Six common beliefs addressed, Part 51

1. Are bananas deadly?

People love to point at something and yell “Witch, burn at the stake!” But, being overly dramatic will only cloud your critical thinking skills.

Bananas are not the devil, nor the cause of obesity/diabetes. They are simply an unnecessary food, which disrupts proper blood glucose regulation. Modern bananas have been cultivated to contain more fructose than they otherwise would and they will only end up replacing much better food options, if you insist on including them in your diet.

So, if you have metabolic disease, put the banana down and if you are healthy make sure bananas are only part of an overall low sugar diet so you can keep blood glucose levels healthy.

2. Dietary cholesterol does not raise serum cholesterol.

You might have heard this before. Low carbers love to quote Ancel Keys, the father of the 'Diet Heart Hypothesis', admitting to this very fact. It makes them think they have discovered a "Gotcha!" moment, where Keys admits he was wrong.

But, there is no "Gotcha!" moment and no admittance of anything. It is absolutely true that dietary cholesterol does not raise serum cholesterol, because it’s dietary fat that raises cholesterol, not dietary cholesterol.

3. Medications have no role in treating metabolic disease.

For some people, lifestyle changes alone are enough to achieve remission, but for others they're not and they must resort to medications. Medications should only be complementary to lifestyle interventions, for individuals that have had no, or too little, results from dietary treatments alone. Medication should never be your sole course of treatment, because they will not be able to improve blood glucose regulation on their own. Do not think medications can do your job for you.

For people who must take medications, dietary and exercise interventions must be included, as part of their therapy, to avoid further deterioration of health.

4. Will fasting help lower my weight set point?

Weight set point is determined by leptin and leptin does not respond to fasting, except in one way - lower insulin levels.

Leptin is a slave to insulin and normalizing insulin levels helps normalize leptin, but fasting without a significant effect on insulin will not help regulate leptin. If anything it makes leptin worse. That’s why you need a fasting protocol that lowers insulin without adversely affecting leptin. That’s only achieved through fasts of short duration. 

5. The world is obese, so there is no more world hunger.

World hunger is on the decline. Some people have made the claim that it no longer even exists and the only hunger left is the one created by governments, since we have the ability to feed the world. But, this is a misnomer. One of those "half truths".

Yes, there are plenty of calories available, to feed the world and then some, but the entire planet is protein starved. Hunter/gatherers consume three times more protein than a Westerner on a typical modern diet. So, everyone has plenty of calories, but poor metabolic health to show for it. When it comes to nutrition, it’s not about quantity, it’s ultimately about quality.

6. If you fast for weight loss, drinking tea or coffee is fine, but if you fast for autophagy, then it should be water and salt only.

Fasting is when you consume nothing but water. Period. As long as you are consuming anything with taste or calories, you are by definition, no longer fasting. There is a more appropriate term for drinking while fasting, it's called liquid dieting. Consuming low liquid calories is not fasting, it’s caloric restriction juicing. Changing the definitions of things to fit a narrative won’t work.

Obesity is a condition of poor blood glucose regulation, so if you are tasting things and consuming calories, while fasting, you are stimulating blood glucose. You will not become adapted to not eating if you continue this annoying and very asinine practice. The path to correcting something is to change it, not coddle it.

Autophagy is a process that the body goes through daily. It has nothing to do with obesity. There are different levels of autophagy that the body performs and they are triggered by different conditions. Whether the body does it effectively or efficiently is based on metabolic status. You will not obtain a good metabolic status if you keep eating/drinking while fasting, which is basically snacking. Keep your focus on obesity and keep the silly marketing ploys for day time TV.