My husband, Bryan, tests his blood sugar from time to time. Sometimes I will get him to test with my spare meter for an entire day. We did this recently when I was doing my first 5K trail run. It gave me the insight I needed. We ate the same yet his blood sugar never really rose. However, after the run, his blood sugar was a little low just as mine was. Two hours after supper his blood sugar reading was 5.8 mmol/L and mine was 6.6 mmol/L. So not an overly significant difference. Dinner was a lean chicken breast, lentil salad, and green beans. Same measured portions. He drank water and I drank mineral water (I like the fizz). Within 3 hours after the meal my blood sugar was 4.8 mmol/L and his was 5.2 mmol/L. Once again, a moderate difference.

The reasons I wanted to use him as a guide was the fact that I no longer represent as a diabetic at all and I am not on medication. That said, my body is in a state of change with increasing running distances and intensity (I start hill training next week) and with bringing in other forms of intense exercise. Being able to compare a non-diabetic with the same lifestyle, diet and weight needed to be lost (just over 20-25 pounds each) was helpful. The only thing that would have been better was if he was a woman because hormones can play a role in blood glucose levels.

With this in mind I check my blood sugar when I wake up (I also check my heart rate and blood pressure to ensure I am not over-training). I test before each meal and 2 hours after each meal. I test before I run or workout. If I feel funny during my run or workout, I test. And I test before my bedtime snack. It amounts to between 8 and 10 tests a day (more when I am ill). It's a lot but it gives me control and yes, I micro-manage this. I feel, very strongly, that I was able to reverse Type 2 diabetes through proper balanced carbohydrate intake (as you can gather I don't believe in excluding dairy, whole grains, ancient grains such as quinoa and amaranth, and legumes from my diet because of fibre and nutrient content) and with having an active lifestyle.

I am currently working on building muscle and losing weight. I believe in a slower weight loss for many reasons and am averaging 4 pounds per month. There are benefits to that. One, it makes for permanent change. Two, it helps prevent issues with sudden and dramatic changes in how my natural insulin is working. Three, our diet is a way of eating that the whole family can adopt - meaning less work for me because one meal suits all. And lastly, it means that there are no issues with lack of skin elasticity. Having lost close to half my body weight in over 12 years... I've learned a thing or three about what type of eating works best for me. I've been heavy since age 5 and this is the only time I've had permanent, successful, long-term weight loss. In fact, yesterday was a bit of a milestone for me... the smallest height-weight proportion I have been in 29 years (age 14).

I think Paleo has it's place and while it isn't my cup of tea, I love the fact that it brings about discussions such as this. Really enjoyable to read and participate in this debate.

Edited by Laurie_Ann on 04/05/2012 06:19:17 MDT.

I vaguely remember Ryan saying he was doing a project that envolved measuring blood glucose levels while hiking

I came across this article this morning. Thought it might be relevant to the thread:

http://paleodietlifestyle.com/why-people-fail-paleo-diet/

I have issues with articles, like the one posted that make blanket statements like this...

"Carbohydrates in general shouldn’t be feared, carbohydrates from toxic sources like grains, legumes and refined sugar should."

Yes, I agree with the refined sugars but grains and legumes can be a healthy part of living and provide vital nutrients. Quinoa, amaranth, chickpeas and lentils can be incorporated into a healthy diet. They are often used by those with Celiac. Toxic is considerably misleading (although I will agree with the refined sugar part).

Are you all familiar with the Venus of Willendorf Statue? "Originally found in Willendorf, Austria, this statue of a woman represents the earth, its fertility and continuation of life, from the Prehistoric/Paleolithic era -- a period when fertility and hunting were essential components of survival."

Venus of Willendorf

When I think of paleo - this statue from the upper paleolithic is what comes to my mind. Perhaps this was the body type they revered? While one could argue that this is a fertility statue... you only have to look at the legs to see that, even if the womanly figure portrayed here was pregnant, her legs and back have the markings of someone morbidly obese. I would have fit well into paleo times as far as this type of body shape is concerned, before I lost over 170 pounds or so with eating a variety of foods including grains and legumes.

