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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Good morning, wonderful people. Scott here again, obviously, with the One Day at a Time podcast. Today's topic is coming up frequently now, and I see so many comments, posts, emails, saying, you know, perhaps I'm pre diabetes or I'm type two diabetes, type two diabetes, I need to go low carb, I need to avoid high GI carbs, I need to go on a continuous glucose monitor. And most people with diabetes, potentially pre diabetes, can get insights from that.
Speaker 1:What's important to know here is what's the truth, what should you be focusing on, what does the data say, what does the science say if you are prediabetes or type two diabetes, what you can do to improve your condition or, you know, prevent it from going pre to to full blown type two or to put into remission or as symptoms is said to reverse type two diabetes. Right? But because type two diabetes is a disease of blood sugar regulation, obviously, it's easy to think straight away that, okay, I need to cut out all my carbohydrates because that's what will improve it. And this is really what the this is really what the big question is, is like if eating carbs does cause type two diabetes then obviously we should remove carbs from our diet, right? That's what people are saying, that's what the kind of consensus is, very simplified in that sense.
Speaker 1:But the research team at Stanford University wanted to find out the answer to this. Right? So what they did was they compared a very low carb ketogenic diet with a moderate carb Mediterranean diet. Okay? So Mediterranean diet is usually like fruits, veggies, beans, lentils, breads, pastas, nuts, fish, olive oil, you know, cheese, red wine, that type of stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, the traditional kind of wholesome diet we may be picturing in our minds. Right? Definitely decent in carbs as well. And the ketogenic diet really is, high fat, super low carb, kind of moderate to low protein, but probably a bit less protein. So on a ketogenic diet, you can't really you know, in this research anyway, they they couldn't eat any refined grains, legumes, fruits, whole grains, any added sugars, only nonstarch vegetables were allowed.
Speaker 1:So you kind of eliminated a lot of stuff out there maybe day to day that we would eat. What you think happens here? Like if you were to think about it for a second, do you think that eliminating all the carbs is going to help or do you think that maybe it's more of an energy thing? What's your beliefs on there right now before I go into what the research says? It's interesting to think about it because we have been told for so long that carbs are bad.
Speaker 1:People go as far saying sugar is as addictive as cocaine or sugar is as bad as cocaine, all sugar is bad, all of these things. And this is like influencer or an insect called the glucose goddess who is like talking so much nonsense and this stuff, but people tend to buy into it. But this study was fascinating. There was 33 participants, thirteen with type two diabetes and twenty with pre diabetes. And what they did was they put him on one diet for twelve weeks and another diet for twelve weeks.
Speaker 1:So the same person did both diets, which is great. It's called a crossover trial. So this is where you can get data from both things for the same person. Here's what the study found. Blood sugar declined on both diets.
Speaker 1:One of the main markers you're looking for blood sugar decline in both diets, a higher carbohydrate Mediterranean and even on low sorry, on the low carb obviously, and then on even on the the higher carb one. The ketogenesis showed a slightly larger decline, but this wasn't statistically significant. Right? So basically the same. Body weight dropped them both, but they weren't encouraged to lose weight.
Speaker 1:Obviously they were eating less calories over twelve weeks, were eating about 300 calories less per day. Obviously in the ketogenic group there's no mystery as to why, pretty much can't eat many foods at all, you are kind of siloed into a few foods. And with a Mediterranean type diet, having meals with high protein, with carbs, with fats, olive oil, stuff, they tend to make you feel fuller for longer, so that's why they work well. And common to both diets as well was HDL, which is a good cholesterol, went up and triglycerides declined. So, basically, fats went down.
Speaker 1:Okay? The biggest difference between the groups, it says, well, that bad cholesterol rose 10% on the keto diet, while it declined 5% in The Mediterranean, 15% difference. That's interesting. Okay? But both both work, both if you can adhere to a ketogenic diet and you prefer it, you know, obviously, by all means, go and do it.
Speaker 1:There's not many people I know in in real life, you know, I see it on the Internet all the time. I don't know many people in real life that can stick to a ketogenic diet. Like, I've tried it back in back in the day, and it makes you the first few days are horrible, it makes you think about carbs so much because you have now it's been taken away from you. You then get some brain fog, you start feeling stringy in a sense of weak, your muscles are depleted. You eventually get used to it because of ketosis and then you start using more fat for energy as opposed to carbs because there's no carbs going in.
Speaker 1:You've got to remember the body's primary source of energy is carbohydrates, glucose. Once you don't give it enough glucose, it's gonna have to try and get it another way so the ketosis happens, takes it from a fat, does the ketosis, converts it, all our stuff. Don't get too much in the scientific stuff there, but our primary source is glucose. Right? So when we take that away, the body needs to do something, otherwise we'd be dead.
