The Diabetes.co.uk saga just won’t go away. There is a group there, posting on the low-carb forum, who are engaged in a battle of epic proportions (in their minds) with their arch-nemesis, Eddie, who runs his own counter-blog at http://thelowcarbdiabetic.blogspot.com/. If you have read my earlier posts on the subject you are familiar with this situation. There is obviously a long history of discord there and a lot of sniping back and forth pretty much on a daily basis, from what I can tell. Based on my experiences, which I have already detailed here, my sympathies lie with Eddie and his cohort of true low-carbers. Their main beef with the others appears to be that they pay lip service to a low-carb diet but, in practice, appear not to be doing a true low-carb/high-fat diet and are openly critical of those who do. People often display HbA1c values that are much too high, even when they are taking meds while claiming to be doing low-carb at the same time. In addition, some of the claims in terms of what people are actually eating are preposterous. For instance, some argue that low-carb and low-fat is a sustainable diet when they are weight stable. This is an impossibility, of course, unless you are getting significant calories from alcohol, perhaps. Given the state of mind reflected in some of these posts, one does wonder about that. When the scientific realities are pointed out, defensive comments appear claiming that “everybody is different” as if the rules of nutritional science don’t apply to them and nobody should be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Now that I have become mixed up in this, and since Eddie has been posting flattering things about me on his blog, I have started to notice people trying to transport their troublesome nonsense here.

Here is a classic example that just arrived from “carbophile”:

It’s a pity you don’t feel offended by any of Eddie’s posts…but then you are hardly one of his targets are you?

Whilst I have sympathy for your experiences in DCUK, I find it surprising that an MD would suggest any treatment plan without first finding out histories of those he’s trying to treat.

I have nothing against a LCHF diet, but the perception that it is a panacea for diabetes denies our individuality.

OK – I could engage “carbophile” in a debate to explain why those are unsupportable statements but I am not going to allow this kind of rancourousness to infect my blog. If you want to argue with Eddie, do it on his blog. If you have anything to say about my posts on DCUK, reply there. I have zero interest in the childish back and forth nonsense that has made DCUK an inhospitable place for people who have genuine expertise to share and for people with diabetes who should be benefiting but who are put off by a hostile environment.

I am happy to have a civil debate with anyone who has a position different from mine, but, be advised that I will not be allowing posts like this here. If that appears unclear, please give it some further thought as you take a long walk on a short pier!

Since my interesting experience at diabetes.co.uk a few weeks back, it appears that things have changed for the better over there. You may recall that I started posting on their low-carb forum and quickly found myself in a protracted argument with the forum moderator and a group of his supporters. The problems stemmed from the fact that the moderator et al were claiming to be eating a sustainable diet that was very  low in carbs and also low in fat. As you may know, this is possible while one is burning off stored body fat, but once weight has stabilized, those stored calories need to be replaced with dietary calories, preferably from fat. I had patiently laid out the argument with examples of daily menus which showed that the claims of the low-fat/low-carb folks were unsupportable. I persisted because it appeared to me that this important low-carb venue was leading people astray on the benefits of low-carb/high-fat. Many of the posters there were proud of their HbA1c’s on their version of low-carb but were also taking meds. And, not all of them were achieving normal HbA1c levels, even when combining “low-carb” and meds.

When the moderator was not able to refute my arguments he began to delete my posts and eventually labeled me a troll and permanently banned me from the forum. I was then contacted by another fellow who, as it turned out, was one of the original moderators of that forum and a proponent of low-carb/high-fat who had met a similar fate. I found myself caught up in a struggle that had been going on for some time and in which the current moderator and his preposterous dietary claims had, until now, prevailed.

Things got more interesting when I alerted Jimmy Moore to what was happening across the pond. Jimmy contacted the former moderator and interviewed him on his widely read blog, www.livinlavidalowcarb.com. Things began to change quickly after that. I soon received a sincere apology from one of the administrators of diabetes.co.uk and the moderator and his side-kick were suspended. My “permanent ban” was lifted and I was, once more, allowed to post on that forum. There was a slight hiccup when a new moderator took over (someone proud of a HbA1c of 9.7!), who again banned me. The reason was not given but I suspect it was for “promoting a low-carb diet” for which I had been admonished after suggesting that once you have type 2 diabetes you have two choices: very low-carb and no meds or recommended diet and meds. Interesting that one can be banned for “promoting a low-carb diet” on a low-carb diet forum. Once again, however, when he was alerted to the situation, the administrator apologized and re-instated me.

