Saturday, February 21, 2026
DR. ANTHONY CHAFFEE: Two things that prove that humans were not meant to eat carbohydrates.
Friday, November 28, 2025
SAMA HOOLE: Diabetes treatment became: Eat carbs → inject insulin → blood sugar spike → inject more insulin.
Before dietary guidelines, the standard diabetes treatment was simple:
— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) November 28, 2025
"Restrict carbohydrates. They raise your blood sugar."
This was obvious. Logical. Effective.
Diabetics who restricted carbs had stable blood sugar. Those who didn't, didn't.
Elliott Joslin, founder of…
Before dietary guidelines, the standard diabetes treatment was simple: "Restrict carbohydrates. They raise your blood sugar." This was obvious. Logical. Effective. Diabetics who restricted carbs had stable blood sugar. Those who didn't, didn't. Elliott Joslin, founder of Joslin Diabetes Center: "The chief principle of treatment is limitation of carbohydrates." This was 1916. It remained standard through the 1960s. Then 1977 Dietary Guidelines: "Everyone should eat more carbs, less fat." Diabetics included. The American Diabetes Association updated their advice: "Diabetics can eat carbs! Just take insulin to cover it." Diabetes treatment became: Eat carbs → inject insulin → blood sugar spike → inject more insulin. Instead of: Don't eat carbs → stable blood sugar → minimal insulin needed. One addresses the cause. One treats the symptom forever. We chose symptom management. Created a multi-billion dollar insulin industry. Modern diabetics eat 200-300g carbs daily and inject insulin 4-6 times daily. Pre-1977 diabetics ate 20-50g carbs daily and used minimal insulin. One group had stable blood sugar and minimal complications. One group has unstable blood sugar and complications despite medication. Guess which approach we recommend today. The pre-1977 doctors were right. We abandoned their approach for profit.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
ADDED SUGARS & CARBS . . . ARE AS ADDICTIVE AS OPIOD DRUGS
It is said if foods with added sugar are removed from a grocery store, only 20% of foods would remain. Added sugars and carbohydrates that turn to sugar in the body are as addictive as opiod drugs. Bill SardiIn 1998, I began reading Dr. Barry Sears' Zone Diet books, and a lot impressed me about Dr. Barry Sears' Zone Diet and his recommendation of fish oil supplements. In addition to the great science that he provided, I also appreciated his terrific insights on eating behaviors. One thing that he noticed was that, with the exception of vegetables, kids will eat anything their parents put in front of them. And I thought that's because parents, as individuals themselves, never recognized the purpose of certain foods beyond satisfying pangs of hunger or cravings for taste. Put a bowl of Captain Crunch cereal with milk in front of a kid, and the parent feels like their service to their child for that one meal is done. But there was no science, no systematic approach, no knowledge of the kinds of foods one should eat or serve, or even of nutritional value itself, forget foods that promote weight gain or set the stage for metabolic catastrophe. One of the first books I'd read on nutrition recommended olive oil for headaches. So I tried it, and immediately my headaches were alleviated as though I'd never suffered from them. I'll never forget growing up how certain foods were put in front of me that passed for quick energy foods. Inevitably, these were chocolate bars, like Powerhouse, Chunkie, Snickers, etc. Will never forget how Snickers began pitching their candy bar as a nutritional snack packed with protein from all of the peanuts. Well, if Snickers was healthy, wouldn't that make a PayDay bar even healthier? So advertising can be funny; nutrition, on the other hand, is a deadly serious regime. Then I remember being addicted to Corn Nuts. During the morning break period at school, called Nutrition, I'd consume, as would my friends, a large Coke poured from the fountain paired with a HoneyBun. I don't know how much honey it had in it. But these were our nutritional foods. One of my enduring memories of high school came from sports. I ran cross country and track. There was often downtime waiting for the race to start or waiting for your friend's race to finish. Well, some of the kids would inevitably find a bush grown over with fruit, hanging over a fence. And one kid would start in by grabbing an orange or a cumquat, peel it, and consume its fruit. To this day when I bite into an orange, I am transported back to when I was 15 enjoying a "free, fresh-picked orange or the tartness of a cumquat. It was moments like that I had my greatest nutritional awakening: in this case vitamin C and perhaps some Hesperidine from the fruit's skin. Even when we were called to the Christian Breakfast Club at Pasadena's Lake Avenue Congregation Church, they served French Toast, sausage, milk, and orange juice, and coffee to anyone who asked for it. Why not eggs and bacon? Nutrition information in the public sphere was predicated more on fear than any positive information. I heard only about nitrates in bacon, cholesterol in eggs and to limit your intake of them, ignoring completely the nutritional value of cholesterol, the protein in each one of them, or the benefits of saturated fats for young, growing brains and vital organs. And then if you grew up into adulthood in the 1980s, as I did, then you'll recall the craze or insistence with the low fat, high carbohydrate diets. Eat lots of pasta said the nutritional experts. That instruction set the nutritional trends for the 1980s. Again, if you were young and had a healthy metabolism, you could survive the onslaught of highly refined, high-glycemic starches. I ate my pasta with butter and pesto sauce. Not a bad combination. And so I was on the pasta bandwagon. Talk about your metabolic disaster waiting to present itself. Fatty liver is one of the damages from such a diet. Bill Sardi points this out:
Fatty liver was a rarity decades ago. But now that so much refined sugar and carbohydrates (bread, pasta and rice) are consumed, 35% of Americans have a fatty liver condition that is related to over-consumption of alcohol.
I assert that what physicians have been treating with cholesterol-lowering drugs over recent decades is only indirectly arterial disease and more directly liver disease. And while statin cholesterol-lowering drugs are widely used to treat fatty liver disease, they are not particularly effective and they are a liver toxin. [Medical Science Monitoring Dec 2009] Some statin drugs actually increase deposition o fat in the liver. [Journal Physiology Pharmacology June 2013]
For behavioral addictions, try NAC or N-Acetyl L Cysteine.
