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The Science Behind Oatmeal and Diabetes

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Before Insulin, There Was Oatmeal Before the discovery of insulin, the lives of many people with diabetes were saved or prolonged by Carl von Noorden’s oatmeal diet. As I discuss in my video Is Oatmeal Good for People with Diabetes? , he published his findings in 1903, which were received with a great deal of skepticism. But the critics were overcome in the following years by the weight of the evidence. Acclaimed doctor James B. Herrick began to try the oatmeal diet on his patients. Initially very doubtful, he became astonished by the results, which led to the 1909 proclamation that no case of juvenile or adolescent diabetes should be deprived of the benefits of the oatmeal cure. The great Elliott Joslin, founder of the oldest and largest diabetes clinic in the world, described the effects of oatmeal as “sometimes magical,” calling the oatmeal cure an unsolved mystery, referred to back then as “one of the greatest puzzles in diabetes.” They did have some clues, though. They found th...
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A Surprising Vegetable Approach to Insomnia

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Lactucin, the hypnotic component of lettuce, is put to the test in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of lettuce seeds. “There is a perception that time spent asleep is time wasted,” but it’s widely recognized that insufficient sleep is linked to multiple acute and chronic conditions and increases the risks of death and disease. As I discuss in my video Natural Dietary Remedy for Insomnia , forcing people to get only six hours of sleep per night for one week can change the expression of more than 700 genes. The most dire effect may be endothelial dysfunction. The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that lines the inside of blood vessels and is responsible for allowing our arteries to relax and dilate properly. Randomizing people to get five instead of seven hours of sleep for about a week results in a significant impairment in artery function from just that two-hour nightly difference. How bad is a week of getting only five hours a night? Sleep deprivation ...
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Protect Your Arteries from Saturated Fat with These Foods

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If you’re going to have something unhealthy, is there anything you can eat with it to help mitigate the damage it may cause? If you compare the artery function of vegetarians and meat-eaters, the healthy ability of arteries to dilate and let more blood flow is significantly better among those eating a vegetarian diet. And not just by a little—we’re talking four times better, as you can see below and at 0:24 in my video Foods to Help Protect Your Arteries from Saturated Fat . Vegetarians do tend to be younger, smoke less, be slimmer, and have lower rates of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and heart disease. But the researchers controlled for all that and only let healthy nonsmokers into the study. They also recruited a group of meat eaters who were similarly slim, with comparable blood pressure and nearly identical cholesterol levels. Yet the really healthy cohort of omnivores still got their arteries handed to them by the vegetarians, and the longer someone was me...
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Can Exercise Counteract a High-Fat Meal?

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There is a window of time in which sufficient physical activity can help mediate some of the damage caused by eating an unhealthy meal. I’ve previously discussed studies that show a single meal high in saturated fat can impair artery function in men, as measured in the arm, but what is more concerning is blood flow to the wall of the heart. Researchers randomized men to eat either a high-fat meal that was more than 60% fat, half of it saturated, with more than an egg’s worth of cholesterol, or a low-fat meal that was mostly carbs, less than 10% fat, and had 50 times less cholesterol. Below and at 0:47 in my video Exercising to Protect Your Arteries from Fast Food , you can see a Doppler recording of the left anterior descending coronary artery, known as the widow-maker, before the high-fat meal (top). Its nice strong signal was squeezed down within hours after eating; the image (bottom) was taken five hours after the high-fat meal. The coronary flow reserve decreased after a sin...
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How a Single Meal Can Cripple Your Arteries and Lungs

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What happens within hours of eating a high-fat meal? We are only as old as our arteries. What can we do to preserve arterial function as we age? A poor diet and sedentary behavior can lead to adverse aging processes, like impairment of the little power plants in our cells, which can result in free radical formation, oxidative stress, and inflammation, which lead to the artery dysfunction that can end in cardiovascular disease that ends us. In a series of videos I did about a decade ago, I discussed landmark research showing that a single high-fat meal could cripple artery function within hours of consumption, compared to no change with a low-fat meal, as you can see below and at 1:04 in my video Saturated Fat Causes Artery and Lung Inflammation . In the study, the high-fat meal that so crippled artery function included Sausage and Egg McMuffins from McDonald’s. How do we know the sausage, egg, or cheese was to blame? What about the crappy carbohydrates in the biscuits or somethi...
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What Is the Best Poop Position?

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The Squatty Potty is put to the test. Previously, I’ve talked about the potential efficacy of prunes and dried figs to keep us regular. What influence does body position have on defecation? While squatting continues to be the traditional position for people in Asia and Africa, Westerners have become accustomed to sitting on toilet seats. When we do that, we sit upright, and our poop is forced to make a nearly 90-degree turn, the “anorectal angle,” which you can see below and at 0:37 in my video The Best Poop Position for Constipation . Now, that’s a good thing in terms of keeping us from pooping our pants every time we sit down. But when it comes to doing our business, toilet posture defeats the purpose of our body’s brilliant design—like trying to drive a car without releasing the parking brake. Yet, many physicians are hesitant to discuss “such an unmentionable bodily function,” or they may just be ignorant. Doctors don’t know squat. Of course, this is coming from someone who ow...
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Can Ultra-Processed Foods Be Fixed by Tweaking Their Nutrients?

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What happened when ultra-processed foods were matched for calories, sugar, fat, and fiber content in the first randomized controlled trial? In the United States, “junk food” is often used to describe less-healthy foods, like candy, ice cream, and chips, but there isn’t a consistent definition, so nutrition researchers came up with the concept of ultra-processed . The term “ultra-processed food”—if you want to call it that— describes industrial formulations that are typically seen in those long list of ingredients, which, besides salt, sugar, and fat, aren’t typically found in any cookbook, like various flavors, sweeteners, colors, emulsifiers, and other additives used to imitate real foods or to hide undesirable qualities of the final product. This roughly corresponds to my idea of “red light foods” in my traffic light system, in which, ideally, we should maximize intake of green light foods, minimize yellow light foods, and avoid red light foods. Indeed, most of what people eat a...
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