Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine by Robert H. Lustig



He's a great communicator.



My bold because dang that sounds promising. Not only for those of us still working on our chronic illnesses, but I see increased research interest and tons of people telling their successful low carb stories.

This is in Kindle Unlimited now. It can't hurt that he's a highly regarded medical professional on this very subject.

On my "to buy" list.

He wrote it for the professionals, to get their s h i t together and get on board with preventing food based diseases.

Im thinking about buying two copies. One for my primary!

Do eeeet! He's a fantastically engaging writer, even on a tough subject.

Only on the first chapter and I'm keeping the cats updated with my exclamations of a great truth wrapped in a lovely phrase

Public health has actually been neglected since 1970. It shows.

Here's what I wrote when the book first came out in hardcover:

Thanks I missed it. Is it outdated? The Kindle could be from today but it could be older than I thought. They do tricks like that.

But I agree, food wise it seemed outdated. But if you lived on cereal and take out, it would be a step in the right direction.

I do like his outlining of the forces arrayed against health, offering only treatment.

I think it was published in 2021.

Good points BW. I haven't read the book, but i trust your eval.


As for Probiotics. I know from personal use, that probiotics work.

After a time on Atkins, my gut flora changed. Such that when delving into a loaf of bread caused great gi gurgling and distress. I quickly learned a probiotic resolved the problem. And any future mishaps with bread 🍞 also included a probiotic chaser. Gi disturbances completely avoided.

These days I do feed the bugs. Homemade sauerkraut. Contains both prebiotic and probiotic. And keep pills on hand.

Imho, we would keep inoculating our gut when eating fermented foods, not pasteurized of course, and when munching on plant material in the gardens and woods.

Initial feeding of breast milk to infants contains a probiotic to feed a microbe, a prebiotic.

Which links back to the birthing. Natural birthing exposes child to important microbes. As in its a good thing.

We have lost many strains in the US population for many reasons, including antibiotics. In the South American tribal groups isolated from modern humans, their gi microbes are a complex mix. Containing a bigger variety than US populations.

Like most if not all doctors, drL doesn't have it quite right on many aspects, but he is in the right direction on sugar.

And his patients were young people with terrible eating habits. Not adults with health issues. Once I took his advice as "convincing parents who never heard of nutrition," I moved on to his descriptions of WHY doctors are so useless about understanding the same thing.

The advice about what to eat is the least interesting part of the book, I'm in agreement there.

But his insights into the medical-industrial complex are the eye opening parts. I think everyone should be aware of THAT.

Back at a real keyboard as my iPad decides it will just choose onscreen keyboards at random.

I did wade through the food section but what really astonishes is how it exposes the mindset of how medicine has devolved to people who are not aware of it.

We don't blink at stats like this, because we lived them.



He points out it used to be called adult onset diabetes, but now it's type II and in children.

How many people know that historical fact? No one born in the 80's or beyond. That's when the low fat thing really took off.

WE know what a disaster it was. But Metabolical has a bigger goal. It's about opening minds to make their own decisions once they know the distorted message that's being spread with lots of money.

To rescue the health care of the world, everyone needs to know some basics so we can at least have discussions that don't devolve into people screaming into the void because they are addicted to food that keeps them unhappy and sick and prone to mental and physical disorders.

That's the real emergency, he says, and here, I agree with him. And consider it an important book.

I bought and read Metabolical as soon as it came out in 2021 and can concur with much of what Bawdy wrote in her review. I too, was especially disappointed in the references not being included in the book. In my own experience it's just so much more convenient for them to be included in the book itself, that I was always going to include mine in my own.

My general sense of things with fibre (which is how we spell it over here) is that it can be beneficial, but on a more secondary basis. For example, there are studies out there which suggest fibre is good for us because when you add it to the diet in place of refined carbs, people's blood sugar doesn't spike so hard afterwards (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31809-9). Of course, that finding could just as easily be because of the removal of the carbs as it was the addition of the fibre, but the authors of this example are known nutrition traditionalists, so naturally it must be the fibre, and this is why whole grains are good for us, etc.

However, one important take-home for me that was repeatedly stressed throughout the book in more general terms, was that it's not just what's in the food, it's what's also been done to the food. He made a very good point that the latter is not covered by nutrition information labelling, and I think that's something to be considered in future iterations of food labelling policy. Dr Caryn Zinn gave a presention on this subject at last year's Low Carb Gold Coast event, which could provide an interesting way forward on this.

Overall, while I found myself not necessarily fully agreeing with every individual point he had to make, I still got some value out of the book in the end.

Im am reminded of Dr Sweeny counseling me on my risks for colon cancer. He drank a heaping spoon of Consyl in a glass of orange juice. He handled GI surgeries, including colonoscopies. He was the only doctor to point out my real risk for colon cancer and helped me get the procedure before the age of 50. A real doctor. Kind ,thoughtful. Only one to talk colon issues. Oncologists only talked breast cancer. Like ovarian and colon cancers did not exist.

I transfered the fiber info without the oj. Just sucked it down in water. Yuk eventually bought a bag of horse bran for not much more than a couple containers of Consyl!! Bagged it up and tossed in freezer.

