Michael R. Eades - Protein Power

You may be wondering how a couple of physicians who specialize in weight loss in a relatively small city in Middle America devised a nutritional program that works as well as this one does, while most of the scientists in the major universities are headed off in the opposite direction, puzzling over why their success with low-fat diet plans has been so minimal. In a nutshell, we lucked out. We lucked out because thats how science works. Science progresses because people continue to question why. Researchers propose hypotheses based on their understanding of the natural world and then test themand most of the time these theories blow up in their faces. The lucky ones stumble onto the hypotheses that turn out to be valid. But of course theres more than luck involved, because as Louis Pasteur said, Chance favors the prepared mind, and in our case our minds were prepared by many years of clinical practice with patients suffering all the illnesses that are heir to disordered insulin metabolism as well as by our unique combination of medical interests. Mike is a collector of diet books and old medical texts and has a strong interest in paleopathology and biochemistry; Mary Dan is interested in anthropology and has published a book on eating disorders and the deranged metabolic status of eating-disordered patients.

We have a copy of the earliest diet book ever to sweep the nation, Bantings Letter on Corpulence, first printed in the middle 1800s. This restricted-carbohydrate diet worked like a charm for Banting and, if sales were any in duration, many others. It has always intrigued us because it completely flies in the face of todays low-fat paradigm. At about the same time we ran across Banting we began attending paleopathology conferences and studying anthropology, where we learned what paleopathologists and anthropologists have known for years: the agricultural revolution and the increased consumption of carbohydrates it brought along with it played havoc with the health of early man. Mary Dans extensive study of eating disorders and metabolic hormonal derangements combined with Mikes interest in biochemistry rounded out the preparation of our minds. We looked at Bantings success with carbohydrate restriction along with the paleopathological/anthropological data showing a decline in health accompanying an increase in carbohydrate intake and concluded that maybe the intake of large amounts of carbohydrates wasnt necessarily a good thing. That became our first mini-hypothesis: excess carbohydrate consumption isnt good. But why not?

We knew, as does every doctor, that the immediate effect of carbohydrate consumption is increased blood glucose, then an increased insulin level. We thought that perhaps the increased insulin levels might be to blame for part of the problem. As we studied the medical literature, we found that researchers the world over were finding elevated insulin levels associated with obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetesthe common diseases of modern man. We also found that the same researchers were for the most part trying to treat these patients by giving them more of the same thing we were beginning to believe may have caused the problem in the first place: the high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. It made more sense to us that if excess insulin indeed