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The diabetes treatment that worsens the disease

Gasoline on the Fire

Lies are Unbekoming | March 1, 2026

The Man Who Lost a Foot Before Anyone Told Him the Truth

Morgan Nolte, a board-certified clinical specialist in geriatric physical therapy, walked into an apartment to evaluate a patient with a history of diabetes and multiple amputations. Several toes gone. One foot removed entirely. She began the standard medication reconciliation—reviewing every drug the patient was taking—and stopped.

“Where’s your diabetes medications? You have amputations, you have a history of diabetes, you’re not taking any medications. Let me check your blood sugar, because it’s probably raging high.”

“I don’t need them anymore,” he said. “I got off of them.”

He had changed his diet. Started eating low carb. Reversed his diabetes.

What motivated him to finally make that change? “I didn’t want them to take my other foot, because then I couldn’t live independently anymore.”

The system had taken his toes. Taken his foot. Failed him completely. Only then, facing the loss of the second foot—and with it, his independence—did he discover what no one had told him: the disease was reversible all along.

A Last Ray of Hope

Nolte describes another patient. A woman, morbidly obese, bedbound for ten months. She had sold assets to qualify for Medicaid, to get the care she needed. The physical therapy order read, literally, “as a last ray of hope.” The woman had wounds, skin breakdown, vision loss from diabetes. She couldn’t get up. Couldn’t go to the bathroom. Couldn’t do anything anymore. She wasn’t old.

And she was taking massive doses of insulin.

When Nolte visited, she observed the household. Potato chips. Spaghetti. The woman’s husband had consulted a nutritionist, who told him to switch to whole wheat pasta.

“Let’s pump the body with some glucose,” Nolte reflected, “and then let’s add more insulin to get rid of that glucose. But that’s making the problem of insulin resistance even worse.”

The word Nolte uses for this: heartbreaking.

It’s why she left traditional practice.

What Causes Insulin Resistance?

Type 2 diabetes is defined as a disease of insulin resistance. The cells resist insulin’s signal to absorb glucose from the blood. Blood sugar rises. The standard treatment: give insulin to force the glucose into the cells.

The logic seems sound until you ask a question that medical training apparently discourages: What causes insulin resistance in the first place?

Jason Fung, a nephrologist and researcher, poses an analogy. When antibiotics are first introduced, they work brilliantly. With time and steady use, bacteria become resistant. The drugs lose effectiveness. The body’s response to persistent exposure is adaptation—resistance. This principle is universal in biology. Resistance requires two conditions: high levels of the stimulus, and persistence of those high levels.

Antibiotics cause antibiotic resistance. Viruses cause viral resistance. Drugs cause drug tolerance.

Insulin causes insulin resistance.

This is not speculation. Insulinomas are rare tumors that continuously secrete abnormally large amounts of insulin. Patients with these tumors develop insulin resistance in lockstep with their rising insulin levels. Remove the tumor surgically, and the insulin resistance reverses.

Experimentally, constant infusion of insulin into healthy, non-diabetic volunteers induces insulin resistance within days—a 20 to 40 percent drop in insulin sensitivity. Young, lean, healthy men can be made insulin resistant simply by giving them insulin.

When type 2 diabetics are started on intensive insulin therapy, their average dosage climbs steadily. In one study, patients went from zero to 100 units daily over six months. Blood glucose control improved. But the more insulin they took, the more insulin resistant they became. The underlying disease worsened even as the surface marker—blood glucose—looked better.

Ben Bikman, a metabolic researcher, frames it starkly: “Giving a type 2 diabetic insulin is like giving an alcoholic another glass of wine. We’re giving them more of the very thing that caused the problem.”

The Vicious Cycle

The vicious cycle operates like this: A patient is prescribed insulin for high blood sugar. The insulin forces glucose into cells that are already overfull. The patient gains weight—commonly 20 to 30 pounds. Weight gain worsens insulin resistance. Blood sugar rises again. The doctor increases the insulin dose. More weight gain. More resistance. More insulin.

Fung describes patients confronting their doctors: “You gave me this insulin. I gained 30 pounds, and then you gave me more insulin. How is that making me better?”

It’s not.

Fung uses the image of an overfilled balloon. You keep forcing more air into a balloon that’s already stretched to capacity. It takes more and more pressure to add anything. Eventually something gives. But the standard treatment keeps pumping.

