High Carbohydrate Foods Can Raise Heart Disease Risk

So, the “experts” have finally “connected the dots” as to how we really affect our arteries. Since the 1950s, they have erroneously claimed that fat clogs your arteries and causes heart disease. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health has spent millions of dollars on large dietary trials and NONE of them have showed any link between fat and heart disease. However, these researchers in Israel have found the likely culprit:

Looking inside” the arteries of students eating a variety of foods, Dr. Michael Shechter of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and the Heart Institute of Sheba Medical Center — with collaboration of the Endocrinology Institute — visualized exactly what happens inside the body when the wrong foods for a healthy heart are eaten. He found that foods with a high glycemic index distended brachial arteries for several hours.

Elasticity of arteries anywhere in the body can be a measure of heart health. But when aggravated over time, a sudden expansion of the artery wall can cause a number of negative health effects, including reduced elasticity, which can cause heart disease or sudden death.

How does this one grab you? I heard one skeptic say, well, that does not prove that fat does NOT cause heart disease. That’s a good point but when I read this study, I couldn’t help thinking that someone has shown something similar before….

Ah yes. Pete Ahrens of Rockefellar University was considered by many investigators to be the single best scientist in the field of lipid metabolism. He observed how the triglyceride levels of some patients go up on low-fat diets and they fall on high fat diets. Ahrens called this carbohydrate-induced lipemia (an excessive concentration of fat in the blood). He gave lectures where he showed two photos of blood serum obtained in a test tube from the same patient. One photo was taken during the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, and the other was taken during the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. One test tube was perfectly clear and the other was milky white, indicating the lipemia. The surprise was that the lipemia occurred during the high-carbohydrate diet and the clear liquid happened during the high-fat diet. Elliott Joslin reported this phenomenon in diabetics thirty years earlier.

So this is not the first time a study has shown that carbohydrates are what is driving the ship towards heart disease. That would explain why people like me, who eat exclusive and copious fat and protein will not have any heart disease risk. Let’s hear more from Tel Aviv:

Using a clinical and research technique pioneered by his laboratory in Israel, Dr. Shechter was able to visualize what happens inside our arteries before, during and after eating high carb foods. It is a first in medical history. The results were published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Enormous peaks indicating arterial stress were found in the high glycemic index groups: the cornflakes and sugar group. “We knew high glycemic foods were bad for the heart. Now we have a mechanism that shows how,” says Dr. Shechter. “Foods like cornflakes, white bread, french fries, and sweetened soda all put undue stress on our arteries. We’ve explained for the first time how high glycemic carbs can affect the progression of heart disease.” During the consumption of foods high in sugar, there appears to be a temporary and sudden dysfunction in the endothelial walls of the arteries.

Endothelial health can be traced back to almost every disorder and disease in the body. It is “the riskiest of the risk factors,” says Dr. Shechter, who practices at the Chaim Sheba Medical Center — Tel Hashomer Hospital. There he offers a treatment that can show patients — in real time — if they have a high risk for heart attacks. “Medical tourists” from America regularly visit to take the heart test.

This is why I argue that the disorder of high insulin is the real cause of metabolic syndrome. That means that all diseases that fall under the broad category of metabolic syndrome can be properly classified as symptoms of the metabolic disorder. On the forum I like to say, “only the lucky ones get fat” and I believe this is true because obesity is the least problematic of all chronic disease. If one is obese, they can change their lifestyle and overcome their acculturation by undertaking a zero-carb diet. Upon doing so, they can reverse their obesity in most cases and lead a very fulfilling life. Others won’t lose all the weight they want to; however, they will improve their health and stop any further degeneration towards metabolic syndrome. The lipid improvement happens very rapidly.

So, after that marvelous study. What part do I take issue with? There must be a reason I chose this article to write a post about, right? Of course there is. The conclusion:

The take-away message? Dr. Shechter says to stick to foods like oatmeal, fruits and vegetables, legumes and nuts, which have a low glycemic index. Exercising every day for at least 30 minutes, he adds, is an extra heart-smart action to take.

Relying on the glycemic index is fool’s gold. The glycemic index provides a number according to the ability of a particular carbohydrate to raise blood sugar. The more glycemic the food is, the more it raises the blood sugar. There is a chart which rates these foods in order of the glycemic number. However, the number is only valid for the particular serving size. Ice Cream has a low GI of 53; however, if you eat more than a serving, ice cream will have a greater glycemic load on the body and this is more useful to know than the simple glycemic index. As David Mendoza explains:

The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn’t tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food’s effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn’t a lot of it, so watermelon’s glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.

The problem with low-glycemic carbohydrates is that they tend to exacerbate cravings. Once the metabolism is compromised, the cravings are out of control due to high insulin levels. In order to be successful, a person must adopt a diet that controls both hunger and cravings. Without accounting for these variables, the diet will fail. A zero-carb diet such as I propose will control both variables by lowering your insulin levels over time, which will facilitate weight loss and great health as the blood sugar becomes more stable. The types of foods that Dr. Schechter recommends will only exacerbate cravings and the poor dieter will be driving to consume more and more sweet foods in order to balance the already high blood sugar so prevalent in pre-diabetes.

This is a serious issue that affects millions of people in every industrialized country. One may argue that populations such as the Kitavians ate low-glycemic vegetables and also did not suffer chronic disease. The difference is as diabetologist George Campbell found through his research. He found that once a population consumes a natural average of 70 pounds of sugar per person, per year, the chronic diseases of civilization show up. Not only do they show up, but they show up as a collection. The fact is that not everyone in a transitional population gets the same disease; however, it’s clear that the diseases that fall under the umbrella of metabolic syndrome all begin at the same point. Failure to learn this lesson from epidemiology has kept our modern experts in the dark still searching for a cure to each of these diseases separately. Even the man who coined the term, “metabolic syndrome” (Gerald Reaven) is still suffering from cognitive dissonance.

This indicates that once the metabolism is compromised, one may not return to simple low-glycemic foods due to the already high insulin levels. High insulin will keep blood sugar too low and drive the person to consume more and more sugar to balance the blood sugar in the circulation. This vicious cycle is the reason diets simply do not work in most cases.

http://blog.zeroinginonhealth.com/?p=1021