A whole lot has been going on lately in the news and blogosphere about health and low-carb living that I’ve just been dying to share with you here at my blog. If you could only see the huge stack of stuff I have that I’d like to be blogging about, I could literally write 100 blog posts from that stuff alone–oh to have more hours in the day! Unfortunately, because of the nature of the beast that is my work schedule with podcast recordings, YouTube videos, and all the day-to-day stuff that warrants my time, there’s just way too much of it and too little time in my schedule to write in-depth individual columns about all that’s been happening. I sincerely appreciate all of the e-mails, tweets, Facebook messages and more from you whenever you see an article of interest, so keep those coming to livinlowcarbman@charter.net. Most of the time I stay on top of what is important and get that stuff out there whenever I can. But to remedy the current backup of stuff to blog about, I’ve decided to share a few quick low-carb bits and bytes from my collection of articles that have caught my attention in August 2010.

We’ve all see it happen in television commercials, in magazines, and even right there on the front packaging of foods–HEALTH CLAIMS of all shapes and sizes flung around as a way to market products to consumers. It’s as if food companies are eager as a beaver to put something positive about their products in an effort to woo consumers into purchasing their products, even if those products are not what anyone would ever consider “health” food. While I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with the capitalistic idea of marketing and selling to the buying public, sometimes the envelope gets pushed just a wee bit too far with some of these messages being spread about foods. That was the inspiration behind why Christine and I embarked on a 10-part video series over the past couple of weeks we call “Health Claims Gone Wild!” as part of our “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb On YouTube” videos.

In Episode 89-98, we visited local grocery stores in our area to walk up and down the aisles looking for any health claims that looked kinda funny and they were a-plenty! What we found on some of these packages was nothing short of astounding (Fruity Pebbles promoted as “an excellent source of Vitamin D” with a mere 100IU per serving, for example) and we documented all of it in the following videos. In total, we went to four supermarket chain stores, a health food store, and even a pet food store to show how egregious the health claims being made on the foods we eat has become. We end the series with a video we call “Health Claims Gone Right!” showing how to discover the truly healthy foods that will nourish your body (hint: most of the time these foods don’t contain a label at all!). Hopefully you will find this adventure we took both entertaining and educational as you discover why the food manufacturers don’t have your best health in mind when marketing their products. ENJOY!

Click here to watch this special 10-part video series about the dastardly marketing health claims that food manufacturers are putting on the front packaging of foods and why they’re so unhealthy.

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In Episode 386 of “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore,” we hear from nutritionist Dr. Kaayla Daniel who promotes herself as “The Naughty Nutritionist” because she debunks many of the most common health myths that exist out there, including the claim that soy is a health food. She’s written a bestselling book on this subject called The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food to warn people about why eating soy-based foods is not the way to go. Listen to Dr. Daniel share about how she transitioned from a plant-based diet to an omnivorous eating plan thanks to the influence of The Weston A. Price Foundation, the growing new trend of high-fat nutrition education, why animal fat is so vilified, why a low-fat, high-carb diet is more about profit than health, the myths supporting vegetarianism and why they are so misguided and unhealthy, how a raw vegan is ruining their health, the influence of vegetarians like The China Study author Dr. T. Colin Campbell on the discussion regarding animal-based foods, the raw milk debate, why we should support the Farm-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, the curiously ironic story behind how she became involved with The Weston A. Price Foundation, how soy became considered a health food, the subtle way soy is being marketed now in light of the negative health consequences that have appeared in published studies, what foods containing soy are people completely unaware of, the response she’s received about The Whole Soy Story, what the deal is with her new moniker “The Naughty Nutritionist,” the infertility issues that are becoming more prominent, and the use of grain-based meats vs. plant-based foods.

Click here to listen to Dr. Kaayla Daniel speak about the health dangers associated with consuming soy.

