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Obesity and Diabetes Revisited
by Thomas Smith |
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It is startling how often widespread popular belief is not only wrong but, surprisingly, the complete opposite of what the truth really is. Nowhere is this truer than in the snobbery that pervades the weight-loss industry. Popular belief is that being overweight is a sign of self indulgence and lack of willpower. Sometimes we hear, particularly from the overweight group, the comforting pronouncement that obesity is genetic and thus not really anyone’s fault. These are traditional beliefs that are carryovers from the days when our food supply was intact and self-indulgence adequately explained the incidence of obesity. Today, our food chain is so dominated by the warped views of nutrition promoted and enshrined by government agencies, the medical associations, and those companies heavily influenced by them that good, clean natural food is more difficult to find and overweight and diabetic problems, not coincidentally, are rampant. Certainly a population remains of self-indulgent people who so lack willpower that they cannot, or will not, stop overeating. We have always had this minority. This association of overweight with weak will, however, does not explain why two-thirds of the American population is overweight and half of these are grossly obese. Our Energy Environment When we eat more calories than we burn, the body stores the difference either as glycogen in the liver or as fat in our fat cells. Thus, we must keep the number of calories we eat relatively close to the number of calories that we burn. The appestat is an automatic control function performed by our hypothalamus that automatically does this. It warns us to eat when we need food by making us hungry. It produces a sense of satiation when we have eaten what we need. As long as this appestat works properly, our body weight will remain stable in the normal range. The function of the appestat is to, indirectly but quite accurately, regulate body weight. Although the function of the appestat is automatic and does not depend upon the exercise of willpower, we can overrule it and make conscious decisions to overeat. We can even allow these decisions to become habits. This is how the self-indulgent become fat. This phenomenon has, traditionally, been known to be associated with poorer people who depended upon poorer quality food. It is also associated with various psychological stress pathologies that induce both overeating and a poor choice of food. These pathologies are often reinforced by sales practices amongst our food purveyors. A classic example of this is the marketing slogan “You deserve a break today” being used to promote the sale of food. Today, we all consume a poorer quality of food because there is often no other. Calories are not only abundant in our food supply but huge amounts of calories are added by the doping of virtually all of our food with sugar, corn syrup, and the like. This is done in order to appeal to our sweet tooth and sell product. It is also part of the subliminal promotion of brand loyalty. Good nutrition is rare. Essential minerals, vitamins, enzymes, amino acids, fatty acids, phytonutrients, complex sugars, and many more important nutritional factors are simply missing from the foods we eat. Our appestat, noticing this, keeps us hungry until the missing nutrition magically appears in the digestive tract. Of course, with today’s calorie-rich, adulterated food supply, it never does. While we are overeating and looking for the essential nutrition that isn’t there, the body is prudently saving all the extra calories as fat and glycogen. The burden of storing and metabolizing all these extra calories distorts the endocrine system. We soon develop elevated levels of insulin, cortisol, glucocorticoids, depressed levels of T4, and many distortions in the entire metabolic process. Then we get diagnosed as overweight, obese, insulin resistant, or diabetic. This is usually after most of our endocrine system has been trashed. Thus, the malnutrition caused by a poorly-engineered food supply keeps many of us eating far beyond what we need. These extra calories that we consume as a direct consequence are at the very root of both the obesity and diabetes epidemics into which the nation has descended. The typical American reacts by (a) dieting, (b) using nutritional supplements, (c) exercising and consuming nutritious food, and/or (d) seeing a physician. The Effect of Diet Although dieting rarely works to reduce body weight for long, it is by far the most popular recourse for many. For generations, dieting has been promoted as a primary means to reduce body weight. Dieting dates back to at least 1864. A diet book published then advised a daily alcohol intake. Actually, our body systems are now known to convert some of our alcohol intake to body fat. Not only was this an ineffective weight-control technique but it actually promoted the storage of body fat. “Outsmarting the female fat cell,” another more recent pseudo-scientific weight-loss guide, asserts that calories do not count. The only thing that counts is how you eat them, not how many you eat. In the 1930s, an insecticide called Dinitrophenol was widely promoted as a weight-loss medication. Before it was ordered off the market, it caused a number of dieters to lose their eyesight. Another high-risk theory was promoted in the Cambridge Diet. This one killed a number of people before it, too, was ordered off the market. We have all lived through the more recent era that saw the Jack LaLanne program, Stillman’s quick weight-loss program, the Beverly Hills diet, the Phen-Fen program, the low-carbohydrate diet, the Atkins diet, and many, many others. Each of them took a guess at the cause of being overweight and each of them in turn failed miserably to resolve the weight-loss problem. The reason that all diets all fail is that when we diet the body perceives itself to be undergoing a famine. All of its self-protective responses kick in. The body’s metabolism slows down, we become ravenously hungry, and we become sluggish with lowered energy levels. Our digestive efficiency increases and we extract more calories from our food and excrete fewer calories. We then increase the storage of fat in our adipose cells until the diet is severe enough to limit this process. Eventually, we abandon the diet at the increasingly intense urging of our appestat. However, when we do, the increased digestive efficiency remains and we gain back the