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diabetes

London – food & drugs

Mystery revellers at Westminster

Gorgeous springtime weather here in the UK, which has earned it after a sodden couple of months. Last weekend it hit 17c on Sunday which brought all the picnickers out in force. Primrose Hill was littered with everyone and his dog, and the market at Camden Lock was seething. It’s not the market that was during my day, but I was pleased to see a few things have endured, like Marine Ices and Belgo Noord. But the market itself – once a jumble of knick-knacks, housewares, jewelery, and oddities with a bit of food – has become one big street food extravaganza with little else on offer. If you’re hungry and willing to eat and run, it’s the place to be on a weekend. But otherwise, other markets.

Camden Regents Canal

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve managed to arrive in time to attend some of the free lectures on offer at Kings College London in its Feed Your Mind series. I went to the well-attended first session, Obese London, to learn about obesity rates and their consequences for Londoners. These are highest among immigrant populations, whose diet plummets away from traditional foods into heavy consumption of the worst foods (chips, sugary drinks, chocolate, sweets and processed foods) the longer they’ve been in the country. And of course these deliver obesity and its associated chronic illnesses including diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and higher mortality.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I headed to KCL’s Guy’s Campus, in the shadow of the Shard, and arrived as the Tuesday farmers market was underway. The afternoon’s entertainment was called Hot & Spicy Drugs, which focused somewhat disappointingly and pretty much exclusively on capsaicin (the heat in chilli peppers) and its possible uses in pharmacology. I’d been hoping for a bit more talk about more of the hot & spicy foods and their uses both traditional and pharmacological, but I learned some interesting things. Birds lack the receptor protein that gives chillies their heat; drugs that block this receptor in humans have been developed but are not used since they also block our ability to feel external heat, which seems a pretty undesirable side effect. Applied topically, capsaicin (after an introductory period of discomfort) has a desensitizing effect which can help a lot of kinds of neuralgia and neuropathy. Capsaicin creams and patches have been found to be helpful in relieving pain associated with arthritis, shingles, psoriasis and a number of other conditions. And we got to do a taste test with randomly assigned chocolates with different amounts of chilli in them; as might have been expected, the perception of heat varied wildly among tasters.

Tomorrow I’m off to hear the creator of meat from stem cells, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University, extoll the virtues of stemburgers. Yum.

Food & mood, sleep & diabetes

Having kicked off my conference by hearing from the magnificent Sandor Katz, I wondered how the rest would compare. My second session, Depression & Anxiety Epidemic: How, why & what works better than anti-depressant drugs, though interesting, was a little disappointing. Julia Ross MD (author of The Mood Cure) had clearly spent some of her thunder in the first of her three-part appearance (while I was hearing Katz) and so left unexplained in this session some of the technical aspects of her talk that she’d covered earlier.

However, she gave some good causal information: that people have a 51% greater chance of mood disorder if they eat the Standard American Diet. The top three causes of mood disorder problems are the dietary changes since the seventies (when refined foods replaced home cooking, cereal product and sugar consumption increased, and refined industrial vegetable oils replaced animal fat); the increased addictiveness of refined sugars; and low calorie dieting, where the brain chemistry needed to support mood (and much else) is literally starved out.

She sketched out the diet needed for proper brain function, and explained a useful fact about the WAPF dietary principles’ obsession with pastured meat (grass-fed and finished beef, for example), which is that corn-fed protein is deficient in tryptophan, the amino acid without which serotonin – the body’s chief mood regulator – cannot be produced or function. There was much else, including a discussion of how caffeine, aspartame and ritalin block the effects of the body’s natural relaxants, keeping it in a perpetual state of stimulation, which of course doesn’t allow the brain to rest and recharge. She observed that most people on SSRI (antidepressants) really need them, but may be unaware of the side effects or addictive qualities, or the non-pharmaceutical alternatives (she provides amino acid therapies to her patients).