Some of the harshest criticism about low-carbohydrate diets such as Atkins has been the supposed negative heart health implications due to elevations that take place in the cholesterol levels of dieters who restrict their carbs in favor of more fat and protein. Additionally, it is presumed that any weight loss that occurs on a high-fat, low-carb diet is quickly gained back making it a uniquely ineffective means for managing weight. Finally, bone health is supposed to suffer for people following a carbohydrate-restricted diet because the higher protein content allegedly promotes bone loss. However, all of these theories about low-carb diets have been summarily shot down by a brand new study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and published in the August 3, 2010 edition of the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Lead researcher Gary D. Foster, PhD, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education and professor of Medicine and Public Health at Temple University, and his team of researchers noted that previous studies comparing low-fat diets with low-carb carb diets have failed to take into account the need for behavioral treatment as part of their dietary instruction which has resulted in poor weight loss outcomes. So they embarked on a 2-year randomized trial study of 307 participants placed on either a low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet combined with a “comprehensive lifestyle modification program” that took place in three academic medical centers, including the University of Colorado in Denver, Colorado, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The average age of the study participants was 45 years old with a mean body mass index (BMI) of 36.1. The study participants were split up into one of two diet categories:

LOW-CARBOHYDRATE DIET GROUP (153 participants)
Carbohydrate intake was limited to 20 grams daily with unrestricted consumption of fat and protein during the first 12 weeks of the study. Permissible carbohydrates were limited to mainly low-glycemic index vegetables. Participants were encouraged to eat 4-5 small meals every few hours and to use butter, mayonnaise and vegetable oils instead of margarine and they were discouraged from trying to “do a low-fat version of the program as it will disrupt weight loss.” At the end of the first 12 weeks, study participants were allowed to increase their carbohydrate consumption by 5 grams daily each week in the form of more vegetables, some fruit, and even whole grains and dairy products until their weight became stabilized. The principles outlined in the all-time #1 bestselling low-carb diet book Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution were encouraged, but the study participants were never provided with a copy of the book. They were told to watch their carbohydrate intake primarily while urged to consume foods that are “rich in fat and protein” to satiety. The behavioral modification implemented with this group was “to limit carbohydrate intake.”

LOW-FAT DIET GROUP (154 participants)
Calories were limited to 1200-1500 daily for women and 1500-1800 daily for men with a fat/protein/carbohydrate ratio of 30/15/55. Study participants were strongly encouraged to keep their calorie intake reduced with a specific focus on cutting down on their fat consumption. The behavioral modification implemented with this group was “limiting overall energy intake.”

Click here to see the surprising results of this latest head-to-head battle between the low-fat and low-carb diets!

ATTENTION SUPER FANS OF THE LIVIN’ LA VIDA LOW-CARB SHOW: We are quickly approaching our landmark 400th Episode set to air on September 9, 2010 and we’ve got a great idea for that show that involves YOU! If this podcast has positively impacted your life and health in a way that you’d like to share with your fellow listeners, then e-mail Jimmy Moore your name, landline telephone number or Skype username, and the best time to contact you so he can get in touch about recording a very brief segment celebrating our 400th show. So many of you have e-mailed some truly amazing stories about the life-changing impact this podcast has made in your life and now it’s time to highlight those for this special episode. Thank you for supporting the #1 low-carb podcast on the Internet today!

In Episode 385 of “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore,” we welcome back to the podcast pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Larry McCleary (author of the 2007 book The Brain Trust Program) who became so intrigued by something the past couple of years that he describes as the brain-belly connection it quickly became apparent he needed to detail more about it in a book he recently released called Feed Your Brain Lose Your Belly (read my review). Listen to Dr. McCleary share about an update on what he’s been working on the past couple of years with childhood cancer patients, why brain problems associated with obesity piqued his interest so much so that he wanted to write a book about it, the hormone relationship to the brain-belly connection, the greater significance of the hormone insulin in these metabolic pathways, why the leptin hormone is not as important as people like Dr. Ron Rosedale think it is, the farmer’s ability to know exactly how to fatten up their livestock, why carbohydrates are so addictive, the reason hypoglycemia hits when you consume carbohydrates by themselves, a diet comparison study and the impressive results comparing various levels of macronutrients, why a “starvation” diet is actually a high-fat, moderate protein, low-carb diet when the body feeds itself, why eating a cruise ship diet makes you hungrier and hungrier (think high-insulin!), why we overeat because we’re fat and don’t get fat from overeating, why doctors fail to communicate the negative role of carbohydrate on insulin levels, how to change the mind of a skeptical medical professional, why hunger doesn’t happen in the belly but rather it’s a brain state, what foods should be consumed for good brain-belly health (HINT: don’t skimp on the fat or eat up on carbohydrates!), why farmers who were feeding cows coconut oil to fatten them up actually made them lose weight, the consequences of not feeding your brain properly, why herbs and spices are so vital to an effective meal plan for variety and their antioxidant properties, his thoughts on whether eating the taste of “sweet” (even non-caloric ones) will make them crave sweet even more, his skepticism about the use of artificial sweeteners (Splenda alone is 750 times as sweet as blood sugar), why exercise is the “new horizon” for the brain and body (although he notes diet is much more important than exercise for weight loss), the clinical trial studies he conducted on real people to prove the concepts he discussed in his book are effective, and his use of a “weight loss accelerator” supplement he developed called Vi-texxa.

