carbs, diabetes and common sense

[Guest guest]

This has come up a few times and I don't know quite where to respond,

so I thought I'd start a new thread.

I'm inherantly skeptical of all the claims on nutrition made on

insulin response or glycemic (blood sugar) response. A lot of the

alternative nutrition theories are leaping on these because carbs

tend to do poorly on these measures.

But Weston Price tells us that diabetes is really only found in

societies that eat the " displacing foods of modern commerce. " While

its true that the nearly vegetarian primitives did have higher rates

of cavities and obesity than the heavier meat eaters, they had a

level of health that dwarfs the average westerner.

So how can carbs play a central and causal role in causing diabetes?

The answer is they don't. Its far more likely that our current de-

vitalized foods cause it (see my post on " fructose (was: healthy

sports drink) " for my pet theory: endothelial dysfunction). And

blaming carbs has another problem: the mechanism. Usually spiking

blood sugar or stimulating insulin is blamed.

But are we as WAP-ers prepared to accept soy as being healthy because

its extremly low on the glycemic index? Or to accept potatoes and

carrots as causing diabetes while white rice and high fructose corn

syrup don't because they are much lower on the glycemic index?

Or what if its not high blood sugar, but insulin? Just as there is

the glycemic index that measures how blood sugar responds to dietary

carbohydrates, there is the insulin index that measures how much

insulin is stimulated after differant foods. Did you know that fish

and beef are higher on the insulin index than white pasta? Does that

mean that beef is more causal in creating diabetes than white pasta?

I know what you guys might be thinking at this point: " Ok, so

glycemic index and insulin index don't tell the whole story. Soy,

white pasta and high-fructose corn syrup may pass those tests, but

they are unhealthy for other reasons. " But this is exactly the same

tactic that the cholesterol guard is using! They tell us to avoid

meat, eggs and whole milk, then turn around and tell us that although

white bread lowers cholesterol, we need to avoid that too! And even

though polyunsaturated oils lower cholesterol more than olive oil, we

are told that olive oil is healthier!

Please lets not fall into the trap of talking about surrogate end

points and not rigorously challenging causation vrs. correlation.