Killing Yourself With Carbs

I know someone with diabetes. Heck, I know ten someones with diabetes and I’m sure you do too. That’s because in the past 30 years, diabetes rates have tripled to 347 million worldwide. You might wonder what caused this epidemic of disease and this is where the story gets interesting.

In the 1950’s President Eisenhower had a heart attack and was out of the oval office for ten days and this was when heart disease, which was relatively unheard of at the turn of the century, had now become the leading killer of mankind. Everyone was in a state of panic about what was causing heart disease. Several theories were advanced but there was one that seemed to prevail; it was called the Diet Heart Hypothesis and it proposed that fat and cholesterol in your diet elevated cholesterol in your blood and that clogged your arteries and gave you a heart attack.

American Psychologist, Ansel Keys, developed the Diet Heart Hypothesis and he undertook a study, the Seven Countries Study, to prove his hypothesis. Trouble was, Keys cherry picked the data, excluding all the countries that did not prove his hypothesis. Nonetheless Keys was able to convince the American Heart Association that fat and cholesterol caused heart disease and they should be eliminated from the American diet.

I don’t know about you but I remember suddenly having to use margarine instead of butter, Crisco instead of lard, and skim milk instead of whole milk. Everyone adopted these changes despite the fact that there was no evidence to merit them. We were told it would be good for us and we believed it.

Then, in the late 1970’s, Senator George McGovern turned his attention to nutrition and put together a committee that suggested nutrition guidelines to lower risk of disease. These guidelines later formed the basis for the food pyramid which was established in the eighties and that was when rates of heart disease and diabetes exploded.

These new nutritional guidelines suggested that we lower our consumption of fat and ramp up our consumption of carbohydrates which appealed to people who thought that this was the nutritional way to better health. All of a sudden, everything was low fat - yogurt, cookies, pudding, cereals - you name it, there was a low fat version of it. The question nobody asked was what they replaced the fat with in order to make it taste good. The answer, of course, was sugar.

And so we began to eat more sugar and carbohydrates because according to the new food guidelines that’s what we were supposed to do. Nobody stopped to consider that the more we ate this way, the sicker we got and we scratched our heads in wonder at the fact that diseases like Type 2 diabetes were skyrocketing.

Carbohydrates and sugar do not satiate people for long and so people must consume a lot of these foods to feel full. Not unlike the geese in Paris who are force fed starches in order to obtain the fatty livers needed to make foie gras, continuous consumption of carbohydrates and sugar have the same result in humans.

The liver is a storage vessel, but it can only hold so much. It tries to get the glucose into the body’s cells, but if the cells are already stuffed with glucose no amount of insulin will be able to cram more in. Worse still, sugar is made up of 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose. Only the glucose can be used by the body. The fructose must be metabolized by the liver and how does the liver metabolize fructose? It turns it into fat.

We know now that if you continue to consume high levels of glucose, carbohydrates and fructose, you will develop fatty liver. And the scary thing is fatty liver always proceeds Type 2 diabetes.

So we’re told that diabetes is an irreversible, chronic disease that can not be cured. And the treatment for this is to prescribe more and more insulin to cram more and more fat into the cells. The truth is quite contrary. Diabetes is a completely reversible disease that is a simple matter of restricting carbohydrates and eliminating sugar so the body will be forced to pull fat out of the liver and the pancreas.

The treatment really is that simple and it’s available without drugs, surgery, or cost. Science and knowledge has opened the door for us.

All that we have to do is walk through.