WD: I was also interested in hearing more about your experience with morning sickness and the effects of a low-carb diet. Could you tell us more about this? Also, any thoughts on why this happens?
MF: As we continued to expand our thoughts about VLCD and fertility/pregnancy, we began to extend the nutritional approach into pregnancy. We know that pregnancy hormones dramatically worsen insulin resistance that is responsible for the condition, gestational diabetes. If insulin resistance is worsened, then reactive hypoglycemia is worsened. One of the biggest symptoms of hypoglycemia is nausea. So, in response to this, we have counseled our patients on the diet in pregnancy and have found a dramatic reduction in nausea. We recommend snacking every two hours in pregnancy.
The other "traditional" issue in pregnancy are cravings. These also likely stem from hypoglycemia. I have had many husbands tell us later that their wives, in contrast to friends etc, were calm and not moody or anxious during their pregnancies. Hypoglycemia probably is a serious issue for the fetus as well and may be the "signal" that turns on the insulin-resistant gene. Many theorists feel this might be an activated gene during the pregnancy.
WD: Do you use any unique approaches to the low-carbohydrate approach, e.g., inclusion of dairy, meal frequency, "induction" strategies (i.e., induction to the diet, not of labor!), etc.?
MF: Yes. As I'm sure everyone who works in the VLCD world does, we also have some tricks to make this work better. My biggest push, although hard to get patients to agree, is to see a counselor along with our follow-up in order to deal with "addictive behaviors" and "stress eating" that so many of our patients relate to us. Good stress management and cognitive behavioral therapy go a long way in helping this become a permanent change.
We also really push frequent calorie intake or "snacking." I think again that hypoglycemia produces an inborn drive to "cure" or "fix" starvation and leads to dramatic overeating. We have a short list of snacks that we recommend. The concept of hunger is offered as a failure of the program. We aim to eliminate hunger, as it represents hypoglycemia. The analogy I use is, if you drove your car until you ran out of gas before you ever sought to find gas, your life would be miserable. So it is the same with your metabolic engine: If you let it run out, the measures your system takes to fix it are very detrimental to life and certainly to nutritional health.
Our other big push is fat. People can wrap themselves around protein and vegetables, but they totally miss the high-fat (animal fat) part of the conversation. We have to really push that aspect. In regards to dairy, we allow for non-processed cheeses and minimal milk. An alternative is to mix about 4 oz whole milk with 4 oz of heavy whipping and 4 oz of water to create a "milk" with less sugar. Similarly, shakes and smoothies can be made with heavy whipping cream with pure whey protein powder added to create a liquid meal for those who "don't have time" to cook.
WD: Thanks, Dr. Fox. We look forward to hearing more about your approach in future.
Contact information:
Michael D. Fox, MD Jacksonville Center Reproductive Medicine www.JCRM.org Phone 904-493-2229
Allow me to wear my Track Your Plaque hat for this post.
Mr. Richard Rawle is CEO of Utah company, Tosh, Inc. Mr. Rawle has been an avid follower of the Track Your Plaque program and has introduced the program to company employees. Here's what he has to say about the experience:
“Our company has been utilizing the principles of TYP [Track Your Plaque] for over a year and has experienced great results that have positively impacted the lives of our employees and our health care costs.
Since we began our wellness program, we have presented the TYP diet and lifestyle guidelines to all of our employees and their families. Although the overwhelming majority of our employees do not have cardiovascular issues, the preventative nature of TYP is too important not to be utilized. The TYP principles along with our increased focus on healthy living have already changed our group’s blood chemistry. HDL levels in particular have increased significantly and resulted in a large percentage of our employees having HDL levels of 60 or higher. Vitamin D levels have substantially increased and LDL levels have significantly decreased in the majority of our employees. Subsequently, in the 12 months just ended, our health care costs are some 35% less than other groups of comparable size and age.
I believe the TYP program has been an integral part of the success of our company's vast improvement in employee health/wellness, resulting in significant health care cost reductions."
Richard Rawle CEO Tosh Inc.
Track Your Plaque saves lives. Track Your Plaque also saves money . . . lots of it. Despite the upfront costs of some additional blood testing and a heart scan, the dramatic reduction in need for medications, reduced heart attack, diabetes, and many other chronic conditions add up to a huge cost savings, much as Tosh, Inc. employees have enjoyed.
The Federal government has been looking towards large hospital systems to lead the way in healthcare delivery, systems that employ their physicians and possess economies of scale. But I say the answer to reducing healthcare costs will NEVER be found in hospital systems. Healthcare cost savings will be realized by delivering truly effective health solutions directly to people themselves, much as we do in Track Your Plaque.
Many people ask: "How can wheat be bad if it's in the Bible?"
