Hypoglycemia, Blackouts, Seizures

Here is another interview with the woman visiting West Virginia to work with Challen Waychoff in person.  This is basically an exit interview about her experiences in Wheeling before she heads back home later this afternoon.  Turns out one of the biggest roadblocks that she was running into at home was eating "too much health food."  She kept trying to do things like make pancakes from fresh-ground whole-grain flour and things at home, only to find out that such measures were not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.  As you listen to the interview, be open to these ideas...

a) Whatever she did here obviously helped her out.

b) Very ill people may actually recover better eating easy-to-digest refined foods as opposed to hard-to-digest unrefined foods.

c) The mineral supplements given may very well make up for the lack of minerals in refined foods - and maybe even end up being far more nutritious than whole foods without supplementation.

d) Many additives found in processed foods may be minutiae, benign, or at the very least less harmful than eating food you can't digest.  

e) Getting the body chemistry in a certain place may make vitamin and mineral absorption so much more effecient that avoiding refined food becomes unnecessary.  

f) Reams claimed to have developed the program for anyone to be able to remineralize even buying and eating common foods out of their supermarket.  

Anyway, those are thoughts I've had that have kept my mind open to following the program as Challen feels is ideal.  Of course, eating refined food is not really a required part of the program, so don't let your health food infatuation stand in the way of your open-mindedness about all this.       

Hypoglycemia – It’s Not All in Your Head, It’s All in Your Urine

While I of course am still very unsure of what to make of my RBTI adventure overall (it’s only been a week, and it is quite a shocking mind funk), I feel comfortable saying that there is at least something of value going on here. How much value? I don’t know. It remains to be seen. I have no doubt that some seriously undesirable body chemistries can be greatly improved, and from the improvement many health problems of all kinds can be improved along with it. This is obviously a very familiar concept here and in the world of nutrition and natural health to begin with.

While I am most skeptical that the ideal urine and saliva pH is 6.4, what I am becoming increasingly certain about is the absolute awesomeness of the tool used in RBTI known as the refractometer. The refractometer is a simple agricultural tool that measures the degree of refraction as light passes through a liquid. The result is a number representing the total amount of dissolved carbohydrate in the liquid (I thought this number was the “Brix” number, but was corrected by DML on that – thanks dude).

What’s so cool about it is that it really is the best measurement of your true sugar levels. The mainstream thinks it’s all about the blood sugar level, and this can be revelatory, but often the carbohydrate levels in the urine and the blood move in completely opposite directions. This is particularly true as it pertains to what people casually refer to as “hypoglycemia.”

Hypoglycemia is a term that drives many in Western Medicine berserk. They go nutty nuts (a technical term used by Martin Short in his role as Clifford – one of the most monumental and inspiring motion pictures in the history of film) because actually having blood sugar levels in the range of hypoglycemia (below 65 mg/dl) is very rare - and you can go below that and sometimes feel just fine, with no signs of an adrenaline surge.



In fact, if most people were to test their blood sugar when feeling that shaky, irritable, lethargic, headachy, mid-afternoon “hypoglycemic" dip, they would find that their blood sugar is actually elevated. And this is where the confusion over what is really physiologically taking place in a person’s body stems from. It is most certainly hypoglycemia, but because the blood sugar is fine or even elevated, in the medical world this is not hypoglycemia but just some psychosomatic crapola. The refractometer settles this.

I’ll explain in a moment. First, let’s look at the “hypoglycemia” experienced by one of the people who turned me onto Challen and the RBTI in the first place.

I had a very difficult time helping this person to rehabilitate herself from a high-protein/low-carb distance running combo that left her completely unable to metabolize food and hospitalized for months. She was a wreck. When carbohydrate was freely available to her system she actually felt pretty good. When it wasn’t, she would tremble and shake, vomit, lay awake sleepless, and deteriorate rapidly. We tried again and again to tweak macronutrient ratios and things like that, but still she would experience these crushing hypoglycemic blows.

What she was experiencing, without a doubt, was the symptoms of her adrenal glands kicking into hyperdrive in order to elevate sugar levels in the body. That’s where the shaking, psychological and mood disturbances, cold hands and feet, and so forth stem from. Not exactly rocket science.

