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!
The worlds population has doubled and tripled and quadrupled in one hundred years(one mans lifetime). — One hundred years ago everybody walked to go places, their was no electricity or running water or telephones or thermostats or sounds other than nature. Horses were a luxury. We lived and breathed with nature within our surrounding area of trees and land and water. We foraged and hunted and grew foods and sought out water and heat and shelter. Sod houses on the prairie. Houses of animal skins and sticks in the woodlands. Candles and oil lamps and hand made torches we had for light. Hundred pound sacks of flour and sugar and coffee and tea and tobacco and alcohol and gun powder could be purchased and were mainstays and staples in traded goods, along with guns and knives and cotton fabric. — Prior to this for one hundred billion trillion light years, the earth remained the same. Pristine! (With one half of one billion people and none of the above). — Natures food and water and whatever our hands could make, that’s what we had and nothing more. We lived with abundance and beauty in all things, surrounding us. — More than one billion people starve in this world today. — I’m saying it’s a stimulated jump from where we were at, to where we are today. Stimulated by sugars and hybrid carbohydrates and processed carbohydrates and other stimulants, with no end in sight.
Interesting points, Bunnell Farm (although I believe it is closer to 150 years ago rather than 100 years ago). My thinking is leaning toward the notion that excess carbohydrate consumption keeps aggression at peak levels. Improving technology removes barriers to the escalating effect of the aggression.
“Improving technology removes barriers to the escalating effect of the aggression”. — That’s a large statement!
Maybe a little background is in order.
Yes, Diabetes.CO.Uk is a commercial site. The infrmation on the main site is crap, because it has been passed by The Authorities. The Forum *used* to be quite useful as it contained a number of knowledgeable *and* well-controlled diabetics.
Diabetes Uk itself is a Charity – or is it?
http://www.diabetes.org.uk/Get_involved/Corporate/Acknowledgements/
very similar list of sponsors to the ADA and most other health “charities” both sides of the Herring Pond.
Doctors have to obey protocols written by NICE, NHS Evidence, MEREC etc. which are then filtered by the PCTs – kind of local government-owned HMOs. Currently diabetes is only to be diagnosed by HbA1c which must be over 6.5, test strips are forbidden to Type 2s and a low fat high carb diet must be used. Only a relatively few doctors are left who are prepared to disobey. A recent instruction is that diabetics must be reassessed which has led to some GPs deregistering diabetics with an A1c below 6, telling them they are “no longer diabetic” or were “never diabetic”. They are also *supposed* to take patients off lantus/levemir and put them on NPH.
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/newsarticle-content/-/article_display_list/12341186/gps-told-to-switch-to-hba1c-testing-for-diabetes-diagnosis
This is all cost-saving at an enormous price.
DUK the Charity have their own officially sanctioned forum
http://www.diabetessupport.co.uk/index.htm
curiously this used to have Rules where you could not suggest changes in diet or medication, which has since been relaxed. It’s predominantly a newbie forum, all hugs and no depth.
I think this is the target market for the D.Co.Uk forum, they are repositioning themselves.
Back in the dim and distant past a small but well organised group of control freaks, some of who are, some of who pretend to be and some who just wish they were Medical Professionals, decided to stamp out all the narsty low carbers and ensure that patients were not assaulted by information not available from Official Sources.
The farce is that AFAICR only one of them eats anything remotely resembling the government sponsored 230 – 300g/day of carbs (don’t forget in the UK fibre is not included so this is purely digestible carbs, and includes a recommended daily allowance of 70 – 90 g/day for “sugar”). It’s like the old joke that the definition of an alcoholic is “someone who drinks more than their doctor” – to these people a low carber is “someone who eats fewer carbs than me”.
Whenever the then moderators banned them they complained to Admin who promptly reinstated them and eventually banned some of the mods instead, leaving the place in the hands of Ken.
The Real Perpetrators started their own forum
http://diabetesforlife.freeforums.org/
as you can see it went dead when they decided to take over D.Co.Uk again.
Here they are at play
http://carbophile.blogspot.com/
Meanwhile back in reality
http://www.diabetes-support.org.uk/info/
this place is written by and for diabetics, check out the information by comparison.
You’ve no doubt met Test Test Test aka Jennifer’s advice
http://www.diabetes-support.org.uk/info/?page_id=136
widely available from many sites.
The D.Co.Uk version was rewritten to make testing only at 2 hours as per advice from Medical Professionals and relax the targets. Why not just link to or repost the original? In fact offsite links are not permitted, especially not to blogs, only to Permitted Sources like WebMD. This is presumably to keep the suckers onsite and prove this to their advertisers. That’s basically why I stopped using them, I could no longer link to Alan
http://www.loraldiabetes.blogspot.com/
Jenny
http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/
DSolve
http://www.dsolve.com/
or numerous other resources.
