Open Future Health Blog

April 2016 - 5 items

Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

Change Your Breakfast, the first step for Better Weight Control

Your body tries to maintain a stable state. Homeostasis is the name given to the series of set points the body tries to maintain, body temperature, blood pressure, weight, and blood sugar are good examples.

Blood sugar, should be constant, about 1.5 teaspoons (6gm) of glucose in your entire blood system. If you eat a high carbohydrate meal, potatoes, bread, and followed that with a desert, you can easily add the equivalent of 15 to 20 teaspoons of glucose to your system. That creates an emergency, and in healthy people, the hormone insulin, copes with the crisis, using glucose as energy, storing some of it as glycogen, and putting the rest on your hips as fat, crisis over.

When you wake in the morning after an overnight fast, your blood sugar should be normal, insulin will be "off" and you will be burning fatty-acids as fuel. The secret of a weight loss breakfast, is to keep that process running until at least lunch time.

One alternative is to skip breakfast, but if you eat a muffin at morning tea, or take sugar in your coffee, you've wasted the effort.

Breakfast Eggs

You MUST NOT, have porridge, weet-bix, toast, bagels, museli or any form of grain or sugar in your breakfast. If you do, you'll turn insulin "on" and for a time, fatty-acid burning will stop. In addition you'll be "hungry" again in less than two hours. There is no long lasting satiety in carbohydrate foods. No nutritional density, when compared with fats and proteins.

An easy breakfast is bacon and eggs. For variety you can dress that up in some way; adding spinach, or kale or silver-beet to the pan with the bacon, is a good idea. You can have tomatoes, or egg plant or zucchini for a change.

I like to eat more offal meats, so I might have black pudding, or chicken livers, lambs fry, or hearts, to make a change. When I first did this my meals were too big. Much more than I needed. One strip of bacon and one egg is enough for me, but I often have something else for variety like a tomato too. This is very nutriment dense food with high energy content. You will find that skipping morning tea is easy to do. Skipping meals is also easy, for instance it's now 1.30pm and I have not had lunch yet. I will have lunch, but I'm not hungry.

Don't add any sugar to your tea or coffee. If you are hungry, add a tablespoon of butter, or coconut oil to your hot drink. We call that saturated coffee, or sometimes bullet proof coffee.

That takes you to lunch time. Can you think of a lunch that does not involve eating bread, pastry, biscuits, and potatoes? Salad and a small tin of salmon for instance. Keep insulin "off" for as long as you can.

Use Your Hybrid Fuel Capacity

Each of us has a capacity to metabolise two alternative fuels. Glucose or fatty acids/ketones. As adults most of us only use the glucose metabolism, unless we get sick.

Breast fed babies are in mild ketosis, the rapid development of their brains is enabled by ketones. When you were ill and unable to eat normal meals, your body goes into ketosis, fatty acids and ketones make you well.

Unless we are accustomed to fasting for long periods, four days or more, or unless we are eating a very low-carbohydrate diet, adults are seldom in ketosis. When people claim that their lack of energy is because of "low sugar levels" it's because of their faulty high carbohydrate diet.

The Women's Health Initiative Dietary Intervention Study, showed that at least for older women, the recommended low-fat high-carbohydrate diet was NOT a healthy diet. This surprising finding is still being denied by some experts. Dr Tim Noakes, suggests why older people in developed societies put on weight, while eating a wide variety of "quality food" that's supposed to be "healthy."

Tim Noakes says that because we've eaten carbohydrates 4 to 10 times a day for 50 years, that our bodies respond to an excess of carbohydrates by becoming carbohydrate intolerant. This is the beginning of the same process that creates type 2 diabetes in individuals. To some extent, we are ALL somewhat down the track to developing carbohydrate intolerance. From a medical point of view, it appears as metabolic syndrome, six metabolic problems that occur as a cluster. They can be recognised before type 2 diabetes is diagnosed, and are part of the same chronological development pathway.

