Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Dissolve Away those Pesky Bones with Corn Oil

I just read an interesting paper from Gabriel Fernandes's group at the University of Texas. It's titled "High fat diet-induced animal model of age-associated obesity and osteoporosis". I was expecting this to be the usual "we fed mice industrial lard for 60% of calories and they got sick" paper, but I was pleasantly surprised. From the introduction:
CO [corn oil] is known to promote bone loss, obesity, impaired glucose tolerance, insulin resistance and thus represents a useful model for studying the early stages in the development of obesity, hyperglycemia, Type 2 diabetes [23] and osteoporosis. We have used omega-6 fatty acids enriched diet as a fat source which is commonly observed in today's Western diets basically responsible for the pathogenesis of many diseases [24].
Just 10% of the diet as corn oil (roughly 20% of calories), with no added omega-3, on top of an otherwise poor laboratory diet, caused:
  • Obesity
  • Osteoporosis
  • The replacement of bone marrow with fat cells
  • Diabetes
  • Insulin resistance
  • Generalized inflammation
  • Elevated liver weight (possibly indicating fatty liver)
Hmm, some of these sound familiar... We can add them to the findings that omega-6 also promotes various types of cancer in rodents (1).

20% fat is less than the amount it typically takes to make a rodent this sick. This leads me to conclude that corn oil is particularly good at causing mouse versions of some of the most common facets of the "diseases of civilization". It's exceptionally high in omega-6 (linoleic acid) with virtually no omega-3.

Make sure to eat your heart-healthy corn oil! It's made in the USA, dirt cheap and it even lowers cholesterol!

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Using Reiki to benefit health.

I think at this time my health may benefit from Reiki and I intend to find a therapist who may be able to help me.

One of the greatest Reiki healing health benefits is stress reduction and relaxation, which triggers the bodies natural healing abilities, and improves and maintains health. Reiki healing is a natural therapy that gently balances life energies and brings health and well being to the recipient.

This simple, non-invasive healing system works with the Higher Self of the Receiver to promote health and well being of the entire physical, emotional and psychic body. Therefore it is truly a system of attaining and promoting wholeness of Mind, Body and Spirit.
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Friday, February 12, 2010

Thou Shalt NOT Eat MEAT!

The bible has been manipulated in so many ways that the original teachings are a contradiction in themselves. Here is a quote from the Bible and an explanation of what it means.

"For I tell you truly, he who kills, kills himself, and who eats the flesh of slain beasts, eats the body of death. For in his blood every drop of their blood turns to poison; in his breath their breath to stink; in his flesh their flesh to boils; in his bones their bones to chalk; in his bowels their bowels to decay; in his eyes to scales; in his ears their ears to waxy issue. And their death will become his death."

The Essence Gospel of Peace, Book 1.

I know the acidic negative effects that animal flesh has on your bowels, blood and in turn to your body. I know that the acid from animal protein (uric acid, nitric acid) gives rise to bacteria, yeast and mold and all sickness and dis-ease. I know that boils and pus created by bacteria and yeast comes from animal protein acid. I know that to buffer the double loss of alkalinity from eating animal protein the body leaches calcium from the bones causing osteoporosis. Look into an old person's eyes, they are not white, they are a cloudy, consistency from the bad formation of blood in the bowels, which, in turn, makes eye cells. Again, how did the ancients know this?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

S. 3002 Must Be Overhauled or Scrapped - Act Now!

S. 3002 Must Be Overhauled or Scrapped - Act Now!

Introduced by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) on February 4th as the “Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010,” S. 3002 is designed, according to the bill preamble, to “more effectively regulate dietary supplements that may pose safety risks unknown to consumers.”

The bill follows a surge of anti-doping initiatives and announcements dating back to September 29, 2009 (when the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs heard the testimony of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, or USADA), and to a December 2nd, 2009 USADA press conference. If passed, the proposed bill would dramatically harm consumers, cripple the nutritional products industry, and do absolutely nothing to stem the tide of laboratory-concocted, performance-enhancing drug hybrids masquerading as dietary supplements.

It is important to recognize that Senator McCain is a true American patriot known for his independence and Senator Dorgan has shown leadership in the area of net neutrality, which is critical to the free flow of health information for consumers.