I have been observing and making the occasional post over the past few days and I have to admit that the atmosphere seems to have improved. The original moderators are nowhere to be found; clearly a good thing. Also, their band of sycophants and supporters seem to be much more muted in their non-sensical ranting. I am hopeful that this forum has, once again, become a place where diabetics can benefit from accurate advice on low-carb/high-fat dieting.

Seems like that old saying is true: the best disinfectant is sunshine.

I have had the opportunity to have another look at a very successful diet program recently. I will reflect on what have been the elements of that success, but, first the more important stuff.

Isabelle is thriving. She is all of 22 months now and still eating little in the way of carbs and virtually zero sugar. There are times that she might eat a strawberry or chew on a piece of apple but her food preferences are for protein and fat. We don’t limit fruit, it is just her preference. She has always been a chatterbox but recently she has begun to speak english. And, even at this early stage of language development, she is starting to tease her dad. We had a little incident a few weeks ago where a large latte was left on the roof of my freshly washed white car. Of course, as I began to drive it splashed all down the side leaving a mess not unlike that of a seagull in gastric distress. Everyone had a laugh at Dad’s expense, including Isabelle. From that point on she started to tease me with “car so bad”. From first thing in the morning to when I arrive home from work, her first words for me are “car so bad”, to which I reply, “nooo, daddy’s car is good”. She is a delightful little girl and cute as all get out, too. She brings a huge amount of joy into all our lives. And, she still has not had a fever or a rash. I am more convinced than ever that the absence of sugar has a huge positive impact on her immune system function. There has been scientific work in this area. Here are some references that I got from Barry Grove’s website (www.second-opinions.co.uk ) that make the case for increased starch and sugar consumption causing a significant reduction in the ability of immune system cells to neutralize bacteria:

Kijak E, Foust G, Steinman R.R. Relationship of Blood Sugar Level and Leukocytic Phagacytosis. South Calif Dent Assn 1964; 32: 349-351

Sanchez A, et al. Role of sugars in human neutrophilic phagocytosis. Am J Clin Nutr 1973; 26: 1180-84.

Ringsdorf WM jr, Cheraskin E and Ramsey RR jr. Sucrose, Neutrophilic Phagocytosis, and Resistance to Disease. Dent Surv 1976; 52: 46-48

I have just returned from a visit to two small towns in southern British Columbia, Midway and Grand Forks. Firstly,  I have to say that this is a beautiful part of the country and is well worth a visit just for the surroundings. However, my time there was not for tourism but related to, what else, diet.

Something interesting is happening. You will recall that I was recently in Valemount, BC where Dr Stefan DuToit has been running a highly successful diet program for the local population (see my earlier post: Village(s) on a Diet). Although the diet he is using is more restrictive than what I would recommend in terms of calories and fat, and although it is not as low in carbs, his dieters routinely achieve significant weight loss and usually correct their metabolic problems while getting off their meds. I recall one gentlemen telling me he is saving $500 per month on meds. Another woman showed me her before photos and told me she had lost half her body weight. One of the most remarkable aspects of Dr. DuToit’s approach is that he gets very high rates of compliance on a diet that I think is not that easy to follow. In my discussions with other physicians and public health types about this, the common observations are that this is a flash in the pan, that it will prove to be unsustainable and that the initial success is likely due to Dr Du Toit’s charisma and is therefore not reproducible.

Well, it turns out that this may not be true at all. The longest running Valemount dieters are now at about 18 months. There has been some attrition but the majority appear to be sticking with it. We have been helping Dr DuToit manage the transition to a diet that will be sustainable for the long-term by adding fat back in once maximum weight loss has been achieved. He thinks this will be the key to long-term success. We will continue to monitor the data from his groups and, hopefully, will have something he can publish so that others can benefit, too.

