Category: Disease

Huge Study Of Diet Indicts Fat And Meat

By JANE E. BRODY
Published: May 08, 1990

EARLY findings from the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease are challenging much of American dietary dogma. The study, being conducted in China, paints a bold portrait of a plant-based eating plan that is more likely to promote health than disease.

The study can be considered the Grand Prix of epidemiology. Sixty-five hundred Chinese have each contributed 367 facts about their eating and other habits that could ultimately help them and Americans preserve their health and prolong their lives. The data alone fill a volume of 920 pages, to be published next month by Cornell University Press. Among the first tantalizing findings are these: Obesity is related more to what people eat than how much. Adjusted for height, the Chinese consume 20 percent more calories than Americans do, but Americans are 25 percent fatter. The main dietary differences are fat and starch. The Chinese eat only a third the amount of fat Americans do, while eating twice the starch. The body readily stores fat but expends a larger proportion of the carbohydrates consumed as heat. Some of the differences may be attributable to exercise. The varying levels of physical activity among the Chinese were measured, but the data have not yet been analyzed.

Reducing dietary fat to less than 30 percent of calories, as is currently recommended for Americans, may not be enough to curb the risk of heart disease and cancer. To make a significant impact, the Chinese data imply, a maximum of 20 percent of calories from fat – and preferably only 10 to 15 percent – should be consumed.

Eating a lot of protein, especially animal protein, is also linked to chronic disease. Americans consume a third more protein than the Chinese do, and 70 percent of American protein comes from animals, while only 7 percent of Chinese protein does. Those Chinese who eat the most protein, and especially the most animal protein, also have the highest rates of the ”diseases of affluence” like heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

A rich diet that promotes rapid growth early in life may increase a woman’s risk of developing cancer of the reproductive organs and the breast. Childhood diets high in calories, protein, calcium and fat promote growth and early menarche, which in turn is associated with high cancer rates. Chinese women, who rarely suffer these cancers, start menstruating three to six years later than Americans. Dairy calcium is not needed to prevent osteoporosis. Most Chinese consume no dairy products and instead get all their calcium from vegetables. While the Chinese consume only half the calcium Americans do, osteoporosis is uncommon in China despite an average life expectancy of about 70 years, just five few years less than the American average.

These findings are only the beginning. Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemist from Cornell University and the American mastermind of the Chinese diet study, predicts that this ”living laboratory” will continue to generate vital findings for the next 40 to 50 years.

The study, started in 1983 to explore dietary causes of cancer, has been expanded to include heart, metabolic and infectious diseases. Dr. Chen Junshi of the Chinese Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene organized the survey to cover locations from the semitropical south to the cold, arid north.

Exacting, Labor-Intensive Study

The extensive volume of raw data and its counterpart on computer tape will be available to any scientist to use as raw material for medical research.

It is an exacting, labor-intensive study, initially financed by the National Cancer Institute, that probably could not have been done anywhere except China. For nowhere else can accurate mortality statistics be combined with data from people who live the same way in the same place and eat the same foods for virtually their entire lives.

Nowhere else is there a genetically similar population with such great regional differences in disease rates, dietary habits and environmental exposures. For example, cancer rates can vary by a factor of several hundred from one region of China to another. These large regional variations in China highlight biologically important relationships between diet and disease.

And nowhere else could researchers afford to hire hundreds of trained workers to collect blood and urine samples and spend three days in each household gathering exact information on what and how much people eat, then analyzing the food samples for nutrient content.

‘The Whole Diet Panoply’

”The total cost in U.S. dollars of this project – $2.3 million plus 600 person-years of labor contributed by the Chinese Government – is a mere fraction of what it would have cost to do the same study here,” Dr. Campbell noted. And unlike typically circumscribed American studies that examine one characteristic as a factor in one disease, the Chinese investigation ”covers the whole diet panoply as it relates to all diseases.”

Dr. Mark Hegsted, emeritus professor of nutrition at Harvard University and former administrator of human nutrition for the United States Department of Agriculture, said: ”This is a very, very important study – unique and well done. Even if you could pay for it, you couldn’t do this study in the United States because the population is too homogeneous. You get a lot more meaningful data when the differences in diet and disease are as great as they are in the various parts of China.”

In the first part of the study, 100 people from each of 65 counties throughout China each contributed 367 items of information about their diets, lives and bodies. The responses from residents of each county were then pooled to derive countywide characteristics that could be measured against the area’s death rates for more than four dozen diseases.

By matching characteristics, researchers derived 135,000 correlations, about 8,000 of which are expected to have both statistical and biological significance that could shed light on the cause of some devastating disease.

In the poorer parts of China, infectious diseases remain the leading causes of death, but in the more affluent regions, heart disease, diabetes and cancer are most prominent, Dr. Campbell said.

Adding Taiwan to the Research

Although from an overall perspective of nutrient composition the Chinese diet is more health-promoting than ours, he said, there are some important limitations that result from a lack of economic development.

”Food quality and variety are not as good as ours,” he explained. ”With limited refrigeration, bacteria and mold contamination is more common, large amounts of salt and nitrites are used to preserve foods and hot spices are used to mask off-flavors.”

The study is now being expanded and revised. New mortality rates are being gathered to update the original mortality data from the early 1970’s and to reflect causes of death for 100 million people in the late 1980’s. The original 6,500 participants are being resurveyed and people from 12 counties in Taiwan are being included in the expanded survey, which will also measure many socioeconomic characteristics.

”We want to see how economics change and health factors follow,” Dr. Campbell explained in an interview. ”Taiwan should be interesting because it is intermediate between the United States and China in nutrient intake and plasma cholesterol levels. And since the Taiwanese gene pool is more like the Chinese, we can study the relative contributions of genetics and diet to risk of disease.”

Cholesterol as Disease Predictor

Dr. Campbell continued: ”So far we’ve seen that plasma cholesterol is a good predictor of the kinds of diseases people are going to get. Those with higher cholesterol levels are prone to the diseases of affluence – cancer, heart disease and diabetes.”

Contrary to earlier reports that linked low blood cholesterol levels to colon cancer, the Chinese study strongly suggests that low cholesterol not only protects against heart disease but also protects against cancer of the colon, the most common life-threatening cancer among Americans. In China, mortality rates from colon cancer are lowest where cholesterol levels are lowest.

Over all, cholesterol levels in China, which range from 88 to 165 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood plasma, much lower than those in the United States, which range from 155 to 274 milligrams per 100 milliliters of plasma.

”Their high cholesterol is our low,” Dr. Campbell noted. He said the data strongly suggest that a major influence on cholesterol levels and disease rates is the high consumption of animal foods, including dairy products, by Americans.

‘Basically a Vegetarian Species’

”We’re basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant foods and minimizing our intake of animal foods,” he said.

The Chinese have already begun to capitalize on these findings, using them to develop national food and agricultural policies that will promote health.

”Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock,” Dr. Campbell said. ”Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move, and the Chinese are listening. They’re realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go.”

The plant-rich Chinese diet contains three times more dietary fiber than Americans typically consume. The average intake in China is 33 grams of fiber a day, and it ranges as high as 77 grams in some regions. Dr. Campbell found no evidence to suggest that diets very high in fiber are in any way deleterious to nutritional well-being.

While American scientists worry that fiber may interfere with the absorption of essential minerals like iron, no reason for concern was found among the Chinese. Rather, those with the highest fiber intake also had the most iron-rich blood.

Iron From Vegetables

The study also showed that consumption of meat is not needed to prevent iron-deficiency anemia. The average Chinese adult, who shows no evidence of anemia, consumes twice the iron Americans do, but the vast majority of it comes from the iron in plants.