However there are a host of problems in the bill serious enough to make it a completely irreparable and untenable piece of legislation. These include:

(1) The creation of completely outrageous European Food Supplements Directive (EFSD)/Health Canada-esque facility registration requirements for all brands, products and ingredients, despite the fact that food facilities are already required to be registered;

(2) The effective removal of the "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) status for most major dietary supplement/herbal ingredients, thereby deeming most supplements as "adulterated" unless they are included on the FDA's "Accepted Dietary Ingredients" list;

(3) The creation and maintenance of voluminous safety dossiers on every dietary supplement and ingredient;

(4) The requirement that “all adverse events” (not just serious adverse events) relating to supplements be reported, including non-serious, trivial and unsubstantiated reports; and

(5) The codification of arbitrary and capricious cease-and-desist and recall authority based merely on the FDA’s “reasonable probability” that an item is adulterated or misbranded (this action can be taken regardless of whether the manufacturer is properly challenging the order).

This bill’s proposed establishment of an “approved list of ingredients” (much like EFSD’s approved lists of supplement ingredients and ingredient forms) is something to which the U.S. government (specifically the U.S. Codex delegation) has been adamantly opposed. So why would that same U.S. government endeavor to create “lists” - within its own borders - that it sees fit to battle against internationally?

In addition, the proposed provision that would require “all” adverse events to be reported would bog the AER system down with hundreds, if not thousands, of trivial and product-unrelated reports. This would serve to bury reports noting potential areas of commonality (signal events) in a garbage heap of useless information.

Once this bill is shelved, Citizens for Health will be happy to work with Senators McCain and Dorgan to come up with solutions directed at increasing and improving U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) enforcement against labs-for-hire that spike food products with steroids and other banned drugs.

But the priority now is to ensure this bill never sees a vote in the Senate. Send a letter to your Senators now, urging them to reject S. 3002, the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010.

Arizona and North Dakota residents: Since your Senators are the sponsors, you will be sending them a letter urging them to withdraw the bill from consideration. In addition, Arizona residents in one of the districts represented by Congressmen Jeff Flake, Trent Franks and John B. Shadegg will also be sending them a letter asking them to reach out to Senator McCain, urging him to withdraw the bill.

Please take action immediately and send the following letter to Senators. Tell your senators NOT to co- sponsor the detrimental legislation and to do everything in their power to defeat it. Then forward this to your friends and family and ask them to do the same!

Here is a sample letter to send to your Senators:

Do Not Co-sponsor Senator McCain's Attack on Dietary Supplements

Dear [Senator],

Please do not co-sponsor Senator McCain's Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA). Please instead oppose it!

DSSA would repeal key sections of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). DSHEA protects supplements if 1) they are food products that have been in the food supply and not chemically altered or 2) if they were sold as supplements prior to 1994, the year that DSHEA was passed. If a supplement fits one of these two descriptions, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cannot arbitrarily ban it or reclassify it as a drug.

If this bill passes, the FDA would have full discretion and power to compile a discreet list of supplements allowed to remain on the market. Supplements drawn entirely from food and long established supplements or supplement potencies could be arbitrarily banned.

McCain's Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA) appears to be supported by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which is funded by major league sports teams including baseball, football and others. In his comments, Senator McCain cited six NFL players recently suspended for testing positive for banned substances and purportedly exposed to these substances through dietary supplements.

The problem here is of course one of illegal sale and use of steroids. So why dismantle the supplement industry in order to control already illegal substances?

The FDA currently has complete and total authority to stop illegal steroids and, more broadly, to regulate dietary supplements. If the agency were doing its job, it could and would have prevented the sale of illegal steroids. The answer to this problem is not to give FDA more power; we should instead demand that the FDA do its job.

Why would a bill be offered to solve an illegal steroid problem that does not really address the steroid problem but instead gives the FDA complete and arbitrary control over all supplements?

One possible explanation is that the bill's sponsor buys into the often heard argument that supplements and drugs should be treated identically, that both should be brought through the FDA's drug approval process in the same way. This is a completely false argument. The FDA drug approval process costs as much as a billion dollars. It is not economically feasible to spend such vast sums on substances that are not protected by patent, and natural substances cannot legally be patented.

This is the great "Catch 22" of American medicine. The FDA is unfriendly to supplements because they do not come through the drug approval process. But the drug approval process only makes sense for patentable substances that will sell at very high prices. This leaves the FDA, which is supposed to guard and promote our health, hostile to the kind of natural medicine--based on diet, supplements, and exercise--that represents the real future of healthcare.

