In the Seventies the Browning Public Schools became conscious of diet and hired a highly trained nutritionist named John Kyle to help reform the breakfast and lunch programs, which depended heavily on commodity foods. John was a young man, a little eccentric, who had spent a bit part of his childhood bedridden due to some kind of disease or condition I’ve forgotten. In order to keep him busy, his mother had taught him to knit. By the time we knew him, he had also learned to spin. He used these skills in innovative ways, creating highly structured haute couture items without a pattern but by doing a sort of stitch-math in his head. As for fibers, he was using pet hair. He didn’t shear them like sheep, but saved all the combings. His collie yielded enough fiber for a beautiful neck scarf and he had created a smashingly lovely white sweater in a kind of honeycomb stitch from samoyed fur. It was lightweight but very warm.
John Kyle was always lecturing us about death by “maple bars” which we called locally “long johns.” You know -- yeast doughnut dough in a long rectangle with maple glaze. I hardly dare mention them for fear of craving them. But John told us that white sugar (the maple is just flavoring) and white flour were poison and that it was the craving that was the tip-off. He pointed out that lead poisoning worked the same way: eating a little made you crave more, so that toddlers in old houses crept their way around the woodwork picking off flakes of lead-containing paint to eat. We didn’t exactly take him that seriously. He tried to make the kids eat “superdonuts” that had everything in them that a kid should have for breakfast. They would not. John Kyle moved on.
What he said stuck in my mind and I was reminded every time I was around some “granola” who refused to eat white sugar or white flour and there were quite a few. Usually healthy svelte people. Hmmmm. But I indulged, especially in the nineties when I was trapped in Portland with no comfort but books and Starbucks. Finally I was diagnosed with diabetes II a few years ago when my eyes were filled with floaters and flashers. If you have them, you’ll recognize their nicknames -- they’re debris from bleeds or other damage to the retina and the flashes come from the retina itself when damaged. A few now and then are normal in older age, but not normal when there are many.
Luckily (sometimes I’m bowled over by the good luck in my life!) I was in contact (I’m not sure why or how) on email with Dave Lull, a research librarian in Wisconsin who keeps a list of people who would benefit from information he finds. Soon I was tied into a network of VERY smart and informed people who understood about “metabolic syndrome” when it was still being called “adult onset diabetes.” Anything that made a person have a high glucose reading in one of those little finger-stick gizmos was called diabetes of some kind, so there was diabetes I and II and III and . . . headed for more. In particular, Dave advised reading the research and analysis by “Jenny” that is encapsulated on http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/
Hassim Taleb has been talking about iatrogenic medicine, that is, medicine that causes damage, usually inadvertently. Something is seen as beneficial (see discussion of antibiotics yesterday) but then it becomes overused, taken for granted. Something like that seems to have happened with insulin. High blood sugar? Take insulin. Even higher blood sugar? More insulin.
On the day I was diagnosed, my blood sugar was in the three hundreds (one hundred is normal) and the doctor’s prescription was so powerful that I barely managed to drive home. My blood sugar went so low that the little reading machine began to flash and beep. I hurried to eat a bit of sugar. This particular doctor thought that since one hundred was normal and lower was better, she would push all HER patients down into the eighties to show she had total control over them, better than other doctors. Notoriously, it’s hard to make people stop eating as they always have, so she just upped the insulin. Desperate to save my eyes, I stopped eating any detectable sugar. Since then I’ve been maintaining on one 500 mg metformin a day. (I changed doctors.) I’ve dropped fifty pounds without trying.
Everything Jenny said confirmed what John Kyle had said. This week Dave Lull sent me a long article from the New York Times by Gary Taubes called “Is Sugar Toxic?” http://www.nytimes,com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-1.html (It is behind a paywall so I can't link.) For a while now there’s been less information around because the research people were rethinking the whole situation. It’s much more complex than had been assumed.
First, the problem was redefined as “metabolic syndrome.” Second, sugars are a KIND of molecule, not just table sugar, and it seems that sucrose (the three “crose” sisters in most food are “Sue” crose, glucose, and fructose) is the one most clearly damaging. Third, indicators for heart attacks have included the ingestion of fats and a wide waistline. The latter seems to be an indicator for a particular KIND of fat, which is the kind that piles up in the liver.
Glucose goes directly into the cells and can be decreased simply by exercise: a brisk walk around the park on the next block will drop my glucose reading by as much as thirty points. (Jenny says that in an hour or so after eating one’s glucose reading should be 140 or less to avoid damage. 100 is ideal.) If the glucose isn’t taken up by cells, it converts into fat and is stashed in the body. Metabolic syndrome means that the cells have developed resistance to taking up glucose. More insulin is needed to force them to take in the glucose. But taking more insulin makes them resist more. Eventually the pancreas is so exhausted from producing so much insulin that it just stops. Then you start on insulin tablets or maybe you begin to mainline insulin with a syringe. Insulin promotes tumor growth. It’s all this struggle on a molecular level that destroys inner cycles of hormones and reactions -- and organs. Then the newspaper lists your cause of death as “complications due to diabetes.”
This is not the hardest part of dealing with diabetes -- I live a very isolated life in part because of the social impact of not eating sugar in a community that interprets sweetness as friendship and sharing. (The other part of the isolation is chosen so I can write all day. Then there’s my aversion to drinking, which is very parallel to the uses of sugar and will kill you as quickly. John Kyle could get into quite a froth over THAT.) The food industry is deeply implicated in all this, right down to the level of crop production. Foods are much more bitter and tasteless than they were in the Fifties. This is a deeply rooted (pun, yes), knitted (yes) into our culture and ecologically complex problem. But it may solve overpopulation. Those most vulnerable are the indigenous and the poor, who love their long johns.
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