profile than grain or carb-fed cows.  In summary: natural good, man-made bad.

This research is being reported in the popular press as showing that dairy fat is healthy.  The Harvard (where the researchers are from) Gazette's article is entitled "Dairy fat may help not harm" and the CBC news article is titled "Dairy fat may cut type 2 diabetes risk."  Both articles are headed by photos of cheese.  The research is well done, has limitations that the researchers are aware of, and it will stimulate cellular and clinical research targeting the details of how slightly different types of fats affect disease.  Unfortunately, the oversimplified sound bites the public gets with images of cheese plates is sendin are sending the wrong message, just like the benefits of margarines were proclaimed decades ago and ended up killing many of us too soon.  Lumping all fats in dairy together will make it look like cream and butter are a health food, which they are not.  All that we have seen so far is that a particular fat produced by bacteria in cows is correlated to improving our health.

Bad Research Adds to Our Confusion By Saying Exercise Before Breakfast is Good

A recent study (click it to enlarge the image) showed that your metabolism is higher, so you burn more body fat, while on a Holiday diet (high-calorie and high-fat) if you exercise in the morning before eating anything.  Sounds great until you look at the details of how the study was done.  The researchers compared people exercising that either had not eaten or that had spiked their blood sugar with 675 Cal of carbohydrate at breakfast and then gorged on 200 Cal of sugar per hour during the exercise.  Excess carbohydrate consumption forces insulin to send blood sugar to fat cells.  Fat cells then rob all the sugar from, and stop sending fats into, the bloodstream because they interpret all the insulin as a signal that the blood is overloaded with fuel.  For example, Gail Butterfield showed in a paper over 10 years ago ["Pre-Exercise Carbohydrate Meals: Application of Glycemic Index", DeMarco HM et al., Med Sci Sports Ex 31 (1999) 164] that eating fast-digesting carbs (corn flakes) was much worse for metabolism and performace than eating slower digesting carbs (All Bran) before exercise: The faster-digesting corn flakes cut the amount of fat burned during the workout in HALF, raised the athlete's pain levels, and made them fatigue faster.  This was true even though the total amount of carbs between the two groups was the SAME.  Now imagine having fast-digesting carbs in a LARGER amount (675 Cal) and adding excess sugar during the workout as well: this will totally sabotage the workout and the body's metabolism, driving the body into insulin resistance, higher body fat, and greater disease risk.  My advice: Always consume both carbohydrate and protein before your workout but do NOT spike your blood sugar.  The "benefits" of exercising without eating are relative to an absolutely horrible breakfast (the equivalent to two bagels or a half dozen slices of bread).  Science like this adds to the misinformation and confusion of nutrition, making healthy eating harder for society, not easier.  It reminds me of all the scientific papers showing the benefits of high protein diets when none of them comment on the fact that such benefits are compared to high-carb diets that cause insulin resistance.  When compared to slow-digesting carboydrates (whole grains, whole fruit, vegetables), high-protein diets make you much LESS healthy.  Thank you to Ashish for making me aware of the starving exercise paper.

You Eat Less Comfort Food After Imagining Eating It

4 days ago an amazing piece of research came out in Science [v330, p1530].  After imagining eating 30 pieces of candy, unrestricted candy consumption was cut to nearly half.  After imagining eating cheese, unrestricted consumption of cheese was nearly cut in half, but there was no change in candy consumption.  This means that imagining eating a food partly satisfies the mind so it needs less later on.  Imagining moving but not eating 30 pieces of candy nearly doubled the amount of candy subsequently consumed, but imagining moving that many quarters had no effect on subsequent candy consumption.  That means imagining handling something you want (we want candy more than quarters) without eating it makes you want it more.  Although not part of this research, this lends support to the idea of "mindfull eating" i.e. that fully and slowly enjoying food will result in less of its consumption and more enjoyment than if you just gobble it up.  Now we know that fully and slowly enjoying food just in your imagination BEFORE you eat will reduce how much of it you natually eat even when you have no restrictions.  Mental imagery research has shown that imagining complex actions, like dance moves, significantly improves a person's ability to do those moves afterwards in real life.  It is as if imagining that you are dancing gives you acutal dancing experience.  Imagining eating a food does the same thing: it is like a real world experience as far as your mind is concerned.  If you were addicted to sugar, imagining eating candy might make you eat MORE since it could trigger the addiction.  The new research in Science did not investigate that aspect.  Thank you to Jon for making me aware of this paper.

MOVE more towards health: 350 cal/day!

It was shown in 2005 (Science, vol 307, p 584; click left image to enlarge) that leisurly standing or walking twice as much as sitting in your day burns 350 more calories.  For the people in the study, those that moved the most had 5 times less body fat than those who sat the most (10 instead of 50 kg).  It makes a strong arguement for not needing to exercise or even put much thought into nutrition as long as you just STAY ACTIVE.  Spending work, play and leisure time in front of a screen reduces muscle (use it or lose it) and increases fat (can't use it or lose it).  The lead author of this study founded a company that makes desk treadmills so you can slowly walk while working all day: Good idea!  www.treadmill-desk.com

Fat David and Fat Lincoln were created by the advertising agency Scholz and Friends in Hamburg, Germany for the German Olympic Sport Committee's new campaign trying to get people to move more.

Fish oil is NOT the same as eating fish

Highly purified and concentrated fish oil supplementation during pregnancy has been proven ineffective for reducing post-partem depression or increasing the child's later cognitive abilities [Makrides M et al., JAMA 304 (2010) 1675].  Concentrated fish oil often requires chemical alteration of the fats, and distilled fish oil risks oxidation, so "ultra pure" fish oil has been molecularly altered by man.  Consider that EATING FISH during pregnancy (2-4 servings per week) was correlated to twice the probability of the child later scoring above the lowest fourth in itelligence [Hibbeln JR et al., Lancet 369 (2007) 578] even when ignoring mercury; the benefits are likely higher if focusing on low-mercury fish.  The more we manipulate food to get what we think is best for us, the worse the outcome.  The more food we eat in its pure form straight from the Earth, the healthier we become.  Then you can expect cognition to rise and depression to fall.  A rigorous meta-analysis of over 1000 papers on the subject found that only 14 of the studies were done well enough to trust the results and be included in a comprehensive analysis.  Those 14 reliable studies showed a significant benefit for depressed subjects: a reduction by 1/2 standard deviation in depression score towards normal (towards no depression) [PY Lin et al., Biol Psychiatry 68 (2010) 140].  These studies used fish oil from various sources, and no analysis has been done to date comparing different types of fish oils.  We only know that eating fish has a large benefit, that using fish oil on average has a moderate benefit, and that a recent study using highly processed fish oil showed no benefit.  The processing methods of fish oils used by various companies on the market are ambiguous so it is not possible at this time to make specific recommendations for brand names or specific products.  However, if you want to supplement with fish oil, look for one that advertises low-temperature processing and keep it in the freezer with minimal air exposure, with the amount you are using for the week in the fridge if you wish.