Click here to listen to one of the leading health voices on behalf of high-fat, low-carb diets today in Dr. Larry McCleary!

It’s no real secret about how most of Hollywood gets themselves into shape when they have an important movie role coming up that requires them to shed the excess weight off their body. According to Jim actress Courtney Thorne-Smith revealed in a September 2009 interview that low-carb is how people in the industry eat and that it’s pretty common knowledge amongst industry insiders what you need to do to slim down is restrict your carbohydrate intake to primarily nuts, cheeses, meats, and non-starchy veggies. The problem is that while this way of eating is considered normal within the inner circles of the celebrity world, very few of them are out there talking about how the low-carb lifestyle changed their life. High-profile celebs like Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston, Angelina Jolie, LL Cool J, Cameron Diaz, Dolly Parton, and others all swear by low-carb, but haven’t really taken up the mantle for this cause. Earlier this year, celebrity chef Alton Brown shed 50 pounds on a semi-low-carb diet with great fanfare and notoriety. But this week People magazine is reporting that 52-year old funnyman-turned-actor-turned-game show host Drew Carey has slimmed down a total of 80 pounds and come off of all of his diabetes medications thanks to “shaving his diet of carbohydrates” and exercising “religiously.”

Click here to read more about Drew Carey’s amazing low-carb carb weight loss success story that now has him off of all of his diabetes medications as well!

It’s undeniable if you look at the state of modern health around the world today that we have dug ourselves into a huge hole as a society. Obesity, diabetes, and preventable chronic diseases have spread like wildfire despite the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in finding pharmaceutical drugs to allegedly counter all of these health ailments. However, the one area most of the so-called health “experts” have conveniently neglected to invest any time and effort into examining more closely is also the most cost-effective when it comes to resolving this monstrosity that befalls us in modern times is our diet. What if we could reverse the negative impact of most chronic diseases simply by making some basic changes to our diet that could restore weight to normal levels and dramatically improve health without the use of any questionable drugs? What if all it took was going back to the diet of our ancestors which bears very little resemblance to what we refer to as “food” in the 21st century? Would it make a noticeable difference in the collective health woes we now find ourselves facing? That’s the bold thesis presented by UK-based nutritional anthropologist Geoff Brown in his historical look at the evolution of our diet detailed in the book Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Health and Our Food.

Bond has a personal connection to this subject since he lived in some remote African villages early on in his career where he saw firsthand how primitive tribes lived and ate for survival. This once-in-a-lifetime experience gave him ample evidence that he later used to compile much of the material contained in this book. He notes that our bodies are highly adaptable to the rigors we put them through, but they still require some elementary elements to function properly. One of the reasons Bond says we’ve gotten away from this basic nutritional concept in favor of what we have today is the onset of industrialized farming. Deadly Harvest provides all the dirty details about how and why grains (grass seeds) were introduced into our diet which began “a massive upheaval in human nutrition” that took us one step “away from our ancestral diet.” The consequences of this change are now rearing their ugly head in the weight and health of people today.

Click here to read the rest of my review of Geoff Bond’s Deadly Harvest including my one major beef with him regarding his stance on saturated fat.

