Low-carb diets work. Why does the American Diabetes Association push insulin instead? : LC Research/Media Forum : Active Low-Carber Forums

#1 ^

Sat, Apr-20-24, 05:18

Demi

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Low-carb diets work. Why does the American Diabetes Association push insulin instead?

Quote:

Low-carb diets work. Why does the American Diabetes Association push insulin instead?

The American Diabetes Association takes millions from companies that stand to profit from our reliance on drugs. Is that affecting their guidance?

Neil Barsky

For a glimpse into how big business influences the $4tn US healthcare system, look no further than the world’s most powerful diabetes advocacy and research non-profit, the American Diabetes Association (ADA).

Diabetes afflicts 38 million Americans, with another 90 million considered pre-diabetic. Every year the disease claims the lives of over 100,000 Americans and disproportionately affects people of color. It is also ruinously expensive, as doctors visits, hospital stays, insulin, blood test strips, leg amputations, continuous glucose monitors and numerous glucose-lowering drugs add up to about $400bn a year. To put it bluntly, we are losing the war on diabetes.

And unlike many other diseases – such as certain cancers, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, or Crohn’s – type 2 diabetes is reversible.

This bears repeating and elaboration. Numerous nutritional studies have shown that diabetes can be reversed through a strict diet low in carbohydrates, the macronutrient that people with diabetes cannot metabolize without the help of drugs. The ADA concedes this – but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the drug therapies or the foods and recipes that the organization recommends to people suffering from the condition.

In 2020, the then ADA president, Tracey D Brown, rocked the diabetes world when she disclosed that she had type 2 diabetes and had gotten off insulin and other medications by adhering to a low-carbohydrate diet.

“Here is what I do. And it is pretty simple,” she said in an interview that might have made the ADA’s pharmaceutical benefactors crazy. “Elevated blood sugars happen when you have sugars in your body and you don’t have insulin to manage the sugars in your body. Carbohydrates turn into sugar. So I just try to get people to be aware of how many carbohydrates you are actually putting in your body.”

The very next day, the low-carb-focused website DietDoctor.com published a “breaking news” story about the “highly encouraging news” that “the influential CEO of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) is on the record as a low-carb eater”. The following year, Brown resigned her position at the ADA to take a senior role at Walgreens.

The evidence that low-carb diets can effectively treat diabetes has been around at least since before insulin’s discovery in 1921, when doctors often prescribed very low-carb (ie low-sugar), fat-rich diets to their patients. In the late 18th century, as recounted in Gary Taubes’s book Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin and Successful Treatments, a Scottish doctor by the name of John Rollo helped two patients with diabetes (a rarer condition those days) return to health by restricting their carbohydrate intake.

“The ingenious author of the work now before us,” a 1797 article in the Edinburgh review Annals of Medicine said, “recommends a mode of treatment, which in some cases, has been decidedly productive of remarkable benefit.”

In 2019, the ADA quietly and grudgingly acknowledged the low-carb diet’s effectiveness. In a journal article on dietary guidelines in its medical journal Diabetes Care, the ADA gave the low-carb diet its due:

“Low carbohydrate eating patterns, especially very low-carbohydrate eating patterns, have been shown to reduce A1C” – the metric that measures one’s blood sugar levels over a period of time – “and the need for antihyperglycemic medications. These eating patterns are among the most studied eating patterns for people with type 2 diabetes.”

Unfortunately, the ADA still sees diabetes as a progressive disease that gets worse over time. It still sanctions insulin therapy for people with type 2 diabetes, a remedy many doctors say will harm patients in the long run.

“Type 2 diabetes is a condition of too-high blood sugar and too-high insulin where the body is resisting the effects of insulin, and signaling that it has stored enough,” Mariela Glandt, a Harvard-trained endocrinologist who prescribes a low-carbohydrate diet to her patients in the Bronx, told me. “Giving insulin to someone with diabetes is like giving more alcohol to an alcoholic when they are shaking. It will treat the symptom – ie, the high sugar will come down – but in the end we make the disease worse and increase the chances of long-term complications.”

As I previously wrote about in the Guardian, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes three years ago and prescribed insulin shots and metformin, but was able to get off all medication by adhering to a strict low-carbohydrate diet.

The experience left me baffled. I couldn’t understand why only a tiny minority of clinicians seem to recommend a diet-based approach to diabetes treatment, rather than the insulin-heavy regimen I was initially prescribed. Or why the ADA’s huge educational campaigns soft-pedaled the diet, and preferred to let millions of people with type 2 diabetes take numerous medications or shoot themselves up with insulin instead.

