Mercola on the fiber diet

http://organicindia.mercola.com/psyllium.aspx

I'm a little confused here. I thought diets rich in fiber were horrible and cause constipation and whatnot. I know breakfast cereals should be avoided but fiber from oatmeal and beans should not? What about whole wheat?

fumanchu wrote:http://organicindia.mercola.com/psyllium.aspx

I'm a little confused here. I thought diets rich in fiber were horrible and cause constipation and whatnot. I know breakfast cereals should be avoided but fiber from oatmeal and beans should not? What about whole wheat?

Dietary fiber is absolutely vital for good health.

Fiber lowers cholesterol.
Fiber stabilizes blood sugar.
Fiber increases SHBG and lowers serum estrogens.
Fiber is fermented into short-chain-fatty-acids, which enhance the growth of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria and play a central role on the physiology and metabolism of the colon.
Fiber helps prevent constipation.
Fiber helps control how much you eat due to its bulking effects.
Fiber helps combat heart disease.
Fiber helps combat diabetes.
Fiber helps combat prostate cancer.
Fiber helps combat breast cancer.
Fiber helps combat ovarian cancer.
Fiber helps combat uterine cancer.
Fiber helps combat diverticular disease.
Fiber helps to decrease toxins within the digestive track.


Mercola is bald!

Mercola is bald!

Interestingly enough mercola blames his hair loss when he was a carb diet addict and ate a very rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables and limited animal fats.

Dr Mercola:

If I had only known this earlier I would still have a full head of hair! Yes folks, up until five years ago I was a certified carb addict and had a terribly unbalanced excess of high grain foods. I really believe this is a landmark article that nails the association between eating sugar and breads and premature baldness.

The incredibly bald Mercola has a Gary Taubes (who is also balding) type of view. He thinks that since carbs cause insulin we should stop eating carbs because too much insulin causes insulin-resistance... but he fails to explain what causes the "resistance"!

The truth about insulin-resistance/diabetes... the truth the multi-billion-dollar meat and dairy industries and even the pharmaceutical corporations don't want you to know is that it is actually the fats and oils in our diet which cause the "resistance". The way fats and oils causes insulin-resistance is by coating the muscle-fibers, inhibiting the muscles from taking insulin out of circulation like it is supposed to, leaving the insulin "free" to float back to the liver where it then inhibits SHBG and IGFBP's, this is when the problems begin to happen.

If the incredibly bald Mercola is right, he should start spouting some new hairs soon, right? If he talks about how carbs caused his baldness, shouldn't he talk about how restricting carbs is reversing his baldness or has helped him grow new hair?

There has yet to be a doctor who can reverse diabetes with a low-carb diet. If it’s possible, name the doctor who did it. Conversely, Dr. Neal Barnard has shown a McDougall-type diet (10% fat, 10% protein, 80% high-fiber carbohydrate) will actually reverse diabetes. The same diet is shown to reverse heart-disease as shown by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn and prostate-cancer by Dr. Dean Ornish.

Click me

Ok, Mercola should start spouting new hairs if he was right. But does your diet does this? You never mention it anywhere

Fiber is not necessary for human health.

Here's the short explanation: Is it better to consume a whole grain diet or a refined grained diet? The answer is obvious, yes then fiber would be beneficial.

If you do not eat grains, and then supplement with fiber, is that a good thing? No, it will just give you a larger stool.

Marketers have taken full advantage of the fiber gimmick. Is a whole fruit better than the juice? Another obvious answer, yes--an instance where fiber in its original form is good. But do we need to add fiber for health? No.

If your metabolic type benefits from grains, when it would be better for whole grains not refined, so as already mentioned above--that's one positive case for fiber. Instead of giving the fiber the credit, let's just distinguish whole food vs. refined.

If your metabolic type is protein and does not emphasis carbohydrate, then grains should not be eaten much if at all, and fruits should be kept to a minimum.

How do I know this? Blood chemistry.

I give Dr. Mercola a lot of credit for admitting his mistakes over the years. I was no different, I fell for the same dogma that he did.

The biggest supporters of fiber are those who benefit from a carbohydrate/vegan diet and believe that somehow the rest of the world will too. It's just not that simple.