I think that Paleo eating might be good for short term but I challenge the long term effects of this type of eating plan. Sorry... but after my reading my opinion is that Paleo is the latest fad.

edited to repair broken link and add a few thoughts

Edited by Laurie_Ann on 04/09/2012 09:50:49 MDT.

Congratulations Laurie Ann, on your 29 year record.

I agree that a moderate and varied diet, centered on real and not processed foods, is the way to go. People can do a vegan subset of that, or a paleo subset, but I like to gown the middle ... an omnivore's moderate diet.

(twitter update)

Edited by JohnJ on 04/09/2012 12:04:41 MDT.

Laurie, two things.

First, considering that you recently stated that you don't know very much about paleo, and haven't read very much about it, I would think that your statement here is very much a blanket statement based on lack of knowledge of it. The author of the article was trying to soften the oft inflexible outlook that many paleo adherents have and if you read more of his articles you'll get a better understanding of where he is coming from. Remember he is addressing paleo adherents, not people like you who obviously don't put any stock in the whole way of thinking. That's your take, of course, and no one is pushing you to follow this. But for people who do want to follow it and feel it has something important to offer, this article is helpful for those having trouble with it. It's working for a lot of people. I've never followed any fad before, but this has made a big difference for me, and I really don't care what pigeon hole name people want to label it; as a method of controlling my health I'll take what works. Nothing before ever did. Certainly not what you are advocating... which is what I religiously followed for 30 years, with no improvements at all, especially after getting diabetes. Mind you, I was never overweight until I started taking insulin.

Second, there are a lot of cultures around the world that did not often have obesity, where from before recorded history being fat was considered a beautiful and unusual state to be in, namely because it was so hard to achieve and a sign of opulence. Paleolithic people were no different from us in intelligence or cultural tendencies like ceremonies and basic social structure, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they upheld certain people in their societies who were more powerful and wealthy. Those who could afford the luxury of getting fat probably often did indulge in it. Or maybe that woman on whom the statue might have been based was an anomaly, something so rare that, like often happened in Eastern cultures with children who were mentally handicapped, she was revered and worshipped as a god. Or maybe the statue was purely imaginative. Who knows?

I'm not sure what your point is about the statue. Is it concerning obesity and how paleo helps you lose weight? Some people who eat paleo do it to lose weight, but most adherents tend to do it long-term, long after the weight has been lost, to maintain a strong sense of health. Paleo is not just a way of eating... it also equally incorporates certain ways of exercising, a commitment to reducing stress, getting proper sleep, and even making sure to incorporate play. It works much like the components of UL backpacking... it's a system with each aspect of your lifestyle contributing to your health. One reason I like it is that it is comprehensive and doesn't just focus on food.