This is not a minor matter; if people with diabetes were told clearly and unambiguously that if they stopped eating carbohydrate-rich foods they could probably arrest or reverse their diabetes, could thousands of lives and billions of dollars be saved?

“The reality is that if you want to treat type 2 diabetes effectively, the first thing you have to do is throw out the ADA’s dietary guidelines,” Sami Inkinen told me. Inkinen founded Virta Health, a healthcare startup that treats people with diabetes by prescribing a very low-carb diet. “The ADA has been slow to accept change. Very slow.”

The ADA’s messaging seems almost calculated to add to the confusion – as if, after 80 years of existence and billions of dollars spent on medical research, the ADA is merely a helpless observer in the low-carb diet debates.

“From carb-free to low-carb, to whole and empty carbs, it’s hard to know what it all means,” the ADA website reads. “‘Carbohydrates’ or ‘carbs’ get a lot of attention these days and it’s no secret that carbs can affect your blood glucose (blood sugar). You might be wondering if you should eat less of them, or even eat them at all. You’re not alone!”

The ADA’s chief scientific and medical officer, Dr Robert A Gabbay, said that the ADA’s dietary guidelines were the result of a rigorous scientific process undertaken annually by a team of medical experts who scrutinize the latest studies about how best to treat type 2 diabetes. “There is no ‘one size fits all’,” he told me. “There is more than one way for people to successfully manage their diabetes.”

He added that corporate funders have no say in the organization’s guidelines: “The standards of care process receives no funding from the industry, [and] our guidelines and recommendations are based on science.”

The ADA has a major say in how diabetes is managed globally. Its medical practice committees issue Standards of Care medical guidelines to American physicians and doctors around the world. The organization boasts a $100m annual budget, 600,000 volunteers and has 20,000 members from the healthcare community. It holds bike-a-thons and walk-a-thons, and publishes dietary guidelines and recipes that are downloaded by the millions every year. It publishes academic journals and holds medical conferences in which the latest research is presented. It funds medical research. It hosts summer camps for children with diabetes.

“Their professional practice committee writes all of the guidelines that we follow,” Kasia Lipska, an endocrinologist at the Yale School of Medicine, told me. “Clinicians have a lot of respect for that body. Their guidelines are the bible for diabetes medical practice.”

The ADA is far from the only obstacle to widespread adoption of a low-carb diet. Absent a national health education initiative that links carbohydrates to the diabetes epidemic, low-carb clinicians will be a voice in the wilderness. It can be challenging for many people with diabetes to forgo the breads, sweets, pastas and starches that form the basis of many diets. And given the dearth of healthy eating options on the shelves of many American supermarkets, some clinicians I spoke with, each of whom was dedicated to their patients’ wellbeing, said it was more effective to simply prescribe their patients pharmaceuticals.

“The low-carb diet can resonate,” a retired endocrinologist told me. “But of all the patients I had who adopted low-carb diets, very few were from lower socio-economic classes.”

Diabetes was hijacked as a business opportunity almost from the moment that insulin – the hormone that people with type 1 diabetes cannot produce – was first discovered by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto. In 1923, the University of Toronto board of governors sold the patent for insulin to Eli Lilly and Company for $1, because Lilly was better able to manufacture and distribute the synthetic hormone. “Insulin does not belong to me,” the insulin medication’s co-inventor, Sir Frederick G Banting, said. “It belongs to the world.”

Eventually two international drug companies – now known as Novo Nordisk and Novartis – wrangled patents as well.

“The reason the insulin story is so outrageous is that the inventors of insulin wanted insulin to belong to everybody,” David Mitchell, the founder of the non-profit organization Patients For Affordable Drugs, told me. “Somehow these three drug companies got together to create a global oligopoly. It’s a remarkable thing when you consider the birth of insulin.”

The ADA’s corporate contributions are not precisely traceable. Based on financial filings, this is what we know: between 2017 and 2024, more than 50 pharmaceutical and device manufacturers contributed over $134m to the organization, or roughly 20% of its total funding. Food industry contributions were not broken out.

It isn’t difficult to see how contributors to the ADA get bang for their buck. The ADA’s social media feed is a virtual supermarket of products purveyed by its funders.

Need a diabetes test? Go to CVS! ($10m 3 year partnership in 2021.) Want to learn more about kidney care? Do it with DaVita! ($1.5m in 2024.) Want to donate to the ADA? Just head over to your local GNC store and put your money in the tin can. ($100k in 2024.) Needless to say, a low-carbohydrate product that lowers blood sugar also reduces need for the drugs and ancillary products that make diabetes such a boon for the healthcare industry.

