Low-carb diets, such as the Atkins and Rosedale diets are a brilliant way to lose weight without feeling hungry. I was on the latter for over 2 years before switching to caloric restriction with optimal nutrition (CRON), which is probably the best diet currently known to science, in December 2007.
Low-carb is a proven weight-loss diet, but it's also popular among MVPS sufferers because it tends to keep blood glucose levels lower and more even throughout the day. That, in theory, reduces the adrenaline spikes that plague chronic candy eaters and soda drinkers. The problem is, low-carb diets impede proper hydration. As a result, they tend to create electrolyte imbalances -- particularly with regards to essential trace minerals -- which can in turn result in the familiar panicky MVPS symtomology. This is why I don't do low-carb. More on this hydration problem below.
The main theory behind CRON is that by eating fewer calories but not compromising on nutrition, we can live longer. This is accomplished by: (1) just like burning less fuel in a car keeps its engine cleaner for more years, burning less food in an organism creates less internal pollution; and (2) your body falsely concluding that the environment is lacking in food, necessitating the devotion of caloric energy toward tissue repair, instead of high athletic performance and reproduction. (There are some studies which suggest that, although sustained performance drops due to the low calorie budget, the body will, after a few months under sufficient caloric restriction, generate new mitrochondria (cellular batteries), resulting in increased peak performance.)
So yes, one's sex drive does drop somewhat, which in my opinion is a small price to pay for feeling so many fewer aches and pains (as CRON lowers inflammation). And on the tissue maintenance front, there is one notable exception: wound healing. If you get cut, you'll leak like a faucet, due to reduced platelet aggregation. This is apparently nature's way to ensure that you don't die of a heart attack or a stroke before you can find abundant food again, and reproduce. In my case, it also resulted in emergency surgery at one point, so CRON is not advisable in dangerous environments where injury is likely, or medical facilities are incompetent. Maybe I'll share that story in another post.
Sometimes, if I have a lot of physical work to do, I eat more. Basically, I try to eat what my physical workload demands, although I'm human and certainly have overshot sometimes. That's why I also take a number of powerful supplements, including resveratrol, to hopefully make up for my occasional gluttony. Still, I'm lean, although I'd like to get back to thin. Yes, thin men look less attractive to women, which is another price to consider. I sometimes think, for this reason, that CRON is better suited to women. What good is a long life, if we men can't find interested partners?
Anyhow, I followed the Rosedale Diet for over 2 years. In that time, I had a number of horrible spates of "insatiable thirst", in other words, the feeling of extreme thirst which was not satisfiable, no matter how much I drank.
After much trial and error, including plenty of blood tests, I finally nailed the problem. I would be surprised if other low-carb dieters didn't have the same issue:
The insatiable thirst problem
1. The Rosedale Diet didn't require me to count calories, so I'd consume massive amounts of pecans, and worse, almond butter, to satisfy my hunger. No doubt I exceeded the protein guidelines of the diet.
2. The high level of fat in these nut products blocked the absorption of water-soluble trace nutrients. I'm not sure whether this blockage occurred in the intestines or at the cell membranes, but it was obvious from my thirst that something was wrong.
3. I got blood tests from a kidney doc, but all was normal, probably because I took the tests in the morning, long after my kidneys had worked all night to restore homeostasis.
The problem got so bad, after 2 years, that I began to research hydration intensely. (You would think that this might have occurred to me earlier, but let's just say I'm a slow learner.) I discovered that sugar was actually required for hydration -- not for the reason that it provides energy, but because it triggers a rise in insulin. The insulin, in turn, instructs the cells to open their membranes to the blood, in order to imbibe sugar. In the process, they also imbibe other substances from the blood, in this case, trace minerals which are critical to proper hydration. (I don't want to come across as an advocate of the old theory that insulin's role is mainly as a sugar-regulating hormone, rather than a global metabolic regular. In this case, I'm just focussing on this one particular role.)
Now, if you consume very little sugar to begin with (because, after all, we're talking about low-carb diets), and on top of that, your system is clogged with fat (albeit the monosaturated variety found in almonds and pecans), you don't have much opportunity to jam water-soluble micronutrients into your cells. (That's why you need to shake oil-and-vinegar salad dressing; fats don't like to mix with water-soluble substances.) Worse still, I was taking my daily vitamin pill in a single shot, meaning that the sudden high influx of micronutrients was more likely to saturate the already-constricted transport system into the cells.
I caught on to all this when a friend of mine told me that body builders often dirnk grape juice before taking their muscle-building supplements. Apparently, they do this so that the cells will open up for the sugar, only to receive the supplements moments later, before they can close again.
Granted, I'm oversimplifying this: cells have many molecular portals for many different purposes. But it seems clear to me, if from none other than the personal experience of satisfying my own thirst, that sugar is an effective means of opening our cell membranes for long enough to feed them with micronutrients. After all, if you eat sugar, it makes you thirsty, which I would say amounts to a hormonal signal that our cell membranes have opened and are demanding water and micronutrients. Fat never does this.
