{"id":136062,"date":"2010-01-04T14:01:59","date_gmt":"2010-01-04T19:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.proteinpower.com\/drmike\/?p=3907"},"modified":"2010-01-04T14:01:59","modified_gmt":"2010-01-04T19:01:59","slug":"pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/136062","title":{"rendered":"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain*"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"As I was thumbing through the weekend edition of the Financial Times<\/em> (my favorite newspaper) on a lazy Sunday morning, my eye fell on a little boxed off squib titled Dr Mehmet Oz on the January Detox<\/a> (scroll to bottom to see the piece).\u00a0 If I ran across something like this in a local daily newspaper, I wouldn\u0092t think much about it, but in the venerable Financial Times<\/em>?\u00a0 Since we all know how much good the wonderful Dr. Oz has done Oprah (as evidenced by the photo to the left – were I she, I certainly wouldn’t be toasting him), I decided to read it to see what he had to recommend on detoxing.\u00a0 I wasn\u0092t disappointed.\u00a0 He lives up to his billing.<\/p>\n

How does Dr. Oz recommend we detoxify our livers?\u00a0 Let\u0092s read and see.<\/p>\n

\n

I like a simple cleansing fast as an easy, inexpensive means of flushing out toxins and rebooting the system (a juice detox, say, which involves a short-term diet of raw vegetables, fruit juices and water). But it is important to remember that detoxifying the liver, the organ responsible for detoxing our bodies, would take a month of healthy living.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Brilliant!<\/p>\n

Let me see if I get this straight.\u00a0 You detoxify your liver by a fruit-juice fast, right?\u00a0 Which means throwing back at least three or four glasses of fruit juice a day.\u00a0 Okay, got it.<\/p>\n

Sounds great.\u00a0 But bit of critical thinking.<\/p>\n

What happens to the liver to cause it to need detoxifying?\u00a0 How about fat accumulation?\u00a0 A fatty liver is one that needs detoxifying.\u00a0 Fatty livers are way more common than you might expect.\u00a0 Studies have shown that about a third of Americans are walking around with fatty livers, a disorder called non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder (NAFLD).\u00a0 No one really knows what the long-term effects of this problem are going to be, but it is known that fatty accumulation in the liver can lead to an inflamed liver, which can then go on to develop cirrhosis and possibly even liver cancer.\u00a0 Since this epidemic of NAFLD has arisen fairly recently, it\u0092s unknown how it will play out over the long haul, but I doubt that it will be a good result.<\/p>\n

So where does all this fat in the liver come from?\u00a0 Most researchers think it comes from excess fructose consumption.\u00a0 The pathways of the metabolism of fructose lead to fatty accumulation in the liver, and giving laboratory animals a lot of fructose gives them fatty livers.\u00a0 If you couple this information with the fact that fructose consumption has skyrocketed over the last three decades, it makes sense that at least part of the NAFLD we\u0092re seeing comes from too much fructose.<\/p>\n

With these facts in mind, let\u0092s take a closer look at Dr. Oz\u0092s recommendation to undertake a juice fast to cleanse or detox the liver.<\/p>\n

If you go on a juice fast, how much juice do you drink.\u00a0 Three or four glasses a day, I would imagine.\u00a0 And I would also guess that these would be decent sized glasses.\u00a0 Most people don\u0092t drink an eight ounce glass of anything.\u00a0 Eight ounces is only a cup, which really isn\u0092t all that much.\u00a0 Even those little weenie juice boxes that parents put in their kid\u0092s lunches are 8.45 ounces, and most glasses of juice that people drink are larger than that.\u00a0 A regular-sized soft drink can contains 12 ounces, which is probably much closer to the size of a glass of juice most of us would drink, especially if we were on a juice fast.\u00a0 Four glasses of juice – a not unreasonable amount to drink in a day if that\u0092s all you\u0092re drinking – would end up being 48 ounces of juice.<\/p>\n

