Over the Counter Natural Cures (23 page)

Health professionals and popular media insist that “there is no cure for type 2 diabetes.” Such statements stem from misconceptions about health, prescription drugs, and type 2 diabetes (herein referred to as insulin resistance), not from science. This chapter aims to eradicate the confusion and the insulin-resistance epidemic.

Your newfound understanding of metabolism, blood sugar,
commonly used prescription drugs, and supplements will equate to years of increased lifespan, bad blood or not. It will also keep you out of the Fat Gain Hall of Fame.

MY NOMINATION INTO THE FAT COW HALL OF FAME

I have been rail thin…and I have carried more fat than I like to admit. As a collegiate wrestler, I had 4 percent body fat. As time passed and I moved into my late twenties, I ballooned to a whopping 30 percent body fat. I felt weak, tired, edgy, and depressed, and I was haunted by a constant craving for food—usually anything that had sugar. My brain screamed, “Eat, eat, eat,” and my body said, “Store, store, store.” It was the beginning of a metabolic nightmare. My wife would hint that I was “getting round.” Later, I learned that she secretly felt I was becoming a candidate for the Fat Cow Hall of Fame.

Through graduate school and a career as a medicinal chemist, my weight was steadily climbing. After carrying 140 pounds in college, I was now schlepping around 205 pounds. Not cool. Unlike so many fat people today, I didn't carry it proudly. I didn't let my waist “muffin top” out of my jeans, and I knew instinctively that “tight wasn't right.”

The best part about being fat was that I could invent a ton of excuses for letting myself go. I made the excuse that “my dad was fat. And so was his dad. Being fat runs in the family.” I made the excuse that “getting fat is an inevitable part of aging.” I made the excuse that “getting fat doesn't matter; everyone else is.” Once I realized how ridiculous these excuses were, I wanted to get thin fast. My knee-jerk reaction was to look for a pill.

DIET PILL SECRETS

As an organic chemist trained in biochemistry and drug design, my first course of action was to consider the weight-loss drugs. I scrutinized
every diet pill available. I mapped out the purported actions of Fen-Phen, Alli, Hoodia, SSRIs, Wellbutrin, chromium picolinate, and whatever else the nutritional supplement industry hailed as the latest and greatest diet pill.

FEN-PHEN

The first diet pill to hit the market was a combo of the psychostimulants fenfluramine and phentermine (marketed as Fen-Phen). Made by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, its $52 million marketing plan began selling the pants off fat Americans in 1992 by promising appetite control—despite not having FDA approval for the so-called anorectic drug combo. Fen-Phen's benefit hardly outweighed its risk. Users lost a mere 5.5 pounds of body weight, compared to the loss achieved by dieting alone.

Research published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
showed that users of the combo faced a twenty-three-fold increase in the risk of developing pulmonary hypertension and cardiovascular complications.
¹³⁰
Marketing ceased in 1997 after rampant heart disease and death. Wyeth paid about $17 billion in damages but was never charged by the FDA for the illegal marketing of an unapproved drug.

ALLI

The over-the-counter diet pill Alli is proving to be worthless, too, just like its commercial predecessor Xenical. Both trade names represent the same drug: orlistat. Once ingested, it blocks the absorption of dietary fat intake—both good and bad fats. The activity of the drug only achieves about 5 percent loss of total body weight. Simultaneously, it puts users at risk for decreased absorption of essential, fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K and beta-carotene. But there's an icky side effect that most aren't aware of until it's too late.

Alli may go down in history as the most embarrassing—or at least the most revolting—diet pill in history. While leaching essential vitamins from the body, it also causes users to…shall we say…"poop their pants.” Seriously. Its maker, GlaxoSmithkline, suggests that users “wear dark pants or bring a change of clothes to work.” Skipping one soda per day, or maybe even just looking at a gym, would prove more effective and less risky than using Alli—and you wouldn't have to carry a diaper to work.

