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DURK PEARSON & SANDY SHAW'S
NEW 21st CENTURY
WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM
In 1986 Durk & Sandy wrote a book called "The Life Extension Weight Loss Program" which hit the best sellers list. The popularity of the book impacted the nutritional world by introducing the public to the fact that they could lose weight by simply using nutritional supplements. Not only was it a healthy way to lose weight it was a revolutionary way. With this weight loss program Durk and Sandy became known for the introduction of "stimulated thermogenesis", a process by which one could increase the rate at which the body burns fat.
Now 20 years later, they are changing the world of weight loss and weight control again with the revolutionary development of their NEW WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM ….GLYCEMIC CONTROL !
The interview that follows will introduce you to a weight loss strategy based on the concept of glycemic control. It is designed to revolutionize the way you eat and to improve your health without the need for calorie counting or even exercise - it is the best of both worlds - you can now truly enjoy the pleasures of eating!
Exclusive interview with Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw
Durk: We're introducing a new "Glycemic Control Weight Loss Program, a protocol that has helped me lose a lot of weight. At the outset, I weighed 234 pounds, but after about seven and half months, I'm down to 203 and still dropping. During that time, I've never gone hungry, I haven't done any significant exercise (although exercise is undeniably good for you), and I haven't counted calories. There are, of course, certain "downsides" to losing weight: I keep having to buy smaller-size blue jeans, and I even had to buy a smaller gun belt for when I carry my .44 magnum out at the ranch.
Anyway, the program involves a change in diet, where you start by selecting foods with a low glycemic index. That's a numerical rating system for carbohydrate-containing foods, based on how they effect your blood glucose levels after you consume them. It's not a theoretical index, but one based on actual measurements in humans.
An example of a low-glycemic food is sweet potatoes, which our program would substitute for white russet baking potatoes. It also entails the use of a special strain of barley flour (or, barley flakes) which contains very high levels of beta-glucan, a soluble, viscous fiber that slows down the absorption of the foods it is mixed with - a truly amazing effect. When you add the barley Flour or Flakes to almost any food, it will lower the glycemic index. That turns what you eat into "time released food!"
Sandy: Because weight loss is a complex subject, we're going to do a series of interviews on it. In this one, we'll discuss what makes you fat ant then explain how you can reduce the amount of fat on your body.
We've found that lowering the glycemic index of what you eat can reduce your weight by altering the effects that food has on your body and by reducing the amount you eat.
In the next interview, we'll discuss the bulk of the experimental data pertaining to the glycemic control strategy of our weight loss program, which is fundamentally associated with the rate of glucose absorption as well as the overall caloric energy balance involved.
A key point is that resting metabolism drops when glucose is low, so when people reduce calories by dieting, the drop in resting metabolism makes it hard to lose weight. The time- release factor is important as the impetus for helping to prevent this undesirable effect, but much more important is the idea that it causes (or can cause) a person to eat less. Also, a slow glucose release permits more to be burned, leaving less to be converted to body fat. Resting metabolic rate is not invariable, even without the use of thermogenic agents.
How you Get Fat
Durk: If you understand why you get fat, it will be a lot easier for you to do something about it without the pain.
When you sit down to a holiday feast and start digging into that yummy russet baked potato in front of you… what happens? Why does it make you fat?
The answer is - when you eat a baked potato, its starch gets depolymerized in your gut by an enzyme called alpha-glucosidase, turning it into glucose. The glucose is quickly transported through the intestinal wall and is absorbed into your bloodstream. Your blood sugar goes sky-high.
Sandy: In fact, the russet baked potato actually has a glycemic index nearly as high as that of pure glucose, and it's typically about 50% higher than the much lower glycemic index of pure sucrose (cane or beet sugar), although it can be close to 100% higher, depending on the source of the potatoes and other variables. Thus, if you eat 100 grams of baked potato, you might as well be ingesting almost 100 grams of glucose in a glucose tolerance test. Your glucose level spikes, and your body reacts by releasing a lot of insulin to prevent hyperglycemia.
Durk: Some of the excess glucose in your blood will be converted to glycogen, a glucose polymer that's stored in your liver for quick conversion back to glucose on demand. Between meals, a substantial amount of that glycogen is released as glucose to fulfill the ongoing needs of your body's cells, even if you're not an active athletic type. Obese people appear to store large amounts of glycogen that undergo major fluctuations during the day. This suggests that, for the obese, glycogen is a critical source of cellular fuel - and that makes it hard for them to burn fat they are storing.
That fat got stored in the first place owing to excessive caloric intake, especially when it was absorbed too quickly. If there is more glucose in the blood than the cells need, and if the liver is full of glycogen, which occurs soon after a meal, the fate of the excess glucose is pretty much sealed: it gets converted to fat and stored in fat cells. Unlike glycogen, fat can never be converted back to glucose - it can only be stored or burned.