Nor are animal products needed to prevent osteoporosis, the study showed. ”Ironically,” Dr. Campbell noted, ”osteoporosis tends to occur in countries where calcium intake is highest and most of it comes from protein-rich dairy products. The Chinese data indicate that people need less calcium than we think and can get adequate amounts from vegetables.”

Another common health concern that could prove to be a red herring is the fear that aflatoxin, which is produced by a mold that grows on peanuts, corn and other grains, causes liver cancer. Rather, the Chinese study strongly indicates that chronic infection with hepatitis B virus and high serum cholesterol levels are the primary culprits.

”We did not find any relationship between aflatoxin and liver cancer, and we have the largest study on this question ever done,” Dr. Campbell said.

Among other intriguing findings are a relationship between infection with herpes simplex virus and coronary heart disease and a relationship between infection with the yeast candida and nasopharyngeal cancer.

”Lots and lots such relationships are turning up as we plot out the 367 characteristics on maps of China and try to match them up with maps of disease rates,” Dr. Campbell said. ”The data now need to be interpreted, and six Chinese scientists are working with us on this. The amount of information gathered in this study is kind of staggering,” he said, then proceeded to outline his interest in gathering more.

FOODS TO AVOID FOR OSTEOARTHRITIS

Dec 15, 2010 | By August McLaughlin
Refined carbohydrates and unhealthy fats may worsen symptoms of osteoarthritis.
Photo Credit Adam Gault/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Osteoarthritis, also called degenerative joint disease, is a chronic condition that causes cartilage deterioration in your joints. The most common form of arthritis, according to MayoClinic.com, osteoarthritis most often affects your hands, neck, hips, lower back and/or knees. While no cure exists, medical treatments, physical therapy and lifestyle changes, such as a healthy diet, may help reduce your symptoms. For best results, seek specified guidance from a qualified professional.

REFINED CARBOHYDRATES

Refined carbohydrates, such as enriched flour and sugar, provide calories, but few nutrients to foods. As high-glycemic foods, refined carbohydrate sources can have a damaging impact on your blood sugar levels, appetite, energy and moods. The University of Maryland Medical Center recommends avoiding enriched breads, pasta and snack foods as one useful dietary step toward reducing osteoarthritis symptoms. For best results, check food packaging on breads, cereals, pasta and snack foods, and avoid those that list enriched white or wheat flour or added sugars, such as cane sugar, corn syrup or brown rice syrup as main ingredients. Beverages rich in added sugars include regular soft drinks, sweetened coffee drinks, chocolate milk and fruit punch.

MEAT AND EGGS

Meat and eggs contain saturated fat, which, when consumed in excess, increases your risk for heart disease, certain forms of cancer and obesity. Meat and eggs also contain omega-6 fatty acids. Consuming too many omega-6 fatty acids and too few omega-3 fatty acids, found in fatty fish and flaxseed, may exacerbate arthritic pain and inflammation, according to Arthritis Today. For best results, choose fatty fish, such as salmon and tuna, lean poultry, low-fat dairy products and legumes, over red meat and eggs most often. Since the egg yolks contain the saturated fat and omega-6 fatty acid content, consume the whites only.

TRANS FATS

Trans fats are created through a process in which hydrogen is added to vegetable oil. Trans fats can increase your “bad,” or LDL, cholesterol, and increase your “good,” or HDL, cholesterol. Trans fats can also lead to inflammation, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. To reduce your trans fat intake, choose whole foods such as fruits and vegetables, over processed snack foods such as crackers, potato chips and pastries. Trans fats are prevalent in shortening, margarine and all foods that list partially hydrogenated vegetable oil as an ingredient. Frozen meals, canned soup, certain brands of peanut butter and numerous fast foods also contain trans fats.

Read more: http://www.livestrong.com/article/335491-foods-to-avoid-for-osteoarthritis/#ixzz2ixIAdD8P

More Red Meat = More Diabetes

Renowned Harvard nutritionist gives us even more reason to cut back on the carne.

July 31, 2013

Higher Red Meat Consumption Linked to Diabetes
Once again, a medical study finds significant health risks, like diabetes, in the consumption of red meat. (Photo: Diane Diederich/Getty Images)

On Sunday, the Boston Globe Magazine featured a profile of Harvard professor Walter Willett, calling him the “world’s most influential nutritionist.” Willett’s influence comes as much from his ability to debunk or reframe studies about food and nutrition as it does from his original work.

In the long and very interesting article, Globe writer Neil Swidey mentions a recent study of Willett’s that was released in June: A new look at the 123,000 people involved in a 20-year study ending in 2006 found elevated red-meat consumption to be linked with an increase in diabetes.

According to the study, conducted by Willett and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health, participants who ate at least a half serving more red meat over a four-year period were 48 percent more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes in the following four years. Conversely, those who lowered their meat consumption by more than half a serving per day decreased their diabetes risk. The research was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Previous studies have connected red meat intake with an increased risk of diabetes, but Willett’s study was the first to show that eating more meat raises a person’s risk—and vice versa. Red meat is defined by the United States Department of Agriculture as that which comes from mammals, while white meat comes from poultry and fish.

Not surprisingly, the meat lobby strongly refutes such claims—“nothing to see here, folks!”—and frequently attempts to dismiss studies that are critical of meat on propaganda websites like MeatPoultryNutrition.org and MeatSafety.org.

“While some recent studies have generated headlines linking meat to different ailments, it is important to remember that conditions like heart disease, cancer and diabetes are complex conditions that cannot simply be caused by any one food,” American Meat Institute spokesman Eric Mittenthal told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

On the FAQs page of MeatPoultryNutrition.org, a site run by an industry lobby group called the American Meat Institute, pleads for readers to not give up their meat: “The wisest course of action is a balanced diet, weight control, plenty of exercise and a healthy degree of skepticism about the ‘study of the week,’ ” the site reads.

But Willett’s four decades of research and consistently reliable findings are difficult to dismiss wholesale. And while he admits further study is necessary to account for lifestyle and other health factors, Willett and his colleagues believe the strong connection found between red meat and diabetes warrants people cutting back on their consumption of beef, pork or lamb (giving up meat on Mondays may be a good place to start).

And as we’ve reported numerous times, we are eating less meat, overall.Americans’ meat consumption dropped by more than 12 percent between 2007 and 2012—an amount that equals a half-pound of meat per person, per day.

If Willett’s findings hold true, the result of a less meat-centric diet may be a reduction in the instances of diabetes among Americans, which has skyrocketed in recent years. And that will be great news indeed

More Whole Grains, Less Belly Fat

 

Want a flatter, leaner tummy? Remove from your diet white, processed grains like white bread and white rice, and eat more whole grains such as oatmeal, barley, bulgar, 100% whole-wheat bread, whole-wheat pasta, and brown rice, research has found.

More Whole Grains, Less Belly FatStudying 50 obese men and women, scientists at Pennsylvania State University put all 50 subjects on a calorie-reducing diet for 12 weeks, but divided them into two groups. Half were instructed to eat whole grains; the other half were told to choose refined, processed grains, like white-flour foods.

After 12 weeks, average weight loss for both groups was about the same: 8 to 11 pounds. But the whole-grain group showed significantly greater reductions in the percentage of fat around the middle, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

That’s great news not only for a svelte tummy but also for health. Numerous studies published over the past two decades have found that belly fat is particularly harmful to our hearts and health. Abdominal fat is one of the characteristics of a now-epidemic condition in the U.S. called the metabolic syndrome, which is a collection of several risk factors for diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

Belly fat is also linked with chronic low-level inflammation in the blood vessels, which in turn is a harbinger of heart attacks and strokes. Another risk factor that tumbled among the whole-grain eaters (and not the refined grain eaters) in the Pennylvania State University study was a key marker of chronic inflammation – C-reactive protein, or CRP.

