Are we over-medicated?

[Suff]

Aggers you might want to consider that your diet is a maintenance diet. Not a weightloss diet. Also from everything you say, you don't avoid walking and have an active life. This means you can take in much more carbohydrate energy than a sedentary person or a fat person can. I laud you in this and the diet, I'm sure, works for you.

However take me. I sit on a chair 8-10 hours a day 5 days a week. I have no choice. I have to sit on a train for 5-6 hours twice a week travelling. My main exercise is walking 10 minutes to the metro station (usually flat out as I'm fairly hot when I get there) and working in the house at the weekends.

I'm quite seriously overweight. Even though I've lost a lot of weight recently, I can put all of that back on in 2 weeks eating the wrong things and the wrong amounts. I could undo months of fairly hard work in just a few handfuls of days.

The diet, for someone like me or someone who has out of whack cholesterol or insulin tolerance, must aid the goal. To that end, I don't see that a low fat diet does that. I was always absolutely starving on a low fat diet for every lb lost. Every time I stopped a low fat diet I put on twice the weight I lost.

Looking at the scientific evidence of what fat and carbohydrates do to the body, I don't see that what the medical profession is saying matches. Carbohydrates elevate the triglycerides and cause extended LDL retention. Carbohydrates cause insulin rushes to cope with them. Fat does neither of these. Fat is a secondary factor. If you push carbohydrates into your body and fat at the same time, then your body will absorb the fat, it can't do anything else. If you want to blow your cholesterol balance and insulin tolerance, the best way is to eat a deep dish pizza covered in meat and egg along with a side order of chips and cheese washed down with a litre of full sugar Coke. Tastes absolutely wonderful if you like that kind of thing, but, to your body, it's like a narcotic and a fat storage order.

This is nothing more than the biomechanics of the body. When medical advice stands in diametric opposition to the physical mechanics of the body, I ask questions. Being told I'm an idiot does not endear me to the advice.....

Scientific evidence is given here.

There is one critical statement here which rings so true.

When blood triglycerides are eleveted, it is usually because the liver is turning excess carbohydrates (especially fructose) into fat

. This is biomechanics. When the liver is saturated with carbohydrates, it turns the excess carbs into fat. As a byproduct it produces triglycerides. This is not fantasy, this is fact. Note the statement. Especially Fructose. 5 a Day anyone?

Bottom line? Eat a lot of carbs, don't burn them off, the liver will produce fat and elevate triglycerides. In essence elevating your cholesterol count.

The second one I found with a very simple search on google.

Read the preamble. Watch the video. I like his statement about people who advocate how a high fat diet causes heart disease.

We must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us. They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations.”

As you can see. I'm having to write huge screeds to explain my position. So let's turn the tables around and do a google search for study showing high fat causes heart disease.

However if you search for scientific studies which show that high levels of carbohydrates cause elevated dangerous types of cholesterol, or cause diabetes, you will be inundated.

So I will stop now. We are being medicated because the medical advice on diet damages our health so badly that we have to be medicated

[Kaz]

I think you might well be putting it back on very quickly as you use extreme dieting measures to lose a lot in a very short time. Weight lost slowly is more likely to stay off, or at least come back on more slowly.......

I do however agree that carbs stack the weight on, especially refined ones.

[Suff]

No extreme measures. I lost it all by cutting back, avoiding the worst of the carbs but not veg and often not potatoes. Also each weekend I exercised hard I spent the next week consolidating the loss.

However, yes, I can put on half a stone in a week if I'm bad....

If you didn't read the literature or watch the presentation, it's quite simple.

All the quoted studies, by both sides of this argument; which monitors more than just what a low fat diet and drugs do, show that there is one and only one factor which points clearly to cardiac issues.

That is reduced HDL cholesterol. Regardless of what the others are doing.

There is pretty much only one way to reduce HDL cholesterol.

Stop eating the foodstuffs which produce it, namely the fats and oils. Then replace those foodstuffs with carbohydrate variants, refined or not.

Simple message. Even if you are a perfect weight, if your HDL cholesterol is low then you run a 4 times greater risk of cardiac problems than a person who is borderline obese and has high HDL cholesterol.

Now there's a thing to think about. Or even something to talk to your GP about.

[Aggers]

I must say, Suff, that I admire the thoroughness of your comments on this subject,
although, frankly, most of it is way beyond my capability to understand.

Obviously I must be doing something right, so I'll just leave it at that, The question
of the relationship between diet and consequential body weight is, it seems, a most
complicated matter, which the medical profession, in general, seem quite unable to
agree upon.

[Suff]

HI Aggers,

Clearly if your regime works for you then I would not dream of suggesting that you change it.

However, for me, I'm very irritated at the "medicate first discover second" mentality in the medical profession now. Also I've been increasingly disparaging of the whole "fat is bad" attitude of the medical profession. Especially when what they say is diametrically opposed to the actual scientific fact.

I do the research because I'm finding, increasingly, that if I don't know what I'm talking about then what I'm told is turning out to be wrong or misleading. I don't know whether it's pressure of success in a system which is totally broken, but whatever it is I'm not willing to allow it to impact me.

The more I dig, the more I get concerned. Especially when I find that my condition that I have now can be mis-diagnosed as Asthma. Which it was by the Army in my mid 20's. Now my record says I have had a form of Asthma and it's a matter of fact so they don't need to search for any of those conditions any more.... So they try to medicate for other conditions which don't exist, without fully testing to prove that they do exist.

This is also what they have done with the fat issue. They have medicated everyone who is overweight using, at best, equivocal evidence to introduce a diet which doesn't work for weight loss unless you go to extremes. In the process causing the very condition they claimed to be trying to avoid. The evidence is there, but it's being suppressed.

Medical treatment has become politicised and that I object to.