And she was at her worst early in the morning. 4am is a very common time of day to enter into a hypoglycemic state and it progresses throughout the early dawn hours if no food is ingested. This person had a glucose meter, so she tested. During this hardcore (and I mean hardcore) hypoglycemic episode, her blood sugar levels would soar to 130 mg/dl (technically hyperglycemia!) – a diabetic fasting level. But this person was definitely no diabetic. In fact, eating would immediately make her feel better and send the blood sugar plummeting to 75-ish.

What’s going on here is that the adrenals keep blood sugar elevated – trying to deliver sugar to the system somehow, and when food is ingested insulin rises, shuts down the adrenal glands, and stops the release of glycogen coming from the muscles and liver (which is the source of the hyperglycemia during fasting).

There is always a push-pull going on between the primary sugar raising and sugar lowering forces in the body. In the most simplistic sense, activation of the sympathetic nervous system causes the body to release sugar from within, and when food is ingested the body switches into a parasympathetic state that allows the sugar to be stored and stops the release of sugar from within.

In someone with hypoglycemic tendencies, the sympathetic nervous system goes wild to continually try to make carbohydrate available.

You may be a little confused at this point. Is hypoglycemia really hyperglycemia and how can I call someone with hyperglycemia (blood glucose 130mg/dl) “in a hypoglycemic state?”

The almighty refractometer tells the real story. If you want a tool that will tell you whether you lack carbohydrate or have too much, blood sugar testing ain’t gonna do it for you. The refractometer, however, is extremely reliable from what I’ve seen thus far. During those hypoglycemic dips, so common in the wee hours of the morning and in the early afternoon, the refractometer reading of the urine will tell you all you need to know.

Now, when this person tests the sugar levels of her urine, it will confirm if she is hypoglycemic or not (but of course, by now, she knows exactly what it feels like to have the sugar level dipping too low – hypoglycemic symptoms emerge like clockwork). The reading will be 1.2 or less, and in her case, with a severe problem, it is often much lower (like 0.5). Yet, her blood sugar often moves in the exact opposite direction.

Part of the RBTI program is keeping the sugar levels stable in a small range instead of a large, chaotic roller coaster range. And many years ago, when I first ate to keep my sugar levels as stable as possible by eating precise amounts of carbohydrates at precise and consistent meal times, I no doubt experienced the benefits.

If you know, even after doing RRARF (which can increase your glycogen storage capacity, improve glucose clearance, and other things that are helpful in keeping sugar levels stable), that you still have some lingering sugar swings that are causing you problems with energy, sleep, mood, focus, appetite and cravings, and more – there’s no question that using a refractometer and figuring out the precise times of day, number of minutes after meals, and so forth that your sugar levels tend to tank could be a huge game changer. Then, by simply eating a piece of fruit or two during that time, you may in turn be able to keep your sugar stable enough to reap the many potential rewards of keeping this stable (and keeping the stress response dormant).

From what I have gathered so far, Challen’s rules regarding hypoglycemia couldn’t be simpler. Whenever sugar levels are below 1.5 on the refractometer, eat a piece of fruit or have a sip of juice (and get to know at about what time that is going to happen). If you have sugar crashes in the wee hours of the morning, make sure not to eat heavy in the evening and keep an apple or glass of juice by your bedside. That’s it. Complicated stuff I know.

But seriously, Challen strongly thinks that the refractomer alone would be enough to really improve people’s health. I tend to agree. For self-care and dietary fine-tuning, it shows a lot of potential. Seeing how unstable some people’s sugar levels are with the use of the refractometer, more medical folk would really understand hypoglycemia, and realize that the problems are not just all in people’s head when the problem doesn’t show up in the unreliable glucose tolerance test.

Granted, this article is really an oversimplification of the whole picture of sugar regulation and how sugar levels interact with the pH and salt levels.  But like I said, I do suspect that the refractometer does have a medical value aside from the strict practicing of the full RBTI program.  I can't wait to get one and play with it.   

Ray Peat - Sugar vs. Starch

I didn’t want to give up on the Ray Peat topic altogether now. There is still a lot to be said. In fact, his lengthy article titled “Glycemia, Starch, and Sugar in context” is a perfect article to deconstruct. It is full of many of Peat’s main philosophies about stress hormones, blood sugar regulation, metabolism, gelatin, polyunsaturated fat – you name it. It’s all there in that article. And it’s the perfect article to examine because some of it is great, and some of it is downright silly. It’s a great blend. In fact, it will probably take many posts to break this single article down – but once we are through most of you will have a pretty good idea about Ray Peat, and also will be left, hopefully, with a balanced view of him as a researcher (which is something few can claim – most either think he is a total wacko or is like the Messiah of nutrition).