Attempting to lose weight by blocking or avoiding fat is futile—as proven by Alli. Eating fat in general does not make you fat. Eating unhealthy fat does. Healthy fats (from seeds, nuts, grass-fed beef, avocados, fish, and coconut oil) are essential for proper growth, development, and maintenance of good health. These vital fat sources provide your body with energy without causing you to gain weight. In sharp contrast to trans fats, carbohydrates, and even protein, healthy fat tells your body to burn fat (via lypolysis and thermogenesis) while making you feel fuller quicker—preventing you from eating yourself into the Fat Cow Hall of Fame.

HOODIA

Hoodia gordonii
seems to be “all the craze” in diet pills. It garners millions and suckers even more. Discovered in 1937, it's used by the San Bushmen of Africa to curb appetite during long stints in the desert. It was never used for fat loss. But that didn't stop drug giant Pfizer from investing over $20 million to research its active ingredients. Apparently, researchers intuitively thought that appetite control would lead to fat loss—and that Americans would benefit from curbing their hunger during the arduous, hunger-inducing stints at the grocery store. Wrong.

Hoodia only slightly curbs hunger among obese Americans—probably due to their severe sugar addiction. Still though, hoodia hucksters call this
the “miracle effect.” In reality, it's the “pointless effect.” Hoodia's slight anorectic ability has never translated into significant weight loss. There are no large-scale clinical trials to prove otherwise. Lesson learned, Pfizer abandoned hoodia and its active ingredients—a steroidal glycoside—as a diet pill. They unleashed it to the supplement industry. Ignoring the science, which they seem to do very well, the industry uses the cactuslike plant to scam dietary supplement users daily.

SSRIS

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are being used to capitalize on America's expanding waistline. None are FDA-approved as diet pills. But in a frantic scramble to get a piece of the diet pill action, the drug industry is touting and prescribing these antidepressants as such.

Experts thought that SSRIs would increase the amount of active serotonin in the brain and control appetite to elicit perfect weight. The SSRI known as Wellbutrin (bupropion hydrochloride) refutes the flawed hypothesis.

Wellbutrin fails to shrink the ever-expanding belly. People who used it for a year lost a clinically insignificant 7.5 percent to 8.6 percent of body weight, according to a study funded by its maker. And users faced ghastly side effects.
¹³¹

Wellbutrin was withdrawn in 1986 because of an unacceptable incidence of seizures. It was released later that year for unknown reasons. Clinical trials show that 6.1 percent of users suffer from seizures. Reallife data suggest much higher rates. Wellbutrin is the third-leading cause of drug-related seizures, with cocaine being number one.

Wellbutrin isn't the only failed SSRI being pushed as a diet pill. The drug industry is ravenous for the fat profit that comes from fat Americans. Therefore, they're eager to push Prozac (fluoxetine) or the biological wild
card known as Meridia (sibutramine) as the next billion dollar diet pill. All have failed miserably—causing every one of them to be prescribed with “proper diet and exercise.”

CHROMIUM PICOLINATE

Capitalizing on the overt failures of the pharmaceutical industry, supplement companies continue to amass billions by peddling what they say are safe and natural diet pills. Like its pharmaceutical counterpart, the supplement industry uses a slew of herbal products in an attempt to confer perfect weight. Chromium picolinate is among the most well known.

Chromium picolinate continues to garner attention from the obese who hope to lose fat with a single pill. Chromium is a trace metal that works in our body to activate insulin. Without it, insulin would be unable to escort toxic glucose out of the bloodstream and into the muscle cells for energy metabolism.

Recognizing this, supplement hucksters erroneously promote chromium picolinate as an insulin-lowering agent. The theory is that by potentiating the fat-storing hormone insulin with chromium picolinate, our bodies would produce less of it. And less insulin means less fat storage. This theory has not held up to the rigors of the scientific method.

Looking closer at clinical trials, researchers at Harvard University found that supplementing with the co-factor chromium picolinate failed to elicit any significant weight loss—a meager two to four pounds over six to fourteen weeks, a loss that could be achieved in seven days among the obese with proper exercise. The big fat failure of chromium picolinate to induce weight loss probably results from the fact that the obese are not deficient in this metal.

Biologically, active chromium is readily available in common foods such
as whole grains, processed meats, coffee, nuts, and even wine and beer. And because it is a “co-factor,” the body requires very little of it to properly use insulin. Thus, every one of these sources can provide the required amount.

