Friday, June 29, 2012

Solutions to Obesity

How does one treat obesity?

As an engineer, I need to know what causes it, then remove the cause, is the first step.The causes can be grouped: 

  1. Spiritual / belief disorders. - treatment - reprogramming.  (this is where my greatest changes have occurred) Developing the desire to overcoming - ignorance, apathy, greed,  and do something about the problem. Those who do not care cannot be helped. Some will understand and for those, I will carry on.
  2. Compulsive Overeating, a behavioural addiction, (as opposed to the  atypical bulimia, anorexia). Treatment - Schwartz, OA, alternate obsession with 3 moderate meals per day, and work or live the remainder of the time.
  3. Sugar Addiction, a substance addiction. (dopamine circuit) Treatment - complete abstinence. May also include fructose addition, and fruit may also need to be excluded.
  4. Grain Addiction, a substance addiction. (serotonin circuit)  wheat, gluten and/or gladin, amepectin A, or carbohydrate in general - Treatment complete abstinence.
  5. Over production of gehlin, chronic stress, chronic distress, chronic abuse, trapped,  ... Treatment ???
  6. Over appetite stimulation - Treatment - remove all appetite stimulus... coffee, alcohol, sugar, grains, great tasting processed food, chocolate, etc. Reward theory- 
  7. Cravings - Treatment - supplements as required, removal of triggers... temptation.
  8. Hunger - removal of fructose, and glucose, lactose, gladen, gladin, etc, from diet, or what ever is triggering the hunger. Including leptin resistance, insulin blocking leptin signal, fructose blocking leptin signal.
  9. Insulin, low blood sugars - low carb, let the liver produce the required glucose.  This includes insulin resistance/ fat locked in issues/ division of energy (Taubes, Lustig)
  10. Tired - go to bed. Angry, lonely, bored, resentful, (get over it - buckup buttercup)
  11. Emotional issues - Deal with it. or become a buddhist.
  12. Personality issues - personality disorders -
  13. lack of food knowledge - ignorance, apathy, greed
  14. other physical, emotional, medical issues 
The diet that works for me is LCHF, no fruit. Low GI may work for those without insulin - hyperinsulinemia - BG issues.


Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Past, Present and F...

We are just back from a few days away, and it is time for a review.
It has been over one year since I started this process, an what have I learned?

Well, not what I expected. I already knew that carbohydrates were not suitable for human food in any processed form. I now know that I do not consider processed eatable products to be food, and should be banned from human food stores. These are creating a industry, sick people industry. Should I get in to it or fight against it?

I knew that wheat products were addicting, but now I know how. Likewise with sugars. Recovery means to stop considering carbohydrates as food.

The government does not have the citizens best interests at heart, they have their own re-election in front of them, and support the money system that will get them re-elected. Big Ag, big pharma, selling to the chronic miss informed people who do not have the time to sort the facts from the bull shit. It is all about the money, and keeping it flowing. No one planned this whole mess. No one can fix it, but each individual can live a Paleo template lifestyle with integrity and forethought. We can save ourselves, and those we influence.

It is difficult to go through life watching the trains head for each other, knowing that the wrecks are going to happen, having just avoided a wreck myself, and not fully recovered yet, and no body is listening. What to do? The media bull shit is loud. Noise to signal ration is large. The signal is weak, intermittent. I have dealt with this in the geotechnical engineering world my whole career, and no longer care to continue.... that is to say... teach the solution, just to be ignored.

Does one continue to rail against government nutrition recommendation ignorance, just like other forms of stupidity? Or do I just say, Oh well, and carry on looking after myself? Or does one speak out the lack of green vegetables in the convenience foods? The dis-service fast food does to the public? But as the man said," sell what the people are buying." Change must come from the consumer, and that will only happen after they need and want a change.

Stop struggling to lose weight and lose weight. Food / not food... approach, three moderate meals a day, closed kitchen other times. I just do not know. Indecision. no choice, too many choices. How does one turn this into a money generator?

Friday, June 22, 2012

the men who...

Zoe does a nice summary of 2
http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2012/06/the-men-who-made-us-fat-episode-2

This reminds me of the story about the frog in the water with a small flame under the pail.... It get hot without him noticing...

We have noticed now. We can save ourselves, and those who we influence. The remainder.... Oh well.

It is really about how to convince people the conventional wisdom is wrong.

I am away this week, in beautiful Duck Lake, Saskatchewan. (Wife's family historical  home). The local store is also the only fast food place, but the sell wonderful roaster port ribs at reasonable prices, and Chesters chicken, regular, corn breaded or crushed nut breading. Low carb is showing up all over the place, but it was peanut breading. chicken with peanut butter taste. Um. Not bad, but then this is Duck Lake, where the natives and  Métis got restless in 1885. The natives still are not in the best of humour. Oh well.

