THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE AND AN IMPORTANT WARNING

If you are on Facebook, you may already know about what happened to my husband. I have put off writing about it because I was not yet ready to relive the worst day of my life, but this very scary story contains an important warning that I feel I need to share as soon as possible. I don’t want what we experienced to happen to anyone else. I thought the life I knew was over early Friday morning on October 28. My husband, Dean, got…

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CALORIES IN VERSUS CALORIES OUT

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you the solution for obesity. Eat less; move more. Our collective weight problem would go away if all the overweight people just quit eating more calories than they burn. Couldn’t be simpler. There are 4,086 calories in a pound of fat. Divide that by the 7 days in a week and you get 584 calories. So if you eat 584 calories less per day you will lose a pound a week. If you continue to eat 584 fewer calories every day for a…

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LESSONS ABOUT OBESITY FROM FAT MONKEYS

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An experimental drug that dramatically reduced the appetite of rodents caused obese baboons to double or triple their food intake and is now being considered as a treatment for cancer patients and those who need to gain weight. Monkeys are better research models because they are more like humans than rats or mice, not only physiologically, but also in eating behavior; they will eat when they are bored, even if they are not hungry. Fat monkeys are providing some interesting findings about what causes obesity…

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LAST DAY FOR COMMENTS ON USDA GUIDELINES

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July 15th is the last day to submit your comments to the USDA about their new food guidelines. I urge you to please speak out before this travesty is finalized. You are limited to 2,000 characters or less, and they seem to count spaces. If you want to send a longer message, you can send it as an attachment. I thought people would be more likely to read it if they didn’t have to open anything, so I worked really hard to get my comment…

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POTENTIAL DANGERS OF AGAVE

“Agave provokes bitter debate as a sweetener,” reads the headline in the March 23rd Chicago Tribune: www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0323deardorffmar23,1,7478086.story. The story raises questions about the safely of the trendy, expensive, liquid sugar made from the Mexican agave cactus. Agave nectar is being marketed as a healthful, all-natural substitute for sucrose because it has a very low glycemic index and doesn’t raise insulin levels. However, the dangers of fructose are well known, and agave nectar is almost 100% fructose. As I wrote in this previous post, http://carbwars.blogspot.com/search?q=agave, fructose…

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Gout and Metabolic Syndrome

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I did a little research on gout for a friend who had been given the standard advice for treating this painful condition: eat a low-fat diet, cut out red meat, seafood, fish, beans, and other purine-rich foods, and take medication. Purines can be broken down into urate, which can crystallise out to cause pain in the joints, so a reduction in purine-containing foods is standard advice, in spite of the fact that most uric acid is made in the body and does not come from…

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Rating Consumers Report

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The June, 2007 issue of Consumers Report again disses low carb diets. They point out that the diets were not tested (Isn’t that the whole point of Consumers Report? To actually test things?), but rated by a panel of nutritionists as to how they compare to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. As long as diet plans continue to be ranked based on the U.S. Guidelines, we will get bad advice and will likely continue to get fatter and sicker. Just look at the food…

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