Gary Taubes documents a particularly graphic case in his research on insulin’s effects. A woman developed type 1 diabetes at seventeen. For the next forty-seven years, she injected insulin into the same two sites on her thighs. The result: cantaloupe-sized masses of fat on each thigh—visible proof of insulin’s direct fattening effect on tissue, independent of diet or calories consumed.

A 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that type 2 diabetics on intensive insulin therapy gained an average of eight pounds. Nearly one in three gained more than twenty pounds in three and a half years.

The treatment makes patients fatter. Fatter patients become more diabetic. More diabetic patients need more treatment.

Chronic and Progressive

Fung practiced nephrology for ten years, following orthodox protocols for his diabetic patients. When he looked back at the results, he realized he had not helped them much. He had made them fatter, sicker, and more reliant on drugs.

This confronted him with a choice that confronts every physician working within this system. If the treatment isn’t working—if patients are getting worse—there are two possible explanations. Either the treatment is wrong, or the disease is simply like this: chronic and progressive, inevitably worsening no matter what you do.

Doctors, Fung observes, don’t want to blame themselves. So the profession chose the second explanation. Type 2 diabetes was declared a chronic, progressive disease. The treatment was correct; the disease was just incurable.

“The doctor said, well, the treatment is correct because the blood glucose is fine. Therefore, this must be just the way the disease is—chronic and progressive. Not understanding that their entire treatment paradigm was quite incorrect.”

This framing persists despite obvious counter-evidence. Everyone in medicine knows that if a type 2 diabetic loses significant weight, their diabetes usually improves dramatically or disappears entirely. The disease is observably reversible. The profession declared it irreversible anyway.

Fung identifies two “big lies” in diabetes treatment. The first: that type 2 diabetes is chronic and progressive and cannot be cured. The second: that lowering blood sugar is the primary goal. The actual disease is not high blood sugar—that’s a symptom. The disease is too much glucose in the body and too much insulin trying to manage it. Lowering blood sugar with more insulin just moves the glucose from the blood into the tissues, where it continues to cause damage. The trash isn’t thrown out; it’s hidden under the bed.

Twenty Years On, Off in a Month

The reversal evidence is not subtle. Fung conducted a case series with three patients who had been on insulin for twenty years. They implemented 24-hour fasting three days per week. Within one month, all three were off all their insulin.

Twenty years on the drug. Off in a month.

Nolte reports clients getting off blood pressure medications they’d taken for years within a couple of months. Cholesterol medications. Blood sugar medications. “Happens all the time,” she says. “All the time.”

The man with the amputated foot reversed his diabetes after losing multiple toes and an entire foot to a treatment paradigm that never addressed the underlying cause. His remaining independence depended on figuring out what his doctors hadn’t told him.

Tim Noakes, the South African scientist, puts the absurdity plainly: The medical profession has never encouraged people with lactose intolerance to consume milk, or people with gluten intolerance to eat wheat, or alcoholics to keep drinking. “Yet somehow this common-sense rule seemingly does not apply to the treatment of diabetes.” Patients who cannot properly metabolize carbohydrates are told to eat carbohydrates and inject insulin to manage the consequences.

We fuel the fire with carbohydrates and try to put it out with insulin. The fire grows.

The New Standard of Care

In 2023, the American Diabetes Association updated its standards of care. For patients 65 and older with few other health problems, an A1C of 7 to 7.5 is now acceptable.

An A1C over 5.6 indicates prediabetes. Over 6.5 indicates diabetes.

The new standard of care is diabetes.

As populations get sicker, the definition of sickness is adjusted. The threshold for concern rises to meet the worsening baseline. Physicians become desensitized to illness. One of Nolte’s members lost 50 pounds, eliminated her blood pressure medication, resolved her joint pain. At a church function, someone asked if she was sick—she looked so thin. “I’ve actually never been healthier,” she said.

We are becoming desensitized to what healthy bodies look like. We are becoming accustomed to people who are overweight, on multiple medications, progressing through a disease they were told could not be stopped.

Nolte has heard physicians tell patients directly: “You can’t reverse insulin resistance.”

She has seen a physician refuse to order a fasting insulin test, writing back: “I reached out to some colleagues in endocrinology and they said they only check insulin for a type 2 diabetic. You’re only prediabetic, so we’re not going to do that. And you can’t really reverse insulin resistance anyway.”

The patient needed a new doctor. But most doctors learned the same curriculum.

