Disturbing News About Ultraprocessed Products

My friend Nancy recently asked about a jar of “light mayo” whose first and third ingredients were water and “modified food starch,” respectively. She bought it because, in contrast to the 100 kcal found in conventional mayonnaise, it listed calories per serving at 35 kcal. I would say that it is an expensive way to buy water and flour. Currently, approximately two-thirds of the calories in the standard American diet derive from ultraprocessed items. I would like to discuss the many recent articles connecting illness and ultraprocessed products. Note that I don’t call them “food.”  Continue reading


Can I Eat Fruit?

On many occasions, patients have asked me whether it’s okay to eat fruit. They’re worried about whether they should eat a food that they know is rich in sugar. Let’s think about this for a minute. Does anyone really believe that fruit is what’s causing the epidemics of diabetes and obesity? You can rest assured that the obesity and diabetes epidemics are not being caused by fruit. I think of fruit as “nature’s candy” and while it’s true that some fruits contain a lot of sugar, it is always accompanied by a large amount of fiber. Continue reading


Not a Breakfast for Champions

Breakfast cereals, generally speaking, are not particularly nourishing, although they do have a praiseworthy origin. They were invented near the turn of the 20th century by health spa owners offering an alternative to the eggs, coffee, and beef, bacon or sausage that constituted the usual breakfast of the time.

Not coincidentally, the invention of breakfast cereal also provided an economical use for the crumbs that fell to the bottom of the bread ovens at the health spas. The word “cereal” itself is a synonym for “grain,” and it is derived from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. We have strayed a long way from that origin. Continue reading


How Much Stripped Carb is Safe to Eat?

Today’s post is about how much stripped (refined) carbohydrate is okay to eat.  Stripped carbohydrate means white flour, white rice, corn starch, corn syrup, sugar. Plus fruit juice and beer. Basically, stripped carbs are carbs (mostly grain, though not only) that have had their fiber and color stripped away. It’s not a coincidence that white flour looks exactly like corn starch and powdered sugar. They’ve all had their color and fiber stripped away, and all that’s left is a pile of white powder.

This post is only about stripped carbs. It is not a discussion about whether carbohydrates are okay to eat. There are people who feel that carbohydrate has no place in their diets, and who manage beautifully on a very-low-carbohydrate diet. I get plenty of comments from readers who eat this way. Someday, we may discover that this group of people share a combination of genes that makes it very difficult for them to tolerate even modest amounts of carbohydrate. For now, I am glad that they have figured out how best to protect their health. So this post is not for them. It is for people who tolerate whole grains, fruit, and beans without any problems. People who feel awful if they skip the vegetables, grains, beans, and fruit. Like Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn.

If you look out your window at some growing food, you will notice that there is no such thing–in nature–as carbohydrate without fiber attached. Stripped carbs are relatively recent  inventions. Stripped carbs are derived from raw ingredients — mainly grain and produce (dates and beets) — that are abundant in nature. Human beings figured out how to convert these ingredients to flour and sugar only in the past couple of hundred years or so. We did not evolve to eat these food-like products, and certainly not at the volumes we currently consume them.

How much stripped carbohydrate is it “safe” to eat? Not a lot. But I would not say zero. There’s a certain amount that probably doesn’t matter much, one way or the other. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to a relatively simple equation, one that is probably affected by three things: 1) your genes, which are heavily influenced by your environment, 2) the amount of unmanageable stress you withstand on a daily basis, 3) and the amount of activity in which you engage regularly.  

Stress can be physical, emotional, social, spiritual. It can come from within (fever, anxiety, bereavement, pregnancy) or without (a blizzard, a heat wave, a new baby, winning the lottery). It can be the result of circumstance (a safe falls on your head) or questionable decision-making (skipping breakfast). It can be due to conflict, real or imagined. Agents of stress can be small like a virus, or large like an asteroid. Pain, fatigue, sleep deprivation are serious and common causes of stress.  

And, yes, stress can be caused or exacerbated by eating foods that don’t provide the building blocks your body needs to function optimally. Like stripped carbohydrate. In other words, stress causes stress. That’s one place you do not want to be. So eating more nutritious food, which helps make your brain and body work better, is one way to decrease the amount of stress in your life. 

Are you looking for a number? Okay, here it is. You can have two servings of stripped carbohydrate. But how often, you ask? Well, that depends on you. It could be two servings per day, per week, per month, or even per year. If you are slender, active, comfortable, and quite healthy, you may be able to tolerate as much as two servings a day of stripped carb.

Note that this means not two cans of soda pop, but two ounces. A can of soda with 12 teaspoons of sugar is not one serving. It is 12 servings. Two servings is just one-sixth of a can.

Continue reading


Toast and Jelly Waste Your Insulin

You probably already know that diabetes and obesity in the United States have reached epidemic proportions, but you may be surprised to learn that many, if not most, cases of diabetes are preventable. How? The best strategy for preventing diabetes and obesity is to learn how to conserve your body’s insulin supply. Continue reading


Newsflash: The American Diet Causes Obesity

Have you ever heard anyone say that all you have to do to make your diet more nutritious is to stop eating white flour and sugar? Does that seem radical to you? What’s wrong with white flour and sugar? What would such a change accomplish? I’m not going to say you can never eat white flour and sugar. My motto is moderation. Most people can tolerate a treat now and then. But let’s look at what’s really happening. Why are two-thirds of Americans currently overweight or obese? Because the standard American diet is so nutrient-poor that most people are literally hungry all the time. So they eat.

It’s not about willpower; it’s about nutrition. Continue reading


Make Your Insulin Last a Lifetime

If you’ve seen my TED talk, then you know I spend a fair amount of time teaching folks how to use their insulin more efficiently so that they don’t run out, and so they have enough (hopefully) to last a lifetime. Insulin is like a valet service that escorts blood sugar from your blood to all your cells. If you don’t have enough, your sugars start to rise. The fact is that even though you need insulin to live, it is not your friend. You want to use as little as possible. You want the levels of insulin in your bloodstream to stay as low as possible. Just like blood sugar, you want your insulin levels to remain low. Why? Continue reading


Stripped Carbs First Thing in the Morning? No!

Having a hard time understanding why breakfast is the one meal of day that you should not eat toast, bagels, muffins, waffles, pancakes, cereal, biscuits, bread or grits? Here’s why:

When you eat foods that are rich in fiber, fat and protein, it takes quite a while for your body to break them down. So they get absorbed into your bloodstream very slowly. But whenever you eat items made primarily from sugar and other kinds of stripped carbs, your digestive system absorbs the ingredients very quickly.  Continue reading