Wheat is indeed mentioned many times in the Bible, sometimes literally as bread, sometimes metaphorically for times of plenty or freedom from starvation. Moses declared the Promised Land "a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey" (Deuteronomy 8:8).
Wheat is a fixture of religious ceremony: sacramental bread in the Eucharist of the Christian church, the host of the Holy Communion in the Catholic church, matzoh for Jewish Passover, barbari and sangak are often part of Muslim ritual. Wheat products have played such roles for millenia.
So how can wheat be bad?
What we call wheat today is quite different from the wheat of Biblical times. Emmer and einkorn wheat were the original grains harvested from wild growths, then cultivated. Triticum aestivum, the natural hybrid of emmer and goatgrass, also entered the picture, gradually replacing emmer and einkorn.
The 25,000+ wheat strains now populating the farmlands of the world are considerably different from the bread wheat of Egyptians, different in gluten content, different in gluten structure, different in dozens of other non-gluten proteins, different in carbohydrate content. Modern wheat has been hybridized, introgressed, and back-bred to increase yield, make a shorter stalk in order to hold up to greater seed yield, along with many other characteristics. Much of the genetic work to create modern wheat strains are well-intended to feed the world, as well as to provide patent-protected seeds for agribusiness.
What is not clear to me is whether original emmer, einkorn, and Triticum aestivum share the adverse health effects of modern wheat.
Make no mistake about it: Modern wheat underlies an incredible range of modern illnesses. But do these primitive wheats, especially the granddaddy of them all, einkorn, also share these effects or is it a safe alternative--if you can get it?
I've ordered 2 lb of einkorn grain, unground, from Massachusetts organic farmer, Eli Rogosa, who obtained einkorn seed from the Golan Heights in the Middle East. We will be hand-grinding the wheat and making einkorn bread. We will eat it and see what happens.
Wheat starches are composed of polymers (repeating chains) of the sugar, glucose. 75% of wheat carbohydrate is the chain of branching glucose units, amylopectin, and 25% is the linear chain of glucose units, amylose.
Both amylopectin and amylose are digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme, amylase, in the human gastrointestinal tract. Amylopectin is more efficiently digested to glucose, while amylose is less efficiently digested, some of it making its way to the colon undigested.
Amylopectin is therefore the “complex carbohydrate” in wheat that is most closely linked to its blood sugar-increasing effect. But not all amylopectin is created equal. The structure of amylopectin varies depending on its source, differing in its branching structure and thereby efficiency of amylase accessibility.
Legumes like kidney beans contain amylopectin C, the least digestible—hence the gas characteristic of beans, since undigested amylopectin fragments make their way to the colon, whereupon colonic bacteria feast on the undigested starches and generate gas, making the sugars unavailable for you to absorb.
Amylopectin B is the form found in bananas and potatoes and, while more digestible than bean amylopectin C, still resists digestion to some degree.
The most digestible is amylopectin A, the form found in wheat. Because it is the most readily digested by amylase, it is the form that most enthusiastically increases blood sugar. This explains why, gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a much greater degree than, say, chickpeas.
The amylopectin A of wheat products, “complex” or no, might be regarded as a super-carbohydrate, a form of highly digestible carbohydrate that is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than nearly all other carbohydrate foods.
10,000 years ago, Neolithic humans did not obtain wheat products from the bagel shop, grocery store, or Krispy Kreme. They obtained wheat by locating a nearby wild-growing field of wild emmer or einkorn wheat grass, then harvesting it with their stone sickles.
Neolithic humans, such as the Natufians of the Fertile Crescent, carried their freshly-cut wheat home, then ground it by hand using homemade mortar and pestle. As yeast-raised bread was still some 5000 years in the future, emmer and einkorn wheat was not used to bake bread, but was consumed as a porridge in bowls. Einkorn has the simplest genetic code of 14 chromosomes, while emmer has 28 chromosomes.
A third variety of wheat appeared on the scene around 9000 years ago, a natural hybridization between emmer and goat grass, yielding the 42-chromosome Triticum aestivum species. Egyptians learned how to cause wheat to rise around 3000 BC, yielding bread, rather than the unleavened flatbreads of their predecessors.
From the original three basic varieties of wheat available to Neolithic man, over the past 30 years wheat has exploded to over 25,000 varieties. Where did the other 24,997+ strains come from?
In the 1980s, thousands of new wheat strains arose from hybridization experiments, many of them conducted in Mexico. Then, in the late 1980s, genetic engineering quietly got underway in which geneticists inserted or deleted single genes, mostly designed to generate specific characteristics, such as height, yield per acre, drought resistance, but especially resistance to various pesticides and weed killers. The fruits of these efforts were introduced into the market in 1994. Most of the genetically modified foods were thought to be only minor modifications of the unmodified original and thus no safety testing in animals or humans was conducted.
