It's all about ME, baby! (Birth - 1997)

It's all about ME, baby! (1997 - present) is my story after discovering the Atkins Diet. This is my story up to that point. I was born one snowy Winter's day. Mum told me that my cot was placed next to an open window in Central Middlesex Hospital. That explains a lot! Here's mum, me and my sister.


I don't remember much about my early years. As we were relatively poor (dad was a tailor and mum did typing for a solicitor), getting regular French Fancies & Corona lemonade deliveries was considered a status symbol. I ran around in the street with other kids of my age but I was fat. I was also very short for my age (insufficient GH from my pituitary?) and was rubbish at sports in primary school. Here's a photo taken when I was about 9 or 10. I'm the shortest boy in the picture.


Stripy shirts were all the rage, apparently. Even at this tender age, I used to regularly fall asleep after eating a plate of chips.

In secondary school, sports was dreadful what with having to play cricket using a cricket ball (instead of a tennis ball), contact sports, swimming and showers. Being short, fat & under-developed, I was embarrassed to get undressed in front of my peers, so I developed the art of forging sick notes in my mum's handwriting. I was a very sickly child! ;-D

My forging skills resulted in the total avoidance of swimming (also contact sports, cross-country running etc) and a big improvement in the quality of my handwriting! With tennis, I had to travel to a tennis court by train. I didn't mind doing that, as there were no showers at the tennis courts and I could play the game for a while until I overheated. Secondary school was where I developed a total hatred for almost all sports and when I left, that was the end of exercise as far as I was concerned. When I left secondary school at the age of 18, I was 4 feet 9 inches tall.

At university, I would have a cheese & ham salad baguette washed down with a can of Coke (non-diet in those days) for lunch, followed by a snooze.

At work, I would have a cheese & raw onion roll washed down with a can of Coke for tea-break, followed by a snooze. Here's me at the age of 26. At some point, my pituitary gland "woke up" and secreted GH, as I grew to 6 feet 1 inch tall in my late twenties.


I did manage to get some work done!

When I was dating, I jogged/walked for over 4 miles a day to see my girlfriend. I got slim. After I married, that stopped and as I was a skint Electronic Engineer and Lesley was a skint Cake Decorator, my diet was predominantly cheap carbohydrates, like bread, pasta, potatoes & rice. The result? Lots of snoozes + lots of weight gain. I was a lazy git, apparently.

In 1992, Lesley left to live with her mother. In 1994, I started dating Eileen. At parties, I became (in)famous for falling asleep after eating nibbles made from refined carbohydrates.

I am NOT the anti-carb!

On a messageboard far, far away I was told:-

"While cakes and biscuits might be regarded primarily as treats, bread and pasta are staple foods, which form an important part of the diet of growing children, who are recommended by experts to get a fairly high proportion of their calories from carbohydrates, including wheat flour.

It is normal and healthy for children to have sandwiches and pasta as part of their meals, and pizza and pastry in moderation are perfectly appropriate. As are occasional treats.

I don’t suppose that I am the only person who is tired of your ceaseless evangelising on behalf of your own diet. But it is one thing to feed yourself as you please, and to talk about it if you wish, it is quite another to suggest that there is good reason for people to adopt your personal principles and ignore the advice of paediatricians, dieticians, and properly constituted advisory bodies when feeding children."

Also

"I'm sorry Nigel, but you do give the impression of being on a one man crusade against wheat in our diets. You are also making the assumption that we all eat refined wheat. What about wholemeal bread, wholegrain cereals, wholemeal pasta? You are also assuming that we all buy sliced white bread. I make most of my bread in my bread machine, using organic flour. I know what goes into my bread, and it tastes so much better than supermarket bread.

Pasta need not be made from wheat, for example rice noodles and rice and corn pasta for coeliacs.

So many cuisines have wheat products in their diets. Obviously there are the different breads - nan, pitta, flatbread, tortilla wraps etc; a huge array of pastas, cous-cous; bulgar wheat. Wheat is also used in so many religious/celebratory foods - the bread at holy communion, Christmas/simnel/birthday cakes etc. I could go on."

Plus

"Most widespread cultures have one or two staple carbohydrates, predominantly grains, that are the basis of the normal healthy diet.

In Europe and Northern American those staples are wheat and potatoes. It is hence making a rod for your own back, and entirely unnecessary, to try to feed a child without both of these unless they have specific issues such as Coeliac disease - ask the parent of such a child just how difficult it is. Your argument that the eating of wheat is what makes westerners fat is entirely specious, as few of the more lean members of the culture have eschewed wheat, and your suggestion that the recommendations based on the food pyramid have failed at the population has got more obese since the pyramid was devised is a twisting of the facts – all the relaible evidence shows that the people who stick to the recommendations are just fine, it’s those that don’t follow the guidelines who become obese. The guidance in no way is a cause of the obesity epidemic.

In most of Asia the staple is rice (which, as eaten, is a refined grain incidentally, I don't know why you think it isn't)."


The above raises so many points that it's hard to know where to start. The beginning is probably the best place. WARNING! The following contains some irony.

