Nothing To Do With The Bread Then?!

I wonder that after all my experience research and experimenting on me, that I found I couldn't trust the food industry and decided more than a decade ago to only eat fresh very low carb diet.
No processed.
No mechanized food.
No extra ingredients.
No additives.
No colourings.
No and so on.
I have fresh meat from my butcher and fresh salad veg from the greengrocer.
Fresh eggs, plus fresh fruit.

No wonder I'm considered weird.


Beware bold letters on packaging.
They don't say it's not recommended for T2s, like it should.

Lamont D said:

ONI wonder that after all my experience research and experimenting on me, that I found I couldn't trust the food industry and decided more than a decade ago to only eat fresh very low carb diet.
No processed.
No mechanized food.
No extra ingredients.
No additives.
No colourings.
No and so on.
I have fresh meat from my butcher and fresh salad veg from the greengrocer.
Fresh eggs, plus fresh fruit.

No wonder I'm considered weird.


Beware bold letters on packaging.
They don't say it's not recommended for T2s, like it should.

Click to expand...

I just read this morning about a very popular gluten free brand (simple mills) has been shown to contain unsafe (for celiac)levels of gluten in three of their very popular products (one which I loved a few years back, their yummy almond flour crackers) AND high levels of glyphosphate….and it’s supposed to be organic!
I no longer have any packaged food….

and I too am considered weird!

Bcgirl said:

I just read this morning about a very popular gluten free brand (simple mills) has been shown to contain unsafe (for celiac)levels of gluten in three of their very popular products (one which I loved a few years back, their yummy almond flour crackers) AND high levels of glyphosphate….and it’s supposed to be organic!
I no longer have any packaged food….

and I too am considered weird!

Click to expand...

In certain gluten free brands, the gluten is replaced with potato starch.
Never mind the process to produce the finished product.
Coeliac friendly I don't think so!
And wheat in Bold letters...!!!!!!

It has to be anything but, doesn't it?
There is no clues around.

@Lamont D and @Bcgirl you are not weird. This term is now reserved for Trump and his Republicans.
As I am sure you are aware too, there are increasing number of reports
that ultraprocessed food is bad for your health,
thus you are actually front runners and ahead of the curve.

I've banned all low fat food from my fridge, and try to avoid ultra processed food,
apparently that would include yoghurts and I like these too much.

Re what constitutes processing of food and what it means to us with metabolic disease - @Lupf - you can make your own yoghurt - and even bought at the store - is minimally processed? (Of course I mean the unflavoured unsweetened kind! ) (But I look out the window and see cows....living in Kiwiland in the countryside from time to time as I do.) Dairy is one of those 'if you are dairy tolerant' foods, which most humans are not. Anyway, I would say any food that you can make yourself from basic ingredients in your own kitchen is minimally processed. Bread is of course like this too. And we all know the difference between home baked goods and store bought? In terms of the ingredients. The amount of processing involved. So eating 'minimally processed' is part of being a modern, evolutionarily speaking, human? I would say.

I have never home cured meat, but of course it can be done in ones own home/environs (bearing in mind I am thinking 'in the countryside' kind of thing, and remember well the many buildngs that contained hanging meat/animal carcusses on the farm.) We need a butcher to enter into this discussion of what food is good for us with T2D, and the actions on animal flesh that we perform. (I never met my butcher grandfather and great grandfather so have no insights. Just a legacy of the importance of quality sausage ingredients.) We humans have been preserving meat for the longest time in our history. In Aotearoa, pre-European invasion it was bird meat preserved in bird fat for journeying with food. In Europe - this is where ham and salami, and of course - the sausage, came about? Preserving that nutrition-intense animal flesh, no? To eat later, sometimes, much later.

Fermented food is thought to be good for us because it mimics the effect of eating organs from animals, is my understanding. Which is good for digestion and gut biomes... But this whole area regarding nutrition is filled with controversy - part of the 'interesting times' we live in. Which the Weston Family Group would be all too aware of. Hence this very interesting thread.

