If you are like many people I talk to these days, you’ve heard about cholesterol and are concerned about it, but what really bothers you is your weight. You know being overweight is unhealthy, but mainly you don’t like the way it looks and feels. It’s a physical, social, and psychological encumbrance. And it just keeps creeping up. You’ve probably tried dieting, but that didn’t work the way you hoped. You lost a few pounds, but it all came back. You know exercise helps, but you can’t seem to muster the energy to do it. Chances are, you’re a little discouraged.
You may also be getting a little worried. It was bad enough when your weight was just a matter of looks—now you’re wondering if it could cause serious health problems. You know that being overweight raises your risk of heart disease and diabetes. Maybe your doctor told you that your “bad cholesterol” was high or your “good cholesterol” was low, or that your blood sugar was rising.
Everywhere you turn, you get hit with dietary advice. Every nutrition expert on the globe is hawking a new diet, and the funny thing is, they often contradict one another. Some weight gurus tell us to eat less fat and more carbohydrates; others recommend the opposite. Some advocate vegetarianism; others say we should eat more meat. So many weight-loss solutions are touted that you can’t help but conclude the obvious: none of them works very well.
You need to be skeptical of things you hear and read about weight loss, because there’s a lot of wackiness in the field of nutrition. Sensationalists and pseudo-experts comb the nooks and crannies of food research looking for tantalizing factoids, and then report them out of context as if these items represent the hottest news coming down the pike. They play on people’s fascination with the notion that small amounts of potent, heretofore unrecognized substances in foods can cure or cause disease.
Furthermore, some diet-book authors encourage food extremism that has no basis in scientific fact. Claims that we’re deficient in a particular vitamin, that hidden pollutants are making us sick, and so on, ignore the fact that researchers have spent billions of dollars and millions of hours trying to find links between diet and disease, and for the most part, have come up empty-handed. Remember, too, that when useful information is found, researchers are quick to spread the news to the medical community.
One reason food experts are so adamant in their opinions is what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. When people make a choice, they tend to seek out information that supports their decision and discount information that contradicts it. Avoiding contradictory information reduces inner conflict, or cognitive dissonance. If a person makes daily decisions to eat a particular way for years, that individual will invariably become convinced of the wisdom of such a regimen and see alternatives in an unfavorable light.
Indeed, most diet gurus try to eat the way they preach. Eating is a highly personal activity. If these people changed their opinions, they would have to admit not only that their ideas and statements were off-base, but also that they were consuming the wrong food. It would create too much cognitive dissonance.
Another reason experts can’t agree on what constitutes a good diet is that it’s difficult to detect concrete differences in people’s health based on what they eat. Our bodies have an amazing capacity to take what we eat, convert it to what our bodies need, and get rid of the rest. Nutritionists may nitpick about the fine points, but human beings generally do well on any kind of diet as long as it contains some plants and some animal products.
Fortunately for us, in recent decades, scientists have acquired some important lessons on the ways in which unbalanced diets result in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. At the same time, though, because these discoveries contradict previous notions that people held dear, the new ideas have created heated controversy.
So, if you’re skeptical of weight-loss claims, you have good reason to be. Despite all the dietary advice peddled in the media today, Americans just keep getting fatter. That makes it abundantly clear that if an answer exists, it has eluded many of us.
For that reason, it’s important to tell you that the advice I give here is based not only on my interpretation of medical research, but also on the experience I’ve accumulated in twenty-five years of practicing preventive cardiology. I have seen the strategies I advocate help people lose weight, lower cholesterol, and prevent diabetes. The newest concepts about nutrition have bolstered my confidence in these approaches and inspired me to share them with you in this book.
The good news is that science is coming to the rescue. In the last couple of decades, billions of dollars have been spent on research into human metabolism, and the investment is finally starting to pay off. Scientists have made remarkable breakthroughs in their understanding of the way lifestyle and genetics interact to influence such things as weight and cholesterol. This new knowledge has overturned many of the notions doctors and nutritionists took for granted for years, and at last, new, more effective ways of losing weight, lowering cholesterol, and preventing diabetes are emerging.
