The Carb-Sane Asylum

From Mark Sisson's Weekend Link Love this past weekend comes this:   Soy protein present in egg yolks and chicken tissues .  Ruh roh!!  Mark writes: It’s confirmed: meat and eggs from soy-fed chickens contain soy isoflavones . The title of the article – “Soy protein present in egg yolks and chicken tissues” – isn’t quite accurate, but soy isoflavones are often phytoestrogens and thus somewhat concerning. Boys are reaching puberty younger than ever before, a new study shows, but “it’s unclear why.” Perhaps the phytoestrogens from soy-fed chicken products are involved?

Hope this post finds everyone safe and having not lost much in the wake of this massive storm.  I was semi-awake most of the night.  Our power went off a few times, and cycled on and off for a couple hours, but luckily it held.  There were no generators to be had as of early Friday afternoon ... this is something we need to get because all I could think of was our freezers full of food being lost.   Being at relatively high elevation and far enough inland, I wasn't worried about water too much, more about wind and our big tree.   One fairly big limb came down on our shed which then blew apart ... Not sure if it can be saved, but it is what it is, and relatively minor.  Quite a few smaller limbs came down as well.  Although it makes for less privacy, I'm happy our neighbor had some limbs on his tree  trimmed recently.  Still, something hit his house and ripped his fascia board off.   According to the hubs, we have a chicken in t...

Continuing on in this series dealing with  the neuropathy study  from which the following statement has been repeated regarding blood glucose levels:   Nerve Damage Occurs when Blood Sugars Rise Over 140 mg/dl After Meals   (as stated by  Ruhl  , Jaminet  (Kindle Locations 712-716), and   Kresser .) At the risk of repetition, this does seem to have originated with Jenny Ruhl's interpretations of this study wherein 50% of 72 individuals with neuropathy were diagnosed as IGT having a BG level over 140 mg/dL at the 2-hour mark of an OGTT.   The IGT group was also more likely to have painful sensory symptoms than the roughly one-third who were normoglycemic (the remaining group were frank diabetic).

If you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in biology, just remember this and own it: carbohydrate controls insulin; insulin controls fat storage .  It's All About Insulin (Well, at Least 80 Percent of It): Eighty percent of your ability to achieve body composition goals is determined by your diet—essentially, your ability to moderate insulin production so you can access and burn stored body fat for energy, while preserving or building muscle. Insulin is an important hormone that transports nutrients into cells for storage. When the delicate insulin balance is abused by habitually consuming too many carbs, cells become insulin resistant; more fat is stored and it becomes increasingly difficult to burn. This sets the stage for the development of serious conditions like Metabolic Syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Synthesis of testosterone and human growth hormone are hindered by excessive insulin production, creating an artificially accelerated aging p...

This comes from the Reebok/Crossfit page on Facebook.   In response to a photo of Neal Maddox eating a donut ,  Tom Inkel  writes: One of the rewards of a good diet, fitness level, and self-awareness is knowing what licenses like this that you can take without impacting your goals. I feel bad for people trying to live blindly by some set of rigid rules for life that they've conjured up off CrossFit/Paleo websites. As humans, we have a limited pool of free will/willpower. (Read Dan John's book sometime: Never Let Go.) If you use that willpower up on unnecessary rigidity, two things happen: (1) other parts of your life fall apart to compensate (and eventually, your rule system itself); (2) you alienate from CrossFit/Paleo everyone watching who can't make those same commitments (due to things like a crazy schedule, kids, sickness, etc.), because you've just told them that they aren't good enough for CrossFit/Paleo because they can't do it "right." Th...

I've got at least one more post in this series directly relating to the neuropathy study  to which concerns over BG levels over 140 mg/dL and nerve damage can be traced. This post is actually going to be rather short.  In the study, they found that half of those with neuropathy were diagnosed with IGT having a BG level over 140 mg/dL at the 2 hr mark on an OGTT.  An additional 18% were diabetic and 32% normoglycemic.  So the incidence of IGT was roughly three times as prevalent in this neuropathic population as in the general population.  Further, the IGT group had more painful sensory symptoms than the normoglycemic group.  But here's the thing:

... it's not a competition, the compliant/successful are analyzed separately, and while we're at it, perhaps we can do away with this notion that any single outcome or cluster of outcomes is somehow more important because we've designated them as "primary" ahead of time. Such is where I find my thoughts wandering as the Look AHEAD diabetes trial passes in and out of my head as I absorb the discussions of it here and about the web.