Good beef country, mostly grass fed, some winter green feed, some early winter corn for pasture, and swath grassing. Corn will not mature here, but it produces pasture for early winter. I do not know how that fits into "grass fed" but the criters east ears, leaves and stocks in that order.

The post office is closed in favour of private post office boxes. The biggest business is a pea plant, that chips to China. Main street is about half empty, but bar does well, and the local store/fast food place. Liquor store/insurance sales place does well. Yes, an odd combination. Post office/convenience store/gas pump/ bus depo/ survives, although the husband is away trucking in Alberta, where the economy is hot. The bank became the town office. It had the north wall reinforced with a used grader blade just like the one in Dog River, for those who noticed.

Friday, June 15, 2012

Two Low Carb Choices

The Last Chance Saloon in Wayne, Alberta, just east of Drumheller, Alberta has two Low Carb meals on the menu. Wow! Now, those of you who know Wayne will understand. Wayne has a population of 30. It has one business, the Last Chance Saloon, bar, dinning place. It did have a general store and a post office, but when the population dropped to 15, Canada Post pulled the post office. The old people died off and the young parting types moved in. The place is booming. There is one new house, and another under construction. In 1982 it had a community reunion long weekend, and drew 1300 people. It had been a major coal mining place. It is the a place the that banned giving horses beer at the bar. Oh well. In the days of no entertainment in the bar, it put wheels on the piano, for quick exit of the piano.

Back to the menu. It has two low carb choices on the menu. Two 4 oz burger Alberta beef paddies with salad, or two Alberta buffalo paddies from the farm on the top of the hill beyond the 11th bridge. In 6 km, there are 11 bridges on this piece of road. 10 of those are one lane... yield to oncoming traffic... wood plank decks... numbered... all on a meandering creek.

John Wayne shot several moves in the gullies above Wayne. It has camping for 1300 people. A summer hotspot. With nothing but a old bar, that is known to sell beer in Mason jars. Water always comes in Mason Jars. Apparently the last owner left the basement half full of them. The places has still parts on the wall, along with coal mining equipment from the 1930's. Good burgers also, but buffalo is usually good.

Appetite Reduction

Eat fruit and get hungry. No fruit, no appetite. The choice for weight loss is apparent.

But why is there such a loss of appetite with removal of fruit? Fat cell equilibrium only explains the numbers.

Could it be as simple as fruit is an appetite stimulus? Along with sugars, grains, carbohydrate in general? A survival method developed in prehistory?


Thursday, June 14, 2012

fruit and hunger

Zero fruit, and no hungry. I suffered hunger for 63 years, all because I was eating fruit and thinking it was good for me. The government and nutrition experts, and several doctors do not know what they are talking about. They learned what was basically wrong. Fruit is a appetite stimulus. To bad. Fruit is no longer food.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Equilibrium Coefficient of a Fat Cell

Warning: a bit of not very heavy maths, a bit of physical organic chemistry.

This is conjecture at this time, but it is the broad stroke, crude model of a fat cell.

First we have glucose (Gu), fructose (Fu), and free fatty acid (FFA) that can flow across the cell membrane. Fu and FFA by pure diffusion, and Gu with the help of insulin. We can express the concentration as [Gu], [Fu] and [FFA]. The equilibrium coefficient equation must look something like K= [Gu]x[Gu]  / {[Fu]x[FFA]}.
So examining the equation, to lose weight we want [FFA] to increase. It is essential to eat to drive [Fu] down, and limit [Gu] supply, but [Gu] is related to blood glucose, so is essentially stable on low carb. [Fu] is a small number, but is liver overflow, that likely increases with fructose intake and liver damage. It is uncontrolled for the most part.

K is actually a lumped value of all the k of each step in the process. The concentrations verses time plot will produce a big X curves before equilibrium.

So what does this all mean: No fructose, no fruit, yields high fat loss potential. Appetite should drop, at least low craving part. Gut hunger, gut first pass effect will still occur, but a bit of oil and water should feed the gut.

The sum of fat, glucose, fructose, and damaged protein must caloric still be less than what we burn to lose weight. No argument, but the appetite reduction that should happen with no fructose is the key.This still leaves compulsive eating and other food addictions to be dealt with.

It seems to work; I am down 2.9 kg in 4 days. If we assume glycogen and a bit of fat loss, the number is good. No hunger except just before evening meals, 7 hours after lunch.

More on the derivation later.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Appetite Reduction

Appetite reduction is the key to weight loss. Appetite reduction will result in eating less, less intake equals weight loss. The reasons for less intake may be low carb, ketonic diet, low insulin generating diet, or other reasons.