In 2021, Patients for Affordable Drugs published a landmark report exploring connections between 15 patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry. The ADA scored lowest because it: “Accepts funding from pharma industry” and also because it “Has board members with financial ties to pharma industry; Shares lobbyist and/or lobby firm with pharma,” the report said.

Reading the ADA’s publications, one would get the impression it is a grassroots organization supported by moms and pops. A banner on their website blares: “Your Support Goes Twice as Far!” Every few seconds, a pop-up announces a new small donation: “Patrick F donated $100.” “L Robert H. donated $12.” “Al S donated $20.” These small donors may not know that, in 2021, the Patients for Affordable Drugs report, found that a third “of the members of the ADA board of directors have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry”.

Diabetes is a national scandal hiding in plain sight. Despite infinite medical innovations, including glucose-lowering drugs, fast- and slow-acting insulin, A1C tests, continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps, more than 100,000 Americans die from the condition annually. In 1980, before many of these medical breakthroughs were available, that number was 35,000.

The big winners of the ADA’s cozy arrangements with industry, of course, are the pharmaceutical companies that enjoyed an estimated $58bn in annual sales in 2017, and the medical device and food companies who donate to the ADA in exchange for recipe endorsements.

The losers are the millions of people with diabetes who suffer amputations, blindness, neuropathy, often daily shoot themselves with insulin and eat carbohydrate-rich foods because they simply are not informed about their healthier options. It is not too late for the ADA to, loudly and in no uncertain terms, tell people with diabetes the truth. It might lose funders, but it would also save lives.

Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of The Marshall Project

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...tion-big-pharma

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#2 ^

Sat, Apr-20-24, 05:24

Demi

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She was fired after not endorsing Splenda-filled salads to people with diabetes. Why?

Elizabeth Hanna says she was fired by the American Diabetes Association after refusing to approve recipes heaped with the additive made by a major donor

Neil Barsky

Elizabeth Hanna had a simple job: help people with diabetes figure out what to eat. Anyone with common sense knows this should probably not entail foods that might increase people’s risk of getting diabetes. But that’s not necessarily the thinking at the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the world’s leading diabetes research and patient advocacy group, which also receives millions of dollars from sponsors in the pharmaceutical, food and agricultural industries.

According to a lawsuit Hanna recently filed against the ADA, the organization – which endorses recipes and food plans on its website and on the websites of “partner” food brands – tried to get her to greenlight recipes that she believed flew in the face of the ADA’s mission. These included recipes like a “cucumber and onion salad” made with a third of a cup of Splenda granulated artificial sweetener, “autumnal sheet-pan veggies” with a quarter cup of Splenda monk fruit sweetener and a “cranberry almond spinach salad” with a quarter cup of Splenda monkfruit sweetener.

Guess which company gave more than $1m to the ADA in 2022? Splenda.

Hanna, a registered dietitian nutritionist and certified diabetes care and education specialist with “16 years of experience in the field of medical nutrition therapy”, according to the lawsuit, says the ADA and in particular Nicole Johnson, the ADA’s vice-president of operations for the science and healthcare division – “a former Miss America who has traded upon the dreams and aspirations of people with diabetes to reach fame and fortune” – pressured her to endorse what she believed were unhealthy and unethical claims.

Hanna refused, according to the lawsuit, and complained internally; she was fired in October of last year, in what she believes was an act of retaliation and silencing. Her lawsuit also alleges that a higher-up, “apparently conscious that her prior statements would not support a poor performance finding for Hanna … fraudulently altered, modified and/or destroyed” a performance review. The ADA denies the allegations made in Hanna’s lawsuit.

The Hanna lawsuit should be read against the backdrop of the global diabetes and obesity epidemics. The United States has some of the best medical research institutions in the world, and other countries look to us for guidance on how to best treat diseases such as diabetes. But as someone who was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes three years ago, I can attest that the dietary and medicinal guidance one gets from doctors and the ADA can be worse than the condition. The result is what the former head of the World Health Organization has called “a slow-motion disaster”, that led to the deaths of 2 million people in 2019.

Hanna filed her lawsuit against the ADA in New Jersey in November. Her lawsuit paints a picture of an organization more beholden to its corporate benefactors than the 127 million Americans with diabetes or pre-diabetes – echoing the kinds of criticisms that you can read in online diabetes forums, where one person charges the ADA with existing “in service of physicians and sponsors, not patients. They are in the business of selling pharmaceutical and nutritional products. It’s in their best interest for people to remain sick.”

