Eating Ourselves Sick by Louise Stephen

Author:Louise Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2016-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Dietary carbohydrate and metabolic syndrome

When we think of dietary carbohydrates we usually think of wheat-based products such as pasta, bread and bagels, and we might imagine a fit and active athlete ‘carbo-loading’ before a big race. In reality, however, carbohydrate is just another word for sugars and molecules that combine sugars. As we have seen, the carbohydrate we are most familiar with – table sugar or sucrose – is a disaccharide made up of glucose and fructose. When many sugars combine, they form polysaccharides, such as starch. We know starches as a major component of the refined wheat products most Westerners consume regularly, such as breakfast cereals, bread, pizza, pasta, pies, biscuits and muffins. These may look different from the cans of ‘sugar-sweetened beverage’ cited by obesity researchers as major culprits in disease, but they are still effectively sugars, and overconsumption contributes to obesity and its many inherent health problems.

Many critics of sugar lay the blame for the explosion of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes at the door of either sugar or its evil constituent fructose. But other researchers disagree that sucrose or fructose is the only culprit, and implicate refined carbohydrates, or carbohydrates generally, as the second half of a somewhat dastardly duo.

A new wave of research

Well-known American biochemist and professor of cell biology Richard Feinman states:

Diabetes is a disease of carbohydrate intolerance. Type 1 is characterised by an inability to produce insulin (a hormone and master controller of the metabolism) in response to carbohydrate. In type 2 there is a peripheral insulin resistance along with deterioration of the [beta] cells of the pancreas. The most salient symptom (and a major contributor to the pathology) is high blood glucose which, not surprisingly, is most effectively treated by reducing dietary carbohydrates … It is not hard to guess the best treatment for a disease where the defect is a poor response to ingested carbohydrates.

Professor Feinman is among a new wave of scientists and medical researchers currently producing the research that demonstrates the dangerous consequences of the high-carbohydrate, low-fat (high-sugar) diet that has been sold to us by various vested interests and gatekeeping organisations over several decades.

Of particular interest to the low-carbohydrate researchers is the fact that several markers of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes are often eliminated upon the move to a low-carbohydrate diet, and those with these conditions need no drugs to manage them. Indeed, a review published in 2015 noted the abject failure of current dietary recommendations (promoting high carbohydrate and low fat intake) to halt the explosion of type 2 diabetes in any way or even remotely improve obesity, cardiovascular disease or health in general. The authors (26 medical specialists and researchers) state: ‘Carbohydrate restriction is the single most effective intervention for reducing all of the features of metabolic syndrome.’ They present twelve points of evidence supporting the use of the low-carbohydrate diet as the first approach to type 2 diabetes and as an adjunct to medication in type 1 diabetes:

1. Hyperglycaemia (high blood glucose) is the most salient feature of diabetes.

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