Rehab plan focuses on diet

By DAN RICE, Staff Writer

link to article

Audrey Sunnyboy noticed a troubling trend when she entered the drug and alcohol treatment field in 1990.

"I was watching people and was realizing that most of the Alaska Native people did not recover from alcoholism," she said. "And as I was going along, I would ask, 'Did you ever go to AA?' Then they would say, 'No, because I didn't want to talk.'"

Sunnyboy said the realization that AA's 12-step program does not work for everyone, especially people who are reluctant to talk about themselves, is what led to her interest in providing an alternative form of treatment.

Last month, Sunnyboy, a 57-year-old certified traditional counselor originally from Nenana, opened the Sunny Denyaave Center, an office where she hopes to help alcoholics and drug users quit their habits by repairing their bodies through nutrient replacement and proper diet.

Her strategy is based on the work of Joan Matthews Larson, a Minnesota doctor who operates nutrition-based recovery centers and has authored books about her technique.

Sunnyboy spent a year working at Larson's Health Recovery Center in Minnesota in 1999 and has been trying to start her own center in Alaska ever since. The technique is based on the theory that drugs and alcoholism are treatable physical diseases, not moral flaws.

"The way AA looks at it and the way most people look at it is as weak-willed, psychological behavior," Sunnyboy said. "What (Larson) and the other doctors say is that that is not so. An alcoholic or person who is addicted to drugs is not nutritionally sound."

With her rented office in Regency Court Mall, Sunnyboy said she plans to coach clients through a six-week program aimed at repairing the body through introducing a host of vitamins and nutrients and improving the diet.

Curbing drug and alcohol cravings can be as simple as changing what people eat, she said.

The main culprit for promoting alcoholism is sugar, she said.

"Sugar and alcohol cause the same reaction in the body," said Sunnyboy, whose computer desk is stacked with books including a sugar-free cookbook and William Duffy's "Sugar Blues."

Sunnyboy explained that sugar and alcohol consumption both result in the pancreas increasing blood sugar and releasing insulin. Continued sugar consumption, she said, causes the pancreas to become "trigger happy," producing an imbalance that leads to feelings of irritability and cravings for alcohol and drugs.

She said that reducing a person's carbohydrate intake and adding high-protein foods to their diet will stabilize the body. Combined with the introduction of vitamins, everything from magnesium to vitamin B, the goal of the improved diet is to replenish nutrients needed to restore balance in the body and brain.

"That's what this treatment program does is to explain why the body does this," Sunnyboy said. "You control the cravings with nutrition, you learn to eat smaller, protein-packed meals, you learn how to maintain your body."

Sunnyboy, who quit drinking and doing drugs at age 40, said she first became interested in nutrition-based recovery after reading Larson's "Seven Weeks to Sobriety." In the book, Larson wrote that her son committed suicide after a short bout of alcoholism, leading to her search for a better treatment method. She hypothesized that every alcoholic fits into one of four categories based largely on their body's composition--most are hypoglecimic--and that dietary changes can improve someone's condition in almost every case.

"Alcoholism is not a character defect. It is not the sign of a weak will. It is not a bad habit that needs to be broken. It is a devastating physical disease that damages both mind and body," Larson wrote.

Larson's book and other nutrition-based recovery methods are gaining popularity throughout the drug and alcohol treatment field, said Ann Dapice, vice-president of T.K. Wolf, Inc., a Tulsa, Okla.-based recovery and research center that formed as an alternative to traditional methods.

Dapice said the main factor preventing nutrition-based recovery and other programs that treat alcoholism as a physical defect from gaining widespread acceptance is that AA is still considered to be the only treatment option.

"You've got a very old guard of alcoholism and drug treatment people," she said. "They say it's a disease, but they treat it like it's a moral issue. It's very hard to convince old 12-step people to change."

Dapice has a personal reason to be frustrated by what she said is a lack of progressiveness in the alcoholism-treatment field. She said her son survived cancer with treatment only to later die due to symptoms of alcoholism.

Sunnyboy's first test subject was her fiancee, Harry Littlefield.

A disabled Vietnam veteran, Littlefield said he started drinking and doing light drugs almost every day during the 1990s after his deteriorating physical condition ended his ability to work as an electrician.

Littlefield said he gradually built up his body through taking nutrients such as cod liver oil and calcium. Once he added an improved diet, Littlefield said he started feeling better, first physically then mentally.

"After she built me back me up from all the vitamins and everything, I could think a lot better," he said, adding that he quit drinking and drugs about two weeks after starting the program.

Sunnboy said that she put up her own money to rent her new office. She said that after spending a year working with Larson, she made it her personal goal to bring the program north. Sunnyboy acknowledged that she faces plenty of challenges in trying to operate a center based on a technique that is not widely accepted. However, she said many effective practices, such as Dr. Robert Atkins' low-carbohydrate diet, were not popular at first.

