Latest / Common Sense Health / Sugar and Rice Diet
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello, today I'm talking about the rice and sugar diet. Now imagine my face when I, a staunch advocate of the carnivore diet, sit down to write an article exploring a dietary protocol consisting almost entirely of white rice, fruit juice and refined table sugar. Now you would be forgiven for thinking, well, I've lost my mind. Or I've been covertly sponsored by the Sugar Research Foundation. But bear with me, because to truly understand human physiology, we have to use some joined up thinking and confront the paradoxes. And there is no greater paradox in nutritional science than Dr Walter Kempner's rice and sugar diet. was introduced at Duke University in 1939, and this protocol was used to treat severe health conditions like malignant hypertension, kidney failure and, quite surprisingly, diabetes. Now, recently, research teams digitized Kempner's patient charts, over 17,000 of them, and the findings confirmed what he claimed decades ago. Patients saw dramatic reductions in blood pressure, reversal of diabetic symptoms and recovery from renal failure. pretty good so far. So how does a diet that violates every rule of carbohydrate intolerance actually reverse diabetes? Well, the secret doesn't lie in the sugar they were eating. It lies in what they weren't eating. So we need a little sort of sidebar here about Otto Warburg and the cancer fermentation connection. So to understand Kempner, we have to look at his mentor. Now Kempner trained under this brilliant German physiologist and and Nobel laureate Otto Walberg. Now Walberg won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme. However, he is most famous for what is now known as the Walberg effect. He discovered that unlike healthy cells, which generate energy efficiently using oxygen in the mitochondria, cancer cells behave entirely differently. Even when plenty of oxygen is present, cancer cells bypass normal respiration and instead rely on a primitive, inefficient form of energy production, the fermentation of glucose, which we call aerobic glycolysis. Now, Warburg believed that the root of cancer and many of the cellular diseases was this failure of cellular ⁓ respiration. He was obsessed with how cells produce and utilize energy. And Kempner absorbed this philosophy, concluding that chronic diseases, particularly of the his retina and heart were rooted in cellular exhaustion and metabolic overload. To Kempner, the only way to heal damaged, failing cells was to drastically reduce the metabolic burden that was placed upon them. So the Kempner protocol was essentially all about reducing metabolic burden. So following Warburg's influence, Kempner believes that a diet to lessen the metabolic load could restore function in interrelated failing organs. And his solution was to reduce this load to absolute baseline levels. So the original rice diet provided around 2000 to 2400 calories daily. It was incredibly high in carbohydrates, but almost entirely devoid of sodium, fat and most crucially protein. And by the way, I use the word calories very loosely as I don't think it's a good metric, but here I use it because people do understand it quite broadly. And that's how the literature was written in those days. Now, when dealing with chronic kidney disease, reducing protein drastically lowers the amount of waste from nitrogen urea, giving failing kidneys a much needed break in that way. As a quick aside, this is why standard creatinine blood tests can skew if you you're eating a standard low-carb or carnivore diet due to higher meat intake and muscle mass. If you want an accurate assessment of your filtration rate of your kidneys, please always look at the cystatin C, which is not influenced by protein. But anyway, now, how did this diet, the sugar and rice one, reverse diabetes, a disease that is at its core, chronic carbohydrate intolerance? Well, this is where the metabolic magic trick happens. The heavy lifting of the rice and sugar diet was almost certainly driven by this severe protein restriction which triggers a fascinating and powerful hormonal pathway. And I'm talking about a hormone called FGF21, fibroblast growth factor 21. Now FGF21 is a metabolic master switch primarily secreted by the liver. In the early 2000s, researchers investigating diabetes and obesity treatments discovered that severe protein restriction, specifically a lack of essential amino acids, like methionine caused the liver to panic a little bit. It senses an amino acid famine and begins pumping out massive amounts of FGF 21. Now, when FGF 21 is elevated, it forcefully increases glucose uptake into the tissues, which is always incorrectly called increasing insulin sensitivity, by the way. Anyway, FGF 21 also increases energy expenditure and promotes fat oxidation. So by starving the body of protein, kempner's patients were kept below 20 grams a day. The diet kept FGF21 chronically elevated so the body became so artificially sensitized to insulin that it could clear the massive sugar loads that Kempner was feeding them. So the patients weren't healing because sugar is good for diabetes. They were experiencing a profound stress-induced starvation response that temporarily bypassed their metabolic blockades. Hope that made sense. While the digitized data confirms that Kempner got results, applying common sense reveals why this diet is a terrible idea for a long-term chronic disease and the management of it today. So let me go over three key areas where it's a problem. if the first one is sarcopenia and malnutrition, you cannot survive on 15 grams of protein a day without your body cannibalizing its own lean tissue to get the amino acids it needs for basic survival. Patients on the Rice diet lost massive amounts of weight but a significant portion of that was vital muscle mass. Losing muscle exacerbates insulin problems in the long term. A skeletal muscle is your primary metabolic sink for glucose. Number two ⁓ physiological torture compliance on the rice diet was notoriously abysmal. Kempner was known to rule his clinic with an iron fist sometimes actually yelling at patients who deviated so living on a plain white rice and sugar water diet is a miserable existence that completely ignores the satiety ⁓ nutrient density and a basic joy humans required to thrive really and the third one was treating the symptoms starving the patient Kempner's approach opposed the conventional wisdom of restricting sugar, ⁓ positing instead that diabetes is a cellular inability to utilize glucose. While true, his solution was to use protein starvation to forcefully kick down the cellular doors to accept the sugar. But the nub of this is simple. Why use severe protein malnutrition to force glucose into cells when we can simply address carbohydrate intolerance by removing this amount of carbohydrate? So the bottom line is that Dr. Kempner's work is a fascinating historical anomaly and a masterclass in how extreme metabolic manipulation can force the body to adapt. It proves that our biology is incredibly resilient and it highlights how powerful pathways like FGF21 can be so useful when they're triggered. at the time. However, we do not need to subject ourselves to a low protein, high sugar gulag to achieve metabolic healing. A well formulated ketogenic or carnivore lifestyle achieves metabolic rest, drastically lowers insulin and reverses type 2 diabetes. I've seen it plenty of times. So all the while we're providing the essential amino acids and healthy fats required to build muscle, support our vascular system and actually enjoy our life. So while I tip my hat to Dr. Kempner for his historical contribution to the medical literature, I think I will pass on a bowl of sugar and rice. If anyone needs me, I'll be over there eating a ribeye. Now that noise indicates I've come to the end of the information on the rice and sugar diet. I hope you enjoyed it. was a comment prompted to do this. I've got a comment on my sub stack. If you're looking for a community that values joined up thinking of a mainstream nutritional dogma, you could also join my common sense carnival community online. There is a link in the description or you could even book a console if you're interested in a one to one chat with me. You want to deeply look into your own blood work or your metabolic health. I'm there for that as well. You can also find me on my website at theukcarnivore.com So I hope you enjoyed this very short video and I look forward to seeing you on the next one. If you enjoyed it, please consider like, sharing and subscribing. And if you got to the end and you didn't enjoy it, well, I do apologize. Hopefully the next one you will enjoy. See you soon.