What about fibers role in protecting against colon cancer? Or is that a disease caused by an infected-jaw-bone?

Fiber is a very important ingredient to controlling cholesterol and blood-sugar-levels. Also fiber helps remove excess hormones from the body like estrogens and androgens.

misterE wrote:What about fibers role in protecting against colon cancer? Or is that a disease caused by an infected-jaw-bone?

Fiber is a very important ingredient to controlling cholesterol and blood-sugar-levels. Also fiber helps remove excess hormones from the body like estrogens and androgens.

IP3 & IP6

Vitamin D is a serious factor in colon cancer development, and a lack of good microflora. Butyric acid (which can dervived from butter is protective), no need to hope for IP6 some some fiber fermentation.

And yes, jaw bone infections are a definite factor as well, and last but not least, antibiotics are a real plague, they probably a large factor as well.

Fiber and Colon Cancer: Following the Scientific Trail

Because science is such a dynamic process, you can never exactly tell where it is going to lead you. Conclusions that once seemed logical and fairly solid may be revised—or completely overturned—as more and better research is done on a particular topic. One example of this is the relationship between fiber and colon cancer.

Starting about 30 years ago, a high fiber intake was regularly recommended as one way to lower the risk for colon cancer. This recommendation was largely based on observations that countries with a high fiber intake tended to have rates of colon cancer lower than the rates found in countries with a low fiber intake.

But such descriptive studies don't provide the most definitive information. While they are often good points to start a scientific journey, they only take a broad look at large groups of people. Descriptive studies generally can't address all of the factors that might account for differences in rates of disease. Fiber intake could indeed have something to do with the differences in colon cancer rates, but those differences could also involve many other things that differ between countries, including other diet or lifestyle factors.

When studies that can take such things into account on an individual level began to look at the issue of fiber and colon cancer, the picture became much less clear. A number of case-control studies found that a high fiber intake was linked to a lower risk of colon cancer, but many did not. Given these wavering results—and because case-control studies are not an optimal way to assess food intake, relying as they do on participants' recollections of what they ate in the past—more research using better methods was needed. In the meantime, many health professionals still regularly recommended a high fiber intake for people trying to lower their risk of colon cancer.

Not until the results of cohort studies came out did this recommendation begin to lose its backing. Because cohort studies observe a group of people over time, their findings are generally stronger than those of case-control studies, especially when it comes to something like diet and colon cancer. What most of these cohort studies found was that fiber intake had very little, if any, link with colon cancer.

Such findings were further bolstered by the results of randomized trials—types of studies that many consider the gold-standard of research. These studies took a group of people and randomly assigned individuals to one of two groups. One group was put on a high fiber diet, while the other group followed a lower fiber diet. After 3 to 4 years, the two groups were compared and no difference was found in rates of colon polyps—noncancerous growths that can turn into cancer. Of course, colon polyps are not cancer, but since it's thought that all colon cancers start as polyps, it is strong evidence that fiber intake has no direct link with colon cancer.

In this case, the path of discovery led from widespread belief in a clear link between fiber and colon cancer to acceptance of the likelihood that there was no strong link between the two. As such, it's an excellent example of how research can often develop. What may start as a clear connection based on findings from broad, descriptive studies can slowly unravel as more and better-quality research unveils the true nature of a relationship. However, keep in mind that a weak relationship is difficult to exclude altogether. Further studies might yet demonstrate a weak effect of fiber on colon cancer, although such a finding wouldn't alter the conclusion that other means must be sought to prevent colon cancer.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/nutrition-news/fiber-and-colon-cancer/

What about fiber and cholesterol or fiber and blood-sugar? Or fiber's role in excreting hormones like estrogen?

BUMP

What in your blood chemistry is a tell tale sign for your metabolic type? I've looked into niacin and vitamin c testing.

CS, what about fiber and cholesterol or fiber and blood-sugar? Or fiber's role in excreting hormones like estrogen?

My time is really too limited to focus on dietary minutia.

The liver clears out hormone metabolites, so does the gut. I don't need one spect of fiber to accomplish this.