Speaker 1:Right? Some people say when they'd adapted to this, prefer it. But when I did it, and this is just my opinion, but there's many opinions of the same, there still feels to be something missing. There still feels to be hampered, draining, performance hampered, all that type of stuff, the brain isn't as clear, know, you now are living on a thread where you can't consume a carbohydrate. It's gonna knock you out of ketosis, and you're always thinking about that.
Speaker 1:And then you're using these ketosis sticks to pee on it, make sure you're in ketosis. This stuff is this is unless you need it medically, this is leading to potentially disordered eating territory. And this is what this continuous glucose monitor is doing as well. It is the gateway to more disordered eating. If you are using the continuous glucose monitor and you're not diabetic and you think learning from these spikes, these acute spikes, oh my god, I spiked my glucose.
Speaker 1:Oh my god, doing a workout spike there. Yeah? Normal. And now you're starting to micromanage your spikes, you're gonna have a really, really bad relationship with food, you can have a bad relationship with carbs and anything that spikes your glucose because you think that's a be all end all, but it's not. So clearly in this research, Stanford University, there is no best diet when it comes to managing these types of conditions.
Speaker 1:It really is managing your body composition. If you can lower your body fat percentage, you are gonna improve your body's health as a blanket statement if you are overweight or obese. You You can say this claim, well, maybe not, this is that, but in the research, clear. If you are overweight or obese, if you drop your body fat percentage, your health markers go up even when the diet isn't great, even when the diet is kind of junk foodie as well. I'm not advocating that, but what that means is you can still have your favorite food.
Speaker 1:You can still have your ice creams and chocolates. Okay? You don't need to go 90% as we call clean and 10%, you know, whatever. You can maybe go sixtyforty to start with, even fiftyfifty if you wanted to. What's important is that you stick to it and you can lose weight sustainably.
Speaker 1:And in the research again, what does it say? Slow weight loss trumps quick weight loss in terms of muscle preservation, in terms of actually staying off, in terms of mental health, in terms of less negative adaptations like I mentioned in previous podcast. When you look at these diets and people say keto makes you lose more weight, right? Keto makes you lose more weight. No.
Speaker 1:Even in this research, the ketogenic diet and the Mediterranean diet, they both lost weight, they're roughly the same weight. So you're saying to me you wanna go through the hell of a keto diet when you could eat a a lovely Mediterranean diet which is far more varied. Right? So being able to stick to it is really, really important. It's really, really important.
Speaker 1:You can stick to the type of diet that you want to follow. And you have to start looking, and like yesterday's podcast was talking, this relationship in our own mind with our own food, the awareness we have, we've to be very careful here. You can fall into the traps of watching these influencers on TikTok that are saying don't eat this, don't eat that. You start going into this black and white thinking about food, you start seeing your diet as singular foods. Or if I have that singular food, it's gonna make me fat and it's gonna make me unhealthy.
Speaker 1:But actually, if you take a bird's eye view, that's what's gonna give you an indication. You know, there's a classic, you know, one bad meal isn't gonna make you fat and one good meal isn't gonna make you healthy. One training session isn't going to make you super fit, missing one isn't going to make a big difference either. And when you stretch that out over a long period of time, you start seeing what health looks like. And if you were to visualize this for yourself looking forward, do you want to be a prisoner to your food and your diet?
Speaker 1:Do you wanna be a prisoner or do you wanna be freed by it? Those are the two choices you have. If you want to be freed from the food prison that we put ourselves in through these people listening, we must be always open to consuming whatever foods are available. If I want to eat a Mediterranean diet today but something happens, the shop has nothing left and I have to go and buy a ready meal or whatever and I'm on the road or whatever it is, I've to buy a ready meal, I've to get a protein bar, whatever, and I haven't really hit that thing. I'm not worried.
Speaker 1:I'm not worried at all by it. As long as my calories are roughly where I want them to be and my protein intake, I'm not worried about the type of diet I'm on. Obviously I know, you know, everybody knows in the back of their minds what good nutrition is. We've been told this in school, it hasn't changed. Fruits, vegetables, good fats, we know this.
Speaker 1:There's no magic there. Obviously you have your fruits and veggies and all our stuff. That's not really where we're getting confused. Where we're getting confused is we think singular foods are the problem or singular food groups are the problem. It's never been the problem.