In the meantime, however, some other sites have started using Dr DuToit’s diet and are also demonstrating excellent results. A group has started in McBride, BC, a small town about an hour’s drive from Valemount. The physician there tried the diet, lost weight and has now recruited a bunch of local people who are losing weight and getting off their meds just like their neighbours in Valemount. And, since then, another project has sprung up in Midway, BC, a southern town smaller than Valemount. In that case, a local public health nurse who learned about Dr DuToit from the CBC news coverage a few months ago, travelled up to Valemount to join one of his groups. Both she and her husband did very well on the diet and now she has started a group in Midway. This is not led by a physician but the local doc is open-minded and supportive. Again, the results are startlingly good.

What does all this mean? For starters, it means that there is some validity to the approach that goes beyond the effect of a charismatic doctor (not to suggest the doctors mentioned here are not charismatic; they are). It also means that the results are reproducible. Not only is this a model that can be implemented in a family practice setting by a doctor, it can also succeed when it is led by a non-physician. This is pretty exciting.

Until now, my physician colleagues have not had a stellar track record in terms of getting their patients to lose weight. I think this is largely because we haven’t developed a quick and ready approach that is amenable to the real-life realities of general practice medicine. If it were as simple as writing a prescription, they would be all over it. Since it is not, and since the failure rate of the currently accepted approach (eat less, exercise more) is so abysmal, I think it is completely understandable that my colleagues have, for the most part, abandoned the field. And this is why I think it is so fascinating to figure out what is the secret of the huge success of Dr DuToit’s approach.

We are hard at work analyzing the data but I don’t think that is where the answer necessarily lies. I think the initial diet is so significantly lower in carbohydrates that the subjects do benefit from de facto carb restriction more than the calorie restriction. And, you can restrict fat early on as you are burning off your stored body fat. So the diet he has been using, in the early stages, makes sense from a low-carb diet perspective even if it is not quite as low as I would recommend. In addition, however, I am very impressed with the effect of the group dynamics. He has his dieters meet together once a week for an hour. I have attended a couple of these sessions and they remind me a little of what an AA meeting might be like (I have never attended one of those). There appears to be something compelling to be part of, and accountable to, a group of others who are engaging in the same struggle. There has been research that supports this idea and certainly there are examples in the commercial diet industry that incorporate the concept of group support.

Having said that, there are other elements of this success that need to be considered. For instance, is there something unique about a small community that contributes to better compliance? As someone pointed out to me, “everybody knows your business”. Perhaps one is more determined to succeed if there is the perception that everyone is watching. If this is the case, the anonymity of a large city would make it easier to relapse. It would be interesting to test that idea (not that I need any more research questions at the moment).

I will continue to study Dr DuToit’s diet and perhaps we will eventually publish something. If he has solved the problem of what a physician in a general practice setting can do about reversing obesity, he will have done everyone a huge service. I will keep you posted as I find out more.

This is getting humorous. For awhile there my posts on the Diabetes.co.uk forum had been moved to a new thread. I had a look earlier today and discovered they have now been deleted entirely. I have to assume that would be because anyone who read them would understand that the moderator with whom I was debating was completely in the wrong. I had a look at some other threads and found he was attacking my advice on things like the need to replace the salt your kidneys will excrete when you significantly reduce carbs. His position is that you should restrict salt and drink lots of water. As anyone who is remotely familiar with hyponatremia would know, this is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Now, I find that my IP address has been banned which means I can no longer even look at the forums on that website. Wow, that’s pretty extreme. I can only conclude that I represented a huge threat to the moderator and his mission there which appears to be to sabotage people who are trying to benefit from a truly low-carb diet. He urges them to restrict fat and salt, both of which would make it very hard and probably impossible to maintain a long-term sustainable low-carb diet.

Why would he do that? Maybe he is clever and is consciously doing this so that people stay on meds and continue to require the supplies and equipment advertised there. Or maybe he is a complete idiot. I don’t know which it is but the net effect is that lots of people are being given bad advice which will impede their ability to improve their health through low-carb dieting.

I let my good friend Jimmy Moore know about this and I expect he will do a piece on his blog, hopefully a full exposé.

Keep an eye out for that at: www.livinlavidalowcarb.com.

