Jerky is the obvious trail food. It’s energy dense and doesn’t require any preparation. High in protein and fat, it should be low in carbohydrates, especially for those of us with diabetes who need to control our blood glucose levels. But all the brands I’ve found in the stores are too heavy on the carbs.

Now, however, we can get low carb beef jerky online from a non-profit group making paleo-diet designed snack packs. The proceeds go to programs helping kids maintain fitness. Thanks to my corespondent Cheryl for turning me on to this great resource.

The group is Steve’s Club in the desperately poor city of Camden, New Jersey. Steve Liberati says that he started Steve’s Club to be “an athletic fitness club geared towards young boys and girls who aspire to greatness.” [Read more →]

Just changing when you eat can has a big effect on how much you weigh. At least if you are a mouse.

A new study is the first causal evidence connecting meal timing and increased weight gain. The journal Obesity on September 3 published “Circadian Timing of Food Intake Contributes to Weight Gain” online in advance of print.

Only the abstract is available free. But lead author Deanna Arble of Northwestern University’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology sent me the full text and answered my questions.

For six weeks the researchers fed some of the mice only during their normal sleeping hours. Their weight gain was 48 percent. But the mice that they fed the same type and amount of food only during the hours that they were naturally awake gained just 20 percent.

[Read more →]

What I eat keeps changing all the time. Since I change regularly everything else that I do, this should be no surprise.

My breakfast starts with two glasses of GreensFirst. This is one breakfast that I can consume immediately after getting up from bed. The experts all tell me that we do better when we eat within an hour of arising, but that’s always been hard for me to get down. GreensFirst solves that problem beautifully.

I absolutely love this way to start the day! Much better than the two cups of coffee I used to start the day with. Now, I drink only decaf, and much less of that (I also stopped drink single malt Scotch whisky). I don’t drink any alcohol now. I stopped drinking regular coffee and alcohol to help control my headaches, which are now gone, but I am staying off of them for my health (and budget). So sometimes bad things can lead to good outcomes!

When I wrote the article about GreensFirst, I hadn’t experimented much with it. But since I keep changing, I now make it with protein powder and refrigerated sparking mineral water and really enjoy the fizz. Of course, I have to mix it up with a little bit of filtered tap water, because cold water doesn’t work as well. [Read more →]

Whenever my energy level is inexplicably low as it was on a hike last week, I consume more of the good fats. We get our energy either from carbohydrates or fat.

And now that I eat very few carbs to control my blood glucose level and my weight, I need to get most of my energy from the fat in my diet. But sometimes in my quest to control my weight I don’t get enough of either.

Big mistake.

But what are the good fats? They are those with the highest proportion of monounsaturated fatty acids, explains Dr. Dick Williams. He is a consultant to BalancePoint Health, a cholesterol, weight loss, and diabetes control program headquartered in Boulder, Colorado.

“When you stop burning carbohydrates for energy, you need to turn on your fat burner,” Dr. Williams told us at the most recent meeting of our local diabetes support group. “Some of the best examples of monounsaturated fats are avocados, olive oil, and nuts — especially almonds, pecans, and walnuts.” [Read more →]

Dental disease is a wake-up call that your diet is harming your body, concludes Dr. Philippe P. Hujoel. He reviewed the two hypotheses about whether or not dental disease is a warning that we are headed toward chronic system illness. After examining all the evidence, he concludes that it is.

“The five-alarm fire bell of a tooth ache is difficult to ignore,” Dr. Hujoel told me. He is professor of dental public health sciences at the University of Washington School of Dentistry in Seattle.

But we do tend to ignore it.

He lays the blame squarely at the feet of Ancel Keys and his believers. Dr. Keys promulgated the lipid hypothesis and focused on excess fat intake as the primary cause of systemic chronic non-communicable diseases — like diabetes. For Dr. Keys a healthy diet consisted of increasing our intake of “fermentable carbohydrates.” [Read more →]

High glycemic foods make the major blood vessel of our upper arms swell out or expand from internal pressure, according to new research. This brachial artery is the most convenient place that scientists and doctors have to measure how elastic our arteries are.

The elasticity of our arteries anywhere in our body is a measure of our heart health. When the walls of an artery anywhere in our body expand suddenly, this can lead to heart disease or sudden death.

Those of us who have diabetes need to do what we can to keep our arteries healthy. The statistics are shocking: 68 percent of Americans 65 or older die from heart disease, and adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to die from a heart attack than other Americans. [Read more →]

More and more research pinpoints inflammation as a root cause of type 2 diabetes. Being overweight makes it harder for us to control our diabetes, but that can’t be what causes it. Since a lot more people are overweight or obese than have diabetes, weight alone can’t lead to diabetes.

No one ever demonstrated that obesity causes diabetes or even insulin resistance. In my most recent book, Losing Weight with Your Diabetes Medication, I speculated that essentially it might be the other way around: That what makes so many of us overweight could be insulin resistance or impaired beta cells.

Type 2 diabetes generally results from the combination of impaired beta cell function and insulin resistance acting on susceptible genes. Why then is there such a large overlap between being heavy and type 2 diabetes?
[Read more →]

When you drink white tea, you may lose weight. And if you drink it without any caloric sweetener, it sure won’t make you gain weight.

Researchers in Germany showed in experiments reported in the June 2009 issue of Nutrition & Metabolism that white tea stops the generation of new fat cells and at the same time stimulates the burning of fat. When they grew human fat cells in a laboratory, they also found that after treating them with an extract of white tea, those cells had less fat in them.

Led by nutritionist Marc Winnefeld of the German health food company Beiersdorf AG, the researchers reported their findings as “White Tea extract induces lipolytic activity and inhibits adipogenesis in human subcutaneous (pre)-adipocytes.” The free full-text of the provisional PDF is online.
[Read more →]

Imagine my surprise when I read a new research report that the healthiest methods for cooking veggies seem to be microwaving or cooking on a flat metal surface without any oil. After all, on the Internet we can find thousands of diatribes on the dangers of microwave cooking. Several of my friends have junked their microwaves or given them away to people they don’t like.

Researchers at the University of Murcia and Madrid’s University of Complutense in Spain examined how six different cooking methods affected the antioxidant activity of 20 different vegetables. We get most of our nutritional antioxidants from vegetables and fruit. They may prevent cancer and other diseases.

The six cooking methods were boiling, pressure-cooking, baking, microwaving, frying, and cooking without oil, which they called griddling. The vegetables were artichokes, asparagus, beets (beetroot), fava beans (broad beans), broccoli, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflower, celery, corn (maize), eggplant, garlic, green beans, leeks, onions, peas, green peppers, spinach, Swiss chard, and zucchini.
[Read more →]