Anne Mullens is not a name that is well-known to many people in Tumbler Ridge, but she helped define how Tumbler Ridge was viewed by the rest of the province.
In 1983, Mullens was the lone reporter sent to Tumbler Ridge by the Vancouver Sun to report on the creation of BC’s latest (and so far last) instant town, sprouting up to support the two new mines that were being developed by Dennison and Teck (Quintette and Bullmoose, respectively).
Mullens was a new reporter at the time, having worked at the Sun for about four months. She was not part of the newsroom, but reported on women’s issues—fashion and health, mostly. But the editors were having no luck finding any reporters willing to make the long trip to Tumbler. “I think I was their last hope,” Mullens joked as she reminisced about the old times with a crowd at Willow Hall on July 7.
But Mullens was willing, indeed, even eager to go on an adventure so she loaded up all her gear and a 35 lb “portable” computer to head to Tumbler Ridge, where she spent three months watching the town go from nothing more than a conglomeration of trailers to the town we know and love today.
She returned once, back in the 1990s, but hasn’t been back since. Indeed, she has moved on from writing for the Sun, and instead covers issues of health and wellness, first for the Sun, then for nearly 20 years with Reader’s Digest, before writing for the Swedish website Diet Doctor, “the world’s leading low-carb and keto website.”
While she has since moved on from writing for the Diet Doctor (and, she says, writing full-time for a living, having retired just a few weeks ago), she is still involved in studying how diet effects health outcomes, especially around Type II Diabetes, including being Director of Communications for the Institute for Personalized Therapeutic Nutrition (IPTN).
Indeed, it is that which renewed her connection with Tumbler Ridge, as Dr. Charles Helm is a board member for IPTN.
Mullens was in town as part of the Tumbler Ridge Medical Conference, but spoke to the group at Willow Hall about controlling health outcomes by better nutrition, using a mix of her personal story and scientific research.
She says she took the health messages of the last century—avoid fat—to heart. “For 35 years, I ate no fat at all,” says Mullens. “I would never have butter, I would never have cream.”
But despite her low-fat diet, she found herself as a pre-diabetic. So she adopted a low carb, higher fat diet instead. “I added butter to vegetables, and when I put butter on the vegetables, they tasted better and I ate more of them. I wasn’t worried about the fat so much. And within a month of doing that, I lost 15 pounds, and my blood sugar came right back down again. It was simple. I didn’t do major changes.”
Indeed, one of the biggest changes she made was she liked to start each morning with oatmeal and dried fruit. “I started eating Greek yogurt, which has a fair amount of protein, putting berries, like raspberries and blueberries into it. Then I would add pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds, and it tasted like the morning porridge that I wanted, but my blood sugar did not spike at all, and it made me feel less hungry during the time.”
She realized that oatmeal caused her blood sugar to spike. “There’s these new devices called CGMs—continuous glucose monitors—and you can actually test yourself. I’m very much into experiments, so I got my family together and said ‘let’s all eat these foods and see what happens. Some of my sisters can eat oatmeal and they’re fine. Me? I go sky high. You can’t use the advice that I used to give as a journalist that everybody needs to eat this way. You might be able to eat some foods, but somebody else can’t. And if you’re having trouble with your blood sugar, it’s finding out what is the thing that works best for you.”
She says with CGM it’s very easy to test. “If you try a CGM, the first week, you should eat as you’re normally eating. Don’t change your diet right away. Eat how you would like, and see what your main foods are doing to your blood sugar. Then make tiny changes to your diet in the next week, and see what difference that makes. That can be so educational. You can make these tiny shifts in the way you’re eating that will bring your blood sugar down.”
A CGM is a patch-like device that is worn on the arm and has a tiny filament that goes into the arm to monitor blood sugar levels. Each sensor costs about $100 and lasts about wo weeks, as the filament degrades over time, but that should be long enough for most people to test what foods affect their blood sugar.
For Mullens, simply backing off from the oatmeal and changing the type of fruit that she ate from banana, mango and pineapple to berries, like blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries was enough to keep her blood sugars under control. “My doctor said, ‘whatever you’re doing, keep doing it, because you’re doing great.’”
So she did, almost to the point of obsession. “I discovered that, with not eating as many carbohydrates, not only did my blood sugar improve, I lost 15 pounds. I also felt more energy, my brain felt clearer, and I felt happier. I used to have a tendency to eczema and all my eczema cleared up.”
