Healthy Diet at Home

The newest diabetes diet recommendations came out a few days ago: eat more carbs, and use drugs to keep your blood glucose under control. Scary stuff. Diabetes Health Magazine recently ran an article by Hope Warshaw entitled “Type 2 Diabetes: From Old Dogmas to New Realities – Part 2.” In that article Warshaw first focuses on and ridicules weight loss for diabetics in connection with better glucose control, and then likewise attacks a low carb diet – calling both of them old dogma. For those who have actually studied the principles and science behind carbohydrate restriction and/or have put them to the test, adversity against our own personal truth and experience isn’t new. But when someone looked to as an authoritative voice presents that, a minimum carbohydrate intake of 45% of daily calories is the new reality for diabetics, it’s hard to walk away and let that be. Is Weight Loss for Diabetics Really Dogma? When I was first diagnosed with pre-diabetes, my physician believed that if I...

Last month Jimmy Moore started testing his blood sugar after eating popular low carb products. Here’s the facts and myths about blood glucose levels when eating low carb. Saturday was the first time I heard about Jimmy Moore testing his blood glucose levels after eating some of his favorite low carb foods. While Twitter is a great place to keep in touch with your favorite bloggers, it’s easy to miss important tweets – unless you think to pull up their most recent posts. While most low carbers stop by Jimmy's blog every day or two, I quit doing that about a year ago when videos became the norm there. At that time, I didn't have a high-speed internet connection, so wasn't getting anything out of that blog. Saturday, I just happened to be reading the tweets of the people I follow on Twitter when Jimmy announced his blood sugar testing results from eating Julian Bakery’s CarbSmart breads was in. Since I now have high-speed access, I clicked on the link he provided, and began ...

The Environmental Working Group released their latest “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean 15” listing for pesticide contamination today. So how did low carb veggies and fruits do? Avacados make a great low-pesticide choice Non-starchy vegetables and low-glycemic fruits are the mainstay of a healthy, low carb diet. High in fiber and nutrients, and low in carbohydrates and calories, they help to keep blood glucose levels from spiking too high. However, environmental contaminants like PCBs, arsenic, dioxin, cadmium, bisphenol A, and mercury can interfere with the body’s metabolic processes. A low carb diet is designed to lower fasting and post-meal insulin levels, allowing the body to have ready access to its fat stores. But pesticides (including herbicides and insecticides) can increase or impair insulin secretion, or damage beta cells themselves. While most organic vs. non-organic arguments stem from what feeding your family organic vegetables would cost, many scientific studies clearly show envir...

I stopped by The Lighter Side of Low Carb’s Facebook fan page the other day, and noticed that Cleo had posted a picture showing what her personal USDA plate looks like. She had 3 strips of bacon, an egg, and 3 peas smiling up from the plate. While most of the comments shared how they would personally alter the foods in the graphic (I would have added another egg and more peas, myself), the one comment that caught my attention said - “Peas are evil.” There seems to be a common tendency within the low carb community to demonize foods not listed on the Atkins 2002 Induction menu chart. But I don’t know how or when that ever got started. I took a quick trip back to 1970 (one of the two Atkins’ books that survived the flea bombs that destroyed almost everything I owned last year), but Dr. Atkins’ advice didn't even insinuate that peas are evil. He said: “…additions are interchangeable and flexible. You can make any of these additions any week that you choose. I could be very arbitrary ...

It’s a myth that all overweight people have insulin resistance and/or metabolic syndrome. It’s also a myth that everyone’s insulin and blood glucose levels soar into the clouds when they eat carbohydrates. If you have normal blood glucose control, your body’s sensitivity to insulin will quickly take care of the small rise in glucose you get after you eat. In fact, typical folks never see a rise in blood sugar levels much above 120 mg/dl (6.6 mmol/L) – no matter how much starch and sugar they eat. The problem comes for those of us with an abnormal response to the carbohydrates we eat. Reasons for that vary, but taking the necessary steps to correct the problem can often make us feel ill. The Atkins’ Flu, Detoxing from Sugar, and Carbohydrate Withdrawal The first two weeks of a low carb diet can send the body into a tizzy. We’re restricting the body’s first-used fuel source, emptying out glycogen stores, dumping a lot of excess water, and coaxing our liver to begin breaking down stored b...

Slipped off Your Low-Carb Diet? Here's How to Recover Quickly! Did you go out to eat at a restaurant?  Restaurants are famous for hiding sugar and other carby fillers in their food.  Maybe you went to a party, and couldn't tell if your food was really free of carbs, or not. Perhaps, you deliberately caved in to those delicious looking cupcakes that someone brought into the office, or you decided to chuck the dieting game and just kick back and enjoy your vacation.  Now that you've come to your senses, you know you blew it, but you're hoping that it won't harm your low-carb diet efforts too much. Whatever happened, it's over now. Don't beat yourself up about it. However, the Ketostix might be giving you a bad time. Instead of turning pink this morning, they stayed beige. The scale bounced up a pound or two, and now, you're craving those chocolate chip cookies you used to make for the kids before you went on the Atkins Diet. You're afraid that you aren...

I ran into a horde of regurgitated news release type articles the other day that pointed me towards a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition this month. It was a short-term study – just two weeks long – but it clearly showed how a low-carb diet burns more liver fat during Atkins Induction than a low-calorie diet does. I didn’t read all of those articles, because the first two were just copies of the original press release put out by UT Southwestern Medical Center – the sponsor of the study. So I took a trip over to PubMed where I actually found two studies published this month comparing how low-calorie diets and low-carb diets affect fatty liver disease. What is a Fatty Liver? Even though the researchers of the two-week study say fat in the liver “ is due, in part, to increased hepatic synthesis of fat from carbohydrates via lipogensis, ” The American Liver Foundation says a little bit of fat in the liver is normal. Maybe that’s because so many America...