Another complains: “I truly believe that the entire medical establishment, including the ADA, wants to keep diabetics diabetic in order to continue to reap the [revenue] paid for prescriptions every year.”

That might sound harsh. Yet, according to Hanna’s lawsuit, the ADA went through “no less than four individuals in the director of nutrition position since 2019 and no less than three individuals in the associate director of nutrition position since 2020”, with previous ADA nutritionists allegedly fired or driven out after refusing to comply with what they believed were unethical and unscientific demands. The lawsuit goes on to suggest that companies such as Splenda had a direct line to the ADA’s highest authorities.

After Hanna declined to approve recipes she considered inappropriate, according to her lawsuit, an ADA colleague advised her that Splenda “would escalate the issue to the ADA’s chief executive officer, Charles Henderson, but instead it appears that Splenda raised the issue to Robert Gabbay MD (“Dr Bob”), chief scientific officer of the science and healthcare division”. Hanna later learned “that Splenda refused to make the suggested changes to bring [the recipes] into conformity with nutritional science and continued to demand approval”.

The Splenda arrangement, the lawsuit argues, was simply “a scheme to defraud the American people by approving and endorsing recipes submitted by Splenda … when the ADA knew that those recipes were contrary to … well-established and emerging scientific principles”.

In 1976, researchers discovered trichlorogalactosucrose, a highly sweet-tasting chemical compound that they dubbed “sucralose”. Splenda successfully marketed sucralose as a sugar substitute; since 1991, Splenda has sold “more than 100 billion yellow packets”, the brand’s website boasts, and become by far the most popular artificial sweetener in the US. (Splenda also sells sugar substitutes derived from natural sources such as monk fruit and stevia.)

Sucralose is far more concentrated than sucrose, the compound in table sugar; the human body cannot metabolize sucralose like sugar, so it passes through without the body absorbing its calories. Sucralose is mixed with fillers to create Splenda, which contains fewer calories than sugar and is allowed to be marketed as a calorie-less sugar substitute, though it does contain some calories.

A large share of Splenda’s consumers are people with diabetes; Splenda advertises its sweeteners as a tool for wellness generally and diabetes management specifically. In a press release this January celebrating Splenda’s 25th anniversary, Ted Gelov, the chair and CEO of the Heartland Food Products Group, Splenda’s parent company, said: “This anniversary is not just about our brand; it’s about the countless individuals who have trusted Splenda to be a part of their health and wellness journey.”

Yet research has suggested that Splenda may wreak havoc on gut biome health and lead to increased glucose intolerance in a way that is similar to regular sugar. In fact, just last summer, at the very same time Hanna was battling with her bosses, the ADA’s own journal Diabetes Care published a study, drawn from 13 years of data from 105,588 participants, that concluded that there were “positive associations between artificial sweetener intakes and increased [type-2 diabetes] risk” that “strengthen the evidence that these additives may not be safe sugar alternatives”.

The World Health Organization has said that non-sugar-sweeteners such as Splenda may contribute to “risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mortality in adults”. According to the CDC, as Hanna’s lawsuit cites, high blood-sugar levels can put a person with diabetes at risk of diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA, which can cause coma or death.

Hanna’s lawsuit says that she told higher-ups at ADA that she was uncomfortable endorsing recipes “that promoted the use of non-nutritive sweeteners, like Splenda, sprinkled on whole foods like vegetables and beans”; that the ADA’s own guidelines banned “approval of recipes that used non-nutritive sweeteners on whole foods”; and that she and her team had only approved Splenda-based recipes in the past in situations in which “the non-nutritive sweeteners were being used to cut down on sugar and calories”.

There is “no reason, other than taking Splenda’s money, for the ADA to recommend that people with diabetes add massive amounts of Splenda to cucumber salad”, Hanna’s complaint argues. In response to questions about the Splenda lawsuit, the ADA said it cannot comment on ongoing litigation.

Heartland Food Products Group rejected the allegations made in Hanna’s lawsuit, and said it had notified her counsel to that effect.

“Any allegation that Heartland Food Products Group, the makers of Splenda Brand sweeteners, was involved in any improper scheme is false and offensive,” it said. “Like many other companies focused on helping people with diabetes and the impact diabetes has on health, Heartland will continue to support the ADA and honorably provide recipes and educational information to help people successfully reduce sugar levels and live happier and healthier lives.”

