The Snackwell Effect, Part 1 talked about how we lost our ability to regulate blood sugar by overwhelming our bodies with cereal, bread and Ho-Ho’s. I finished the article by recommending that you measure a few days of carbohydrate intake (not calories or fat, just grams of carbs) and see how far away from the number 72 you were. This article is going to be about how to reverse this whole process.

First, let me start by explaining what a carb (carbohydrate) is. It is sugar. There are many types of sugars such as maltose, glucose, lactose, fructose, galactose, mannose, dextrose…. you get the picture. Scientifically, carbohydrates are a nutritive molecule that are used by living cells for fuel. The body takes these carbohydrates, brings them into the mitochondria of the cells and transforms it into energy the cells need. It is fuel for the cells. It is what gives food its sweetness and is a great and easily utilized fuel source for our bodies. Carbohydrates are considered one of the three macro-nutrients that the body needs (protein and fats being the others).

Second, let me explain what will happen if we don’t limit our carbohydrate intake to around 72. A metaphor might be flooding an engine with too much fuel. It gets swamped and no longer runs efficiently. What happens when we subject the body with too much fuel over long periods?

Eighty-one percent of all adults over the age of 55 are diabetic or pre-diabetic. If we really wanted to deal with the health care crisis, we’d be dealing with this first. Pretty much everyone dreads receiving a diagnosis of cancer. You don’t want to get cancer? One of the very first things you should do is cut down on carbs. Tumors have four times the number of insulin receptors as regular cells because cancer cells need all that glucose for their extra-fast metabolism. Ask any oncologist and they will tell you the same thing. There are studies that show the link between sugar and cancer. Yet, most people do not deal with their diet until after a diagnosis, when it’s basically too late.

How about heart attacks? The number one cause of death in diabetics is a heart attack, and they are SEVEN times more likely to have one. Why? Because the high levels of insulin and glucose basically creates a “sludge” in the bloodstream. When that thicker blood gets to the capillaries, it can’t make it through, causing the tissue a lack of oxygen. As more and more capillaries get clogged up, the tissue starts to die — whether it’s in the heart, causing a heart attack, or in the kidneys, causing kidney failure, or in the eyes, causing blindness, or causing neuropathy and ultimately gangrene and amputation. Every 24 hours, 230 diabetics have a limb amputated. That’s almost ten per hour here in the US. And many more have a heart attack.

Worried about Alzheimer’s? If you have blood sugar issues, you should be. A Swedish study showed that borderline diabetics had a 70% chance of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and this connection is especially strong with people who DIDN’T have the genetic tendencies. The risk was especially high for people who also had hypertension.

How many patients have hypertension and want to know if acupuncture can help? Of course it can, AND they will have much better results if they also deal with their insulin resistance and diabetes; the excess insulin and sugar causes slow but serious damage to the capillaries, raising the blood pressure.

I could go on and on. There are direct links of blood sugar imbalances for everything from anxiety to PCOS, from depression to arthritis. It is so prevalent that stabilizing someone’s blood sugar should be the first thing we do, leaving only a few symptoms left for us to “clean up”, so to speak. So how do we do this?

The first step is to be very clear for yourself what’s going on, so that you can explain it to patients in a way that they understand. A friend of mine, Marlene Merritt filmed a series of YouTube videos for this very reason, available at http://www.youtube.com/merrittwellness. Feel free to see how she explains it.

The second step is to get clear on how many carbs are actually being consumed per day. It’s easy to use one of the diet web sites. They allow you to look up commercial products such as Starbucks mochas, as well as generic foods. Two things to watch out for: make sure the serving size is being taken into account since most people don’t pay attention to that, and that everything is being measured, since it’s easy to write off milk and beans as proteins even though they still have quite a few carbs.

Research has shown that a body system that is not “broken” can manage about 70-100 g of carbs per day.  Notice that I’m not advocating a “no-carb” diet here. That’s a topic for another day. I typically recommend people limit their intake to around 72 g to rein in their sugar cravings. So what does 72 g look like? Well, a banana is 29 g. A piece of bread is 20-24 g. An 8-ounce flavored yogurt is 25 g. That grande mocha, made “healthy” with non-fat milk and no whipped cream is 42 g.

