Whether people with diabetes need bigger brains that other people is something that science hasn’t studied yet. But some scientists who have studied our early ancestors have just discovered that we got our big brains originally from a diet that came in large part from fish and other aquatic animals.

Until now, most of the scientists who study our early ancestors assumed that they lived on the plains of East Africa. This “savannah theory” seemed to point at a diet of roots, seeds and nuts, some green plants and the occasional small game — the hunter-gatherer hypothesis. This is pretty far from the oceans where fish live.

But fish also live in lakes and streams. And now we know that some of our earliest ancestors about 1.95 million years ago lived around such a wet environment. Archeologists working in northern Kenya found that our ancestors ate a lot of fish, turtles, and crocodiles. By analyzing the bones of the animals and the stone tools that our ancestors made the scientists showed that in fact we descend from a long line of fish-eaters.

Yesterday This Fisherman Caught a Smallmouth Bass — Our Ancestors Caught Prehistoric Bass

The connection between fish and brains is omega-3 oils, which make up about 60 percent of the fatty acids in our brains. And about 2 million years ago our ancestors first developed the big brains that humans have.

We didn’t get their big brains from plants, because our bodies are inefficient in converting plant-based omega-3 into the long-chain omega-3 that our brains need. Only fish, shellfish, algae, and those animals that feed largely on aquatic sources have a lot of omega-3 that our brains can use.

Our mothers told us that fish was brain food. And now we know that they were right in this as in so many other things.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

The National Weight Control Registry is the best guide we have showing us how people actually lose weight and keep it off. These are the people who have succeeded in a major weight loss program and in keeping off the pounds.

Diabetes doctors typically tell us to loose 10 percent of our body weight. I know from my own experience that this helps to control our blood glucose level. And I know too that getting down to a normal body mass index, or BMI, is even better for maintaining a low A1C level.

The National Weight Control Registry started in 1994 and now tracks more than 5,000 people. And because I am one of them, the people at the registry sent me a copy of a publication that summarizes their findings as thanks for returning a one-year questionnaire. The article, “Long-term weight loss maintenance,” appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

To be included in the registry, people have to be at least 18 and have kept off at least 30 pounds for a year or more. I reached that milestone four years ago. And a couple of years ago my friend Gretchen Becker encouraged me to share my results with the registry.

I haven’t seen any statistics about how many of the people included in the registry have diabetes. But I know that my weight loss strategies have been different from most. Using Byetta got me started with my weight loss program, and a very low-carb diet intensified it.

Most people, however, say that they have lost weight by following a low-calorie, low-fat diet. Without question, weight loss means a low-calorie diet. Almost certainly, following a diet of any sort is also a key to success. In fact, participants who maintained a consistent diet during the week and year after year were much more likely to maintain their weight than those who varied their approach.

Other keys include:

Eating breakfast every day, followed by 78 percent of registry members.

High levels of physical activity. Fully 94 percent report that they get more exercise now than they did before they lost weight, and 90 percent report that on the average they exercise an hour a day. Walking is the most common activity, reported by 78 percent of the participants.

Regular weighing. More than 44 percent report that they weigh themselves at least once a day.

I know from my own experience that when my scales broke in February just before I went on a long trip that not weighing myself regularly was disastrous for my weight. In a three-month period I gained 12 pounds and am now fighting to take them off.

The really good news is that it gets easier. People who successfully maintained their weight loss for two to five years had a much greater chance of long-term success.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Like most people, especially those of us who have diabetes, I have to watch my weight all the time. That’s why my favorite dessert is one that doesn’t have any carbohydrates and only 30 calories.

It’s simple to make with only four ingredients besides water. Another good thing about these ingredients is that since they aren’t perishable, I always have them on hand. All the tools you need are a bowl, a measuring cup, and measuring spoons, a stove, and a freezer.

The only problem with this snack or dessert is that it doesn’t give me instant gratification, since it has to set for an hour. But I consider that a small price to pay for something tasty and filling that won’t attack my waist or my blood glucose level.

Most of us know my favorite dessert in a related, high-calorie form. And some of us think of it as a cheap substitute for a real dessert.

In the form of Jell-O, that’s true. And my favorite dessert is certainly inexpensive, but tasty enough for my taste buds, which haven’t touched Jell-O for years.

I’m talking about the generic form, gelatin. I start with a 7 gram packet of unflavored gelatin that the local Kroger chain sells in a box of 32 envelopes. All of the gelatin’s calories come from protein.