Please read the earlier post about fiber.

turbojet - Mainly triglycerides and glucose levels. If I ate what misterE eats and if I ate what he ate, these levels would not be optimal for our health. To the contrary if we ate what we ate and tested these levels they would be much closer.

CausticSymmetry wrote:My time is really too limited to focus on dietary minutia.

The liver clears out hormone metabolites, so does the gut. I don't need one spect of fiber to accomplish this.

The liver and gut clears hormones by sending them out with the bile. If you do not have enough fiber in the diet to bind and remove the bile, it is reabsorbed along with the excess hormones, which were supposed to be excreted. (Low-fat) high-fiber diets are shown to lower estrogen and free-testosterone. Fiber is crucial for reducing inflammation also.

misterE wrote:The incredibly bald Mercola has a Gary Taubes (who is also balding) type of view. He thinks that since carbs cause insulin we should stop eating carbs because too much insulin causes insulin-resistance... but he fails to explain what causes the "resistance"!

The truth about insulin-resistance/diabetes... the truth the multi-billion-dollar meat and dairy industries and even the pharmaceutical corporations don't want you to know is that it is actually the fats and oils in our diet which cause the "resistance". The way fats and oils causes insulin-resistance is by coating the muscle-fibers, inhibiting the muscles from taking insulin out of circulation like it is supposed to, leaving the insulin "free" to float back to the liver where it then inhibits SHBG and IGFBP's, this is when the problems begin to happen.

If the incredibly bald Mercola is right, he should start spouting some new hairs soon, right? If he talks about how carbs caused his baldness, shouldn't he talk about how restricting carbs is reversing his baldness or has helped him grow new hair?

There has yet to be a doctor who can reverse diabetes with a low-carb diet. If it’s possible, name the doctor who did it. Conversely, Dr. Neal Barnard has shown a McDougall-type diet (10% fat, 10% protein, 80% high-fiber carbohydrate) will actually reverse diabetes. The same diet is shown to reverse heart-disease as shown by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn and prostate-cancer by Dr. Dean Ornish.

well 2 points.
1) vegan diet does not exclude high fat foods
2) protein and dairy can be non fat (non fat milk or chicken breast).

so it seems weird to correlate veganism with non-far diet?

also, do you really think meat and dairy (which have been around for a long time) is whats causing the recent skyrocketing incidents of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance in america, especially where the FDA declared a war on fats 30 years ago, and sugar and fructose comsumption has exponentially grown ?

zanza wrote:
1) vegan diet does not exclude high fat foods
2) protein and dairy can be non fat (non fat milk or chicken breast).

1) Vegan diet excludes aromatase-enzymes (animal-fat) not plant-fats like nuts or avocado, even thou I believe they should be limited.
2) When it comes to non-fat dairy or low-fat meat, you still have the protein-problem, which increases free-IGF-1 and lowers SHBG allowing testosterone conversion, it tips the body PH towards acidic which leeches calcium from the bones, also impairs kidney function. Plus regardless of being low-fat, all animal products contain cholesterol and contain no phytonutrients.

zanza wrote:also, do you really think meat and dairy (which have been around for a long time) is whats causing the recent skyrocketing incidents of type 2 diabetes and insulin resistance in america, especially where the FDA declared a war on fats 30 years ago, and sugar and fructose comsumption has exponentially grown ?

Dairy is a relatively new-food considering what humans ate thru our entire evolution. Dairy is the ultimate-processed-food and probably the worst because not only is it an animal-product... it's a processed-animal-product!

Meat has been around for a while, but never in human history prior to WW2 did humans make meat their dietary-staple. American does not follow a low-fat diet, far from it. The PERCENTAGE (not the amount) of fat has gone down only because the percentage of sugar has increased more than fat.

I have visited your mention link it is an interesting and helpful information about the Mercola on the fiber diet. I have first time hear about it. I would like to know deep about it like its resources to get it, its benefits and so on.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090303123802.htm

Missing Link Between Fructose, Insulin Resistance Found

ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2009) — A new study in mice sheds light on the insulin resistance that can come from diets loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in most sodas and many other processed foods. The report in the March issue of Cell Metabolism also suggests a way to prevent those ill effects.