The  appetite stimulation from grains, and sugars and fruits, MSG, alcohol, artificial sweeteners, steevia, and all those other things that stimulates appetite just plain must be avoided, eliminated. Appetite stimulus by blocking leptin signing is suspected. Insulin has a similar effect according to Lustig. The actual method is secondary to feeling the effect. When there is no appetite stimulation, there is a 2 or 3 moderate meals in the day, little hunger, and that hunger that I experience is low intensity, not intense craving that comes with even a little fruit.

There is some glucose in the coleslaw dressing that I use, but it seems ok. Butter is somewhat insulinogenic, but it seems ok. Fructose, glucose, gladin, and starches all seem to stimulate appetite. Oh well, they can be banned food for a while, or not considered to be foods. Nuts also go on this list.

Why does fruit block leptin? How come all the weight loss grue's  are not stating this much more loudly? Well perhaps it is not true for all, dose dependent, below the radar, as Lustic suggests. Perhaps the appetite stimulus changes with time and energy expenditure. But what do I know?

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Leptin vs fructose

To keep from getting hungry, leptin comes into play. 


Foods that block leptin signalling include sugars, HFCS, and fruits ok.
Fructose directly causes insulin resistance and reduction in leptin signaling (1 l or 2? i do not know). Glucose cause reduced signaling indirectly through higher insulin. MSG, alcohol, artificial sweeteners, including stevia, all directly block leptin.


So any weight loss program should avoid all leptin signal blocking foods, even trace amounts. That means no fruits. None. Noda. Different people have different levels of leptin blocking from fructose, ah, the old dose dependent variation, probably normal distribution, and as I have always been fat, I will be on the low dose tail.


When I was losing, I was not eating fruit. That is the first thing I took back to stabilize my weight, and have been gaining ever since, and hungry. Time to test this theory. No fruit for a while.   



Even the amount of fructose in fruit causes leptin resistance/leptin blocking/hunger for some of us. Anyone trying to lose weight should not take in any fructose. After you are happy with your weight, feel free to add fruit. See Lustig’s work.
Calories is only one gross issue; appetite control is the other. It is only my opinion that anyone who is trying to loss weight should do all practical to reduce appetite. That includes no fructose, but what do I know.





Here is what someone else suggests.


To control your appetite and hunger you can keep keep your leptin levels high by doing the following.
  • Avoid high fructose corn syrup and too much sugar. High fructose corn syrup blocks leptin from letting your brain know that you are done eating. The brain does not recognize fructose as a real food and it makes you keep eating. Sugars make your brain less sensitive to leptin.
  • Eat your healthy fats, monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats. The healthy fats help boost your leptin levels, so they are more satisfying than saturated fats. Both are also great for you heart and arteries.
  • Take zinc. Zinc increases your leptin levels. You can buy zinc in 15mg packets or get it from your multivitamin, which usually contains 12mg 
  • Stop crash diets. When you lose a lot of weight quickly from serious calorie restriction, your leptin levels plummet. So you get hungrier, your thyroid decreases output and your metabolic rate drops.
  • Eat ONE large meal per week.Your body then senses the rush of fuel and boosts leptin levels, increasing your metablism and priming your body for fat loss. 
  • Sleep well. Research has found that shorter sleep periods (6 hours or less) lowers leptin levels, cause an increase in appetite and make people crave carbs and other fattening foods. 

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

about the web

http://www.nofructose.org/
http://sweetpoison.com.au/

 http://www.raisin-hell.com/

One more problem explained by the modern diet.




Monday, April 23, 2012


Stop it or you’ll go blind


Macular degeneration is the primary cause of blindness in Australia today.  And evidence is mounting that the likely cause of the disease is consumption of vegetable oils.  But once again Australia’s Dietitians Association is on the side of the processed food industry instead of the consumer (or in this case, the patient).

Our eyes are exquisitely complex pieces of machinery which work much like a camera.  Light from the outside world hits the the retina at the back of our eye.  The macula is the centre of the retina. It is responsible for our detailed vision.  If our macula is damaged, we can no longer see fine detail, drive, read or recognise faces. 

Macular degeneration begins in a layer of cells underneath the retina called the Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE). The RPE is responsible for transporting oxygen and other nutrients up to the retina and moving waste products down to the blood vessels underneath. It also contains a specialised immune system which reacts to some of the more dangerous waste products produced by the macula. 

When the RPE wasted disposal system fails, junk from the retina builds up underneath the RPE. These junk deposits, known as drusen, appear as yellow spots on the retina and are visible in a normal eye examination.  As the disease progresses, vision loss happens because the RPE cells die (‘dry’ macula degeneration) or because the RPE cells fail to prevent blood vessels from growing into the retina (‘wet’ macula degeneration) from below the RPE.

