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    Death by Carbs: Are you eating yourself into an early grave?
    Death by Carbs: Are you eating yourself into an early grave?
    Death by Carbs: Are you eating yourself into an early grave?
    Ebook199 pages2 hours

    Death by Carbs: Are you eating yourself into an early grave?

    By Dr. Stephen K. Fairley

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    About this ebook

    There are three serious, widespread addictions in Western society that account for countless unnecessary and premature deaths. We all have to die sometime; these things just help to ensure our death is sooner rather than later.

    Tobacco and alcohol are self-explanatory and accepted without question by most people. What most of us don’t seem to realise is that far more people die prematurely from carbohydrate poisoning than tobacco and alcohol combined. Premature death by carbohydrate poisoning is a slow but steady process that is potentially completely avoidable.

    Each year this results in the premature deaths of many millions of unsuspecting people worldwide, particularly in Western societies.

    Are you at risk? Do you know how to avoid this Grim Reaper that is trying to take your soul to another place before you are ready to leave?

    This book reviews the scientific evidence behind the claims.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVivid Publishing
    Release dateFeb 16, 2016
    ISBN9781925442878
    Death by Carbs: Are you eating yourself into an early grave?
    Author

    Dr. Stephen K. Fairley

    Stephen Fairley is a Medical Specialist in Gastroenterology and Liver disease with a particular interest in fatty liver disease and the metabolic syndrome. He works part time in public practice at the Townsville Hospital and part time in private practice. He is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medicine, James Cook University, Townsville Australia, and has more than twenty years of experience in specialist practice and teaching in Townsville where he lives with his wife and their four children. Previous publications include Do you want to live to be 100? and The Mystery of Sustained Weight Loss.

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      Book preview

      Death by Carbs - Dr. Stephen K. Fairley

      Disease.

      Chapters

      1.Introduction

      2.The Big Bad Wolf

      3.Carbohydrates

      4.Why are Absorbable Carbohydrates bad?

      What is the evidence?

      5.Carbs and Liver disease

      6.Carbs and Diabetes

      7.Carbs and Obesity

      8.Carbs and Cardiovascular disease

      9.Carbs and Cholesterol, Saturated Fat Levels

      10.Carbs and Cancer

      11.Going all the way! A ketogenic diet

      12.Going low Carb. Is it safe long term?

      13.The Paleo diet. What is it? Is it a good idea?

      14.So what can I eat?! What’s in? What’s out?

      15.How to calculate your carbs

      16.Recipe examples

      17.Summary – Good health!

      Appendix 1: Carb Counter

      Appendix 2: Medical terms

      INTRODUCTION

      It really is all just a question of balance.

      In life and nature there is usually a fine balance which keeps everything running in harmony. We often take this for granted and you can see this, for example, if you look at what mankind has done to our planet over the last two thousand years. For millions of years prior to this change had been very slow and the world had been in a relatively stable balance or equilibrium. Then man came out of the jungle and mass extinctions of other life forms followed. The climate has started to change and things are getting worse, not better.

      Many of the functions in your body’s metabolism are also like this. They are in a delicate state of balance. Your body and its metabolic processes (which keep you alive) have evolved slowly — over many hundreds of thousands of years — in man and his predecessors. The consequence of this is that you were really more designed to live in a cave, climb trees for berries and hunt for game in the forest. You got a lot of exercise, a moderate amount of fat and protein and a small amount of carbohydrate in your diet. Not much changed over the last 150,000 years.