I add the contents of the packet to 4 ounces of cold water and then add 4 packets of SweetLeaf Stevia from Wisdom Brands. This non-caloric sweetener recently won GRAS (generally recognized as safe) approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Then in goes 1/8 teaspoon or a bit more of salt.

Meanwhile, I boil 8 ounces of water and add it to the gelatin along with 1/2 teaspoon or a bit more TrueLemon. Then I put it in my freezer for 55 minutes to an hour, when it’s ready to enjoy.

Vegetarians might want to use something besides gelatin, which is a protein derived from collagen. Alternatives are agar, seaweed, carrageenan, and konjac.

What are your favorite low-calorie and low-carb snacks and desserts?

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

My most recent post here reviewed a new study indicating that resting after meals is hard on the pancreas, could lead to diabetes, and could make existing diabetes worse. This is an interesting hypothesis and one that you can check out yourself.

But one of my correspondents suggests that the results might be related to the fact that overweight people who overeat at a meal are more likely to lie down. “Edgy thin people probably jog instead,” she says.

That’s a good suggestion, and I’m not sure that the authors of the new study controlled for weight. But now comes a closely related study that indirectly offers support for the hypothesis that lying down after we eat isn’t a good idea.

People in China in the 50s and over who regularly take naps after a meal increase their risk of diabetes by 28 to 36 percent, according to a study just published in Sleep, the official publication of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, a joint venture of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society. The authors of the study are associated with universities and hospitals in China and the U.K.

Correlation, of course, doesn’t prove causality. It is suggestive and may be a good suggestion to follow, because the only downside is probably being a bit tired, which in fact could lead to a better night’s sleep. Anyway, a little jog after a meal will do a lot more to reduce blood glucose than lying down ever will.

The authors of the study that I review last week are in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, while the new study is China-based. Some of the most interesting research on diabetes now seems to be coming from countries that hadn’t been at the forefront of diabetes research. This Internet age seems to be leveling the playing field.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Learning that you have diabetes can be overwhelming. All at once your life has changed.

In fact that is really good. Now you can be healthier than you ever were — if you get more active, lose weight, take your medicine, and cut your stress.

Those are the essentials. The rest are optional tweaks and theory.

Like this one today. The journal Medical Hypotheses deals only in theory, as its title implies.

This journal has an “article in press” that it will publish soon. It’s not online yet.

One of the authors, Alexander Dynyak, M.D., lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan. If you don’t know where that is, join the crowd. But Kazakhstan is in Eurasia and is the ninth largest country in the world in land area. It is also the world’s largest landlocked country.

Another author, Andrey Dynyak, is currently pursuing his M.D. degree in Ukraine. Andrey also publishes their research findings on diabetesnewfrontiers.org and sent me a copy of the Medical Hypotheses study.

The study has the usual technical title: “Diabetes mellitus: Hypoxia of the islets of Langerhans resulting from the systematic rest prone on the back after a meal?” In plain English, that means that the islet cells in our pancreas might not get enough oxygen and cause diabetes if we lie down in the two hours after we eat.

Who would have thought of that! I certainly never did. But the islets are especially susceptible to oxygen deficiency. This study investigated whether the pressure on the pancreas of food in the stomach after a meal might be related to diabetes. To test their hypothesis, the authors surveyed people with diabetes compared with a control group. The people with diabetes numbered 91 and those in the control group numbered 20. Every one of the people with diabetes had been resting after eating at least three or four times each week. But only 2 of those in the control group, or 10 percent, did.

Then the researchers attempted to get the people with diabetes to change their resting behavior. The researchers recommended that the people with diabetes not lie down within two hours of a meal. That’s because this is the average time it takes for food to pass through our stomachs.

But only 20 percent of the people with diabetes were consistent in not resting during those two hours. Of those, however, the researchers found general improvements, an increased capacity for work, better blood glucose control, and less need for diabetes medication.

The article indicates that resting during the two hours after a meal might lead to diabetes. I wondered if this might, however, imply that people who already have diabetes should also avoid resting then.

“Yes, that is basically what it implies,” Andrey Dynyak replied. “In general, a passive rest within one to two hours after a meal in a recumbent position should be avoided. However, being more specific for diabetes, a passive rest after a meal prone on the back or reclined is what should be avoided.

“Unfortunately, it is becoming such a common and usual behavior that by many is regarded as normal. Fortunately, it is easy to test, and positive results can be seen shortly after changing this specific behavior.”