Recognition of carbohydrate intolerance is evident in the number of people who benefit from a gluten-free diet. Taking that a stage further, some people benefit from being wheat-free. Some people (perhaps myself) develop autoimmune conditions that are diet related. In an effort to find the cause of a persistent red and itchy rash, I started cutting things out of my diet. My objective was not to discover a way to easily reduce my weight. The discovery of the field of ketogenic diets in general, and the Banting diet was for me an accident.

Carbohydrate intolerance is damage you have done to your body because of your dietary choices. If the amount of damage is small, you can continue to eat a mixed diet, restricting sugar severely, and carbohydrate somewhat, to successfully regain control over your weight, and correct your blood pressure and your fasting blood lipids. Going a stage further again, is to strongly reduce the consumption of all carbohydrates, adopting a full ketogenic lifestyle. When you do that, you mimic starvation, (but you never feel hungry) and you engage the alternative fuel source, fatty-acids and ketones.

If you restrict the amount of carbohydrate you eat, you need to eat more fat for energy. This additional fat CANNOT become fat on your hips in the absence of extra insulin in the blood. You need to understand what causes an insulin spike in your blood. Learn to eat in a way that keeps insulin turned off, and you will lose weight. Hormones ARE responsible for the excess weight many of us carry. Learn to control insulin, and the fat you eat will become fatty acids and be converted to energy.

The take-away is this: Your body is a hybrid fuel organism. You can run on glucose or fatty acids and ketones. The scientific way to reduce weight is to eat as little sugar as possible and to reduce other carbohydrates quite strongly. That leaves you with an energy deficit, so at the same time you need to eat more saturated fats, or mono-unsaturated fats like olive oil, for energy. We've been indoctrinated for all our lives to avoid fat in our diet. So all of us struggle with that wrong idea and many others. Our wrong ideas make us fat, and make it difficult to eat in a healthy way. Pruning from your mind these faulty ideas is your key task. When you've done that getting your weight right will be easy.

The Self-Discovered Diet

You all know the saying, "Diets never work." That's true only because your food choices are a reflection of you, and all your acquired past knowledge.

If I tell you how to eat in a healthier way, and I can do that in 3-5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because even if you understand what I'm saying, you still can't do it. What I've told you becomes absorbed into the knowledge of a lifetime, and is overwhelmed by all the acquired knowledge you have, much of it leading you in wrong directions. For instance, people commonly have a poor understanding of normal health, accepting quite poor health as normal. In the same way, we often expect poor health among older people when we should not.

In talking to people, I often tell people things they should do, that they agree to do, but they don't do it. Why?

Firstly, all the acquired knowledge of a lifetime, tells you that you already KNOW, how to eat in a healthy way. So what I might have to say must be nonsense, or impossible for you to do. Recall the surprising results of the Women's Health Initiative (2006), "That the recommended diet has no health benefits." Think about that as a stake in the ground. Both the SAD recommended by dietary experts, and the common sense knowledge of the public about a human healthy diet, is WRONG. Are you confused? If so that's a sensible starting point for a journey discovery.

Secondly, you trust your doctor or your dietitian, or the advice your mother gave you. You know that they wouldn't intentionally put you wrong. If Open Future Health really had a dietary solution everyone could use, lots of people would be doing it already, and your trusted adviser would tell you about it. In 2005, Doctor Annika Dahlqvist, found it's not quite that easy. Powerful forces prevent new knowledge becoming widely known.

Thirdly, most people seem to believe that good health is not something they have much control over, unless one likes to do a lot of exercise. I'm OK like I am. I'm not "very healthy" but I'm never sick either, so what's to worry about?

As I said what we think, and what we decide to do is a reflection of all our past knowledge. The three paragraphs above are a tiny fraction of the sort of thinking that keeps us trapped in our old knowledge and in our old ways of behaving. So there can be no progress unless you make it happen. You hold the key. It's between your left ear and your right ear. All you need to do is use it. Give yourself permission to use it. Then begin your search for what works.