If McCain's bill passes, we can look to Europe for a snapshot of what we may be in for: EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, has sharply reduced the list of available supplements and is in process of reducing potencies to ridiculous levels, such as less beta carotene than can be found in half of a large carrot.

Please refuse to co-sponsor and otherwise oppose the Dietary Supplement Safety Act!

Kindest regards,
[Your Name]
[Your Address]
[City, State ZIP]

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Life of ALL Flesh Is The Blood

"The first writing of embryology, cellular microbiology and biological transformation (pleomorphism) is found in the Old Testament: 'For the Life of All Flesh Is the Blood' (Leviticus 17:14).

The Life and Death of the body Is In The Blood! What's Blood Got To Do With It? Everything!

I perceive from thirty years of blood research that the blood is the basic material of which the human body is continually being created or formed. I have referred to the red blood cell as the foundational stem cell. As is the blood, so is the body. Why? Because body cells are created from blood - the red blood cells. Continuing with this thought, I also perceive, so is the body, so is the brain. And, as is the brain, so is the quality of thought. As a man or woman buildeth, so is he or she. And as a man or woman IS, so thinks he or she.

Solomon's temple is an allegory of a man or woman's temple -- the human body. This house is built without a sound of a saw or hammer. And the quality of that temple is dependent upon the quality of the food, drink, and thought one puts into it. The saying 'you are what you eat' or 'you are what you think' is at the foundation of organized earthly matter.

Your body is the temple of the living God. But man, blinded by selfishness and pride, searches here and there. Scours the heavens with his telescope, digs deep into the earth, and dives into the ocean's depths, in a vain search for the 'Elixir of Life' that may be found between the soles of his feet and the crown of his head.

Our human body is a miracle of organization. No work of man can compare with it in accuracy of its process and the simplicity of its law. This law is the law of the universe, the law of opposites or opposition - and there needs to be opposition in all things that we might learn by our experience. So we can understand cold by experiencing hot or health when we experience sickness or dis-ease.

As I perceive the complexity of the human body I realize this: at maturity, the human skeleton contains about 165 bones, so delicately and perfectly adjusted. The muscles are about 500 in number. The length of the alimentary canal is 32 feet long.

The amount of blood in an average adult is 5 to 6 liters weighing over 30 pounds or one-fifth of the total body weight and is a living flowing organ. There is over 3 million red blood cells made every second and 11 million body cells made from blood per second.

The heart is six inches in length and four inches in diameter, and beats seventy times per minute, 4200 times per hour, 100,800 per day and 36,720,000 per year. At each beat, two and one-half ounces of blood are thrown out of it, 175 ounces per minute, 656 pounds per hour, or about 8 tons per day. All the blood in the body passes through the heart every three minutes. And during seventy years it lifts 270,000,000 tons of blood.

The lungs contain about one gallon of air at their usual degree of inflation. We breath, on an average, 1200 breaths per hour and inhale 600 gallons of air, or 24,000 gallons daily. The aggregate surface of air-cells of the lungs exceed 20,000 square inches, an area nearly equal to that of a room twelve feet square.

The average weight of the brain of an adult is three pounds, eight ounces. The average female brain is two pounds, four ounces. The convolutions of a woman's brain cells and tissues are finer and more delicate in fiber and mechanism, which evidently accounts for the intuition of women. It would appear that the difference in the convolutions and fineness of tissue in the brain matter is responsible for the degrees of consciousness called reason and intuition.

The nerves are all connected with the brain directly, or by the spinal marrow, but nerves receive their sustenance from the blood, and their motive power from the solar plexus dynamic. The nerves, together with the branches and minute ramifications, probably exceed ten million in numbers.

The skin is composed of three layers, and varies from one-eight to one-quarter of an inch in thickness. The average area of skin is estimated to be about 2,000 square inches. The atmospheric pressure, being fourteen pounds to the square inch, a person of medium size is subject to a pressure of 40,000 pounds. Each square inch of skin contains 3,500 sweat tubes, or perspiratory pores (each of which may be likened to a little drain tile) one-fourth of an inch in length, making an aggregate length of the entire surface of the body 201,166 feet, or a tube for draining the body nearly forty miles in length.

