Low-GI Diet Helps Make Babies

Less Toast, More Eggs

A diet of primarily low-glycemic carbohydrates, such as fresh vegetables and fruits, has been found to boost fertility. At least it did for Jools Oliver, wife of TV celeb chef Jamie.

The fetching Briton and her hubby have popped out two babies, only after Mrs. O changed her diet.

We’ve known this for years, but the mainstream is finally catching on to the fact that the body’s hormone levels can easily be controlled by keeping blood sugar and insulin balanced. Here is a batch of data demonstrating the effects low glycemic index carbs can have with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS).

I’m a bit confused: The article, bootlegged from the London Telegraph, tells us that scrambled eggs and toast are low-glycemic. Toast? Maybe in England, where dry white toast might be the healthiest carb on the breakfast table among crumpets and, um, spotted dick.


I’m certainly no fertility expert, but I’d say if you’re trying to balance your insulin, stay away from the toast. Have some fruit with your eggs.

But it seems to have helped keep Mrs. Oliver busy.

Dictator Does Doritos

I guess we are torturing them after all.

I’ll be the first to say it: Saddam Hussein’s prison conditions are indistinguishable from those of the Nazis, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Stalin’s gulags…or even that hell-on-earth, Camp Delta, Cuba.

The former Iraqi president is being executed slowly, his pancreas and liver murdered one corn chip at a time. Sure, he asks his captors to bring him a bag. But do the imperialist dogs have to be so cruel as actually to inflict the helpless man with their orange triangles of death?

It’s been a while since I’ve made a meal out of an entire bag of chips, but it’s hardly what one would call prison food. Especially for the likes of the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’.


Crunch all you want.
We’ll buy more.

Reports also tell us Hussein wipes his food tray and washes his hands quickly after being touched. He is described as a germ-phobe, but this is the first time in decades he’s had to eat his meals without the peace-of-mind of a food taster. The man has lived in fear of being poisoned.

Nonetheless, he polishes off a family size bag of nacho cheese flavor tortilla chips in ten minutes. Surprised he doesn’t suspect that the bright powder on his fingertips is ‘agent orange.’

It’s only a matter of time before so-called human rights advocates protest America’s cruel acts of junk food addiction being perpetrated on their prisoners. Perhaps Bob Geldof will campaign for a menu of alfalfa sprouts and tuna salad. At least slap the California warning label on the bag.

Asked a “drive-by caller” to the Rush Limbaugh show today:

“Who’s eating better these days on the island of Cuba? Guantanamo detainees or Elian Gonzalez?”

Betcha Can’t Eat Just One

Left Coast Buttinskis Save Lives

Californian health ‘advocates’ apparently aren’t satisfied with their existing Nanny-State regulations, and are trying to slap warning labels on bags of chips. Cancer warning labels. On potato chips.

Cali’s Prop 65 requires warnings on all products that contain trace amounts of carcinogens, and acrylamide is one such chemical that the World Health Organization has found in some commercially-processed, starchy foods.

OK. But what about everything else in chips that’s been proven unhealthy?
These hippies can’t see the forest for the acrymalide.

A health professional who claims to be an ‘advocate’ of the public health and who enjoys the resources of the WHO studies and who has the Governor’s ear has a responsibility to find better ways to feed the people.

This measure, if effective, would only serve to punish the “big corporations” (which is the real goal of any activist, after all) who manufacture snacks by requiring the addition of warning labels. It’s an expense, but also an attempted deterrent.



Canada requires graphic warnings
on cigarettes that take up half
the area of the package.


The efforts of these attorneys, if they really cared about the public health, and if they really wanted to reduce the profits of snack giants like Frito-Lay and Proctor & Gamble, would be better spent encouraging the people to give up processed and starchy foods altogether. With hope, Governor Schwarzenegger will be more practical.

Vetoed, As Predicted

Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell Vetoes SB 1309

As asserted in this column earlier, Connecticut’s Junk Food Bill was flawed in that it was based on bad nutrition myth. While any measure to limit junk food consumption by our children is a step in the right direction, much state-mandated “advice” such as this Bill, or as the USDA Pyramid, simply provides another means of escape from personal nutrition responsibility.

And, when that advice is full of incorrect data and legendary assumptions, its intended recipients suffer. The bureaucrats make money, the lobbyists retire early, the doctors publish best sellers, and all while another generation of kids grows fatter and lazier.