And the subject of gutbiomes is new to us, and fascinating....

I think it is really important to think about food at the most basic level during these discussions. Because metabolic disease comes back to food and drink, ultimately. (We can ignore the amount of physical activity we engage in, here, for the purposes of argument?!) And bird, fish and seafood, and other mammal flesh - is basic food for people. (Doesn't mean you have to choose to eat it! Of course. Kudos to vegans and vegetarians, always.)

Melgar said:

@Lamont D unfortunately potato starch is one of the ingredients in gluten free flour . I had a rash moment and bought all the ingredients to make my own gluten free flour
- white rice flour, tapioca flour and sorghum flour along with the potato starch. I can never get that fluffy light texture. The result always tastes stale and heavy. Every now and then I’ll by a GF loaf but my blood sugars go high and I regret the adventure.

Click to expand...

I think I have always believed, since a youngster, I knew, who was part of the youth club football, developed coeliac and it was awful to see his health deteriorate over a few months.
With my own issues coming to the fore around the same time before my diagnosis. I was gaining weight, whilst he was losing it.
His doctor advised gluten free bread, but his mother, couldn't see improvement, until the youngster kept not eating it, and he did improve from not eating gluten free labelled stuff. Just food that was free of wheat.
That has always stuck with me.
I did my own research, even tho I'm wheat intolerant, not gluten. And the more I researched, the more that most research doesn't include leaving wheat or grains out of research such as has been highlighted.
And never recommend eating fresh food, regardless of the obvious benefits.
And I will add, that if I didn't change to a fresh low carb diet, that hasn't been through a machine.
I would not be here.
Just wondering how many, like us, have no idea what is happening to them, and will never know, that so called healthy food that the medical profession, dieticians recommend, have suffered like I did for years believing that it couldn't be what was going on my mouth. That the basic foodstuffs are doing it?

Lupf said:

@Lamont D and @Bcgirl you are not weird. This term is now reserved for Trump and his Republicans.
As I am sure you are aware too, there are increasing number of reports
that ultraprocessed food is bad for your health,
thus you are actually front runners and ahead of the curve.

I've banned all low fat food from my fridge, and try to avoid ultra processed food,
apparently that would include yoghurts and I like these too much.

Click to expand...

Sorry to deflate your gracious remarks.
But I have been diagnosed as weird by my GP at the time.
And my endocrinologist endorsed it, whilst laughing to himself.

It is weird to go hypo from food.

The republican party is worse than weird! Not very normal at all.
But so is our right wing media and the puppets who are perpetually telling us lies to the benefits of the 1%
People not profit!

Lupf said:

I am a bit surprised by some of these findings, e.g. I would have expected a noticeable correlation with BMI as in my view the large increase in obesity and diabetes since the 1980s are linked, but if I read the paper correctly this is not what is observed. On the other hand I would have expected that they find that (too much) processed meat is is a larger risk than unprocessed meat.

Click to expand...

If I understand it correctly, the link between diabetes and BMI is extremely well established (in other research). What I believe they're saying is that the observed link between consumption of specific meats and diabetes risk is not due simply to some effect resulting from eating specific meats which makes people fatter than eating other meats. When people are compared like-for-like BMI-wise, the observed meat association still appears to hold. Or do I have that wrong?

I don't actually believe any one food type can do it. If carbs alone caused diabetes then places like China, where the staple food was rice (and meat was expensive), or Ireland in days past where the staple was potatoes (and meat was expensive) would have historically high rates of diabetes. They don't - rates of diabetes have increased massively in both countries as diet became more varied, not less. Similarly, the few people for whom meat was the staple (like the Inuit) do not have a history of high diabetes rates (as far as I know). Increases in BMI though do correlate with increases in diabetes rates pretty much the world over. I doubt any one food type is 'the cause' - I suspect it's much more complicated than that.

It doesn't matter very much to us though. We're already diabetic. What matters is how to maintain our health for as long as possible after the fact, and I won't be upping my carb intake any time soon just so that I can lower my meat intake.

