Jin’s Life

In the past few weeks, there has been a storm brewing, kinda like a clash between the forces of light and darkness. It was a war that started between the editor of the Men’s Health Magazine, Adam Campbell, and the American Diabetic Association (ADA). Here’s the article that started it all:

Cure for Diabetes

and the ADA response (with Adam Campbel’’s reply)

The ADA Response

In case you are lazy to read (and you shouldn’t be as these two articles are a good read really), the dispute revolves around what the ADA recommends as a good diet for diabetics and people with poor glucose tolerance, versus what Adam Campbell suggests would be a better diet. The ADA recommends a diet HIGH in carbohydrates (not just the fruits and vege, but also all the starchy stuff). Hmm.. diabetics already have poor glucose tolerance, which means that they have more glucose (sugar) in their blood. Now fruits and vege have sugar in them, but there tend to be a quite a small amount of it, and much of these foods are comprised of fibre (and both which you should eat loads of, and at EVERY meal). Starchy stuff on the other hand (i.e. potatoes, rice, pasta, quinoa etc) are made out of funnily enough starch, which chemically are just a huge bundle of glucose molecules. They also do not have that much fibre for the amount of glucose they have, that is to say, they have a high sugar to fibre ratio.

So what happens when we eat starchy stuff? Well the starch get broken down to it’s basic unit – glucose and gets sent straight into our blood. In normal people, who have normal functioning pancreas, our body will produce insulin to shuttle these glucose into our cells – muscle AND fat cells (the proportion depends on factors like the time of day, and how long it has been since a workout/activity etc. More on this another time.). So you can see why the ADA recommendations are just counter-intuitive. I mean by encouraging starchy food to diabetics in favour of proteins and fats, you basically creating an environment of high blood glucose that you know these people can’t maintain properly.

As a medic, I know that sugar alone won’t cause diabetes. Type II diabetes results from a variety of factors like being overweight and inactive. However sugars contribute in a big way to creating an environment that will lead to obesity and therefore diabetes. You see glucose when taken at the wrong time, in the presence of insulin, will predominantly be shuttled into the fat cells and stored there. Some of it will go into other tissues like muscles, but not that much really. On the other hand, if glucose is taken during or a couple of hours after an intense exercise session, it gets transfered into the muscles preferentially, meaning you won’t really get fat from eating carbs. As Dr John Berardi once paraphrased, “There’s no such thing as a bad food. It’s about when you eat them that matters” (or something like that).

So I am in total agreement with Adam Campbell on this topic. The ADA is just plain misguided, and not using clinical evidence to base their recommendations. This is just bad medical practice. By the way, even if you are not diabetic, doesn’t mean that you should pig out on sugars/starch carbs, as you can see from above, you can be putting yourself at risk of gettign overweight (as well as putting yourself at risk of developing all sorts of other disorders).

By the way, don’t like the way you look and feel? Got poor skin? Flabby gut? Just feel tired all the time? You probably to change your lifestyle, eat better and exercise regularly (especially with weights for the best bang for you buck). So check out “The Metabolic Advantage”, which you can get from Amazon and most book stores. Alternatively just ask me I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.