Asians Were Skinny On Rice For 1000s Of Years - Then Things Went Terribly Wrong - Doctor Explains

Is rice bad for you? Rice has been a staple for billions of people for a very

long time Asians have stayed skinny eating rice

for thousands of years, but then something went wrong. In this video

you're going to learn about the Asian paradox and you'll understand what

really happened coming right up

hey I'm dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure that you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't

miss anything weight gain obesity insulin resistance

and diabetes have become a worldwide problem especially in the last 3040

years it started in the Western world but now it's becoming a worldwide

problem and since it's well known today that carbohydrates is the strongest

trigger of insulin which drives insulin resistance and diabetes the most

successful diets have been low carb so keto is the furthest version it's the

strictest version of low carb along with intermittent fasting and that's where

they get the best results but then there is this counter-argument that in the

midst of that it seems like the Asians are still really skinny and this is

called the Asian paradox and it says if carbs are so bad then how come the

Asians can eat all that rice and don't have any of those problems ok that's

that's the basis of the Asian paradox so the first thing we need to understand

the first thing we need to examine is if it's valid so let's do a little bit of a

reality check and let's look at obesity and diabetes in the two largest

countries in Asia India and China they have over a billion people each so in

1975 India had 1.5 percent obesity and in 2014 less than 40 years later about

two generations they had 8% more than a 500% increase in two generations in

China I went from 3.5% to 18% again over a

five fold increase and if we look at the rural boys in China then in less than 30

years it's gone from 0.3% to 17.2% that's not a five hundred percent that's

a five hundred fold increase so something that was no

existent now is almost one in five so something has changed and the main thing

to understand is that there is no Asian paradox they are in the middle of this

just like the rest of the world and when we look at diabetes since 1980 to 2014

India has gone from 12 million cases to 64 million cases and China has gone from

20 million to 103 million these two countries have the highest prevalence of

diabetes in the world today there don't have as high a percentage as the

US but they have more people so there's more diabetics in those countries and

there unfortunately only lagging a few years or a couple of decades behind

because they're following the same social and and dietary trends for

thousands of years rice was a staple and people were doing extremely well on it

then a few hundred years ago 16 - 1700s somewhere they learned to polish the

rice they refined it they turned brown rice into white rice but it was only the

rich that could afford it and the rich probably ate some other things too so it

wasn't that big a deal but then in 1850 in the second half of the 19th century

they learned to polish it very inexpensively and what promoted this

trend was trade that when they traded the rice they had to transport it on

ships and if the rice had a bunch of nutrients then it would spoil so when

you polish the rice you remove the nutrients when you take brown rice and

turn it into white you take away most of the nutrients so there's less stuff that

can spoil that can interact with the oxygen but then you're also taking away

the stuff that your body really wants let's look at the difference here

between brown rice and white rice because rice is often promoted as a

complex carb they say that Oh sugar is bad but rice is good because it's a

complex carb well when we look at the glycemic index

quickly it affects blood sugar then rice is in the 60s somewhere depending on

which study you look at brown is a few points better than than white but

they're both very high glycemic index they're still mostly starch so yes

you're much better off eating brown than white but they're still gonna trigger a

tremendous amount of blood sugar brown rice has starch protein fiber vitamins

and minerals it's the complete package the way it grew in nature but when we

turn it into white rice we keep all the starch that's basically the starchy

portion of the brown rice but we polish away about half or so of the protein and

we polish way virtually all the fiber all the vitamins and all the minerals so

now it is arguably about the same as white sugar it is basically an empty

calorie and what happened in Asia at the time because this was the main staple is

that people started developing something called beriberi and we don't have the

exact numbers because they didn't keep statistics back then but there were

probably tens of millions maybe hundreds of millions that had varying degrees of

beriberi and beriberi is a is a deficiency of thiamine or vitamin b1 and

this is a necessary vitamin for energy production and for nerve function and so

forth so these people developed weakness extreme weakness to the point of

paraplegia where some of them couldn't even move or walk and in some cases it

led to death it also led to swelling especially in the lower extremities it

led to pain loss of appetite and even more severe neurological syndromes and

beriberi is the root of the word is weak weak or I can't I can't

so that just gets back into the weakness and the the paraplegia that that results

