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.gif) Neela Sakaria: Thanks for joining us Ms. Schwarzbein. Please tell our readers a little bit about your background.
Diana Schwarzbein: My background is that I am a board certified endocrinologist and a board certified internist. I trained at LA County USC for nine years. I left LA in 1990 to move to Santa Barbara, CA and I have had my own practice there for 12 years.
Neela: This is your second book on the subject?
DS: Yes, this is my second book and we also have two cookbooks that go along with the program. A lot of people think it's my fourth book but I consider it my second book.
Neela: How did this project come about?
DS: THE TRANSITION came about because when I wrote the first book, THE SCHWARZBEIN PRINCIPLE, I wrote it because I was seeing a lot of diabetic patients and people who were insulin resistant. So I wrote it for insulin resistant patients. Then a lot of people saw themselves in the book and said "oh my goodness, I have weight around my mid-section, I must be insulin resistant also." Then I had a lot of people who were NOT insulin resistant, going on an insulin resistant program - and that's very damaging. If you're insulin resistant and you go on an insulin resistant diet, that helps your body heal. If you're insulin sensitive (which is what you want to be), and you go on an insulin resistant program just to lose a few pounds, then over time you can become insulin resistant.
So I really wanted to tell people to wait a minute, there are two sides to the story. Yes, high carbohydrates and high insulin levels are bad, but low carbohydrates and low insulin levels are bad too. So I thought that in order to explain that, I decided to tell people what happens when insulin levels go too low, and tell it from the point of view of the adrenal glands. It's the insulin rebuilding, versus the adrenal glands which use up biochemicals. I wanted people to understand they need to match their building and losing. When people lose weight they tend to think they're doing all the right things -- I wanted people to understand that it's not just about weight, it's about your body's ability to build what it needs for the long run.
Neela: Did you do any additional research for the book?
DS: I have my own private practice, so I never do research -- I do patient follow-up care. It was more about what I was seeing. For the first four or five years, everyone came in with diabetes, and after that it switched to people who weren't diabetic but thought they were pre-diabetic. It just flowed -- I wrote the first book because everybody was coming in with diabetes and eating high carbs. The second book I wrote because people coming in were not diabetic, did not have a predisposition, were not insulin resistant, but were jumping on the low-carb movement and were harming themselves by going in that direction. I really wanted to keep people in the middle.
But it goes a little further than that -- I wanted people to understand that stress and chemicals (refined sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc) play a role in your metabolism. Caffeine may not have a caloric intake, but chronic caffeine use can actually make you fat. I'm trying to give people the background to understand how the body works. It's not that calories in equals calories out.
Neela: What would you say to people who might be feeling kind of overwhelmed with all the things they have to worry about nowadays when it comes to food -- what to eat, what not to eat? How can we make it less complicated?
DS: I'd tell them to go back and listen to their grandparents. Make it as simple as you can. Eat real food. You can't go wrong if you're eating real food. Where you get in to trouble is when you eat processed foods. As far as pesticides and all that, your body is able to handle toxins in the environment when it's given the food it needs. Eat balanced. Make sure you have a protein, a fat, a carb, a vegetable in every meal. Don't skip meals. Just try to make it real. When you get fast foods you have no idea what you are putting in your body, and most of what you are putting in cannot be reused by your body to rebuild.
Neela: Have you gotten positive feedback from people about the advice in your book?
DS: The book has only been out for a little while so I haven't yet gotten a lot of feedback from readers, but I've gotten a lot from patients. When patients come in they look at me and see that I'm very healthy and fit now. They look at me and think I don't understand. The reason I put my story in the book is so that patients will feel better and see that I've been there and followed this program. People say, "oh my god, that sounds like me." They tell me they've read my story and relate. They say, "wow I wish I knew what you knew when you were seventeen." But I didn't know anything back then, I was pretty lucky because I happened to have an interest in science. But I was stumbling along. I really felt like I was in the twilight zone back then. I didn't know what was going on. I started eating better foods but I was gaining weight -- it's the same thing that happens when people stop smoking. The reason I included my story is because it really has helped my patients.
Neela: Can you expand on the importance of sleep?
