You may have seen them; they have names like 75ed976fhr5429t5m2 or other largely-numeric gibberish. They usually have folders inside them with names like "i386" and "amd", or a long list of numeric names. And they share one annoying characteristic: You can't delete them.
Where did they come from? Microsoft. They were the temporary folders created to hold files that were being installed as part of a Windows Automatic Update. (The "Microsoft .NET" packages are particularly infamous for this, but others can do it as well, I've found.) Once the relevant updates have been applied, and the system has been restarted, those folders are entirely useless; they are supposed to be deleted automatically - but sometimes they aren't. And when you try to delete the folders manually, you get an error message telling you that you aren't allowed to delete the first file in the list inside. The same goes for the rest of the files.
So how can you get rid of them?
Here's the slickest and easiest fix I've found.
1. If your system has multiple user accounts, log in as the Adminstrator (or a user that has the same privileges). If you don't know what I'm talking about here, then you can skip directly to the next step.
2. Right-click on the folder that needs to be deleted. Select "Sharing" from the menu. Click on the boxes for "Share this on the network" and "Allow others to change my files" to place check marks in both of them. Apply the changes.
You can now delete the entire folder. (It will complain that somebody else might be using the files, but obviously this is not a warning that you need to worry about in this instance.)
I've seen other, much more cumbersome solutions, but this is the easiest one to use in most cases.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Low-carb in a fairly large nutshell...
This was originally composed as a response to someone's question in an email, but I thought it might as well get posted for general consumption.
Carbs in the diet - nearly all of them - cause elevated levels of insulin in your blood, even when the carbs are consumed in what would seem like small quantities. A single slice of bread spikes the insulin level in the blood for as much as several hours at a time. Recognizing the importance of this insulin spike is the fundamental key to understanding the problems that cause overweight, diabetes, and many other things.
Any carbs that convert to glucose in the digestive tract (which is most of them) contribute to the problem. Bread, potatoes, honey and table sugar all have nearly identical effects on insulin levels, as do many other things, including "whole grain" breads, rice, granola, and even dried beans. Certain carbs, like fructose, don't elevate insulin, but fructose has its own ill effects. For a while, it was believed that a diet that was high in "fiber" would ameliorate the effects of the carbs, but the research that was done in an attempt to demonstrate this ended up proving that fiber, while inoffensive, is also powerless to make a positive difference in the face of high levels of the problem carbs. (Fiber, basically, is a form of carb that the body doesn't convert to glucose or fructose, and which doesn't cause problems at all as a result.)
So with carb consumption comes elevated insulin. Oddly enough, insulin in the blood tends to make you hungry; that effect is a big part of the reason why the old saying "hunger is the best sauce" fits so well; as you start to eat carbs, your hunger actually increases because of the rising insulin. This can become a vicious cycle very easily; you eat something with carbs in it, the blood sugar rises, the insulin rises, the sugar level declines - but the insulin level doesn't fall for a while yet; now you're really hungry even though it hasn't been very long since you ate. (You've heard of the "sugar crash"? This is the simplified version of the biochemistry behind it.) So you eat again - probably including more carbs, because they're everywhere. Spike - crash - spike - crash. Getting the idea that this might not be healthy? You'd be right - and as the guy in the infomercials would say, that's not all...
An elevated level of insulin in the blood makes your system unable to use fats as fuel; it puts the muscles and most other fuel-using parts of the body into "burn only sugar, and not fat" mode, and at the same time it puts the fat cells into "grab all the fat that comes by and stash it" mode. And because the liver will try its best to help speed this along by converting that sugar to fat (in the form of triglycerides), the elevated insulin can cause a lot of fat accumulation. If you don't eat again for quite a while, that stored fat can get used up pretty much right away, if everything is normal. After all, when insulin is very low or absent, fats are continuously released from storage for use as fuel. But when insulin is present in the quantities that are common in most of the US population for most of any 24 hour cycle, that doesn't get a chance to happen; for most or all of the day, fats are only stored, and sugars get converted to fats - and stored. This is the basic reason that people get fat on a typical American diet; even long after they go to bed at night, the insulin level doesn't drop back to the point where they can use what they've been storing. But that's not the worst...