I went through the USDA database of foods looking for all the juices I could find that had fructose broken out from the total carbohydrate figure and tabulated them.\u00a0 Take a look at the chart below which is total carbs and fructose in grams.\u00a0 And remember that 100 grams equals a half a cup.\u00a0 So when you see something listed at 111.6 grams of fructose, that means more than a half cup.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It should be clear from this chart that a fruit juice fast provides a whole lot of fructose and a whole lot of carbs.\u00a0 The fructose is particularly problematic in that it encourages fat accumulation in the liver.\u00a0 The amounts in 48 ounces of any of these fruit juices would be more than enough to stimulate the synthesis and storage of fat in the liver.<\/p>\n

How Dr. Oz thinks this would detox the liver is beyond me.<\/p>\n

One other note on his cleansing fast.\u00a0 It\u0092s not just fruit juices; it includes raw vegetables, too.\u00a0 I assume Dr. Oz recommends the raw vegetables for all of the flavonoids, carotenoids, lycopenes and other phytonutrients.\u00a0 I guess he never learned that most – if not all – of these nutrients are fat soluble.\u00a0 Consuming raw vegetables and fruit juices without some fat along with them means you don\u0092t absorb any of the nutrients.\u00a0 Dr. Oz must have missed that day at medical school.<\/p>\n

So, the actual result of his cleansing detox that is supposed to \u0093flush out toxins [while] rebooting the system\u0094 is that more fat accumulates in the liver, insulin goes up thanks to all the carbs and you don\u0092t even absorb the phytonutrients.\u00a0 Sounds like just a hell of a deal to me.<\/p>\n

Let\u0092s spend just another moment looking at yet a different piece of idiocy in this small, small piece of writing.<\/p>\n

Says Dr. Oz:<\/p>\n

\n

Caffeine throws off all the systems, so drink green tea, which has only a quarter of the caffeine of dark tea or coffee but packs a powerful energy punch.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Oh dear.\u00a0 Where do we start?\u00a0 Green tea has almost as much caffeine as coffee, not a quarter of the caffeine.\u00a0 And, please tell me Dr. Oz, where do we get the \u0093powerful energy punch\u0094 from green tea if it\u0092s not from the caffeine?
\nNo sooner had I finished reading the Financial Times Oz recommendations, which, by the way, struck me much more as a prescription from a witch doctor than from a trained physician, than MD pointed out that the same Dr. Oz was on the cover of the Sunday magazine that comes with our local paper.\u00a0 Yep, USA Weekend<\/em> features our friend expanding on his recommendations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u0092m not going to go through them all (you can read them here), but one did catch my attention:<\/p>\n

\n

Ditch extreme diets<\/strong>. People almost always fail to lose weight because they try diets that are too radical to stick with. For a lifestyle change to succeed, it must be sustainable. So instead of eliminating all foods that fit into a certain category or counting every calorie, try making changes that are less noticeable but no less significant. If you can eliminate just 100 calories from your daily intake, for example, you will lose about a pound per month. How hard is that?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a blatant attack on the low-carb diet without saying it in so many words.\u00a0 And the notion that \u0093if you can eliminate just 100 calories from you daily intake\u0092\u0094 you will lose weight over time is the ultimate recommendation of someone who is clueless about the operation of the energy balance equation.<\/p>\n

Pitiful.<\/p>\n

I\u0092m going to leave you with a poem that I believe is prophetic for Dr. Oz and his nutritionally-unsophisticated compadres.\u00a0 Sooner or later science will out and these folks will be shown for the idiots they are, and they will be left as part of the detritus of the desert of faulty nutritional thinking.\u00a0 Too bad they will leave a lot of corpses in their wake.<\/p>\n

The poem by Shelley is titled, appropriately enough, Ozymandias<\/p>\n

OZYMANDIAS<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Percy Bysshe Shelley<\/p>\n

I met a traveller from an antique land
\nWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
\nStand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
\nHalf sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
\nAnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
\nTell that its sculptor well those passions read
\nWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
\nThe hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
\nAnd on the pedestal these words appear:
\n“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
\nLook on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
\nNothing beside remains. Round the decay
\nOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
\nThe lone and level sands stretch far away.<\/p>\n

*Said by Great and Powerful Oz<\/a>
\nin The Wizard of Oz<\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I was thumbing through the weekend edition of the Financial Times (my favorite newspaper) on a lazy Sunday morning, my eye fell on a little boxed off squib titled Dr Mehmet Oz on the January Detox (scroll to bottom to see the piece).\u00a0 If I ran across something like this in a local daily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136062\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}