I will not put every paragraph in the article under the microscope, but we will start with a few that I have selected to discuss and keep the conversation going for a while. In so doing, hopefully we’ll get somewhere. Begin! (spoken in the tone of the original Mortal Kombat video game).

“Judging by present and past statements of the American Dietetic Association, I think some kind of institutional brain defect might account for their recommendations. Although the dietetic association now feebly acknowledges that sugars don't raise the blood sugar more quickly than starches do, they can't get away from their absurd old recommendations, which were never scientifically justified: “Eat more starches, such as bread, cereal, and starchy vegetables--6 servings a day or more. Start the day with cold (dry) cereal with nonfat/skim milk or a bagel with one teaspoon of jelly/jam. Put starch center stage--pasta with tomato sauce, baked potato with chili, rice and stir-fried beef and vegetables. Add cooked black beans, corn, or garbanzo beans (chickpeas) to salads or casseroles.”

Peat, in his disdain for mainstream nutrition beliefs, is poking fun at the dietary recommendation to base the diet primarily around starches and not simple sugars. Of course, these recommendations were based on widely held but later discovered-to-be-mistaken beliefs that complex carbohydrates – like grains, potatoes, corn, and beans, digested more slowly than simple sugars comprised of less “complex” molecules. It had been known for ages that these foods generally led to more stable blood glucose levels (measured over a 6-hour time period as opposed to just basing everything off of what happens in the first half hour), and were great preventatives against hypoglycemia unlike the foods listed by early anti-sugar author E.M. Abrahamson (1951) who gave the following prescription for those prone to hypoglycemia, “no sugar, candy, or other sweets, no cake with icing, no pies or other pastry, no ice cream, no honey, no syrup, no grape juice or prune juice. And regrettably, our string of ‘no’s’ includes cocktails, wines, cordials, and beer. Finally, if you have hyperinsulinism, you must avoid caffeine as you would the pest.”

Of course, there are many diseases including hereditary fructose intolerance and various glycogen storage diseases in which starch is a completely safe food to eat, but the ingestion of any of the foods listed by Abrahamson containing simple sugars can cause life-threatening bouts of hypoglycemia. This has nothing to do with the absorption rate of the carbohydrates, and in my experience the absorption rate of the carbohydrates has nothing to do with a food’s ability to trigger hypoglycemia. Quite simply, absorption rate or “glycemic index” of foods or the insulin spike after eating rapidly-absorbed starches has nothing to do with hypoglycemia. Thinking that it does is just another pseudoscientific sasquatch.

Thinking that such recommendations were made due to some brain defect is even more offensive, as many of the mantras of mainstream nutrition are based on the pioneering work of Denis Burkitt, Hugh Trowell, T.L. Cleave, and others who spent time in Africa gathering hard data on the rates, or absence I should say, of many cancers, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, constipation, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, appendicitis, diverticulosis, and many others on diets built around starchy agricultural staples – notably whole grains, corn, root vegetables, and the like. It’s not like these beliefs were pulled out of thin air as part of some government propaganda machine. And as Burkitt witnessed, the more food that was displaced with whole grains and tubers, the lower the fasting glucose level of the population.

"The Dietetic Association's association with General Mills, the breakfast cereal empire, (and Kellog, Nabisco, and many other food industry giants) might have something to do with their starchy opinions. Starch-grain embolisms can cause brain damage, but major money can also make people say stupid things."

These food companies make more money the more high-fructose corn syrup and vegetable oil they manage to squeeze into the food, as these are generally much cheaper calories than those in villainous grains or potatoes (although they are still plenty cheap). More importantly, the more fat and extra sweet HFCS in the product, the more of it consumers buy and eat because sugar – particularly high-fructose corn syrup because it is sweeter, and fat, are more stimulating than starch, generally-speaking (although there are plenty of people that get more riled up about chips, Cheez-its, and baguettes than sugar-laden sweets). To think that such companies are behind some massive scheme to steer people towards vile corn and potatoes and away from wholesome simple sugar is comical to put it lightly.