but eventually they figured out what caused the problem and

the late 1800s they started identifying vitamins and eventually someone also got

a Nobel price for this in the early 1900s so the solution was to enrich the

white rice so here's what enrichment is and one of my teachers dr. Goldberg

explained this the best and it stuck with me that enrichment if I want to

enrich you then I take a dollar from you and I give you back a penny and now I

have enriched you because what they take away is the fiber and the vitamins and

the minerals and they don't just take away the thiamine they take away B one

two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve and they put back one

so like they take a dollar they put back a penny so it's enough to not get

beriberi but you're still eating a depleted food you're still eating empty

calories it's still roughly the same as sugar in terms of nutrition and if you

look up beriberi today it'll say that it's a very rare disease so I thought oh

well a case here and there well it turned out rare means less than 200,000

cases in the United States alone so it's still a huge deal and I think that's

very sad because the solution to beriberi is whole food it is virtually

impossible to get it if you actually eat food the other group that gets it a lot

other than people eating junk food are alcoholics because they hardly eat any

food at all they get the only thing they care about is the alcohol but it goes

back to the same thing if you just eat food you're not going to get it

so let's look at a few other factors about what has been going on because

Asians have been eating rice for thousands of years and they were doing

relatively well and then in the last hundred and fifty to two hundred years

they ate more of the refined rice but that still leaves us a gap because

it's only in the last few decades that we've seen this explosion of obesity and

diabetes so what else has changed well 200 years ago 85% of the world lived in

extreme poverty and today that number is less than 9% so the majority of the

world's population has moved from extreme poverty to middle class and a

lot of these numbers and a lot of these concepts we have huge misconceptions

about so I would recommend that you go and read the book called factfullness

by the Swedish statistician and researcher Hans Rosling Hans Rosling in

English he explains a lot of the things that are actually happening in the world

as opposed to the way we think they're happening in the world

another interesting fact from fact fullness is that in the last 20 years

alone poverty has declined by almost 50% so we have less than half the poverty in

the world today than we did just 20 years ago and with that poverty means

that people don't have enough to eat when they move out of poverty that means

they have enough to eat food goes from being a scarcity to

something that is adequate or plenty what else has happened in the last 50

years it's not just rice but we've had more and more and more processed foods

and these processed foods started in the United States and in the Western world

but now they're spreading across the globe so we have more packaged food we

have more white bread we have more white rice we have more fast-food restaurants

we have more sugar more high fructose corn syrup more chemicals so all of

these things matter so if we try to put this together a little bit then number

eight here they the reason they could eat the rice for as long as they did

without developing problem was that for most of that time they were under a

calorie restriction calories were scarce food was a scarcity and also they were

working hard they were out in the fields they were

working they didn't have time for snacks they probably ate once or twice a day

for the most part okay so that's what we talked about today is intermittent

fasting eating fewer meals so that you eat something with carbohydrate like

rice and then you trigger insulin and the insulin stores the excess

glucose but if you don't eat again for several hours if you only eat a couple

times a day and you're working in the field now you're going to use up those

stored calories you're going to whatever has been converted to fat or glycogen

you're gonna use it up before you eat again and you never have a chance to

develop insulin resistance and you can't develop insulin resistance

if calories if food is scarce now on the other hand in the last 40 years and

escalating is we have had more food there's fewer poor people calories are

not scarce anymore we are more sedentary we work more office jobs so we have time