Wasn't substantial fat storage necessary for survival in the past?
Durk: Yes. Back in the Ice Age, few people grew old - it is estimated that only 1or 2% even reached forty years old. Becoming obese was not in the cards, but having a nice, thick layer of fat on your body provides good insulation against the winter cold, as well as life- saving source of fuel when food was scarce. Just ask any polar bear, seal, or whale about the virtues of blubber!
Glycemic Control - The New Gold Standard
Durk: Our Glycemic Control Weight Loss Program is a powerful tool for creating healthier, lower-glycemic foods while eating what you like. It is based on the special barley Flour or barley Flakes, which has about twice the beta-glucan of regular barley and about three times as much as oats.
Oats are generally considered to be the gold standard of low glycemic, high -solubility, viscous -fiber foods. So, we are going to be comparing our barley flour and flakes with oats.
Sandy: Back in the '90s, we began working with a strain of barley that was selected for its high content of beta-glucan. But, the barley we are using now has about twice the beta-glucan of the original. It is derived from a native strain found in an area of the Himalayas around Tibet, Nepal, and India: it is extremely high in beta-glucan to begin with, and was selectively bred to be even higher.
Comparing our barley Flour and Flakes to oatmeal, a study in Plant Foods for Human Nutrition in 2005 found a remarkable difference.
In non-diabetics, the rise in glucose was only 15.5% (one-seventh as much) for the barley flour and flakes as compared with oatmeal; in diabetics, that figure was 35%. For insulin, the corresponding figures for barley flour compared with oatmeal were 29% in non-diabetics and 32% in diabetics.
Clearly our Flour and Flakes is a very low-glycemic food. In fact, if you look at the glycemic index (GI) of our barley Flakes as a hot cereal it comes in at 25. (With glucose being 100 - white bread 70, whole grain bread 59, hot cereal oats 51.) This is comparable to some lentils, which have GI value in the 20s.
Creating Time-Release Food
Durk: If you add some of the barley Flour to lentil soup - the results are amazing. I didn't feel like eating anything else for 24 hours. And if you don't feel like eating, it's easy not to get fat and to lose weight! By adding the Flakes to the lentil soup, we transformed something that was low in glycemic index to something even lower, turning it into a carbohydrate time-release type of food.
An article from Cereal Chemistry in 1997 makes the time-release case. While pasta is moderately low in glycemic index for a carbohydrate-rich food, in this study plain pasta showed a significant blood sugar rise. However, just by replacing part of the wheat flour with our Flour - the blood sugar rise was almost statistically insignificant, and it went on hour after hour. The insulin rise was much lower too.
Cholecystokinin is a hormone produced in your gut. It signals your brain, "I'm full; I'm not hungry anymore, so I don't need to eat." It is a satiety hormone.
In a 1999 study done with regular pasta, Cholecystokinin was elevated for about 3 hours after a meal. But using a pasta in which some of the wheat flour had been replaced using some of the same barley flour we are using, they found the Cholecystokinin was elevated for 6 hours - twice as long.
What other effects can the high beta-glucan in barley Flour and Flakes provide?
Sandy: Beta-glucan has remarkable effects on the amount of the carbohydrates that you digest. In another article published in the Journal of Nutrition in 2002, researchers compared the digestion of regular barley with that of our naturally rich-beta-glucan barley, they found that humans absorbed less glucose from the special barley than from the regular barley, because more of the former remained undigested and wound up in the colon. There it was fermented by intestinal bacteria, producing short-chain fatty acids, which are very healthful; they also help make you feel full.
Also, of interest… in the Cholecystokinin study above, the scientists found that the beta-glucan in barley inhibited absorption of cholesterol from the meal, but is also apparently stimulated reverse cholesterol transport, a process in which cholesterol is removed from the arteries and excreted. This may contribute to barley's cholesterol -lowing abilities.
Barley is not, however a substitute for statins in this regard. On the other hand, if you eat meals enriched with this special barley flour or flakes, you may not need drugs to reduce cholesterol. Barley flour is capable of reducing cholesterol. In fact, the FDA actually allows a cardiovascular claim for the use of barley fiber.
Durk: To qualify the amount of soluble fiber in the barley product must be a mere 0.75-gram per daily serving; at 30% soluble fiber that means 2.5 grams per day of our barley Flour or Flakes products. This is less than oatmeal, because there's three times as much of the beta-glucan in the special barley.
The way the claim reads is, "Soluble fiber from foods such as (product name), as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease. A serving of (product name) supplies more than 0.75 gram of the soluble fiber necessary per day to have this effect."
How else can one use the Glycemic Control Weight Loss strategy?
