DIET | DETECTIVE^®

Basing a diet on the glycemic index sounds good, but is it?

It's interesting to see how many diet books have come out in recent years taking portions of the wildly popular Atkins diet and tried to transform them into nicely packaged "new" diets. Sadly, most of these so-called diets greatly miss the mark of the masterpiece of the original.

Such is the case with Rick Gallop and his series of books on The G.I.Diet. It's an interesting concept that Gallop has capitalized on selling millions of his little books. But is the information he provides useful to people who are livin' la vida low-carb? Let's examine his latest book to find out.

Sugar-Free Mentos snags another victim of dubious side effects

There oughta be a big bold WARNING label placed on any sugar-free product that purports to be "sweetened with Splenda" if sucralose is not the top sweetener. You know what I'm talking about--while the Splenda logo appears prominently on the front of the packaging of many low-carb, sugar-free products, the truth is there's something else making that product sweet. 

I received a rather enlightening comment in response to Episode 58 yesterday to my latest podcast at "The Livin' La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore."

Nothing thrills me more than to see someone who has finally been able to overcome the low-fat/low-calorie dogma that dominates our culture while sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other such garbage carbs keep getting a free pass by our health establishment. Such is the case with a nurse from North Carolina named Peg Hatley.

Drs. Maratos-Flier and Kliewer found the hormone behind Atkins diet

We have seen some truly remarkable research come out in favor of the Atkins low-carb diet this year, most notably the Stanford JAMA study from March 2007 showing it as the superior diet for weight and health.

People who are livin' la vida low-carb already naturally accept the physiology behind this way of eating as an excellent way to burn stored fat through the use of ketosis and that those ketone bodies become our source of energy rather than carbohydrates. We've even had studies showing a low-carb diet burns twice as much stored fat as a low-fat diet.

But now we read in this MedPage Today column that two different researcher teams have stumbled upon what one of them describe as a "serendipitous" discovery of a hormone in their studies that actually works as the very mechanism behind why fat-burning is so functional on a low-carb diet.