Hi @HairySmurf . Re BMI/body fat and type two/insulin resistance - the theory behind it is the sick fat cell theory, where fat cells operate in an organ-like manner, with hormone signaling (and mis-signaling) and blood glucose and insulin regulating functions.

Just to complicate things there is lively debate over what comes first - the body fat or the insulin resistance. ie that gaining body fat is a symptom of the glucose/insulin chaos, not the other way round. Very interesting!

Re carbs, my understanding it isn't carbs per se. It's the idea of excess carbs for your body type at least, and always in relation to the fats you are eating. And excess carbs come in frankenfood forms in the SAD way of eating, with a ton of aspects to it that cause a metabolic maelstrom. And lots of attention to the Ultra processed vege oils that have become a major in our diets.

@HairySmurf you are correct. The hypothesis that was tested in this paper was does meat consumption increase likelihood of getting diabetes. As you say the link between diabetes and BMI is well established. The same applies for carbs. The paper did not search for a link between carb intake and risk of diabetes. Thus my previous statement in this thread on carbs is also incorrect "If there would be a large correlation between carb intake and chance of developing diabetes, this analysis should have picked this up, but it hasn't." @Rachox The paper did not find a correlation between bread and risk of diabetes because it did not test if carbs cause diabetes (and therefore it did not rule it out either).

What is causing this increase in diabetics is not clear, but increased BMI is clearly associated with an increased risk of developping diabetes. Thus the question can be extended to what has been causing this increase in obesity. Here my view is that obesity started to increase at the time when fat was being banned and people started eating food with added sugar, i.e. more carbs in their diet and that these two are related. Does someone know of an extensive study on this question?

Regarding your last point on we are already diabetic and it doesn't matter how we got there, we need to deal with it: I fully agree, and had intended to say this in my earlier entry, but left it out as the post was (too) long already.

I don't understand thinking it doesn't matter how we became T2 diabetic, as knowing this is an integral part of getting better, or being as healthy as one can be, considering.

This is of course at the basis of choosing a healthy Way Of Eating, when one has T2D. (I believe there are multiple WOEs that are healthy for us, simply speaking - with the common denominator being they are wholefood based.)

AloeSvea said:

Hi @HairySmurf . Re BMI/body fat and type two/insulin resistance - the theory behind it is the sick fat cell theory, where fat cells operate in an organ-like manner, with hormone signaling (and mis-signaling) and blood glucose and insulin regulating functions.

Just to complicate things there is lively debate over what comes first - the body fat or the insulin resistance. ie that gaining body fat is a symptom of the glucose/insulin chaos, not the other way round. Very interesting!

Re carbs, my understanding it isn't carbs per se. It's the idea of excess carbs for your body type at least, and always in relation to the fats you are eating. And excess carbs come in frankenfood forms in the SAD way of eating, with a ton of aspects to it that cause a metabolic maelstrom. And lots of attention to the Ultra processed vege oils that have become a major in our diets.

Click to expand...

There are lots of theories on the subject. My suspicions include that Type 2 isn't a single disease but probably a blanket diagnosis for a number of diseases which all look the much the same from the outside. On this forum alone there are personal accounts which just don't fit together as pieces of a puzzle that point to a single disease with a single path toward a Type 2 diagnosis.