      Then our predecessors walked out of the forest and began growing crops. Food became relatively plentiful and they had time to think about easier ways to do things, rather than always thinking about where to get their next meal. The industrial revolution followed and machines began doing these things for us and we could sit back. Machines began planting, harvesting and processing our food, as well as moving us around so we didn’t have to walk. This obviously resulted in less exercise and a change in the type of food we were eating. Exercise is clearly important in using up surplus calories we take in as carbohydrates. Very often people quote this lack of exercise argument as the sole reason we now have many of the medical problems I will describe. The food processing and fast food giants love this argument and have milked it for all it is worth over the last 30 years. The message from them is clear — any medical issues you may endure are your fault, not theirs. You just failed to exercise enough! Well, as you know, nothing in life is ever that simple. Exercise is only a small part of the equation. There is a lot in the media out there about needing to get people out exercising, which is a good thing, but exercise on its own will not solve the problem. They are missing the primary point here. Lack of exercise is only a small part of the balancing act your body is trying to maintain. Don’t be fooled, exercise is not the whole answer: nowhere near it. Those who want you to believe this angle are usually pushing this side of the argument for one thing – money. There are billions of dollars to be made by keeping you all in the dark and not telling the whole truth. Those trying to cover this up know it. The tobacco industry did the same thing for at least 20 years after the medical profession had proven that smoking caused lung cancer. They kept you all in the dark as best they could. They ran strong advertising campaigns and they strongly denied the rock solid evidence. They were very worried you might stop buying their cigarettes. Clearly they had your best interests at heart didn’t they? In my view the food processing giant’s current behaviour is no different to that of the tobacco industry’s behaviour in the past.

      Now, as I said above, it is all about balance. That balance put simply is calories in versus calories out. In the last 35 years, with the advent of processed foods and fast foods, there has been a great change in this balance. There has been a great change in the calories or energy going in, and to a much lesser extent, a reduction in the calories or energy going out. The reason the calories going out has not dropped dramatically is because most of the energy consumed by your body is used simply to keep you alive, keep your body temperature up, keep you breathing and your heart pumping. Let us take your heart as an example. It beats about 75 times per minute, 4,500 times per-hour and 108,000 times per-day. It pumps about five litres of blood per-minute, 300 litres per-hour and 7,200 litres of blood per-day against a pressure of 120 millimetres of mercury, or about two pounds per square inch. It does this all day, every day of your life, to keep you alive. The point here is that greater than 90 percent of the energy expenditure in most of you, or calories out, hasn’t changed all that much over the last 35 years. In other words, it’s NOT all about exercise.

      What has changed is the other side of this equation or the delicate balancing act involving you. It is the calories, or energy taken in. The increase in the calories consumed on the left side of the equation has been almost exclusively carbohydrates. There has been very little change in protein or fat intake. The impact on your life and your health has been dramatic. This example is very similar to real life. Imagine yourself walking through life on a tightrope with a balancing pole. You are well above the ground, all is going well and then someone starts putting extra weight as carbohydrates on one end of your balancing pole. That’s it. You are finished. You lose your essential state of balance and fall from the tightrope. Hopefully you have a safety net waiting below to catch you so you don’t hit the ground and die or suffer a serious injury.

      We call that safety net modern medicine. As doctors, we think we are all very clever! When you land in that so called safety net, we can do all sorts of things to treat the consequences of your carbohydrate imbalance. We can give you numerous tablets for your diabetes, your high cholesterol or your high blood pressure. We can operate on your heart to bypass blockages, or we can operate to remove cancers. The unfortunate truth is we don’t always get all the cancer and some of the heart surgery patients die on the operating table.

      Wouldn’t it be better if someone didn’t put the weight on the end of your balancing pole in the first place, and left you peacefully walking through life? Then you are much less likely to fall. You are likely to have a happier and longer life without unnecessary surgery and medication.

      If I’m not getting the message prevention is better than a cure across to you with the above example, try the next.

      There is a machine in the middle of an oval which fires cricket balls randomly in any direction and there are 12 doctors around the edge of the field. Their job, like the fielders in cricket, is to catch all the balls and make sure none of the balls go out of play over the white line around the edge of the field. This example is for you millions of spectator sports fans out there. A ball represents a new diagnosis like diabetes and the doctor catching it is treating the disease. If a ball goes out of play over the white line, it signifies a person dying. The machine starts firing a ball every second in random directions and the doctors start running around in circles, bumping into one another, trying to catch all the balls and ensure none of them go out of play. This is our current approach to health care and it is madness!