DS: I'm trying to get people to improve their metabolisms. Metabolism is not the ability to burn off fat weight. It's the ability to build biochemicals and use them up. Building and using. It's during sleep time that your using side of the equation goes down. It gives your body a chance to restore itself, especially if you do a lot during the day. Eating alone isn't going to help you rebuild. Sleep really is a chance for your body to heal. What happens over time is that people's hormones will get out of balance and they'll start waking up in the middle night and thinking that's normal. That's not normal.
When you talk to patients you find that they don't sleep enough to do what they do, but then they compensate with caffeine or something else. So, it has a lot to do with if my patients aren't sleeping, then they're not eating well. They're not excercising because they're too tired. So sleep really became a part of the stress management part of my program so that people could follow the rest of their steps.
Neela: In the book you talk about the problems with over-excercising. Can you explain?
DS: Back to the using versus the building. Anything that raises adrenaline and cortisol higher than insulin, makes you use up your biochemicals faster. That's very addicting, because when you are using up your biochemicals, you feel that life is really great, you feel energetic. A lot of people have done that for so long that they are really worn out. They'll go out and exercise a lot to get that feeling of well being. But it's only raising their adrenaline and cortisol. It's another form of addiction. Anything that will give you that release of adrenaline and cortisol, you can get addicted to. What I was finding was that when people were coming in, they were saying that when they do cardiovascular exercise, they feel exhausted. This is because they are already worn out. You're not going to fix yourself by using your biochemicals even more. Once you've got yourself into a metabolic hole, don't dig yourself deeper. You've got to understand how the body works. Look at it from two sides. Am I building or breaking down? I'm not saying don't ever break them down, because that's how you do things. But there's got to be a match between them.
What's happened in the last twenty years is that we're a lot more stressed. We do a lot more. There's a lot more communication coming at us -- email, TV, etc. So we tend to take on more. We were told to go on a high carb low fat diet. Then you're using up your proteins and not building any. So there's been a huge mismatch. A lot of people have gotten mismatched. That's why we have to go through a transition of healing.
Neela: Do you feel that the emphasis on low fat, high carbs has been about an obsession with weight loss?
DS: I think it's come from the misconception that if you eliminate fat, you'll have lower risk of heart disease and diabetes and cancers. That really backfired. We know that the more carbs you eat, the higher your insulin goes, the higher your risk of breast cancer, stroke, diabetes. We're seeing an epidemic now. The science has been known forever. I think it was more about people thinking about their weight. Thinking that if they're thin, they're healthy. There's been such an association between being overweight and getting heart disease. There's a definite association but it's not associated with eating too much fat. That's where it breaks down.
Neela: Is there anything else you'd like our readers to know?
DS: I'd like them to know that if they've damaged their metabolism, they shouldn't despair. The body is able to heal. You just have to give it the right tools and you have to honor the fact that damage has been done. If you take the time to heal, you can. That's very empowering. It used to be thought that once you damage something, all you can do is stop it from getting worse. But we know that you can reverse diabetes and high blood pressure. There's so much you can now do, that will cure what you've done. When I went through this, I had a condition of insulin resistance. At that time it wasn't known that you can cure that, but I don't have it anymore. So don't despair. Take the knowledge and start working on it. The first thing you can do is to eat as well as you can. Then work on the other stuff after that.
Neela: Not to simplify your book, but would you say that the overall message is to eat balanced meals, exercise in moderation and get enough sleep?
DS: You're absolutely right. I'm saying all those little cliches that everyone has been saying forever. But what I'm doing in my book is I'm giving the hormonal explanation so I'm hoping people will understand. Some people say "oh my last doctor said it was just stress." Do you know what "just stress" means? Stress is really damaging to the system. I want people to take away that what you do on a daily basis matters, even if you don't feel it. You can learn to do everything in moderation at an early age, and you will age better. Everybody thinks these things are genetic, but they are acquired.
In my first book I was telling everyone to eat real food. Now I'm saying eat real food, exercise, get sleep, stay away from toxic chemicals. But yes, it is the same idea and that's great, I want it to be simplified. I'm not looking for this to be rocket science. I want everyone to understand that they have control.
Neela: Great, thank you. I think your work is very enlightening and helpful.
THE SCHWARZBEIN PRINCIPLE II: The Transition
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
ISBN: 1558749640
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