The Endpoint

The woman bedbound for ten months, covered in wounds, losing her vision, taking massive amounts of insulin while eating spaghetti—she represents the endpoint of a treatment logic that inverts cause and effect. The system identified high blood sugar as the enemy. It deployed a weapon that causes weight gain, which worsens insulin resistance, which raises blood sugar, which requires more of the weapon. Then it declared the resulting devastation proof that the disease was always going to progress this way.

The man who reversed his diabetes after losing a foot did so by removing carbohydrates from his diet—by stopping the influx of glucose that insulin was trying to manage. He addressed the cause. The insulin had been addressing the symptom while worsening the cause.

Prescribing insulin for type 2 diabetes is putting gasoline on a fire. Patients see this. “You gave me this insulin, I gained 30 pounds, and then you gave me more insulin.” They experience the paradox in their own bodies. But the institution that created the paradox cannot acknowledge it without acknowledging decades of harm.

So the disease remains chronic and progressive. The patients remain blamed for their failure to comply. And the treatment that worsens the condition remains the standard of care.

References

Books:

  • Taubes, Gary. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health. Anchor Books, 2008.
  • Taubes, Gary. Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. Anchor Books, 2011.
  • Noakes, Tim. Lore of Nutrition: Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs. Penguin Random House South Africa, 2017.
  • Noakes, Tim, et al. Diabetes Unpacked: Just Science and Sense. No Sugar Coating. Columbus Publishing, 2017.
  • Fung, Jason. The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally. Greystone Books, 2018.
  • Bikman, Benjamin. Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease—and How to Fight It. BenBella Books, 2020.

Interviews and Presentations:

  • Fung, Jason. “Get Rid of Diabetes Once and for All.” The Jesse Chappus Show, September 2022.
  • Nolte, Morgan. “How to ELIMINATE Insulin Resistance Once and for All (COMMON Early Signs).” The Jesse Chappus Show, December 2024.
  • Bikman, Ben. “If You DO THIS Your Insulin Resistance Will Be Normal FAST!” The Jesse Chappus Show.

March 1, 2026 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Comments Off on The diabetes treatment that worsens the disease

SUGAR, NOT GENES: THE HIDDEN DRIVER OF CHRONIC DISEASE?

Most U.S. infant formulas contain mainly added sugars, posing a serious risk to babies’ health, researchers say

By Pamela Ferdinand | US Right To Know | February 25, 2025

Most infant formulas in the U.S. contain mostly added sugars instead of natural lactose, which experts say can harm early development, a new report from the University of Kansas shows.

“Infants may consume upwards of 60 grams of added sugars per day, or the equivalent of two soft drinks per day if they are entirely formula-fed,” researchers say in the study, published yesterday [Feb. 24, 2025] in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis. 

The findings reveal “the staggering extent” to which sugar-laden U.S. formulas undermine federal healthy diet recommendations for infants—and cannot be easily avoided, they say.

“[Most] of the formulas that parents and caregivers feed their infants likely present a substantial risk to their infant’s health and development. Ultimately, caregivers and infants in the US deserve a formula market that promotes healthy infant development and does not promote early obesity risk.”

Added sugars provide energy but lack nutritional value, boosting the odds of rapid infant weight gain that can eventually lead to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other health problems. They may also make babies develop a stronger preference for sweet foods, increasing the risk of overeating and obesity later in life. And they do not support beneficial gut bacteria as well as lactose.

In contrast, lactose, which is naturally found in breast milk, cow and goat milk, is perfectly designed to support an infant’s nutrition, immune system, and gut health, researchers say. Because lactose digests slowly, it doesn’t cause the sharp spike in blood sugar that can set the stage for long-term health problems. It also satiates hunger and helps the body absorb minerals that are important for bone health.

Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital who conducted some of the original studies linking sugar-sweetened beverages and fast food to obesity, calls infant formula spiked with added sugars a “metabolic nightmare for infants.”

“You lose the beneficial effects of what lactose does, and you get the harmful effects of what these fast-digesting sugars do,” Ludwig says. “Unless we’re talking about the very rare child who can’t take lactose, that should be the dominant carbohydrate.”

Out of 73 formulas available in the U.S. in 2022, the vast majority of which were for infants up to 12 months old, the researchers found only five contained mainly naturally occurring lactose—and those are no longer available in this country. It is unknown whether any formulas on the current U.S. market contain primarily naturally occurring lactose, they say.