You can always expect an AP staff writer to blame the “big corporations” for the failure, never to admit something proposed by a Democrat politician would fail on its own merits:

“Soft drink companies lobbied fiercely against the bill. Williams said about $250,000 was spent to lobby against the legislation.”

That’s State Senate President Pro Temp Donald E. Williams, Jr., Democrat, who feels that the veto is the “biggest blunder” of Governor Rell’s administration.


Sen. Williams, left, who, when he isn’t saving your children from you, is saving owls’ habitats.


Rell explains why she agrees that “…the bill usurped the role of parents…”, that she prefers to keep such decisions within the realm of home: “It is my hope that local boards of education can take the guidelines developed by the department and tailor the guidelines in such a way that they meet the needs of the children and parents…”

Keep it local. Let the government make some decisions for us, but don’t let a bunch of bureaucrats and lobbyists make all of them.

New Jersey’s Junk Ban

We’re still keeping an eye on Connecticut’s Bill 1309, banning some junk food from the state’s public schools.

The Bill is a welcome good start, sure, but it is flawed. There is a misconception that because high-fructose corn syrup, which is still less than half fructose and mostly glucose, is packaged in a nippled bottle with a picture of a sweaty ballplayer on the label that it is somehow healthy.



The latest word is that Gov. Rell, above, will veto it.

Developing…




Now New Jersey is the latest of some dozen and a half states to attempt to enact a junk food ban. Never one to mess around, the Garden State proposes to be a bit stricter than Connecticut:

Under the New Jersey plan, soda, candy and foods listing sugar as the first or principal ingredient will be banned from school cafeterias. Snacks and drinks with more than eight grams of total fat per serving and two grams of saturated fat will be banned, and cafeterias will have to restrict amounts of foods with trans fats.

Paleolithic readers might not like that limit on saturated fat, but remember that ‘snacks and drinks’ in this case most likely means dairy fat and transfatty hydrogenated crap like corn chips and yellow, plastic nacho cheeze (with a Z).



Jersey’s is the better plan here, as they would ban all soda pop (even diet), and “sports” drinks. Only water, milk, and 100% juice. And this means everywhere at the school, vending machines, after-school activities and events.

Some buildings are said to “rely” on the extra income of peddling junk food, but that’s tough. The schools are going to have to figure out that they can turn a profit selling something more wholesome at a ball game. Complaining that a concession stand can’t capitalize on selling healthier snacks like fruit and pita sandwiches and fresh juice is like saying no one’s going to pay a couple hundred more for a car with seatbelts in it.

It may be true that demand has more power than supply when it comes to teenage appetites. And I’m sure a cocaine dealer says he doesn’t have to ‘push’ his product; it just sells itself. But the school snack bar is not the place to conduct such an experiment.



Of course, the article lets us know some people don’t like the junk food ban, like 13-year-old Malcolm Jones, who says “it’s whack” that they took his pizza and fries.

Like the Connecticut Bill, the NJ Law calls for the implementation of stricter rules over the next couple years. But whereas Connecticut legislators seek to require each local school system form a “School Wellness Committee”, all public and private Jersey schools, those receiving federal funds for subsidized meal plans, must all comply with the same rules.

There are ways around it, of course, which we’ll see when the new rules go into effect. For instance, there seems to be no ban on what a child can bring into the school himself. The more enterprising kids might try their hand at peddling chocolate bars and potato chips on the playground. A “brown bag” lunch may well replace the “dime bag” as the schools’ most controlled contraband.

But I think I prefer what New Jersey’s doing to the Connecticut proposals.

And any law that is deemed “whack” by a 13-year-old must be a great law.

Joe Biden: Plagiarist, Taliban Travel Agent

He lost his longshot presidential bid back in the ‘80s when Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.(D-Delaware) was exposed for stealing others’ writings and passing them off as his own.

(Making stuff up may have disqualified him for Prez, but Biden is now poised for a stellar career over at Newsweek, The New Republic, CBS News, the NYT…)

He long ago joined ranks with the enemy, becoming a favorite of the Left’s efforts to poison the earth with white flour. Biden strengthened his position over the weekend with this arrogant, flippant remark about Guantanamo Bay:

"This has become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world."

Propaganda? Recruiting? I have to say, Biden has it right. No, not for the reasons he wants to be, but he’s right: There is no better recruitment tool than the news of the cushy treatment al Q’aeda detainees receive in Gitmo.

