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I have mentioned my friend Nick a number of times before. Just when I think he has become predictable, I discover another gem from him. We met for a coffee, a walk, and another coffee. I had not been feeling right, still plagued by a low level of anxiety, so his genial company was a great distraction, and I really relaxed with him.

He is not an academic man, as he readily admits. But he is profoundly sensible and highly focussed on certain things in life. Health is one of them. I mentioned the low-carn diet I had tried. And amazingly, he had been put on this diet when 17.

It was at Stanford University in the States, when he started out swimming for Wales. His freestyle technique was one of the best in the World. The dieticiens advocated a low carb, diet, with carbs derived from leafy vegetables.

His most common meal was a bowl of salad, and a chicken breast with 2 tablespoons of olive oil sprinkled on it.

Nick can be a very disciplined man, and he thrived on this diet for nearly 20 years. Very few could have done this, missing meals out with friends. Not drinkingfizzy drinks, or eating bread etc. But the point is, the net effect was extremely good health.

I mentioned my light headedness, and he said that he too had this. It went in 3 days, and then he was fine. Nick is very very good at enduring discomfort. I suspect I am, but the worry side, where I incurred excess anxiety coupled with the light headedness was frightening.

To minimise the light headedness, he said that I should simply drink water. This was corroborated by research on the Internet. Potassium shortage in addition to dehydration is the likely cause of the condition. I learnt that avocados are a great source for this - I eat them regularly now.

I will read more, to be as best armed for a retry as possible. But Nick has given me renewed incentive to resume the change in diet. More on this when I start again.

I have gained a better perspective on the low-carb / high-fat diet from personal experience. Namely, the famous light headedness when your body switches from carb burning to a process called ketosis to get its energy.

The latter is slow and possibly ‘out of practice’, our bodies so inexperienced to low food situations that we rarely dip into this modus operandi.

However, after a day with no carbs at the 2 main meals, the light headedness was too disturbing to ignore, so I shoveled some oat biscuits down my throat. But, alas, had to also endure a violent anxietal reaction to the state I was in. Having got used to over reacting to situations by ‘panic attacking’, my mind now uses this frightening response way too readily.

So I had to lie in bed with a light head, dipping in and out of sleep, saturated in anxiety. Fortunately, I know how to handle the anxiety, and can now relax, and let time see the levels drop. It is most odd to be highly anxious and relaxed at the same time, and this is indeed a fair reflection on how I felt.

I was coerced into studying more about the low-carb / high-fat diet and a salient article :

http://www.philkaplan.com/thefitnesstruth/atkins1.htm

Which gave a much broader perspective on the whole subject.

It does not, however, explain wny the Inuit and Masai diets are so healthy.

For myself, I will simply retune my carb and fat levels to avoid ketosis. The stability of blood sugar I have had has been so refereshing and something I have simply not been used to my whole life. So a persistence with this diet is justified.

In summary, I think I would describe the changes that will likely work for me, and avoid the light headedness :

1. Have bran and more sunflower and watermelon seeds with my oats breakfast
2. Replace my morning carrot snack with things like an oat biscuit with avocado
3. Have about a half portion of starch (normally whole grain rice) and more fat with each main meal
4. Replace my afternoon banana with a similar snack to the morning
5. Eat precooked salmon and mackeral chunks as regular snacks, with low Gi carbs
6. Continue drinking a large latte morning and afternoon- the full fat milk is a blood sugar stabiliser in practice in spite of the milk sugar content
7. Use more olive oil and sesame oil as dressings for the fat in meals
8. When playing sport, I’ll load up on carbs, especially bananas

I have eaten a carrot, apple and banana every day for decades, and I am entirely happy to change. The banana was a baddie - too fast to assimilate. It just goes to show that a perfect food such as a banana is not perfect for everyone at all times!

I’ll write here how this diet retuning pans out. Meanwhile, I feel dreadful after such a bad night, but the sun is shining, so I’ll just chill out!

Update : 27-30 April 2009

After discovering that my friend Nick had lived on this diet for 22 years, he kindly made me a typical low-carb meal, and set me on my way again to re-trying the diet. Warning : it makes you feel unhealthy and disoriented, or at least if you are as sensitive as I am. I have ordered 2 books on health and diet that puts the low carb diet into perspective regarding research findings.

After further reading on nutrition, I feel it highly revelant to provide some sound evidence of the falacy that high levels of meat and fat consumption are deleterious to health.

