Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thomas Twining started selling tea in London in 1706. His eponymous company has been doing it for 300 years, then. You’d think they know tea if anyone does. Here’s Twinings Green Tea:

Green? Brown?  Golden brown? Tea-colored? Flax? Tannin? Purple? Polka-dotted?

Does that look green to you? I guess they specialize in black tea (which I bet isn’t black after brewing).

My quest for green “green tea” continues. I already found one: Kirkland Ito En Matcha Blend Japanese Green Tea from Amazon.

Steve Parker, M.D.

PS: If you don’t like green, you’ll find none of it inside my books.

PPS: The remains of Ulysses S. Grant and his wife are in a mausoleum referred to as Grant’s tomb. They are above ground, so technically they aren’t buried.

You’ll want to keep reading if you have diabetes and are sedentary and overweight or obese, because odds are good that you have insulin resistance. Insulin resistance makes it harder to control your blood sugars.

I thought I knew a lot about diabetes, but I’m still learning from P.D. Mangan:

“It looks like we can add cold exposure to the list of interventions that increase insulin sensitivity.

Type 2 diabetes is positively associated with ambient temperature. The warmer the weather, the more diabetes. Up to about 30% of the variation in diabetes can be explained by  temperature.

Curiously, no effect of temperature was seen on obesity, although other studies have found that there is one.

The authors believe that activation of brown adipose tissue (BAT) may contribute to this effect. BAT is a type of fat tissue that increases its metabolism for the sole purpose of generating body heat.

Cold thermogenesis has many health benefits, although helping you to lose weight probably isn’t one of them, for the same reason that aerobic exercise is not very effective for weight loss.

The connection between cold exposure and insulin sensitivity isn’t just an association either: acclimation to the cold causes a substantial increase in insulin sensitivity.

Eight people with type 2 diabetes were exposed to cold temperatures, 14 to 15 C (57 to 59 F) for 6 hours a day for 10 days. Insulin sensitivity increased 43%.”

Source: Cold Exposure Increases Insulin Sensitivity – Rogue Health and Fitness

DiaTribe has a brief report on a recent survey sponsored in part by Sanofi, a maker of at least five diabetes drugs.

From diaTribe:

“Of the 1,000 adults with type 2 diabetes surveyed, 55% said they were willing to do more to accelerate progress toward their A1c goal, including more frequent doctor visits and changing medications. Meanwhile, of 1,004 endocrinologists, primary care physicians, and other medical professionals surveyed, only 18% thought people with type 2 diabetes would be willing to make such efforts. That’s an alarming three-fold discrepancy!”

Source: Goal Mismatch: Doctors Underestimate Patient Willingness to Get to Target A1c Quickly | diaTribe

The survey was online. Whether online survey-takers are similar to usual clinic patients is a matter of debate.

Steve Parker, M.D.

Interleukin-10 is a cytokine that tends to limit inflammation and also controls some aspects of our immune systems. Increasing interleukin-10 levels may be healthful.

“Chad Dolan, of the Laboratory of Integrative Psychology at the University of Houston, TX, and colleagues found that healthy adults who swapped from a Western diet to a Paleo diet experienced an increase in interleukin-10 (IL-10) levels, indicating a lower risk of heart attack and cardiovascular disease.”

Source: The Paleo diet: Could it reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease? – Medical News Today

“The Paleolithic diet has been receiving media coverage in Australia and claims to improve overall health. The diet removes grains and dairy, whilst encouraging consumption of fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and nuts. Our aim was to compare the diet to the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating (AGHE) in terms of compliance, palatability and feasibility.”

Source: Compliance, Palatability and Feasibility of PALEOLITHIC and Australian Guide to Healthy Eating Diets in Healthy Women: A 4-Week Dietary Intervention. – PubMed – NCBI

Please click over and take a look:

“The Paleo Diet, otherwise known as the “Caveman Diet,”  is hugely popular at the moment. And lots of folks want to know how it plays with diabetes…

The DiabetesMine Team has taken a deep dive here into what this eating plan entails, and what nutrition experts and research have to say about it.”

Source: The Paleo (Caveman) Diet and Diabetes

A new meta-analysis suggests there is no link:

“Popular hypotheses suggesting actionable links between obesity and the bacterial makeup of the human digestive system are difficult to support, a new analysis concluded.

The analysis examined 10 previous studies on the topic, and raises doubts over those studies’ suggestions that a certain “signature” in the digestive systems or microbiomes of obese mammals might increase a person’s likelihood of weight gain or obesity, reported Patrick Schloss, PhD, and Marc A. Sze, PhD, both of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, in mBio.”

Source: Gut Bacteria and Obesity: How Strong a Link? | Medpage Today

Living in the U.S. and not being an international traveler, I’m interested in how foreigners perceive the U.S.  Jamie Scott (from New Zealand) was recently in Boulder, CO, for the Ancestral Health Symposium. Parts of this trip he loved, but others, not so much:

“Let’s put this bluntly – we HATE travelling inside America.  The best way to describe it is dehumanising.  From the time you set foot on American soil, you never feel welcome. You are herded, yelled at, scolded, and glared at.  San Francisco is generally a much better entry point than LAX, but it is still terrible.

I always arrive with the intention of treating everyone doing their job like a human being, but by the time I was through immigration and heading toward the TSA screening for our connecting flight to Denver, I was seriously needing to bite my tongue.  It didn’t matter whether it was the person checking our baggage through, the person checking our passports at TSA, or the cabin crew on our flight – not a single one had the ability to acknowledge you as a human being in front of them.  Even the armed guard checking tickets on our train ride from downtown Denver to the airport left us feeling barked at and interrogated.”

Source: In Thin Air | re|evolutionary

In case you don’t know it, Boulder has little resemblance to the rest of the U.S.

Sof Andrikopoulos recently criticized the paleo diet as being unfit for folks with diabetes. Tom disagrees. For example:

“Andrikopoulos isn’t exactly a common name, yet it sounded familiar.  So I searched the blog.  Sure enough, I wrote a post about the Aussie perfesser back in February after he produced a study purporting to demonstrate that a paleo diet will makes us fat and sick.  I say purporting because the (ahem) “study” was on mice … and the “paleo” diet tripled the furry little subjects’ sugar intake, provided all their protein in the form of casein (just like yer average paleo diet, eh?) and increased their normal fat intake by 2567 percent – with much of the fat coming from canola oil.  Yup, sounds exactly like my paleo diet.”

Source: Fat Head » This Is Why So Many Australians Have Diabetes