The Splenda affair is far from the first time the ADA was caught with its hand in the corporate cookie jar. In 2006, the New York Times published an investigation into the ADA’s entanglement with pharmaceutical and food companies. In the article, the ADA’s chief medical officer boasted that the organization had turned down millions of dollars in prospective fees from various food companies interested in forging partnerships. “We tightened things up quite a bit,” Richard Kahn, then the organization’s chief scientific and medical officer, said.

Well, not exactly. In fact, at the time, the ADA had just inked a $1.5m sponsorship deal with Cadbury Schweppes, the world’s largest confectioner. “Maybe the American Diabetes Association should rename itself the American Junk Food Association,” said one consumer advocate.

Kahn next offered one of the most startling comments about nutrition and diabetes one will ever read: “There is not a shred of evidence that sugar, per se, has anything to do with diabetes,” he told the Times.

Last year, the ADA signaled it still has not lost its appetite for carbohydrate-rich foods. In March of 2023, it announced a partnership with the Idaho Potato Commission that made Idaho potatoes the first vegetable to be included in the ADA’s Better Choices For Life program.

“With a mission to prevent and cure diabetes and improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes, the number one question the ADA receives is, what can I eat?” the Idaho Potato Commission press release read. “Many wrongly believe they cannot eat potatoes.” The release goes on to recommend that the potatoes should be prepared with the skins on, and should be baked or boiled, not fried.

Some clinicians say that it is terrible nutritional advice. “Potatoes are a starch and starches are simply chains of glucose, or sugars,” Mariela Glandt, a Harvard-trained endocrinologist who prescribes a low-carbohydrate diet to her patients in the Bronx, told me. “Since diabetes is an intolerance to sugar, potatoes tend to make the diabetes worse. For people with diabetes, a potato is a potato.”

The Idaho Potato Commission donated between $150,000 and $499,000 to the ADA. According to a recent annual report, the commission is the only one of the ADA’s top 35 donors that sells a vegetable.

One hopes that Elizabeth Hanna’s lawsuit helps put an end to the ADA’s practice of taking money from food companies that sell products that can harm people with diabetes. Thanks to the work of journalistic mavericks such as Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz, there is already a vocal public that thinks the ADA is making reckless food recommendations.

In a recent post on Taubes and Teicholz’s Substack publication Unsettled Science, Teicholz poked fun at a recent ADA video featuring its current director of nutrition and wellness (Hanna’s successor, in other words), recommending that people with diabetes fill a full quarter of their plate with carbohydrate-rich foods. The ADA video, which had nearly 2m views, elicited a torrent of negative online reaction, Teicholz noted: “Quite a few [of the comments] wondered the obvious: why tell diabetics to eat starches (carbohydrates) when one could well define diabetes as simply a condition of carbohydrate intolerance? One commenter suggested adding a Coke to complete the meal.”

The United States is a country where cereal companies market their sugary products to children, local news shows promote 7-Eleven’s “Slurpee Day”, vegetables are scarce in many neighborhood stores and nearly 70% of American adults are considered overweight or obese. Type 2 diabetes is a serious and sometimes life-threatening condition that is directly tied to America’s dietary dysfunction. The ADA did not cause the problem. Elizabeth Hanna’s whistleblower lawsuit, however, suggests that the organization’s nutritional advice is actually making it worse.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...iabetes-lawsuit

#3 ^

Sat, Apr-20-24, 15:47

GRB5111

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Demi

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...tion-big-pharma

Quote:

"The ADA is far from the only obstacle to widespread adoption of a low-carb diet. Absent a national health education initiative that links carbohydrates to the diabetes epidemic, low-carb clinicians will be a voice in the wilderness. It can be challenging for many people with diabetes to forgo the breads, sweets, pastas and starches that form the basis of many diets. And given the dearth of healthy eating options on the shelves of many American supermarkets, some clinicians I spoke with, each of whom was dedicated to their patients’ wellbeing, said it was more effective to simply prescribe their patients pharmaceuticals.

“The low-carb diet can resonate,” a retired endocrinologist told me. “But of all the patients I had who adopted low-carb diets, very few were from lower socio-economic classes.”

Diabetes was hijacked as a business opportunity almost from the moment that insulin – the hormone that people with type 1 diabetes cannot produce – was first discovered by a team of researchers at the University of Toronto."

Sad and true. While the ADA may not be the only obstacle, many obedient doctors and medical personnel are blindly following the ADA's recommendations for treatment that have become very lucrative providing ongoing funding of the ADA as payment for continuing to deliver this message. No, it doesn't make sense for anyone who has tried for health by adopting low carb, but the much larger portion of the population listens to medical professionals, and in the U.S., hears the continual drumbeat of prescription ads where people are portrayed as happily dancing their ways to better health in a world where drugs seem to enable people to eat anything their hearts desire. It's a wonderful world if you're employed or subsidized by pharma.