In Episode 384 of “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore,” we hear from registered dietitian Annette Presley who is the co-author of the book The Liberation Diet: Setting America Free from the Bondage of Health Misinformation! with Kevin Brown. She taught nutrition from the perspective of conventional wisdom for 14 years before she came across the great revolutionary work of Dr. Mary Enig on the healthfulness of consuming saturated fat. Ever since, she has become an activist sharing the truth about nutrition and its impact on health. Listen to Annette share about why it confused her to learn that nutrition is more about disease management rather than prevention, her exposure to the late, great Dr. Robert C. Atkins at a dietitian’s conference, her asthma diagnosis in 2002 which led her to find alternative nutritional therapies to taking steroids, how Dr. Enig’s book Know Your Fats radically changed her thinking on diet, the anger she felt that almost made her quit nutrition for good, why it’s so difficult for dietitians to break free from the conventional wisdom they’ve been taught, how she got hooked up with Kevin Brown and wrote The Liberation Diet with him, how her frequent letters to the editor about consuming saturated fat raised the ire of some local dietitians to the point they reported her to have her credentials revoked (she won by presenting the science), the quirky disclaimer she uses about the work she is doing now, why you have to eat processed foods to eat a low-fat diet, whether lawsuits about diet are forthcoming, how to get people to break free from their fear of fat, her high saturated fat remedy for heart disease, why fat is so delicious and nutritious in your diet, why she shared the history behind the failed low-fat diet in her book, what role exercise plays in her program, her personal negative experience eating a high-carb diet, how the Internet is leading the revolution for spreading the truth, and her quick thoughts on agave nectar, exercise for weight loss, butter vs. margarine, the so-called “healthy” foods that are anything but, and the profit motive that dominates much of the promotion of food in America.

Click here to access this fascinating conversation with a registered dietitian who truly understands the importance of saturated fat in a healthy diet.

Navigating through all the daily barrage of information that comes out about diet and health these days can be quite intimidating. There are thousands upon thousands of books telling you to eat this, don’t eat that, add these foods and supplements, avoid these things or they’ll kill you, so forth and so on. As a consumer living your life the best you know how, it can be extremely hard to know who and what to believe and whether any of it really makes practical sense for you and your family. How do you know who you can trust to tell you the truth about the relationship between what you eat and the effect that will have on essential functions of the body like your metabolism, heart and brain? It’s extremely rare to find someone (ANYONE!) who fits the bill when it comes to providing reliable information that is backed by solid research and not just some flippant opinion based on a whole lot of nothing. But leave it to a brain surgeon to be the one to assimilate all of the data, cut through all the complexities about it, and then make it all seem understandable and convincing for us common laypeople. That’s exactly what you get from pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Larry McCleary in his latest book called Feed Your Brain Lose Your Belly.

Dr. McCleary is the bestselling author of a fantastic book released in 2007 entitled The Brain Trust Program that closely examined the impact our diet has on brain health. But with this new book, he wanted to dig deeper into the unmistakable connection between the brain and the “other brain” commonly known as the metabolism. The thesis Dr. McCleary asserts in his book is that there is a very clear connection between the brain and the belly and that by feeding your body the right kind of nutrition to keep your brain healthy, you’ll experience a domino effect in your metabolism that will keep your hunger at bay, make you feel satisfied with the way you eat, and enjoy amazing weight loss success. And this isn’t some fast and loose diet thesis we’re talking about here–Dr. McCleary has tested this on real people who have been highly successful at shedding the pounds while improving their brain health dramatically thanks to some sound scientific principles explained within the pages of this book.

Click here to read the rest of my review of Dr. Larry McCleary’s Feed Your Brain Lose Your Belly.

The science supporting a high-fat, moderate protein, low-carbohydrate nutritional approach is sound and has been for many years now. And the more we learn about the detrimental impact that carbs are having on our health, the closer we’re inching to a day and age when we will be able to love and enjoy this fabulous way of eating as a universally accepted dietary option for people dealing with obesity, diabetes, and many of the chronic diseases so many people are currently suffering from. You might be thinking to yourself that this seems like a wild dream to even fathom low-carb acceptance as a plausible outcome with the current negative atmosphere about dietary fat (that it is “clogging your arteries” and going to give you a heart attack) and almost universal embracement of carbohydrates (that they are “essential” to the human diet) that livin’ la vida low-carb could ever be taken seriously as the natural therapeutic treatment option for healing many of life’s health woes. But there’s good news on that front–we’re getting closer now than we’ve ever been before thanks to the newfound embracement of high-fat, low-carb living by one of the world’s most recognized names in health, Dr. Andrew Weil.

Click here to see the three-year transformation that has taken place in the dietary philosophy of Dr. Weil after he read Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories Bad Calories and his increasingly bold support now for high-fat, low-carb living!