Similarly, research on people who adopted the Pritikin Program found that CRP levels plummeted. Within two to three weeks, C-reactive protein decreased 45% among women, 39% among men, and 41% among children.Metabolism, 53: 377, 2004; Journal of Applied Physiology, 100: 1657, 2006; Atherosclerosis, 191: 98, 2007.

At the Pritikin Center, guests learn their fat-to-muscle ratio via DEXA Body Composition Scanning. After two to three weeks, follow-up scanning reveals how powerful Pritikin living is in shedding fat and increasing muscle.Studies have also found that among both adults and children, the Pritikin Program reversed the clinical diagnosis of metabolic syndrome.

“But please don’t feel complacent if you don’t have a pot belly,” urges Dr. Danine Fruge, Associate Medical Director at the Pritikin Longevity Center.

“There’s a tragic – and growing – problem in our country, and we doctors call this problem TOFI, which means thin on the outside and fat on the inside.”

You are a TOFI if your weight is normal, but your body mass shows a high ratio of fat to muscle. You may not see the fat, but it’s there, under the skin, and deposited around and inside the internal organs, including the heart, muscle, and liver. It’s largely the result of our sedentary lifestyles — our lack of muscle use — and our fatty, sugary, white-flour-focused calorie-dense diets.

At the Pritikin Longevity Center, guests learn their fat-to-muscle ratio via DEXA Body Composition Scanning. After two to three weeks, follow-up scanning reveals how powerful Pritikin living is in shedding fat and increasing muscle. The end result is a leaner, fitter, better toned body.

What does it mean to be a TOFI? “It means,” warns Dr. Fruge, “that despite normal weight, you are still at increased risk for diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases related to obesity.”

Bottom line: Excess body fat, whether it’s around your belly or deep within, is dangerous.

“So get up and get moving!” encourages Dr. Fruge. “And enjoy the many benefits of the Pritikin Eating Plan, rich in healthful whole foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and beans.

“I know of nothing else in medicine that comes close to what a healthy lifestyle like Pritikin can do.”

Fructose, Sweet but Dangerous

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup Worse Than Sugar?

By , About.com Guide

Updated October 09, 2008

About.com Health’s Disease and Condition content is reviewed by our Medical Review Board

high fructose corn syrupSodas are Usually Sweetened with High Fructose Corn SyrupPhoto: Scott Olson/Getty Images

What is fructose?

Fructose is a monosaccharide (simple sugar), which the body can use for energy. Because it does not cause blood sugar rise tremendously (has a low glycemic index), it was once thought that fructose was a good substitute for sucrose (table sugar). However, the American Diabetes Association and nutritional experts have changed their minds about this.

Is fructose bad for me?

A small amount of fructose, such as the amount found in most vegetables and fruits, is not a bad thing. In fact, there is evidence that a little bit may help your body process glucose properly. However, consuming too much fructose at once seems to overwhelm the body’s capacity to process it. The diets of our ancestors contained only very small amounts of fructose. These days, estimates are that about 10% of the modern diet comes from fructose.

What happens if I consume too much fructose?

Most of the carbohydrates we eat are made up of chains of glucose. When glucose enters the bloodstream, the body releases insulin to help regulate it. Fructose, on the other hand, is processed in the liver. To greatly simplify the situation: When too much fructose enters the liver, the liver can’t process it all fast enough for the body to use as sugar. Instead, it starts making fats from the fructose and sending them off into the bloodstream as triglycerides.

Why is this bad?

This is potentially bad for at least three reasons:

  • High blood triglycerides are a risk factor for heart disease.
  • Fructose ends up circumventing the normal appetite signaling system, so appetite-regulating hormones aren’t triggered–and you’re left feeling unsatisfied. This is probably at least part of the reason why excess fructose consumption is associated with weight gain.
  • There is growing evidence that excess fructose consumption may facilitate insulin resistance, and eventually type 2 diabetes. However, some of this effect may be from chemicals in soda which reacts with the high fructose corn syrup.

What are the major sources of fructose?

Fruits and vegetables have relatively small, “normal” amounts of fructose that most bodies can handle quite well. The problem comes with added sugars in the modern diet, the volume of which has grown rapidly in recent decades. The blame has often been pinned to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which is made up of 55% fructose and 45% glucose. However, sucrose is half fructose and half glucose. So, HFCS actually doesn’t have a whole lot more fructose than “regular” sugar, gram for gram.High fructose corn syrup has become incredibly inexpensive and abundant, partially due to corn subsidies in the United States. So, really, the problem is more that it has become so cheap that it has crept its way into a great number of the foods we eat every day.

Is corn syrup fructose different than fructose found in other foods?

No, all fructose works the same in the body, whether it comes from corn syrup, cane sugar, beet sugar, strawberries, onions, or tomatoes. Only the amounts are different. For example, a cup of chopped tomatoes has 2.5 grams of fructose, a can of regular (non-diet) soda supplies 23 grams, and a super-size soda has about 62 grams.

Which foods have high fructose corn syrup and other sugars?

Today, almost all packaged foods have sugar added in some form, which almost always includes a lot of fructose. Honey has about the same fructose/glucose ratio as high fructose corn syrup. Fruit juice concentrates, sometimes used as “healthy sweeteners,” usually have quite a lot of fructose (never mind that the processing of these concentrates strips away most of their nutritional value). Look at the ingredients on packaged food labels and you will probably see sources of fructose. See my article, Sugar’s Many Disguises, to learn what to look for.

Sugar the villain in obesity epidemic

It’s addictive and toxic, like a drug, and we need to wean ourselves off it, says US doctor

Video: The Bitter Truth

  • sugar obesity
Dr Robert Lustig’s book Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar has caused a backlash from the food industry, which, he says, wants to ‘paint me as this zealot’. Photograph: Alamy

Sugar – given to children by adults, lacing our breakfast cereals and a major part of our fizzy drinks – is the real villain in the obesity epidemic, and not fat as people used to think, according to a leading US doctor who is taking on governments and the food industry.

Dr Robert Lustig, who was this month in London and Oxford for a series of talks about his research, likens sugar to controlled drugs. Cocaine and heroin are deadly because they are addictive and toxic – and so is sugar, he says. “We need to wean ourselves off. We need to de-sweeten our lives. We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple,” he said.

“The food industry has made it into a diet staple because they know when they do you buy more. This is their hook. If some unscrupulous cereal manufacturer went out and laced your breakfast cereal with morphine to get you to buy more, what would you think of that? They do it with sugar instead.”

Lustig’s book, Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar has made waves in America and has now been published in the UK by 4th Estate. As a paediatrician who specialises in treating overweight children in San Francisco, he has spent 16 years studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system, metabolism and disease. His conclusion is that the rivers of Coca-Cola and Pepsi consumed by young people today have as much to do with obesity as the mountains of burgers.

That does not mean burgers are OK. “The play I’m making is not sugar per se, the play I’m making is insulin,” he says. Foodstuffs that raise insulin levels in the body too high are the problem. He blames insulin for 75% to 80% of all obesity. Insulin is the hormone, he says, which causes energy to be stored in fat cells. Sugar energy is the most egregious of those, but there are three other categories: trans fats (which are on the way out), alcohol (which children do not drink) and dietary amino acids.

These amino acids are found in corn-fed American beef. “In grass-fed beef, like in Argentina, there are no problems,” he said. “And that’s why the Argentinians are doing fine. The Argentinians have a meat-based diet … I love their meat. It is red, it’s not marbled, it’s a little tougher to cut but it’s very tasty. And it’s grass-fed. That’s what cows are supposed to eat – grass.