#4 ^

Mon, Apr-22-24, 02:29

WereBear

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The turn of the last century saw incredible gains being made in public health, with sanitation and vaccination, and personal health, as early sulfa drugs and then antibiotics really were miracle cures.

But reading Taubes' book on diabetes explains how we got here. Insulin was an amazing discovery, and they began using it to manage the patient's body so they can "eat normally." To return this person's body to the point where they could overcome the poor diet? Except the industrial diet was just beginning and already creating more issues as the decades rolled on.

By focusing on the body getting injections, they never stopped to consider that the diet they were trying to "normalize the body to" was the problem in the first place. "Just inject insulin to cover" became an attempt to be a pancreas for the patient. Even diabetics on pumps can be considered brittle because they continue to overwhelm their body with too much carbohydrate.

Much like with my illness, they are beating on the same nail over and over instead of continuing to explore different routes. They didn't realize how they were creating insulin resistance with their medical guidelines.

They still say diabetes is an chronic disease which inevitably worsens and leads to terrible complications. Because that's all they see. I got an appointment with a big deal endocriniologist, and I was the slimmest, healthiest, person there. Everyone else was suffering terribly with diabetes, and for 20 minutes I'd seen the chart that suggested a minimum number of carbohydrates.

Has our science gotten so vulnerable to marketing influence of all kinds that they can't get out of their own way? Usually, such crises do create new "schools" of thought, as we see now, but the ones who won't shift are still in charge.

#5 ^

Mon, Apr-22-24, 07:59

Ms Arielle Ms Arielle is offline

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Yup,Its all about the Benjamin's.
I knew a type 1 diabetic that continued to gain weight over the 8 plus years I visited weekly. My son had a weekly play date. Garbage fed to the kids for snacks. Chips, sugary ice pops and such. Never an apple. Never cheese.

While sad when that arrangement came to an end, the bright side was my son was eating less garbagy snacks.

She had no apparent understanding of food. Yet had high tech insulin pumps and the ability to closely monitor her blood sugars.

She put on some 40-50# slowly over the years.looking pudgy and inflamed.

Anything I suggested fell on deaf ears. She was captivated by the medical system using insulin to justify eating SAD.

#6 ^

Mon, Apr-22-24, 10:51

Calianna

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Ms Arielle

~snip~

Anything I suggested fell on deaf ears. She was captivated by the medical system using insulin to justify eating SAD.

It's like that about almost all medicinal breakthroughs lately.

Just read an article this morning from CNN about why weight loss always plateaus, and you stop losing weight, which even happens with WLS and on GLP-1 drugs, although Zepbound allows you to lose weight longer than Wegovy does. They both rely on continually reducing the number of calories you can eat - apparently no consideration at all given to the nutritional composition of those calories, just that you can't eat as much.

[Spoiler alert: They were only comparing diets that are based on reducing calories, meaning they obviously were not figuring any kind of difference in results to anything remotely resembling LC or Keto.]

So the solution?

Developing MORE meds that will allow the overweight to continue to lose weight.

Of course.

Because you can't possibly expect people to change WHAT they eat in any way, just artificially limit how MUCH they can eat. Or cover up the problems they cause with more drugs.

__________

I really do empathize with how difficult it is to completely change how you eat.

For those of us who are a metabolic mess, it requires giving up almost everything that used to be the staple of your diet, and mostly sticking to the perimeter of the grocery store, even avoiding some of the foods found in the perimeter (notably breads and other baked goods, as well as the carbiest produce, such as potatoes)

It also makes it very difficult to go out to eat, since most steak places will use a sugary rub on the meat, a salad will likely have sugar and starch in the dressing, with a bunch of croutons tossed on top of the salad. The side veggies often have sugar or starch in the "seasoning".

The family type restaurants only offer pitifully small servings of protein (usually smothered with some kind of sugar and/or starch based sauce), vegetable oil based fats, and a mile long list of starchy and/or sugary side dishes. (I should add that I live in Pa Dutch country - practically everything has always been sugar and starch based)

I don't mind eating pizza toppings and leaving the crust behind (which we have dubbed "pizza blanks", LOL!), but the pizza sauce is often sweetened, and that sticks to the cheese (which they use as little of as they can get away with, even when you order "EXTRA cheese"). The "meatballs" and sausage on it taste like flour. Pepperoni also has a little sugar in it. The veggie toppings are hopefully fresh and not treated with any kind of sugars.