      Surely, it would be much simpler and more cost effective to just walk up and switch off the machine?! This approach could be termed preventative medicine. Currently, medicine is all about running around in circles trying desperately to catch those cricket balls at the end of a person’s life. We try not to let any go out of play. Virtually all our money spent on health, being many billions to trillions of dollars, is directed at the end of people’s lives. We think that all we have to do spend twice as much money putting twice as many doctors around the edge of the field and all will be OK. We give these doctors new technology like bigger gloves, hoping this will make them a better catch. Unfortunately, this is how our society and politicians approach this problem. Just spend more on the fielders. The thing people don’t seem to understand here is you don’t have to turn the machine on in the first place. Money could be spent wisely on preventative healthcare strategies!

      The upset to this delicate equation of what goes in and what comes out only began about 35 years ago. It is not just a question of more calories in, or if you like more fuel, it is also a question of where the calories or fuel come from. This is critically important and I think we have been wrong about this for years. The medical profession has been running around blowing trumpets about the dangers of fat, particularly saturated fat and have largely missed the point. The food manufacturers have seen the potential for more profits and raced one another to put out numerous healthy low fat alternatives to our traditional foods.

      With our increased carbohydrate intake in the last 35-40 years we have had a skyrocketing increase in obesity and numerous other obesity related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. I suspect there are several factors contributing to the obesity epidemic as discussed in a prior publication, The Mystery of Sustained Weight Loss.

      The primary issue here however is likely to be carbohydrate excess. This is an issue that we can do something about. We can’t change your genes but hopefully we can change your behaviour.

      As a society, we are suffering from a severe case of a carbohydrate poisoning syndrome.

      If you do not act, you are very likely to die younger or suffer serious, largely avoidable diseases as a result. Those doctors are not as good a catch as you might hope. This is a very large problem, excuse the pun. Here we are discussing more than two-thirds of people in western society who are overweight or obese. There is no such thing as dying from natural causes. We all die from something. Your choice in this balancing act of life is simply how soon you would like this to occur. When do you plan to fall off that tightrope you are walking through life on? Do you really think doctors are good at catching cricket balls?

      Assuming you do not have another terminal illness which is untreatable, such as widespread cancer, it is never too late to begin tackling this one.

      If you are within normal weight range and exercise regularly then carbs are not likely to be an issue for you but you should still eat the correct carbs. The problem for our society is that you are in the one-third minority. My comments in this book are directed primarily at the two-third majority of our society.

      In some areas of this book I go into a lot of detail and I do not apologise for this. It is not to confuse you. It is to back up any claims made. Firstly with a discussion of the probable mechanisms involved, and secondly with the evidence from the scientific references. This is what we call evidence based advice. It is not some hocus pocus wild diet plan requiring a magic wand or crystal ball. There are no wild unsubstantiated claims. If these in depth discussion sections are a bit too heavy or boring just read the take home message at the end – that will be the important part.

      The health profession has mislead society very badly in the past with incorrect unsubstantiated dietary advice. They ignored the evidence which never supported their claims and kept on preaching the wrong advice like religious zealots. We are currently paying the price for following this bad advice and we are paying very heavily, as many of you are well aware. You can measure the cost in dollars, kilograms or years lost in premature deaths and suffering, your choice.

      CHAPTER 1

      The Big Bad Wolf

      The big bad wolf allows you to put a face to a name. Hopefully a face you will remember. Every time you read or hear about The metabolic syndrome, I hope this face comes into your mind and sends chills down your spine. This is very scary stuff! This is very real! This is the reason we need to review our dietary habits. Every time you go to eat the wrong thing, or fail to exercise when you have the opportunity to do so, remember this image and his large teeth. Burn it into your mind. Smell his rotten breath

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