Well, well. It turns out that I am not the only one who has figured out that the preposterous claims of the forum moderator were bogus. Eddie from www.lowcarbdiabetic.co.uk appears to be on to them as well. Have a look at these sites for more info:

http://thelowcarbdiabetic.blogspot.com/

http://www.lowcarbdiabetic.co.uk

I also note that my series of posts on the forum at Diabetes. co.uk has been restored under the heading Low Carb/Low Fat.

Have a look and decide for yourself if I am a troll.

This is an update of the previous post. The Diabetes.co.uk website moderator has now purged all my posts. To explain this he has declared that I was nothing but a troll whose purpose was to challenge the moderator and disrupt the discussion. Here is part of what he says:

“This thread has now been cleaned up and the posts and related responses from the Troll who only wanted to attack the Monitors and their personal way of doing things has been removed from this thread.”

You can find this on the thread titled: Viv’s Modified Atkins Diet in the forums at Diabetes.co.uk. It is interesting to note that Viv, the person who started the thread and, apparently a long-time participant in the forum, was so disgusted by the moderator’s behaviour that she announced that she has withdrawn from the forum. She had sent me private messages indicating that she agreed with my position.

The moderator had to remove my posts because anyone who took the time to read them would understand that the low-carb/low-fat diet he claimed to be eating and which he was promoting to others was, in fact, impossible to sustain. I had taken the information provided and broken down the macronutrients and calories to show that you cannot do both low-carb and low-fat while you are maintaining a stable weight. I had also described the recent studies which show that fat and saturated fat are not harmful when you eat a low-carb diet. If there is no need to avoid fat when you reduce carbs, a very low-carb diet becomes sustainable over the long haul. This is an important point because, if you fear fat, you will have to ramp up carb consumption once you stop burning off your body fat and, for most people, that means the weight and associated problems will return. So why would anyone not want to hear that message?

Okay – I’m not obsessing about this. Here’s my point. I had a closer look at the whole website. It looks, at first glance, like the official site of a national diabetes organization or perhaps even a government sponsored entity (have a look at Diabetes.org.uk, the national non-profit to see how similar the websites are). It is not. It is a for-profit commercial endeavour. It is run by people with no particular expertise in diabetes. The editorial team is comprised of a professional writer, a mathematician and a journalist. Their panel of “Diabetes Expert Contributors” consists of a diabetes educator, an author, a psychologist and a freelance journalist.

It appears that the whole purpose is to attract a large number of diabetics and expose them to advertising for profit. Here is what they say to their potential advertisers:

About Diabetes.co.uk

Diabetes.co.uk is an important and comprehensive online information resource. With a lively community of repeat visitors, and high search engine placement for key terms on all major search engine, Diabetes.co.uk provides an excellent route to reaching targeted traffic.

Our range of advertising options include the following:

Banners & skyscrapers, news features, mailshots, newsletter marketing, advertorial, features, competitions, reviews, directory entry and site sponsorship.

Got that? “News features” means product advertising masquerading as a news item. “Mailshots” – it looks like they will send advertising spam to the email addresses of their participants for a price. “Advertorial” means something masquerading as an editorial is actually designed to promote a product. “Reviews” means that an apparently objective review of a product is actually paid for and is designed to promote the product.

So now I have a better understanding of why their low-carb diet forum is only masquerading as a place where low-carb diet is promoted. As you will know from reading my posts and many of the comments on this site, if you do a proper low-carb diet you can get off your medications. If you are diabetic or have metabolic syndrome you can achieve normal markers without having to take multiple drugs. You can even stop testing your blood every day once you have stabilized on a sustainable long-term low-carb diet. Think of all the money saved on drugs and testing supplies that would represent. If the people on that site were to do that in droves, what would that mean to the advertisers of all those products?

In my back and forth with the moderator someone mentioned that they had had a problem earlier with “evangelicals”. I took that to mean that others like me, who understand how a low-carb diet works and who challenged the faux low-carb being promoted there, had made earlier attempts to participate. I also understood this to mean that they had been driven away.

Okay, maybe I’m obsessing a little. But it just galls the heck out of me to see vulnerable people being misled and taken advantage of like that. Buyer beware.

I thought I would share with you an interesting experience I had this weekend on another blog. “What”, you say, “are you doing on someone else’s blog when you neglect your own so badly?”. Guilty!