The study also shows the quality and type of sugars in infant formulas varied by formula. Gentle (with marketing claims such as “gentle,” “soothe,” “sensitive,” or “acid reflux”) and lactose-free formulas contain less sugar than standard formulas but much more starch, the study shows.

“Our findings highlight a major problem with the infant formula supply,” says lead author Audrey Rips-Goodwin, who headed the analysis of data from the Nutrition Data System for Research for KU’s Health Behavior and Technology Lab. “Our infant formula market totally contradicts what experts in infant health recommend.”

Children under 2 years should not be given any foods or beverages with added sugars, since they need nutrient-rich diets and are developing taste preferences, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2020–2025). Yet with few formula options free of added sugars, the researchers say parents and caregivers who can’t breastfeed or access breast milk face tough choices in terms of finding a nutritionally suitable formula due to lax government regulations.

Unlike adult food products, US regulations do not require that added sugars be reported on the nutrition label of infant formulas (only total carbohydrates). The FDA specifies 30 nutrients that must be included in infant formulas but does not regulate the types of carbohydrates or require their clear labeling. That means formula manufacturers can use any type of carbohydrate, including starches or added sugars such as corn syrup solids, fructose, and glucose.

“Consumers are blinded to the fact that added sugars may be present in infant formulas, and in what quantities,” the researchers say. “As a result, parents and guardians may unknowingly feed their infants formula that contains substantial quantities of added sugars.”

The study builds on others that revealed the high sugar content of infant formula. It also comes less than a year after news reports that two of Nestlé’s leading baby-food brands, promoted as healthy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, contain high levels of added sugar.

To promote healthy development, the researchers say efforts should focus on requiring formula companies to produce products that contain naturally occurring lactose as the only sugar. The amount of lactose present in infant formula should also reflect that of human milk.

At the same time, societal barriers to breastfeeding, including a lack of parental leave and affordable early child care, should be removed, the researchers add.

“[The] focus on an individual-level solution (breastfeeding promotion to women and caregivers) is not well matched to addressing the systemic nature of the problem and places an unfair burden on women and families who are expected to navigate this systemic issue,” Rips-Goodwin says.

Senior author Tera Fazzino agrees.

“Even though breastfeeding is promoted as the best option, the lack of support makes it hard to do exclusively,” says Fazzino, associate director of the Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research & Treatment at KU’s Life Span Institute. “Most parents end up using formula, either as a supplement or completely. But our findings suggest that formula itself may pose a serious risk to infant health.”

Reference

Rips-Goodwin AR, Jun D, Griebel-Thompson A, Kong KL, Fazzino TL. US infant formulas contain primarily added sugars: An analysis of the infant formulas on the US market. Journal of Food Composition and Analysis. Published online February 2025:107369. doi:10.1016/j.jfca.2025.107369

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | March 6, 2025

March 9, 2025 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A smarter way to suppress inconvenient science

By Milind Watve | My Science My Way | August 31, 2022

After a delay of 6 months, the journal PLOS One returned our manuscript saying that they could not find an academic editor and reviewers for our manuscript. PLOS One is a fairly open minded journal and has a team of editors representing wide diversity of fields. That’s why this kind of response is quite surprising. This is only for the second time in my life I received this response. Earlier incident was with the journal Biology Direct. Are the two incidents only a matter of rare chance? Or are there any specific reasons to it?

One thing common about both is that both were about diabetes, highlighting models that are at substantial deviation from the prevalent mainstream thinking in the field. I think there lays the reason.

What was our paper about? It pointed out a large number of anomalies in the prevalent theory of glucose dysregulation in type 2 diabetes. It listed dozens of mismatches between the theory and an array of reproducible experimental or epidemiological findings. It also suggested an alternative model that could account for almost every anomaly in a coherent thread of logic. Classically type 2 diabetes is believed to result from an elusive concept of “insulin resistance” and inadequate compensatory insulin response. We, on the other hand assumed with sufficient evidence in hand that diabetes begins with vasculopathy. Because of deficient vasculature there is inadequate and defective glucose transport to the brain which makes the brain deficient in glucose. Deprived of sufficient glucose, the brain instructs the liver to release more glucose in blood. Vasculopathy is long known to be a characteristic of diabetes but the thinking was that chronic rise in glucose is the cause of vasculopathy. We are saying the reverse, vasculopathy the cause of rise in sugar. There is clear demonstration that transport of glucose from blood to brain is reduced prior to hyperglycemia. Further, ALL the experimental and epidemiological patterns not explained by the insulin resistance theory are explained with complete coherence by the “vasculopathy first” model. Therefore the alternative model looks more promising. There also exists published evidence that early signs of vasculopathy are seen much prior to hyperglycemia.

