Are You Ready for Bathing Suit Season?

We have only six short weeks left until Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer — and bathing suit season for most people. If your New Year’s resolution to lose weight hasn’t worked as well as you had hoped, don’t despair. There’s still time to look better at the beach. And I can tell you how to do it.

Block This

Part 2 of a 2-part series

The use of fat and starch blocking diet aids is insanely counter-intuitive to me. I spend my life trying to get more nutrition into people, not less. Remember, anything that blocks the digestion and absorption of a macronutrient will also tend to block the absorption of micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals.

With the fat blocker Alli, the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K is impaired. That’s why when taking it, users are instructed to be sure to take a multivitamin at night (away from the time you took the drug). If you follow the whole Alli program, you eat no more than 15 g of fat per meal.

Block This

Part 1 of a 2 Part Series

In a world where the numbers of overweight and obese people only continue to climb, many people are desperate for any help they can get with weight loss. Sure, most people can lose weight following a low carb, or conversely, a low calorie, low fat diet — for a little while anyway. But long-term compliance continues to elude many people. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could eat all the carbs or all the fat you wanted and not gain weight?

That’s the allure of a category of newer dietary supplements called starch blockers, and the over-the-counter fat blocker called Alli. The idea is, “Go ahead and eat the foods you like, just keep them from breaking down and make them pass right through, so you don’t absorb the calories.”

First, just to give you a little background… Starch blockers are substances that stop the digestion of starches by blocking one of the enzymes that break them down. For example, a prescription drug for diabetics called acarbose (Precose) blocks the enzyme called alpha-glucosidase.

Sugar, Carbs and Diabetes Risk

In medical circles, the idea that sugar increases the risk of diabetes is considered to be an old wives tale. However, recent studies bring not just sugar, but all high glycemic index (GI) and high glycemic load (GL) foods into question. Two studies from last year showed that women with the highest intakes of high carb-containing foods (high GI and high GL) had the greatest risk of becoming diabetic.

One studied looked at all high GI and GL foods and found the highest intakes of these foods were associated with the greatest risks of becoming diabetic. Sugary foods weren’t evaluated separately, but just as part of the overall diet. While cereal is primarily a high GI food, this study showed that a diet high in cereal fiber lowered the risk of diabetes.¹ (This makes sense, because fiber slows the release of sugars into the blood stream.)

The Straight Facts on Carbs

If you’re a carb lover, now’s the time to get a handle on how many carbs you should be eating every day. This information is not just important for your waistline. It’s also important to control the potential for disease-causing inflammation that increases with high levels of circulating insulin and blood sugar — and that may cause cancer.

That was the result of a recent analysis of 39 studies that found that the greater a person’s intake of high glycemic index and high glycemic load foods, the greater the risks of certain types of cancer (endometrial and colon).¹

Want to Stay Healthy? Choose Your Carbs Carefully

Headlines have confirmed what I have been preaching for a long time — when it comes to carbohydrates, the kind you eat really does matter. You can eat calorie-controlled high sugar or refined flour foods all you want (you know those popular little 100 calorie packs?), but more and more studies have found it won’t get you anywhere with long term weight management, heart disease, or diabetes prevention.

A 2005 study involving healthy people with no existing heart disease or other conditions found that the more they ate high-glycemic index foods, the more weight they gained.¹ Another study in overweight young adults found that when comparing two diets that were equal in the amount of ingested carbohydrates, the diet low in glycemic index carbs nearly doubled fat loss.²

Low Carb Diets Looking Better All the Time

If anyone needs yet another reason to change from a diet high in refined carbohydrates, they just got it. A study reported this July in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a diet higher in refined carbohydrates (high glycemic index foods) significantly increased the risk of developing age-related macular degeneration.

Macular degeneration is the number one cause of blindness in this country in people age 60 and up, a statistic of particular importance to baby boomers. Estimates from this study were that 100,000 cases of blindness from AMD could be avoided if people would make this one easy change — stop eating refined sugar and flour and the foods and drinks made with them.