Sandy: The special barley Flour and Flakes can be added to almost any type of meal that you like. You can add it to soup, …for example - before or after you cook it. It will thicken the soup like a starch would - after all, it is a barley starch. But a regular starch will be broken down almost immediately, causing a blood sugar and insulin spike, with much of that glucose ending up as body fat. By contrast the special barley starch will meter out glucose from the soup over an extended period of time. Starch. incidentally, constitutes only about 30% of our barley flour: the rest is mostly beta-glucan fiber and protein.
Universal method for lowering the Glycemic Index
Durk: Now, if you are going to be sitting at someone else's table and you were not involved in preparing the food, all you need to do is take a glass of something like milk or fruit juice and mix couple of tablespoons of our special barley Flour into it. Then, by drinking it before you start eating…your meal will turn into a time-release meal!
Sandy: By the way, it is still better to eat a sweet potato than a white russet potato. We're now enjoying sweet potato French fries - we both love French fries. The only trouble is, the white potatoes have a very high glycemic index. Although the GI of those fries is lower that that of a corresponding unfried potato (because fat retards the rate of digestion), it is still high. You can fry the potatoes in a healthful fat, such as a high-oleic sunflower oil, or you can bake them in the oven and avoid the fat altogether- but, either way the GI will be high. So Durk and I use sweet potatoes instead, because they have a much lower GI. Plus, they're a great source of fiber, and they taste wonderful - even better than conventional fries. And by drinking a beverage with a couple of tablespoons of our barley Flour, you can lower the GI even further. This is a universal method for lowering the Glycemic Index of your food. Because of the lifestyle many people live these days -you may be sitting in a heated office or home, moving your fingers and eyes while looking at your computer screen - that may be the extent of your exercise. Under these circumstances, our special barley Flour or Flakes comes to the rescue; it is so easy to just add it to your daily diet!
What else can your special Glycemic Control Flour and Flakes do?
Durk: The beta-glucan it contains is picked up by macrophages, a type of white cell of your immune system, and broken down. The fragments are presented to other white cells, which are then activated, and those activated white cells have been found to attack bacteria and virally infected cells in experimental animals. It also stimulates your immune system to attack cells infected by various viruses, including the swine flu, and a variety of bad bacteria, while at the same time encouraging the growth of good bacteria, such as Lactobacillus, in your colon.
Could you say that it feeds the immune system?
Durk: Yes, it literally does feed it. It's a dietary supplement for your immune system as well as for your cardio-vascular system. So this is really a win-win situation. And it is very easy.
Of course, the more you lower the glycemic index of your meals through food choices, the better it will work. Even if you eat a high -glycemic food, simply adding the Flour or the Flakes can lower the glycemic index. So, you end up with the benefits, but with less fat, lower glucose levels, and reduced insulin release. High glucose and high insulin are both dangerous by themselves, quite apart from their ability to increase body fat.
How much of the special barley Flour or Flakes would one have to use to get the kinds of benefits you're talking about?
Durk: I use about six tablespoons a day. When I have a glass of juice or a bowl of cereal in the morning I mix in a couple of rounded tablespoons. At lunch I take two more, and when I have dinner, I have another two. This has also resulted in my dinners being considerably smaller than they used to be, which is one of the reason my weight continues to drop.
Sandy: I like adding three or four tablespoons of the Flakes to a high- protein, reduced sugar cereal. Remember that the barley contains 18% protein, almost as much as meat. Like meat, but unlike most cereals proteins, it is high in lysine. So, it has a high available-protein-use efficiency.
Our built-in genetic program for storing excess energy as body fat is so strong that it takes a range of strategies to circumvent it. One way is to keep the glycemic index of foods down as low as possible. And our Glycemic Control Weight Loss Program is a universal method for doing that.
Let me stress, if you choose lentils rather than baked potatoes to begin with, you'll be better off… especially if you add our special barley Flour. But, if you really like vichyssoise (potato soup), by all means add the barley Flour to it - it will reduce what would otherwise be a very high glycemic index.
Also, our special Flakes make a great breakfast cereal, either alone or mixed with your favorite grain. And the barley Flakes are also a wonderful addition to meat loaf, casseroles, turkey stuffing and lots of other yummy foods.
Durk and Sandy closed their interview by saying…
"There are many reasons why we gain weight as we get older which we will discuss in our next interview. We also have a couple of additional new dietary supplements that will work with our Glycemic Control Weight Loss Program. These products will be introduced in the near future!"
Direct Health Nutrition is happy to introduce the Glycemic Control Weight Loss Program to our line of products. It is now available and in our warehouse. Call today…
Direct Health Nutrition
866-234-2341
References referred to by Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw in the above article are public documents. Please contact
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