Both the Inuit Eskimos and the African Masai tribes eat a diet from all vegetables. The Eskimos live almost entirely on meat and fish and water. They never come even remotely close to the mandatory 5-a-day vegetables. Yet they are extremely healthy, with the following attributes :

• No incidents of diabetes
• No tooth decay (and they never brush their teeth)
• Very low/no heart desease rates

In the early 20th century, an American, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, made an exhibition to the Arctic and lived with the Eskimos for 10 years. He reluctantly starting eating seal every meal every day, knowing that he would tire quickly of the lack of variety. Yet he did not. True, after a few months, whale and fish were eaten instead. But he lived like an eskimo for 10 years and was entirely healthy.

He travelled back to New York, and, with a colleague, was monitored in New York on the meat and water only diet. Scientific scrutiny found no health problems.

Likewise, the Masai tribe live in a similar diet, with the addition of blood and milk. They often go for days on end drinking only milk. Straight from the cow (the pasteurisation process destroys a lot of the nutritional value of milk, principally to extend its shelf life, and hence make more money for the vendors. Calves cannot live on pasteurised milk).

They too are very healthy, slim and strong.

Amazingly, they feed liquid fat to babies to build their strength. What an outcry if that happened in the West! Even I feel this is so alien as to be ludicrous. But we seem to have simply been brainwashed to believe fat to be bad. Period.

In both cases, the highly treasured mantras of Western nutrition are completely ignored, to negative detriment.

Converesly, when Eskimos and Masai people moved away and lived on a Western diet, their weight boomed, and diabetes  started appearing.

Yet because this style of life and eating is so far removed from our normal diets, it is marginalised, and rarely enters the media. It is simply too radical, and would bugger up the sales of the enormous carbohydrates industry. So it very very rarely meets the light of day. And this is truly sad.

You can read further here :

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22116724//

Many things in life are very slow to dawn on me. I remember at school that my average exam results in the early secondary school years were around about 50%. Concepts and methods took ages to infiltrate my brain.

Fortunately, when they did, they slotted into a solid framework, onto which I was able to add and extend as time went past.

It has likewise slowly dawned upon me a growing sense of the reality of global indoctrination that pervades modern life. The media, industry, and governments tell us what they want us to hear, regardless of its alignment with reality.

So it is with food agencies, although I do actually have some sympathy for their plight. They are principally burdened with the onerous task of communicating good health via nutrition. Because their audience is huge, and diverse in intelligence and mindsets, they are forced to simplify advice. Additionally, they are battered by the £N hundred billion food and supplements industries with ‘guidance’ that steers the public to further consumption of profitable food stuffs.

Fundamentally, the stunningly complex nature of food, coupled with the equally complex nature of humans, our food needs, and food assimilation processes, amplified by our genetic diversity means that the food agencies have a thankless task. If they generalise, they miss much of the real complexity and diversity - peanuts for some can kill, for others it is a valuable food, for example. If they give multiple routes to good health, they confuse.

In summary, it is probably dangerous to listen to their advice. For example, those who have stuck to the recommend high carbohydrate diet may be on the route to hypoglycaemia or type 2 diabetes. Yet this diet is a mantra - the majority of nutritional guidance books repeat it. I know because I checked the whole bookcase of such books in the big bookshop in town.

So what can you do? A good question, but there is a greater liklihood that reading diversely on nutrition on the Internet will  give a better picture, where the need to cater for the masses and big business does not bias the information.

I wrote to the British Food agency and a prominent other health agency regarding the high carbohydrate mantra. That was days ago - I have only received acknowledgements so far. I was seeking the Scientific basis for the mantra, along with the anti-fat mantra. I’ll post their replies here if they are forthcoming.

Phew, that was tiring, but oh so exciting! For a second consecutive game, Liverpool drew 4-4 with their opponents. Last week it was Chelsea, this time Arsenal.

I seriously cannot remember Liverpool playing with such electric pace and crispness of passing and ball control. To have done so in 2 consecutive games is amazing.

But the point of this entry is not the football per se. More that even in the midst of such breathtaking football, we really do not live in that moment, savouring the game, nearly as much as we should. Not, if it is your team playing. We are so focussed on progression that we fail to live in the moment. I want Liverpool to win the league, but if I spend every match yearning only for victory, biting my nails even when they are 3-0 up, then I am missing so much!

