secret agent girl wrote:DreamStalker wrote:Grains are unhealthy for other reasons beyond the scope of weight loss and not discussed here.
Dude, you had to know someone would pick up on this and ask for more info! Please elaborate?
Also, I have a question... With this eating style you have been describing to us, do you think someone with high cholesterol would find their 'bad' cholesterol going down as they lose weight and approach better health in terms of hormonal regulation? Or would they maybe find they are getting healthier and losing weight and still their cholesterol remains high?
Reasons that grains are unhealthy?
Besides the fact that they are mostly starch carbohydrates that elevate your insulin levels, they also contain gluten, lectins, and phytic acid.
As our spinner noted, gluten is what usually comes to mind when we hear about health risks of grains. Gluten is a protein responsible for celiac disease, an autoimmune disease of the gut. Google celiac disease and save me the effort of extra typing in this response.
There are also lectins (a plant toxin), which are proteins capable of passing through the digestive linings and into our blood system where they travel throughout the body and bind to many other proteins in the body -- often cause allergic reactions and inflammation of the cells they bind to. They are also known to bind to leptin and insulin receptors which fuel the process of fat storage (ie. weight gain).
Phytic acid reacts with niacin (B3 vitamin) and the minerals calcium, magnesium, iron and zinc causing deficiencies of niacin and those minerals.
If that is not enough, grains are very high in omega-6 and are the primary cause of the unhealthy omega-3:omega-6 ratios of the western diet. Omega-6 is a pro-inflammatory fat know to be at the root of many modern diseases and particularly atherosclerosis (the foundation of heart disease).
Put simply, the relatively small amounts of of nutrients that grains provide (that one can get lots more of from veggies), the anti-nutrients of grains far outweigh any benefit of consuming them.
Grains are inedible unless they are processed by technology. Even the so-called whole grain products are really not whole grains because they have been ground to remove the husk. If one eats fresh real whole wheat grains from wheat grass, they are completely indigestible. Ask yourself this, how many people do you know of that grow wheat in their backyard garden, harvest it, and make their own food from it? It is just too much work to process it even into so-called whole wheat bread.
I direct you back to what our good friend Ray Audette said in my post above.
As for "bad" cholesterol, it depends what you mean by "bad". The media, dietitians/nutritionists, and many doctors believe that LDL is the "bad" cholesterol. It is just not that simple. Truth is that there are at least 7 subtypes of LDL cholesterol and it is the small dense subtypes that are "bad". It just so happens that the "bad" LDL subtypes are created when we eat a diet rich in carbohydrates where as the neutral LDL subtypes are created when we eat a diet rich in saturated fats. To find out what subtypes of LDL you have, you need to ask your doctor for a more refined cholesterol test than the traditional lipid panel that most everyone gets.
This excerpt from Dr. Davis at the HearscanBlog :
There are three commercial tests available today:
1) Gel electropheresis (GGE)--often known by its "brand" name as the Berkeley lipoprotein profile, after Berkeley HeartLabs. GGE uses a gel with an electric field applied to cause lipoproteins to migrate, based on particle size and charge.
2) Vertical auto-profile (VAP)--a form of centrifugation, or high-speed spinning of blood plasma to separate lipoprotein particles.
3) Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)--the idea of putting plasma in an NMR (also known as MRI) device to characterize blood proteins.
All three tests do an excellent job. All are competitively priced. All have validating data--lots of it--to justify their broad use (though health insurers, in their vast wisdom, would still have you believe that the tests are "experimental").
But is one better?
Having done many of all three (though least of VAP), I am partial to Liposcience's NMR. (By the way, I receive no fees from Liposcience to use their test, nor to promote it in any way.)
I believe NMR is superior in a few ways:
1) I believe that the LDL particle number is the best way to truly quantify LDL, better than apoprotein B and "direct" LDL.
2) It provides what I believe to be more accurate small LDL measures.
3) It provides intermediate-density lipoprotein (IDL), a post-prandial, or after-eating, measure not available on the other two.
Perhaps I'm biased because I use the NMR most frequently. But I've used it because I felt it yielded superior, more clinically believable, data.
In truth, all three laboratories do an excellent job and you'd be served fine by obtaining any of the three. But my heart goes to NMR.
I'm having a Berkeley test done in mid-March.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the ratio of triglycerides to HDL is more telling than the LDL to HDL ratio. Again, because the LDL number says nothing about subtype composition of the LDL, the LDL to HDL ratio is useless. The Trigs to HDL on the other hand has been found to correlate much better to risk of heart disease. That is because high trigs indicate cholesterol being created by high carbohydrate intake. So not worry so much about so-called bad LDL and instead focus on getting triglycerides down to low levels and HDL up to high levels.
I forgot to post this link in case you wish to take a deep dive into more detailed info about cholesterol -
http://www.theantiagingdoctor.com/hrtdisbrk.htmPresident-pretender, J. Biden, said "the DNC has built the largest voter fraud organization in US history". Too bad they didn’t build the smartest voter fraud organization and got caught.