Anyway, let’s start with the more important stuff. Isabelle, my little low-carb miracle, is growing like all get-out. She is at the 95 percentile for height and 75th for weight at 20 months. She is adorable, of course, but also appears to be very smart. Yes, all parents think that, but we have our son to compare with. He is a smart boy, does well at school and is a pretty sophisticated thinker for his age. When he was at the age of 20 months, he was no slouch either. What seems to distinguish Isabelle is her amazing comprehension. She is speaking lots of words now but no sentences yet. On the comprehension side, she understands pretty much everything we say to her. She responds appropriately to directions like, “go to your bedroom so I can change your diaper”. She is very conscious of what she wears. When dressing, some things she approves of and others she will refuse to wear. That one seems to be hard-wired. Alex could care less how we dressed him and only recently gets picky with his attire and then only occasionally. It’s probably a gender thing.

The other thing about Isabelle is that she has not been ill. There was a short bout of runny nose about four months ago but she has never had a rash or fever.  I think that is somewhat remarkable, especially as Alex is an efficient vector, bringing home every virus that passes through the herd. He brings the virus home but doesn’t succumb to it himself, of if he does, has a very mild bout of it.

Anne and I generally don’t get sick, either, although this spring I had about a week of mild cough and runny nose. That is unusual for me since I have been doing low-carb. In the old days, I would get at least one doozy of a cold per winter, sometimes more. I really do think there is an immune system benefit from restricting carbs.

Apparently, there are other potential benefits, too. I was at the annual scientific meeting of the Nutrition and Metabolism Society in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago.  All the usual suspects were there: Richard Feinman, Mary Vernon, Eric Westman, Jeff Volek, Jackie Eberstein, Abbie Block and Steve Phinney. It’s always a great way to reconnect with all these terrific colleagues and there are usually some interesting presentations, too.

There were two speakers who are doing research on ketogenic diet and cancer. Thomas Seyfried is a researcher at Boston College who believes passionately that we have the whole cancer paradigm wrong. He argues that mutagenesis is not the primary event that drives cancer cells to appear. He makes what I think is a convincing case that cancer might be primarily a metabolic disease. He believes that the primary event is a metabolic dysfunction in the cell at the level of the mitochondria, the result of which is a shower of reactive oxygen species (aka free radicals) which then damage the cellular DNA leading to cancer-causing mutations.

This would explain a couple of puzzling things. Firstly, there is evidence that as a person gains excess weight their risk for a whole bunch of cancers goes up in parallel. Why would having a bit of extra fat tissue on board increase your risk of a variety of cancers? If your weight gain was the result of a disordered metabolism and the same problem caused cancer the mystery is solved.

Secondly, the whole chemotherapeutic approach to cancer is targeted at DNA and cell replication. Success rates vary with some good results and lots that aren’t so good. If the primary problem is one step removed and we are targeting therapies at a point downstream from where the real cause of the problem resides, this would explain these less than stellar success rates.

Dr Seyfried presented some remarkable results where, in rats with human tumours, the cancer is basically stopped by a low-carb ketogenic diet. He had some case studies in children with brain cancer which were compelling, as well.

Eugene Fine, a researcher in nuclear medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is doing a study on whether a low-carb ketogenic diet can be used as a cancer therapy. The details of his study can be found here:

http://www.einstein.yu.edu/rechargetrial/page.aspx

While it is too early to say that this diet will prevent cancer or that it can be used as a cure, both presentations were fascinating and certainly suggest that there will be more to this story in the future.

Gary Taubes has a new article in the New York Times Magazine on the harms of sugar. You can find it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=taubes&st=cse

It is a good review of current and historical evidence and touches on the issue of cancer towards the end. I highly recommend it, as I do with pretty much everything Gary writes, including his recent book, “Why We Get Fat”. If you found “Good Calories, Bad Calories” too much of a challenge, I urge you to get the recent book. I call it GCBC lite.

Now, about my being banned for “troll like behaviour”. A colleague told me to check out Diabetes UK as they had released a position on low-carb diets. The position paper, of course, turned out to be a disappointment, no surprise there. But I noticed that among the forums on their site, there was a large one devoted to low-carb diet for diabetics. Wow! That’s pretty cool for some kind of semi-official diabetes site. Or, so I thought.

