BY DAN HILDEBRAN
A nutritionist who retired after 36 years at the University of Florida’s Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences spoke to the Keystone Heights Rotary Club on Wednesday, March 26.
Dr. Harry Sitren reviewed the U.S. Government’s attempts to get Americans to eat healthier foods.
He showed the group the food pyramid that used to be printed on food labels. Sitren declared the effort a failure.
“The bottom of the pyramid was widest, and they wanted you to eat lots of grains in breads and cereals,” he said. “There was no evidence that it ever worked. That’ll increase your body weight, and our country’s getting wider, and chronic diseases are getting more common, especially obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease is still up there.”
Sitren said the food pyramid was influenced less by nutrition science and more by the fact that the U.S. agriculture industry grows a lot of grains.
Profit motive trumps nutrition
The PhD said the U.S. Agriculture Department updated the pyramid in the 2000s, encouraging exercise and adding customization features on its website where users could enter their weight and other inputs.
However, the plan’s fatal flaw of advising the consumption of carbohydrates to equal between 45% and 65% of daily calorie intake remained.
He added that when Michelle Obama devised a different scheme called “My Plate,” grains remained an essential component of the plan.
“The thing is,” he told the Rotarians, “The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees all this, they favor, of course, agriculture in this country, and we produce lots and lots of grains: corn and soy and wheat, and they want that to be the basis of your intake, but that’s what makes people overweight.”
Sitren also said the calories-in-calories-out model is flawed because it works against normal human physiology.
“You just can’t tell people that— don’t eat as much or exercise more…because we eat primarily to satisfy our appetite,” he said. “We eat until we feel satiated. Satiated means full that you don’t want to take another bite.”
Carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity
The retired professor and graduate coordinator said the latest research shows the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity is the best way to think about healthy eating.
Sitren said that the body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose, and the pancreas secretes insulin to the bloodstream, which signals cells in the body to take the glucose from the bloodstream and send it to the cells, which produce energy.
He said this process should take around two hours, after which the glucose level should return to its baseline of 100 milligrams per deciliter.
However, too much glucose in the bloodstream for too long can start glycation, in which glucose sticks to protein cells and interferes with their function.
“And then that eventually leads to all the adverse effects of having elevated blood sugar, which is diabetes,” he said. “That’s why with diabetes, which is rampant in our country, leads to blindness and toe amputations and it attaches all that high glucose levels in there, attaches to proteins of the body and interferes with their function.”
Sitren said diabetes is the Number 1 cause of blindness and kidney transplants in the U.S.
“We just keep eating carbohydrates as the base of our diet, which is what USDA says,” he claimed, adding that according to the government, Americans should be getting around 30% of their energy from fat, around 20 % from protein, and the rest from carbs.
“But this is the result,” he said. “We’re getting bigger, diabetes is rampant in the country, and healthcare costs are tremendous.”
Sitren said that European studies conclude that half of all diabetes patients can eliminate their diabetes on a very low-carbohydrate diet.
“They’re not cured of it because if they go back on carbohydrates, they’ll experience all the adverse effects of diabetes,” he said.
Eat more fat
Sitren said Americans should decrease their carbohydrate intake to less than 10% of energy consumed. He added that it is hard to get protein intake above 50%, so that leaves fat.
“You have more oils in your diet, more fat in your diet,” he said. “Don’t trim away the fat around the beef steak. Eat that olive oil. Fat is what gives food flavor, but that’s what we are still being told to eat less of. But it should be the opposite. You should knock out carbs as much as you can, which is grains and pasta. Minimize that.”
“The protein is fine,” he said of the government’s recommendation of 20% of calories a day. “It’s the carb and fat ratio that you want to change. And that means eating more butter, healthy oils, olive oil, and that kind. Cheeses are fine. Whole milk instead of skim milk to get those fat calories in.”
“And now,” he added, “there are plenty of studies to show this works. Plenty of people with diabetes can get off their medications. They’re almost all off by knocking out the nutrient that causes all the problems in the body.”