Our body takes in an average of five and a half pounds of food and drink each day, which amounts to one ton of solid and liquid nourishment annually. So in seventy years a man or woman eats and drinks 1000 times his or her weight.

There is not known in all the realms of architecture or mechanics one little device which is not found in the human organism. The pulley, the lever, the inclined plane, the hinge, the 'universal joint,' tubes and trapdoors, the scissors, grindstone, whip, arch, girders, filters, valves, bellows, pump, camera, harp, irrigation plant, telegraph and telephone systems. All these and a hundred other devices which man thinks he has invented, but which have only been telegraphed to the brain from the Solar Plexus and crudely copied or manifested on the objective canvas.

No waterway on earth is so complete or so populous as that wonderful 'river of life', the blood stream. It has been said that 'all roads lead to Rome.' I have discovered that all roads of real knowledge lead to the 'river of life' -- the blood. The blood is an epitome of the universe. When man turns the mighty searching's of reason and investigation within the 'river of life' of the blood, a new heaven and earth will appear.

While I have theorized that all body cells are made by the transformation of the red blood cells - It is also true that blood is made from the food and supplements that we eat and the liquids that we drink. The foods and the liquids that we eat and drink are set free by the process of transformation called digestion and carried into the circulation through the delicate villi and microvilli of the small intestine. The villi and microvilli are analogous to the roots of a tree or plant with the same biological purpose - to make embryonic cells or stem cells.

Air breathed into the lungs enters into the arteries and chemically unites with the minerals and living anatomical elements of the blood stream, and by a wonderful transformation creates blood, known as 'hematopoiesis', which then through transformation creates flesh, bone, muscle, nerves, organs, hair, nails, etc.

The quality of the food we eat and the supplements we take and the liquids we drink determines the quality of the blood. As is the blood, so is the body - so is the body, so is the brain - as is the brain, so is the quality of thought. As a man or woman buildeth, so is he or she. And as a man or woman IS, so thinks he or she. Through my research I have found that the best way to build healthy blood is with green foods, green drinks and polyunsaturated fats.

Everyday the body works extremely hard to keep the 'river of life', the fluids of the blood at a delicate pH balance of 7.365. Any variation from this delicate pH balance the body goes into preservation mode to protect and maintain the integrity of this fluid at 7.365. If the pH of the blood is higher then 7.365 this indicates a state of acidosis in the tissues as the body is attempting to maintain the pH balance of the blood. If the blood pH drops below 7.365 then the buffering system is either depleted or struggling and the acids are in the blood indicating a more serious acidic or degenerative condition. This is called by medical savants decompensated acidosis. The body will do everything it can to maintain the blood pH at the expense of other organs and organ systems to prevent decompensated acidosis. This can lead to latent tissue acidosis which can be determined by measuring the pH of the urine. In latent tissue acidosis the pH of the urine will be less than 7.2 at any time during the day but most prominent in the morning urine. If the problem of latent tissue acidosis is not resolved then serious degenerative dis-ease or so-called disease will ensue. This includes heart disease and especially ALL cancerous conditions.

One of the major buffers of the blood is fat, and especially the electron rich polyunsaturated fats found in the blood and body cells. Fats are used to buffer acids for the purpose of maintaining the plasma or extracellular pH at 7.365. These fats bound to acids are then eliminate or stored away from the organs and organ systems that sustain life.

When the diet is over-acidic, this can draw down or use up the essential fats both in the cells and in the extracellular fluids causing a fatty acid deficiency leading to poor bi-lipid membranes or weak blood and body cells and many associated symptomologies: anemia (low concentrations of iron which acts as the oxygen carrier of the red blood cell), anisocytosis (irregular and unhealthy blood cells), rouleau (when the blood cells chain together causing oxygen deprivation from poor ciriculation), disseminated vascular coagulation (when the blood begins to clot prematurely and thicken. This causes high blood pressure), and cellular breakdown leading to major disorders.

I have studied live and dried blood for over thirty years. I utilize a high powered phase contrast and bright field light microscope to view a drop of blood from a client's fingertip, obtained with a sterile lancet. The purpose is to examine the structure of the blood cells and plasma fluid, to determine the relative level of cellular health and cleanliness, and to view areas of balance and imbalance suggested by the blood picture. I use live blood analysis to evaluate the internal biochemical internal environment referred to as the biological terrain to see whether or not it is dirty or clean and the strength and weakness of the red and white blood cells.