and opportunity to eat more frequent meal we have the means we have the

prosperity and the meet the opportunity to eat more frequent meals and now we

start developing insulin resistance so it's not as simple a question as is rice

good or bad for you white rice is gonna be bad in the long run because it is

refined it's not a complete food brown rice could potentially be an okay food

so here's what we need to look at to determine if you would be okay to maybe

have some brown rice so under the yes column we have if your insulin sensitive

so if you've had some tests if you're lean if you're active then it should be

alright if food is still scarce then rice is not a problem because rice it

raises blood sugar you store away the excess and you retrieve the excess there

will never be a buildup there will never be insulin resistance

food is scarce and that's again has been the case for most of the thousands of

years that Asians have been eating rice but it is no longer the case if you have

an active lifestyle if you are young and or if you do intermittent fasting then

rice is probably okay it may not be optimal it may not be the absolute best

thing but so it's an effective efficient way to feed the world if food is scarce

so when is it not okay to eat rice well if your insulin resistant if you've

already developed insulin resistance now your body is resisting burning that fat

and every time you eat some rice and you trigger more insulin you'll increase the

tendency to store more you will promote insulin resistance and we virtually

impossible to reverse to reduce insulin resistance if you keep putting in the

carbs so the rules have changed when you became insulin resistance you can't look

at a skinny person and say oh this person is doing this and it works for

them you need to do that and just work out more it doesn't work like that if

there is plenty of food if there is frequent meals and always a little

excess now rice is not a good idea because it's going to trigger insulin

and insulin is going to make you more hungry if food is plenty you're going to

eat more if food is scarce not a problem if you have a sedentary lifestyle if you

are older or if you eat three or more meals a day then rice would not be a

good idea and I saw some videos of some young people some attractive

teenage 20 year old people who said that oh well I eat rice and it's the natural

thing for Asian and it's good for me well that person hasn't gotten into this

category yet so sure if your insulin sensitive and active and young and so

forth then it'll take 10, 15, 20 years for you to develop that problem

and that is why we see these tremendous shifts in diabetes and obesity because

it takes a while to to develop that problem for it to manifest so if we look

at this problem on a more global scale where are we heading well diabetes type

2 which was basically unknown 200 years ago now has 425 million people in the

world have type 2 diabetes and they are projecting that in 2045 that will be 629

million and they think that the most of that increase is going to happen in

Southeast Asia because that's where the largest number of people are and they

have just started this ballooning trend now I hate to say this because I'd like

to have a positive outlook on things but I think that 629 million is a gross

understatement because we are just seeing the beginning of this trend we

are seeing more prosperity in the world we are getting the entire world into the

middle class and moving up toward better and better prosperity we are seeing more

and more processed foods and we have more and more of these people who are

already insulin resistant so the way insulin resistance works again I've

talked about this in some previous videos that early on you are insulin

sensitive there's a balance between glucose and insulin so glucose would be

the blue one and insulin would be the red one but glucose is a controlled

variable so 5 or 10 years later the glucose is still the same because the

body is working really hard at keeping it where it is but insulin has gone up

because of all these factors insulin resistance multiple meals processed

foods so it takes more work to keep the blood sugar down but if we only measure

blood sugar we're not going to see this and

then 15 20 years later blood-glucose is still okay but it takes three four five

times more insulin to keep it down and then in the end 15 20 25 years into the

process now we have type-2 diabetes so when they talk about these numbers the

four hundred and twenty five million diabetics I think we have three billion

people at least who are somewhere in the process here so again I hate to be

negative in that sense but let's look at it positively if we understand this if

we start understanding insulin resistance instead of just obesity or

blood sugar then we can start doing something about it and this number

doesn't have to get into the billions but we have to change something so rice

has been a good staple and it still works if you eat the whole brown rice

and your insulin sensitive you're young you're active etc but for most of the

world's population it is not a good idea anymore because in the US for example

eighty seven percent of people are officially overweight that means

eighty seven percent of people are insulin resistant there is probably less

than ten percent over in this group who are perfectly balanced who have insulin

sensitivity the rest of the population are moving in the wrong direction so is

rice good or bad for you well brown rice can be alright under certain

circumstances depending on you white rice is barely better than white sugar

so you want to avoid it except maybe a few times a year when you have a really

good sushi if you enjoyed this video then I'm sure you're gonna love that one

thank you so much for watching I'll see you in the next video