"They laughed at him until he passed away," she said.

Reporter Dan Rice can be reached at drice~newsminer.com or 459-7503.

That's fascinating. I've read about the alcohol/hypoglycemic connection before. Let's hope it's a trend.

I totally agree that what you eat is directly related to craving alcohol. I used to drink alot of beer. I craved it all the time and would have one or two every day. Since I have been eating low carb I sometimes have a Sleeman's Clear beer (2.5 carbs) or a Light Source cooler (2 carbs) on the weekend but I no longer crave it.

My husband on the other hand eats alot of carbs (he's naturally thin) and drinks alot of beer.

Very interesting. It's been known for some time that alcohol (particularly binge drinking) causes your blood sugar to go all over the map, so I found it strange when I heard that AA meetings can be infamous for having coffee and donuts. A disease that has such physical consequences has to be approached medically and nutritionally, in addition to emotional/spiritual work. Good for Ms Sunnyboy.

This is a wonderful article - and so very true! I'm living proof of it. Thank you for posting this, got beer.

The only problem with what I read is that Alcoholism isn't just a physical problem.

So you can get rid of the cravings through nutrition that's wonderful but then you are left with the same person who when stone cold sober forgets the trouble that alcohol brings and will pick it up again.

More power to her, I'm not knocking her method. Even though AA is free and I'm sure hers isn't. Maybe in 70 years she will have helped millions get and stay sober as a result of her vitamins.

This is a very interesting idea. Here's a non-PC take on this:

Consider the fact that the highest rates of alcoholism in the world are in the northern latitudes, Inuits, Finns, Russians, etc, and that these peoples historically relied more on protein and fat for the their calories and less on carbs. They were late to the "benefits" of the agricultural age.

This could also tie in with the other article today about which states in the US have the fastest growth rates of obesity. Are the states with the largest number of poor, whose diets are heavy on carbs, the states with the highest rates of alcoholism?

wow. this is interesting. maybe the non-PC take has some truth to it...northern dwellers aren't 'used' to the combination of alcohol+agriculture, of course, wide-spread alcohol consumption is largely the result of agriculture...hmm...are we onto something?

Well, my native american ancestors were from the southern united states and alcoholism is common among them, so i think that latitude doesn't necessarily matter. Nyah Levi

First thing that came to mind when I read that article -




I believe this theory to be true. Before lowcarb, I used to drink a couple of glasses of wine every night, often with chocolate. After LC, I virtually stopped drinking, and not intentionally - I just didn't think of it! Now I'll have a glass of wine if I go out to a nice restaurant for dinner, but the rest of the time I don't think about it, and don't miss it.

Perhaps the historical diet and the coming late to agriculture are the factors in higher rates of alcoholism.

I don't believe that nutritional deficiencies are the reason people seek alcohol.

However, I do believe there is a correlation between someone who seeks sugar, and drugs or alcohol. It is known that manic depressive people often crave sugar. It may be a matter of some people needing to seek the stimulation of substances to try and balance out their own imbalances. Self-medication via diet and/or drugs. It may be useful for affected people to understand why they are craving these things, however, I don't know that it will allow them to quit needing them. The chemical imbalance that gave them the craving, is still present.

If sugar/carbs led to the chemical imbalance in the first place, wouldn't we all be alcoholics or drug abusers?

I refer to a "neurochemical imbalance" that causes us to have emotional problems such as manic-depression or ADHD, but I'm not necessarily a big fan of drug therapies for these conditions. I don't think we have enough knowledge to understand just what is going on, and there are no doubt a whole spectrum of neurochemical combinations that makes a simple one-drug-fits-all treatment, impractical at best and detrimental in a majority of cases. In the final analysis, I don't know that we can necessarily expect to "cure" people with these afflictions, any more than we can expect to make everyone blue-eyed and six feet tall.

Oh and putting an alcoholic on a low carb diet might just help their life in a nutritional sense. They will be a more healthy alcoholic. On the other hand, alcoholics I've known aren't real interested in taking care of themselves, nutritionally or otherwise. And if they are, maybe they are simply more likely to try and break their addiction. In which case, going on the LC diet is once again simply a correlatoin and not cause-and-effect.

Interesting you should mention this....I have Native American ancestors also, and my reading about them suggests that NA's ate a primarily protein diet with little sugar/carbs. When they were exposed to a European diet including sugar, carbs, and alcohol, they basically went crazy/became addicts because their bodies had never had to deal with this kind of food - so they dealt with it badly.

Perhaps it's not about latitude, but about the dietary habits (for literally thousands of years) of our ethnic ancestors coming down to us genetically vs. what food is socially acceptable/culturally common/available now (the last several hundred years.)

I'm not sure if I stated the above very well, but it explained a lot to ME about my own behavior/addictions.