Tag: dietary guidelines

Aug0320203rd Aug 20203rd Aug 20202Commentsby fmadmin

Naiman weighs in on low-carb versus low-fat wars

Posted in LCHF

Dr Ted Naiman

By Marika Sboros

Among the plethora of diet books weighing down virtual shelves, I came across a quirky one: The P:E Diet by US physician Ted Naiman.

It puts protein back on a pedestal as the prince, if not the king, of foods for health in body and mind.  It elevates high-intensity exercise to brave new heights. And it weighs in on low-carbohydrate versus low-fat diet wars.

He and co-author William Shewfelt come down on both sides of those wars. They also hammer solid nails into the coffin of perennial fear-mongering around high-protein diets. Still, many experts see potential harm in an “unnaturally high intake of protein” long-term.

The P:E in the title stands for an intriguing protein-to-energy ratio in foods. The book’s subtitle is Leverage Your Biology To Achieve Optimal Health. Naiman and Shewfelt might have added: Buffest Body And Optimum Sports Performance Safely, Effectively, Sustainably.

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Jul27202027th Jul 202027th Jul 20201Commentby fmadmin

Muecke eyes sugar and type 2 diabetes: the ‘real pandemic’?

Posted in LCHF

Dr James Muecke. Picture: Matt Turner

By Marika Sboros

Australian ophthalmologist Dr James Muecke has clear vision. He wakes each day and sees in graphic, gory detail a threat hanging over the lives of fellow Australians.

It is not the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is that each day, 250 people will develop type 2 diabetes. They do so “unnecessarily”, Muecke says, because type 2 diabetes is a preventable disease. It also makes people “more susceptible to pandemics”, he says. That claim is controversial but evidence-based and many MDs and researchers internationally endorse it.

Muecke is more than halfway through his time as 2020 Australian of the Year. He won the award for three decades preventing and treating blindness in some of the world’s poorest countries. His focus now is fighting a leading cause of adult blindness worldwide: type 2 diabetes.

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Jul16202016th Jul 202023rd Jul 20203Commentsby fmadmin

COVID-19: diet best weapon for protection, survival?

Posted in LCHF

Photo: Adam Nieścioruk, Unsplash

Revised*

By Marika Sboros

You could wait around hoping for a vaccine to fight COVID-19 or you could use a weapon already here, close at hand, in your kitchen.

It is diet – but not just any diet. It is a low-carbohydrate diet.

Compelling research shows that low-carb diets treat and prevent the serious underlying conditions that significantly up your risk of dying from the virus. (*Editor’s note: It has been pointed out that it is more accurate to say that the evidence suggests improved outcomes from rather than prevention of infection. Noted.) Chief among these: obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD), in particular, hypertension (high blood pressure), heart attack and stroke that fall under the medical umbrella of metabolic syndrome.

Doctors call them “diseases of lifestyle”. They define lifestyle disease as a “medical condition or disorder resulting from lifestyle habits”. Diet is a major habit contributing to lifestyle disease.

Globally, expert voices for low-carb diets for protection (from the worst effects of the virus) have grown louder since the pandemic began. So loud, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a no-brainer by now. You would be wrong. The claim remains extraordinarily controversial.

The latest authoritative voice raised in support of low-carb is Australian researcher Dr Maryanne Demasi in an editorial in the BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine.

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Jun0920209th Jun 202010th Jun 20207Commentsby fmadmin

COVID-19 SPAWNS ANCIENT PATH TO BEAT NEW VIRAL PANDEMICS?

Posted in LCHF

Photo:  visuals on Unsplash

By Marika Sboros

Is there a simple, scientific way to protect us all from the latest coronavirus pandemic and similar viral pandemics in future? Are governments around the world ignoring it?

Yes on both counts, says US nutrition science researcher and author Nina Teicholz.

In an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently, Teicholz gives the first step on that way. And it has nothing to do with social distancing. Or washing hands. Or face masks – important though all those elements are in these troubled times.

“We need to talk about not only the masks that go over our mouths but the food that goes into them,” says Teicholz.

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May11202011th May 202011th May 20201Commentby fmadmin

FASTING: LIFE IN THE LONG AND SHORT LANE

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

Life In The Fasting Lane (Harper Wave) is a brave, new book on one of the oldest, traditional healing modalities. The three authors – a doctor, a researcher and a layperson – promise the “absolute, unfiltered truth” about fasting.

That’s a big, brave promise. In this case, Dr Jason Fung, Eve Mayer and Megan Ramos are uniquely placed to deliver on it.