The catch is, if we accept the alternative model, the entire line of treatment of diabetes will become completely redundant. That would lead to collapse of a trillion dollar business. But that is much ahead in the sequence. Right now we are not over-claiming. We only say in this paper that the alternative model explains almost all the anomalies and therefore needs to be considered seriously and trigger research on a new line.

How do researchers in a field react to a finding, hypothesis, model or synthesis that directly contradicts the prevalent theory? You would expect them to critically view the new finding, may be find flaws in the argument, aggressively criticize, debate and so on. I am ready to believe that a welcome response is highly unlikely. It would be natural to expect heavy criticism. This might happen if the new argument is inherently flawed and it is easy to find the flaws in it. But what if the prevalent theory itself is flawed and the new argument it substantially stronger and sound in terms of logic, mathematics and evidence?

From repeated experience I know what a typical response of scientists is, particularly from the field of biomedicine. They prefer to keep mum. They neither accept nor reject any disruptive thinking or evidence. They pretend that they just haven’t heard of it. Criticism can be replied to. A debate is likely to take a logical path so that ultimately truth will prevail with a good chance, if not every time. But the strategy that always defeats novel thinking is “silence”. When the giants in a community have vested interests in a prevalent theory and someone makes a sound case that it is wrong, they just keep mum, pretend that nobody said anything; they did not hear anyone saying anything. In the days of hierarchical structure of science publishing this strategy can perhaps never be defeated. The giants in the field can block the new thought from getting published in the flagship journals of the field. They don’t care if it gets published anywhere else because they know nobody reads research anyway. Research is propagated only through a handful of journals; that too only through the titles and abstracts. Rarely if ever, research papers are read completely. So often the data in the paper contradicts the statements in the abstract. But everyone reads only the abstract and therefore truth remains masked. If we point out stark difference in the data and the conclusions in a paper, the journal is guaranteed to not respond.

This is not different in principle, from the responses of researchers to a disruptive idea described by Thomas Kuhn, albeit two major differences. One is that of difference in culture of the research fields. Kuhn mostly talked about physics in which ideas are debated. Debate is not in the culture of biomedicine. They have smarter ways to suppress alternative thinking. The second difference is that Kuhn wrote when peer review was not a mandatory norm in science publishing. Now peer review is another weapon by which any upcoming thought can be swiftly killed. And you need not waste any time in reading and commenting as well. Just decline to handle the manuscript and that is enough!! Here is our manuscript in a preprint form (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.19.477014v1) and see below the correspondence with the editors.

September 29, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Why the Low Fat Diet Makes You Fat (and Gives You Heart Disease, Cancer and Tooth Decay)

Book review by Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall | February 12, 2015

The Truth About Animal Fat: What the Research Shows

The Big Fat SurpriseThe Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet lays out the scientific case why our bodies are healthiest on a diet rich in saturated fat from animal products. Analyzing study after study, Nina Teicholz leaves no doubt that the number one cause of the global epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease is the low fat high carbohydrate diet doctors have been pushing for fifty years.

Blaming the Victim

My initial reaction on learning how the low fat diet became official government policy was to feel ripped off and angry. For decades, the medical establishment has been blaming fat people for being obese, portraying them as weak willed and lacking in self control. It turns out the blame lay squarely with their doctors, the American Heart Association (AHA), the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Congress and the food manufacturers who fund the AHA (Proctor and Gamble, Nabisco, General Foods, Heinz, Quaker Oats and Corn Products Refining Corporation) for foisting a diet on them that increases appetite and weight gain.

The low fat diet is based on a “theory” put forward in the 1950s that heart disease was caused by elevated cholesterol levels – and a few deeply flawed epidemiological studies. In other words, the low fat diet is a giant human experiment the medical profession conducted on the American public while attempting to prove that saturated animal fats cause heart disease. Fifty years of research would show the exact opposite: not only do low fat high carbohydrate diets increase the risk of cardiac death, but they’re also responsible for a myriad of other health problems, with obesity and diabetes being the most problematic.