Anyway, I plunged in and registered in order to post. Through an initial exchange of emails with the moderator I learned that I was forbidden from using my professional designation in the user name. That meant that I couldn’t call myself Dr J. Okay, not a big problem, so I signed up as canuck1950. I’ll leave you to decipher that.

There was a thread asking whether it was safe to do low-carb during pregnancy. Of course I have an opinion on that. After posting a couple of things there that appeared to be well received, I noticed that the moderator posted an admonition that some dangerous ideas were being put forward and that people should consult with their nurses for advice or some such thing. Clearly an attempt to refute my advice that there is nothing to fear from continuing a low-carb diet during gestation. Okay, no biggie.

Then, on a thread by Viv who posted her experience doing basically Atkins induction, I noticed there was some hesitation about eating fat and saturated fat. So I plunged in with my dissertation on why the evidence that has emerged lately in this area should allay anyone’s fears about these dietary components and that the only way to sustain a low-carb diet over the long haul after you have stopped losing weight is to replace your internally stored fat calories with fat added to your diet. Well, that wasn’t well received by the moderator at all. He insisted that low-carb and low-fat together was the only way to go and that it was sustainable over the long term. This is what they call in the UK a “load of bollocks”. I didn’t use those terms but tried a couple of times to explain why that is just not possible. It was clear fairly early on that the moderator was annoyed with me but I persisted. It’s not that I care so much what someone claims to be doing even when it is clearly preposterous, but in this case, he was using his position as moderator to promote his ideas as “the only way to go” when it was clear to anyone with a basic understanding of human energetics that he was delusional. Anyway, my reward for continuing to challenge him was that I was declared to be a troll and banished from the forum. He indicated that I could re-register in a week’s time only if I provide credentials indicating that I am an authority on this subject. They had already made it clear that they were not impressed with academic credentials but somehow the irony of that demand was lost on them. The unfortunate thing was that being cut off prevented me from making a final post to say, “I rest my case”.

The most interesting thing about this little fiasco is that it was quite apparent that, even though they claim to be proponents of low-carb dieting for diabetics, they were very fearful of what it means to do a truly low-carb diet. They remain very much caught up in the fear of fat paradigm. And their claim to be able to have it both ways, to eat low-carb and low-fat, means they are not only fooling themselves but actively propagating the irrational fear of fat that prevents many people from achieving maximum success from a low-carb diet. It did occur to me that perhaps their real purpose is to deflect people away from a true low-carb diet as we know that people with diabetes or metabolic syndrome can get off all their meds that way. When I see things like that I suspect the hand of Big Pharma could be at work (or I could be paranoid).

Anyway, if you want to amuse yourself, you can find the forum at this site:

http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=18803&start=90

If you feel compelled to register and comment in their fora, I would encourage you to do that. However, be forewarned that the moderator is a bit of a tyrant (apparently he is a retired policeman). I would ask only that you do not identify me or direct people to this blog. I have been lucky in terms of not having to deal with hostile and unreasonable people here and I don’t want to have to start now.

I think this is, above all else, a cautionary tale. There are lots of people out there who will lead you astray when it comes to diet. Everybody is different and there is lots of individual latitude in terms of carbohydrate tolerance but one thing is clear – if  you have insulin resistance you have developed a carbohydrate intolerance. You need to restrict carbs to avoid the conditions associated with insulin resistance and the multitude of medications used to treat those conditions. If you go low enough to get below your individual threshold of tolerance, you can avoid the problems and can usually get off all the meds, too. There are big vested interests who benefit from selling those meds. Are they actively trying to subvert the movement to low-carb? I don’t know. But I do know this – they would be crazy not to.

Happy low-carbing on this Easter weekend!

I want to talk about two villages on a diet. I have had a hard time watching the CBC series, “Village on a Diet”, as it seems to be mainly focussed on exercise as a weight loss strategy for the people of Taylor, BC. It is becoming increasingly clear that the approach being used is not science-based but designed for maximum emotion and drama. Watching overweight and unfit people being pushed to exercise beyond their capacity to the point where they are often in tears gives me no pleasure. This is especially true since I know from reading the science in this area that it is not helping and may even be counterproductive.