We now have many thousands of wheat strains that are different in important ways from original emmer, einkorn, and Triticum aestivum wheat. Interestingly, it has been suggested that einkorn wheat fails to provoke the same immune response characteristic of celiac disease provoked by modern wheat gluten, suggesting a different amino acid structure in gluten proteins. Another difference: Emmer wheat is up to 40% protein, compared to around 12% protein for modern wheat.
In other words, the wheat of earlier agricultural humans, including the wheat of Biblical times, is NOT the wheat of 2010. Modern wheat is quite a different thing with differing numbers of chromosomes, different genes due to human manipulation, varying gluten protein composition, perhaps other differences.
Somewhere in the shuffle and genetic sleight-of-hand that has occurred over the last 30 years, wheat changed. What might have been the "staff of life" has now become the cause of an incredible array of diseases of "wheat" intolerance.
A 60-some year old man heard that nattokinase "thinned the blood." So he had been taking it for the past 6 months.
One week before he came to see me, he abruptly became quite breathless. He was unable to walk more than 20 feet or bend over to tie his shoes due to the breathlessness.
He came to see me in the office. I was alarmed by how breathless he was without signs of heart failure or other obvious explanation. I sent him for an immediate CT pulmonary angiogram. Within 30 minutes, we had the diagnosis: a large "saddle" pulmonary embolus, meaning a large blood clot that straddled the right and left main pulmonary arteries. One wrong move and . . . bang! He would have been dead within a couple of minutes, since a large clot can completely occlude the large arteries feeding the lung, essentially corking any blood circuiting through the lungs and back to the left side of the heart. (Causing, incidentally, electromechanical dissociation, in which the heart keeps beating for a few minutes but no blood is being pumped. CPR can keep you alive for a few minutes, then it's over.)
When I advised the patient of the diagnosis (after initiating the REAL anticoagulants), he said, "But I was taking nattokinase!"
Exactly. Blood clots are no laughing matter. They are potentially fatal events. Betting your life on some company's advertisement is nothing short of foolish.
Anyone who reads The Heart Scan Blog knows that I am an avid supporter of nutritional supplements. I even write articles and consult for the supplement industry. But I truly despise hearing unfounded marketing claims that some supplement companies will make in the pursuit of a fast buck.
There is no doubt that we need better, safer methods to deal with dangerous blood clots, whether in the lung, pelvis, or other areas. But, before anyone takes a leap based on the extravagant marketing claims made by a supplement manufacturer, you want to be damn sure there are real data--not marketing claims, REAL data--before you use something like nattokinase in place of a proven therapy.
Don't confuse the very interesting, though unpalatable, natto with nattokinase. Natto contains vitamin K2 and some other interesting compounds, including nattokinase.
Wheat is among the most destructive components of the human diet, a food that is responsible for inflammatory disease, diabetes, heart disease, several forms of intestinal diseases, schizophrenia, bipolar illness, ADHD, behavioral outbursts in autistic children . . . just to name a few.
But why?
Wheat is mostly carbohydrate. That explains its capacity to cause blood sugar to increase after eating, say, a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread. The rapid release of sugars likely underlies its capacity to create visceral fat, what I call "wheat belly."
But neither the carbohydrate nor the other components, like bran and B vitamins, can explain all the other adverse health phenomena of wheat. So what is it in wheat that, for instance, worsens auditory hallucinations in paranoid schizophrenics? Is it the gluten?
First of all, what is gluten?
Gluten protein is the focus of most wheat research conducted by food manufacturers and food scientists, since it is the component of wheat that confers the unique properties of dough, allowing a pizza maker to roll and toss pizza crust in the air and mold it into shape. The distinctive “doughy” quality of the simple mix of wheat flour and water, unlike cornstarch or rice starch, for instance, properties that food scientists call “viscoelasticity” and “cohesiveness,” are due to the gluten. Wheat is mostly carbohydrate, but the 10-15% protein content is approximately 80% gluten. Wheat without gluten would lose its unique qualities that make it desirable to bakers and pizza makers. Gluten is also the component of wheat most confidently linked to immune diseases like celiac.
The structure of gluten proteins has proven frustratingly elusive to characterize, as it changes over time and varies from strain to strain. But an understanding of gluten structure may be part, perhaps most, of the answer to the question of why wheat provokes negative effects in humans.
The term “gluten” encompasses two primary families of proteins, the gliadins and the glutenens. The gliadins, one of the protein groups that trigger the immune response in celiac disease, has three subtypes: a/ß-gliadins, ?-gliadins, and ?-gliadins. The glutenins are repeating structures, or polymers, of more basic protein structures.
