Are you eating a low-carb, high-fat fad diet like Adkins or Paleo in order to lose weight? Do you have a family history of diabetes or have you been told you have prediabetes? If so, then you really need to read this.

Low-carb diets like the Paleo or Adkins diet are still really popular. Many people lose weight following them, but others dont. Furthermore, for those with prediabetes these low-carb, high-fat diets dont reduce the risk of advancing from prediabetes to diabetes.

A 2016 study reported in Nutrition and Diabetes magazine found that New Zealand Obese mice with prediabetes fed a low-carb, high-fat diet gained weight, and did not see an improved function of their insulin-producing pancreas. The mice were fed a low-carb diet consisting of 13% protein, 6% carbs and 81% fat, with over half of the fat calories coming from saturated fat. Even thoughtheir triglycerides and HDL(the good cholesterol) improved, they gained weight and their was no improvement to the health of their pancreas. In other words, they got fatter and their prediabetes did not improve.

Researchers believethat a low-carb, high-fat dietcauses an accumulation of fat in the liver causing the liver to keep making glucose. In healthy people, higher insulin blood levels halt the production of glucose in the liver. This normal process goes awrywhen someone with prediabetes eats a low-carb, high-fat diet. Keep in mind, the CDC reports that more than 1 out of 3 adults in the U.S. have prediabetes.

The diet used in the low-carb, high-fat diet study consisted of a very high fat diet over 3/4 of the calories were coming from fat and half of those were from the heart-clogging saturated kind. I wonder what the results would have been if the diet had consisted of slightly less fat and the heart-healthy unsaturated kind the mono- and polyunsaturated fats.Would there have been weight loss and improved pancreatic function?

From Adkins.com

The Adkins and Paleo diet depending on what you choose to eat could have you consuming a diet low in carbs but really high in fat the saturated kind if you are not careful. There are a few differences in the two diets. The Paleo diet forbids dairy, meaning cheese, yogurt, and milk and encourages only grass-fed meat.

From the Paleodiet.com

It also emphasizes heart-healthy fats mainly from fish, seeds, oils like olive and flax seed, and avocado. The Adkins diet does not discern between saturated fat and healthy fats. It also allows cheese and only full fat dairy after phase 1. Both diets encourage lots of non-starchy veggies, but the Paleo diet allows fruit from the start and expects that 35-45% of your calories come from non-starchy fruits and veggies.

You have to usesome common sense when it comes to dietary choices.Why not use some of the dietary tips from the Omniheart study that protectsheart health while still eating a lower carb diet? Here are some other tidbits:

Fad diets like Adkins and Paleo may seem like a prescription to a lovely destination, but are you losing weight? And if you reached your goal are you going to keep maintaining on that diet? You most likelystill have to learn how to keep old habits at bay. Find a path to health that is sustainable. NutritionAction.com, a nonprofit group that has consumers interests at heart (they are the ones that got trans-fats listed on food labels), has a wonderful guide that will help you lose weight in a sensible way and keep your heart healthy.

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And you think Adkins and Paleo diets always work? - Bangor Daily News (blog)

Ive been helping people lose weight for more than 20 years. In all of that time I have seen some weight loss mistakes being repeated over and over. One mistake in particular is failing to make a plan.

Holidays are a major cause of stress for many dieters.

There are known threats to diets. Some women have a monthly threat that their lack of planning sets their diets back a few days every time around that time of the month. Then there are the seasonal threats and the holiday threats that are equally predictable but for which too many dieters fail to make a plan.

Easter is coming. Its a threat and Ive already heard dieters say, Ill be fine. Ill just be careful.

This isnt a good plan. Its not a plan at all. Planning isnt difficult and the results are worth the time and effort. Rather than opening your eyes on Monday morning feeling bloated and full of regret, a little planning can turn that around. Instead of worrying about whether youll be able to get your control back, you can celebrate your Easter success.

Be prepared for your Easter gathering. This is not the day for leggings and a long tunic top or sweat pants. Wear something thats snug around the waist, not stretchy. Eat somefruit and vegetables before you go. Think of your stomach as a balloon 3/4 full of air. An empty belly (totally deflated balloon) makes it harder to practice flexible restraint.

