In medical training, I was taught that a low-fat diet high in complex carbohydrates prevented weight gain and disease. I believed what my professors said. Early on, I advocated low-fat diets. But this soon changed. I now teach my patients to balance their meals. Let me tell you how this all came about.
In July 1990, I had just finished nine years of medical training at the University of Southern California. My training was in endocrinology and metabolism, and I was ready to go out and help the world. I accepted a position at a prestigious medical clinic in Santa Barbara, California. The clinic was famous for having been the premier diabetes center in the United States during the 1920s.
SNIP
Here are the facts:
Claim: Eating fat makes you fat. If you do not eat fat, you cannot gain fat.
Fact: A low-fat diet makes you fat. Eating fat causes you to lose body fat and reach your ideal body composition. Furthermore, eating dietary fat is essential for life. Eating fat is essential for reproduction, for the regeneration of healthy tissues and for maintaining ideal body composition.
Claim: Eating fat and cholesterol adversely affects your cholesterol profile and puts you at risk for heart attacks.
Fact: Eating a low-fat diet causes heart attacks. High insulin levels produced by a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet result in plaqueing of the arteries, because insulin directs all the biochemical processes that lead to plaque formation in arteries. Eating fat and cholesterol can prevent heart attacks by lowering insulin levels and switching off the internal production of cholesterol.
Claim: Eating fat causes cancer. Low-fat diets prevent cancer.
Fact: Low-fat diets (high in carbohydrates) cause insulin levels to rise too high-a growth factor and a major player in cancer-cell replication. Dietary fat lowers insulin levels. Dietary fat is also essential for hormone production, which in turn is essential for a healthy immune system. In other words, dietary fat provides the immune system with key components that fight the growth of cancer cells.
Claim: Eating fat increases your risk of high blood pressure (hypertension).
Fact: Cutting fat from your diet increases the risk of high blood pressure because, without fat, insulin levels rise higher in response to food. Insulin stimulates various biochemical processes that can lead to increased blood pressure.
Claim: A low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, which is the current "standard of care" treatment for diabetes, makes patients healthier.
Fact: Long-term low-fat, high-carbohydrate dieting leads to insulin resistance and, if continued, results in Type II diabetes. This same diet makes diabetics sicker.
It is important to note that these claims are not backed up by long-term scientific studies. But the facts are supported by physiology and biochemistry (true science). By focusing on physiology and biochemistry, and the evidence of my own clinical experience, I learned how prolonged high insulin levels set off a multitude of chain reactions that disrupt all other hormones and biochemical reactions at the cellular level. I termed this chronic disruption "accelerated metabolic aging," and recognized that it led to body-fat gain, chronic conditions and degenerative diseases.
Throughout the six-year period I have referred to above, I learned that there are other factors that raise insulin levels, both directly and indirectly, and that prolonged high insulin levels are caused not only by eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet but also by stress, dieting, caffeine, alcohol, aspartame (an artificial sweetener), tobacco, steroids, stimulant and other recreational drugs, lack of exercise, excessive and/or unnecessary thyroid replacement therapy, and all over-the-counter and prescription drugs. These factors have become central in the eating and lifestyle habits that have prevailed over the last twenty years and that parallel the rise in the incidence of disease during this same period of time.
My program gradually expanded to include balanced nutrition, stress management, exercise, the elimination of stimulants and other drugs, and hormone replacement therapy-a complete program designed to balance insulin and all other hormone levels.
The Schwarzbein Principle was written to share this program with you-to tell the truth about losing weight, being healthy and feeling younger, by first focusing on this principle: Degenerative diseases are not genetic but acquired. Because the systems of the human body are interconnected and because one imbalance creates another imbalance, poor eating and lifestyle habits, not genetics, are the cause of degenerative disease.
I have seen what high-insulin eating and lifestyle habits do to people. People are getting fatter, sicker and more depressed. Indeed, it has not taken long-only two decades-to realize the repercussions of eliminating fat, one of the most important nutrient groups, from our diet and replacing real food with invented substances, processed foods and stimulants.
Moreover, American society's preoccupation with numbers-whether referring to chronological age, total cholesterol numbers or the number on the bathroom scale-has wrought devastating results. Many popular books offer programs that require time-consuming computations and obsessive measuring and focus on food. But my experience with patients demonstrates that, ironically, the more a person obsesses about numbers the more likely he or she is to engage in harmful behaviors that generate chronic health problems and disease. One of my goals as a physician is to change our culture's fixation on meaningless numbers to an emphasis on quality of life.
When people are told that poor health is genetic, they are more likely to tolerate illness and decreased quality of life as their lot. Along with this resignation comes increased body fat, depression and lethargy. Teaching people that health and vitality are within their grasp, and showing them how to achieve optimum health, is the key to the success of my program. When people understand that they have control over their health, they are motivated to make significant changes in habits.
As a physician, I hope to influence the medical profession so that more emphasis is placed on preventive medicine. Giving people the power to attain balance, to heal themselves and to avoid illness instills motivation, in addition to dramatically improving doctor-patient relationships and potentially revolutionizing the "standard of care."
This book could have been written around the many important studies that are cited in the References section. But the problem is that there is never going to be a perfect study. Questions always remain unanswered, no matter how many references you cite. And there are so many opposing theories that it would be virtually impossible to counter every one of them. I realize that I would have never come to my own conclusions about accelerated metabolic aging if I had focused on studies rather than true science. So I chose to write a book explaining how the body works at the cellular level, not a book based on other researchers' conclusions.
The truth is, anyone can prevent accelerated aging and disease, achieve ideal body composition and extend longevity. As you learn more about physiology and read the case histories that demonstrate my clinical experience (which shows that aging and disease are one and the same) you will understand how you can gain control over your health. My hope is that the information in this book will lead you to balanced nutrition and to a lifestyle that will regenerate and heal your body so as to prevent accelerated aging and disease and thereby improve the quality of your life.
Diana Schwarzbein, M.D.
Santa Barbara, California
http://www.schwarzbeinprinciple.com/index.htmlWell, of course they're "fads"! Anything that does not allow the medical community/government to dictate our lives is a "fad". Didn't you know that? And how dare you think that you know your body better than some bureaucrat? </s>
America is fat because of processed food. Take a look around your grocery store. If you don't need paper products or cleaning supplies, it's possible to avoid the middle aisles completely.
The fattest people have the most junk, because we all know it's too exhausting to cook.