Healthy blood under live blood cell analysis shows a clean internal environment and unhealthy blood shows a dirty internal environment full of yeast, bacteria and damaged blood cells with a high white count trying to clean up the cellular debris from an over-acid lifestyle and diet. Where standard laboratory blood tests are generally quantitative (how many cells are there?), live and dried blood cell analysis is qualitative (what is the condition of the cells?). Standard laboratory tests are often used as pre and post studies to live blood cell analysis because there is correlative value in knowing both the quantity and quality of the client's blood cells.

Viewing live blood under a microscope is probably as old as the microscope itself. But it was the work of European scientists Dr. Antoine Bechamp and Dr. Gunther Enderlein in the mid-19th and early 20th Centuries that would advance the use of the microscope, challenge the medical establishment of the day and propose new ways of interpreting what was being viewed in blood. Other microscopists included noted physiologist, Dr. Claude Bernard, who coined the term 'internal milieu,' 'Germ Theory' advocate Louis Pasteur, Californian Dr. Virginia Livingston Wheeler and Canadian scientist Gaston Naessens.

In the 1920s, European medical practitioners added another twist to unconventional microscopy when they began looking at dried blood samples, later called the Oxidative Stress Test. A glass microscope slide is dabbed onto a bead of blood on the finger in sequence several times, resulting in a slide with 8 individual drops of blood pressed upon the slide and allowed to air dry.

The resulting clotting patterns seen in the dry blood under the bright field microscopy format reveal a characteristic 'footprint' which can be seen in similar cases and, thus, are predictive of certain generalized pathologies. For instance, cases of advanced degenerative disease show very poor clotting, minimal fibrin formation with many white 'puddles' disseminated throughout the sample. A healthy control subject's blood shows a tight, fibrin rich clotting pattern with no white polymerized protein puddles.

In the 1930s, the head of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. H.L. Bowlen, MD, introduced the dry blood test to America. Dr. Bowlen learned the dry test from President Dwight D. Eisenhower's physicians, Drs. Heitlan and LaGarde. In the 1970s, one of Heitlan-LaGarde's students, Dr. Robert Bradford of the American Biologics Hospital in Mexico, began teaching other practitioners including Dr. Robert O. Young over 30 years ago. So now there is over 70 years of dry blood testing data by hundreds of health care practitioners worldwide.

One of the most significant theories I can share with you is the primary site where hematopoiesis or red blood cell production takes place - and that is in the intestinal crypts of the small intestine. It is in the intestinal crypts that liquidfied food is biologically transformed into the erythroblast, and then into the primary cell, the erythrocyte, or the red blood cell. It is through this understanding that you will come to understand the importance of this article's heading, 'what does blood have to do with it?'

It has everything to do with it! The red blood cell is the primary cell that becomes a bone cell, a muscle cell, a heart cell, a liver cell when needed. The quality of the blood determines the quality of the body cells and the quality of the blood is determined by what you eat, what you drink and what you think! So, if you are eating proton-rich acidic foods and drinks, you will have weak blood cells and eventually weak body cells. All major disorders are a result of weak blood and weak blood is a result of the lack of electron-rich alkaline food and drink.

In 1952, four physiologists, Drs. Donn, Cunningham, Sabin and Jordon performed a two-week starvation experiment using chickens and doves. They found that the red blood cell production was from the bone marrow. When fasting or starving, the cells of the bone marrow, adipose tissue, muscular tissue and liver tissue transform into red blood cells. The process always begins with the bone even when the bowels are congested, or in the case of the condition of ciliac sprue, when there is damage to the intestinal villus.

In spite of what the four physiologists discovered, the primary site of normal blood production originates in the intestinal crypts. When we are congested in the bowel from eating proton-rich acidic foods the production of the red blood cells stops in the intestine and the body cells transform reversely to the red blood cells in order to keep constant the amount of red blood cells at 5 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter.

This is the reason folks on high protein diets, like Atkins and the South Beach diets, lose weight. They are wasting their body cells away to make red blood cells at the expense of their health while they are congested in the bowels with morbid undigested animal matter!