"In an old experiment, a rat was tube-fed ten grams of corn-starch paste, and then anesthetized. Ten minutes after the massive tube feeding, the professor told the students to find how far the starch had moved along the alimentary canal. No trace of the white paste could be found, demonstrating the speed with which starch can be digested and absorbed. The very rapid rise of blood sugar stimulates massive release of insulin, and rapidly converts much of the carbohydrate into fat."

I smell more sasquatch here. In fact, the smell is so strong the John Lithgow is outside my window shouting the name “Harry” over and over. Jack Black and Kyle Gass are here with a bottle of aerosol Trap B Gone and are setting up a drumset as we speak. Sasquatch’s “drumming is kickass” they tell me.


Insulin converting carbohydrate into fat? That’s not how insulin works at all. In fact, a solid debunking took place a couple months back at http://www.carbsanity.blogspot.com/ in which it was shown that the body is in negative fat balance (burning more fat than storing) during postprandial insulin spikes – like the kind you get after having some good old corn starch. On top of that, the easiest carbohydrate to convert to fat has been shown time and time and time and time and time again to be the one that travels to the liver and is digested most slowly. It’s called fructose. Not only does the presence of fat make fat storage easier, if fructose is converted to fat in the liver (which it can be under certain circumstances) it increases insulin resistance, which can lead to increased fat storage (insulin lowers appetite and increases metabolic rate, so becoming unresponsive to the hormone has a tendency to increase appetite and reduce metabolic rate).

Insulin is also intricately tied to leptin, the master hormone of managing the calories in/calories out equation. Surges in insulin cause surges in leptin, which lowers appetite and increases the metabolic rate. Stating that making insulin rise leads to becoming fat is a complete misrepresentation of the bigger picture. In fact, starch-based diets usually lower appetite dramatically, and many starchy foods like potatoes and oats are known to satisfy the appetite on fewer calories than just about any foods known (higher “satiety index”).

Speaking of corn starch specifically, this has actually been used successfully by Francine Kauffman of the American Diabetes Association in the prevention of early morning hypoglycemia in diabetics – more evidence that absorption rate is not the prime determinant of whether or not a particular carbohydrate goes on to trigger hypoglycemia and general blood glucose dysregulation.

Anyway, don’t get the wrong idea here. I’ve been eating simple sugars in favor of starches myself for many months now and have noticed some apparent benefits. Many seem to do better with sugars than starches for keeping hands and feet warm, producing more energy, getting better sleep – probably due to enhanced liver glycogen storage, and so forth. Many fare better from a digestive standpoint on fruit, juice, and sugar than more complex carbohydrate molecules. Some even report a lowering of appetite on sugar vs. starches, especially with the consumption of whole fruits which, like most starchy staples, are very high satiety index foods. Fruit is also generally more nutritious and hypoallergenic.

So be open to either, or a combination of the two. It’s up to everyone to experiment for themselves to see what the relative benefits and drawbacks of the two basic types of carbohydrates are. But the point here is to shoot down Peat’s wacky and erroneous biochemical justification of the outright superiority of sugar over starch. There is not a clear cut right or wrong carbohydrate, and the mainstream belief that “complex” carbohydrates are superior to simple sugars is not the result of a governmental or agribusiness conspiracy.

In the next episode, we will continue looking closer at Ray’s cookie-cutter and false portrayal of insulin as being a hormone that, if driven up, will drive blood sugar down and cause hypoglycemia. Don’t worry, Ray’s got some tremendous gems in this article as well, as he is one of the few that actually does have some understanding of type 2 diabetes, realizes that it is a shortage, not a surplus of glucose at the cellular level, and so on.

For more discussion on the sugar and starch issue, read this free book on how to raise your metabolism.

Whee, This Health Stuff is Easy!

I don't like throwing out personal stories I receive from others too often.  A lot of health gurus out there make a bad habit of selectively sorting out all the favorable testimonials they receive and busily go about propagandizing their work - and believing it themselves.  I may have once been into telling everyone how awesome I was, mostly because I knew I had really stumbled upon something amazing and no one was paying attention and it was driving me crazy.  But I don't have that kind of time anymore, I'm too busy learning.   This, however, is a classic case of honeymoon chasing, and restricted eating gone awry - and it's well-written enough to be VERY enjoyable to read. 

