New Diet Book Now Available - The World Turned Upside Down: The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution by Richard David Feinman, PhD

In his new book, The World Turned Upside Down (NMS Press, January 2015), Author Richard David Feinman, PhD - one of the nation's foremost leaders in the field of metabolic and nutritional research and a professor of cell biology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York - provides us with the information and the tools to decipher the nutritional medical literature on our own.

The World Turned Upside Down is the story of nutrition, biochemistry and metabolism - how you process the food that you eat - as well as the practical application of science to daily life. Written from the perspective of a distinguished biochemist, the book boils down all the facts from four different angles:

Part 1: Nutrition and Metabolism: The Stuff You Eat and What Happens to It

Part 2: Policy and the Mess in Nutrition

Part 3: Food and Eating (including recipes)

Part 4: The World Turned Upside Down, The Second Low-Carb Revolution

According to Feinman, "The best diet is the one that works. It doesn't matter how "scientific" it is or how healthy your physician thinks it is. If you gain weight, or if your fasting blood sugar goes up, it's useless or worse." Ultimately, at the end of the book, the reader will simply know what to eat -- and why.

Feinman believes "a low?carb diet which is widely accepted as effective for weight loss is likely a strategy for general health for most people. Acceptance of such a notion is the goal of the revolution. The greatest virtue of carb restriction is its fail?safe feature. If you are not rapidly losing weight or seem to hit the wall, it is a way of eating (WOE) that gives you freedom from the sense of fighting a war against fat. You will almost never gain weight and you will escape that overbearing feeling that every meal is a battle. The real threat of overweight is not health. Mortality correlates with weight only at the very extremes. The real threat is the sense of loss of control."

The book is unsparing in criticism of the nutritional establishment; an establishment which it seems must inevitably be overthrown. Deeply discouraging to Feinman and a motivator for his writing is exposing the "politics of medicine" where "establishment medical journals and the private and government health agencies have insisted on low-fat, low-calorie dogma in the face of all its failures." Beyond the corruption of science is the harm to the patient. Feinman finds the resistance of the medical profession to dietary carbohydrate, especially as the first line of attack against diabetes and metabolic syndrome, "incomprehensible."

A major focus of The World Turned Upside Down is the concept of the metabolic syndrome. There is almost nothing in biology that is not connected with feedback. This fundamental idea is widely ignored but it is pervasive. If you reduce your intake of cholesterol, your body will respond by synthesizing cholesterol. If you stop eating carbohydrate, your body will respond by synthesizing glucose and making other fuels available. The idea of the metabolic syndrome, that superficially different physiologic states - overweight, high blood pressure, the so?called atherogenic dyslipidemia (the lipid markers that are assumed to contribute to cardiovascular disease) - are tied together and in combination indicate risk of disease is, in Feinman's view, a great intellectual insight. That the common effector is likely the hormone insulin, points to the importance of controlling dietary carbohydrate, the major stimulus for insulin secretion.

Everybody knows somebody with diabetes. Because it is progressive, the disease is an under?appreciated source of suffering. Clinicians will tell you that it is like cancer in its devastating effects. Diabetes is the major cause of amputations after accidents and the major cause of acquired blindness. The historical and intuitive idea that you should not add carbohydrates to the diet of people with a disease of carbohydrate intolerance continues to be borne out by experiment and clinical practice and there are no serious contradictions.

Feinman observes a close connection of cancer with obesity and diabetes and the role of insulin. He describes work by his colleague, Dr. Eugene Fine, targeting insulin in the treatment of cancer, as the sign of future progress despite its small size as a research project. Reflects Feinman: "If it turns out that we learn to treat diabetes by learning to treat cancer, it would not be the strangest thing that ever happened in science."

"You are what you eat" is not a real biological idea. You are what your body, that is, your metabolism, does with what you eat is the better principle. Your body is not a storage container. It is a machine. Not one that grinds everything down to calories, but a chemical machine. The input to the machine is the digestive tract but even the digestive system is more than simple plumbing. Within the cells of the intestine, between the absorption of food and the entry into the circulation, transformations are taking place.

The World Turned Upside Down challenges the fear-mongers: CHAPTER 8: SUGAR, FRUCTOSE AND FRUCTOPHOBIA explains that sugar is a food not a poison but it is a carbohydrate. While nobody denies that many in the population are plagued by excessive availability and over?consumption, it is still a feature of la cuisine, haute and otherwise.

CHAPTER 9 gives a perspective on SATURATED FAT - ON YOUR PLATE OR IN YOUR BLOOD? The fat in the Big Mac will not constitute any risk if you chuck the bun. You are what you DO with what you eat. Numerous large and expensive clinical trials continue to show that dietary saturated fat, in general, has no effect on cardiovascular disease, obesity or probably anything else The failure to accept these failures is the primary example of lore and politics over science.

While it is true the saturated fatty acids in the blood can be a health risk, plasma saturated fatty acids, in humans are not tied to dietary saturated fat, and are more dependent on carbohydrate in the diet. Well controlled experiments show that low carbohydrate diets with high saturated fat actually reduce saturated fat in the blood. How is this possible? That's what metabolism does. You are not what you eat. Scientifically accurate and entertaining, this book paints a broad picture of the nutrition world: the beauty of the underlying biochemistry and the embarrassing failure of the medical establishment, the practical value in low-carbohydrate diets and what's wrong with the constant reports that normal foods represent a threat rather than a source of pleasure.

The book tells the story of the first low-carbohydrate revolution, 12 years ago, how it started, what killed it and why another one is happening. It explains how type 2 diabetes can be virtually cured for many people by a reduction in dietary carbohydrate which is better than drugs and why you need to know about it even if you don t have diabetes.

The long?overdue tests of carbohydrate restriction as a cancer therapy may be the important battleground in the second low?carbohydrate revolution. The new scientific paradigm may also be better received in the area of oncology due to the failure to otherwise contain the disease. In obesity, diabetes and metabolic diseases, it may be necessary to clear out the backlog of biased, unscientific and statistically flawed studies that have so far impeded progress.

The World Turned Upside Down gives information and the tools to decipher the nutritional medical literature on one's own. Irreverent and witty, this book boils down all the facts from different angles to a simple message on what to eat and why.

Lastly, this is a book for scientists. Not particularly for guys with an atomic?force microscope in their lab, but for people who want to look at nutrition from a scientific point of view. Science is less about sophisticated measurements, than it is about basic honesty.

About the Author

RICHARD DAVID FEINMAN is Professor of Cell Biology at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York where he has been a pioneer in incorporating nutrition into the biochemistry curriculum. A graduate of the University of Rochester and the University of Oregon (PhD), Dr. Feinman has published numerous scientific and popular papers, including most recently as the Lead Author/Scientific Research Paper: "Dietary carbohydrate restriction as the first approach in diabetes management: Critical review and evidence base" (Nutrition Journal, January 2015). Dr. Feinman is the founder and former co-Editor-In-Chief (2004-2009) of the journal, Nutrition & Metabolism.