Eat Better, Stay Healthy, Prevent Pandemics

Micah Meadowcroft calls for cutting Fifteen Pounds To Slow The Spread (The American Conservative, July 26, 2021). The title refers both to waistlines spreading across America and to spreading health problems, from chronic diseases to viral infections. In May of 2020 Nina Teicholz outlined the relationship between poor nutrition and the pandemic in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: A Low-Carb Strategy for Fighting the Pandemic’s Toll:

The coronavirus has added a brutal exclamation point to America’s pervasive ill health. Americans with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related diseases are about three times more likely to suffer worsened outcomes from Covid-19, including death. Had we flattened the still-rising curves of these conditions, it’s quite possible that our fight against the virus would today look very different.

Here is a study from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health: Research finds a majority of Americans metabolically unhealthy.  Another study: Global pandemics interconnected — obesity, impaired metabolic health and COVID-19 (Nature Reviews Endocrinology, January 21, 2021) reports:

Furthermore, novel findings indicate that specifically visceral obesity and characteristics of impaired metabolic health such as hyperglycaemia, hypertension and subclinical inflammation are associated with a high risk of severe COVID-19. In this Review, we highlight how obesity and impaired metabolic health increase complications and mortality in COVID-19. 

Not everyone can eat everything, notes nutrition journalist Gary Taubes (author of Good Calories; Ban Calories, and The Case for Keto). Discovering what foods are best for our personal health turns on how our individual metabolic systems and gut microbiome respond to the food we eat. If you can’t figure out the list of ingredients on packaged foods that fill most grocery store shelves, maybe your body can’t figure them out either.

For Americans who struggle with food cravings, reducing high-carbohydrate foods will help, since they actually cause cravings by spiking blood glucose levels. Carbohydrates in meals and snacks are quickly converted to glucose and a single teaspoon is all the bloodstream can hold. Insulin is released to push extra glucose into the liver and then into fat cells, and soon blood glucose levels crash, causing craving for more carbohydrates. For more, see: New study: low-carb diet reduces food cravings and improves eating control (DietDoctor, January 4, 2020)

Food with protein and healthy fats don’t cause this metabolic roller coaster and instead provide a steady, healthy metabolism. High stress and poor sleep can also contribute to metabolic distress.

Much disagreement and debate continues among the nutritional research community over what’s best to eat, when to eat, and how long to fast (best to break-fast in the morning, or maybe wait until noon?).

Some advocate many servings of whole grains, fruit, and vegetables, and maybe a little lean meat. The USDA offers a Let’s eat for the health of it pamphlet (pdf) picturing children and parents with bowls of lettuce, whole tomatoes, and carrots, plus slices of bread. The little kid reaches for the tomato bowl (how is he going to eat those?), while looking eagerly at the carrots. Maybe the photo was staged?

What if this government food plate, like the Food Pyramid before it, is more the cause than the cure for America’s obesity and diabetes epidemic? What if the federal push to lower fat, especially saturated fat from eggs, whole-fat dairy, and red meat contributed to increased insulin resistance and weight gain? Eggs and bacon for breakfast were replaced by sugary, high-carb breakfast cereals served with reduced-fat milk. Breakfast cereal companies and vegetarians had and still have an outsized influence on the federal nutrition guidelines and lead the ongoing nationwide pubic health push to add more grains, vegetables, fruit to the average diet (at the expense of protein and healthy fat). It’s worth at least reviewing the research.

Enhanced sweet corn or reduced sugar chocolate bar?
A 15 oz can of “Golden Sweet Corn” from Costco has 3.5 servings, each with 7 grams of sugars, which is 1 gram less than sugar in a 1.2 oz JoJos Chocolate Bar. JoJo bar also has 5 grams protein, 4 grams fiber and 6 grams (healthy!) saturated fat.

For many, high carbohydrate (and high-sugar) foods, whether bread, fruit, or vegetable, contribute to inflammation and then to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. Blame the food industry or the healthcare industry, or blame the public health establishment, or blame grocery stores packed with sweet processed foods. People are misled by media stories and advertising about what foods and macronutrients are healthy and which are not. “Heart-healthy” breakfast cereals probably are not. To learn more, see this December 2020 story on the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners.

Stumbling into Low-Carb and Keto
I wasn’t so much trying to lose weight as curious about early studies showing that overweight people were at much higher risk during the pandemic. But turning sideways to the mirror in May of 2020 made it clear I had added belly fat. I could pull my stomach in (good exercise!) but not for long. Much the same thing had happened to my father. He was slender for much of his life, then began to gain weight in the 1980s, adding a pound or two each year.

Since May of 2020 I’ve been researching, writing, watching videos and listening to podcasts on nutrition and public health. Federal nutritional guidelines, university nutrition establishment, and the processed food industry all claim saturated fat should be avoided.

But establishment nutrition advice hasn’t worked for most, who continue to gain weight when trying to follow the federal Food Plate (and earlier Food Pyramid). Thanks to a few dozen–now hundreds—of doctors, the nutrition landscape is shifting.

Journalists Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories, Why We Get Fat) and Nina Teicholz’ (The Big Fat Surprise) reported on the weak research and ideological bias behind the low-fat federal nutrition narrative and guidelines. For an overview, see the 2020 documentary Fat Fiction. 

[And more recent: How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity, STAT, September 13, 2021]

Jay Richard’s Eat, Fast, Feast emphasizes the history of fasting along with reducing carbohydrates.

Public health officials created a much larger health crisis than COVID by creating and promoting the low-fat nutritional guidelines, and pushing the food industry to develop hundreds of low-fat foods (that were high-carb, seed-oil, and sugar packaged foods).

Gary Taubes makes an interesting observation in a podcast. Without going through a personal “conversion experience” the low-carb/keto world is hard to believe. Overweight doctors learned first-hand that the calories in-calories out model with “eat less, exercise more” advice didn’t work for them, and they realized why it hadn’t worked for their overweight patients. 

Here are some organizations which have taught me about nutrition:
• Low Carb USA – https://www.lowcarbusa.org/
• Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners – https://thesmhp.org/ (project of Low Carb USA)
• Nutrition Coalition – https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/ (Nina Teicholz group to influence federal guidelines)
• Diet Doctor – https://www.dietdoctor.com/about (which recently pivoted to promoting higher protein)
• LowCarbMD Podcast – https://lowcarbmd.com/
• Adele Hite – https://www.adelehite.com/  And DietDoctor podcast: Low-carb myth and the US guideline with Adele Hite, PhD — Diet Doctor Podcast – https://youtu.be/O_gt-xDXM00
• Life’s Best Medicine – https://lifesbestmedicine.com/ (Brian Lenzkes, 1/2 of LowCarbMD Podcast hosts this Christian ideas and nutrition podcast)
• Low Carb Down Under on YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/user/lowcarbdownunder
• CrossFit Health – https://www.crossfithealth.com/ 
And on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=crossfit+health

And last, past posts on nutrition and public health:  https://economicthinking.org/category/nutrition/
Also the research of University of Texas nutrition scientist Roger Williams. Williams’ book Biochemical Individuality is available on Amazon.
Post on research career of Roger Williams:  https://paulingblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/roger-j-williams-nutrition-scientist/
Also: Low Carb San Diego (Aug. 26-29). Available in-person and online: https://www.lowcarbusa.org/low-carb-events/low-carb-san-diego-2021/