“We [in the US] feed them corn and the reason is twofold – one, we don’t have enough land and, two, when you feed them corn they fatten up. It usually takes 18 months to get a cow from birth to slaughter. Today it takes six weeks and you get all that marbling in the meat. That’s muscle insulin resistance. That animal has the same disease we do, it’s just that we slaughter them before they get sick.”

But his bigger message is that cheap sugar is endangering lives. It has been added to your diet, “kids have access” to it, and it is there in all sorts of foods that don’t need it, he says. When high-fat foods were blamed for making us overweight, manufacturers tumbled over each other to produce low-fat products. But to make them palatable, they added sugar, causing much greater problems.

Cutting calories is not the answer because “a calorie is not a calorie”. The effect of a calorie in sugar is different from the effect of a calorie in lean grass-fed beef. And added sugar is often disguised in food labelling under carbohydrates and myriad different names, from glucose to diastatic malt and dextrose. Fructose – contained in many different types of sugar – is the biggest problem, and high-fructose corn syrup, used extensively by food manufacturers in the US, is the main source of it.

Lustig says he has been under attack from the food industry, but claims they have not managed to fault the science. “The food industry wants to misinterpret because they want to discredit me. They want to paint me as this zealot. They want to paint me as somebody who doesn’t have the science. But we do,” he says.

Evidence of dietary effects on the body is very hard to collect. People habitually lie in food diaries or forget what they ate. Randomised controlled trials are impossible because everyone reverts to a more normal eating pattern after a couple of months. But his sugar argument is more than hypothesis, he says, citing a recent study in the open journal Plos One, of which he was one of the authors. It found that in countries where people had greater access to sugar, there were higher levels of diabetes. Rates of diabetes went up by about 1.1% for every 150 kcal of sugar available for each person each day – about the amount in a can of Coke. Critics argued sugar availability was not the same as sugar consumed, but Lustig and his colleagues say it is the closest approximation they could get.

That study was aimed at the World Health Organisation although he believes it is a conflicted organisation.

But so is the US government, he says. “Government has tied its wagon to the food industry because, at least in America, 6% of our exports are food. That includes the legislative and executive branches. So the White House is in bed with the food industry and Congress apologises for the food industry.”

Michelle Obama appeared to be onside when she launched her Let’s Move initiative in February 2010 with a speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association of America. “She took it straight to them and said, ‘You’re the problem. You’re the solution.’ She hasn’t said it since. Now it’s all about exercise.

“Far be it from me to bad-mouth somebody who wants to do the right thing. But I’m telling you right now she’s been muzzled. No question of it.” In his book he tells of a private conversation with the White House chef, who he claims told him the administration agreed with him but did not want a fight with the food industry.

Some areas of the food industry have appeared to be willing to change. PepsiCo’s chief executive officer, Indra Nooyi, who is from India which has a serious diabetes epidemic, has been trying to steer the company towards healthier products. But it has lost money and she is said to be having problems with the board. “So here’s a woman who is trying to do the right thing and can’t,” he says.

Court action may be the way to go, he says, suggesting challenging the safety of fructose added to food, and food labelling that fails to tell you what has been added and what has been taken out. Fruit juice is not so healthy, he says, because all the fibre that allows the natural sugars to be processed without being stored as fat has been removed. Eat the fruit, he says, don’t drink the juice. Lustig is taking a master’s at the University of California Hastings college of law, in order to be a better expert witness and strategist.

It is not a case of eradicating sugar from the diet, just getting it down to levels that are not toxic, he says. The American Heart Association in 2009 published a statement, of which Lustig was a co-author, saying Americans consumed 22 teaspoons of it a day. That needs to come down to six for women and nine for men.

“That’s a reduction by two thirds to three quarters. Is that zero? No. But that’s a big reduction. That gets us below our toxic threshold. Our livers have a capacity to metabolise some fructose, they just can’t metabolise the glut that we’ve been exposed to by the food industry. And so the goal is to get sugar out of foods that don’t need it, like salad dressing, like bread, like barbecue sauce.” There is a simple way to do it. “Eat real food.”

Does he keep off the sweet stuff himself? “As much as I can. I don’t go out of my way. It finds me but I don’t find it. Caffeine on the other hand …”

Lustig’s food advice

• Oranges. Eat the fruit, don’t drink the juice. Fruit juice in cartons has had all the fibre squeezed out of it, making its sugars more dangerous.

• Beef. Beef from grass-fed cattle as in Argentina is fine, but not from corn-fed cattle as in the US.

• Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other sweetened beverages. These deliver sugar but with no nutritional added value. Water and milk are the best drinks, especially for children.

• Bread. Watch out for added sugar in foods where you would not expect it.

• Alcohol. Just like sugar, it pushes up the body’s insulin levels, which tells the liver to store energy in fat cells. Alcohol is a recognised cause of fatty liver disease.

• Home-baked cookies and cakes. If you must eat them, bake them yourself with one third less sugar than the recipe says. Lustig says they even taste better that way.

Some Sea Lice With That Farmed Salmon?

Sea lice devour a a farmed salmon in New Brunswick, Canada. 7Barrym0re/Wikimedia Commons

I’ve written a lot about “superbugs”from factory-farmed meat, as well as“superweeds” and “superinsencts”from genetically modified crops. Turns out, industrial agriculture is wreaking similar havoc in the sea. What do I mean? Consider the salmon, that noble family of fish, which has evolved over the millennia alongside an ignoble parasite: the sea louse.

Often less than a centimeter long, the sea louse operates like the land louse that bedevil humans: by attaching itself to the skin of the host and then chomping down and sipping its blood. Happily, wild salmon and sea lice populations achieved a rough balance over their time on the planet—wild salmon developed resistance to the point that sea lice can do their thing without causing significant harm.

That was the state of things, anyway, until the emergence of industrial-scale salmon farming in Norway in the 1970s. In industrial salmon production, the fish are stuffed together by the hundreds of thousands in pens open to the coastal sea. These conditions provide a veritable banquet for sea lice—rather than having to scour the sea for their hosts, the parasites find their targets wriggling around en masse in one place. Left to their own devices, the industry discovered, the age-old parasite-host balance is upset, and farm salmon populations succumb to sea lice.

Undaunted, producers resorted to a prized tool of land-based industrial agriculture: pesticides. The idea is simple: If farmed salmon can’t fight off sea lice with their own defenses, dump toxic chemicals into the feed (or directly into the pens) to do the job for them.

The practice worked well enough as the farmed salmon industry exploded in size and—still dominated by a few large Norwegian firms—set up shop in Chile, the United States’ Pacific Northwest, and Canada. The explosion in production turned salmon from a luxury food to an everyday staple. Today,90 percent of salmon consumed in the US comes from vast farm operations.

Lepeophtheirus salmonis (sea louse): Watershed_Watch/FlickrLepeophtheirus salmonis (sea louse)Watershed_Watch/FlickrBut—surprise!—sea lice are constantly adapting to the poisons used to control them, forcing the industry to ramp up pesticide doses and search for novel poisons. In Canada, source of 40 percent of the farmed salmon consumed in the United States, the sea lice appear to be winning.

The Toronto-based Globe and Mail used Canada’s version of the Freedom of Information Act to uncover government documents revealing alarm over the fact a pesticide called Slice—the only one Canada has registered for use in salmon pens—is losing effectiveness in the nation’s teeming factory salmon farms.* Reported the Globe and Mail:

“Over the last two years, [New Brunswick] salmon farmers have noted growing levels of sea lice tolerance to the in-feed lice control drug Slice,” Claire Dansereau, deputy minister in Fisheries and Oceans, wrote in a memorandum for the minister in September, 2010. “It appears Slice is no longer effective unless applied in triple doses. Farmers have been seeking access to other treatment products including hydrogen peroxide, Salmosan, AlphaMax and Calicide.” [Emphasis mine.]