Chronic elevated insulin (a condition that is now pandemic in much of the world, and worse in the US than in most other nations) eventually results in hyperinsulinemia, a condition in which the insulin level is elevated well above normal whenever any carbs are present in the diet; if continued too long, eventually the body's ability to cope with that insulin - and respond to it - fails, resulting in diabetes. The whole process can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years, sometimes longer, depending upon the individual. (Some people may never develop it, but that doesn't mean that they won't show the ill effects of a carb-laden diet.) And sure enough, the diabetes epidemic in the US got worse starting about 10 years after the FDA and USDA published their high-carb-based nutritional recommendations in the early to mid '70s, which really launched the era of the high-carb low-fat mania.
So carbs cause insulin to get raised; what drops it? Well, excess insulin in the blood is removed by a substance called Insulin Degrading Enzyme. But in hyperinsulinemia, the production of the enzyme just can't keep up with the need to clear the excess insulin from the bloodstream. Even in people who haven't developed hyperinsulinemia, it's easy for the level of the enzyme to be just barely adequate to clear the excess insulin, if they're eating a lot of carbs. That's bad, because ordinarily, the excess amounts of that enzyme will switch roles and act to "clean up" various things, like the deposits that are believed to contribute to the formation of the plaques found in Alzheimer's patients. Like most things in the body (insulin included), that enzyme serves multiple purposes - and it's needed for all of them. When the supply gets used up by an overloaded demand in one area, the rest get neglected. Things get unbalanced. That's bad.
So, long-term high levels of insulin lead to hyperinsulinemia, and that clobbers the body's clean-up enzyme that would be doing a lot more than cope with the insulin if it could. And hyperinsulinemia leads to diabetes. Presumably you know about the plethora of ills that go with diabetes; nerve damage in the extremities, obesity, heart disease, atherosclerosis and more. Worth avoiding, wouldn't you say?
For quite a while, diabetics were advised to substitute fructose for the regular sugar in their diet. But that turns out to have been a bad idea. Fructose (which is one of the two sugars that are produced when table sugar breaks down) has been strongly implicated as a major contributor to (if not the principle cause of) elevated levels of bad cholesterol, which further contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In the diet, it stresses the liver, where it is converted into triglycerides. It is also directly suspected as a contributing factor in the buildup of the plaques which are present in Alzheimer's patients, through the formation of what is known as advanced glycation end-products. (That's part of what the insulin-degrading enzyme is needed to help clean up - another vicious cycle.)
So fructose is a bad actor, and table sugar is 50% fructose. But it's not the only source for most people in the US; it is present in higher-than-table-sugar levels in high fructose corn syrup, which is a government-subsidized substance used in nearly all non-diet soft drinks, most mass-produced baked goods, most pancake and waffle syrup, and even things like ketchup and relish. Outside of table sugar, HFCS and honey, fructose is fairly rare in a diet that does not include those three sources; it is found only in small quantities in most raw fruits, but the presence of significant glucose along with the fructose makes the majority of fruits (and nearly all juices) problematic in any event. (I have mused that if Genesis had been written by someone in possession of all the facts, the stricture would have been "Do not eat fruits of any kind, for they will make you ill in old age.")
In the absence of carbs, the body's ability to deal with large amounts of fat in the diet is prodigious for most people. Fat clearly is what we handle best and easiest as caloric fuel, with protein being second - and protein is essential. Carbs, however, are absolutely not essential at all, as long as there's enough fat and protein available. And most people simply will not over-eat when their diet is composed entirely of non-carb foods with adequate fat. The insulin response that drives their hunger vanishes, and they'll eat only what they need.