Speaker 1:They make the enemy of something so you can fight against their enemy onto their side. The hard thing about this kind of approach, this flexible approach, is it's open to attack but in a sense that oh you're saying to eat rubbish junk food, that's bad for you, it's terrible' and what I say to that is the real world, we do eat chocolate, we do have a birthday cake, we do have a pizza, we do have these biscuits, a cup of tea with your friends sometimes, yes I'll a chocolate brownie or whatever, I'll go to a cafe, yes I'll have this, yes I'll have a donut here and there. There's no problem to it, absolutely no problem. I'm not going to say shouldn't do that, I even advocate doing it. People are that's terrible, is it though?
Speaker 1:I mean you think it's terrible because obviously on paper someone goes around look at this shit, look at this in the park and look at all these ingredients'. You can say everything's terrible, you can say that your water's poison, this and that, but they're not living in the real world. The real world is, as humanity, as the Western world, we are living in this very varied mixed kind of food options and we're not going to be able to escape that into a utopia of unprocessed foods grown in the back garden by my grandmother. That's not going to happen. That's not happening.
Speaker 1:So I would rather make peace that I'm going to eat a variety of foods and I'm going to enjoy it whether it's one week I'm 80% unprocessed, whether another week I'm only 30% unprocessed, another week I'm 50% unprocessed. When I look at the grand scheme of it, bird's eye view, the important factors are what's my average energy intake been because I'm going way too over, even if I'm eating quote unquote healthy foods, I'm still going to put weight on, and if I'm putting fat on and I'm going from a weight that my body's healthier to overweight and obese levels, then that's gonna be causing me health problems. So first of all I'm looking at energy intake. Have I got that balanced energy intake? I'll have the ups and downs over the weeks, but is it in tune with what I need and is it going down when I need to lose some weight or am I going up too quick, whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Then I'm looking at protein because I need that protein in there. I need to be recovering from workouts, need to feel fuller from my meals, I need to have the building blocks, you know, to get strong, you know, to maintain muscle mass because over my next hopefully I live another thirty, forty, fifty years, me retaining my muscle mass is gonna play a huge role in my metabolic health and in my health in general. Look at those two factors. Then you might go down, okay, maybe you wanna look at other factors, that's fine. You wanna look at maybe your fibre intake or your fat intake or whatever.
Speaker 1:But that's how you look at things. If you look at it this way, you are immune, you are fortifying yourself against all this nonsense online because you've cut through the noise, you know this is what the science says, this is what the industry experts say, this is not just my opinion, this is from the research and this is from people that have got no sides in this war. There's a war out there food and there's people taking sides And always the people that are trying to bring what the reality is the situation that get shunned away because no one likes the reality of it, which is always it depends, this is fine, this is fine, this is fine. People, they get bored by it. They want to be told no, that is definitive, that's definitive, that's definitive and that's bad and that's bad and that's bad.
Speaker 1:And then we can start making all sorts of excuses well no wonder I'm this way or that way, it's because I've been eating carbs or I've been eating brown rice, I've been eating white rice, or I make sense now. You see how it works? And you still you're a prisoner to this all these years go by. 10. Why do you want to live this way?
Speaker 1:You wanna be free. Free yourself from this is possible. No diet is better. The diet that's best is the one you can stick to where your energy intake is controlled and your protein intake is decently high and you can, you know, have a variety of foods in your diet and you have a good relationship with your food and with yourself, but you don't panic, don't catastrophize if you have a flipping cheeseburger, you don't lose your head and you don't cause a stress response and make everything worse. That's where you want to be.
Speaker 1:That's the main thing. That's your goal. If you can do this, you can be or you can fortify yourself. You can fortify yourself with moderation as the epictetus, as the philosopher said, you fortify yourself with moderation as this is an impregnable or impenetrable fortress, depending on translation. Say that again.
Speaker 1:I love the quote. This was said two thousand years ago. Fortify yourself with moderation as this is an impenetrable fortress. It's the same with your food. If I am moderate in my food intake of in my moderate in terms of my ice cream intake and in even in my unprocessed food intake and in this and that, I'm not being in in I'm not in any extreme camp.
Speaker 1:I am protecting myself with moderation. Same when it goes for drinking. If I can moderately drink, I protect myself against the hangovers, but I also protect myself against thinking, oh, well, I will miss out on this and that. Moderation is the key, but it's not sexy to sell. But I think we should make it sexy.
Speaker 1:As one of our members said that, moderation is sexy. Anyway, moderation is the name of the game. Okay? Hope that was useful. I'm gonna try and get a type two prediabetes expert on to chat with.
Speaker 1:The research I've explained, I've shared and they've shared as well, but to take maybe a live Q and A on this stuff because a lot of people are worrying about prediabetes and maybe markers are there. So, again, this study kind of tells you some information on that, but we'll have a q and a and, have a chat about it. So have a good day, Fortify yourself in moderation, and I'll be speaking to you all soon.