Did you find yourself sweeter and kinder after Whole30 reintro?

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Radishes, salt and butter

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Somewhere Over The Rainbow Trout

 

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Dr. Anthony Komaroff, Harvard Medical School 

 

 

 

  DECEMBER 19, 2014

 

 

DEAR DOCTOR K:

I have Type 2 diabetes. Many low-carb and sugar-free products contain “sugar alcohols.” What are they? Do they count as carbohydrates?

 

DEAR READER:

Type 2 diabetes is marked by elevated levels of blood glucose, or sugar. Untreated or poorly controlled diabetes can lead to serious complications including heart attacks, kidney failure, amputation and blindness.

 

An important part of controlling blood sugar involves making healthy food choices. People with diabetes should be particularly mindful of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are like a chain with a number of links. When a carbohydrate with many links enters your stomach and intestine, it is broken down into multiple small pieces. The smallest piece, the single link in the chain, is primarily what is absorbed into the blood. The most important small sugar is glucose.

 

Table sugar is a two-link carbohydrate that is easily broken down into glucose. If you were to swallow 10 teaspoons of table sugar, it would quickly enter your bloodstream. That’s not good. You want to eat carbohydrates that are broken down in the gut more slowly so that they enter the bloodstream more slowly.

 

We’ve talked about this concept before: Foods that contain carbohydrates that are rapidly broken down into glucose have a high glycemic index and high glycemic load. A steady diet of such foods is not healthy for people with diabetes — or for anyone else.

Carbohydrates are the major component of bread, pasta, cereals, fruit, milk, vegetables and beans. They have more of an impact on blood sugar levels than fats and proteins do.

 

For years, doctors advised people with diabetes to avoid table sugar or foods with lots of sugar. That’s still good advice, of course. But these days, the taboo against sugar has been replaced by an emphasis on overall carbohydrate control.

What does that mean? First, limit carbs to about half of your total calories for the day. Equally important, primarily eat carbohydrates with a low glycemic load.

 

You asked about the many so-called sugar-free foods that contain sugar alcohols. Examples of sugar alcohols (also called polyols) include sorbitol, xylitol and mannitol. These sweeteners are often found in sugar-free chewing gum, candy, cookies and ice cream.

Polyols do contain some calories and carbohydrates. But only half of the sugar alcohol is digested and absorbed into the bloodstream. On the other hand, nearly all the table sugar in the diet enters the blood. If you count carbohydrates, as many people with diabetes do, count half the calories from sugar alcohols as carbohydrates.

 

Products containing sugar alcohols do have drawbacks. If eaten in large quantities, for example, they can have a laxative effect. 

In summary, reach for healthy sources of carbohydrates — vegetables and fruits — over candy and soft drinks.  You’ll be doing your blood sugar a favor while getting a lot more nutritional bang for your buck.

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Linger on with friends

 

Pines are fine

 

Help those less fortunate

 

Make Christmas memories

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Wow those food pictures are awsome... Hope they tasted as great as they looked!

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Losing Weight Makes You Leaner 

Myth

It depends on what kind of body weight you lose: body fat or muscle. If you reduce your level of muscle by cutting too many calories, your ratio of muscle to body fat gets worse. You can rapidly lose 100 lbs in a year's time but still look like a similar version of your original self minus muscle mass. The percentage of your body weight that is body fat increases. Just getting thinner isn't the same as getting leaner.

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The Myth of Loose Skin

 

 

It is important that when you tighten loose skin by exercise that you perform exercises that are toning the muscle, and therefore the surrounding skin. Do strength training 3 times a week, and perform aerobic exercises like swimming or jogging on the remaining days. Aerobic exercises will help you lose weight and the strength training will tone up and tighten your muscles and increase endurance. A big part of eliminating loose skin is building muscle. Exercise can tighten and add muscle to your abdomen.   Avoid dieting and all quick weight loss diets to avoid loose skin.

