Excerpt
Protein Power
Chapter 1 A New Nutritional Perspective Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
VOLTAIRE
We have a medical book published in 1822 passed down to Michael from his great-grandfather, a country doctor from the Ozark Mountains. A long section deals with yellow fever—in the 1800s no one knew what caused it or how it spread. Now, of course, we understand that the mosquito is the carrier of the virus that causes yellow fever, but then the cause eluded the best minds in medical science. Read what this standard 1822 medical textbook says about yellow fever:
“… it rises from the exposure of putrid animal and vegetable substances on the public wharfs … it always begins in the lowest part of a populous mercantile town near the water, and continues here without much affecting the higher parts. It rages most where large quantities of new ground have been made by banking out the rivers for the purpose of constructing wharfs. … the yellow fever is generated by the impure air or vapour which issues from the new-made earth or ground raised on the muddy and filthy bottom of rivers. …”
From our contemporary vantage point we want to reach back and tell them, “Look, it’s a mosquito; why can’t you see the big picture?”
The medical problems that confound us today will probably amaze scientists in the twenty-first century as they puzzle over why we medical pioneers of today were unable to reach out and grasp the obvious, why we were so advanced in certain areas of medical treatment yet so abysmally deficient in others. Why, they may ask, could our surgeons perform open-heart surgery so skillfully as to make it a routine operation while at the same time our nutritional experts couldn’t determine the optimal diet for preventing most of the problems necessitating that procedure? Why spend so much time and effort developing complex surgical techniques and other wondrous medical procedures that prolong the life of a diseased body for a few months or, at best, a few years instead of focusing on nutritional changes capable of prolonging healthy life for decades? Why can’t we see the big picture?
The Failure of the Low-Fat High-Carbohydrate Diet
Yes, doctors today are aware that diet plays a significant role in the development and progression of the major diseases afflicting modern man—heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and many kinds of cancers. As a consequence dietitians, nutritionists, and physicians constantly exhort us to eat properly to avoid these disorders. By their definition, eating properly means rooting out fat from our diets and replacing it with complex carbohydrate.
Ever since the surgeon general recommended in 1988 that Americans severely reduce their consumption of fat, especially saturated fat, the race to zero-fat products has been on. Eggs, red meat, and other superior protein sources have been virtually drummed out of the American kitchen. Reduce fat intake to almost nothing, we are told by battalions of nutritional experts, and good-bye obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and all the rest. Sounds great in theory, but—and here’s why physicians a hundred years from now will be shaking their heads—it doesn’t work.
The low-fat, high-complex-carbohydrate approach has proven a failure. It doesn’t reduce cholesterol levels to any great degree unless followed to an almost ridiculous extreme, in which case it can actually cause other equally sinister problems, as you will soon discover. It gives diabetes sufferers endless grief in trying to regulate their blood sugar levels. It doesn’t reduce high blood pressure unless it brings about significant weight loss. Its success rate for weight loss is almost nonexistent. (You may be surprised to learn that we’ve treated many people who have gained weight on the low-fat diet.) The result of the current no-fat mania has been a fatter and less healthy America, thanks in part to the zeal of food manufacturers who have given us an endless variety of fat-free high-carbohydrate junk to replace the fat-filled junk we were eating before.
In the face of this dismal record, what do we as medical professionals do? Do we write off the low-fat diet as something that sounded good on paper but didn’t work in practice, abandon it and begin searching for something better, as we would a new drug that had failed? No. Instead we say, “Bring on more of the same. Let’s try harder, let’s try longer, let’s be more diligent.” We tell our patients that it must be their fault if their condition doesn’t improve on a low-fat diet; they must not be following it correctly. But such thinking flies in the face of metabolic reality because dietary fat alone is not the problem. The problem lies in the biochemical structure of the low-fat diet and the mixed signals it gives to the body’s essential metabolic processes. Ironically, not only does the low-fat diet fail to solve the health problems it addresses; it actually makes them even worse.
The program we outline in this book triumphs where the low-fat, high-complex-carbohydrate diet fails. It reduces cholesterol rapidly without increasing other risk factors; it reverses, or at least significantly improves, adult-onset (type II) diabetes; it drops elevated blood pressure like a rock; it offers a long-term solution for the problem of excess weight—all without asking you to count fat grams or worry about fat percentages. It does all this simply by selecting foods that work with your body’s metabolic biochemistry instead of against it.
The human body is a remarkably resilient, reactive, regenerative piece of biochemical machinery. Like any piece of complex equipment, it functions best when treated properly. The proponents of low-fat dieting believe the best way to treat the body is by restricting the amount of fat, particularly saturated fat, the body takes in and replacing it with complex carbohydrate. Their flawed thinking goes like this: too much fat accumulation in the arteries causes heart disease and other problems, too much fat accumulation in the fat cells causes obesity, and too much fat intake exacerbates diabetes, so if we reduce fat intake, we’ll solve all these problems. Although it seems logical, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t take into account the body’s biochemistry and the ways our metabolic hormones cause us to store fat. When we understand and control these potent body chemicals, we can achieve our health goals by controlling fat from within rather than trying to eliminate it from without. To begin to understand how this works, let’s first examine food from a biochemical perspective.
