Dr. Jonny Bowden's Blog

In your opinion, what's the most overrated health food?

It's a tie between canola oil and agave nectar/syrup. Both are pretty much a triumph of marketing over facts. Starting with the former, the processing of commercial canola oil is like sausage making-the de-gumming, deodorizing and other hideous high heat procedures it undergoes in order to make it palatable make its reputation as a "health" oil pretty questionable. The only canola oil I consider even mildly acceptable is cold pressed and organic, and even then just as a salad oil, but there are much better ones. As for agave, it's funny to me that the same people who are outraged about the overuse of high fructose corn syrup are wild about this stuff. The composition of high fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose 45% glucose, while agave is between 55-90% fructose!

Thinking about the adage of breakfast being the most important meal (and we'll just call it "very important")-what foods go into yours?

Anything from a piece of wild salmon; to an egg, spinach, and apple scramble; to a raw food bonanza of berries, coconut flakes, nuts, and Greek yogurt sprinkled with probiotic powder.

So you're, er, "pro" probiotics, even in powder form?

Absolutely. Probiotic powders (or in some cases capsules) are on many nutritionists top ten-even top five-supplement lists. Health begins in the gut, where nutrients are absorbed, and if the gut is overrun with bad bacteria and has a limited amount of good bacteria, many systems are affected (including immunity). Probiotics have a nice research resume for being effective for many things-and we don't get enough of them because we don't eat enough fermented foods like yogurts, pickles, and kim chee.

What's your favorite new food find-anything you've just discovered and can't get enough of?

I'm a serial monogamist when it comes to food, and I've been in love with frozen cherries for a while now. Mixed with raw milk or yogurt they're my favorite edible nighttime treat. Cherries contain a whole family of beneficial plant chemicals called anthocyanins; some of which are particularly effective as anti-inflammatories. This is why cherries are so well known as a folk remedy for gout. Because frozen vegetables and fruits are picked and frozen at the height of ripeness, they're always a very good alternative when you can't get fresh.

How about a top health mistake people tend to make?

Believing high cholesterol causes heart disease. Fully half of the people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol. And fully half of the people with "elevated" cholesterol have no cardiovascular disease. In my book that makes cholesterol a pretty lousy predictor for heart disease, even though lowering it produces 20 billion in revenue for the makers of Lipitor and Zocor combined.

Supplements. What's your take?

The standard party line from the dinosaurs at the American Dietetic Association is that you can get everything you need from food. Try getting a decent dose of COQ10 from food-or alpha lipoic acid, or saw palmetto, or even vitamin D. Those people are idiots. You can get all you need from food if by "all you need," you're talking about enough to prevent a severe vitamin deficiency disease. Supplements allow us to handcraft a program that provides nutritional support for a wide variety of conditions. You might be able to manage without supplements, but you can manage without indoor plumbing also. The question is why would you?

What are three amazing foods we should be eating more of-and why?

I like blueberries, wild salmon, and grass-fed beef. Blueberries, for all the reasons you've heard before. Wild (not farmed) salmon, for its omega-3s, the antioxidant astaxathin (which gives it that pink color), and the protein. And grass-fed beef because it has none of the problems associated with commercial supermarket meat-no antibiotics, steroids, hormones and other potential carcinogens-along with a higher omega-3 content, some CLA (conjugated linolenic acid, an anti-cancer anti-obesity fat), and it's humanely raised on top of it.

Many thanks to Camille and Sara at Svelte Gourmand for this interview.

Labels: breakfast, interview, nutrition, p, probiotics, supplements

Meathead Breakfast

Q: What's the perfect breakfast for the hardcore weight-training dude?

A: Call me old fashioned, but I still can't see how you can improve much on oatmeal mixed with eggs and protein powder.

That's what the old timers at Gold's in Venice used to eat and they weren't exactly 98-pound weaklings. They'd bring Tupperware bowls full of the stuff, which, by the way, travels really nicely when you make it up at home.

If you're into minimal cooking you can also try one of my favorite egg dishes: Warm up some butter or coconut oil in a frying pan, slice up an apple, and brown the slices in the mix. Add two or three scrambled eggs and a couple of fistfuls of spinach and continue to stir until the spinach softens and the eggs are cooked. Season with anti-inflammatory turmeric [a.k.a. curcumin] and some lemon pepper.

If you think the 18 grams or so of protein in three eggs isn't enough for you, add a protein drink. And if you need extra slow-burning carbs, have a small bowl of oatmeal on the side.

Big Tobacco's New Buddy: Big Processed Food

Q: I heard recently that food manufacturers chemically alter some foods to make them more addictive, sort of like the cigarette companies have done with tobacco. Any truth to that or is it just a conspiracy theory?

A: I wish I could say it's a conspiracy theory just so I could get in a couple of tinfoil hat jokes, but unfortunately it's not.

Former FDA commissioner David Kessler, MD, goes into deep detail about exactly how this works in his new book, The End of Overeating (highly recommended, by the way) and it ain't pretty.

Kessler quotes research by Adam Drewnowski that shows it's the combination of sugar with fat that makes people go nuts. Give someone a packet of sugar and tell him to go to town and you won't get much enthusiasm. Ditto for a stick of butter. But combine the ingredients and watch out.

Drewnowski conducted a study where he added various amounts of sugar to five different dairy products from skim milk to heavy cream. People gave low marks to sweetened no-fat products like sweetened skim milk and low marks to unsweetened high-fat products like a heavy cream/vegetable oil blend. But any high-fat product that had sugar added, or any high-sugar product that had fat added, scored higher than the winner on American Idol.