 

 

The best way to avoid loose skin is to lose weight slowly, around 1 to 2 pounds per week. Slowly losing weight allows you to maintain your muscle mass while losing fat and allows your skin time to adjust gradually.  Toning the muscles prevents the need for having loose skin surgically removed if you want to remove over  70 -150 pounds.  Tone from the beginning...as you go, don't wait until the end to exercise.

 

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/weight-loss-surgery/Pages/risks.aspx

 

http://weightloss.about.com/od/obesityhealth/a/blexcessskin.htm

 

• Water - Drinking plenty of water is a crucial component of maintaining skin elasticity. From both food and drink, you should be taking in at least 2 liters of water each day.
  
•  
  
• Protein rich foods - Fish contains collagen and elastin forming components, as well as oils to help maintain healthy skin.
  
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• Green Tea - A study found people who drank one and a half cups of green tea enriched with a total of 609 milligrams of catechins (a group of antioxidants) every day for 12 weeks lost almost 16 times as much visceral fat as those who consumed green tea without the added antioxidants. To achieve similar results with store-bought green tea, you'll need to brew two to four cups daily (many varieties can contain 160 to 470 milligrams of catechins per cup).
  

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You can’t detox your body. It’s a myth. So how do you get healthy?

 

There’s no such thing as ‘detoxing’. In medical terms, it’s  nonsense. Nutrition and exercise is the only way to get healthy. 

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Meet the liver

 

The body's main defense against toxins is the liver. Everything you breathe or swallow that is broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream passes through the liver. The body depends on the liver to regulate, synthesize, store, and secrete many important proteins and nutrients and also to purify, transform, and clear toxic or unneeded substances.hile the liver does detoxify the blood — turning potentially harmful chemicals into water-soluble chemicals that can be sweated or excreted — the organ does not function like some sort of lint screen that becomes saturated with intercepted toxins needing to be shaken loose.

 

That is, viewed from biology, there's no such thing as liver cleansing. Toxins might be completely or partially detoxified; they might pass through the liver again and again. But they do not accumulate in the liver. Exceptions would be with vitamin A, iron and copper, but this is rare and is a sign of liver disease.

 

At best, one could argue that so-called liver cleansers might help the liver function better to remove toxins. There are no convincing studies to support such claims, although some studies support the notion that dandelion and milk thistle promote liver health.

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Meet the fat cell

 

 

A  general detoxification scheme is done with fasting, juicing, swallowing an herbal solution or eating a raw diet.

In short, there are no foods or herbs that magically bind and pull toxins from your blood or organs. The toxins maintain many chemical forms, after all; and there's no reason why a so-called natural detox solution could locate and extract all that is harmful in a body and leave all that is good.

 

The most logical argument here is that fasting or juicing will help burn fat cells, which are known to contain toxins. Yet the body burns the fatin the fat cell, not the whole cell itself. Fat cells shrink; they usually don't disappear. If they did — as in a case of extreme starvation — doctors aren't sure what would happen to the toxins within.

 

The toxins wouldn't just fall out of the body but rather likely go through the liver again. It may be that a sudden release of toxins, accumulated slowly over the years and stored relatively safely in fat cells, could overpower the liver and cause serious damage.

 

Reduce accumulation

 

The best advice to lower your toxic load is to reduce your exposure to toxins (smoking, urban pollution, unnecessary medication), maintain a healthful diet, and drink plenty of fluids to allow the kidneys, liver, lungs and sweat glands to do their job in eliminating as many toxins as possible.

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I think dogs can cure whatever is ailing you.

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Mindfulness

 

 

Mindfulness improves stress and anxiety conditions.  It helps with the healing of brain injuries, too.  Mindfulness is not associated with any one religious orientation nor does it conflict with any.

 

Instead of going through our day on automatic pilot, we can reflect on our choices and change becomes possible.

 

If we have an unhealthy thought about ourself - "I can't live without my sugar every day" - it perpetuates a unhealthy habit.   If we supplant every negative thought with 3 positive ones, we can begin to restructure our brains and thoughts about what we really want for our life.

 

Research has proven that this practice can even lift people out of anxiety and stress.   That's a powerful force.

 

 

Open.   Mind.  Insert.  Possibilities.