Then you need to do a lot of reading, and talking and learning. As you learn you need to try some of the new things. Some of the things you've been told about all your life are not valid. Read, think, discuss, plan, act, and see what happens. Along the way, you'll discover some of the things you believe now, are not valid. Cut those ideas out of your knowledge tree. You can do it. Only you can do it.

As you go along, if you are getting good advice from somewhere, you should be able to make steady progress in discovering a diet that works much better for YOU. Your own personal "self-discovered diet." That's the point.

Your Self-Discovered Diet, will be a diet you can apply in your life, successfully. You will have done a great deal to remove from your acquired knowledge, those wrong ideas that prevent you from eating in a healthy way. Even if your "self-discovered diet" isn't yet the perfect diet in some ways, because it's your diet, you can fix it.

So where does Open Future Health, or The Real Meal Revolution, or the Keto Diet movement world wide come in? There is a lot to learn, a lot of science, a lot of practice experience, and lot of food tips, many new ways of cooking and baking and making real food for the whole family. There is help available. Many Books, web sites, videos, all the information you need. Too much really, overwhelming.

To make the best progress, in an easy way, I suggest you join an Open Future Health Forum. A place to ask for direction when you are not sure what to decide. Please join the Facebook Group for Open Future Health. This will help you keep up with changes in the Open Future Health Website. If you wish you can also engage in discussion here. Please use this link.

(Note: 2022) Alternatively, Join the Australian Group "Defeat Diabetes" led by Prof. Peter Brukner, and guided by Dr Paul Mason. This is a relatively new group, with clear objectives and tidy presentation. There is still a lot to learn, so don't mess about with the three month subscription, take the annual option.

The question now, is simple. Will you give yourself permission to do it?

What you Think you Know - is Probably Wrong

I'm delighted to come across Zoë Harcombe's website and the important work she has been doing since at least 2010. Her website like mine, tries to give you good information. When I first visited it's a bit overwhelming, and I guess my site suffers that way too. But if you quietly follow the links, she talks a lot to good sense. She also offers a great deal of access to technical documents, which may or may not be an advantage.

Enjoy this short video. (Video Removed)

Zoë Harcombe's intro to The Obesity Epidemic

Note:

Input v output, calories in v calories out, does NOT explain obesity, or help anyone to lose weight.

Calorie restrictive diets ALWAYS FAIL, and for very good scientific reasons.

Exercise is not a sensible or practical way to control your weight.

Eating fatty food, does NOT clog your arteries, or put fat on your hips.

Diets may be restrictive but diets do not have to be boring. High-fat diets are delicious.

Note Also:

The causes of heart disease are not known, but we do know it's not cholesterol and it's not the fat in your diet.

The cause of diabetes is known. The standard treatment of diabetes for the last 50 years is wrong. Type 2 diabetes is entirely curable by diet alone. (There's no profit for drug companies in that, so a dietary cure not recommended.)

Sugar and flour are an excessive part of our diet. If you are young, eat them in moderation, or small portions. If you are older and you have any ONE of the symptoms of metabolic syndrome, cut sugar OUT of your diet and strongly limit carbohydrates in your diet. If you already have diabetes, do that even more vigorously, learn to live in ketosis.

ALL of us, suffer from food propaganda, that misleads us in our quest for better health. Your knowledge is supposed to protect you from harm. But bad knowledge leaves you open to harm, and in nutrition, bad knowledge is everywhere. Until about 2000, "nutrition science" was mostly science free, certainly bio-chemistry free. What is published in newspapers and magazines, about weight control, remains almost entirely science free, even today. As Zoë Harcombe explains, almost all the dietary knowledge we have is NOT science based, although, like the calories in v calories out idea, it often looks like science on the surface.