Eventually made jump to fiber from foods. All kinds of fibers are in food, not just the outer bran from grain. I had to rely on my knowledge of hay to reach this point of thinking. Which is not the angle most folks have. Hay has cellulose and hemi -cellulose and lignins. All fibers. Lignin is best left to the ruminants. Requires much chewing to become bioavailable. And im not chewing my cud to do that. Clearly the lignin feeds certain microbes but are humans set up for that??

I dont think so. Ihmo, fiber is a complicated subject for human digestion. What ever we eat, it requires specific microbes to do the digesting of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin.

The question is do we need it? I think some of us benefit from vegetables and fibrous ones and some cannot handle vegetables, or the contaminantes that come with those foods.

Clearly many on carnivore benefit. For me and colin cancer, many vegetables are viewed as anti cancer like mushrooms and the list is long according to dr. Li who does the research.

Grains.
Hull
Bran
Endosperm
Germ

Us very low carbers like to use the hull cause we cannot digest that lignin. Whole wheat re moves that, leaving the other three. Is bran digestable? No. But it slows the digestion of the starches, and the endosperm adds a bit of fat, slow digestion.

Yes, all crazy stuff. Fiber is complicated.

Thanks for giving me the publication date! Which is NOT on my Kindle Unlimited version, I looked. This explains how I totally missed it: 2021 was my year to try to work 40 hours a week in my small business. I was trying to make up the giant deficit from getting laid off during lockdown. 2022 was me on 5 months of bed rest, trying to recover from forcing myself to work 40 hours a week.



This is what paradigms do, and why they must be TESTED in actual SCIENCE. (Augh!) Paradoxes are friends. They tell us where we are going wrong, like the famous "French Paradox" illustrating the actual food facts they got wrong.

I currently rely on my coconut consumption to provide fiber. My digestion is super-sensitive to most plant things, it seems. Even the few leaves of romaine I added to my Italian sub in a coconut wrap became a warning. I think it's likely the way I used to eat was so damaging my digestive system is now on constant alert. There's no point in telling me, "How can you have such an OVERreaction to a few leafy greens? They're good for you!"

They aren't good for me. There isn't a nutrient in them I can't get, more easily, from meat, seafood, and dairy. When I eat vegetables, I don't think I get much nutrition. In fact, I'm with the writers speculating that the "vegan honeymoon" isn't simply the replacement of junk with vegetables, which is, for most people, a significant upgrade in nutrition.

Also, a leaky gut might respond when someone changes from junk to juices. They might do a juice cleanse and actually get some relief. Only to ruin it when they get into soy concoctions like tofurkey and fake meat to shut up their protein craving. Which I know, from reading vegan soup labels, means they love sugar in all its forms. They are, if strict, essentially doing the Rice Diet of "they won't stay on it, I have to whip them" fame.

It's additionally that vegetables seem to vary greatly when it comes to bio-available nutrition. In people who digest vegetables, especially if they cook them or try recipes, could mean vegan can work as a calorie-restricted fast. Without making it feel like a lack of food.

It's like a virtue-signaling way to stuff yourself without guilt. As a recovered eating disorder person, I see how veganism can become a binge-substitute for some people. (Because they talk on Youtube and I grasp how they still have a food obsession, essentially. I've been there.)

These people can break their food addiction if they are given stuff to nosh that will help them get off the junk food. And we all know how well that moderation/portion control ploy works when it comes to addictive substances like wheat, sugar, and those opiods in milk products that make us helpless before ice cream. I've been able to transfer that to cheese and my protein smoothies.

It goes all the way to the other end of the food spectrum, where "keto" is really about the nuts, chocolate, and artificial sweeteners. Everything we try that works also get gets grabbed by the pyramid schemes and con artists. To make none of it have meaning.

As a six week switchover stage, a "vegan cleanse" might actually have some health utility. Get people cooking, and have tasty vegetables in mind, as they move towards a better eating plan for their individual needs. But no one is doing it that way, though I think that's the place for vegan. I know I wouldn't last six weeks. I only lasted 2-3 months on vegetarian without getting pale, fat, tired, and sick.





I got excited about his book by his calling out of what I think of as the Medical-Industrial Complex. Which has tentacles from agriculture to pharmaceutical, distorting every stage of the life cycle, killing us slowly through our wallets.

I thought this was by far the MOST valuable part of the book. The food research should have been sprinkled throughout, as support and discussion points.(Speaking as an editor.) He's too much of an academic to see that, but you'd think a Big Five publishing house would. It being, yanno, their JOB. But they have fired everyone competent so their spreadsheet looks good every single quarter.

It's a political book about health. It should have focused on the dangers as we slide towards everything being ultra-processed, which would have fitted his excellent title.

I saw this during the late 80's/early 90's when artificial food hit a new peak. They took out the fat and added sugar. That was the beginning of my own experience with actual weight loss success by being able to control my own access to food and exercise. I could workout every morning, count fat grams, and snack on rice cakes sprinkled with white cheddar cheese dust. This regimen kept me a consistent size 12, with the exercise making the loss better distributed on a tall frame.

Everyone, including myself, saw it as a success of my effort, which it was. Though not a recipe for long term success, it turned out. It was actually laying the groundwork for future disaster. At forty I started gaining and when I tried what worked before, it made things worse. That led me to Atkins.

And thank goodness and this forum I would have had a mental and/or physical breakdown a few times by now.