But their book is about more than just the “F” word – “Fasting”. The word still strikes fear into hearts and minds of MDs and dietitians who equate it, wrongly, with hunger, starvation, deprivation, even premature death.

The book’s subtitle speaks volumes: How to Make Intermittent Fasting a Lifestyle —and Reap the Benefits of Weight Loss and Better Health.

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Jan23202023rd Jan 202024th Jan 20203Commentsby fmadmin

Dr Mariela Glandt: sweet medicine to beat diabetes in Israel

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

A century ago, doctors looked on in awe as patients with type-1 diabetes responded to life-saving insulin therapy. These days, Israeli endocrinologist Dr Mariela Glandt feels “the same awe” watching her type-2 diabetes patients get off insulin.

Glandt, who trained at Harvard Medical School and Columbia University in the US, lives and practises in Israel. She is on a mission. Glandt has started a revolution in Israel against mainstream medical treatment for type-2 diabetes (T2D). She hopes it will spread more widely through orthodox medicine globally.

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Jan17202017th Jan 202018th Jan 20200Commentby fmadmin

Dietitians: health hazards or mainstream LCHF healers in 2020?

Posted in LCHF

Picture: Stuart Dawes

By Marika Sboros

Will 2020 be the year that low-carb finally goes medical mainstream to treat and prevent a wide range of life-threatening diseases? Will dietitians be the main movers and shakers who achieve that magic by dispensing cutting-edge, 21st Century, evidence-based dietary advice?

Is 2020 the year they become healers who use food as medicine?  Or will many of them just carry on dishing up unscientific, industry-led dietary dogma that researchers say makes them dinosaurs – and a public-health hazard?

The signs are auspicious for positive change. One sign is the recent launch of the Cape-based Nutrition Network’s world-first, internationally curated, low-carb, high-healthy-fat (LCHF) online training course for dietitians and Certified Nutrition Specialists (CNS).

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Nov0320193rd Nov 201923rd Jan 20202Commentsby Marika

ISRAEL WAKES UP TO LOW-CARB AND KETO!

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

Dr Mariela Glandt is the brains behind Israel’s first keto, low-carb, high-healthy-fat (LCHF) conference. The event draws leading LCHF and nutrition experts from around the world.

It takes place at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv on November 7 and 8, 2019. There’s still time to book a place.

Glandt hopes it will bring LCHF and keto into the medical mainstream. She is founder and director of the Glandt Center for Diabetes Care in Tel Aviv. The clinic specializes in optimization of diabetes care through very low-carb (ketogenic) diets.

Glandt trained as an internist at Harvard and an endocrinologist at Columbia University. She has more than two decades of experience in treating diabetes. She also has clinical experience in the many related conditions that significantly increase the risk of life-threatening diseases.

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Oct10201910th Oct 201910th Oct 20190Commentby Marika

Ketosis for kids: is mother’s milk really a danger?

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

Mention the “k” word (ketosis) for kids and many, if not most, paediatricians and paediatric dietitians recoil.

Ketogenic diets are very low in carbs and very high in healthy fats (VLCHF). The very idea of putting kids on keto diets scares paediatricians and dietitians.  Especially for infants.

It’s as if paediatricians and dietitians consider it close child abuse, not far from infanticide. They pass on those fears to parents.

Yet babies are born in ketosis and mother’s milk is very high-fat – and low-carb, relatively. This keeps newborns in ketosis all through nursing, says US neuroscientist Dr Angela Stanton.

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Aug30201930th Aug 201930th Aug 20199Commentsby Marika

Heikkilä: Finland’s Noakes, Fettke, Baker, Dahlqvist or Bourdua-Roy?

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

Is it most correct to call Dr Antti Heikkilä Finland’s Tim Noakes, Gary Fettke, Shawn Baker, Annika Dahlqvist or Èvelyne Bourdua-Roy?

You’d be most correct to say he’s a mix of all five medical doctors from around the globe. Or even a precursor of most of them.

He has much in common with Noakes in South Africa, Fettke in Australia, Baker in the US, Dahlqvist in Sweden and Bourdua-Roy in Canada. Like them all, Heikkilä has incurred establishment wrath. And for the same “crime”:  for daring to challenge medical and dietary orthodoxy for obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other life-threatening illnesses.