This combo (sugar, fat, and/or salt) creates what Kessler calls "hyperpalatibility." Rats given a chance to eat such combinations will literally gorge themselves. Obviously, so do humans.

Sugar, fat, and salt is what makes food "compelling" according to dozens of food executives that Kessler interviewed. Take potato skins, for example. Typically, the potato is hollowed out and the skin is fried which provides a substantial surface area for "fat pick-up." Then some combination of bacon bits, sour cream, and cheese is added. The result is fat on fat on fat on fat, much of it loaded with salt.

Is this stuff addictive? You bet it is.

Sara Ward of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied the willingness of animals to work for a food reward even when they're not hungry. She used Ensure, a particularly loathsome drink doctors give to older patients who aren't eating enough calories. The breaking point at which the animals would no longer work for the "reward" was just slightly lower than the breaking point for cocaine.

So it's not so much that manufacturers chemically alter the food as it is that they use lethal (to us, not to them) combos of ingredients to make them irresistible and to make us overeat them.

Then they cleverly pair those foods with an actual emotional or visual experience, which later become stored as pleasant associations to the food - i.e. a "Happy Meal" or a TV commercial with Megan Fox. Pretty soon, you've got a customer for life.

CLA: Anti-Cancer, Maybe Anti-Belly Fat

Q: What do you think of CLA as a supplement? Any way to get it in foods?

A: The most impressive thing I've ever seen about CLA - conjugated linolenic acid - were the before and after pictures of rats in a CLA experiment. One group got their regular rat food and the other got the same diet plus CLA. Then they sacrificed the rats and photographed their abdominal regions. It was pretty dramatic - the CLA rats had hardly any abdominal fat compared to the rats that hadn't been fed CLA.

Wish that it worked that clearly in humans. It's definitely possible to find studies in good peer-reviewed journals that show that CLA reduces abdominal fat in some populations. (1) And one study even showed that it reduced the amount of abdominal fat gained over the holidays.(2)

But other studies show no such thing. And to add to the confusion, there are two isomers (arrangements of molecules) in CLA - the t10 c12 and the t9 c 11, and they're said to have somewhat different effects.

The research just isn't conclusive. For example, at least two studies show that CLA plus chromium lowered both body weight and visceral fat mass in high-fat diet fed mice (3, 4), but another study showed it didn't do squat for overweight women.(5)

But CLA seems to have some nice anti-cancer effects, and those are better documented than the weight loss effects in humans. So it certainly can't hurt to try it, but I wouldn't be too optimistic about its effect on weight alone.

If you try it, the dose would be 3 grams per day. It's found in the meat and by-products (like butter) from cattle, but only from healthy grass-fed beef. Besides having a lot more omega-3's, grass-fed organic beef also has CLA, which is virtually missing from the meat of grain-fed, high omega-6 factory-farmed animals.

Sugar Alcohols: The Good and the Gaseous

Q: I try to eat low-sugar foods but it seems that many of these are jam-packed with sugar alcohols like sorbitol, maltitol, etc. Is that stuff bad for you?

A: They're not exactly bad for you, but if you eat a lot of them you won't be a welcome guest at parties due to increased flatulance. But some are clearly better than others.

My favorite sugar alcohol is xylitol, which you can use in hot beverages and which has a very low glycemic impact. It also has some anti-bacterial effect (preventing bacteria from adhesing to tissues) which is why it's in all the "healthy" chewing gums.

Another sugar alcohol to watch for is erythritol. It has a glycemic impact of exactly zero, and so far no one has reported anything remotely bad about it. You're starting to see it in health food stores and it's sold under the Truvia name in little packets. Way better than something like Equal.

The Food Pyramid, Bowden-Style

Q: If you were to redesign the old government food pyramid, what would it look like?

A: It would probably be more like a circle with about 70% of calories divided equally among protein, fat, and fibrous vegetables and fruits; another 10% for nuts, another 10% for beans, and an optional 10% for grains.

New Health Food: Sugar?

Q: Now that most people know that HFCS is bad news, many food makers are bragging about using raw cane sugar or even organic sugar. Is that a better way to go?

A: The new marketing of sugar as a "health food" is the biggest crock of nonsense I've seen in a while, and I've seen some real doozies.

Let's get something straight. Both table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup have the same two ingredients: glucose and fructose. The more damaging of the molecules is clearly fructose, but check the proportions: High-fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Plain old crappy garden-variety sugar, now being sold as the "healthy" alternative to HFCS, is 50/50.

The problem with HFCS wasn't so much the extra 5% fructose, but the fact that it's so cheap that manufacturers now use it in everything, including foods that were never even sweetened before. This deeply increases the fructose load on the body, not so much because of the little bit of extra fructose, but because we're consuming so much of the stuff.

It's hard to see how substituting the same amount of a 50/50 mix ("natural" sugar, give me a break!) helps address the problem, which is that we're eating too much sugar, whatever form it comes in!

And by the way, just to blow your mind, the new darling of the health food set, agave nectar, is more than 90% fructose. Some bargain.

Incidentally, in case this wasn't clear from previous articles, fructose in its natural setting - like in an actual apple - isn't the problem. It's when you extract it and use it as a sweetening agent, either as 55% of HFCS, 50% of sugar or 90% of agave nectar. Then it's a huge problem.

This interview was originally published at Tmuscle.com. Read the uncensored interview with Jonny Bowden »

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