1. Be very choosy about Easter candy.

2. If you will be in a situation where tension runs high with family members find ways to physically or mentally remove yourself.

3. When faced with the meal and the hors doeuvres pick carefully.

4. Avoid alcohol altogether or mix wine with sparkling water for a spritzer.

5. Move, move move!

6. Practice, practice, practice these tips by creating images in your head and watching yourself successfully perform the actions you will do to stay on track.

A well-formed plan is the best way to ensure you will great the scale with confidence after Easter.

Things dont always work out as planned. Your best shot of sticking to your plan is making it as specific and detailed as possible. Then reviewit in your head over and over and over. The more familiar you are with your plan the greater the chances it will become a reality.

If your best laid plans go awry, you didnt fail, you just need to adjust your plan so that it works the way you want it to work next time. Dont beat yourself up or start giving yourself negative self-talk, instead write the word Easter on a piece of toilet paper, flush it, and go on with your program as though Easter never happened. A little weight gain is not a setback or a roadblock, its just a detour.

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Do not let the Easter bunny wreck your diet - Bangor Daily News

Turning plastic, grease and beer mash into cash The San Luis Obispo Tribune "Local farmers save money on feed and it helps us quickly and safely dispose of the grain that would turn pretty nasty in a few days," said Andrew Nations, president/owner of Great Raft Brewing in Shreveport. "It's a great way for both of us to get the ... and more »

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Turning plastic, grease and beer mash into cash - The San Luis Obispo Tribune

People love their bananas. Ask anyone to grab a snack, and 9 times out of 10 theyll pull out a banana from their backpack and pocketbook. In fact bananas are the most popular fruit in the US with the average person consuming 25 pounds a year. They dont need any washing or refrigeration. They are high in fiber and potassium, and low in calories. What could be wrong with them? Depending on the ripeness and size, a banana can have a huge impact on blood sugar. That can be a good thing if you are running a marathon, but a bad thing if you are watching your blood sugars or tryingto lose weight. Bananas are not alone in spiking blood sugars; there are other foods high on the glycemic index scale that do the same thing.

Glycemic index (GI) is a scale used to measure the impact of a specific food on blood sugar. GI ranks foodin comparison to a food reference point, either glucose or white bread, which are both ranked at 100. The GI of a food tells you how quickly the sugar from the food will enter the blood stream. Eating low GIfoods have helped with weight loss as well as maintaining steady blood sugars in those with prediabetes or diabetes. Eating foods that keep blood sugars from spiking requires less insulin. A lower blood insulin level lessens the workload for the pancreas, preserving its function, and also helps with weight loss. Here are some examples of low, medium and high GIfoods:

Glycemin index is only part of the picture. To completely understand how much a food will impact blood sugar you also need to know how much sugar it will deliver. This is called the glycemic load. Glycemic load takes into consideration portion size.A glycemic load of 10 or below is considered low, while a glycemic load of 20 or more is considered high.

ripe bananas are sweeter but also have a much higher GI

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition maintains a list of glycemic index and glycemic load of over 750 commonfoods. The table below lists glycemic index, serving size based on grams, and glycemic loadof a ripe banana, a slightly under-ripe banana and an over-ripe banana with some brown spots. I could not find any information on a fully green banana, but you can safely assume it has an even lower GI than the slightly under ripe banana.

A study reported in Diabetic Medicine on the effect of banana ripeness on blood sugars in people with type 2 diabetes, revealed:

Green bananas contain more resistant starches. Resistant starches are starches that resist digestion in the small intestine. Resistant starches are fermented by our healthy gut microbes and help to produce vitamins and health-promoting compounds as well as destroy potential cancer causing toxins. Resistant starches also help to reduce blood sugars.

When fruits ripen the resistant starches convert to sugar which is why a ripe banana tastes sweeter and will raise blood sugars much more than a green banana.

This is where Glycemic Load comes into play. A small banana has 18.5 gms of carbs, while a 9 inch banana contains over 35 gms. When you consider serving size in addition to ripeness, you can easily see how blood sugars could really spike by eating a large ripe banana.

Diabetes.org discusses other factors that impact the GI of foods.

