Once-blobby UK politician Tom Watson left a lot of people scratching their heads recently when he revealed he has lost 45 kilograms (over 100 lbs) and reversed his type 2 diabetes on a low-carb diet. Although it was coupled with an exercise regime, this is not supposed to be a healthy way to eat, so the “experts” say. Experts at what? Blather, ignorance and fake science.
Tom Watson
Watson’s remarkable achievement cuts to the heart of the biggest controversy in nutrition science today. Mainstream medicine still insists diets should be low in fat and high in starchy carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes and pasta.
People should especially shun saturated fat, from red meat and dairy, because this is said to raise cholesterol and so the risk of heart disease. This is the advice from underperforming, ignorant scientists who are advizing the US and UK governments and is the same in most Western countries.
It’s like they can learn nothing. They have fixed opinions, not to be dislodged by mere facts, and are killing millions with their stupid policy. Did you see the figures for obesity, diabetes and heart disease go down when they brought in the 1970s US food “pyramid”, which said stop eating saturated fats and eat more carbs instead?
No, because in fact the figures for heart disease, diabetes and obesity absolutely SOARED sky high in all the countries that adopted it.
They had a chance to put it right a few years back, when it emerged the whole saturated fat thing was a criminal concoction of fraudulent scientist Ancel Keys (who we KNOW was faking it; the documents showing his collusion with the sugar industry in covering up sugars central role in deadly diseases eventually surfaced).
The 2014 cover of Time Magazine that startled the world (but not me!)
Did they take the chance to put their deadly foolish advice to rights? No-o-o! They STILL attack fats, bang on about cholesterol and STILL the rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are soaring through the roof. The old-guard fools who got it wrong are never going to own up. Even professors still go on spouting the same nonsense they have always done, rather than admit their mistake.
A Calorie Is Not Just A Calorie
According to stupid orthodoxy, weight depends on the balance between calories in and calories out. If you want to lose weight, you have no option but to double down on avoiding fat because fat has more than twice the calories per gram as the other two main food groups, carbs and protein.
They teach that a calorie is just a calorie. THIS IS AS STUPID AS IT GETS. A sugar calorie behaves totally differently than a fat or protein calorie. It’s not just a question of calorie accountancy at all. It’s about knowing what happens to a sugar calorie and what it does to our metabolism.
They don’t appear to have a clue.
Sugar calories trigger a rise in insulin. This useful hormone is there to get glucose out of the blood and into the cells, where it provides energy. But here’s the killer:
When there is too much sugar in the diet, the body cannot store glucose. It has to go somewhere and IT TURNS TO FAT, where it is stored.
Overwhelming amounts of sugar—which are to blame for almost all modern ills—so overworks the insulin regulatory mechanism, that the body starts ignoring its signal. Instead we get “insulin resistance”, in which the body produces large quantities of insulin but it doesn’t work!
So the two types of diabetes are this:
- Type 1 diabetes, where the body has damage to the pancreas and can’t produce enough insulin;
- Type 2 diabetes, where the body produces tons of insulin—but it doesn’t work as it should!
The results are the same in both types of diabetes: high, uncontrolled blood glucose, which is very dangerous. It can lead to coma and death.
Type 2 diabetes is easy to control: stop eating sugar!! Duh! That’s why the sugar industry fought the science so hard and, with the collusion of Ancel Keys, buried the connection between sugar and death. It’s one the greatest health scams in history and has cost BILLIONS of lives over the decades.
There is a slight complication to this story, which is that any and all carbs will end up as simple sugars, like glucose and fructose, once digested (even milk is a “sugar food” rather than a fat food, because of its lactose content). So to avoid diabetes, obesity and heart disease as a result, you need to drastically reduce your intake of ALL carbs.
That’s it, in a nutshell!
So what do the US government dietary guidelines teach? Eat your heart out (literally) with carbs. It recommends refined white flours and sugar, as well as whole grains, which are WORSE! Forget the silly myth that whole grains are “slow carbs” and denser nutrition. Whole grains are double the damage of refined grains.
I don’t care what nutrients are found in whole grains (such as whole meal bread and brown rice). They are denser substances and lead to MORE, not less, blood sugar.
Please don’t write and tell me you followed a low-fat, low-calorie diet and lost weight. Of course you can, if you eat little enough. For many Westerners, busy slurping sugar-rich sodas and guzzling burgers and pizza pie, of course you’ll lose weight if you start to eat sensibly.
But I’m talking about a lifetime health issue here, not just a weight loss plan.
What Should We Eat?
I have said over and over in my writings that we should eat a hunter-gatherers diet. We are hard wired for such an eating pattern. We didn’t eat ANY grains. We were not farmers—there were no grains! Instead we ate meat, fish, fruit, berries, nuts and vegetables. We drank water. The only sugar that would ever show up is in very seasonal fruits and the occasional lucky find of honey!
That’s about a low-carb as you can get: little or no carbs. And guess what? It’s the greatest (fastest, easiest) way to lose weight and reduce your risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
The original (re-)discoverer of this dietary approach was an Englishman called William Banting (1796-1878). He was so fat he was deaf (fat deposits in his ears). But he followed a severely carbohydrate restricted diet and lost weight, his ears cleared and he lived a long happy life (82 years).
To this day, the approach is often called Banting (like it was a verb). The modern expert on Banting (apart from me!) is Prof. Tim Noakes from South Africa. You can find several interesting videos of him explaining the importance of this concept on YouTube.
But guess what? Noakes was attacked by enraged colleagues who wanted him buried academically. They sued him, using government money, but eventually lost. This is an example of the grotesque phenomenon of “academic mobbing”. It’s every bit as ugly as mob violence—but comes from people who ought to know better.
So… back to what the experts think:
Low carb shouldn’t work, they say. It’s “unhealthy”. That despite the fact that controlled randomized trials show that it is at least as good as low-fat diets at helping people lose weight – in fact some trials suggest it is better; the Atkins, for example.
What’s more (read this slowly): Trials show that eating lashings of saturated fat doesn’t even raise people’s cholesterol. It’s nothing more than a myth and never was other than a myth, circulated by greedy American corporations in pursuit of profits.
Skeptics say low-carb eating only works because the monotony makes people eat fewer calories overall, even though they aren’t counting them. They produce no data to back up this nonsensical suggestion—BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T COUNT THE CALORIES EITHER. So it’s not science, it’s opinion.
The truth is, when following a low carb diet, you don’t feel hungry. And as for monotonous, the SAD is unbelievably monotonous. Wheat-corn-wheat-sugar-corn-sugar-wheat… Without the fats there is NO flavor, so they add chemical flavors, like MSG, to make it “tempting”. It doesn’t tempt me!
Instead we hunter-gatherers get to enjoy sea foods, steaks, chicken and other fowl, ham, eggs galore, fruit, roots, nuts and vegetables. We tend to hold back on the legumes—but even those are not banned. See, there is nothing to count on a low carb diet. If you feel hungry at any time (unlikely) just eat!
What could be better than that, as a means of losing weight and maintaining health?