When someone starts to restrict carbs, which is often the only thing raising their blood sugar and helping them have energy (since so many of these people eat low fat, while fat would actually help to stabilize their blood sugar), the rules they had about eating have to change! One of the first rules that needs to be broken is the low-fat rule. Eating low fat is what got us into this mess, and to get out, healthier fats are going to need to be added. Butter would be a good start — it helps you absorb the minerals from vegetables. More protein would be helpful – eggs, nuts/nut butters, full-fat dairy products like cheese, some meat – all of these will give the body energy while not triggering insulin. When insulin is not triggered, the overworked receptor sites can start to recover (which starts the process of reversing the insulin resistance and diabetes), and with insulin out of the bloodstream, the body can start to access fat.

And since proteins and fats cause us to be “satiated” (satisfied) for much longer periods to time, we tend to eat less and are not as hungry later, thus reduce our calorie intake even more. Imagine this; which would leave you full longer; a bag of cotton candy or a 3 oz steak? Even though they have the same calories, the cotton candy would leave you hungry much quicker than the small piece of steak. That is because the cotton candy is all carbs and gets metabolized much more quickly. The steak offers much more of a “slow burn”.

More vegetables need to be eaten, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking fruits are just as good. Fructose is a sugar and turns into fat much more efficiently than glucose. High amounts of it (as in high-fructose corn syrup and agave nectar) causes fatty liver disease and lipid problems in the blood. But don’t count green vegetables and the like in the carb counting. Those are the good guys. You count potatoes and other starchy ones, but all the rest of them are fine. However, don’t eat those green vegetables by themselves; eat them with some butter, a dip or olive oil, or spread some peanut butter on celery. Something has to be added that will give you a little more energy since vegetables are not very “calorie dense”.

The other piece to this, and this is possibly the most important part, is that you have to eat every two to three hours, before you are hungry. No exceptions. Eating frequently like this allows the adrenals to begin to recover from the ups and downs of carbohydrate intake, and since the blood sugar stays more stable, people have fewer cravings. They notice their energy is better, they start to sleep deeper, are more rested when they wake up because their body is not having to work so hard to stabilize itself.

The results can be very quick. People who who begin these changes we see results in less than a week. It doesn’t mean that they’re “fixed” yet, but just this one piece can turn around conditions you may have been struggling to improve such as: insomnia from liver blood deficiency, spleen qi deficiency or kidney deficiency. Again… That’s Chinese medicine jargon.

There are other elements that can be added in as well. Herbs can often help reduce carb and sugar cravings such as green tea or several funky Chinese herb formulas. I often tell people to go to HyVee and buy coconut oil (there are two types of coconut oil. The “unrefined smells and tastes like coconut while the “refined” doesn’t taste or smell like anything) because, as a medium-chain fatty acid, it’s used by the body as quickly as a carb, but doesn’t trigger insulin. Our patients love using it and find that it stabilizes blood sugar remarkably well and far longer than most other foods. You can also keep a jar of nut butter in your office fridge, which is easy to eat and helps people keep you away from the other all-too-accessible carbs.

The YouTube video I mentioned earlier says much of this; it was filmed primarily so that people could learn from it and pass it on. The father of a patient saw the video, and took on the recommendations. His diabetes had not been under control for years, and seeing this explanation just made it “click” for him. A few weeks later, he was in his doctor’s office, and the doctor was stunned at the improvement in his numbers and asked him what he was doing. She said, in amazement, “You’re doing this only with food and lifestyle changes?” The doctor said that!!!

That’s what you have to do; start becoming educated on how to do it yourselves. It’s completely possible to reverse this awful trend and the first step is to understand it clearly and then be able to explain it to yourself and maybe even others. You may be the only one who does.

Yes, I know that changing 50+ years of dietary habit is a difficult think. It does indeed take some effort to pay attention. But do! Do pay attention to what you’re eating. Keep a diary of what you eat… or even better, make a menu plan so you know what your diet will look like for the next few days. It may take you a half hour of your time, but isn’t that worth it when you think about the years worth of better health you’ll be enjoying because of it.

So that’s that. If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know. I’d love to help… Jason