Triple doses. What do such massive amounts of pesticides mean for farmed salmon eaters? No one really knows. Taras Grescoe, author of the excellent book Bottomfeeder, put it like this in a 2008 New York Times op-ed:

To rid salmon of the lice, fish farmers spike their feed with a strong pesticide called emamectin benzoate [the chemical name for Slice], which when administered to rats and dogs causes tremors, spinal deterioration and muscle atrophy. The United States Food and Drug Administration, already hard-pressed to inspect imported Asian seafood for antibiotic and fungicide residues, does not test imported salmon for emamectin benzoate. In other words, the farmed salmon in nearly every American supermarket may contain this pesticide, which on land is used to rid diseased trees of pine beetles. It is not a substance I want in my body.

While sea lice and their pesticides duke it out in Canada’s salmon cages, one sure loser is emerging from the battle: wild salmon, which once flourished along the area’s coasts and streams. The rough balance between wild salmon and their parasites evaporates in areas of intensive salmon farming, where sea lice populations boom.

A 2007 Science study gauged the effects of salmon farming on wild populations. The conclusion is devastating:

We show that recurrent louse infestations of wild juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), all associated with salmon farms, have depressed wild pink salmon populations and placed them on a trajectory toward rapid local extinction. The louse-induced mortality of pink salmon is commonly over 80% and exceeds previous fishing mortality. If outbreaks continue, then local extinction is certain, and a 99% collapse in pink salmon population abundance is expected in four salmon generations. These results suggest that salmon farms can cause parasite outbreaks that erode the capacity of a coastal ecosystem to support wild salmon populations.

Collapsing wild salmon stocks, of course, are treated as an “externality” by the salmon industry: a cost of production borne by society as a whole, not by producers. And if those megafarmers get their way, the Globe and Mailreports, Canada’s salmon farms will soon be using a lice-targeting pesticide called AlphaMax that Environment Canada, the country’s version of the EPA,has identified as a threat to wild lobster stocks. Farmed salmon may be cheap at the grocery store, but its true costs are proving high, indeed.

*Correction: This story originally reported that the lice problem had gotten out of control in salmon farms on Canada’s west coast. Actually, the problems are on the east coast. The text has been corrected. I regret the error.

Parkinson Disease

Red Meat, Vitamin B2 Deficiency, and Parkinson Disease

Recently, someone in my family got a diagnosis of Parkinson disease, which is the same disease that Michael J. Fox has. So naturally I searched the medical literature to see if there was a dietary angle to the disease. There is, and it’s very exciting! Removing red meat from the diet and correcting a vitamin B2 deficiency might prevent Parkinson disease, and it might even help reverse some of the effects of the disease. This would actually change the course of the disease, whereas all doctors can do at present is treat its symptoms.


How I Searched the Medical Literature

I went to http://www.pubmed.com/ and clicked on MeSH Database. Then I typedParkinson disease in the search box and clicked onGo. One of the results was Parkinson disease. I clicked on that and selected the subheading “diet therapy” and added that to the search box. Then I clicked on Search PubMed.

What I Found

One of the articles that I found pointed out that Parkinson disease is far more common in elderly people in Europe and North America than it is in elderly sub-Saharan Black African, rural Chinese, and Japanese people. In other words, it’s far more common in people who eat a lot of meat than in people who eat a heavily plant-based diet.

Another interesting article suggested that Parkinson disease might result from two separate problems related to diet and nutrition (High doses of riboflavin and the elimination of dietary red meat promote the recovery of some motor functions in Parkinson’s disease patients. C.G. Coimbra and V.B.C. Junqueira. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research, 36: 1409-1417, 2003). The first problem is an overload of iron from eating too much red meat. The second is some problem in the way the body handles riboflavin (vitamin B2). To put these ideas to the test, the researchers tested 31 consecutive Parkinson disease patients who entered their clinic. Every single one of them had abnormally low levels of vitamin B2 in their bloodstream, even though they were eating food that should have provided enough vitamin B2. In comparison, only 3 out of 10 patients with other neurodegenerative diseases had a vitamin B2 deficiency. The Parkinson patients were also big red meat eaters. The researchers told the Parkinson disease patients to stop eating red meat and to take 30 mg of riboflavin three times a day. The patients who followed this advice regained some of their lost motor skills. Mildly afflicted patients became completely asymptomatic, and even some of the more severely afflicted patients improved a lot. These findings were dramatic and exciting, and this article should have lit a fire under the researchers who are studying Parkinson disease. Here was a simple, cheap, and safe dietary modification that addressed the actual cause of the disease, and could even reverse some of its effects.

Unfortunately, people tend to discard the results of dietary studies out of hand, partly because these studies can’t follow the same format as a drug trial. For example, you can’t “blind” people to what they’re eating, so there’s never a “placebo control.” Also, some people become totally unhinged if they hear that the foods they like aren’t good for them. Predictably, someone wrote in a truly idiotic critique of the study (Comments of H.B. Ferraz et al. ) The authors’ responsewas withering. They said things like “By searching the current medical literature, Ferraz and associates might readily become familiar with countless preliminary studies which have been subsequently confirmed by larger and better controlled research” and “The citations made by Ferraz and associates demonstrate that they have completely missed our point, even though it was clearly emphasized even in the title of our study.” What a smack-down!

Ferraz and coworkers were worried that if people stopped eating red meat, they might end up with a protein deficiency. Well, where do gorillas get their protein? If a diet without red meat provides enough protein for a 500-pound silverback male gorilla, it should provide enough for a human being. And what would be the harm in testing Parkinson disease patients for riboflavin deficiency? Why aren’t Ferraz and coworkers worried about the possibility that we’re missing an opportunity to stop Parkinson disease in its tracks?

Marketing Milk and Disease

Marketing Milk and Disease by John McDougall, MD

The Dairy Industry is really big business, with sales of
over $11 billion for milk and $16 billion for cheese
annually in the USA alone, so you might expect hard line
marketing from them, but would you expect them to
aggressively sell their products if they were known to be
harmful to people, especially to women and children?

The Dairy Management Inc., whose purpose is to build demand
for dairy products on behalf of America’s 80,000-plus dairy
producers, has just released the Dairy Checkoff 2003 Unified
Marketing Plan (UMP) with a budget of $165.7 million. (1)

The United Marketing Plan explains, “This ongoing program
area (referring to the section Dairy Image/Confidence) aims
to protect and enhance consumer confidence in dairy products
and the dairy industry. A major component involves
conducting and communicating the results of dairy nutrition
research showing the healthfulness of dairy products, as
well as issues and crisis management.” (1)(Most likely, I
fall under the heading of “issues and crisis management.”)

A significant portion of the money from the 2003 Unified
Marketing Plan is specifically targeted to children ages 6
to 12 and their mothers. The goal is “to guide school-age
children to become life-long consumers of dairy products,
2003 activities will target students, parents, educators and
school foodservice professionals.” (1) (Similar words and
intentions have been attributed to the tobacco industry.)
All this marketing is working, too: annual fluid milk
consumption among kids 6 to 12 increased to 28 gallons per
capita, the highest level in 10 years. Children under 18
drink 46% of the milk consumed in the USA.

Realize that when I say milk in this article, I’m also
implicating all dairy products that are made from milk:
non-fat milk, low-fat milk, buttermilk, cheeses, cottage
cheese, yogurt, ice cream, whey, kefir, and butter. All
of them share a similar nutritional profile (plus or
minus the fat, protein, and sugar), and as a result, all
of them contribute to a wide range of health problems.

Will the UMP Inform You of the Contamination?
E. Coli, AIDS and Leukemia Viruses?

Last month I left you with some very disturbing facts
about the contamination of milk with loads of bacteria
and millions of white blood cells (pus cells) which are
there to help fight off the infections found in cows and
milk (see the April 2003 Newsletter found at
http://www.drmcdougall.com).