On insulin resistance - that has two separate but tightly-related meanings. When a person is said to be insulin resistant that person has a high amount of insulin in the blood relative to blood glucose. As measured by a test like HOMA-IR - how much insulin does it take to keep BG levels stable basically. How 'effective' is insulin at pushing BG levels down. What it means for a specific tissue or cell to be insulin resistant is different - literally, resistance to the effects of insulin. In muscle tissue specifically, lying in bed for two days will do that, make a person more 'insulin resistant'. In the liver, in my specific case, it looks like it was excess liver fat that did it. On that score for me personally it looks like Roy Taylor was right. Lost a mess of weight and my fasting levels are now extremely low. Markers of ill health in the liver are now normal. How low insulin resistance in my liver 'naturally' is now I don't know, and I won't know until I come off the Metformin completely, which I may never do. Very much lower than it was though, though, with absolute certainty. There are Type 2s who have fasting BG levels of 4.4 or 4.5 mmol/L, off meds, after big weight loss. Those people now have lower whole-body insulin resistance as measured by a test like HOMA-IR and also have livers which are effectively no longer insulin resistant. If they gain weight, is it because of insulin resistance which is no longer there? If they gain weight just by eating too much, will liver fat levels go up? If liver fat levels go up and the liver becomes insulin resistant again, might this accelerate further weight gain? The 'which comes first' debate doesn't make sense in this specific context when referring to the liver or when referring to whole-body insulin resistance which encompasses insulin resistance in the liver as the primary factor (which is what HOMA-IR actually does in practical terms in many cases). It's clearly possible to put on a lot of weight, causing excess liver fat, causing insulin resistance, while also possible to increase liver fat (by drinking far too much alcohol for example) without putting on very much body weight and thus get to an insulin resistant liver that way. Sick fat cells have nothing to do with it in this specific context, but that's not to say inflammation in adipose tissue (sick fat cells) might not be another path toward diabetes.

On body fat - it could be both. Insulin resistance could lead to weight gain, and weight gain could lead to insulin resistance. An 'expert' in a video just talking about it in a way that implies insulin resistance works the same way in every tissue in the body, let alone in every person, makes it very hard for me to take that source of information seriously. Massively obese insulin resistant people do exist, who also, incidentally, have giant pancreases compared to the average person, but who also never become diabetic or even prediabetic. The typical Type 2 however has a shrunken pancreas. A follow up study to Taylor's DiRECT study showed that most Type 2s who lost a lot of weight during the study had pancreases that were initially abnormally small but started to grow in the couple of years following that weight loss. DiRECT also showed recovery of 1st-phase insulin response in the months following the weight loss. I've seen that for myself via experimenting with CGMs and eating sets of identical meals months apart. I can now eat significantly more carbs than I could in March (when I passed Taylor's 'magic' 15Kg weight loss) without spiking above 8 mmol/L. How does that all work, if Type 2 is caused by insulin resistance in everyone given that diagnosis? How do sick fat cells fit in with all that? In short - I have yet to read the theory that explains is all. Things to begin to make a lot more sense though if Type 2 isn't one disease but several that all look the same from the outside. All it takes is a high result on a HbA1c test while still displaying signs of producing 'plenty' of insulin, with 'plenty' being defined in a very vague way that just means 'Not Type 1'. I don't believe I'll every read the theory that explains it all, because I believe that's probably impossible.

Hi @HairySmurf - a really big and important topic - wanna start a thread on it for us to do a deep dive into type two and insulin resistance? And def different types of type 2 and categories, one of my pet subjects. I would love to!

But just to rein us in on this thread - this is about the difference between meat and bread/baked goods in blood glucose dysregulation/type two! And the studies that get headlined as reason to state causes of insuin resistance based type two. And that's a really big important topic in itself.

I followed up on the studies analysis by folks more expert than me, and we can do a lot more discussing this, as it's a super important topic for us with T2D, and for people reading those headlines (red meat causes type two, to put it simply). We can put it right in here, and we can put it right in our communities (all over the world, to remind). And especially important for those in caring and medical occupations to know about this as well...

An excellent person to go to on this subject, and on nutrition controversies generally is Zoe Harcombe, as she does analyses of such professionally. A PhD doctor in public health nutrition since 2016. She's a writer, public speaker, and 'internet personality'. ie is a really good communicator. There is a lot, and on this thread's topic, that can be read without paying for it, on her website. Her speciality is obesity, and of course - the opposite. Lots of youtubes out there and conference clips etc, with her speaking on such topics.

I'm a bit confused whether it's OK to post a link? I'll do it, and totally understand if that or this whole post disappears, or it is asked to...

https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2023/10/red-meat-type-2-diabetes/
published on her website after the big article/journal article preceeding this one, in October 2023.