Now, as any competent nutritionist will tell you, high blood sugar is proinflammatory and leads to any number of diseases. It might be the single most damaging cause of aging, next to respiration itself. So we have an obvious problem here: how do we hydrate effectively without inviting diabetes due to high blood sugar?
Let's start with the popular glucose theory: By now, must people are familiar with glycemic index (GI), which is basically a measure of peak glucose level pursuant to the consumption of a given amount of a given food, and glycemic load (GL), which is the total amount of glucose leached into the blood from the same. Soft drinks have an extremely high GI, in that they can rapidly raise your blood sugar. But you could eat a giant bowl of lentil beans with a much higher GL: even though the lentils will never raise your blood sugar as high as a few ounces of cola, they will, given many hours of digestion, eventually release more sugar into your blood.
Now, the theory goes that you'll prevent diabetes more effectively, by eating low-GI foods, with only secondary concern for GL. In other words, while lower GL is preferable, GI is what influences diabetes more profoundly. So dieticians constantly remind us to eat complex carbs instead of soft drinks, white bread, and fruit.
This is where I have some disagreements. Let's forget about sugar for the moment, and just look at nutritional value. We can throw out soda, white bread, crackers, French fries, and anything else that modern humans have squirted out of a factory and called "food". For the purposes of GL and GI analysis, that leaves 2 major sugar sources: complex carbs like those found in grains, legumes, and squashes, which eventually turn into sugar; and sugars like those found in fruits.
Imagine that you had a magic wand that could remove all the sugar and carbs from any food, instantly. Wave it at brown rice, and you'd have mineral-rich brown husks with a modest density of antioxidants. Wave it at a pumpkin, and you'd have omega-6-rich, fiber-rich pumpkin seeds. Wave it at almost any sort of berry, and you'd have a fibrous spherical shell loaded with some of the most healthful chemicals known, in high concentration.
In other words, minus the carbs and sugars, fruits -- particularly berries -- offer denser nutrition than do complex carbs. Critically, they tend to contain many nutrients that you can't find in a vitamin pill, unlike the popular trace minerals found in, say, rice bran. (OK, rice bran is rich in phosporous, which is hard to obtain, but have you ever tried to get over-the-counter pterostillbene or anthocyanin, found in blueberry skins?) It's also easier to extract the carbs and sugars from fruits, as they tend to lack the complex carbs found in grains, legumes, and squashes.
So what does this mean? It means that the sugar from fruit -- again, particularly berries -- rushes into our blood, leaving behind a cornocopia of healthy chemicals. Complex carbs, on the other hand, leach sugar into our blood all day long, causing the brain to become insulin-resistant, while at the same time paying us comparatively little in terms of beneficial chemicals.
The problem, of course, is GI: fruit -- even berries -- cause a huge spike in our insulin level, which is allegedly more prodiabetic than even the prolonged, but lower, insulin rise due to the slow digestion of complex carbs.
Now, remember that magic wand? We all have one. It's called "exercise". Think about it this way: if you eat of a bowl of blueberries, then hit the step aerobics class or the morning bike ride 15 minutes later, you interrupt your glycemic rise, diverting all that sugar into your muscle cells, where it gets burnt as energy. Instead of allowing high levels of sugar to remain in the blood or the cellular machinery itself -- where, in both cases, it would bind with functional proteins and cause horrendous damage, rather like putting chewing gum in your car's engine -- the process of respiration converts it into less toxic byproducts. Conveniently, the "berry chemicals" still floating in your blood will help deal with these byproducts, not to mention the air pollution you're inhaling during your exercise, from rubber gym mats or vehicle exhaust. Most likely, you'll also get a more effective cardio workout with some sugar fueling your cells, resulting in better fitness.
But what if we'd taken the low-carb approach? We're afraid of anything that might spike our blood sugar. So instead of cancer-suppressing blueberries, we eat lentil beans for breakfast, in a serving containing same number of calories. We get some trace minerals, but nothing that our vitamin pill doesn't give us anyway. We also get a lot more iron, which we don't want, as it starts to get toxic not far above the 100% RDA already found in our vitamin pill. We get some fiber, but the fruit also has this. We hit the gym a bit later (say after 30 minutes) because it takes longer to digest, meaning that our blood sugar will peak later. Unfortunately, the rise in blood sugar happens more slowly, so we're more sluggish with the cardio routine. Then, worse, after we're done at the gym, our blood sugar continues to be moderately elevated for hours while the beans digest. So there we are, sitting at the office, glycating our proteins to death, literally gumming up the mechanics of our biochemistry, while we sweat due to an accelerated metabolism which is struggling to dump its excess energy. Likely as not, we're also tired around midday, because our blood sugar is elevated. (Strange, isn't it, how both low and high blood sugar results in fatigue?) So there goes our economic productivity as well. Finally, when it's all over, we have what? Some minerals that we could have gotten from a pill, some fiber, and generally speaking, far smaller quantities of beneficial chemicals than we would have obtained from a calorically equivalent serving of berries.