The studies Teicholz cites also debunk the myth that animal fat increases the risk of breast and colon cancer.

Heart Attacks Rare Prior to 1900

Coronary artery disease and heart attacks were virtually unknown prior to 1900. When Ancel Keys, the father of the low fat diet, began his anti-fat crusade in the 1950s he claimed that industrialization and an improved standard of living had caused Americans to switch from a plant based diet to a diet that was higher in animal fats. This was total rubbish. Prior to 1900, Americans had always eaten a meat-based diet, in part because wild game was much more plentiful in North America than in Europe. Early cookbooks and diaries reveal that even poor families had meat or fish with every meal. Even slaves had 150 pounds of red meet a year, which contrasts unfavorably with 40-70 pounds of red meat in the current American diet.

What changed in the twentieth century was the introduction of cheaper vegetable fats into the American diet, starting with margarine and Crisco in the early 1900s.

Keys was also responsible for the theory, again without research evidence, that high cholesterol levels cause heart disease. This was also rubbish. Fifty years of research negates any link between either total cholesterol or LDL* cholesterol and heart disease. In study after study the only clear predictor of heart disease is reduced HDL. The same studies show that diets high in animal fats increase HDL, while those high in sugar, carbohydrates and vegetable oils reduce HDL.

Teicholz also discusses the role of statins (cholesterol lowering drugs) in this context. Statins do reduce coronary deaths, but this is due to their anti-inflammatory effect – not because of their effect on cholesterol.

Researchers Silenced and Sidelined

For decades, researchers whose findings linked low fat diets with higher rates of heart disease, cancer, stroke and tooth decay were systematically silenced and sidelined. As frequently happens with doctors and scientists who challenge the powerful health industry, their grants were cut off and, in some cases, their careers destroyed.

For fifty years, the medical establishment simply ignored the growing body of research linking the high sugar/carbohydrate component of the low fat diet to heart disease, as well as those linking vegetable oils to cancer. Vegetable oils oxidize when cooked, leading to the production of cancer causing compounds such as aldehyde, formaldehyde and 4-hydroxnonene (HCN). Unsurprisingly diets in which vegetable oils (other than olive oil) are the primary fat are linked with an increased incidence of cancer. Several studies overseas have found high levels of respiratory cancer in fast food workers exposed to superheated vegetable oils.

The Atkins Diet

The Big Fat Surprise includes a long section on the Atkins diet, a popular high fat/protein low carbohydrate weight reduction diet in the 70s and 80s. The use of a high fat low carbohydrate diet for weight loss dates back to 1862 and was heavily promoted by Sir William Osler in his 1892 textbook of medicine. According to Teicholz, recent controlled studies totally vindicate Dr Robert C Atkins, who was ridiculed as a dangerous quack during his lifetime. They also debunk claims that high levels of protein in the Atkins diet cause kidney damage. In addition to being perfectly safe, controlled studies show it to be extremely effective for weight loss and treating diabetes.

The USDA and AHA Quietly Reverse Themselves

As Teicholz points out in her conclusion, the nutrition researchers who blindly pursued their anti-fat campaign – and politicians and corporate funders who supported them – have done Americans an immense disservice by creating a virtual epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

A few years ago, the tide began to turn, largely due to the 29,000 subject Women’s Health Initiative launched in 1993. In 2013, the USDA and AHA quietly eliminated fat targets from the dietary recommendations. Because they made no real effort to publicize their change of heart, many doctors are still giving their patients the wrong dietary advice and hounding them about their cholesterol levels.

Dump the Skim Milk

The take home lesson from this book is that it’s virtually impossible to eat too many eggs or too much red meat, cheese, sausage and bacon. Americans (and their overseas English-speaking cousins) need to dump the skim milk and margarine down the sink because whole milk and butter are better for you. People need to go back to cooking with lard, bacon drippings and butter. Cooking with vegetable oils can give you cancer.

Anyone with a weight problem needs to totally eliminate sugar and carbohydrate (the Atkins diet recommends less than half a slice of bread a day).

And if your doctor hassles you about your cholesterol tell him or her to read this book.

*LDL (low density lipoprotein) is referred to as “bad cholesterol” due to its alleged link to heart disease. HDL (high density lipoprotein) or “good cholesterol” appears to provide some protective effect against heart disease.

March 21, 2015 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment