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Jan 23, 2024

A few things to consider about no

“It seems crazy now,” says John Parrillo in “The Parrillo Odyssey.” “The

"It seems crazy now," says John Parrillo in "The Parrillo Odyssey."

"The mainstream nutritional thinking, the settled science of the day, was that ‘a calorie [is] a calorie’ and it [makes] no difference if [they are] from chicken breast or ice cream."

Written by Marty Gallagher, "The Parrillo Odyssey" chronicles John Parrillo's accomplishments during the 50 years he's been promoting health and vitality through diet and exercise. His innovations in weightlifting equipment and bodybuilding techniques, creation of ultra-healthy energy bars, powdered drinks, and nutritional treats, and the booming business that developed as a result prove him to be a real Renaissance man - as well as a "nutritional revolutionary."

And the revolution began after Parrillo entered his first bodybuilding contest and found the standard way of eating in the days before it - to consume virtually no carbohydrates - made him look and feel miserable. So he did what I’m forever advising you to do.

Experiment with your diet to make it and you better.

Through his tweaking and altering with his and other bodybuilders’ diets, he noticed that starchy carbs are handled by the body differently than fibrous ones, a distinction not previously made. "That there's a vast difference between the insulin impact of 25 grams of broccoli and 25 grams of white potatoes."

That discovery alone is certainly no small bag of the latter and leads to something else that also seems crazy. Placing a call to a company and speaking directly to the guy who owns it.

But that's how I came to have a 15-minute conversation with John Parrillo moments after reading Gallagher's article about him. It ends with a note that the 76-year-old Parrillo had decided to leave the "pressure cooker" of business and was uncertain if he’d sell it or not.

Therefore, his line of products might only be available until the current stock runs out.

I absolutely live on the instant high-protein pudding, high-protein pancake mix, and the carbohydrate-protein combination powder Parrillo makes, so to say that news filled me with anxiety would be extremely accurate. So would that I stocked up on those three items like a survivalist with a really bib bomb shelter and inside knowledge North Korea was only days away from dropping the Big One.

But before I placed my nearly $1500 order, I thanked whom I assumed was the receptionist for the company providing such high-quality products for so long - never knowing John Parrillo was the one who took my call. He only shared his identity with me after I joked he should be the one to buy the potentially for sale business.

I fear I turned into a fanboy after that. I told him I’d been buying his products ever since he started selling them, reading his magazine since its inception, and that I remembered quite well his first article that contradicted the "a calorie is a calorie" theory.

His voice then took on a nasally, nerdy, know-it-all tone and he said, "But where are your randomized, double-blind studies?" I chuckled at the impersonation of his back-in-the-day detractors - who in all likelihood are now present-day supporters because dozens of studies have indeed proven Parrillo to be true.

But I was doing no chuckling a few days later when I read a study published in the March 2023 issue of Nature Medicine about the sweetening agent Parrillo called the "top next-generation sweetener" in an April 2009 article announcing its addition to many of his products. It's the virtually no-calorie sweetener I was using heavily even before Parrillo wrote about it.

Erythritol.

In the study, Cleveland Clinic researchers first looked at the erythritol levels in blood samples of 1,100 people being assessed for the likelihood of heart disease and found the higher the level of erythritol in the blood sample, the more likely the person was to have a cardiovascular event in the next three years. A second batch of nearly 3,000 blood samples revealed something similar.

Subsequent study found it encouraged blood clotting in mice and eight human subjects.

These findings created a spate of beware-of-erythritol articles. Since I’ve always advocated its use, it's only appropriate to apprise you of this study.

What's not is for me to tell you whether or not to use the stuff. If you have concerns, consult your doctor.

But what I can tell you is why I intend to keep doing so.

It starts with something Parrillo shared with Gallagher: that he bases his "approach" and ultimately what he does and doesn't recommend on his personal results. I do the same, and so far, I’ve had only positive ones using erythritol.

Moreover, my blood work has been top-notch.

That makes me confident that staying the course is the proper course, at least for me, for now.

If you don't share my confidence and are a heavy user, you may want to cut back a bit, and wait for the follow-up studies that are sure to result. Or schedule an appointment with a medical pro.