For the impartial spectator, sure, the games were great. But without a vested interest in the result, not really so good. So sad that the vested interest needed to really enjoy the game is blighted by the ever present focus on future success rather than the game in hand.

So I noticed this tonight and just laughed. The game was played at a staggering speed and I actually sat back and in breathless awe and absorbed the brilliance of the team I have supported since 1971. Fab!

You see, living in the moment is a precious thing - you are generally happiest when doing this - but we so often fail to do this.

A small entry to cover a common theme I am encountering. Namely, that the media, Governments, and Food Standards Agencies mislead us. Their mostly hidden agendas coerce them to twist and distort the truth.

We, the people, pay a high price for these distortions. It is criminal in many ways. But we are rarely party to the truth, so cannot take much action.

For example, Global Warming has been dilluted to Climate Change as a result of oil company lobbying. It misleads us because it dilutes the problem - the title does not indicate the direction of change - and moves our attention away from oil companies, who supply one of the alleged most ozone damaging products - petrol.

Likewise, the push to a low fat diet has misled us to believe that margarine is better than butter.

Did you know that many sweeteners contain over 90% sugar? Because the volume is low, this is apparently not a problem. But you may not also have known that ingesting a sweet product without the sugar content still gets handled as if it were sugar ladened - insulin is raised accordingly. So we end up with the effect of sugar. But do the masses ever get told this truth?

No.

The misleading process  goes on.

I raised the matter of below cost alcohol in supermarkets with Jenny Willet, the Lib Dem MP in Cardiff. She will pursue. But when Gordon Brown was asked by themedia if he would follow the Scottish lead of introducing a minimum price per unit, he misled the people by distracting us - whey should the non alcohol abuser suffer price rises?

The pint here is that in real terms, alcohol is vastly cheaper than it was decades ago. So any price rise would have to be big to get the alcohol up to sensible prices in the first place.

This deflection is criminal, but common practice. And because it is so effective, we rarely see past it. It diffuses the power of our complaint in our own heads.

Another book, another theme. This time, the little matter of the hormone Melatonin, a chemical released by the Pineal Gland.

I will write a little about it now, but more later, all being well, when I have completed reading the book I have on the subject.

Light acting on the eyes is diverted to the Pineal Gland. Descending darkness informs the gland that night is arriving, and it secretes Melatonin. This is what makes us drowsy so that we can go to sleep. Extra melatonin can improve the length and quality of sleep. I know because I take it every other day or so.

Babies sleep around 16 hours a day and release enormous amounts of melatonin. When they grow to adulthood, the amount secreted is much the same, but spread across the now much larger body the effect is  significantly reduced. As we age, this gland loses efficacy and we find it harder to fall and stay asleep.

I’ll step aside a moment to look at another hormone - adrenaline. As you know, this gets released when we get stressed or excited. It spreads across the body, and it latches onto receptors in the walls of cells. It then communicates with the cell.

Melatonin appears to be different. Much more pervasive. It can and does inflitrate directly through the walls of all cells of the body.  There is a melatonin receptor on the cell nucleus. It appears that the aging process is in part influenced by the amount of melatonin reaching the nucleus. In lab tests, most (but, be warned, not all) species of rats had extended lives when they were given extra melatonin.

So not only does melatonin improve sleep, but it may be involved in an extended, healthier life. It significantly enhances the effectiveness of the immune system, and is a brilliant scavenger of free radicals (as the saying goes).

That it is not approved in the UK is deeply sad. Overdose tests in rats showed side effects that were significantly less than commercial sleeping tablets. They could not add enough to the normal intake of water to kill 50% of rats. This is a famous overdose test.

In humans, anecdotal side effects are rare and minimal. In tests with placebos, the occasional side effect was also seen in those taking placebos.

More on this subject later, but I do know that my aunts, in their 80’s, always wake up early, and struggle to get back to sleep. I am keen for them to try a small dose for a few nights. I will report back here if I follow this up.

My sister kindly describes me as maverick, rather than eccentric, a more loaded label. The latter is appropriate, as my friends will testify. The former, is a role I now adopt.

I am Maverick by job title, and have been for some while now. More on that in a moment.

My eccentric nature is very much like that of my Father, and for both of us, the behaviour, mannerisms and vision that earn this monica is instinctive. I can and do override and compensate for the often anti-social, or socially confusing character of my nature. But please understand that I did not choose to have an eccentric instinct. Much as a quiet person does not choose to be quiet. So there is at least some freedom from blame.