As a preventive cardiologist who has spent more than two decades specializing in treating conditions that lead to heart and artery disease, including obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, I have grown as familiar with my patients’ weight fluctuations and blood tests as I have with their faces. In a clinic equipped with analyzers that quickly measure blood levels of good and bad cholesterol, triglycerides, and glucose, I have observed the responses of thousands of people’s weight, cholesterol, and blood glucose to assorted lifestyle changes and medical interventions.
In the past few years, largely owing to discoveries about human metabolism, my approach to helping people with weight problems, high cholesterol, and diabetes has evolved in ways I could never have predicted even a decade ago. Perhaps the most surprising turnaround has been in my thinking about diet.
Today, understanding what I now know to be true, I have a newfound respect for the wisdom of another cardiologist, the late Dr. Robert Atkins. In the 1970s, Atkins popularized a weight-loss diet in which he advocated almost completely eliminating carbohydrates such as fruit, vegetables, and grains but continuing the consumption of fatty foods, including eggs, meat, butter, and cheese. The diet helped people lose weight but fell into disrepute because it encouraged them to eat cholesterol-containing foods at a time when doctors thought dietary cholesterol was the main cause of heart disease. However, in recent years, many of Atkins’s critics have come to realize that they should have listened more closely to what he had to say.
New studies have confirmed what Atkins contended all along: low-carbohydrate diets are more effective than low-fat diets for losing weight. And, dietary cholesterol is not nearly as harmful as the medical establishment thought.
Although Atkins proved to the world that low-carbohydrate diets work and usually don’t raise blood cholesterol levels, much has been learned about nutrition and weight loss since he first popularized his diet. Here are some examples of new concepts that are changing the way nutritionists and doctors think about obesity and high cholesterol:
I have developed a method of combining the scientifically validated elements of the Atkins diet with newer concepts of metabolism. This isn’t just a diet; it’s a way of finding the right strategy for each individual. The results have been amazing:
Nutritional scientists have learned that what’s making so many of us fat and diabetic isn’t the tasty parts of our diet, or the pleasant textures, or the things that contain vitamins, minerals, and fiber. The real villain is a flavorless paste that has no nutritional value whatsoever—that relatively recent addition to our diets commonly known as starch. Because we are physically and economically addicted to this substance, we eat hundreds of times more than our thinner, less diabetic ancestors did. The New Low-Carb Way will help you stop the damage. Tame this beast, and everything else—losing weight, lowering cholesterol, reducing your risk of diabetes—becomes much easier.
You can use new discoveries about body chemistry to tailor your diet, exercise regimen, and medical treatment to your individual metabolism in ways that will give you the best results for your efforts. With the right strategy in hand, you will be amazed how easy it is to accomplish what you set out to do.
You will discover that the New Low-Carb Way means you can get healthier by eating satisfying amounts of good food. It’s absolutely true—you really can radically lower your blood cholesterol level, attain a healthy body weight, and prevent diabetes, yet still eat the foods you love, including chocolate, in satisfying quantities.
Although other popular diet books advocate low-carbohydrate diets—including Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution; The South Beach Diet, by Arthur Agatston, M.D.; and The Zone, by Barry Sears—The New Low-Carb Way is different in several important ways.
To make this book work for you and your personal status in regard to cholesterol, weight, and general health, you should first read part 1 in order to understand the following principles of the New Low-Carb Way:
Or, if you want to cut to the chase, start with part 2, which tells you how to determine your own body-chemistry specifics (the crux of the New Low-Carb Way), and then you can move on to the eating plan, outlined in part 3. If your chief interest is losing weight, read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. If you mainly want to prevent heart disease or stroke, read part 1 and then skip to part 5. To give you a global perspective, here are the basics of the program I have devised:
Step 1 Gather information about yourself (parts 1 and 2). Obtain at least rough estimates of the items in the following list (the first three come from the results of your most recent blood tests). Chapter 3 tells you to use the information.
Step 2 Profile your body chemistry. Use chapters 6 and 7 to uncover the answers to the following questions:
Step 3 Choose a strategy based on your goals and body chemistry. Use chapter 8 to help you zero in on one of the following:
Step 4 Take action. After you choose your strategy, use the tools you need from the following list in order to achieve your goals.
As you read this book, you will be pleased to discover that the New Low-Carb Way is really easy to do and definitely isn’t about extreme food deprivation or exercise overkill. You just have to alter a few lifestyle habits, which will lead you to exactly what you want: weight loss, a healthier heart, and improved overall health.