Another internet personality and family doctor/Keto commentator on things nutrition is Dr Ken Berry who has done a very good youtube on the subject -
'Red Meat Causes Diabetes? New Study should concern Carnivores' – end of 2023

Again on the Oct 2023 study ‘Red meat intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in a prospective cohort study of United States females and males'
And reflected in headlines from various American news outlets…

If it's not OK for me to post above, I took my own highlights from both those dives into such studies, which I can post instead if more proper?

Lupf said:

The article in the independent is as usual not very helpful as it leaves out any doubt that red meat is bad.

I am a scientist, but not a medical researcher and I've read the paper. It presents a meta analysis of almost 2 million individuals, ov which around 100'000 developed diabetes, so it has lots of data. Their results are as follows:
"Our findings show that the consumption of unprocessed red meat, processed meat, and poultry were each associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes." More details are given in tables, but overall the risk of developing diabetes by eating 100 g of unprocessed red meat (50 g of processed meat) per day increases by 10+-5% (15+-5%) and by eating 100g of poultry per day the risk increases less 8+-6%. These are worldwide averages, with significant geographical variations. Typically the increases in risk are slightly higher in the US than in Europe, but the results for Eastern Mediterranean, South and South East Asia and Oceania are non-conclusive.

The study states that the results are adjusted for many factors (called covariates) including food intakes and BMI. They find
"The associations varied across cohorts, but we found no specific factor (i.e., age, sex, BMI, number of incident cases, follow-up duration, levels of meat consumption, dietary assessment approach, or geographical location) that could meaningfully account for this heterogeneity."


Regarding food intake they look at a large set of covariates (fruits, vegetables, fish, dairy, legumes, soy, nuts and seeds, eggs, cereal products, whole grains, potatoes, fibre, sugar-sweetened beverages, coffee, tea, and cooking fat and total energy intake).
In Table S3 in the appendix they list that the results were adjusted for the intake of carb foods, i.e. potatoes, cereals, whole grains, pasta and rice in almost all studies that were included in their analysis. As far as I can judge these results are sound.

*** EDIT: The next two sentences are not correct (my misinterpretation, thanks to @HairySmurf for pointing this out), I've updated my understanding in a later entry on this thread, see https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/nothing-to-do-with-the-bread-then.205847/post-2721749.

If there would be a large correlation between carb intake and chance of developing diabetes, this analysis should have picked this up, but it hasn't. I understand that this is not what many on this forum would have expected.

I am a bit surprised by some of these findings, e.g. I would have expected a noticeable correlation with BMI as in my view the large increase in obesity and diabetes since the 1980s are linked, but if I read the paper correctly this is not what is observed. On the other hand I would have expected that they find that (too much) processed meat is is a larger risk than unprocessed meat.

By dismissing this study just because we don't like the results we are no better than medical researchers ignoring evidence that LCHF diet works for many (diabetic) people. We should welcome such studies, and continue to educate our medical practitioners, what works for us.

Click to expand...

Massive increase in the use of Palm oils!

Lamont D said:

I wonder that after all my experience research and experimenting on me, that I found I couldn't trust the food industry and decided more than a decade ago to only eat fresh very low carb diet.
No processed.
No mechanized food.
No extra ingredients.
No additives.
No colourings.
No and so on.
I have fresh meat from my butcher and fresh salad veg from the greengrocer.
Fresh eggs, plus fresh fruit.

No wonder I'm considered weird.


Beware bold letters on packaging.
They don't say it's not recommended for T2s, like it should.

Click to expand...

Like with the Traffic like code on packages! Yet nothing about Carbs but bashes you over the head on Fat.

KennyA said:

You might be interested in this from the Journal of the American College of Cardiology:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109720356874?via=ihub=&utm_source=arrow.proteinpower.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-arrow-188

Click to expand...

interestingly indeed!
there is similar papers on other carbs and the interest raised surrounding grains.