My wife and I watched a recorded episode last night where the fitness guys are personally affronted by the fact that the townspeople are ungrateful for their efforts to whip them into shape. The number of people willing to subject themselves to their abuse was rapidly dwindling. It looked like only a couple of dozen were still trying. I thought the townspeople were reacting normally to an unreasonable intrusion into their lives, but I suspect I am in the minority with that opinion.

The part of the show that was really offensive, however, was the interaction between the “professional chef” and the lady who runs the local pizza parlour. After showing the school kids how to make “healthy” granola bars that were over 50% dried fruit (!) he goes to the pizza shop to demand that “healthy” thin crust pesto pizzas be put on the menu. The owner, rightfully, points out that he doesn’t know her business. She had already tested the recipe he provided and it tasted like cardboard. This doesn’t stop him from berating her until she has an emotional meltdown (great TV!) and ends up closing up shop and leaving town. He effectively drives her out of business! This is a single mom with kids to support! WTF!

Now, I could understand how this would be defensible if she was the local crack dealer . And I am not a big fan of pizza because there is too much carbohydrate in the crust for me. But, I will feed it to my son who has a higher carbohydrate tolerance. And, when he has some, I sometimes will eat just the topping of cheese, tomato sauce and pepperoni. My son gets virtually no sugar and his pizza would be accompanied by a glass of water, not a soft drink and it won’t be followed by an ice-cream sundae. If you eat only the pizza and you don’t have a carbohydrate intolerance, like I do, it’s not going to hurt you.

Try telling that to the team in Taylor, though. It’s as though the pizza lady was personally responsible for the weight problems of the whole town. They even have pizza lunches at the school! The horror! Good enough reason to ruin her livelihood and drive her out of town. I can’t believe the CBC is party to this travesty.

Okay, that’s my rant on Village on a Diet … for now. Let’s talk about another village. This is where CBC redeems themselves by reporting on the amazing work of a young South African doctor, Stefan Du Toit, who has been getting people to lose weight in Valemount, BC. Stefan lost about 40 lbs using a very low calorie, low-fat, low-carb diet before moving to Valemount from South Africa a couple of years ago. When staff in his clinic learned of this they asked him to put them on the same diet. It worked so well that patients began asking for it, too. Stefan now has treated over 100 people with this diet approach and has had amazing results. Their total weight loss is over 3000 lbs! The really interesting thing about this, when compared to the approach used in Taylor, is that Stefan expressly forbids his patients to exercise until they have reached their goal weight. He says, accurately in my opinion, that exercising makes dieting more difficult because it stimulates your appetite. He has many people who have lost over 90 lbs using this approach and they are encouraged to exercise once they have lost the weight but not before.

I have visited his practice and talked to some of his patients. Their stories are remarkable. They get off virtually all their medications and stick to a diet that even I find somewhat extreme for months on end. Stefan doesn’t swear or bully them and there is no drama and emotion so it would make for boring TV, but the joy these people exhibit is a wonderful testament to their amazing accomplishments.

Here is where you can see the news clip on the REAL Village on a Diet:

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/TV_Shows/The_National/Health/1244506052/ID=1778824999

Happy New Year!

And, yes, it is diet season, again. The CBC is re-broadcasting MBFD this week and they have also premiered their new diet show, “Village on a Diet”, a series depicting the collective weight loss effort of the population of a northern British Columbia village. The CBC has also launched an accompanying six-month initiative, “live right now”, to encourage Canadians in general to eat “healthier” and lose weight.

http://www.cbc.ca/liverightnow/village/index.html

http://www.cbc.ca/liverightnow/blog-entry/live-right-now-launches.html

That is all well and good. I wish them luck. As you may suspect, my expectation is that the overall success rate will be modest, both in the village and in the nation. I am sure there will be lots of success stories to share, though, and everyone will feel really good in the end for having tried to make people healthier.