Now, I do eat lentils, rice, barley, and other whole grain beans from time to time. (I never eat cereal or other bogus refined "foods".) However, I eat them because I enjoy them, and sometimes need variety -- not because they provide significant health benefits. Granted, on the rare occasion that I need to perform hard physical work all day, they provide a steady influx of blood sugar more effectively than do monofats such as olive oil and nut oils, which are a staple of my diet. So I do, on rare occasion, find their GI and GL properties useful. But generally, I gobble a few handfuls of blueberries -- or, on occasion, a less beneficial fruit that I just happen to crave -- and then head to the gym 15 minutes later. When I return, my blood sugar is back to about normal, but my blood is loaded with beneficial chemicals.
Be careful, of course, not to rot your teeth. Fruits tend to be acidic and sweet -- the perfect insurance for your dentist's secure retirement. Just brush after breakfast.
Thus, I try to match the blood-glucose-vs.-time curve of the foods I eat, with my physical workload in power-vs.-time, so that stable blood glucose can be maintained, while also providing the hydrating benefits of sugar consumption and a significant ingestion of beneficial fruit chemicals. Most blood glucose curves consist of a single spike, which then gradually fades into a normal (fasting) blood glucose level. By definition, the spike is steeper for high-GI than for low-GI. However, it tends to fade faster with high-GI than low-GI. That's because high-GI foods release their glucose rapidly, then have nothing more to give. If we can overlap a burst of physical exercise with the would-be-peak in blood glucose, then we can obtain the benefits of fruits -- especially berries -- without the proinflammatory downside. On the other hand, if we're planning to work in the yard all day, it would be more useful to load up on complex carbs, and burn them continually.
One note about glucose: we really shouldn't talk about glucose at all. We should be talking about insulin, or better still, its biochemical manager, leptin. Glucose is just one of many sugars which can create a rise in insulin. That's why 20th-century dieticians thought that they had found the answer to diabetes when they learned to cook with fructose ("fruit sugar"): fructose-sweetened foods triggered a much smaller rise in blood glucose (duh, because they contain fructose, not glucose). However, the proinflammatory and insulin effects are similar, resulting in the same pathology, which we call "type II diabetes". So while I refer to blood glucose just to allow a comparison between my glucose management approach, which is a dietary strategy, and GI and GL, which are glucose impact measurements, I would prefer to talk about "insulin management" (IM):
Insulin management (IM)
1. Provides the full hydration benefits of sugar consumption, without the damage. Exercise is used to prevent blood sugar spikes after eating fruit.
2. Provides a burst of energy for high-performance cardio, or sustained energy for sustained physical labor.
3. Provides all the benefits of anticancer fruit chemicals, without the sugar damage.
4. Provides delicious dietary variety.
5. Advocates monofats with sufficient omega-3 (chiely DHA and EPA from fish oil, or perhaps ALA from flaxseed oil) as a caloric staple.
6. Loads of veggies.
7. Sources protein from nuts, vegetables, and egg whites (not yolks).
8. Avoids all meat sources, due to toxins in the fat and high levels of the amino acid methionine, which some evidence suggests may shorten lifespan. A weekly serving of low-mercury fish, not caught in polluted water, is OK.
9. Avoids all dairy products, which cause PVCs and allergic reactions (notably nasal congestion), and contain high levels of the protein, casein, which has been substantially linked to cancer in animal models. Dairy is OK for brief periods of muscle building (which MVP sufferers probably shouldn't do very intensely anyway), but should be stopped when body mass plateaus.
By the way, numerous studies suggest that consuming high-GI foods with cinnamon reduces the intensity of the ensuing insulin rise. I hypothesize that this is because some molecule in cinnamon operates like insulin, insofar as the latter's cell-membrane-opening ability is concerned. What this means is that, if you dust your morning berries with cinnamon -- to the tune of about 1 gram per day -- you'll decrease your odds of type II diabetes even further. It will also give you a super energy burst in the gym. I did this once, with milk and cinnamon prior to swimming. I don't suggest it. My muscles got so much energy that I could no longer supply them with sufficient oxygen. I had to stop and relax.
As to that daily vitamin pill, I take half in the morning, directly after my fruit, while my cell membranes are wide open and ready to swallow the micronutrients. I take the other half in the afternoon, also usually with a handful of fruit -- a much small sugar dose than with breakfast. This separation keeps my electrolyte balance more stable, which inhibits MVPS symptoms. Be careful, though: vitamin pills are typically low in vitamin D, vitamin K, phosphorous, selenium, zinc, calcium, and magnesium. I eat brocolli for vitamin K (but you might prefer watercress, parsley, or spinach), unsalted pumpkin seeds for phosphorous, shiitake mushrooms for selenium, and supplements for the others.
I also take a number of supplements to protect myself from sugar and pollution. Remind me to post them in the future.
Until next time. I think I'll have a blueberry-strawberry-cinnamon salad in the morning before I hit the gym. Oh yeah, and it doesn't hurt that I consume about 18 pounds of organic broccoli-cauliflower mix per week. I steam it for 5 or 6 minutes in the microwave, just to the point of caramelization (in which the sugars flow to the surface), resulting in a satisfying meaty taste with no burn marks. Throw on some pecans, olive oil, a dash of pepper, and a table spoon of tomato sauce, and you have a very satisfying IM-compliant meal!
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