Hey Gang -
It's me! Happy New Year! And, please God, may 2007 be better than 2006.
My personal stuff seems to have settled down for the moment, and I miss talking to y'all. So here I am again, making a New Years resolution to get this sucker out regularly. If everything goes to hell in a handbasket again, I may get thrown off-track. But for the moment, just sitting down and writing "Hey, Gang" again feels really, really good.
I hope this finds you all well. No doubt some of you have stayed on track with your low carb way of eating, while others, having fallen by the wayside, are just coming back to it with the New Year. Either way, I hope you're feeling wonderful, and realizing anew just how great the benefits of carbohydrate control are:
* Weight control, of course.
* Dramatically reduced appetite
* Greater energy, with far fewer crashes
* More even moods
* Improved health. Yes, even with plenty of meat, eggs, and cheese in your diet.
Which brings me to the biggest low carbohydrate stories of the year:
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, concerned about low carbohydrate diets and their possible influence on heart disease, looked at the Harvard Nurses study. They looked at the diets of 82,000 nurses - and found that a low carbohydrate diet had no overall effect on heart disease risk, regardless of the women's physical activity levels, body mass index or the presence or absence of high blood pressure, diabetes or high cholesterol.
In other words, eating lots of meat and eggs and cheese doesn't cause heart disease, at least if you limit carbohydrate at the same time. I was shocked, shocked, I tell you!
Other low carb news of note:
Some researchers now suspect that Alzheimer's may be a form of diabetes, caused - at least in part, or in some people - by insulin resistance in the brain. I find this news downright unnerving. If this is the case, what the heck is going to happen as the low fat/high carb generation reaches their senior years? Not to mention all those folks who never drink anything that isn't laced with high fructose corn syrup? I have this hideous vision of a small crew of low carbers, the last sane people in a world that's become profoundly demented.
Since one of the things that made 2006 the Year From Hell for me was my mother's Alzheimer's disease reaching crisis stage, I have all too personal experience with this heartbreaking and incurable disease. That the low fat, high carb "health" advice of the federal government, the medical mainstream, and groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine may result in an increase in Alzheimer's makes me so angry I can barely see straight.
Those, for me, were the top low carb stories of the year, but there were more - quite a few more. I have them archived, and will get to some of them in future issues. But right now, there's one other thing I thought worth a mention:
Low carb seems to be making a modest resurgence. Oh, not the wild frenzy of 2003, and probably just as well. We didn't need "low carb" cold cereal and Snackwells anyway. And personally, I don't care whether the rest of the world shares my way of eating or not. I started eating this way in 1995, when all the world was still in the grips of low fat mania, and I've continued, not because it became fashionable, nor because I found a niche writing about low carb, but because this is how my body feels best. Simple as that.
Still, it has been discouraging to see all the ads and magazine articles going back to "Look! This food has only 4 grams of fat!" when I know that the food they're advocating is loaded with junk carbs (like those Subway sandwiches Jared keeps pushing,) and that a diet high in good fats - by which I do not mean only unsaturated vegetable oils - is vastly beneficial to health. A general acceptance of carbohydrate control as a key to healthful eating could only be a good thing.
So it's nice to see a few more low carb ice cream bars in my grocer's ice cream freezer. Nice to hear from my pal Andrew DiMino, who runs Carb Smart that his sales have been up for two years running now. Nice to know that the New Years issue of People magazine, which covered people who have lost large amounts of weight, included one who has lost over 100 pounds on the Atkins diet. Who knows? Maybe I can get a contract to write another low carb cookbook. Stranger things have happened.
In the meanwhile, I'm going to go back to recipe development, and publish the results here. That's where I started. So if you're a long-time reader, thanks for your support. If you're a newbie, welcome to the wonderful world of low carb!
--Dana