I am not surprised that our national broadcaster is sticking to the safety of the consensus approach to weight loss, even though it has been demonstrated in countless studies to be sub-optimal, at best, and in most cases far less effective than simple carb restriction. I am sure they consulted with authoritative sources who would have guided them to this approach. The same sources that would have people with carbohydrate intolerance eat half their calories as carbohydrates, who think it is okay to get 25% of your energy from added sugar, who think fructose is harmless and perhaps even preferable to glucose, who think that fat makes you fat and that saturated fat is “artery clogging”, who think that people get fat because they are lazy gluttons, etc etc etc.  The result is an approach not unlike that of “The Biggest Loser”.

Even though I can understand why the CBC would stick to the safety of the consensus, I have to confess to some feelings of disappointment that they didn’t give us a chance to do a Big Fat Diet series. Or, at least, a competition where we could show the benefits of a low-carb high-fat diet when compared to the consensus approach. Now that would have been fun and entertaining, too.

I will be watching “Village on a Diet” to see how it pans out. Maybe, some day, in an alternative universe, perhaps, we will get the chance to do a “Village on a Low-Carb Diet” series.

Okay, enough wallowing in self-pity. We had a wonderful Christmas break. I know everyone thinks you have to gain weight during the festivities but we don’t. I am not tempted at all by all the cookies and candies, etc. We have lovely meals. I enjoy my food and have no complaints whatsoever. Am I that unique? I don’t think so. So why do so many people use a holiday as an excuse to fall off their diet? One of the mysteries of the universe!

We spent some time at Whistler. My 10 year old son, who is an accomplished skier, decided to learn to snowboard this year. This meant that my 8 year hiatus from riding came to an end as I dusted off my board in order to better teach him. After so long, I had doubts as to whether I could still “shred”, but it came back fairly quickly. It took my son about four days to get comfortable turning both ways and controlling both edges. It took me about that long to get back in form, too. I had to direct some attention to my abs in my daily workout, though, as you are constantly working your core to get up onto the board. That’s a good thing, of course. They have a name for guys like me: “grey on a tray”. At least my son is impressed that I can still do these things at the age of sixty.

Our last day at Whistler was one of those rare high-pressure days where there is not a cloud in the sky, the temperature is just below zero, the snow is crisp and groomed and the crowds are light. We couldn’t resist putting our skis back on for a day of high-speed touring. We raced down the freshly groomed 7-kilometer Peak to Creek run under a brilliant blue sky, surrounded by snowy forests and craggy mountains. That’s my idea of quality time with your kid. We have a family pass which allows my wife and I to swap skiing for babysitting duties, so she got to ski with Alex for the afternoon while I took Isabelle to Starbucks in the village.

Isabelle, our low-carb baby, is growing like a weed. She is all of sixteen months now and is a total delight. She is very active and has a growing vocabulary. Her favourite phrase is “so funny”. She walks around the house laughing and saying it over and over which is, of course, totally contagious. She is fascinated with all our techy gadgets. She demands to play with Alex’s new PSP and insists on exploring the apps on Anne’s new iPhone. She has already figured out how to use the remote for the television where she loves to watch Blue’s Clues. She is also a budding fashion maven. I swear it is hard-wired. She is very conscious of what she is wearing. She loves new clothes. She carries a little purse around the house. She loves wearing her little red Crocs. Anne found a little Burberry bathrobe for her on eBay and she wore it to the hot tub at the hotel last week. She was impossibly cute.

Anyway, all that to say that the low-carb high-fat approach doesn’t seem to have slowed down her development in any way shape or form. The other thing we have noticed is that she hasn’t been ill. She has had the sniffles once but never a fever or even a diaper rash. I do think this is diet-related. She continues to eat every kind of food except carbs. I think the lack of exposure to fructose is important. The more I learn about the metabolic effects of fructose the more I think it may be the smoking gun that explains a lot of the metabolic dysfunction we are seeing today. She has had virtually zero exposure to fructose. It will be interesting to see how this goes. I certainly don’t have any misgivings at this point. And I will keep you posted.

Over the years I have encountered many individuals who have learned about low-carb diet from me or other sources and who have been able to lose weight and improve their health with this way of eating. I am opening this post as a place where anyone who has had such an experience can post about their success. It can also serve as a forum for those who have had issues or who have specific questions for other dieters. I encourage you to share  your stories in the spirit of helping others who may benefit from your experience. I look forward to hearing from you.