I think that these far-off researchers might be onto something. It’s definitely worth testing if you have been lying down during the two hours that it takes for your stomach to digest your food. It won’t make your life worse, and could well make it a lot better.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

At the end of my five-week vacation on the South Island of New Zealand I am returning to the reality of my everyday life with diabetes. For me, reality means controlling my blood glucose level with diet and exercise. Since 2007 I haven’t had to use any diabetes medications to keep good control.

But, like all of us, I do have to watch my diet and exercise. And like most people on vacation my attention sometimes wandered.

While I have diligently following a very low-carb diet since 2007, I readily admit that I enjoyed a few servings of potatoes in New Zealand. Worse, I ate two slices of toast. While I have broken my addiction to all types and forms of grain, the toast in eggs benedict was sometimes impossible for me to ignore.

On the other hand, I ate more seafood than ever before in my life. Seafood is our best source of heart-healthy omega-3 fats. I ate everything from the well-known salmon, prawns, shrimp, oysters, and calamari to butterfish, groper, smooth dory, gurnard, ling, monkfish, and blue cod and on to fish I never heard of before — warehou, tarakihi, whitebait, bluenose, trumpeter, and green shell mussels. They all tasted wonderful to me while at the same time helping to balance out my dietary lapses.

Wild game also has a better ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fats. That helped me to feel virtuous while enjoying a venison cassarole that a ranger on the Milford Track prepared for my lunch. I wrote about this and my other New Zealand adventures on my “Fitness and Photography for Fun ” blog.

Normally, I minimize the amount of fructose that I eat, since it’s so hard on the liver. I do eat some berries when I am at home. The berries that I especially enjoyed in New Zealand are called kiwiberries, miniature (grape-sized) versions of the kiwi fruit we have in America. But kiwiberries are especially sweet and juicy.

New Zealand is rightfully famous for its dairy products. I don’t think that the country has any of the infamous concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we tightly pen our lifestock and chickens and feed them a grain diet, which in turn worsens our omega-3 to omega-6 ratio.

New Zealand dairy products are therefore not only healthier than most of ours but also taste better. I particularly enjoyed their cheese and their “Fresh’n Fruity” brand of natural (no fruit) Greek style yoghurt (as they spell it).

The other major deviation from my diet besides some additional carbohydrates was going back on coffee after almost a year without. I stopped drinking coffee because it was giving me awful headaches. But I can handle one cup a day now. I make sure that it’s a good cup, which the Kiwis do know how to make. In all the better restaurants I can find excellent coffee that is somewhat diluted espresso that for some reason the Kiwis call a “long black.”

In contrast to my somewhat slacker dietary habits on vacation I have been walking and hiking more than usual. I convinced myself that I need the extra calories to give me strength on the trail. I’m hoping that it has been a wash.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Eating fast probably comes naturally to all of us. Hiking a long trail on my vacation in New Zealand a few days ago, I ate as quickly as I could when I stopped, because I wanted to get to the hut before dark.

I ate for the energy that I needed to finish the hike, not for pleasure. For once, I wasn’t concerned about the taste of the food or eating too much of it too fast.

This must have been the way my ancestors and yours ate back in the days when they went out on the hunt or to gather roots and berries. This comes naturally to human beings.

But nowadays we have much more food much more readily available. Normally we don’t have to be concerned about getting enough energy to get to our destination. We have the pick of the most tasty food from around the world. We eat for pleasure much more than for sheer energy.

With a different goal we need a different eating strategy. Specifically, we need to slow down so we won’t overeat. As a bonus, slowing the speed with which we consume our meals giaves us more time to savor them.

Eating slowly has been one of the hardest eating lessons that I have had to learn.  Not until I admitted to a friend that I always eat too fast have I been able to control my eating speed. My acknowledgement to another person was the key to controlling my behavior.

We have to fully accept the truth of our existing state before we can expect to progress or to heal.  Recognizing and admitting our own problem is the necessary first step towards change. This is perhaps because the light of awareness or acceptance or humility is in itself a healing.  If we are forever in denial about where we are stuck, we will continue to overlook the keys that are out there that can set us free.

Once I fully accepted that I ate too fast, I adopted some specific strategies. I had always told myself that I ate fast just because I didn’t want my hot food to get cold. So I started with food that we normally eat at room temperature, like a salad.

Then I consciously told myself to put down the fork or spoon between bites. Now I completely chew what was in my mouth before picking it up again.

While chewing, I don’t do anything else except concentrate on the wonderful food that I am eating. Now, I really taste my food.