By the way, saturated fat is NOT a problem. No study has ever proven that elevated consumption of saturated fat causes elevated levels of triglycerides or bad cholesterol. The non-natural stuff known as "trans fat", however, most certainly is a problem in both areas.
This really just scratches the surface; the body of knowledge that condemns carbs has been accumulating in various disconnected fields of biology and branches of medicine and chemistry for a century or more, but most of the research results have remained uncollected and uncorrelated until recently. One of the people who connected the dots is Gary Taubes, an author I have mentioned before. Many people had pieces of the puzzle, but because the fields where the research was done have grown so specialized, few of them had the rest of the picture...and while it's true that certain people have been aware of the truth about the gross effects of carbs and fats in the diet, their observations haven't been taken seriously by the medical establishment most of the time, often because they were mere clinicians who had been getting results, not respected researchers who had hundred-million-dollar grants funding their investigations. For over 50 years, the research money has been directed solely into trying to prove that fats and overeating are the problem behind obesity, largely as a result of the efforts of a few highly-placed "authorities" who gained stature after World War II without any real research to back up their conviction and their assertion that overeating and overconsumption of fats were the exclusive causes of obesity and other health issues. And, of course, it doesn't help that much of the nutritional "research" has been funded by companies like General Mills, whose revenue derives almost entirely from the sale of grain-based foods; is it any surprise that the studies seldom have been structured in a way that could implicate carbs via their results? I don't think so.
So, what to do?
Four words not mentioned before: Meat is your friend. While it's possible to eat a largely-vegetable diet that includes enough protein and fat, it's much easier to eat healthy when meat is the primary ingredient in the diet - and don't trim those steaks so close. For vegetarians, guacamole is your friend, but it's not enough by itself. (And if you eat meat, you can now revel in the fact that the cheaper ground beef has more fat in it.)
My typical breakfast: Three eggs with 4 ounces of sausage and three strips of bacon, fried in the bacon grease. All told, that's over 100 grams of fat. By the old USDA standards, I'm getting an overload of fat and cholesterol for the day in just that one meal. Lunch and dinner look similar, though they actually tend to be smaller a lot of the time because with no carbs to drive the hunger, I'm not ravenous when I sit down to eat. By the "conventional wisdom" of the '80s, that kind of diet is horribly unhealthy, and I should look like a grounded blimp. Funny thing; my blood pressure and my weight are both down relative to where they were when I was eating lots of carbs. And everyone I know who has followed this path reports the same results; one of them simply says "Bread is deadly. Don't eat anything white." (Not 100% reliable; jicama is very low-carb, and white - and tasty.)
Just remember; if you want the benefits to last, going low-carb isn't a diet, it's a permanent lifestyle. Don't think of it as a way to lose weight, think of it as a way to lose health problems.
Carbs in the diet - nearly all of them - cause elevated levels of insulin in your blood, even when the carbs are consumed in what would seem like small quantities. A single slice of bread spikes the insulin level in the blood for as much as several hours at a time. Recognizing the importance of this insulin spike is the fundamental key to understanding the problems that cause overweight, diabetes, and many other things.
Any carbs that convert to glucose in the digestive tract (which is most of them) contribute to the problem. Bread, potatoes, honey and table sugar all have nearly identical effects on insulin levels, as do many other things, including "whole grain" breads, rice, granola, and even dried beans. Certain carbs, like fructose, don't elevate insulin, but fructose has its own ill effects. For a while, it was believed that a diet that was high in "fiber" would ameliorate the effects of the carbs, but the research that was done in an attempt to demonstrate this ended up proving that fiber, while inoffensive, is also powerless to make a positive difference in the face of high levels of the problem carbs. (Fiber, basically, is a form of carb that the body doesn't convert to glucose or fructose, and which doesn't cause problems at all as a result.)
