begin to realise that anyone who starts a big lifestyle change will always have to deal with other people’s reactions. Some of it is concern. Some of it is based on feelings. Suspicion? Anxiety about changes, because we want people around us to always be the same? Or does it come out of religion – a kind of asceticism, the idea that anyone who turns their focus on the body and their own lifestyle becomes self-absorbed?
I’m blown away by the resistance.
Rita and I begin communicating about all this.
I now understand that many people who change their dietary habits encounter exactly the same resistance from those around them – even at home. But Rita is not only smart and empathetic but also fun and ingenious, and she offers suggestions as to how I can meet these challenges.
She says I need to stand up for myself and my lifestyle more clearly, without placing blame on anyone else. If others then choose to feel bad about my choices, it’s their own problem. I need to learn this, again and again, and oh, how hard it is. I take it personally, and have always done so, if anyone in my circle feels bad because of something connected to me. I carry this like a heavy backpack, and I see the same phenomenon in many women around me. The trick is to lighten that backpack, since it’s no use to anyone. Then there are the practical issues.
My family protests because the cupboards and fridge are suddenly too full when I put in new, space-hogging things like bags of flaxseeds, hazelnuts and goji berries. The freezer is packed with different kinds of frozen berries and big bags of frozen vegetables. My husband, who has many wonderful traits, has a strict inner home economics teacher – we’re talking sturdy cooking lady from the 1950s here. He loves a semi-fanatical order in the cupboards and the doors closed, which becomes hard to achieve when my new foods have to jostle for space with the foods we’ve always eaten.
And all these new powders, where can I store them? Like L-glutamine, as it turns out it’s called, and green powders – a new phenomenon – and protein powder. That’s also new, this thing with protein powder. I use it either as an ingredient in my breakfast, with nuts and fruit (protein, fruit, fat as it’s called in Rita’s language), or after working out. I find a kind of protein powder at my local health food shop that tastes like banana muffins. The only problem is my stomach, which also turns into a banana muffin and starts to produce gas on a scale that could drive the heating system of a medium-sized town.
Another kind of powder turns my stomach into an even bigger balloon. Rita urges me to look for a protein powder that doesn’t make me gassy, and she recommends a vegan powder that’s easy on the stomach. But it turns out that one is impossible to dissolve in water without a blender.
So that’s how I end up on a trip with a client to Geneva with my immersion blender packed in my bag. I arrive early at the hotel, and the first thing I do is go down to the gym and do the day’s workout. Then I get out the wand from my luggage, and the powder I brought with me in a bag, and make a hotel room smoothie in the toothbrush glass, with the Swiss sparkling mineral water Gerolsteiner Sprudel.
In short, a sprudel schmoothie.
I’ve had better tasting drinks. But worse ones too.
Then there’s my mood. Is it the spring light here in Geneva? My fun travelling companions? Or is it . . . me?
Something is starting to happen.
’My family protests because the cupboards and fridge are suddenly too full when I put in new, space-hogging things like bags of flaxseeds, hazelnuts and goji berries.’
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.
– Marie Curie, chemist and Nobel Prize winner
It’s a spring night in Lund, Sweden, 2013.
It’s just the kind of fresh spring evening that creates such expectations of life, love and all the other wonderful things that belong to the light time of year. Students are riding their bikes towards the city centre. Trees are budding in the Lundagård park next to the cathedral’s sandstone walls. The magnolia by the cream-coloured university building will soon begin to bloom, just in time for May Day, when student singers will once again sing a welcome to spring and the beautiful month of May.
Together with the other members of the advisory committee that meets regularly in order to support the university’s big 350-year jubilee, I’m sitting in the old Biskopsgården, just below the library. At the last minute, I’ve decided to attend this meeting, even though my calendar is full. It will turn out to be a significant event.
Every time the group gets together, we have the privilege of meeting one of the most innovative researchers at the biggest university in the Nordic region. Today we’re going to meet a specialist in nutrition research. Professor Inger Björck is introduced and steps forward to talk about her brand-new research. Only a few minutes into her presentation, I realise that her findings are very important, even somewhat sensational.
She gives us a brief background.
Professor Björck leads the Center for Preventive Nutrition Research at Lund University. Scientists there are conducting interdisciplinary research about how a variety of diseases can be counteracted with a proper diet, as well as research into what is known as the metabolic syndrome.
The metabolic syndrome, a medical term that has become more and more common, includes three conditions: diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure. Each of these conditions carries risks. But together, they form a type of super risk for serious heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. It is also suspected that this metabolic condition is connected to certain forms of cancer and even to an increased risk of dementia.
Researchers haven’t quite been able to explain the metabolic syndrome. One theory is that it has to do with insulin, the hormone released by the pancreatic gland when you eat sugar-containing foods and whose function it is to move the broken-down sugar into the cells. People with diabetes 1, which often begins to manifest in the teenage years or even earlier, lack the ability to produce enough insulin.
But there is also an acquired form that sneaks up on people later in life, diabetes 2. (Today there are researchers looking into whether there may also be a number of intermediate forms between diabetes 1 and 2, but we’ll leave that aside here for the sake of simplicity.)
To sketch out a simple explanatory diagram for this process, when you eat sugar and your blood sugar level rises, a signal is sent to the pancreatic gland, which releases insulin. The insulin is sluiced out and ‘opens up’ the cells in order to sluice in the broken-down sugar, along with proteins and fat.
When the body constantly takes in large amounts of sugar and insulin levels have to stay elevated in order to shuttle the sugar out of the bloodstream and into the cells, it creates a so-called insulin resistance. In other words, there is insulin in the blood that’s supposed to deal with the sugar, and that makes the insulin attach to the cells, but something goes wrong in the communication between the insulin and the cells. The cells simply lose their ability to react to the presence of insulin. The number