Beyond gluten, the other 20% or so of non-gluten proteins in wheat include albumins, prolamins, and globulins, each of which can also vary from strain to strain. In total, there are over 1000 other proteins that serve functions from protection of the grain from pathogens, to water resistance, to reproductive functions. There are agglutinins, peroxidases, a-amylases, serpins, and acyl CoA oxidases, not to mention five forms of glycerinaldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenases. I shouldn’t neglect to mention the globulins, ß-purothionin, puroindolines a and b, tritin, and starch synthases.
As if this protein/enzyme smorgasbord weren’t enough, food processors have also turned to fungal enzymes, such as cellulases, glucoamylases, xylanases, and ß-xylosidases to enhance leavening and texture. Many bakers also add soy flour to enhance mixing and whiteness, which introduces yet another collection of proteins and enzymes.
In short, wheat is not just a simple gluten protein with some starch and bran. It is a complex collection of biological material that varies according to its genetic code.
While wheat is primarily carbohydrate, it is also a mix of gluten protein which can vary in structure from strain to strain, as well as a highly variable mix of non-gluten proteins. Wheat has evolved naturally to only a modest degree, but it has changed dramatically under the influence of agricultural scientists. With human intervention, wheat strains are bred and genetically manipulated to obtain desirable characteristics, such as height (ranging from 18 inches to over 4 feet tall), “clinginess” of the seeds, yield per acre, and baking or viscoelastic properties of the dough. Various chemicals are also administered to fight off potential pathogens, such as fungi, and to activate the expression of protective enzymes within the wheat itself to “inoculate” itself against invading organisms.
From the original two strains of wheat consumed by Neolithic humans in the Fertile Crescent 9000 years ago (Emmer and Einkorn), we now have over 200,000 strains of wheat virtually all of which are the product of genetic manipulations that have modified the protein structure of wheat. The extraordinary complexity of wheat proteins have therefore created a huge black box of uncertainty in pinpointing which protein causes what.
But there's an easy cure for the uncertainty: Don't eat it.
The concept of glycemic index is meant to help determine what foods raise blood sugar a lot vs. what foods raise blood sugar a little. Dr. Jennie Brand-Miller's searchable database can be found here.
I have to admit that glycemic index provided me with a sense of false assurance for some years. It screwed up my health until I came to understand the issues a lot better.
For those of you just starting out in nutritional conversations, glycemic index (GI) represents a comparison of the blood glucose area-under-the-curve (AUC) over 2 hours after consuming 50 grams of the food in question compared to the AUC of glucose or white bread. Volunteers involved in developing these values are healthy people who are generally of normal weight.
Glucose, by definition, has a GI of 100. An equal quantity of sucrose (50% glucose, 50% fructose) has a GI of 60, lower than glucose. An equal quantity of whole wheat bread has a GI of 68-77 (Yes: The GI of whole wheat is higher than sucrose). Non-carbohydrate foods, such as eggs or avocado, have no GI since they do not impact on blood glucose.
Because the GI is also sensitive to how much carbohydrate is contained, the concept of Glycemic Load (GL) was introduced:
GL = (GI x amount of carbohydrate) / 100
GL is therefore the GI that incorporates the glycemic potential of the food of interest. GI does not vary with portion size; GL varies with portion size.
Let's take whole wheat pasta, a food regarded by most people as a healthy choice. Whole wheat pasta has a GI of 55--fairly low--and a GL of 29. A serving of 180 g (approximately 6 oz cooked) provides 50 g carbohydrates.
People who advocate that low-glycemic index foods would say that this is a desirable profile and should therefore replace high-glycemic index foods.
I say WRONG. First of all, most of us are not slender 20-somethings. We will therefore not show the same response as a young, slender person (like the GI volunteers), but will show exagerrated blood sugar responses. So this much low-glyemic index whole wheat pasta will typically yield a blood sugar of 120-200 mg/dl in non-diabetic people, high enough to trigger glycation. Sure, a high-glycemic index food, such as white flour birthday cake with plenty of sugary icing, might trigger a blood sugar of 140-250 mg/dl, much worse. But that doesn't make the lower blood sugar following pasta any less bad--it's still terrible.
Another issue: GI is assessed over a 2-hour timeline. What if blood sugar remains high in a sustained way, say, over 6 hours? That's precisely what whole wheat pasta will do: Keep blood sugar high for an extended period.
So not only does a low-glycemic index food like pasta increase blood sugar in most of us extravagantly, it does so in a sustained way.
Lastly, low-glycemic index pasta still triggers small LDL particles to an extreme degree, as I discussed in the previous Heart Scan Blog post, Small LDL: Complex vs. simple carbohydrates.
Don't be false reassured by the notion of low GI or GL. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that NO glycemic index is a GOOD glycemic index (or load). The foods we want to dominate our diet are the foods that aren't even listed in the GI database.