The macula contains a high concentration of some of our most specialised hardware, the rod and cone cells that allow us to see in fine detail and in colour.  These cells are unusual in that they use polyunsaturated fats in their membranes rather than the saturated and monounsaturated fats used by most of the remainder of our cells. 

If you’ve ever wondered what an essential fat (like omega-3 DHA) is essential for, there’s a big part of your answer.  The omega-3 DHA fats make up the outer segments of the light sensitive cells in the retina and are the most frequently replaced cell membranes in our body. 

When these molecules are exposed to light they oxidise rapidly (this is thought to be an important part of how our light sensing cells work).   Normally oxidation is a very bad thing because of the waste products it produces (broken bits of fat molecules and free radicals). 

But our body didn’t fall off the back of the potato truck yesterday.  The special immune system built into the RPE does a magnificent job of getting rid of all the junk, so the oxidation is not normally a problem.  That is unless we use the wrong kind of polyunsaturated fats. 

Researchers have consistently found that people with macular degeneration have abnormally low levels of Omega-3 fatty acids in their retina.  This has inspired many studies which look at the dietary fat breakdown of the participants. 

As expected a lot of those trials have shown that when people are eating a diet high in fish (the principal dietary source of the correct omega-3’s) they tend to have less macular degeneration.  But closer analysis of the figures has unearthed a very worrying exception.  They are only better off if they are also NOT eating omega-6 fats.  Indeed, people eating a diet high in omega-6 fats are twice as likely to have macular degeneration as those eating a diet low in those fats (regardless of how much omega-3 they are consuming).

We have known for at least two decades that our body isn’t that picky when it comes to omega-3 and omega-6 fats.  If we need an omega-3 polyunsaturated fat and the only one handy is omega-6 then our body just goes ahead and uses that.  And there’s no reason to suspect that our body isn’t doing exactly the same thing in our eyes. 

A number of researchers have speculated that what is going on in macular degeneration is that when we eat too much omega-6 fat, our body is simply using that instead of the preferred omega-3.  When the omega-6’s are oxidised, their waste products are different to those produced by the omega-3’s.  This waste is not recognised by the RPE, not cleaned up by its immune function and accumulates as the drusen which lead to macular degeneration.

The only place we are likely to encounter significant quantities of omega-6 fats in our everyday life is in, well, everything.  Over the last two decades, the Australian Heart Foundation and the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) have been busily ensuring that the dominant health message in this country is that we should be eating those fats (rather than ‘unhealthy’ saturated fats).

The omega-6 fats occur in large quantities in ‘vegetable oils’ made from seeds (canola, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, rice-bran and grape-seed).  And it is exactly those oils which now form the basis of every margarine, every fried food, every ‘ovenfry’ food, most biscuits, most breads, and most ‘heart-healthy’ products on sale in Australia today.

Faced with this research, the DAA’s response is exactly the same as their response to research that sugar is an extremely dangerous addition to our diet – denial.  Worse than that, their official position appears to be a rerun of a press-releaseprovided by the Australian Oilseed Federation (the folks representing those with money to make out of seed oils).

Macular Degeneration is a debilitating disease which now affects a significant proportion of our population. The average Australia is four times more likely to suffer from macular degeneration than they are to suffer from Dementia.  One in sevenAustralians over the age of 50 (a little over a million people) has macular degeneration and this number is likely to increase by at least 70 per cent by 2030.

There is now significant evidence of the role of seed oils in the development of the disease.  But once again, the folks charged with looking out for our health are squarely on the side of their corporate sponsors

Luckily there is something you can do without their assistance.  Don’t eat seed oils.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Feeling a fructose high

I just realized that I can feel a assumed fructose high. It may be a glucose/fructose high, but my blood glucose is in the normal range. Perhaps it is something else, but what ever it is, really takes the edge off. To bad that the negative of this slightly dopey feeling is weight gain. But if this slightly blunted feeling, were only in the unconscious,    but recognised in the unconscious, it could drive the obesity epidemic. But it is and does.

I am 63 years old, and I never before picked up on this feeling as being caused by fructose. But then I have been low carb (80/20) for a while now, and this may be one of the few time that I have gone from  ketonic to fructose dose. It is like low grade alcohol, mild dose, long term nipping.

Is this what Buddha referenced to as rice intoxication? Or was that spoiling rice by yeast, on the way to rice wine... or was it this effect, which I quite like. To bad the calories required to maintain it are so large.

Sugar highs feel nice. Is this what they mean as "reward theory"?