We'll keep it totally anonymous, but I will say I'm glad I took her by surprise and made her realize.  She wanted me to post it tomorrow, but I told her "I can tell you right away I can't wait another day."  Sorry, I'm on like a total 80's binge right now.  I met a girl who crimps her hair and owns the movie Space Camp, so I'm really trying to step it up.  By the way, the title of this post stems from the fact that I'm starting to believe that this whole speeding up the metabolism and healthy eating/living thing is a heck of a lot easier than I ever imagined.  Which is amazing news.

For more discussion on many of the topics covered below, download THIS FREE EBOOK.    

"I was alternately vegan and vegetarian for years, had an interim period of (still mainly-vegetarian) SAD omnivory, and then discovered paleo after a crippling six month bout of IBS/chronic diarrhea. Prior to paleo I also had: a multi-nodular thyroid adenoma appear that would occasionally blow up to the size of a ping-pong ball, severe amenorrhea (maybe two menstrual periods a year), severe depression, reactive hypoglycemia, arthritis, anemia, non-stop respiratory and sinus infections, seasonal allergies, lethargy, memory problems and brain fog and probably some other stuff I am forgetting.

Most of this stuff cleared up after going paleo, luckily. However, after the honeymoon period of like "Holy shit! I can run around and do stuff now and feel good! AAAHHHH! This is the best diet in the world!" (about 9 months), I found many of the health problems creeping back into my life. The biggies were: my hair became so brittle that I eventually had to chop it off because it was breaking off every time I touched it, my daily diarrhea came back, my thyroid cyst started to increase in size again, I became fatigued as hell, my now regular period became plagued with cramps, my blood pressure was super low, and the original mental clarity I got started to fade. Total fast track to bummer town--I wasn't sure where to go from there.


Then I found your site. I had been aware of it, of course, but hadn't really checked it out until recently due to the whole "Matt Stone is a douche" thing that seems to have a life of its own in the paleosphere subconsciously steering me clear. Then, two weeks ago, Chris Masterjohn linked your "Protein--A Closer Look" article and it was one of those really formative light switch moments. I empathized with your diet history because it paralleled mine in many ways—initial good experiences with mostly fruit going downhill, initial good experiences on LC going downhill, etc. I read the whole thing closely, went on to read other entries, watched some of Josh Rubin's videos, downloaded your free e-book, and looked up everything I could find about Ray Peat.

Holy #$%*ing shit! Between all of them it was like the smack I needed to try something new and it all made so much sense intuitively. I found a summary of Peat's dietary guidelines that someone made on the internet (noting that he emphasizes a lot of the things that I love to eat and crave often and that paleo dictum advises to limit, like dairy products and fruit, and deemphasizes a lot of the things that paleo folks fetishize but that I have to force myself to choke down, like tons of red meat.) I combined these guidelines with your HED ones and modified my current diet thusly:

--less muscle meat
--more bone broths and supplemental gelatin
--more coconut oil, less bacon grease for cooking
--addition of some daily fruit
--less oily fish and more white fish and molluscs
--more dairy products
--addition of white rice
--upping veggies and starches (was never VLC or anything, but eliminated the guilt of taking more veggies than meat on my plate)
--having a little homemade sweetened tapioca pudding every couple days

Small changes in the grand scheme of things, but evidently a big friggin' deal to my body. Within a single WEEK my temperature went from the high 95s/low 96s (where it has consistently been for most of my adult life) to staying somewhere between 98.5 and 99.3. In fact, the heating system broke at my work three days ago and I didn't even notice--normally I would have been bundled up and shivering. The white coating on my tongue that has been there for the past six months is gone (so the whole discussion of reversing thinking on candida diets in that interview you did with the Rubins made me high five the air!).

I have tons of energy, am sleeping much better, my breath and body odor is noticeably better smelling, my brain is working again, my thyroid cyst is noticeably smaller, my bowel movements are solid once more, my libido is coming back and no menstrual cramps this month. How much of this is the diet, how much the return of spring and sun, and how much is joy about throwing old attitudes out the window I do not know, but whatever the percentage, thanks, dude--I feel better than I have in many many months. Keep on researching and blogging and adapting--you are totally helping people."