Without getting more involved and reading and participating in the books and online discussions of paleo, you wouldn't know that it is constantly evolving. Through proper scientific research older ideas are scrutinized and certain old beliefs are either confirmed or found to have problems. Many paleo discussions have centered around the different findings that adherents have had with such things as potatoes, quinoa, and milk, all things that in the early days or in the strict school of paleo were considered off limits, but which, through experimentation and experience have been shown to pose no problem. Remember, the reason paleo is called paleo is to try to emulate a period in human history during which our bodies reached the height of direct interaction with our surroundings, before agriculture allowed us to start becoming independent of the vagaries of that environment. The advantage of this is that this attempts to find a state in which, genetically, the environment shaped us to optimal physiological adaptation due to natural selection. No one is saying that agriculture wasn't a huge advantage to us, but ongoing archaeological research has found a lot of evidence of a great decline in our health ever since agriculture began wholesale. Take a look at the research going on at Jonzac, France, by Paleolithic anthropologists, Dr's. Mike Richards and Shannon McPherson of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the studies of Gary J. Sawyer at the American Museum of Natural History, and the work of Leslie Aiello of the President Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research... all of them, in the studying the remains of Paleolithic people and early Neolithic people have found generally optimal health in the former and many signs of deterioration in the latter. Dr. Aiello even states that Homo Erectus, just before our species, represented the highest point in human physiological development. They have all found that as agriculture progressed the variety in what we ate gradually decreased, until today our choices in food have been severely restricted to the few vegetables, grains, tubers, meats, dairy, and fish we eat today. Hell, even the variety of food Japanese ate when I was a child changed dramatically over the last 40 years as western eating habits took over Japan... and the sudden and heretofore completely alien to Japanese culture, obesity epidemic. Japanese ate rice before that, but never in large amounts, because it was for centuries a luxury (even when I was a boy in Japan few people could afford to regularly eat sushi). The Japanese diet consisted mainly of a huge variety of vegetables and fish, with rice as a small aside and much needed carbohydrate source. I almost never saw fat people in Japan when I was a boy; now they are everywhere (though there is debate about rice being a culprit grain in paleo. It doesn't seem to have the effects that wheat does).

My point being paleo is far more than just a simplistic "no carb/ lots of fat" trend diet. There is healthy debate going on and experimentation and involvement with many serious, peer-reviewed scientists. If grains were found to be optimal, that's what paleo adherents would eat, since the point is to seek the optimal diet for humans, not advocate certain dogma. That is what attracted me to this whole movement in the first place. .

Edited by butuki on 04/09/2012 15:57:10 MDT.

"In a census record of 1873, nutritional information for the Hida Region (Gife Prefecture, Central Honsyu¯) shows that rice was the most important food, notwithstanding the general unsuitability of the area for the crop’s cultivation (Koyama et al. 1981: 548—51). The same data reveal a typical daily intake of nutriments for premodern Japanese people. The recorded population of this mountainous region was about 90,000, and these people are thought to have maintained the highest dependency in Japan on millet as a rice substitute. The average daily energy intake per capita was 1,850 kilocalories (kcal) (in 1980 it was 2,600 kcal), of which 55 percent was supplied by rice, which also supplied 39 percent of the protein."

- The Cambridge World History of Food: Japan

It's an interesting history. I did not know that a ban on the eating of most land animals helped build the love for seafood.

The average daily intake of calories in Japan throughout most of the periods before the 1800's was about 750 kcal for the average person. Close to starvation rations. The aristocracy ate about 1800 kcal. This (750 kcal) is also the projected amount of daily calories per person that the Tokyo government calculates, should Japan suddenly lose it's ability to import food and rely completely on domestic food production.

This information you can find at the Tokyo Edo Museum.

If you watch the movie "Seven Samurai" you will see the peasants arguing about and hoarding their rice. Rice was the coin that people used to barter their goods. It was very valuable and often represented all of a village's wealth. Most of the people ate millet or barley most of the time because they couldn't afford rice. With improvements during the 1800's (gradually quickening westernization... in the 1800's America forced Japan to open, against the will of the Japanese) the diet quickly began to change. But not until the mid-1970's did an affluent Japanese middle class begin to appear. The poor couldn't afford to buy much, and rice, which is still expensive even today (about $30 for 5 kg), was not something you could easily indulge in. It was a staple in the diet, yes, and everyone tried as much as possible to eat it, but still not something they indulged in as people do today. I know. I lived with a great number of lower income Japanese families as a boy and daily ate what they did. It was one, maybe two (small) bowls of rice, once in the morning and once in the evening, with "o-kazu" (variety of side dishes that constitute the main meal) to go along. Buying and eating fruit was a big deal. People would spend a big wad of cash on, say, a watermelon, which they could only afford maybe once or twice a summer.

Edited by butuki on 04/09/2012 19:51:41 MDT.

is this ever an interesting thread.