Katharine Morrison, the doctor who wrote most of the How-To’s on D-Solve used to post on the forum and now also appears to have been banned (or perhaps she also gave up in disgust).
Now our NHS is about to be sold to (American) insurance companies and HMOs and they appear to be trying to remove as many carb-intolerant people from the population as cheaply as possible, though not that cheaply
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8427937.stm
this is only going to get worse.
What’s *really* disconcerting is that what’s occurring in this forum
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=23217
is also happening elsewhere. The newsgroup alt.support.diabetes was where Alan, Jenny, Jennifer and many others originated. Look at it now!
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.diabetes/browse_frm/thread/9516a487d320e343/9d4b9734447d1b1f?hl=en&q=#9d4b9734447d1b1f
a small tightly organised group of disruptors succeeding in driving out nearly all the sensible posters (including one of the only people EVER to have been banned from Stephan Guyenet’s Whole Health Source, who believes like the USDA that the reason low fat diets haven’t worked is that they are not yet low fat enough)
Youll find the UK crew currently on all the local forums but they haven’t (yet) attempted a takeover elsewhere. I see you “met” Chris Cashin aka Ally, here she is at work elsewhere
http://www.drbriffa.com/2008/06/25/why-might-a-leading-diabetes-charity-offer-dietary-advice-that-is-likely-to-increase-the-need-for-medication/
in some places she uses both identites – Chris and Ally – to back herself up, and also probably a third identity. The multiple identity trick is used by many of these perps and also by Ken the previous moderator.
Ye Ghods, why did I get dragged back inot this? Dan the (former?) admin emailed me (or perhaps it was his bot checking to see if my address was still live for the marketing emails) and I decided to go back through the entire forum. It was quite frightening to see how many posts, threads and entire posters had been retrospectively removed. Mostly the low carbers but also the attacks on the low carbers so poor Benedict will have no clue as to the history. And since the current mods are deleting the personal attacks without banning the perpetrators there will continue to be no “evidence” as to who’s really doing the stirring, or why.
It looks like the carbs are fighting back, both sides of the Atlantic.
You try to take away peoples sugar and carbohydrates and deprive them of their addiction and you got “hell to pay”! — Ten thousand side roads and ten thousand rabbit trails later, all leading back to “sugar and carbohydrate consumption” they pound the same “drum”, still!
You can see why if you look out my back window. Acres and acres of carbs, mainly wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and peas, and rape (Omega 6 oil) – and some years the farmers are forced to sell *below* the cost of growing the stuff. Meanwhile the Foodlike Substance Manufacturing Industry (Pollan) removes expensive nutrition and replaces it with cheap fillers, then sticks on a LOW FAT!!! label and marks up the price.
Fortunately we still have plenty of growers doing grass-fed beef and sheep, asparagus and other decent veggies, and Real Cheese. If this goes to a local shop and then to the end user it can still be profitable without the middle men taking their cut. Hence the large number of fit healthy elderly folks around these parts. I’ll have what they’re having . . .
Dr Jay’s Reply:
It sounds like you live in a lovely place. It is important to support your local food systems for both reasons of better nutrition and health but also for food security reasons. I think this whole, just-in-time, food delivery system we have in North America where your salad ingredients may have travelled a couple thousand miles to get from the field to your plate is very fragile and ultimately not sustainable. I am afraid I am a bit of a pessimist when it comes to food security. I think the world is in population overshoot because of the success of the “Green Revolution” which was based entirely on the ability to improve crop yields through petroleum and natural gas fuelled industrial farming. Since these are finite fossil fuels which are already in decline, this is an unsustainable situation. In the developed world we have had the luxury of reducing the proportion of our household budgets we spend on foods to very low levels as a result. In this low cost food environment, based largely on wage and environmental arbitrage, we sacrifice the sustainability of local producers who can’t compete. This is bound to come back to haunt us when the unsustainability of the current system comes home to roost.
Couldn’t agree more. It may help to import *some* foods to avoid things like local micronutrient shortages (selenium for one) but there’s a cycle here, the Big Arable guys use huge amounts of manure from the animal guys (including digested human ordure and food/garden waste) and feed the soil rather than just the crops. The cost of fertiliser and sprays (and diesel) is horrendous so anything which reduces their use hits the bottom line significantly. It gets a bit stinky this time of year but long term it’s worth it.
Then there’s a lot of land where the only way to crop it effectively is animals, and small scale veggies.
My suspicion is that breeding crops, especially wheat, for disease resistance also has a downside in increasing its toxicity to the end user as well as the targetted bugs. Old fashioned varieties may not have the same ultimate quantity of output but their quality in terms of micronutrients, and flavour, makes them preferable.
Yes a strong local economy has health benefits as well as financial advantages. To a degree the local longevity may be genetic – the churchyards have many octogenarians from a century or two back – but the environment obviously affects gene expression in a positive way.