So with carb consumption comes elevated insulin. Oddly enough, insulin in the blood tends to make you hungry; that effect is a big part of the reason why the old saying "hunger is the best sauce" fits so well; as you start to eat carbs, your hunger actually increases because of the rising insulin. This can become a vicious cycle very easily; you eat something with carbs in it, the blood sugar rises, the insulin rises, the sugar level declines - but the insulin level doesn't fall for a while yet; now you're really hungry even though it hasn't been very long since you ate. (You've heard of the "sugar crash"? This is the simplified version of the biochemistry behind it.) So you eat again - probably including more carbs, because they're everywhere. Spike - crash - spike - crash. Getting the idea that this might not be healthy? You'd be right - and as the guy in the infomercials would say, that's not all...
An elevated level of insulin in the blood makes your system unable to use fats as fuel; it puts the muscles and most other fuel-using parts of the body into "burn only sugar, and not fat" mode, and at the same time it puts the fat cells into "grab all the fat that comes by and stash it" mode. And because the liver will try its best to help speed this along by converting that sugar to fat (in the form of triglycerides), the elevated insulin can cause a lot of fat accumulation. If you don't eat again for quite a while, that stored fat can get used up pretty much right away, if everything is normal. After all, when insulin is very low or absent, fats are continuously released from storage for use as fuel. But when insulin is present in the quantities that are common in most of the US population for most of any 24 hour cycle, that doesn't get a chance to happen; for most or all of the day, fats are only stored, and sugars get converted to fats - and stored. This is the basic reason that people get fat on a typical American diet; even long after they go to bed at night, the insulin level doesn't drop back to the point where they can use what they've been storing. But that's not the worst...
Chronic elevated insulin (a condition that is now pandemic in much of the world, and worse in the US than in most other nations) eventually results in hyperinsulinemia, a condition in which the insulin level is elevated well above normal whenever any carbs are present in the diet; if continued too long, eventually the body's ability to cope with that insulin - and respond to it - fails, resulting in diabetes. The whole process can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years, sometimes longer, depending upon the individual. (Some people may never develop it, but that doesn't mean that they won't show the ill effects of a carb-laden diet.) And sure enough, the diabetes epidemic in the US got worse starting about 10 years after the FDA and USDA published their high-carb-based nutritional recommendations in the early to mid '70s, which really launched the era of the high-carb low-fat mania.
So carbs cause insulin to get raised; what drops it? Well, excess insulin in the blood is removed by a substance called Insulin Degrading Enzyme. But in hyperinsulinemia, the production of the enzyme just can't keep up with the need to clear the excess insulin from the bloodstream. Even in people who haven't developed hyperinsulinemia, it's easy for the level of the enzyme to be just barely adequate to clear the excess insulin, if they're eating a lot of carbs. That's bad, because ordinarily, the excess amounts of that enzyme will switch roles and act to "clean up" various things, like the deposits that are believed to contribute to the formation of the plaques found in Alzheimer's patients. Like most things in the body (insulin included), that enzyme serves multiple purposes - and it's needed for all of them. When the supply gets used up by an overloaded demand in one area, the rest get neglected. Things get unbalanced. That's bad.
So, long-term high levels of insulin lead to hyperinsulinemia, and that clobbers the body's clean-up enzyme that would be doing a lot more than cope with the insulin if it could. And hyperinsulinemia leads to diabetes. Presumably you know about the plethora of ills that go with diabetes; nerve damage in the extremities, obesity, heart disease, atherosclerosis and more. Worth avoiding, wouldn't you say?
For quite a while, diabetics were advised to substitute fructose for the regular sugar in their diet. But that turns out to have been a bad idea. Fructose (which is one of the two sugars that are produced when table sugar breaks down) has been strongly implicated as a major contributor to (if not the principle cause of) elevated levels of bad cholesterol, which further contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In the diet, it stresses the liver, where it is converted into triglycerides. It is also directly suspected as a contributing factor in the buildup of the plaques which are present in Alzheimer's patients, through the formation of what is known as advanced glycation end-products. (That's part of what the insulin-degrading enzyme is needed to help clean up - another vicious cycle.)