"Experts" tell us what we should and shouldn't eat. That's worked so well, hasn't it? It's easy to blame people for not following the very guidelines that make them over-eat. It's their own stupid fault! "Experts" scoffed at Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis. He was more right than wrong though and modern medicine now uses sterile practices. "Experts" scoffed at James Lind and it took 42 years before the British navy adopted lemons or limes as standard issue at sea. So we know where "experts" can shove their dietary advice ... somewhere where the sun doesn't synthesise Vitamin D.

I don't try to get everybody on a low-carb diet. Jeez! Firstly, we are not all the same. Everyone has a different requirement for carbohydrate. As I wrote in Carbohydrates: Dogs' Doodads or Spawn of Satan?, "Right carbs, right amounts, right times." People don't do this, though. They eat the wrong carbs (powdered grains, mashed potato & other over-refined carbs like fruit juice) in the wrong amounts (way too much, as per "expert" advice) at the wrong times (virtually every meal, whether active or sedentary). Some random musings...

WHEATFLOUR: I guess it must be the lack of wheatflour that's pushed Orientals to the verge of extinction. Oh, wait...

LONGEVITY: Turn the clock back to a time before modern medicine and we wheatflour eaters had long average lifespans. Oh, wait...

BREAD: The vast majority of bread bought today is muck, mass-produced by the Chorleywood Bread Process. Even home-made bread is made from grain dust. See The problem with "Whole Grain" cereal etc. I don't consider white rice to be a refined grain as it still looks like a grain.

PASTA: When I was a lad, the only pasta we had was Heinz Spaghetti & Ravioli in tomato sauce. Now, pasta is a staple food in the UK? We all know how slim middle-aged Italians are. Oh, wait...

EXERCISE: When I was a lad, I used to run around in the street & playground like other kids. I was still fat. Exercise cannot compensate for poor diet (I ate lots of chocolate, cake & drank sugary Corona lemonade).

Why do we have to eat what farmers grow? Maybe if more people ate less powdered wheat products and more old-fashioned sourdough rye bread, farmers might start growing something else. There are plenty of carbohydrates that don't seriously disturb blood glucose levels, such as rice, rye, barley, quinoa, sorghum, millet, maize, sago, tubers, root veggies, bulbs, legumes & fresh whole fruits.

Nah, it'll never happen! Not while a) crap foods are dirt cheap and b) people keep following the dietary advice of "experts" like sheep ... or should that be lemmings?

See also Anthony Colpo's The Whole Grain Scam.

The problem with "Whole Grain" cereals etc.

As I mentioned in Carbohydrates: Dogs' Doodads or Spawn of Satan?, some breakfast cereals turn into blood glucose faster than table sugar (half glucose bonded with half fructose) even though they're "Whole Grain" cereals.

A whole (i.e. intact) grain consists of a protective outer shell (a.k.a. bran) and innards consisting of starchy/proteiny endosperm and nutritious germ. See Cereal germ.

To turn a grain into a breakfast cereal, it's ground into dust, mixed with water to form a paste and the paste is extruded through holes into whatever shape the manufacturer desires. Technically-speaking, everything that was in the whole grain is in the finished product. However, the form & function have completely changed. Here are a couple of analogies.

1) I want to sell my car. I take it to a scrap-yard and have it shredded into tiny pieces. All of the tiny pieces are put in a skip, which is delivered to my driveway. I place a sign on the skip stating "Whole Mazda MX-5 for sale. Enquire within. £5,000 O.N.O.". What would you offer for my "Whole Car"?

2) An insane person gives me £5,000 (in £50 notes) for my "Whole Car". As I'm on a roll, I take the notes and put them through a cross-cut shredder which turns them into thousands of 2mm x 2mm pieces. I empty the pieces into an attaché case. Who will accept my attaché case full of "Whole £50 notes" as payment for their second-hand car? Any more insane people out there?

Turning grains into dust does four things.

1) It exposes the starchy endosperm.

2) It vastly increases the surface area of the grain resulting in much faster digestion & absorption as blood glucose. Surface area is inversely proportional to particle size. If 3mm grains are reduced to 0.1mm particles, the surface area is increased by a factor of 30. How effective is chewing? Interestingly, once the particle size has fallen below a certain value, reducing it further makes no further difference. See The Effect of Particle Size of Whole-Grain Flour on Plasma Glucose, Insulin, Glucagon and Thyroid-Stimulating Hormone in Humans. Therefore, "whole grain" bread is just as bad as white bread in terms of its glucose & insulin response.

3) It makes the finished product much more likely to stick to your teeth, resulting in the rapid formation of tartar that damages your teeth and gums.

4) It makes the finished product more energy-dense.

Rolled grains are grains that have been steamed (to cook and make them soft), then put through what's effectively a mangle. They're still intact, if somewhat flat. Puffed grains are grains that have been heated to make the water within boil. As steam takes up a much larger volume than water, the grains are inflated to a much larger size. They're still intact, if somewhat funky-looking!

Don't be conned by breakfast cereal labels. If they look like "O"s or Brillo pads or brake pads, they're not intact grains.

Oats are O.K. even when turned into oatmeal, probably due to their high beta-glucan content, which forms a wallpaper paste-like goo when wet. See Particle size of wheat, maize, and oat test meals: effects on plasma glucose and insulin responses and on the rate of starch digestion in vitro.

See also Anthony Colpo's The Whole Grain Scam.