I'm not saying there's enough carbs in the pizza toppings to truly derail a LC diet, but to someone who has gone without sugar and flour (years and years) long enough to detect the taste of those additives even in small amounts, the pizza tastes nasty. It's just one more genre of restaurant where I can't eat. I feel pretty much confined to Five Guys and Jimmy John's. Or deconstructing sandwiches, and scraping sauces off tiny servings of meat, while leaving a restaurant still hungry.

I don't enjoy eating out at all any more.

What I'm saying is that it's downright difficult to eat like this in the real world, and I think that's part of the reason almost no one in the medical end of things is even slightly pushing diabetics or those with metabolic syndrome to change their diet.

Not that I have any intention of ever going back to the SAD diet, or even compromising by eating starchy/sugary garbage just so I occasionally don't need to cook.

#7 ^

Mon, Apr-22-24, 11:40

CMCM

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It's shameful that the ADA is too much on the money train to address the dietary issue. I just know too many people who were diabetic 2 and changed their diets and got to normal. Equally, there are just too many out there who believe nothing but medicine will work. It's sad. And tragic.

I almost never eat out any more because of all the hidden stuff used in preparing food. I used to enjoy a meal out here and there, but now I actually have little to no desire to eat in any restaurant. Between the hidden sugars I don't want to eat and the hidden gluten that might make me sick, restaurant eating has become a minefield. And on top of all that, the cost of eating out has become ridiculously high. Not worth it in any way.

#8 ^

Mon, Apr-22-24, 14:42

WereBear

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Many people are soothed by doing what authority advises, even if it doesn't work. Nothing I tried for over twenty years ever worked right away and stuck around, until low carb.

I also think there's a lot of voluntary, and involuntary, denial operating, because of the normalization of things that just aren't normal. I watch a lot of "how I did it" videos and my favorite part is that it varies. But what almost everyone has in common is portion size.

If anyone grew up during the Figurine era, this seems impossible. The women's magazines had jaw-wiring articles and tips on using child sized plates and flatware. But I digress.

My point being, I don't need portion control. We eat out at a few locally owned places, when we have errands to run and there's not enough energy between us to also make breakfast. But it's cooked fresh and uses some local products.

A corner cafe we like carries a really good gluten free roll I get as a treat, their bagel breakfast sandwich: only I use the GF roll. As delicious as it is, I wind up eating only a quarter of it as a sandwich, and making it open face, and finally finishing with knife and fork, half the roll not even eaten.

Because it's nice for a few bites, but then I notice that the roll actually blunts the impact of the lox, egg, lettuce and tomato, and cream cheese. That's the tasty part! Yet I lose all appetite for the roll very quickly, but finish every bit of the filling.

The roll is filling, but not satisfying. And I think a lot of people probably do confuse one for the other.

So people wind up with an distorted understanding of what hunger and "full" and satisfied feels like and what they mean. If they are anxious, do they know blood sugar swings can do that? And that depression and fast food go together, though I'm sure people overeat because of depression.

It fills such a giant space in their life that I don't think they can imagine anything less than what they are doing to shut up the hunger, as it is.

They need a whole new way of looking at food. Because I tell people, with utter sincerity, that food has never tasted so good, and yet, I think about food the least I ever have.

#9 ^

Mon, Apr-22-24, 14:56

WereBear

Senior Member

Posts: 14,699

Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
Stats: 220/130/150 Female 67

BF:
Progress: 129%

Location: USA

Quote:

Originally Posted by GRB5111

but the much larger portion of the population listens to medical professionals, and in the U.S., hears the continual drumbeat of prescription ads where people are portrayed as happily dancing their ways to better health in a world where drugs seem to enable people to eat anything their hearts desire.

And it might be as simple as that. That larger portion want to believe the marketing, even though they should know better. But there needs to be an alternative, like the way a medical obesity approach is drugs and surgery, and yet people do lose weight by themselves, without those risks.

We don't even need medical permission to eat meat and eggs, do we? It needs to be a choice, not a demonized repudiation of actual science.

And this is where medical training has drifted to, as a game of Suppress the Symptom and then Suppress the Side Effects goes on. When I'm increasingly certain that, most of the time, it shouldn't.

People are finding that out and getting righteously indignant. Here's an amusing story I see repeated in the low carb/healing community:

Quote:

I was overweight and at the doctor for diabetes/repeated infections/digestive/heart issues, and not a word was said about what I was eating. Then I show up having lost XX pounds with better BP and lowered AIC and tell them what I'm eating.