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Jun28201928th Jun 201928th Jun 20193Commentsby Marika

Noakes celebrates anniversary: victory over diet mobsters

Posted in LCHF, noakestrial

Prof Tim Noakes receives a  standing ovation in London in 2018, with Dr Aseem Malhotra (centre) and Dr Peter Brukner (right)

By Marika Sboros

Prof Tim Noakes celebrated a remarkable anniversary recently. It was June 8, 2018, a year since he became a free man, legally speaking.

On that day, the legal sword of Damocles that the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) had dangled over his head for more than four years, disappeared.

Given its behaviour so far, the HPCSA did what many thought it wouldn’t do on that day. It dismissed its prosecution lawyers’ appeal against its comprehensive not-guilty verdict for Noakes in April 2017.

The HPCSA’s own appeal committee confirmed the not-guilty ruling in its entirety. It found Noakes not guilty on all 10 aspects of a charge of unprofessional conduct. Click here to read a report and the full decision. That decision reverberates to this day through medical, dietetic and scientific fraternities globally.

Noakes and I have included a chapter on the appeal in our new book, Real Food On Trial. The subtitle says it all: How the diet dictators tried to destroy a top scientist (Columbus, 2019). It’s an update of Lore of Nutrition, Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs (Penguin 2017).

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Jun0520195th Jun 20195th Jun 20191Commentby Marika

Shawn Baker: heavyweight medicine man in praise of meat

Posted in Vital Signs

BakerVITAL SIGNS

By Marika Sboros

US physician and orthopaedic surgeon Dr Shawn Baker once dreamt of owning a cheesecake factory. He also dreamt of being able to eat all the cheese and sweets he wanted.

He has come a long way since his birth in Hof, a small West German town on the Czech border to an American father in the US Air Force and a South African mother. Ironically, given Baker’s vigorously anti-sugar stance these days, his mother hailed from a family with links to Hullett’s. The company remains dominant in South Africa’s powerful sugar industry.

In a Q&A Vital Signs profile, Baker tells how he conquered his chronically sweet tooth on his medical journey. He also tells how fought off establishment attacks after he advised his obese, diabetic patients to change their diets – and eat more meat – to reduce the needs for drugs and invasive surgery.

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May20201920th May 201920th May 20197Commentsby Marika

Facebook: real reason for take-down of top low-carb group?

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

What’s really behind Facebook’s deletion of one of its biggest low-carb groups, the Banting 7 Day Meal Plans? The social media titan’s responses leave more questions than answers.

Did interests opposed to low-carb therapies sabotage the group? Did Facebook assist that agenda without checking for conflicts of interest?

Facebook claims that a “user” hacked and deleted the group. That made the deletion “voluntary” from within, it says. If so, what does that mean for the personal data of the group’s more than 1,6million users?

There are 1.1 million South African “Banters” – as supporters of low-carb, high-healthy-fat (LCHF) therapies are known in that country. The rest are scattered across the planet. Could the hack have compromised their data? Could the user have hacked Facebook as well?

Facebook has gone to great lengths to suggest otherwise. It reinstated the group on May 17 but not before its sudden removal on May 14 went viral. That precipitated a tsunami of protest from users and supporters around the world on Facebook and Twitter.

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Mar23201923rd Mar 201923rd Mar 201916Commentsby Marika

Malhotra takes aim at heart of media statin support

Posted in Heart Disease

By Marika Sboros

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has been haemorrhaging readers for years.

The newspaper’s recent uncritical support for medical orthodoxy and dogma around diet, nutrition, drugs and cardiovascular disease hasn’t helped. Its treatment of ongoing controversy around cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins is raising red ethical flags.

Britain’s leading cardiologists, Dr Aseem Malhotra, is demanding that The Guardian retract its online article by health editor Sarah Boseley. Under the headline Butter nonsense: rise of the cholesterol deniers, it aims right at the heart of Malhotra’s credibility and professional integrity.

Malhotra has lodged a written complaint with The Guardian’s editor in chief, Katharine Viner. He has included the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Board and Complaints Committee.

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Feb23201923rd Feb 201923rd Feb 20190Commentby Marika

Exercise: you’re never too busy for its magic!

Posted in Food for Thought

44th US President Barack Obama gets incidental exercise with his dog, Bo.

By Marika Sboros

I’m a big fan of exercise – as we all should be. It makes, or should make, intuitive sense that exercise is good for overall health. Exercise builds endurance and keeps you supple and strong as you age

It also makes, or should make, sense that exercise is not the best weight loss tool. Despite what many MDs and dietitians still say.

They want you to believe that obesity the result of gluttony and sloth. That all you have to do to lose weight is eat less and move more.  That’s just food and drug industry propaganda.