A World Stacked Against You -

In a local up-market magazine, "Avenues" for May 2016, the well known and respected nutritionist Bronwen King, proposes that the best human diet would have less meat and more vegetables.  We should drink low fat milk, eat nuts, more legumes and fermented foods.  This is exactly the type of diet the Women's Health Initiative, demonstrated in their 2006 report, as having "no health benefits."

In the same magazine the Green Prescription promoted by the Ministry of Health, and run locally by Sport Canterbury is recommended. They show a badly overweight woman trying to exercise to reduce her weight. I commend the woman for enthusiasm and effort, and condemn the people who are giving her advice.  The Swedish Experts Committee confirm what most of us know, that exercise has minimal if any effect on your body weight.

This is exactly why people have so much trouble reducing their weight.  People who are supposed to be experts in the field, are saying things that have no scientific basis.  We keep on doing the wrong things, thinking that we are doing good things.  Following "expert" advice, gets us into trouble.

I watched a video this week where Nina Teicholtz spoke to a medical specialist audience.  She explained in an hour the key findings of her book, The Big Fat Surprise.  She made it clear that meat was important in the diet.  At the end, two or three persistent voices claimed that we should be eating a vegan diet.

Repeated scientific studies have shown that meat is a valuable resource in the human diet, and that red meat, far from being vilified, has until recent times been eaten at almost every meal, by people who lived long, were strong and healthy, and who didn't get fat.  While vegetarian diets are possible, they are not recommended.

Unfortunately, because almost all dietary research in the last 50 years  has been spent trying to prove that a low-fat high-carbohydrate diet and often vegetarian diet, was a healthy diet. There has been very little progress in nutritional science. We cannot tell you what the best diet for human beings should be. We do know what it isn't. For older women, the recommended "low-fat high-carbohydrate diet" has no health benefits. Presumably that also applies to older men. For children, teenagers and middle-aged people, we cannot say.

There is some evidence that both the low-carbohydrate high-fat diet and the Mediterranean diet, produce good short term results and there's no evidence yet of long term harm. However, there are many varieties of both those diets, that are not valid representatives of the category.

People can eat a more healthy diet, but the entire environment in which we live tries to make sure you don't do that. Misinformation is everywhere. You have to be quite single minded in your research to find for yourself an improved diet. I can point the way. Recently published science strongly supports moving towards the diet our grandparents ate. They didn't have any science to validate what they were eating, but they got a lot of things right. Like having a full breakfast, with meat and eggs and vegetables. Like having a roast red meat meal two or three times a week. Like eating less chicken rather than more. Like eating brains and livers and kidneys, or black puddings.

We need to re-educate ourselves. Understand what went wrong 60 years ago, when "nutritional science," such as it was, took a wrong turn and became unscientific. We've moved away from meat and fat, towards more grains and low-fat, and made ourselves obese in the process. We need to move our diet in the opposite direction to lose weight and be more healthy. How far should we take that? That's what we all need to learn more about.

I've made the choice to learn about ketosis, and to live in ketosis most of the time. There are many health advantages, but it's a very different way of thinking about food. Recently, I've been out of ketosis because I'm eating too much fruit, pears and peaches, which have been free and abundant for over a month. In the transition from glucose burning to ketone burning there is a slight nose sniffle. Not much of a problem and easily avoided, don't be in the, in-between zone. Eat more than 130gm of carbohydrate a day and burn glucose. Or eat less than 50gm of carbohydrate a day and burn ketones. It's a choice.

Even a little thing like having the evening meal at 5pm rather than 7pm helps people to reduce their weight. My father strongly urged me to eat the fat on my plate.  He did, and he was always slim. I changed my diet, based on the recommended diet. I ate cereal for breakfast, with low fat milk, and low fat yoghurt. I ate very little meat, chicken about once a week, fish once a week, we tried to eat lots of vegetables and whole grains, and I got fat.  Now I know why. Dad was right and I was wrong. Thousands of people need to learn that lesson.

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