One spin-off from my nature is that, again just like my father, I have a wide array of abilities and interests. I emphasise right away that these too are instinctive, and I cannot take much credit for them. But what I can do is what my father failed to do, and  make the most of them.

True, my father had family commitments, but I am not blaming him. Merely that I will try to explore what he might have explored had he been independent.

I have spent the Winter writing 2 Go books to explore my creative writing, and also to see how legitimate my view on the poor nature of existing go books actually is (see www.learngo.co.uk). Time will tell. That project was fuelled by a problem. As maverick, I am duty bound, by vocation and by genuine motivation to explore problems. The next problem on the list was my hypoglycaemia (see Diet article).

For a while now, I have been taking melatonin to aid what can be wretched night’s of sleep. This medication, almost bereft of side effects, had to be bought via the Internet. I will write about the benefits shortly.

But as I explore my diet and melatonin, and other matters, I will report back here distill some of what I learn. I mention this because my Maverick role is the antithesis of the traditional, media and Governmentally influenced and indoctrinated route post school we are all supposed to take. It alarms me when I discover things such as the matter of no less than 4 graduates working in the local health food shop. Sure, they make shopping there a meaningful experience, but going from school to uni to 9-5 surely is wrong for many of us.

As Maverick, I literally do not know where my ideas and reading will take me. Or where the money to sustain this life will come from if and when my savings go.

But the point is, I am happier than I can remember working virtually all week (albeit part time because of chronic headaches) every week because the vistas that are opening are so exciting. I work mostly alone, and do only what I please. But this apparently selfish lifestyle is not quite what it seems.

For example, a friend tripped on a big hole in the park where we play football. My instinct was to buy some soil and fill it in. When I elaborate on that idea,  I think that I might well engage the council first. Not necessarily to save money, but to see where the approach takes me. I really do not know where that might be. Maybe they will do notyhing, or maybe they will recognise that regular maintenance is better than players sued for sprained ankles.

The liberation of this Maverick role feels very much an extension of the liberation from the clutches of religious dogma. It took me about a year to free myself of the indoctrination of God out of my system. There is a faint possibility that God might exist, but never in accordance with any of the religious texts.

By freeing myself of the conditioning of ‘my place in society’, I paradoxically may give more back to society. The very indirectness of my life now may yield much more than when constraine, as it was in the past, in a 9-5 job. More often than not, such jobs merely line the pockets of rich people running large companies (I worked for IBM for 12 years) than it helps society. Or at least my part in it.

I regularly tell unemployed graduates that there is another way into ‘work’ than the normal routes. And yes, even when I sat on the beach reading today, I was working. Studying melatonin. Few would describe it as work of course.But what if I were J.K.Rowling sat on that beach instead of me? Sat there researching dragonsfor her first Harry Potter book. Is that work?

Of course, I am not a famous author, but neither was she when she received the first 8 response for her 1st manuscript. All rejections.

The point I am making, is that the linear path is merely one of many. My rambling route forward, driven by instinct rather than work load, may yield many things. I simply do not know yet, but am loving the opportunity. And yes, headaches aside, I DO appreciate this opportunity. My bed bound illness before Christmas starkly reminded me of the fragility and pontential brevity of life. But I owe it to myself, my father, and my brother to take this path. You see, my brother was also blessed with great eccentricity and ideas. One innovation of his made millions for IBM. The rewards were misdirected to a colleague of my brother because he was too humble to speak up for himself.

I mean diet as in nutrition, not as in dieting. The difference is significant.

I have finally come around to making a deeply concerted effort to tackle my low-blood sugar (hypoglycaemic) condition. I have been reading blogs, and books on diabetes and hypoglycaemiaand there is a single, immutable theme that runs through. Namely that I should have a low carbohydrate diet.

The reasoning is fairly simple - carbohydrates are nothing but chains of sugar molecules - and their digestion in large enouigh quantities causes the pancreas to release insulin to swiftly deal with this ‘imbalance’. The excess insulin then makes the processing of consumed fat more difficult, so it gets stored as, er, fat.

So eating fat might make you fat. But much more so if you have charged up on carbohydrates.

So the Governmental food agencies’ mantra that “A low fat diet is best” is too simplistic at best, and certainly misleading.

They claim that fat contains too many calories. They actually use wording like this, rather than the more correct ‘too dense in calories’. The salient point is not whether you are eating fat dense food, (or we would best be advised to eat vegetables only), but how many calories in total that you are eating.