weight even more quickly than we lost it. Nutritional Supplements These are sometimes called isolates. They are either manufactured in synthetic form or else isolated from their original food sources by advanced chemical synthesis and/or separation processes. Although the use of supplements can be very helpful, indeed almost mandatory in today’s nutrition-poor environment, there are numerous problems with their use. In nutritious food, all of the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc., both known and yet to be discovered, appear in an easy-to-assimilate synergistic form. In this form, they interact with each other, just like drugs do, to produce effects that are difficult to predict or to replicate. Vitamin C, for example, requires a host of bioflavonoids to be effective. Vitamin E, in nature, is really a complex mix of a variety of tocopherols; in an isolate, this is reduced to a few of the most prominent tocopherols. The same is true for all vitamins. Minerals in natural food are always complexed with protein to make them assimilable. Frequently in isolates, the protein is missing or the one used is the very cheapest and least useful one available. This is one of the reasons why many supplements are far less effective than they should be. Generally, with most supplements, the manufacturer specifies the daily dose at a level that will cause no problem for even their most sensitive consumer. The truth is that for many supplements, we need much more than the label specifies. This is another of the important reasons why supplements are much less helpful than they could be. A good example of this is iodine. This essential mineral is required to keep our basal metabolism running right. The daily dose is usually specified as about 150 micrograms and the assumption is that we get this from iodized table salt. We actually need about 10 to 12 milligrams daily. By painting a patch of iodine on our forearm we can determine if we are deficient. If the patch disappears in a few hours we are deficient; if it lasts until the next day we are not deficient. Exercise and Nutritious Food Exercise is an important step we can take to preserve our health. Exercise opens up a non-insulin-dependent cellular pathway through which we transport glucose from the bloodstream to the cell interior. Insulin is required to prepare fat for storage and to store it in our fat cells. With lowered insulin levels due to exercise, we become skinny. About twenty minutes of exercise to the point of perspiration after a meal will lower our blood sugar 30 to 50%, with a corresponding lowering of insulin. Unlike dieting, this will slow down the fat-storage mechanism without causing the body to perceive a famine. If our “war on fat” has progressed to the point of diabetes, this will often allow us to reduce or discontinue diabetic drugs. Thus, a program of regular exercise and nutritious, organic food causes our appestat to again function in an automatic way without constant conscious intervention. When the program is done right, we do not have to be concerned about being a statistic in one of our national epidemics. See the Physician When all else fails, we see the doctor. In the early stages of obesity and diabetes, he or she will prescribe drugs to (a) interfere with carbohydrate digestion, (b) block glycogen release from the liver, or (c) stimulate insulin production. When these fail to control blood sugar, our pancreas soon becomes exhausted and fails to produce adequate insulin. This is evidenced by an abrupt decrease in our body weight. At this point, the doctor prescribes injectable insulin. None of these drug interventions actually cure anything. They all attempt to distort one or more body systems in a direction that will compensate for the distortions produced by years of consuming nutrition-less food. Fooling Mother Nature Alien chemistry, deliberately placed in our food for commercial purposes, is known to specifically interrupt and distort the normal functioning of our appestat and to damage cellular functioning. Both genetically- and chemically-altered food is widely used to extend shelf life, to improve tolerance to pests, to reduce the cost of raw materials, to reduce the need for refrigeration, to encourage brand loyalty by creating addictions, to modify texture, color, taste and aroma, and for many other commercial reasons. The scope of this assault on the nation’s health is breathtaking. Much of the overweight and diabetic problems in America can be traced back to the war on fat of the early 1970s. Coconut oil was removed from the diet; and soy, cottonseed, and rape seed (canola) oils were substituted. These cheap, worthless oils now appear in all of our processed food. They are known to precipitate diabetes. If you want to win the war on fat, refuse to eat anything that contains any of these three oils. MSG, with over 100-different aliases, now appears in all of our food. The effect is to create addiction to the food with obesity to follow. The fattening addiction is so powerful that the line of lab rats that scientists use to study obesity is called MSG rats. They are made obese by feeding them MSG. What to Do The war on fat, like the war on poverty, the war on disease, the war on drugs, the war on crime, and the other mind-numbing phony wars that America has been fighting, was never intended to be won. It was intended to misdirect and cloak a new and massive assault on the health of a nation by those who profit greatly by doing so. The effective way to man the trenches and restore our faltering health is to refuse to be misled by popular mysticism and learn how things really work. Refuse to buy cheap and corrupt fats and oils and the processed food that contains them. Use supplements to provide minimum essential needs and set up a plan to burn off the excess calories that you cannot avoid consuming if you buy your food in an American supermarket. And exercise. Thomas Smith is a reluctant medical investigator, having been forced into curing his own diabetes because it was obvious that his doctor would not or could not cure it. He has published the results of his successful diabetes investigation in his special report entitled Insulin: Our Silent Killer (written for the layman but also used by medical practitioners and available by sending US$29.00 to the author at P.O. Box 7685, Loveland, Colorado 80537). He has also posted a great deal of useful information about this disease on his web page www.Healingmatters.com. He can be reached by telephone at 1 (970) 669-9176.
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