Miguel, I'm really afraid that you are tipping the hand of a faddist. That is, you are making really outrageous claims and ones that can't be challenged in a rational way ... go to the Edo museum, watch a Kurosawa movie ...

I have you one accessible online link. I can give you another:

4. RICE DEMAND ANALYSIS

You told us earlier that rice consumption had increased in Japan, right? That is not what this data shows. Rice consumption has fallen while consumption of meat and fish has increased.

john: ? ? ?

I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas from. I claimed that rice consumption has increased? In regards to what, John? Yes, rice consumption has increased, as has consumption of everything else, including meat and fish. The Japanese are among the world's biggest consumers today. Surely you already know that, John.

Your suggestion to use your link as a support for whatever you're trying to say is also a complete misinterpretation of the explanation you find within the link: Many studies report on the Westernization of the Japanese diet: less calorie intake comes from rice and more from animal meat, and the fat content of food has increased. : What this statement says is that less calorie intake comes from rice, and more from animal meat. Since the Japanese consume twice as many calories as they did 200 years ago this simply means that they didn't increase the amount of rice they eat to meet this caloric budget, but increased their consumption of meat (which Japanese barely at all prior to the 1800's) and, something the statement completely fails to mention, consumption of bread, which skyrocketed in the 1970's. They also consume far more milk and other dairy products. Prior to the '70's most Japanese were severely lactose intolerant (as even today most Asians are) so most of them could not handle drinking a lot of milk.

I don't really need a link to show me how things are and have been over the last 43 in Japan since I've lived here all that time and have been watching things change over all that time. The Edo museum reference was, perhaps a little over the top, since most people can't make it there, but the Kurosawa movie is not at all beyond the abilities of any reader here. If you want a link, here you go. You'll excuse me if I don't make any effort to translate any of it for you. Scroll down and you can see different average meal types according to rank and wealth in society. Even the rich were quite frugal. Try to figure out which ones are those of the rich, and which of the average person. And then tell me where all the scads of rice are. And these are not American portions either. Those bigger bowls are about the width of your fist. And a lot of the fish shown (saurie) are about the size of a man's index finger.

Then again, we could dispose with links altogether, and you are cordially invited to come to Japan and visit the Edo Museum with me.

P.S. The Edo Period is officially between the years 1603 to 1868. The Meiji Period, which started in 1868 is generally considered the period of modernization of Japan, when western values and goods began to be heavily pushed within Japanese culture by the Japanese themselves. They even changed their clothing during this period, moving from traditional kimonos to western trousers/ skirts and shirts. This is also the period during which great changes in diet began.

Edited by butuki on 04/09/2012 21:40:11 MDT.

By the way, my offering the link further up in the thread was not for any advocacy of paleo, but simply some information for anyone already attempting paleo.

Miguel,

The point of my photo is that Paleo talks about lean, healthy bodies and it speaks of reduction in disease... yet that statue (art was often a representation of what culture found healthy or desirable) shows obesity.

My thoughts on Paleo come from reading the resources you have sent me, talking to my nutritionist recently (at length) and a little extra medical journal reading I did last weekend. My nutritionist is very open-minded and also does quite a bit of research. Some of her comments were surrounding the body/genetic differences between a modern person and a Paleolithic man.

And yes... keep in mind I am looking at this from a weight loss perspective (as per the original posts), the perspective of a diabetic, the perspective of an athlete in training, and the view of overall/long-term, sustainable health.

What medically supported information I could find covered both sides of the debate, however there wasn't much that supported this for the long term (at least not that I found in my search). Most of what I found supporting Paleo was blog-based and anecdotal.

And... as I said earlier... I see the effects of what I eat about 8 times a day when I test my blood. I see it in how my digestive system functions and repeated hbA1C backs that up. Overall health backs that up... especially when I see the rest of my family dying of heart disease at young ages (the most recent was my brother at age 56). Having extensive heart tests in February backs this up too. It seems what I am doing is right for my body. There is also evidence to support that Paleo-type diets are not good for vascular health... here is one of the many journals I read over the weekend.