The problem with a high carbohydrate diet is that the surge in blood sugars is rapidly countered by the insulin release, and the subsequent drop - the relative drop - often creates a craving for more.

If, however, you eat a balanced meal, with some carbohydrates replaced by quality fats - such as avocado, and, yes, even cheese, then there is a much lower sugar rise, a lower rise in insulin, and a slower blood sugar drop. Basically, you feel more sated, and do not have that urgent craving for more.

Now lool at the UK’s Food Standards Agency guidance :

A healthy balanced diet contains a variety of foods including plenty of fruit and vegetables, plenty of starchy foods such as wholegrain bread, pasta and rice, some protein-rich foods such as meat, fish, eggs and lentils and some dairy foods. It should also be low in fat (especially saturated fat), salt and sugar.

The research into this aspect of diet is heavily weighted against such  advice. The advice is principally given for 2 reasons:

1. It is simple to follow, and makes sense to the general public - low fat in low fat stored
2. It allows the food industry to prosper - the manufacture of carbohydrate snacks alone is a multi-billion pound/dollar industry

Eating a low carbohydrate diet is one of the soundest ways of losing or gaining weight - ie to reach a healthy weight - that is out there. Conversely, cutting down on fats will put you into an almost constant state of carbohydrate craving.

After reading and contuining to read around this subject, I am gradually introducing changes to my diet. The books do warn that going cold turkey to  creates weeks or adjustment discomfort. They tend to gloss over this as if the target goal validated the pain. But I strongly suspect that gradually adjustment is way better.

For example, I now replace my afternoon banana with a mostly protein and/or fat snack. I have eaten a banan every afternoon for decades for two reasons - I love the taste, and it was supposed to be a healthy food.

And, of course, cheese is a very unhealthy food. Right?

The statement is badly phrased. There is no such things as unhealthy food. If I eat a mars bar in the middle of a long game of football, it will probably be very beneficial. In fact, professional cyclists eat very high sugar foods. Have to or they can suffer rapid energy losses.

Bananas and cheese are both healthy foods when eaten approriately.

Eat cheese with little or no carbohydrate and you will be fine - as long as you do not eat too much of course! An excess of anything is not good. Even too many vegetables will elrage your stomach and cause excess insulin to be produced.

The cheese instead of the banana mid afternoon means that I do not suffer food cravings later afternoon.

Now you, the reader, may wonder if this is more meaningful for thise who suffer with blood sugar problems, such as myself and diabetics. Again, the consensus from what I have read is that the majority of us suffer unnecessarily large blood sugar variations because we eat too many carbohydrates.

A number of you may realise that the proposal is in liine with the much criticised ‘Atkens diet’. Alas, that diet was wrongly attacked - the attackers even admitted that it did work, and that good health as well as weight loss ensued.

To tickle your taste buds, read this article :

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1662484,00.html

And let me know what you think.

A final point : did  you know that lard is better for you in some ways than margarine? It contains monounsaturated fats, as opposed to the polyunsaturated fats in marg.

When we go out to buy something, we are influenced by price, aesthetics, and all manner of things. You may choose a new TV for entirely the wrong reasons. Or at leastm for the wrong long-term reasons.

I for one should be fussier than most since ergonomics, a big long term factor, is a matter of high importance to me, yet this facet of a product often gets sidelined by other matters when it comes to the crunch.

The problem with decision making with a view to the long term value is that the long term factors are often way too subtle to see up front. They are easily outweighed by more immediate ‘in-your-face’ factors.

But there is one fabulous example of  this is action. Prams. Or baby carriers or whatever the modern name is for them. Can you guess a key long term factor that should sway your choice?

3 wheels or 2?

Nope

Foldup or not?

Nope

A key factor is that for the long term future health of the baby, it should simply face the mother. Constant visual contact reduces anxiety and crying, and sustains the maternal bond. The long term effect on a baby facing forward is one of mild psychological damage. They are isolated from their Mother. The bond is broken, albeit temporarily.

Am I over-reacting here? I suspect not - research bears this out.

But how easy is this to overlook? Very. Simply because we do not live out the consequence - the baby does. So we do not sense in advance or subsequently the danger of bad orientation.

Now that you know this, next time you see a baby facing away from the mother, think about it. This subtle factor is weak in appearance, but powerful in affect.