I remember my mother telling me that green bananas would give me a stomach ache. Part of that problem is from the fermentation process that occurs in the gut. People with a normal digestion and a healthy diet should not experience this problem. But people with irritable bowel syndrome or some other digestive problem, green bananas could cause gas and bloating.

For the rest of us, unless you are getting ready for a marathon, this is what you should do:

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Go bananas, but go green for a lower glycemic index - Bangor Daily News (blog)

At Eataly in Boston. Photo: Madeline Zappala

Barbara Lynch is one of the most successful restaurateurs in the country: She owns seven businesses in Boston, and in 2014, won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur. To add to her accomplishments, shell publish her first memoir on April 11: Out of Line: A Life of Playing With Fire, chronicling her rise to success following a tough childhood in South Boston. This week, she spent some precious time at home before embarking on a book tour, making herself soup for breakfast, and going out for seafood at her favorite local spots. Read all about it in this weeks Grub Street Diet.

Friday, March 31For breakfast, I had a big glass of cranberry concentrate. I read somewhere that it flushes out fat, and I just got back from two weeks of eating a lot in Italy, so that seemed like a good idea. I also had a few cashews and a cup of tea.

For my second breakfast, I had quinoa, white beans, and carrots, with a poached egg in a broth with curry and cumin. I love soups for breakfast.

And then, for lunch, I had a Caesar salad. This was just a takeout salad, actually, from a deli across the street from my office.

That night, we had a gala for the opening of Eataly Terra, their new rooftop restaurant. Im collaborating with Eataly Boston on their seafood restaurant, Il Pesce. They put in front of us some pasta with charred tomatoes and capers. I had a few bites, a few pieces of grilled steak, a bite of a sausage, and that was that. The opening was great. I also had two glasses of wine.

I went to a friends house after, and they got takeout Thai food. I had three bites of that. Another glass of wine.

Saturday, April 1 Saturday morning, I had chicken and roasted broccoli on top of white rice, with Indian spices and mushroom sauce. My new daughter-in-law made it at home. Shes from Nepal, so she cooks a lot of vegetarian food. Shes a great cook.

For lunch, I had a salad from Dig Inn. It was broccoli greens, salmon, radishes, and beets, with cilantro. The vinaigrette was lemon and olive oil. It was huge!

It was another Terra opening night. I didnt really eat because I worked the floor for much of the night running circles around the restaurant and talking to everyone. I had two glasses of wine. It was a little smoother than most openings. The first 20 people who hashtagged the restaurant came in for dinner and had a great time. When I got home, I had some more of that Dig Inn salad.

Sunday, April 2 That morning, I had another poached egg with radishes at home, and some of that vegetable soup from Friday.

Then, in the afternoon, I got a to-go Greek salad from Legal Sea Foods, dressing on the side, and put a poached egg on that.

For dinner, I made a porcini-mushroom-fennel soup, with a little bit of farro and roasted fennel, and I had that with an aged cheddar cheese, which I shaved onto it. Plus a salad with radish and parsley and asparagus. I didnt have any groceries left, so I used dried porcini and just water, no chicken stock.

Monday, April 3 I had an egg-white omelette with cheddar in the middle. And then I had some of that mushroom-farro-asparagus soup, which I poured on top of the omelette.

That night, I had a gala for an opening of a documentary Im in, called A Fine Line, about women in back-of-house management roles. I was a little early, so I stopped at Bell in Hand and had grilled shrimp with spicy tomato sauce. My friend and I split that, and we had a glass of wine.

Then, I was at the gala for three hours because I was on a panel. After that, I was starving because I was only supposed to be there an hour, but it was a quarter to 10 p.m. I ran over to Neptune Oysters, and I split a dozen oysters, a crab salad and shrimp cocktail, and a half-bottle of Sancerre wine with my friend. I always drink white wine or ros with ice cubes.

Tuesday, April 4 I had a bowl of cereal with almond milk Kashi shredded wheat with no sugar on it. I had chicken with broccoli and farro again as a late breakfast.

I drove around South Boston with a writer from the Times, showing where I grew up. We stopped at my local spot, a bar called Shamrock, and I had one chicken finger and one French fry. They were big chicken fingers! I dipped it in ketchup and honey-mustard sauce. The fries werent great, so I could hold back. If they had been delicious, I wouldve eaten the whole bowl.