Eating more slowly means for me that I don’t eat as much as I did before. This is because of the fact that was long well known to me that our bodies and brains need some time, like about a quarter of an hour, to register that we are full.

The great food that we get now can be so much better and so much easier to obtain then what our hunter-gatherer ancestors were able to eat. We owe it to ourselves to savor it.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

The best way for us to boost the amount of omega-3 fats in our diet might be to come to New Zealand. This country must have the largest offering of fish in the world.

This month I am vacationing on the country’s South Island and have been feasting on all sorts of fish. I know that many people don’t love fish as much as I do. But even those who aren’t particularly found of them will certainly find some varieties and different preparations to suit their taste buds.

Those of us who have diabetes really need the benefits to our heart health that regularly eating fish provide. Everyone’s hearts are healthier when we consume high levels of the long-chain omega-3 fats that cold-water fish in particuar have.

Of course, coming to New Zealand isn’t the only way to increase our omega-3 consumption. In fact, eating fish isn’t the only way either. For starters, we don’t actually have to limit ourself to cold-water fish, even though these fish have the most omega-3.

Take a quick look through the KIM-2 database, which I have written about earlier in this series of articles on achieving a good balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. These two types of polyunsaturated fats compete in our bodies. High levels of omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory, while high levels of omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory.

The KIM-2 database does show that the cold-water fish like salmon and sardines have extraordinarily good ratios of omega-3 to omega-6 fats. But it also doesn’t show ANY fish with more omega-6 than omega-3. That’s one reason why I am eating fish with Maori names that I have never heard of and which don’t appear in the KIM-2 database.

And it’s not just fish where we can get our long-chain omega-3s. The world also has a great variety of seafood that is high in omega-3.

Beyond fish and seafood we have fish oil or krill oil to supplement our omega-3 level. These supplements come in either liquid or capsule form. Some people who don’t like the taste of the liquid do very well with capsules.

But what about the dilemma that vegetarians and vegans face? Even this is not a problem. Think for a moment where fish and seafood find the ultimate source of their omega-3 fats. That source is the lowest on the food chain, a plant called algae.

We can skip the intermediate links in the chain and go ourselves directly to the source. Several companies now offer long-chain omega-3 fats in vegan algae.

Those capsules aren’t cheap. On the other hand coming to New Zealand to eat fish isn’t either.

P.S: I originally wrote this article for HealthCentral.com on March 11, 2010. I am now back in the U.S. after vacationing in New Zealand. You can read about the trip here: http://www.mendosa.com/fitnessblog/?cat=17

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

The rarest seeds and nuts are those that have a positive ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats. Until this month I could find only two — the well-know flax seeds and the much less widely known chia seeds. I wrote about chia seeds here in 2007. None of my other articles here have garnered more comments that that article, testifying to the hunger that we have for news of healthy seeds and nuts.

And now I can bring you news of another seed that is every bit as good for us as flax and chia seeds — and tastes even better. It goes by the strange name “sacha inchi.” When my good friend and food scout called me from the local Whole Foods Market and told me of his discovery, I assumed that it came either from Russia — because of the “sacha” in the name or from East Asia, because “inchi” sounded vaguely Japanese or Korean to me. Instead sacha inchi seeds come from the Amazon rainforest, and the name may come from the language of the Chanka language of the Peruvian highlands.

The Contents of a Package of Roasted Sacha Inchi Seeds

Some people call it the Inca Peanut. Its scientific name is Plukenetia volubilis . [Read more →]

A good friend of mine who is a vegetarian wondered if meat eaters — like me — generally have higher levels of pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats in their systems than vegetarians do. I concluded that vegetarians on the whole probably do consume less omega-6s. I thought that this may go a long way to explaining why vegetarians are often pretty healthy people who sometimes are able to control their diabetes well even while they abstain from fish, which would provide them with anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats.

But now I’ve reviewed the evidence below. My conclusion is that it depends.

The first step to getting the omegas in balance, as I reviewed in my previous article here, “Cutting Back on Omega-6.” The key is to eat less of those foods high in absolute amounts of that fat.

We get the highest levels of omega-6 fats from the standard cooking oils — soybean, corn, canola, and cottonseed. We had good alternatives to those oils so they have little redeeming value.

Then come the tree nuts and ground nuts, which do have redeeming value. So we have to be ambivalent about them, and therefore the wisest course may be to eat them in moderation.

In terms of omega-6 levels, after those two food groups come meat. But not all meat and not just the meat we commonly demonize as the “red meat.” [Read more →]