The Basic Food Groups,

 Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrates

Let’s consider how specific kinds of foods can affect your blood sugar.

Although we can make accurate generalizations about how most of us will react to a particular diet or medical regimen, each individual will react somewhat differently to a given food.

The foods we consume, once you take away the water and indigestible contents, can be grouped into three major categories: protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Seldom do any foods contain solely one type of nutrient. High Protein foods often contain fat; high carbohydrate foods frequently contain some protein and fat. The only foods that are virtually 100 percent fat are oils, butter, margarine and lard.

Since our principal concern here is blood sugar control, we'll concentrate on how the three major types of nutrients affect blood sugar. If you're a long-standing diabetic and had followed the standard ADA diet for years, you'll find that much of what you're about to read is radically at odds with its dietary guidelines—and with good reason, as you'll soon learn.

When we eat, the digestive process breaks down the three major food groups into their building blocks. These building blocks are then absorbed into the bloodstream and reassembled into the various products our bodies need in order to function.

Part 1

PROTEIN:

Proteins are chains of building blocks called amino acids. Through digestion, dietary proteins are broken down by enzymes into their amino acid components. These amino acids can then be reassembled not only into muscle, nerves, and vital organs, but also into hormones, enzymes, and neurochemicals.

We acquire dietary protein from many sources, but the foods that are richest in it are egg whites, cheese, and meat (including fish and fowl). Protein is available in much lower amounts from vegetable sources such as legumes (beans), seeds, and nuts, which also contain the other nutrients, fat and carbohydrate.

As odd as it sounds, given the popular media's recent love affair with a high "complex" carbohydrate, low-fat diet—you can quite easily survive on a diet in which you would eat no carbohydrate, because although we cannot synthesize all the necessary amino acids and fatty acids, we can synthesize glucose from the amino acids found in proteins. Furthermore, by sticking to a diet that contains no carbohydrate, but high levels of fat and protein, you can reduce your cardiac risk profile—serum cholesterol, blood lipids, et cetera—though you would deprive yourself of all the "fun foods" that we crave most. We've all been trained to think that carbohydrates are our best, most benign source of food, so how can this be?

Protein is the second of our two dietary sources of blood sugar. Protein foods are only about 20 percent pure protein by weight (6 grams per ounce), the rest being fat, water and undigestible "gristle." The liver and to a lesser degree the kidneys and intestine, instructed by the hormone glucagon, can very slowly transform as much as 36 percent of the above 6 grams per ounce into glucose. This occurs when a persons’ blood sugar descends too low or the body's other amino acid needs have been met. Neither carbohydrate nor fat can be transformed into protein.

Our experience with over 2000 diabetic patients is almost precisely the opposite of the prevailing "wisdom”, that says, if you want to lose weight and get your cholesterol down, you need to eat lots of fruit, vegetables, and grain products, and cut out meat as much as possible.

Many contemporary dietary researchers exploring this phenomenon have begun to arrive at the conclusion that a high-carbohydrate diet is not so benign. In fact, it has been shown—and it is my own observation—that such a diet can increase body weight, increase serum insulin levels, and raise most cardiac risk factors.

The advent of our agricultural society is comparatively recent in evolutionary terms—that is, it began only about 10,000 years ago. For the millions of years that preceded the constant availability of grain and cultivated vegetable products, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, and ate what was available in the immediate environment, primarily meat, fish, nuts—food that was present year-round, and predominantly protein and fat. In the summers they may have also eaten whole plants fruits and berries, that were not bred to be sweet, and which were available locally in some regions. If they stored away fat during times of plenty, that fat was quickly burned up during the periods when foods were sparse. Although for the past two centuries, fruit, grain, and vegetables have, in one form or another, been available to us in this country year-round, the world’s collective food supply has historically been interrupted often by famine—in some cultures more than others. The history of the planet as best as we can determine is one of feast and famine, and suggests that famine will strike again and again. 

Curiously, the genetic predisposition toward carbohydrate craving and the resultant hyperinsulinemia resulted in the accumulation of minimal fat storage. This was due to the general unavailability of high carbohydrate foods. This functioned during the famines of prehistory as an effective means for survival. Ironically, the ancestors of those who today are most at risk for Type II diabetes were, during prehistory, not the sick and dying, but the survivors. If famine struck today in the United States, guess who would survive most easily? The same people who are most at risk for Type II diabetes.

You can take this knowledge and make it work for you rather than against you.

If you give it some thought, it makes perfect sense: If a farmer wants to fatten up his pigs or cows, he doesn't feed them meat or butter and eggs, he feeds them grain. If you want to fatten yourself up, just start loading up on bread, pasta, potatoes, cake, and cookies—all high-carbohydrate foods. If you are already obese, you know and I know that you crave—and consume—these foods and probably avoid fats.

In many respects—and going against the grain of a number of the medical establishment's accepted notions about diabetics and protein—protein will become the most important part of your diet if you are going to control blood sugars.

If you are a long-standing diabetic and are frustrated with the care you've received over the years, you have probably been conditioned to think that protein is more of a poison than sugar and is the cause of kidney disease. I was conditioned the same way—many years ago, as I mentioned, I had laboratory evidence of advanced proteinuria, signifying potentially fatal kidney disease—but in this case, the conventional wisdom is just a myth.

Non-diabetics who eat a lot of protein don't get diabetic kidney disease. Diabetics with normalized blood sugars don't get diabetic kidney disease. High levels of dietary protein do not cause kidney disease in diabetics or anyone else. There is no higher incidence of kidney disease in the cattle-growing states of the United States, where many people eat steak more than once a day, than there is in the states where beef is more expensive and consumed to a much lesser degree. Similarly, the incidence of kidney disease in vegetarians is the same as the incidence of kidney disease in non-vegetarians.

 It is the high blood sugar levels that are unique to diabetes, and to a much lesser degree the high levels of insulin needed to cover high carbohydrate diets(leading to hypertension), that cause the complications associated with diabetes.

Please note, phosphate is a by-product of protein digestion, and it requires calcium in order to be eliminated from the body---about 1 gram of calcium for every 10 ounces of protein foods.  If you don’t eat much cheese, milk (too high in carbohydrate), yogurt, or bones, all good sources of calcium, it would be wise to take a calcium/magnesium/vitamin D supplement.

Next time we will discuss about Fat