They frown and say, "I'm worried about your diet."

#10 ^

Today, 10:03

Demi

Strong Girls Rock!

Posts: 26,793

Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160 Female 5'10"

BF:
Progress: 109%

Location: UK

Quote:

Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies? A lawsuit dared to ask

The ADA just settled an explosive legal case accusing the organization of betraying people with diabetes

Neil Barsky

A cloak of silence has descended over the recent whistleblower lawsuit claiming that the American Diabetes Association, or ADA, accepted corporate money in return for recommending recipes that threatened the health of people with diabetes.

Elizabeth Hanna, the ex-ADA chief nutritionist who alleged that her former employer fired her over her refusal to endorse Splenda-filled salads, has quietly settled her case. In a statement to the Guardian, Hanna’s attorney, Lauren Davis, said that “the matter has been resolved”. No details were provided either by Davis or by a spokesperson for the ADA, which declined to comment.

For Hanna, accepting a settlement from the ADA was no doubt a simpler and less stressful and risky alternative to a trial, but for me and the country’s other 38 million people with diabetes, it is a letdown. What a great opportunity a trial would have been to expose the inner workings of the ADA, the patient advocacy organization up to its eyeballs in big-business funding.

I recently wrote about Hanna’s lawsuit as part of our series Death by Diabetes: America’s Preventable Epidemic. My view is that diabetes is an urgent national scandal. Over 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes, and 100,000 die from the condition annually. In addition, every year hundreds of thousands of people with diabetes have limbs amputated or suffer blindness or kidney disease. Diabetes costs our country $400bn annually to treat.

And although type-2 diabetes is often reversible through a low-carbohydrate diet, the ADA and the pharmaceutical industry don’t seem very interested in acknowledging that. Instead, they promote a laundry list of corporate deals and pharmaceutical treatments that have failed to stem the disease’s lethal and expensive impact on American life.

Hanna’s complaint, filed last year in a New Jersey court, alleged a litany of wrongdoings by one of the country’s most powerful patient advocacy organizations. Hanna said that ADA higher-ups pressured her to approve recipes that included generous helpings of the artificial sweetener Splenda, despite research published in the ADA’s own scientific journal finding that artificial sweeteners may raise consumers’ risk of type-2 diabetes.

Hanna further alleged that the pressure was the result of a $1m contribution made to the ADA by Heartland Food Products Group. Finally, she said the ADA was a revolving door of nutrition directors, with seven leaders coming and going over the past four years – largely because, she asserted, her predecessors “were either terminated by the ADA when they refused to comply with the ADA’s unethical and unlawful practices or were constructively terminated by the ADA by the abusive and hostile work environment they faced for refusing to comply”.

The ADA rejects the allegations in the lawsuit. The Heartland Food Products Group, which was not named in the lawsuit, has also said that it rejects any allegations of wrongdoing, and indicated it would continue working with the ADA. “Heartland will continue to support the ADA and honorably provide recipes and educational information to help people successfully reduce sugar levels and live happier and healthier lives,” Heartland said in a statement.

By settling, the ADA manages to avoid the discovery process, and the potentially embarrassing revelations that might have come with it.

Hanna’s lawyers appear to have grasped the implications of her lawsuit, and originally suggested her quest could take on heroic dimensions. “Hanna’s story could be the next movie that Americans need to see to understand what is going on behind closed doors between major for-profit corporations and the not-for-profit health sector,” they wrote in their legal complaint.

Although she chose to settle with the ADA, in reality Hanna has already performed a giant public service. Her legal complaint is a public document open for the ADA’s board of directors, clinicians across the US and the world, and members of Congress to read. Her meticulous account depicts the world’s most important diabetes patient advocacy organization as a cynical fund-raising machine, anxious to please its corporate overlords at the expense of the millions of people with diabetes it is supposed to be trying to help.

“The defendant’s conduct shows that they were party to a scheme to defraud the American people by approving and endorsing recipes submitted by Splenda to be lauded by the ADA as a healthy choice for people with diabetes, when the ADA knew that those recipes were contrary to the ADA’s guidelines and well-established and emerging scientific principles,” the complaint reads.

In case you’re curious, the ADA and Splenda appear to be still at it. As I write this, the ADA’s Diabetes Food Hub web page still features no fewer than 203 recipes – some marked “sponsored”, some not – that include Splenda, whose parent company’s $1m contribution has brought to light the utter insanity of our diabetes epidemic.

Isn’t it long overdue for the ADA’s board to act?

Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of the Marshall Project

https://www.theguardian.com/global/...ciation-lawsuit