Dr. Bill Wilson
It isn’t often that a small-town doctor makes a major medical discovery. When you consider that this doctor may be working in isolation, away from major medical and academic centers, treating housewives and miners, and delivering hundreds of babies along the way, it seems nothing short of a miracle.
But in a clinic in Northern Minnesota, where the cold wind blows up to nine months a year, one such doctor seems to have done just that. Nearly twenty years ago, Dr. Bill Wilson, board-certified family practitioner began to notice a pattern in his sick patients.
Looking out into his waiting room, he observed that as the years went by, his patients got fatter and fatter; sicker and sicker. And, he noted with growing concern, that what had once been rare, now seemed to be the rule.
“When I was in grade school,” Dr. Wilson says, “there was usually one fat kid in the classroom, and one who was really dumb.” He shakes his head. “Now our classrooms are dominated by overweight and obese kids, and our academic test scores suggest that brains are going south, too. I could see it in my own examining rooms and it was alarming.”
Dr. Wilson wondered what was going on.
And so he began measuring his patients in a particular way, using a test called the Futrex. It measures body composition… how much fat, muscle mass, and bone a person has. Amassing a database over a 16 year period of more than eighteen thousand cases he began to test his thesis.
Dr. Wilson discovered a simple physical principle that may explain the explosion in obesity that threatens to upend 200 years of health and wellness gains in the West. It’s not weight that’s a problem. It’s fat storage. And the brain calls the shots.
“Of course this makes perfect sense,” says Dr. Wilson. “Bears store fat in the fall regardless of how much food is available, because if they fail to do so, they will never make it through hibernation when they deliver their young. How are they able to store extra fat when they are eating fewer calories in a year when the berry crop fails?
It’s all in their head—in their brain that is. Their brain, which regulates every process in their body, makes sure that their body stores enough fat to make it through the winter.”
“And post-industrial man, being closer to that bear than he’d care to consider, is doing the same thing. He’s storing fat to get through the long, cold winter….. Except there are no long, cold winters any more, except in his head.”
And, as Louis Pasteur noted, “In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.”
For while Dr. Wilson was treating a seemingly endless stream of sick people, he also pursued a lifelong interest in neuroscience.
And what his patients couldn’t know was that Dr. Wilson was leading a double life. After days of seeing an ever growing stream of sick patients, Dr. Wilson went home and in the inky long blue black nights of a Minnesota winter, reading and studying, and measuring the data he was collecting, he developed a new disease model to explain the inexorably growing tide of sick people he saw.
He began to make connections and to understand his patients as never before. He tested every patient, every time they came in, as regularly as most doctors put people on the scale. He measured their fat. Whether it was climbing, or falling, from visit to visit, and noting their health or ill health at the same time.
He began to say to himself, “I’ve got it.”
And, as it turned out, he wasn’t really working in isolation at all. He was constantly reading, studying, and corresponding with some of the world’s leaders in the field of neuroscience to develop and hone his new disease theory.
Dr. Wilson has always had close ties to academe. He began his medical career in an academic setting at U. Minnesota, under the wing of Dr. Franz Halberg, one of the first investigators of circadian rhythms. Dr. Wilson is a born observer, and an obsessive record keeper.
And from the beginning, Dr. Wilson said the same thing, “I’m just trying to understand the plain truth.” And as he developed his thesis, some major scientists began to agree with him.
Dr. Wilson has come to believe the key to the mystery of obesity with all its attendant problems lies deep within the human brain.
The change that has occurred is the overuse of the ubiquitous sugars and fructose which occur in modern processed foods and the products of industrial agriculture. Put another way, Dr. Wilson says, “We have scrambled our brains with sugar.”
Sugars buried in processed foods, sugars binding soft drinks and fruit juices, sugars piled into the American diet, even into many mainstream reducing diets, until Americans now consume a whopping 150 pounds of sugar per year.
“When you realize that 100 years ago, we ate about one pound of sugar per year, you can begin to understand how this basic change in the diet has impacted our brains and bodies so significantly,” says Dr. Wilson.
He has demonstrated in case after case into the hundreds and thousands of documented case studies that the main cerebral disorder handicapping denizens of the Western world can be ameliorated with simple treatment protocols. As Dr. Wilson says, “Get the sugars out of the diet.”
He calls this disease CARB Syndrome (Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain Syndrome) and he has demonstrated that he can cure it.
Why is this so revolutionary?
Because it upends decades of treatment protocols and flies in the face of conventional medical wisdom.
But as any scientist knows, science is a moving target, and Dr. Wilson believes that by looking at the root cause of certain modern human sufferings, deep within the human brain, he can draw a bead on one scourge of modern life.
And his practice experience has shown him that people don’t have to go on a “diet.” They don’t have to take risky pharmaceuticals. They don’t have to undergo dangerous surgeries.
Dr. Wilson’s discovery demonstrates why all the diets we’ve seen, from Dr. Atkins to Agostino, from Tarnower to Pritikin, to the diet Doctor of the week, French Nutritionist Dr. Pierre Dukan, all are looking at the problem from the wrong end of the shotgun, looking down the barrel, into the business end of that gun, if you will.
What all these diets do is provide a temporary answer to a chronic problem. Why are we all so fat? Here’s Dr. Wilson, in his own words, explaining his disease theory of obesity.
“I am a family physician with a long-standing interest in Neuroscience, especially the relationship between various dietary elements and brain function. It is clear that fructose is the primary driver of insulin resistance. When individuals with insulin resistance consume high glycemic carbohydrates, their brain is exposed to magnified post-prandial glucose spikes. Because neurons lack an insulin gate, over time these glucose surges trigger a chronic brain dysfunction disease characterized by inappropriate fat storage and brain dysfunction symptoms reflecting low levels of monoamine neurotransmitters.
“The combination of excessive fructose and high glycemic carbohydrates is directly responsible for the increase in many chronic brain disorders including depression, ADHD, autism, eating disorders, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, PTSD, bipolar II, anxiety disorders and others.”
Drs. James I. Hudson, MD, ScD, and Harrison G. Pope, MD, MPH, Harvard researchers and psychiatrists, first recognized that these conditions were connected about ten years ago, but they were unable to identify the triggers and the pathology of the disease that they called Affective Spectrum Disorder. We believe that we have solved this dilemma and have renamed the condition Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome (CARB Syndrome).
Why are statistics for mortality and ill health skyrocketing? According to the Centers for Disease Control, a whopping one-third of our citizens are obese. The blame can be laid squarely at the foot of modern agriculture and industrial food and pharmaceutical practices.
Dr. Wilson’s disease model shows that consumption of sugars, in all their hidden forms, contribute to ill health. The cure which sounds simple – just get the sugars out of your diet– is actually difficult. Without some Basic Training.
And that’s what Dr. Wilson’s revolutionary Carb Syndrome protocol provides.