Mullens was still writing for Reader’s Digest at the time. “I wrote a bunch of stories for them on the topic. Things like: ‘Do you know that low carbs is really good for Alzhemer’s?’ Finally, my editors asked me if I had any other story ideas.But I literally didn’t want to write about anything else. I realized this is life changing for people. I also met people who had reversed their Crohn’s disease, or young people whose acne had cleared up because they’d changed their diet. I kept finding all these different ways that low carbs was positively affecting people’s lives. Finally, I wrote to Diet Doctor, saying ‘You’ve changed my life. I’ve become really healthy, but you’ve destroyed my career.’ And they invited me to come and write for them, which I did for five years. I wrote, probably 50 or 60 case studies and stories of individuals who had changed their life through eating this way. And some of them were astonishing, including about a Toronto-based woman, who had started her first diet when she was nine years old. Her mother took her to Weight Watchers, and she had been trying to control calories and diet ever since. But she kept gaining weight. At the age of 42, she was 425 pounds. She had lost the ability to walk. She was in a wheelchair. She had sciatic arthritis that was causing her tremendous amount of pain. She also had developed agrophobia, because she felt everywhere she went, she was being judged by others. Finally, she did a ketogenic diet. She cut all of the carbohydrates out of her diet so much so that she began to burn ketones. It took her seven or eight years, but she lost 300 pounds. She is now 125 pounds. She reversed all of her health problems. She says, ‘I feel my life began when I was 59.’ She’s now in her 60s and having a great life. But she has discovered that she is acutely sensitive to carbohydrates. She feels that she probably had a sugar addiction, that if she starts eating any sugar, she cannot stop eating it. So she completely avoids it. She doesn’t even have any non-caloric sweeteners, like aspartame or stevia, because it will trigger something in her brain. So she’s mostly doing a carnivore diet.”
That’s what worked for her, says Mullens, but different people are different. That’s why she is part of the IPTN. “It’s that personal aspect. You’ve got to find out what food causes you to overeat, and what food causes you to feel great. It isn’t just a one diet for everybody. Some people will do great on a vegan diet. Others do well eating mostly meat. You’ll find vegans and vegetarians whose life have been changed, their health is good, and that is the right way of eating for them. But for me, when I did a very high vegetable, almost vegan diet, my gut just got really unhappy. And my eczema got worse.”
She says that there are certain principles that people can focus on, no matter what sort of foods they prefer eathing. Things like focusing on whole foods. “If you see something that has 25 or 30 ingredients, that is probably a highly processed food. Minimize those things.”
Second, she says, focus on the proteins. There are three macro-nutrients: fats, carbs and proteins. While the body can turn carbs to fat and fat to carbs, it needs protein to build muscle and bones. “
She compares the body to hybrid cars. “As humans, we have the ability to store fat on our bodies. This was valuable in earlier times because when we didn’t have food, our bodies would burn that stored fat in order survive. When we have high glucose in our diet, that is fast burning. We either use that energy at that time for, say, hunting down, prey, or we store it. When you saw carbohydrates, your body would be trained to like eat as much as you could to store it as fat, which you would then burn off at another time.
“But over the last century or two, we haven’t needed to switch between those two systems very often. So we’re mostly running on the glucose system. Instead of burning fat, we just keep storing it up.”
In this metaphor, fat and carbs are the two types of fuel the engine uses, but proteins are what build the car. “It’s the tires and the body of the car. You need to have protein in order to repair your tissues. Proteins can come from animals or vegetables: meat, fish, game, eggs, yogurt, beans, legumes. But think first about what’s the protein and make that the centre, and then fill in the rest of the meal with vegetables. You can eat as many vegetables as you like, though some people get sensitive to vegetables. But choose the vegetable matter that you like. And then add enough fat for flavour.
“If adding a cheese sauce to your broccoli makes you enjoy your broccoli more? Add the cheese sauce. Add butter. Use fat for flavour and satiety—which means feeling full. When you add a little bit of fat to your food, it keeps you full for longer, and it can make it more enjoyable to eat it.”
Finally, she says, don’t drink sugar. This is because liquid sugar mainlines it into the bloodstream very quickly.
She says Tumbler Ridge, along with Port Alberni, are soon to be part of a Type 2 Diabetes Project that will focus on creating a food-based, culturally safe services focused on type 2 diabetes remission. The program is a joint initiative between Healthcare Excellence Canada, the Institute for Health System Transformation and Sustainability, IPTN and the Rural Coordination Centre of BC.
Every day in Canada around 550 people are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a disease that significantly increases their risk of heart attack and stroke and is the leading cause of blindness, limb amputation, and chronic kidney disease. Research shows that, with the right timing, information, and support, up to 77 percent of people with type 2 diabetes may be able to achieve remission by changing what they eat. However, under the current standard of care, only about two percent of people achieve remission.
For more information, check out
www.diabetesremission.ca. You can also get your A1C levels tested at the pharmacy.
Above photo: Anne Mullens speaking to a group at Willow Hall.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
