The podcast interview that Jimmy Moore of The Livin’ La Vida Low Carb Show did with me is now available! Jimmy is doing a great job spreading the word about the health benefits of low-carb diets, I love his enthusiastic personality, and I really enjoyed being on his show. He and I had a wonderful chat and we covered a lot of territory about the many unadvertised troubles with grains. If you have not yet read my Going Against the Grain book (or if you just need a little refresher on the information), the interview is a good overview of many of the topics I cover in that book. The interview runs less than an hour, and the many subjects we discussed in that time include:

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by Melissa Diane Smith

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have an 87 percent higher risk of pancreatic cancer, a particularly deadly form of cancer, according to a 14-year study of 60,000 people just published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

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The list of hazards associated with high-fructose corn syrup continues to grow. The refined liquid sweetener found in soft drinks, candy and countless foods in our food supply has been implicated in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. Earlier this year, mercury, a metal toxic to human health, was found in close to half of tested samples of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and nearly one-third of tested foods with HFCS in its top ingredients. (See the Nutrition News & Notes story on that.) Now new research shows that when HFCS is heated, it forms hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a chemical that can kill honey bees and is linked to DNA damage in humans.

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When the most widely read magazine in America asks, “Should doctors be writing prescriptions for arugula salad?,” you know that progress is being made in spreading the word that diet is key in protecting us against disease and reducing health care costs.

In “How America Can Eat Better,” which was published this Sunday, Parade magazine explained that new efforts are under way to get people to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables to prevent obesity, heart disease and diabetes. For example, Kaiser Permanente has helped coordinate farmers’ markets at more than 30 hospital locations. At one of those farmer’s markets, a 53-year-old man started buying lots of fresh vegetables eight months ago. By emphasizing vegetables in his diet, he has now lost 63 pounds.

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Last week Natural Products Expo West, the country’s largest natural, organic, and healthy products trade show, was marked by gluten-free products at virtually every turn and an astounding array of new products sweetened with agave nectar. The trends toward more gluten-free and agave-sweetened products both sound like positive developments, but consumers need to beware of the unadvertised pitfalls of these foods.

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A follow-up to my previous post: Improvement in a wide range of health indicators was documented in nine sedentary, non-obese people with no known health problems who ate a grain-free, dairy-free, hunter-gatherer-type diet for ten days. These people were supposedly healthy to begin with, but they still, on average, saw these large improvements in health:

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BREAKING NEWS: Eating a hunter-gatherer-type diet improves a wide range of cardiovascular risk factors – blood pressure, glucose tolerance, insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglyceride levels – in people who do not exercise in less than two weeks, according to a just-published study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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