Avoid simple carbohydrates to protect your heart....

Today's post: Thursday, 6-12-2008

It used to be that the recommendation to avoid heart disease was to eat a low fat diet that was very low in saturated fat.

As we posted on recently, some restriction on eating saturated fat from animals does protect your health.

But there are some new additions that make an enormous difference in how well that works to protect you.

The amount of the harmful LDL the saturated fat converts to in your body is controlled by how high your blood glucose is & whether or not you exercise regularly and do other things to increase your HDL levels.

(The tiny particle kind of LDL that goes into the molecular chinks in your blood vessel walls, particularly if it becomes oxidized, is the kind that we now know causes heart & cardiovascular disease.)

If you do enough regular exercise & eat health OK protein & fats and unstarchy vegetables for most of your food & carefully avoid most simple carbohydrates, your HDL will be high & your triglycerides & blood glucose readings will be desirably low.

This keeps your total LDL cholesterol readings down to some degree. But the really important thing is that it forces the bad kind of LDL to be very, very low.

This works even better if you get progressive strength training and interval cardio exercise each week & totally avoid the worst simple carbohydrates or high glycemic load foods.

Here’s a recent Early to Rise article on this. I’ll add my comments after it.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

“The Diet That Cardiologists Are Being Urged to Recommend

By James B. LaValle, RPh, MS, ND, CCN

What would you do if you were a researcher and you realized that a diet that had been accepted for years is all wrong? Would you write letters and more letters, urging your colleagues to be aware that research is showing the need for a change? That is exactly what some of the country's top researchers have been doing, including Dr. Walter Willett (who chairs Harvard's Department of Nutrition) and Dr. Frank B. Hu.

Research has clearly shown that the low-fat and low-cholesterol diet that many doctors have been recommending since the late 1980s has done almost nothing to prevent heart disease. Meanwhile, scientists have discovered that a diet with high levels of carbohydrates, specifically those with a high glycemic index and load, is hard on the heart.

Studies as far back as the 1940s show that low-carb diets are effective for fat loss. And epidemiological studies from the 1970s showed a correlation between high carbohydrate intake and the risk of coronary heart disease. But those results were ignored, because everyone thought fat was the lone culprit.

Low-carb diets have now been validated in study after study - not only for weight management, but to control insulin and glucose elevations. This means they are also very effective for controlling Type II diabetes and hypertension. And that is why researchers and some members of the medical community are urgently calling for a change. But will anyone hear them?

A diet that is higher in good fats (not harmful trans-fats) and protein but lower in high glycemic index and high glycemic load foods is the diet that is best for lowering what is now being called cardio-metabolic risk. This new term implies what I and other ETR experts have been teaching for years. The best way to control your weight and reduce your risk of diabetes and coronary disease is to control your glycemic response.

If you haven't yet gotten serious about a low-carb approach to health, it is time for a change.

[Ed. Note: By modifying your diet, medications, lifestyle, and exercise habits, and with nutritional supplementation, your health is largely in your control. James B. LaValle, RPh, ND, CCN - the founder of the LaValle Metabolic Institute and a nationally recognized expert on natural therapies - has come up with an approach to health that has worked for thousands of patients…..]”

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Foods that boost your blood sugar the worst, even more than sugar, include all refined grain foods, high fructose corn syrup, white rice, & white potatoes without the skin.

The glycemic load of your diet is found by multiplying the blood sugar boosting rate, or glycemic index, of the food by the amount of the food you actually eat.

And, the glycemic index of a food when you eat it is influenced by what you eat it with. If you eat it with healthy fats & proteins & fiber the effective glycemic index of the food is lowered & the blood sugar boost you get & its speed is lowered.

Interestingly, straight sugar is only moderately high in glycemic index. But if you eat a lot of it every day, its glycemic load in your diet will be high.

The good news is that you can eat a wide variety of good tasting foods that are low in glycemic load. And, if you only eat it a few times a month in small amounts AND exercise regularly, you can even get away with some real sugar.

The bad news is that at least half the foods that the average person in the United States eats now, have the ingredients in the list above that you are well advised to simply NEVER eat.

And, you have to not buy about that many of the food items in most grocery stores today to avoid those ingredients.

One secret is to buy organic nonstarchy vegetables, health OK fats like extra virgin olive oil, health OK protein foods like beef fed only grass or walnuts for most of your food.

Fresh fruit, real fruit juice with NO sugar or high fructose corn syrup added, nonfat & very low fat dairy all are OK but since their glycemic load is higher, you have to keep your intake down to moderate levels.

Low moderate intake of whole grain foods can be OK. But you have to be careful not to overdo the amount you eat of these foods as they have nearly the glycemic index of sugar.

And, if you have fat you need to lose, the low carb people are right, you need to eat even less.

Unfortunately, the list of packaged foods that have refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, or excessive sugar is astonishingly long.

If it comes in a package, to avoid this stuff, you absolutely must read the label.

It used to be that foods were sweetened with sugar. Some foods still are. But a majority of packaged foods in your local supermarket are sweetened now with high fructose corn syrup.

Jam, jelly, regular soft drinks, ice cream, ketchup, snack foods, breakfast cereals, even some peanut butter, are sweetened today with high fructose corn syrup.

Most breads, and virtually all snack foods, breakfast cereals, & commercial baked goods are made with refined grain.

Your health & your heart health will be MUCH better; & you will be a good bit less fat, if you totally stop buying and eating these foods.

The good news is that if enough people do this, our health & health insurance costs will be lowered by the cost of the illnesses people no longer get.

And, grocery stores & food companies will make more health OK choices available to us.

But if you do this, the health benefits & protection you get are virtually immediate.