The "Insulin Resistance Saga" - Part II: Jimmy has Asthma and My Daddy Eats Five Cheeseburgers and Three Large Servings of French Fries in One Sitting!

Image 1: In 2009 10% of all US children had at least a mild form of asthma. 57% of these children had had at least one asthma attack in the year before. And in the year 2007, 9 people died of an asthma attack on each of the 365 days of the year (CDC. 2007-2009)... yet our understanding of the nutrition-cleanliness-autoimmune axis is still in its infancy while millions of dollars are spent on a non-sensical "war on cholesterol", every day.
  

[Note: This is a direct sequel to the last installment] There she is, Mrs Youesdeay... you hated her. Her and her healthy greens: "Good morning my dear! I see your mommy is in a hurry today?... Good morning Mrs. Singleparent!" Mrs. Youesdeay was standing there, her usual half-anorexic vegan self, staring right into your eyes." It was as if she was saying: "Gimme those peanut-butter sandwiches my dear!" To escape this fate, you had made it a habit to hurry right past her and into the grey building with its unique smell. Mrs. Youesdeay always said that it was smelling of cleanliness... but how could something smell of cleanliness? You have been dwelling over this for some time now, but were not been able to come up with a solution. Jimmy started to cough. "I wonder whether his does this deliberately!" - it is the same ritual every morning. You obviously cannot know that Jimmy's asthma attacks, of which everyone keeps telling you that they are a result of the dangerous house dust - how on earth can some dust be dangerous? - are in fact triggered by the "smell of cleanliness" - or rather the toxic air-pollutants which form, when the vapor from the anti-bacterial cleaning products the cleaners are pouring over the floor by the liter every morning at 4am, right before you and your friends arrive at the kindergarten and the air fresheners Mrs. Youesdeay has placed in regular intervals all over the building mingle (Nazaroff. 2004).

"Jimmy is getting onto my nerves, really!" As usual, Jeany, your best friend, had been the first to arrive at the Kindergarten. You wonder why she does not want to tell you what her mommy did for a living, but in the end, it did not matter, anyway. You take your lunchbox out of your bag and check whether the peanut-butter sandwiches are still there. "You never know, what Mrs. Youesdeay is up to..." The sandwiches are still there and the Snickers bars, as well. Now, that your catecholamine levels are slowly returning to baseline your blood sugar is dropping back to the alarmingly low levels which made you yawn, when you got out of the car, at 7am.

Five past seven, high time for one of those Snickers bars!

Image 2: Takeru Kobayashi is only the most prominent of a new generation of media-hyped "food athletes" and questionable rolemodels for our children (img welt.de).

You grab one of the Snickers and scoff it down with two bites. This way you can make sure that Mrs. Youesdeay, who is still dealing with Jimmy's every morning asthma attack, is not going to see it. While you are waiting for the soothing and gratifying effect of the sugar rush to set in, you are heading over to the shelf with your name - the first (and only) word you can read - and take the half-finished of you, your mommy and your daddy at McDonald's... that was only half a year ago! In those days, when you were still a happy family. "My daddy can eat 5 Cheesburgers and 3 large servings of French fries!", you say. Your own personal record is 3 Happy Meals and in retrospective you were sure that you had finished the fourth one, as well, if you had not insisted on the super-size Fanta, but had stuck to those ridiculous standard sizes. One day, you would beat this tiny Japanese hot-dog eater, ...

... 69+1 hot dogs? that cannot be so difficult, right?

The regular corn syrup from the Snickers bar is doing its job pretty decently, your blood sugar rises and your thoughts stop wandering from topic to topic. Now, you are ready to go. You grab your pencil and begin to draw one of those creamy milk-shakes onto the already over-laden meal tray your mother is carrying. Meanwhile, your pancreas is pumping out insulin like crazy, but the constant influx of long-chain fatty acids from your digestive tract and the triglycerides your liver is still producing from the "corn sugar" (for those who are not aware, this is the new name for high fructose corn-syrup) that is responsible for the unbelievable sweet taste of your "healthy whole grain cereals", along with your chronically elevated cortisol levels, are tricking your body to believe that those free and glycerol-bonded fatty acids must be coming right from the adipose tissue, from which they are liberated in order to preserve your blood glucose levels from falling back into the hypoglycemic abyss and shut down the insulin-induced glucose transport into your brain and muscle cells by -50% (Thiébaud. 1982; Roden. 1996; Shulman. 2000).

"Vanilla or chocolate?"

Mrs. Youesdeay is passing out the low-fat vanilla and chocolate milk that is part of your governmentally sponsored breakfast, here at the Kindergarten. You grab one of the 100% vanilla-free yellowish brews, open the lid and avail yourself of another 10g of sugar and a whole host of artificial flavorings. "Mrs. Youesdeay?", you hear Carlson say. "Mrs. Youesdeay, that is not raw milk, is it? My daddy said that I must never drink raw milk, because it will make me sick and go to the hospital... that happens to 1000s of people every year, my daddy says!" You drop the PET bottle with your vanilla milk and stare over to Mrs. Youesdeay. "You don't have to be afraid Carlson. The USDA and our government are making sure that those scrupulous farmers are made accountable. Our milk is pasteurized and homogenized!"

Did you know that carrageenan (E407), also known as Ammonium Carrageenan, Calcium Carrageenan, Potassium Carrageenan, Sodium Carrageenan, Chondrus Extract or Irish Moss), a emulgator and stabilizer that is used whenever the fat that is giving real foods their unique texture is removed (such as in "your" no-fat vanilla or chocolate milk), is a potent pro-inflammatory agent? In a 2010 study from the University of Illinois (Bhattacharyya. 2010), it stimulated the inflammatory effects TNF-alpha in colonic epithial cells and inhibited its apoptotic (inducing programmed cell-death) effects and thusly set the stage for the development of colon cancer.

You pick the bottle back up and empty the rest of the 0.33l of milk not being aware that the mould-derived vanillin in it is only one of the 7 listed E-numbers and countless unlisted chemicals, of which you can safely assume that their addition to raw milk would solve the "problem" with bacterial contamination in no time ...

[to be continued...]