Rabbits have 5.5 million to 6 million red blood cells. If they are fed nothing, they will die in 2 to 3 weeks. Now, I have never heard of obese rabbits nor I have I heard of rabbits dieing of cancer let alone having reproductive challenges. However, the amount of red blood cells rarely decreases to less than 3 million. Why does the rabbit keep a constant amount of red blood cells without producing them physiologically? The reason is the same as in humans; body cells are reversed transformed into red blood cells. Therefore, such rabbits and even humans will show empty body cells after autopsy.

For example, the liver will retain its shape but its cytoplasm will have vanished. The cells of all organs of the rabbit or the human - dead from starvation - reveal considerable damage. The cells of the liver, kidney, and even the brain become porous. This is caused, as I have said before, from the reverse transformation of the body cells. Through this reverse transformation our body organs can function with a minimum amount of red blood cells until the very end of life.

Current medical science distinguishes between the red blood cells and the tissues or body cells. In reality, they are related to each other and can be transformed - one to another - in both directions. This is what I have termed biological transformation or pleomorphism, but it is currently not accepted by current medical savants!

When a person is eating electron-rich alkaline food and drink, they are building healthy red blood cells and healthy body cells. The body stays energetic and at a healthy weight. When the bowels become congested or damaged from proton-rich acidic food, red blood cell production is impaired and body cells are reversed transformed into red blood cells. Understand that red blood cells not only deliver oxygen and remove cellular acidic wastes, but they are the primary foundational stem cells for creating new bone, muscle, and nerve cells, etc. All current diets put your red blood cells at risk and will eventually lead to cellular breakdown and major sickness and dis-ease, hopefully later than sooner.

Since 1952, medical science has deducted that red blood cells in humans is made in the red marrow of the bone. This is true and only true when one is starving to death. When the body is starving, body cells transform back to red blood cells in order to maintain the balance of human blood at an ideal 5 million red blood cells per cubic millimeter.

When one is not eating right you lose weight by wasting body cells that are biologically transformed into red blood cells. When one is congested in the bowel from eating proton-rich acidic foods and drinks, the body begins to waste body cells to make new red blood cells.

This is why the scripture in Leviticus is so important to understand! It describes the biology of the human cell. And I repeat, 'The life of all flesh is the blood.' This scripture does not say, 'The life of all flesh is in the blood.' No, flesh is blood and blood is flesh, and the quality of the flesh is determined by what you eat, drink and even think! So, as they say in the computer world, 'garbage in garbage out.' This is why ALL diets will eventually fail you because they do NOT address the significance of the red blood cell - and the foods, drinks and thoughts that will build healthy blood that, in turn, will build a healthy energetic body that is neither underweight or overweight - but perfect weight!"

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Saturated Fat and Insulin Sensitivity

Insulin sensitivity is a measure of the tissue response to insulin. Typically, it refers to insulin's ability to cause tissues to absorb glucose from the blood. A loss of insulin sensitivity, also called insulin resistance, is a core part of the metabolic disorder that affects many people in industrial nations.

I don't know how many times I've seen the claim in journal articles and on the internet that saturated fat reduces insulin sensitivity. The idea is that saturated fat reduces the body's ability to handle glucose effectively, placing people on the road to diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Given the "selective citation disorder" that plagues the diet-health literature, perhaps this particular claim deserves a closer look.

The Evidence

I found a review article from 2008 that addressed this question (1). I like this review because it only includes high-quality trials that used reliable methods of determining insulin sensitivity*.

On to the meat of it. There were 5 studies in which non-diabetic people were fed diets rich in saturated fat, and compared with a group eating a diet rich in monounsaturated (like olive oil) or polyunsaturated (like corn oil) fat. They ranged in duration from one week to 3 months. Four of the five studies found that fat quality did not affect insulin sensitivity, including one of the 3-month studies.

The fifth study, which is the one that's nearly always cited in the diet-health literature, requires some discussion. This was the KANWU study (2). Over the course of three months, investigators fed 163 volunteers a diet rich in either saturated fat or monounsaturated fat.
The SAFA diet included butter and a table margarine containing a relatively high proportion of SAFAs. The MUFA diet included a spread and a margarine containing high proportions of oleic acid derived from high-oleic sunflower oil and negligible amounts of trans fatty acids and n-3 fatty acids and olive oil.
Yummy. After three months of these diets, there was no significant difference in insulin sensitivity between the saturated fat group and the monounsaturated fat group. Yes, you read that right. Even the study that's selectively cited as evidence that saturated fat causes insulin resistance found no significant difference between the diets. You might not get this by reading the misleading abstract. I'll be generous and acknowledge that the (small) difference was almost statistically significant (p = 0.053).