After a break, she moved on to discussing Insomnia. She observed we’ve been sleeping so badly for so long, we don’t know what good sleep is, so she defined it for us:

  • 8-10 hours in the dark, with no awakening
  • dream recall in the morning
  • regular breathing (no apnea)
  • waking up rested

Insomnia is rampant in Western culture – she said that a third of teenagers report having it – and is costing us in many ways: it correlates with food cravings (increasing them by 30%), insulin resistance/diabetes, depression/anxiety, ADHD, fatigue and injury. There is also a fourfold increased risk of mortality with the use of sleep medications. So it’s a good idea to solve this without. The first step is to identify the type of insomnia (night owl who enjoys staying up late; can’t get to sleep/don’t enjoy it; light sleeper waking several times through the night; or some combination of these; apnea sufferer; person in chronic pain; restless leg; short sleeper needing only around 5 hours a night; or caffeinated or medicated – ADHD – manic type). Each one corresponds to a different neurotransmitter or amino acid treatment (details in her Mood Cure book, I imagine).

After a hearty supper we were off again, and I chose Treating Diabetes with Dr Deborah Gordon as my post-prandial entertainment. It was excellent. She had much to say on the subject (more info on her website) but the (by now) usual advice applied: no sugar or refined carbohydrates; lots of high quality protein; and the inclusion of dietary fat. She cited a study that was done of 311 women following the Atkins (high protein, low carb), LEARN (low fat, high carb) and Ornish (low fat, plant-based) diets which showed that the Atkins diet was the most successful: it’s very similar to both the Paleo and Weston  A Price eating plans. She also recommended lifestyle choices including avoiding environmental toxins (pesticides, cleaning products), reducing stress, getting enough sleep, avoiding iron supplements (shown to contribute to diabetes), and doing strength training such as the HIIE exercise plans, like Tabata Training.

Sweet sleep

I recently attended a series of lectures from the Arthritis Society designed for people destined for but not already committed to a meaningful relationship with osteoarthritis. The last talk was on diet and nutrition, and someone asked about the “Arthritis Diet” books and articles you see everywhere. The nurse giving the lecture said that these are based on studies of rheumatoid arthritis, which is tied to the immune system, not the more common osteoarthritis which has more to do with wear and tear. She conceded that we do all have sensitivities, so it may be that some foods are better/worse than others for our individual situations, but that there is no one diet that will help people with OA. That having been said, calcium, and vitamin D3 and Omega-3 fish oils which help us absorb it, are particularly important to arthritis sufferers for maintaining bones and connective tissues.

Sugar is a major irritant for a lot of arthritis sufferers, which interestingly has to do with insulin levels. As the instructor told it, if you eat sweets or drink alcohol at night before bed, you end up with higher insulin levels after the insulin has done its work processing all that sugar; like a bored teenager looking for something to do, the insulin crosses the blood/brain barrier and interferes with the release of serotonin, which means you don’t sleep properly, which means your body – inflamed joints and all – do not rest either, and you all feel the worse for it in the morning.

But further readings on the subject suggest to me that doesn’t appear to be what really happens. It’s not insulin but tryptophan that is (we hope) crossing the blood-brain barrier, as it’s needed to produce serotonin. Eating sweets and refined (white) sugars and starches are said to be bad because although they cause serotonin levels to rise, they only raise the serotonin levels for 1-2 hours, which I guess is one reason you might fall heavily asleep after drinking alcohol, and then wake up a couple of hours later. Whole grain starch (whole wheat, brown rice, oatmeal):

Triggers a slow, sustained release of insulin that lowers blood levels of most large amino acids except tryptophan, which remains in the blood and can enter the brain. As a result, serotonin levels rise gradually, and blood-sugar levels remain stable, without the rise and fall experienced with sugar or refined grains.

So… you should eat a nice bowl of – sugarless – oatmeal before bed? Or even better, write yourself a soothing little sonnet.

To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.
Or wait the Amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

–John Keats

I came across another sleep – or rather not sleep – poem which features dogs and which I could have written myself at 3 am last Friday, when old Prince next door was feeling sad. Though it turns out I didn’t need to since Emiliano de Lucas got there first.