Odds stacked against you

[unixronin]

Last night, someone I know pointed me at a July 2007 blog article by a Dr. William Davis, talking about why excessive consumption of processed wheat products is bad for your health.  That includes breads, cakes (see, you always knew Ho-Hos were evil!), pasta, and even those breakfast cereals with the boxes plastered with logos telling you how heart-healthy they are.¹

It’s an interesting blog overall. The title of this post comes from part of Dr. Davis’ capsule “about” text:  “You’ve been playing the health game by someone else’s rules with the odds stacked against you.”

Davis stresses that he’s not dispensing medical advice, just sharing information and discussing health issues frankly as he sees them.  But it seems to me there’s a lot of good information here.

I’ve just syndicated his Atom feed here on LJ as heartscanblog.  If you want to become a little more of an informed player in the health game, you might want to pick the feed up.

[1]  Oh, wait, wait, most of them don’t actually come right out and say that they’re heart-healthy ... they usually wrap the insinuation in weasel-words like “Supa Wonda Brekky Bikkies can be part of a heart-healthy diet” and let you draw the conclusion they want you to, without ever actually making explicit claims.  Well, cellulose packing peanuts can be “part of” almost any diet you care to name, too, but I still don’t recommend eating them.

Comments

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I'm skeptical of his "fundamentalist" approach to wheat-based products -- one must draw a distinction between processed and fresh products. Daily-baked pumpernickel is nothing like Cocoa Puffs. The latter is engineered to give a sugar kick and encourage overconsumptions, not to mention attendant consumption of milk and being full of preservatives.

Fresh bread is an integral component of the Mediterranean diet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I believe you'll find he does make the distinction. The harm, he says, lies in an excess of highly-processed wheat products. But it's probably simpler to advise people "Eliminate wheat from your diet as much as you can" rather than "Eliminate highly-processed wheat products from your diet". The majority of people don't know how to tell them apart, and the ingredients list on the package is seldom of any help in this regard.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

i know many people who almost exclusively live on processed wheat and soy. it's kind of scary. they don't get many vegetables, and some no meat at all.

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[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Daily-baked pumpernickel is nothing like Cocoa Puffs.

Closer than you might like.


Yes, the pumpernickel is *better*. But we're just not built to process it. Well wait, no, we are, which is the problem. We're not built to process ground grains well, which means we absorb them far too well. Add to that our ingenuity and drive and how cheap we've made even those "expensive" carbs...

Processed is worse, yes. But both aren't good.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I dunno, there does seem to be a big difference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Glycemic_index_of_foods). The more processed/"refined" the carbs, the more rapidly sugar enters the bloodstream. I agree that humans are well-designed for digesting carbs, which is why the sugariness has an a large impact on the risk of overconsumption.

Moreover, if you are correct, then one should be able to discern a difference in health between cultures which consume fresh bread but little else unhealthy (e.g., Mediterranean), and those that do not even consume that (e.g., Okinawa). When controlling for confounding factors like genetics, I am not aware of any such difference. Do you have a ref?

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Anti-wheat fundy is right, sheesh. Not a whit of data just blather.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Heh. For reasons having more to do with the current contents of my larder than anything else, I cut out wheat a few days ago. Come to think of it, I do feel better.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

google "paleo diet"

short form: piece of protein about the size and thickness of your palm (not including fingers/wrist), slap it on a plate. cover plate with mixed veggies (esp spinach, broccoli, kale) until the protein is about invisible. consume. basically, no processed foods, at all if you can help it. NO grains. naturally balanced carbs, proteins, fats. hoo-yah.

seems to be advocated by performance oriented super athletes lately. seems to work for them too.

also, don't forget the vigorous exercise. daily. sleep too :>

i should talk, i've been bad for a month, but getting back to it.

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[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

I refuse to believe that stoneage people ignored grains - in season. Obviosuly as hunter gatherers they would eat other things too but no grain is just as stupid as no meat.

We don't eat that much carbo relatively speaking, but I doubt I'd be able to do the vigorous exercise bit with no carbs in the diet. If you do vigorous exercise you can eat whatever you like. That's why I exercise hard.

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Sure, they'd eat what they could get - but the amounts were much reduced, and the ability to grind the grains wasn't really available until, IIRC, right before the Egyptians took over the ME. (Which is why it's interesting that many of the mummies that have been examined have large amounts of plaque buildup in their arteries....)

If you do vigorous exercise you can eat whatever you like.

Cautionary Tale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

as well, our modern methods of processing grains remove a lot of nutrients - esp the white[r] flours; the kernel is gone, and so are the fats/oils; trivia: i only recently read the reason to lose those is to get a shelf stable material that can sit around for months at room temperatures without going rancid. nice! it also produces a really nice, consistently smooth end product useful for all sorts of pretty things.

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[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

The move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture certainly severely impacted nutrition - but the trade off was that on the whole more infants survived (infant mortality in hunter gatherers is really grim, as are the maternal stats for that matter) and the farm lifestyle supports massively higher population densities. I'd rather have been an ancient egyptian than an ancient hunter gatherer. The same tradeoff happened again with urbanization, even worse diets (i.e much more processed grains and even fewer vegetables/meats in exchange for even higher population density). Really its only been in the last 150 years or so that poor city dwellers have had the option of a decent diet - and I suspect if you asked a resident of any 1850s city whether they'd swap their life for one in the deprived parts of the US today they'd jump at it in a heartbeat. Historically humans have been too thin not too fat.

In re exercise and diet. I suspect that prior overindulgence (and genetics) contributed to Mr Fixx' heart problems. Personally I've never been a lardass or smoked heavily and while I've not weighed myself religiously but I doubt my weight has ever been above 90kg and I know my waist has never been above 38". Mind you having said "can eat whatever" I generally don't pig out on Foie gras or even cakes. I eat them with gusto on occasion but in general we eat a lot of cooked and raw veggies, meat and fish as well as the carbo sources of rice, potatoes and grains. It seems to me the key is to eat in moderation most of the time.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

i'm sure they gathered what they could, but it amounted to "very little" and as you say, in season.

the "paleo" thing has little to do with stoneage authenticity as opposed to a simple system that is rich in nutrients and variety while easily ignoring the crap that's out there; spinach is spinach. meat is meat.

that whole grain bread is ... what? 19+ ingredients? did they manage to sneak in some corn syrup? sugars? whale brains? tricky.

and apparently these guys just aren't eating a lot of simple carbs, it's in the fruits and veggies, but locked in down deep.

i like to keep it seasonal too. i have a hard time wanting apples in the Spring for instance. but now? om nom nom nom.

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[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

discovered this spring i can't east wheat at all without icky side effects.
learned a month later my brother had the same problem.
now my little sister is wheat free too.

kinda' crazy. but i'm healthier than i can ever remember being. i blame the oils and oil soluble vitamins my body wasn't absorbing properly.

a mostly veggie diet is a little weird to adjust to at first, though.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

probably a gluten allergy. You could look for gluten free products

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

that, too, but they're expensive and not really all that good, often enough. i get sick of eating rice flour. but i like veggies.
not quite sure what's up. all the tests (including the one for celiac) came back negative, and my brother apparently only has a wheat allergy, while my sister's gone gluten free (and so have i.)

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

So bread isn't healthy?

Sheesh, the man comes off as a crank. He's also using his blog for marketing. (He is at least an actual MD--I checked.) Yes, of course you can eat too much bread (or anything else), and for some people that's easy to do. Yes, bread has a high glycemic index. There are also some people who are allergic to wheat. But claiming it's a major cause of obesity in the USA is just nuts: the biggest problem in the USA is over-consumption of refined sugar.