It is not possible to outrun or outexercise bad diet.

And like many of us, you might think you are too busy to exercise. You’ve got that wrong. It’s dead easy to fit regular, incidental exercise. Take a leaf out of 44th US president Barack Obama’s lifestyle book, for starters.

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Jan28201928th Jan 201928th Jan 20190Commentby Marika

THE DIET FIX: FINALLY, ‘LAST WORD’ IN WEIGHT LOSS!

Posted in BOOKS

Picture: Dreamstime

By Marika Sboros

Are you battling to lose weight? Confused by the minefield of conflicting nutrition and weight-loss advice out there?

Or simply and seriously concerned with your health or the health of those you care about?

If so,  this book is for you.

The Diet Fix is by British public health and obesity researcher Dr Zoë Harcombe. The sub-title says it all: How to lose weight and keep it off… One last time!

On the front cover, British consultant cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra calls The Diet Fix “a gamechanger”. It is that and more.

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Dec18201818th Dec 201818th Dec 201819Commentsby Marika

Kendrick, Wikipedia and ‘dark forces’ waging war on science

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

When I heard that Wikipedia had deleted Scottish GP Dr Malcolm Kendrick’s profile, I was shocked. Not just because I’ve met Kendrick, have read his most well-known, groundbreaking books, written lots about him and have the greatest respect for him.

It’s also not because I take Wikipedia at all seriously. The signs have been there for ages that Wikipedia falsely claims to be a “free encyclopedia”. It is proving to be part of something far more sinister and costly – by default or design.

I was shocked because I know how – and why – Wikipedia did something so stupid and self-destructive. And how it damaged its tattered reputation further by deleting someone of Kendrick’s knowledge, experience and standing. (Not surprisingly, Wikipedia ignored my tweeted request for comment.)

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Nov18201818th Nov 201810th Dec 20186Commentsby Marika

Harvard study: ‘Case against carbs, for fats grows stronger’

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

It’s not the definitive word for best weight loss diets but it’s close. And it doesn’t venture into the contentious plant- versus animal-food divide. A major new Harvard study shows that replacing carbohydrates with fats speeds up metabolism.

It overcomes one of the biggest hurdles in conventional weight-loss diets: the “plateau”. That is the metabolism slowdown that prevents weight loss on conventional diets.

It’s why so many lose some weight but stay hungry and find it increasingly harder to lose more.

The Harvard study in the BMJ is well-designed and randomised. It is also one of the largest feeding studies ever conducted, say the authors. Add recent US research by Virta Health on low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diets to reverse type 2 diabetes and experts say it’s a recipe for speedy, safe, sustainable weight loss.

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Nov0820188th Nov 20189th Nov 20181Commentby Marika

Dr Jason Fung’s single best weight loss tip!

Posted in Food for Thought

 By Marika Sboros

Psst! If your MD or dietitian still subscribes to the CICO (calories-in, calories-out) obesity model, find another one. Quick!

According to the model, obesity is from gluttony and sloth. A calorie is a calorie. And all you have to do to lose weight and keep it off is “eat less and move more”.

The model is not just unscientific, it’s out the dark ages of nutrition science.

Yet many (if not most) MDs and dietitians still believe that CICO rules. Canadian nephrologist Dr Jason Fung is not one. As a kidney specialist, Fung sees many patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes. The two conditions are now so common that doctors refer to them as “diabesity”.

In the article below, Fung gives his top weight loss tip for those struggling with diabesity. Spoiler alert: it’s about as far from CICO as it’s possible to be.

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Oct12201812th Oct 201813th Oct 20187Commentsby Marika

FETTKE: COVER-UP GROWS AFTER CASE AGAINST HIM COLLAPSES?

Posted in LCHF

By Marika Sboros

Australian orthopaedic surgeon Dr Gary Fettke’s professional reputation and licence to practise medicine are no longer under threat. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency (AHPRA) recently cleared Fettke of any misconduct over his opinions on nutrition.

That response was legally and ethically correct, under the circumstances. However, it raises more questions than answers.

One question is why AHPRA went to war on the side of the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) and its members who mobilised against Fettke. Another is why no heads have rolled in AHPRA’s prosecution of Fettke – in a case that legal analysts called a “kangaroo court“.

Yet another is why AHPRA has ignored extensive evidence of bullying, mobbing and intimidation of Fettke at his workplace, Launceston General Hospital (LGH) in Tasmania, for more than eight years. That is raising questions of a cover-up at the highest levels.

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