Along with the rest of America, I mourn the death of Whitney Houston today. To have such a bright light snuffed out so soon is a tragedy.
As a physician, I never treated Ms. Houston, but from her own words in an interview with Diane Sawyer in 2002 where she implied she had both an eating disorder and bipolar disorder, it seems clear to me, she succumbed to a different disorder.
I believe she had a different disease: Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain Syndrome or CARB syndrome. It’s likely you’ve never heard of this disease, by far the most chronic disease in developed countries because it has only been recently that this disease model has been described.
A thin person with too much fat and a brain that isn’t working so well—that sounds a lot like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson can be just as afflicted as an overweight one. Patients with CARB Syndrome are also much more likely to abuse any substance than people with healthy brains. In my opinion, they both might be alive today if they had been appropriately diagnosed and treated.
As a Family Physician with a long-standing interest in Neuroscience—the science of the brain, I have spent decades trying to figure out patients like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson—once seemingly healthy and highly productive individuals who eventually seemed to succumb to the ravages of drugs….or did they? What if instead they died from a dangerous chronic disease missed by the medical and scientific communities.
Let me explain.
Based on recent research it is clear that fructose primarily from sugar and HFC, not glucose , 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. I believe that the combination of excessive fructose and high glycemic carbohydrates is directly responsible for the increase in many chronic brain disorders such as 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).
Thus we believe that two simple dietary elements—excessive fructose and high glycemic carbohydrates are driving the increased incidence of obesity, insulin resistance, type II diabetes and a long list of common brain disorders. Because it takes a healthy brain to auto-regulate fat stores, people with CARB Syndrome will store fat at any caloric intake. Thus even thin people who are under-eating like Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson can store too much fat even as they continue to lose muscle. You will only see this if you ignore weight and measure body composition. Because obesity is defined as excessive body fat, taking such measurements is the only way to tell if someone is truly obese and I have taken over 18,000 such measurements on my patients over the years.