What the authors decided to focus on instead is the fact that insulin sensitivity declined slightly but significantly on the saturated fat diet compared with the pre-diet baseline. That's why this study is cited as evidence that saturated fat impairs insulin sensitivity. But anyone who has a basic science background will see where this reasoning is flawed (warning: nerd attack. skip the rest of the paragraph if you're not interested). You need a control group for comparison, to take into account normal fluctuations caused by such things as the season, eating mostly cafeteria food, and having a doctor hooking you up to machines. That control group was the group eating monounsaturated fat. The comparison between diet groups was the 'primary outcome', in statistics lingo. That's the comparison that matters, and it wasn't significant. To interpret the study otherwise is to ignore the basic conventions of statistics, which the authors were happy to do. There's a name for it: 'moving the goalpost'. The reviewers shouldn't have let this kind of shenanigans slide.

So we have five studies through 2008, none of which support the idea that saturated fat reduces insulin sensitivity in non-diabetics. Since the review paper was published, I know of one subsequent study that asked the same question (3). Susan J. van Dijk and colleagues fed volunteers with abdominal overweight (beer gut) a diet rich in either saturated fat or monounsaturated fat. I e-mailed the senior author and she said the saturated fat diet was "mostly butter". The specific fats used in the diets weren't mentioned anywhere in the paper, which is a major omission**. In any case, after 8 weeks, insulin sensitivity was virtually identical between the two groups. This study appeared well controlled and used the gold standard method for assessing insulin sensitivity, called the euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp technique***.

The evidence from controlled trials is rather consistent that saturated fat has no appreciable effect on insulin sensitivity.

Why Are We so Focused on Saturated Fat?

Answer: because it's the nutrient everyone loves to hate. As an exercise in completeness, I'm going to mention three dietary factors that actually reduce insulin sensitivity, and get a lot less air time than saturated fat.

#1: Caffeine. That's right, controlled trials show that your favorite murky beverage reduces insulin sensitivity (4, 5). Is it actually relevant to real life? I doubt it. The doses used were large and the studies short-term.

#2: Magnesium deficiency. A low-magnesium diet reduced insulin sensitivity by 25% over the course of three weeks (6). I think this is probably relevant to long-term insulin sensitivity and overall health, although it would be good to have longer-term data. Magnesium deficiency is widespread in industrial nations, due to our over-reliance on refined foods such as sugar, white flour and oils.

#3: Sugar. Fructose reduces insulin sensitivity in humans, along with many other harmful effects (7).

As long as we continue to focus our energy on indicting saturated fat, it will continue distracting us from the real causes of disease.


* For the nerds: euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp (the gold standard), insulin suppression test, or intravenous glucose tolerance test with Minimal Model. They didn't include studies that reported HOMA as their only measure, because it's not very accurate.

** There's this idea that pervades the diet-health literature that all saturated fats are roughly equivalent, all monounsaturated fats are equivalent, etc., therefore it doesn't matter what the source was. This is beyond absurd and reflects our cultural obsession with saturated fat. It really irks me that the reviewers didn't demand this information.

*** They did find that markers of inflammation in fat tissue were higher after the saturated fat diet.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Thank You

I'd like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who has supported me through donations this year. The money has allowed me to buy materials that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford, and I feel it has enriched the blog for everyone. Here are some of the books I've bought using donations. Some were quite expensive:

Food and western disease: health and nutrition from an evolutionary perspective. Staffan Lindeberg (just released!!)

Nutrition and disease. Edward Mellanby

Migration and health in a small society: the case of Tokelau. Edited by Albert F. Wessen

The saccharine disease. T. L. Cleave

Culture, ecology and dental anthropology. John R. Lukacs

Vitamin K in health and disease. John W. Suttie

Craniofacial development. Geoffrey H. Sperber

Western diseases: their emergence and prevention. Hugh C. Trowell and Denis P. Burkitt

The ultimate omega-3 diet. Evelyn Tribole

Our changing fare. John Yudkin and colleagues


Donations have also paid for many, many photocopies at the medical library. I'd also like to thank everyone who participates in the community by leaving comments, or by linking to my posts. I appreciate your encouragement, and also the learning opportunities.

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