As many bloggers and milbloggers have pointed out, notably the divine Ms. Malkin, the United States is going out of its way, “--to a fault, I believe--”, to accommodate the religious sensitivities of the radical head-chopping, castrating, baby-bombing militants being held at the detention center in Camp Delta, the U.S. military base in southeast Cuba.


A Gitmo detainee is tortured by being forced
to read a letter in Arabic.

Detainees are provided not only with outstanding medical care, usually found only in wealthy developed utopias like Cuba, they are given Halal (that’s the Muslim version of kosher) meals, they are called to prayer five times a day, they are given mats to pray on those five times a day, kufis (prayer caps) to wear those five times a day, special low sinks for washing their stinking feet, and, uh….they are given Korans.

They are given Korans (yes, the same Korans that were allegedly defiled by interrogators) by detention guards who are careful to handle the Korans properly (that is, with both hands, wearing gloves).

So, compared to the hell-on-earth these men came from back home in Afghanistan or in Iraq, yes, Gitmo is a picnic. All these tales of the fine care these terrorists receive may indeed be "the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting." Or, as a travel agent calls it "pretty brochures."



Senator Biden better shut up or thousands more will sign up for this Caribbean summer camp.

A Conn Job?

Here’s one to keep an eye on.

Connecticut state legislators last week passed a bill that, if signed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, would ban junk food from the Nutmeg State’s public schools’ cafeterias and vending machines. Bout time, right? There is a childhood obesity epidemic to fight, and we're losing.



The (Republican) Governor is balking, however, trying to maintain control of such decisions in the hands of local boards.

If enacted, Connecticut’s would be the strictest such junk food ban in the nation, not only banning sugary, empty-calorie snacks from school lunches, but also requiring twenty minutes of daily physical activity outside of gym class.

Sound like good news?

Depends.


It Takes a Village to Tell You What to Feed Your Kid

Here are the parts I don’t like.

From Section 2 (b): “Each local and regional board of education shall establish a School Wellness Committee…”

Parents need be wary of child-rearing-by-committee.

Section 3 (a) allows only Water, Milk (“including, but not limited to, chocolate milk, soy milk, rice milk and other similar dairy or nondairy milk,”) or pure fruit Juice or drinks that are no less than half real fruit juice.

Water and juice sound OK. The Paleo-nutrition community has countless data on the dangers of dairy and soy, and rice milk sounds like it should have a Budweiser label.



Politicians being how they are, the State’s House debated for eight hours and, bowing to the pressure of all the soft drink companies who lobbied against the bill for obvious reasons, decided to allow diet soft drinks and sports drinks.

Diet soft drinks contain artificial sweeteners which are known to cause an insulin reaction in the drinker the moment he tastes the sweetness on his tongue. This phenomenon, called the ‘cephalic phase of insulin release’, causes more harm to the diet pop drinker than if he drank a good ol’ Coke Classic, so explains nutritionist Dr. Tanya Zilberter:

Sweet taste, even coming with artificial sweetener, raises glucose concentration in the blood before the food has a chance to be digested. Why? Because your body knows that eventually, it will have all the carbs you've swallowed and it doesn't wait until it that happens. When the sweet food is real, the carbohydrates eventually get into the blood... Nature never counted on us inventing artificial sweeteners. Being fooled, your body reacts rather vindictively: it forces you to want more sweet food plus eat more next time, no matter what food you agree to have.

There is enough scientific study that should convince the school boards that diet soda is not any healthier than regular pop.

But they also decided to allow insulin-stimulating high-fructose corn syrupy “sports” drinks, or, as they put it, “electrolyte replacement beverages containing no more than forty-two grams of added sweetener per twenty ounce serving”, to be sold at events after the regular school day ends, at least a half hour after the bell rings. Sheesh. Maybe they should try first to keep kids from drinking alcohol after school hours, then gradually move into Gatorade.



No, I’m afraid on this one I must agree with the bill’s Republican opponents, for instance Sen. Judy Freedman of Westport who just hates “the thought of the state coming in and saying, 'We're going to become the parent authority now’.”

Or Sen. John McKinney of Fairfield: "You're not going to stop childhood obesity by letting them drink sugar-free soda all day long."

No, you’re not.

Bill 1309’s dissidents could merely be under the influence of the soft drink lobby, but they have it right. Removing the junk food and the pop is essential, but don’t think you can make Johnny jog for a half hour, then throw him a glass of Bosco or Tab, and expect to see any results.