Vascular effects of a low-carb, high-protein diet or in plainer English...

Low Carb, High-Protein, Diet Blues

You could convince me to be vegan or vegetarian but not Paleo... not until more long-term and medically conclusive research has been done. My health is too important to mess around with... and I've watched to many loved-ones die from heart disease related to diet and activity.

Edited to add.... this one was interesting (and personally relevant to me)

Low-Fat versus Low-Carbohydrate Weight Reduction Diets: Effects on Weight Loss, Insulin Resistance and Cardiovascular Risk A Randomised Control Trial "The change in overall systemic arterial stiffness, was, however, significantly different between diets (P=0.04); this reflected a significant decrease in augmentation index following the low-fat diet, compared to a non-significant increase within the low-carbohydrate group."

Edited by Laurie_Ann on 04/10/2012 06:22:56 MDT.

Actually Miguel, you wrote:

Hell, even the variety of food Japanese ate when I was a child changed dramatically over the last 40 years as western eating habits took over Japan... and the sudden and heretofore completely alien to Japanese culture, obesity epidemic. Japanese ate rice before that, but never in large amounts, because it was for centuries a luxury (even when I was a boy in Japan few people could afford to regularly eat sushi). The Japanese diet consisted mainly of a huge variety of vegetables and fish, with rice as a small aside and much needed carbohydrate source

Edited by JohnJ on 04/10/2012 07:09:26 MDT.

Miguel I do thank you for your invitation though, I would like to hike the mountains of Japan one day.

I acknowledge both your thoughts, Laurie, and yours, John. I'd be remiss to make my comments about being open minded if I didn't make the attempt to be open minded myself.

Laurie, do please remember that I, too, am a diabetic, as you well know, and have exactly the same fears and concerns as you do. So I don't enter my decision to give paleo a go lightly, especially as a Type 1. I'm not doing this on a whim as many others here might be doing... my very life depends on me getting this right, just like you. And it's not just a distant future fear, either. If I don't do this right I could quite easily die from mistakes tomorrow. The possibility of death for me, and you, are a very likely, daily reality.

Edited by butuki on 04/10/2012 08:52:33 MDT.

I understand entirely Miguel. I think we have to respect that you and I will never agree on the topic and each of us has to do what is best for the type of diabetes that we have. My concern is that with diabetics being at 6 times greater risk for cardiovascular disease, is this really the right diet... do the short-term benefits outweigh the long-term risks? No need to answer that - my point is that is what is in the back of my mind when I research such lifestyle changes.

Each person has to evaluate risks for themselves. In my case, the added familial history of early death from premature coronary artery disease, makes that answer pretty clear for me.... Paleo is far too risky in my case.

This is where we shake hands and agree to disagree. Certainly makes for some good discussion though.

Miguel, I do have sympathy for the paleo idea, especially in the basic form that "we should eat the diet we are evolved for." I think we are evolved for a more general diet than the strictest paleo practitioners believe, which might look like more disagreement than it actually is.

The safest thing IMO is to look for overlap between peleo and nutrition science, rather than to see them in opposition.

I'm going to have a physical (blood work, etc.) Friday and will report back results. My personal weight loss/fitness journey has involved a lot of lifestyle changes over the years, and since I previously worked at a hospital I had blood work done annually. I've been (mostly) paleo/primal for the past several months so I'm curious to see what my cholesterol looks like with the increase in fat and decrease in carbs.

FWIW, I'm not diabetic but do have direct relatives that are or have been.

It would be nice to know that there is no long-term detrimental effect on cholesterol, lipids and all that.

On a side note... with diabetes in your family it is really good that you have made lifestyle/weight changes. It goes a long way.