That night, we had an event at Menton to celebrate the memoir. I had a slice of pizza from Babbo that my staff brought in with fava beans, pancetta, and cheese. It was delicious. Its called Babbo in Boston, but it looks like Otto, owned by Mario Batali. During my book signing, I had two pieces of lamb marinated in yogurt and juniper berries. I tasted the potato gnocchi with cream sauce, peas, and lobster. I also had a tomato tarte Tatin and two and a half glasses of wine from David Hirsch. Probably more than that. I was talking so much that I couldnt just sit down and eat.

And I cant lie: I had a small bag of Cheez-Its sometime that day.

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Chef and Restaurateur Barbara Lynch Averages Two Breakfasts a Day - Grub Street

An exhibit in Germany showed s reconstructions of a Neanderthal man and woman. A researcher found that a 150-pound person provides about 32,376 calories, enough for a troop of 25 adult Neanderthals for about a third of a day. A mammoth, on the other hand, could feed the group for a month.

Scientists know that our ancient human cousins ate one another, at least on occasion. At a handful of European sites scattered across some 250,000 years, researchers have dug up hominin bones that bear telltale markings: blade scratches, teeth marks, burns.

What they cant be sure of is why. Modern humans have long practiced cannibalism for a variety of ritual reasons to frighten enemies, cure illness, honor the dead but anthropologists have no evidence that Neanderthals or other hominin species had a cultural motivation for consuming their kin. So, for the most part, researchers assumed ancient cannibalism was nutritional, or purely for the purpose of survival.

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Which got University of Brighton archaeologist James Cole wondering: If hominins ate each other for nutrition, then how nutritious were they?

For a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Cole calculated the number of calories that could be gotten from one adult human male. Compared to other creatures our ancient cousins ate mammoths, steppe bison, deer it turned out that hominins were a pretty low-calorie snack. A 150-pound person provides about 32,376 calories, enough for a troop of 25 adult Neanderthals for about a third of a day. A mammoth, on the other hand, could feed the group for a month.

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Doing research into the subject, I found that no one had ever defined a calorie value for the human body, and if they did, they were kind of throwaway numbers with no indication of how they arrived there, Cole said.

Coles calculations, on the other hand, are unnervingly specific. His paper contains a chart listing the estimated weight and calorie value for every component of the human body. Head and torso: 5,418.67 calories. Upper arms: 7,451.16 calories. Thighs: 13,354.88 calories. Skin: 10,278 calories. Teeth: 36 calories.

When you stack up muscle values in terms of weigh, we actually fall right where we should right between saiga and roe deer, which are animals roughly about our same size, Cole said, impressively matter-of-fact for someone essentially writing a FDA nutritional facts label for members of his own species.

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Neanderthals and other ancient hominin species, he noted, were far bulkier than modern humans, with big muscles and sturdy builds. They might have been a bit more filling than a Homo sapiens meal, but not by much.

Its interesting because if youre labeling these acts as nutritional cannibalism . . . and you compare how nutritional we are compared to game, we actually arent a very good return, Cole said.

Of course, the Neanderthals werent calorie counters. But they would have been able to tell that a person didnt provide as much sustenance as a boar or a horse. And unlike a boar or a horse, a hominin would be exactly as cunning and skillful as the person whod like to eat him meaning hes much more difficult to kill.

To Cole, this suggests that ancient hominins could have had ritual motivations for consuming members of their own species, just as modern humans did. This shouldnt be surprising he said Neanderthals are already known to have made art, worn jewelry, and developed sophisticated communication.

Clearly these are complex and diverse human species and their attitude to cannibalism I would suggest is going to be as complex and diverse as our own, he said.

Paola Villa, a Neanderthal expert and researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said that Coles calculations offer some interesting information, but should not change our understanding of ancient hominin cannibalism. A person may not have offered the same caloric return as a deer, she said, but hominins werent hunting each other the way they hunted deer anyway.

There never was a suggestion that humans were hunted as food animals, she wrote in an email. Eaten as food, yes, but the cause has always been described as either aggressive cannibalism (well-documented in mammals including primates) or starvation or as a ceremonial mortuary practice.

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Paleo diet: Ancient humans were cannibals, but it wasn't very nutritious - The Boston Globe