BETA-AGONISTS

The supplement industry is hell-bent on discovering the hot, new, billion-dollar diet pill. To this end, scientists have discovered some promising herbs. Many of them work on a family of receptors within the sympathetic nervous system known as beta-receptors. Termed
beta-agonists
, select natural products can work to activate two metabolic processes known as thermogenesis and lypolysis. This simply helps convert stored fat into heat and energy, respectively.

Either directly or indirectly, citrus aurantium, green tea, and yohimbe bark serve as beta-agonists. But, despite their ability to activate thermogenesis and lypolysis, they fail to stick to their promise of being effective diet pills. Using them individually to achieve the perfect metabolism has yet to outperform diet and exercise, and many of their metabolic benefits are negated by poor lifestyle habits.

Unable or unwilling to understand the difference between a betaagonist and a stimulant like caffeine, most nutritional supplement companies design diet pills that simply stimulate the hell out of you—probably due to the inexpensive and addictive nature of stimulants. This explains the added marketing trickery of promising “energy.” Users are ultimately left feeling shaky, dehydrated, and usually edgy.

Pull any top brand off your grocery shelf, and you'll find that it is loaded with high doses of caffeine, caffeine-containing herbs, or stimulants like white tea, oolong tea, yerba mate, and guarana. Users feel energized and alert, but they rarely lose fat—unless they are channeling their energy into exercise.

You can't swallow a pill to achieve what companies are selling: effortless fat loss. There are simply too many lifestyle factors that control weight gain or loss. The only sure-fire way to control weight is to see if you are suffering from the silent killer known as high blood sugar. I had to get really fat and lethargic to learn this.

SUGAR ADDICTION (OR HOW I GOT SO FAT)

As adults, most of us have ignored the warning not to eat sugar. We usually pay more attention to how many calories or grams of fat we put into our body. This was my deadly mistake.

Most low-calorie and low-fat foods are loaded with sugar or “sugar mimics.” These include sucrose, fructose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate (MSG), hydrolyzed proteins, trans fat, and milk sugars such as lactose and maltose—what I call grocery-store fat traps.

Looking at my own eating habits, I was shocked to learn that I was consuming sugar every time I put something into my mouth. Whether I was drinking a “sports drink,” eating a “health food” bar, enjoying a bagel, or even lunching on Campbell's soup, I was consuming some type of detrimental sugar that was causing my body to hold fat rather than burn it. This was the obesity link I was looking for. My fat gain had nothing to do with excess calories or too many grams of bad fat. Instead, it had everything to do with grocery-store fat traps and their detrimental effect on my blood sugar and insulin levels.

Insulin is the nutrient taxi. When you consume sugar, carbohydrates, and protein, your pancreas releases the hormone into your bloodstream to escort blood sugar (AKA blood glucose) and other nutrients into the muscle cells to be used for fuel and revitalization. This keeps us alive and energized. Too much insulin, however, can be detrimental.

Grocery-store fat traps and processed foods that contain massive
amounts of simple carbohydrates (anything served out of a window, package, or box) elicit the drastic release of insulin. This sets a metabolic nightmare into motion.

Surging insulin levels tell the body to store fat and instead use glucose (blood sugar) for fuel. That process cripples fat metabolism by shutting off our God-given rights to be thin—lypolysis and thermogenesis.

Lypolysis is the conversion of fat to work. Thermogenesis is the conversion of fat to heat. Both processes ensure that you walk, not waddle, through life. Without them, fat is stored—typically in the abdomen—and is unable to be used for energy. The fat-promoting phenomena of insulin explain why attempts to lose fat via exercise and trendy diets are usually only successful short term. Fat loss is simply being “blocked” by excess insulin. But that's not all. The metabolic nightmare also causes hormonal systems that regulate muscle growth, sex drive, appetite, mood, energy, and even fertility to be thrown out of whack.

This metabolic nightmare is usually secured long-term by a sugar addiction that accompanies excess insulin. This explains why many people who are obese or suffer from type 2 diabetes feel helpless when it comes to fat gain. They are being driven by a sugar addiction that is conducive to fat gain day in and day out.