So fructose is a bad actor, and table sugar is 50% fructose. But it's not the only source for most people in the US; it is present in higher-than-table-sugar levels in high fructose corn syrup, which is a government-subsidized substance used in nearly all non-diet soft drinks, most mass-produced baked goods, most pancake and waffle syrup, and even things like ketchup and relish. Outside of table sugar, HFCS and honey, fructose is fairly rare in a diet that does not include those three sources; it is found only in small quantities in most raw fruits, but the presence of significant glucose along with the fructose makes the majority of fruits (and nearly all juices) problematic in any event. (I have mused that if Genesis had been written by someone in possession of all the facts, the stricture would have been "Do not eat fruits of any kind, for they will make you ill in old age.")
In the absence of carbs, the body's ability to deal with large amounts of fat in the diet is prodigious for most people. Fat clearly is what we handle best and easiest as caloric fuel, with protein being second - and protein is essential. Carbs, however, are absolutely not essential at all, as long as there's enough fat and protein available. And most people simply will not over-eat when their diet is composed entirely of non-carb foods with adequate fat. The insulin response that drives their hunger vanishes, and they'll eat only what they need.
By the way, saturated fat is NOT a problem. No study has ever proven that elevated consumption of saturated fat causes elevated levels of triglycerides or bad cholesterol. The non-natural stuff known as "trans fat", however, most certainly is a problem in both areas.
This really just scratches the surface; the body of knowledge that condemns carbs has been accumulating in various disconnected fields of biology and branches of medicine and chemistry for a century or more, but most of the research results have remained uncollected and uncorrelated until recently. One of the people who connected the dots is Gary Taubes, an author I have mentioned before. Many people had pieces of the puzzle, but because the fields where the research was done have grown so specialized, few of them had the rest of the picture...and while it's true that certain people have been aware of the truth about the gross effects of carbs and fats in the diet, their observations haven't been taken seriously by the medical establishment most of the time, often because they were mere clinicians who had been getting results, not respected researchers who had hundred-million-dollar grants funding their investigations. For over 50 years, the research money has been directed solely into trying to prove that fats and overeating are the problem behind obesity, largely as a result of the efforts of a few highly-placed "authorities" who gained stature after World War II without any real research to back up their conviction and their assertion that overeating and overconsumption of fats were the exclusive causes of obesity and other health issues. And, of course, it doesn't help that much of the nutritional "research" has been funded by companies like General Mills, whose revenue derives almost entirely from the sale of grain-based foods; is it any surprise that the studies seldom have been structured in a way that could implicate carbs via their results? I don't think so.
So, what to do?
Four words not mentioned before: Meat is your friend. While it's possible to eat a largely-vegetable diet that includes enough protein and fat, it's much easier to eat healthy when meat is the primary ingredient in the diet - and don't trim those steaks so close. For vegetarians, guacamole is your friend, but it's not enough by itself. (And if you eat meat, you can now revel in the fact that the cheaper ground beef has more fat in it.)
My typical breakfast: Three eggs with 4 ounces of sausage and three strips of bacon, fried in the bacon grease. All told, that's over 100 grams of fat. By the old USDA standards, I'm getting an overload of fat and cholesterol for the day in just that one meal. Lunch and dinner look similar, though they actually tend to be smaller a lot of the time because with no carbs to drive the hunger, I'm not ravenous when I sit down to eat. By the "conventional wisdom" of the '80s, that kind of diet is horribly unhealthy, and I should look like a grounded blimp. Funny thing; my blood pressure and my weight are both down relative to where they were when I was eating lots of carbs. And everyone I know who has followed this path reports the same results; one of them simply says "Bread is deadly. Don't eat anything white." (Not 100% reliable; jicama is very low-carb, and white - and tasty.)
Just remember; if you want the benefits to last, going low-carb isn't a diet, it's a permanent lifestyle. Don't think of it as a way to lose weight, think of it as a way to lose health problems.
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