The researchers showed that mice on a high-fructose diet were protected from insulin resistance when a gene known as transcriptional coactivator PPARg coactivator-1b (PGC-1b) was "knocked down" in the animals' liver and fat tissue. PGC-1b coactivates a number of transcription factors that control the activity of other genes, including one responsible for building fat in the liver.

"There has been a remarkable increase in consumption of high-fructose corn syrup," said Gerald Shulman of Yale University School of Medicine. "Fructose is much more readily metabolized to fat in the liver than glucose is and in the process can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease," he continued. NAFLD in turn leads to hepatic insulin resistance and type II diabetes.

Metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes have both reached epidemic proportions worldwide with the global adoption of the westernized diet along with increased consumption of fructose, stemming from the wide and increasing use of high-fructose corn syrup sweeteners, the researchers noted.

High-fructose corn syrup, which is a mixture of the simple sugars fructose and glucose, came into use in the 1970s and by 2005 the average American was consuming about 60 pounds of it per year. Overall, dietary intake of fructose, which is also a component of table sugar, has increased by an estimated 20 to 40 percent in the last thirty years.

Earlier studies had established that fructose is more readily converted to fatty acids than glucose and had also linked high-fructose diets to high blood levels of triglycerides (a condition known as hypertriglyceridemia), NAFLD and insulin resistance. While researchers had implicated a gene known as SREBP-1, a master regulator of lipids' manufacture in the liver, much about the underlying molecular connections between fructose and those metabolic disorders remained mysterious.

In the new study, the researchers zeroed in on PGC-1b, a gene known for boosting SREBP-1 levels. To test its role in the effects of fructose, they blocked its activity in mice fed a diet high in that sugar for four weeks.

Those treatments improved the animals' metabolic profiles by lowering levels of SREBP-1 and other fat-building genes in their livers. The mice also showed a reversal of their fructose-induced insulin resistance and a threefold increase in glucose uptake in their fat tissue.

"These data support an important role for PGC-1b in the pathogenesis of fructose-induced insulin resistance and suggest that PGC-1b inhibition may be a therapeutic target for treatment of NAFLD, hypertriglyceridemia, and insulin resistance associated with increased de novo lipogenesis," the researchers concluded.

The new study has "revealed the transcriptional coactivator PGC-1b as a missing link between fructose intake and metabolic disorders," wrote Carlos Hernandez and Jiandie Lin of the University of Michigan Medical Center, Ann Arbor in an accompanying commentary. "The findings …support the emerging role of gene/environment interaction in modulating the metabolic phenotype and disease pathogenesis. Thus, perturbations of the same regulatory motif may produce vastly different metabolic responses, depending on the specific combinations of dietary nutrients," they continued.

The researchers include Yoshio Nagai, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT , Howard Hughes Medical InstituteShin Yonemitsu, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT , Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Derek M. Erion, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Takanori Iwasaki, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Romana Stark, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Dirk Weismann, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT Jianying Dong, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Dongyan Zhang, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT , Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Michael J. Jurczak, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Michael G. Loffler, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; James Cresswell, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Xing Xian Yu, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Carlsbad, CA; Susan F. Murray, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Carlsbad, CA; Sanjay Bhanot, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Carlsbad, CA; Brett P. Monia, ISIS Pharmaceuticals, Carlsbad, CA; Jonathan S. Bogan, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT; Varman Samuel, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT and Gerald I. Shulman, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT , Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

zanza wrote:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090303123802.htm

Good post zanza, their is no doubt that high-fructose-corn-syrup is bad. Natural fruit-sugar; fructose, on the other hand is the human bodies preferred source of fuel.

misterE - If what you said was true, then I would be seeing improved lipid profiles on patients following the Prudent diet, this has not been case with everybody.

Also, you may noticed that most of those studies 1 though X you posted are from the nutritional dark ages, and not well designed, subject to bias of interpretation and not in any regard confirmation from a scientific method standpoint.

But it does work to further indoctrinate vegans into believing they have it all figured out.

CausticSymmetry wrote:nutritional dark ages

What do you have to say about the three docs (Esselstyn, Ornish, Barnard) who reversed the "big-three" disease associated with MPB with the exact opposite diet you recommend?