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Wednesday, January 6, 2010

[diabetes_int] Digest Number 8516

Messages In This Digest (1 Message)

1.
More on Fructose by Dr.Eades From: anniemay2@webtv.net

Message

1.

More on Fructose by Dr.Eades

Posted by: "anniemay2@webtv.net" anniemay2@webtv.net

Tue Jan 5, 2010 11:31 am (PST)



http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/

"Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain" from the blog of
Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Dr Mehmet Oz on the January Detox

If I ran across something like this in a local daily newspaper, I
wouldn't think much about it, but in the venerable Financial Times? 
Since we all know how much good the wonderful Dr. Oz has done Oprah
(not!), I decided to read it to see what he had to recommend on
detoxing.  I wasn't disappointed. He lives up to his billing.

How does Dr. Oz recommend we detoxify our livers? Let's read and see:

"I like a simple cleansing fast as an easy, inexpensive means of
flushing out toxins and rebooting the system (a juice detox, say, which
involves a short-term diet of raw vegetables, fruit juices and water).
But it is important to remember that detoxifying the liver, the organ
responsible for detoxing our bodies, would take a month of healthy
living."

Brilliant! Let me see if I get this straight.  You detoxify your liver
by a fruit-juice fast, right?  Which means throwing back at least
three or four glasses of fruit juice a day.  Okay, got it. Sounds
great. 

But a bit of critical thinking:
What happens to the liver to cause it to need detoxifying?  How about
fat accumulation?  A fatty liver is one that needs detoxifying. 
Fatty livers are way more common than you might expect.  Studies have
shown that about a third of Americans are walking around with fatty
livers, a disorder called non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder (NAFLD). 
No one really knows what the long-term effects of this problem are going
to be, but it is known that fatty accumulation in the liver can lead to
an inflamed liver, which can then go on to develop cirrhosis and
possibly even liver cancer.  Since this epidemic of NAFLD has arisen
fairly recently, it's unknown how it will play out over the long haul,
but I doubt that it will be a good result. So where does all this fat in
the liver come from? 

Most researchers think it comes from excess fructose consumption.  The
pathways of the metabolism of fructose lead to fatty accumulation in the
liver, and giving laboratory animals a lot of fructose gives them fatty
livers.  If you couple this information with the fact that fructose
consumption has skyrocketed over the last three decades, it makes sense
that at least part of the NAFLD we're seeing comes from too much
fructose.

With these facts in mind, let's take a closer look at Dr. Oz's
recommendation to undertake a juice fast to cleanse or detox the liver.
If you go on a juice fast, how much juice do you drink?  Three or four
glasses a day, I would imagine.  And I would also guess that these
would be decent sized glasses.  Most people don't drink an eight ounce
glass of anything.  Eight ounces is only a cup, which really isn't all
that much.  Even those little weenie juice boxes that parents put in
their kid's lunches are 8.45 ounces, and most glasses of juice that
people drink are larger than that.  A regular-sized soft drink can
contains 12 ounces, which is probably much closer to the size of a glass
of juice most of us would drink, especially if we were on a juice
fast.  Four glasses of juice – a not unreasonable amount to drink in
a day if that's all you're drinking – would end up being 48 ounces of
juice.
I went through the USDA database of foods looking for all the juices I
could find that had fructose broken out from the total carbohydrate
figure and tabulated them. 

Take a look at the chart below (NOTE:see the webpage for chart -
anniemay) which is total carbs and fructose in grams.  And remember
that 100 grams equals a half a cup.  So when you see something listed
at 111.6 grams of fructose, that means more than a half cup.

It should be clear from this chart that a fruit juice fast provides a
whole lot of fructose and a whole lot of carbs.  The fructose is
particularly problematic in that it encourages fat accumulation in the
liver.  The amounts in 48 ounces of any of these fruit juices would be
more than enough to stimulate the synthesis and storage of fat in the
liver.
How Dr. Oz thinks this would detox the liver is beyond me.

One other note on his cleansing fast.  It's not just fruit juices; it
includes raw vegetables, too.  I assume Dr. Oz recommends the raw
vegetables for all of the flavonoids, carotenoids, lycopenes and other
phytonutrients.  I guess he never learned that most – if not all –
of these nutrients are fat soluble. Consuming raw vegetables and fruit
juices without some fat along with them means you don't absorb any of
the nutrients.  Dr. Oz must have missed that day at medical school.
So, the actual result of his cleansing detox that is supposed to "flush
out toxins [while] rebooting the system" is that more fat accumulates in
the liver, insulin goes up thanks to all the carbs and you don't even
absorb the phytonutrients.  Sounds like just a hell of a deal to me.

Let's spend just another moment looking at yet a different piece of
idiocy in this small, small piece of writing. Says Dr. Oz:
Caffeine throws off all the systems, so drink green tea, which has only
a quarter of the caffeine of dark tea or coffee but packs a powerful
energy punch.
Oh dear.  Where do we start?  Green tea has almost as much caffeine
as coffee, not a quarter of the caffeine.  And, please tell me Dr. Oz,
where do we get the "powerful energy punch" from green tea if it's not
from the caffeine?

No sooner had I finished reading the Financial Times Oz recommendations,
which, by the way, struck me much more as a prescription from a witch
doctor than from a trained physician, than MD pointed out that the same
Dr. Oz was on the cover of the Sunday magazine that comes with our local
paper.  Yep, USA Weekend features our friend expanding on his
recommendations.
I'm not going to go through them all, but one did catch my attention:

"Ditch extreme diets. People almost always fail to lose weight because
they try diets that are too radical to stick with. For a lifestyle
change to succeed, it must be sustainable. So instead of eliminating all
foods that fit into a certain category or counting every calorie, try
making changes that are less noticeable but no less significant. If you
can eliminate just 100 calories from your daily intake, for example, you
will lose about a pound per month. How hard is that?"

This is a blatant attack on the low-carb diet without saying it in so
many words.  And the notion that "if you can eliminate just 100
calories from you daily intake" you will lose weight over time is the
ultimate recommendation of someone who is clueless about the operation
of the energy balance equation.

Pitiful.

From the blog of Michael R Eades, M.D.

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