Will the 2003 Unified Marketing Plan specify money to
inform you of this upsetting information? You will never
see an advertisement with a famous movie star proudly
wearing a white mustache, properly labeled as containing
300,000 white blood cells and 25,000 bacteria.

Dairy products were the foods most often recalled by the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from the period
October 1, 1993 through September 30, 1998 because of
contamination with infectious agents, mostly bacteria. (2)

They are commonly tainted with disease-causing bacteria,
such as salmonella, staphylococci, listeria, deadly E. coli
O1573 and Mycobacterium paratuberculosis (4) (possibly one
of the agents causing Crohn’s disease; a form of
life-threatening chronic colitis), as well as viruses known
to cause lymphoma and leukemia-like diseases, and immune
deficiency in cattle.

AIDS and Leukemia Viruses

Dairy cattle are infected with bovine immunodeficiency
viruses (BIV) and bovine leukemia viruses (BLV), worldwide.
(Bovine immunodeficiency viruses can also be properly
referred to as bovine AIDS viruses.)

In the United States, results show an average 40% of beef
herds and 64% of dairy herds are infected with BIV. (5)

In Canada (6-7), the infection rate is 70% and in Argentina
(8) the rate is 84% for BLV.

Herds infected with the BIV are usually infected with the
leukemia virus (BLV) also. (5)

Both viruses can cross species lines thus infecting other
animals, like sheep, goats, and chimpanzees – and they
develop disease. (5)

Nationwide and worldwide, leukemia is more common in the
higher dairy consuming populations. (9,10)

An increased incidence of leukemia has been found among
dairy farmers in multiple studies. (11-14)

BIV infection has been reported in a person. (15)

The bovine leukemia virus has been classified in the same
group as the Human T-cell Leukemia/Lymphotropic virus
type 1 (HTLV-1), which is known to cause leukemia and
lymphomas in humans (Adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma). (16)

BIV is structurally and genetically closely related to
human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type-1 (the virus causing
human AIDS). (17)

Pasteurization kills many types of microorganisms, but it is
not foolproof. There is also concern that pasteurization may
break the viruses into fragments that may become even more
dangerous. (18)

Has it been shown that the bovine AIDS and/or leukemia viruses
will infect you and cause disease? No. Nor has it been proved
that they will not. Compared to the efforts to try to convince
you of the bone-building benefits of milk, almost nothing has
been spent to establish whether or not it is safe to feed your
family dairy products teeming with bovine immunodeficiency and
bovine leukemia viruses (and/or viral fragments). Some countries
take this matter very seriously. For example, in many European
countries, health officials have conducted programs to eradicate
infected herds; Finland’ program has successfully eradicated
BLV from its cattle. (19)

If you live in a region with a high incidence of herd infection
with these viruses you can be pretty sure you will be consuming
dairy products containing whole viruses or fragments of these
viruses, since the milk from many dairy farms is mixed in large
vats at the dairy factory before processing and packaging.
Since the industry will not act responsibly in many countries,
consumers are left with one choice: eliminate all dairy
products from their diet. If eliminating dairy products would
prevent even a small risk of human disease, it would be well
worthwhile, especially since, as you learned in the April 2003
McDougall Newsletter, they are completely unnecessary for
excellent health.

Will the UMP Market the Pain and Suffering Caused Children?

The Dairy Management Inc. has specifically targeted children
in their campaign. (1) This will raise no public concern,
because most people consider cow’s milk the healthiest of all
food choices, especially when it comes to children. Over 25%
of children are overweight in Western countries and cow’s milk,
cheese, yogurt, ice cream, butter, and sour cream, with all
their fat and calories, contribute greatly to this deadly
epidemic. Many of these overweight children are now developing
type-2 diabetes. However, the most common variety of diabetes
found in children is still type-1 or insulin dependent
diabetes (IDDM).

Type-1 Diabetes

The evidence incriminating cow’s milk consumption in the cause
of type-1 diabetes is sufficient to cause the American Academy
of Pediatrics to issue these warnings, “Early exposure of
infants to cow’s milk protein may be an important factor in the
initiation of the beta cell (insulin-producing cells of the
pancreas) destructive process in some individuals.” (20) “The
avoidance of cow’s milk protein for the first several months
of life may reduce the later development of IDDM or delay its
onset in susceptible people.” (20)

Exposure to cow’s milk protein early in life, when the
intestinal tract is immature, sometimes results in the milk
protein entering the blood stream where antibodies to this
foreign substance, cow’s milk, are made by the immune system.
Unfortunately, these same antibodies also attack the insulin-
producing cells of the pancreas. By glassful of milk after
spoonful of ice cream, over a period of about 5 to 7 years,
the child destroys his or her own pancreas – and is left
with a lifelong, life-threatening, handicap: diabetes. The
pancreas is forever destroyed and the child will have to take
insulin shots daily. Complications, such as blindness, kidney
failure, and heart disease will be a real threat during his
or her shortened lifespan.(See my July 2002 McDougall
Newsletter for a discussion of type-1 diabetes).

Constipation

Not as life-threatening as diabetes, but for some as mentally
and physically distressing, is chronic constipation. As a doctor
who has cared for hundreds of children, I can tell you they suffer
with pain, bleeding, hemorrhoids, and embarrassment. The causal
effects of cow’s milk were clearly demonstrated in a study of 65
severely constipated children published in the New England Journal
of Medicine. (21)

These boys and girls complained of only one bowel movement every
3 to 15 days and many didn’t even respond to strong laxatives
(lactulose and mineral oil). Forty-four of the 65 (68%) found
relief of their constipation when taken off the cow’s milk.
Evidence of inflammation of the bowel was found on biopsy, and
anal fissures and pain were commonly associated with the
constipation “elimination of the cow’s milk solved these problems.”

When cow’s milk was reintroduced into their diet 8 to 12 months
later, all of the children developed constipation within 5 to 10
days. For constipation alone, cow’s milk should be banned from
the School Milk Programs, worldwide.

Rhinitis and Otitis Media

The multitude of snotty-nosed kids frequently visiting the
pediatrician’s office for ear infections is much more obvious
than the constipated crowd, and these problems less devastating
than type-1 diabetes, but these complaints also can be due to
consuming the foreign proteins intended for calves. (22-25)
In addition, these same children are likely to suffer from
gastroesophageal reflux, asthma and/or eczema from their
unnatural habit of drinking cow’s milk.

Diseases of Foreign Protein

Many conditions can be traced back to reactions to cow’s milk.
Milk contains more than 25 different proteins that can induce
adverse reactions in humans. (26) Our immune system perceives
these foreign proteins as alien invaders, like a virus or
bacteria, and launches an attack in response, as in the case
of type-1 diabetes discussed above and many other allergic
and autoimmune diseases.

DISEASES CAUSED BY, OR LINKED TO, DAIRY PROTEINS

General: Loss of appetite, growth retardation.

Upper Gastrointestinal:

Canker sores (aphthous stomatitis), irritation of tongue, lips and
mouth, tonsil enlargement, vomiting, gastroesophageal reflux (GERD),
Sandifer’s syndrome, peptic ulcer disease, colic, stomach cramps,
abdominal distention, intestinal obstruction, type-1 diabetes.

Lower Gastrointestinal:

Bloody stools, colitis, malabsorption, diarrhea, painful defecation,
fecal soiling, infantile colic, chronic constipation, infantile food
protein-induced enterocolitis syndrome (FPIES), Crohn’s disease,
ulcerative colitis.

Respiratory:

Nasal stuffiness, runny nose, otitis media (inner ear trouble),
sinusitis, wheezing, asthma, and pulmonary infiltrates.

Bone and joint:

Rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, lupus,
Beheta’s disease, (possibly psoriatic arthritis and ankylosing
spondylitis).

Skin:

Rashes, atopic dermatitis, eczema, seborrhea, hives (urticaria)

Nervous System (Behavioral):

Multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, autism, schizophrenia,
irritability, restlessness, hyperactivity, headache, lethargy,
fatigue, “allergic-tension fatigue syndrome,” muscle pain,
mental depression, enuresis (bed-wetting).

Blood:
Abnormal blood clotting, iron deficiency anemia, low serum
proteins, thrombocytopenia, and eosinophilia.

Other:

Nephrotic syndrome, glomerulonephritis, anaphylactic shock and
death, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS or crib or cot death),
injury to the arteries causing arteritis, and eventually,
atherosclerosis.

References are available through the National Library of
Medicine, http://www.nlm.nih.gov – Search cow’s milk and
any of the diseases listed above.

All dairy products contain milk proteins, including skim milk,
yogurt, cheese, and butter, and many butter substitutes. Milk
proteins are listed in packaged food products with a variety of
names, such as milk solids, skim milk powder, casein, caseinates,
whey, and albumin. Milk is also often put into packaged foods and
not declared on the label – this is illegal and punishable by FDA
action.

Even with all of this disease in children the American School Food
Service Association and the dairy industry have developed a School
Milk Pilot Test to demonstrate that kids will drink more milk in
school if certain product enhancements are made. (27)

The result was milk sales increased by an average of 18 percent
and consumption increased by 35 percent when schools provided
flavored milks and other package enhancements. (28)

The UMP Will Try to Deceive You about the Fattening Nature of
Dairy Foods.

“Independent research confirming dairy’s role in weight reduction
is mounting,” said Dr. Greg Miller, senior vice president of nutrition
and scientific affairs for the Dairy Checkoff. (29) “This helps to
position dairy foods as part of the solution to America’s growing
obesity epidemic.” And Miller added, “Informing the public about
dairy’s role in the fight against obesity will help increase
consumption of milk, cheese and yogurt, among other dairy products.”

Shouldn’t the idea of milk acting as an “antiobesity” food
strike you as fundamentally contradictory? After all, the
biologic purpose of cow’s milk is to provide large amounts
of energy and nutrients to grow the young animal from 60 to
600 pounds. So how does milk become a weight loss product in
the 21st century? This idea began with the observation that
underprivileged people, who have poor diets in general, are
often obese, and also consume few dairy products. (30) Some
experiments that followed showed people and animals on calorie-
restricted diets lost a small amount of extra weight when
calcium or dairy foods were part of their diet.

The “antiobesity” effects of dairy are difficult to explain, but
may be due to calcium binding fat in the intestine, preventing its
absorption. (30)

A thorough search of the literature for properly designed studies
shows only one of 17 randomized studies found weight loss in people
taking calcium pills, and of the nine randomized studies where
fluid milk was added, two showed significant weight gain, and none
showed significant loss. (31)

In one study funded by a grant from the International Dairy Foods
Association, 204 healthy men and women were asked to increase
their intake of skim or 1% milk by three cups a day for 12 weeks;
those consuming the extra milk gained an average of 1.32 pounds
(0.6 Kg). (32) Can you imagine what their weight gain would have
been if they had been asked to add whole milk, cheese, butter,
and ice cream to their diet, instead of skim and low-fat 1% milk?

The result of all this research was well summed up by one of the
dairy industry’s frequent spokespersons at the Dairy Management
Inc. sponsored Symposium: Dairy Product Components and Weight
Regulation, held April 21, 2002 in New Orleans, with this statement,
“In conclusion, the data available from randomized trials of dairy
product or calcium supplementation provide little support for an
effect in reducing body weight or fat mass.” (31)

Yet the consumer will hear from Dr. Miller and the rest of the
industry, eat more dairy products and you will lose weight.

Dairy products are loaded with fats that are easily stored under
your skin as “body fat.” The fats in the cold glass of milk, the
little bite of cheese, and that small bowl of ice cream will move
from your lips to your hips effortlessly. In fact, it moves with
so little effort that the chemical structure of the fat isn’t even
changed. Cow’s milk contains a unique kind of fat with double
bonds located at the C-15 and C-17 position on the fat’s carbon
chain. Examination of a person’s fatty (adipose) tissues following
a biopsy will show the amount of this kind of fat present, which
will be in direct proportion to the amount of dairy products
the person consumes. (33)

All that fat the dairy industry asks us to eat is associated with
higher risks of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and breast,
prostate, uterine and colon cancer. Yet, as a marketing scheme,
the dairy industry has teamed up with the National Medical
Association to write articles about “the role of dairy in helping
reduce the risk of heart disease, hypertension, and other serious
health issues.” (34)

The National Medical Association promotes the collective interests
of physicians and patients of African descent. Please explain to me
how this association came about when the vast majority of people of
African descent (80% to 90%) cannot drink milk because of lactose
intolerance; causing them diarrhea, stomach cramps and gas. (35)

Not only is this dairy fat unattractively worn and a health
hazard, but it is also a source of large quantities of
environmental chemicals, like dioxins and DDT, that affect your
health and the health of a mother’s offspring during pregnancy
and nursing. (36) One reason a young girl needs to start thinking
about a healthier diet early is because the accumulation of these
chemicals in her own body fat occurs over her entire lifetime.

The UMP Will Try to Confuse You about Bone Health and Animal Protein

Osteoporosis is caused by several factors; however, the most
important one is diet; especially the amount of animal protein
and acid in the foods we eat. (37-39 0 The high acid foods are
meat, poultry, fish, seafood, and hard cheeses, parmesan cheese
is the most acidic of all foods commonly consumed.” (40)

Once consumed, this food-derived acid must be neutralized in the
body. Fruits and vegetables can do this neutralizing (these foods
are alkaline in nature). However, because the diet of the average
Westerner is so deficient in fruits and vegetables and so high in
acid foods, the primary neutralizer of dietary acid becomes their
bones. The bones dissolve to release alkaline materials.

Worldwide, the highest rates of hip fractures are among populations
that consume the most animal food (including dairy products) like
people from the USA, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand,
etc. (41,42) The lowest rates are among people who eat little or no
dairy foods (these people are on lower calcium diets) like people
from rural Asia and rural Africa. (41,42)

The basic experiments published in the 1980s clearly show protein
causes bone loss, and calcium offers little or no protection. (43)
Even the foremost scientists hired by the dairy industry know protein
is harmful to the bones. (44) In my April 2003 Newsletter I explained
there was only one properly designed study testing the effects of
fluid milk on the bone health of postmenopausal women, and the results
were: those who received the extra milk for a year lost more bone than
those who didn’t drink the milk. (44) The authors, funded by the
National Dairy Council, explained in their paper, “The protein content
of the milk supplement may have a negative effect on calcium balance,
possibly through an increase in kidney losses of calcium or through a
direct effect on bone resorption.” Trying to explain why those
receiving the milk were in worse calcium balance, they said, “this
may have been due to the average 30 percent increase in protein
intake during milk supplementation.”

Unfortunately, all this damning information does not sit well with
the powerful dairy industry, so they have started the “3-A-Day of
Dairy” program to battle the calcium crisis in America by promoting
milk, cheese and yogurt for “stronger bones” and they have been busy
doing their own research to prove protein is good for the bones.
(45-48)

Regrettably for them, their designing means were just revealed
in the May 2003 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
(49) The article in this journal exposed the way they made the
results show protein is good for the bones. To devise research
that appears to contradict hundreds of articles published over
the past 35 years, you only have to provide sufficient alkaline
material in the diet of the people being studied to neutralize
the acid from the animal foods. This was accomplished by
studying populations that have diets high in neutralizing fruits
and vegetables; the other approach employed was to add a strong
alkali source to the experiment, such as an antacid pill (wafer),
calcium citrate (like Citracal).

Once the acid from the food is neutralized, then any bone building
factors that might be present in meat and dairy can exert their
effects. High protein foods, and especially dairy foods, raise the
levels of a powerful growth-stimulating hormone in the body, called
insulin-like growth factor-1 or IGF-1. Stimulation of bone growth
by this hormone is now being offered as the reason dairy products
build strong bones. It has long been necessary for them to find a
more scientifically supportable explanation, because the bulk of
the research shows the calcium in dairy foods has little or no
benefit for bone health. (50-52)

The UMP Will Not Promote the Fact that IGF-1 is a Powerful
Cancer Promoter

Consumption of animal products increases the levels of
insulin-like growth factor-1 in your body. However, modern
dairy technology has made dairy products an even more potent
source of this growth stimulant. Since 1985, U.S. dairy
farmers have been allowed to inject cows with recombinant bovine
growth hormone (rbGH), a genetically engineered bovine growth
hormone that increases milk production. RbGH treatment produces
an increase in IGF-1 in cow’s milk, by as much as 10-fold. (53,54)
IGF-1 is not destroyed by pasteurization. (53) The overall effect
is that milk seems to raise IGF-1 levels in people more than any
other component of our diet. (55)

The direct evidence of the effects of cow’s milk on IGF-1 levels
in people has been provided by the dairy industry’s own efforts.
Two recent studies, one on adolescent girls and the other on
post-menopausal women, showed increasing milk consumption actually raises
plasma levels of IGF-1 in the person’s body by an average of 10%.
(56,57)

Their take on this is, “this is a beneficial effecT” because IGF-1
stimulates bone growth. But, the actual lasting consequences should
deliver the final deathblow to dairy products: IGF-1 promotes the
growth of cancer. This growth promoter has been strongly linked to
the development of cancer of the breast, prostate, lung, and colon.
(58) Excess IGF-1 stimulates cell proliferation and inhibits cell
death – two activities you definitely don’t want when cancer cells
are involved. (58)

There is more to cancer promotion by dairy foods than IGF-1. Most
dairy products are high in saturated fat – and fat is the number
one suspect when it comes to the cause of most common cancers in
Western societies (for example, breast, prostate, colon, kidney,
pancreas). Recent studies have linked the sugar (lactose) and fat
in milk with ovarian cancer, (59,60) and the calcium in milk
lowers concentrations of a specific form of vitamin D that protects
against prostate cancer, raising men’s overall risk. (61,62)
(See my February 2003 Newsletter for more information on diet and
prostate cancer.) Hormones (estrogens) are also involved in cancers
of reproductive organs, like breast and uterine cancer. There are
several reasons dairy products raise a woman’s hormone levels
causing a variety of hormone-dependent problems from early onset
of menstruation (menarche) to PMS and uterine fibroids – but one
is unique to cow’s milk. Cows are milked even while they are
pregnant. As a result of the pregnancy, cows secrete high levels
of estrogen into their milk. (63)

Will the UMP Advertise that Dairy Is Simply Liquid Meat?

Red meat has become a “dirty word” when it comes to health.
At the opposite end of the spectrum of opinions on food is
cow’s milk – one of the world’S most trusted foods. Do you
remember the “Basic Four Food Groups?” Dairy was usually placed
first in this chart which was hung in every schoolroom (and by
no coincidence the dairy industry also provided the chart).

Dairy products are deficient in iron and beef is deficient in
calcium; both contain too little dietary fiber, essential fat
(linoleic acid), and vitamin C and B3 (niacin) to meet human
nutritional requirements. (64) Heavy consumption of either of
these food groups – loaded with fat and cholesterol – will result
in the diseases common to affluent societies, such as obesity,
heart disease, strokes, type-2 diabetes and cancer, to name
just a few serious problems. (65)

If a patient bargained with me, “I’ll give up only one of the
first two food groups “meat or milk” – hopes of getting well,”
my recommendation for almost all common health problems in
Western society would be, “You’re likely to get the most benefits
if you give up the dairy products.”

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leukemogenic virus. Science. 1981 Aug 28;213(4511):1014-6.

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20) Work Group on Cow’s Milk Protein and Diabetes
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relationship to the etiology of diabetes mellitus.
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constipation in children. N Engl J Med. 1998 Oct
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York.

27) School Milk Pilot Test:
http://www.nationaldairycouncil.org/lvl04/nutrilib/relresearch/pilot_test2.html

28) Results of School Milk Pilot Test:
http://www.nutritionexplorations.org/sfs/pilot.asp

29) Greg Miller’s Comments on Obesity:
http://www.dairycheckoff.com/check/hl0103.asp

30) Parikh SJ. Calcium intake and adiposity. Am J Clin
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intake. Am J Clin Nutr. 2002 Oct;76(4):750-7.

34) National Medical Association:
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52) Hegsted DM. Fractures, calcium, and the modern diet.
Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Nov;74(5):571-3.

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Fast Food will Kill You Fast

DR. MIRKIN: “FAST FOODS” KILL YOU “FAST!”

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DR. MIRKIN: “FAST FOOD” WILL KILL YOU “FAST!!!”

By Dr. Gabe Mirkin, M.D.

According to a study in Circulation (July 2, 2012), people who eat fast foods:

* ONCE a week increase risk for dying of heart attacks by 20 percent;

* 2-3 TIMES a week increase risk by 50 percent;

* 4+ TIMES a week increase risk by more than 80 percent, and increase risk for diabetes by 27 percent.

The study was done on Chinese people in Southeast Asia to explain the recent incredible rise in heart attacks and diabetes that is associated with the increase in fast food restaurants there.

They had the same results as the many studies already done on Western-Caucasians in the United States.

Foto de una carretera en la cual se destacan a...Foto de una carretera en la cual se destacan anuncios de los restaurantes de comida rápida KFC, Wendy’s y Taco Bell entre otros. Picture of a highway in which fast food ads are featured:KFC, Wendy’s and Taco Bell among others. Taken in Bowling Green, KY. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

HOW DO FAST FOODS CAUSE DIABETES AND HEART ATTACKS?

Saturated fats in meat, milk shakes and ice cream, and burnt fats (called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons or PAHs) in all fried foods such as fried chicken and French fries:

* block insulin receptors, to

* prevent the body from responding to insulin, to

* cause high rises in blood sugar.

Sugary foods, particularly sugared beverages, also can cause very high rises in blood sugar levels.

High rises in blood sugar cause sugar to stick to the outer surface membranes of cells to destroy the cells. This damages cells in every part of your body to cause heart attacks, strokes, dementia, nerve damage, blindness, deafness, and the other effects of diabetes.

Sugar enters muscle and liver cells. If the sugar is not burned for energy to power the cells, it will first be stored inside the muscle and liver cells as glycogen.

However there is only a very small and limited amount of sugar that can be stored in cells. Once the cells are full of glycogen, all extra sugar is converted to a type of fat called triglycerides. Triglycerides fill up liver cells to cause a fatty liver.

Having a fatty liver virtually guarantees that you are diabetic or are becoming diabetic..

NEED MORE EVIDENCE?

Eighteen slim and healthy men and women ate at least two fast food meals at fast-food restaurants every day (Gut, published online Feb 14, 2008). In four weeks, they gained an average 14.5 pounds (one put on 26 pounds).

After one week, their liver test called ALT quadrupled from 22 U/l to of 97 U/l and their liver cells filled up with fat.

This means that they were on their way to developing a fatty liver after just ONE WEEK of fast food meals.

Diabetes is the most significant cause of heart attacks in North America today.