Wonder what he said.
This from Dr. Jack Kruse, flavor of the month in LLVLC land, after the Ancestral Health Symposium.
Speaking of “Dominant causes of obesity”………..The buzz from day one was from Gary Taubes ripping Stephen Guyenet on his food reward series. Personally, many of you know I completely disagree with Dr. Guyenet on this topic, but I think he is a great blogger with a great mind. Maybe Gary’s tact could have been better allocated; but he said what had to be said, in my view. I would also remind many that even within a family it is normal to have disagreements from time to time. I personally think this a good thing that with in a group of like minded folks we can disagree at times. I complained loudly to Jimmy Moore on his FB wall and forum about Gary Taubes being “soft” with Dr. Oz earlier this year. So I can not fault him one bit when he decided to sink his canines in to Dr Guyenet at the AHS. I personally wanted to see Gary bare some teeth after the Dr. Oz debacle and this weekend showing tells me he can evolve. That to me was a positive in a bad situation. It does not in one bit negate the major contributions of Dr. Guyenet at all in my view. I just think he had a bad day with his food reward series. We all have bad days at times. No harm no foul.
Quite frankly, the sponsors of AHS have no business having folks like Taubes and Naughton, to name two, speak at such an event! Seriously? What is their expertise on this whatsoever?
If anyone wants to clue me in on what Taubes said, I'm all ears. Stephan and I may not agree on everything and that is fine. His writings challenge me and I don't feel the need to look past everything he says for some body of evidence he's deliberately ignoring to drive an agenda. I would love to know what the teeth-sinking was all about, although my money is on the comment on his blog stating that no serious researcher takes GT's carbs drive insulin drives fat accumulation theories seriously. Where are the actual researchers willing to endorse that theory Gary? Nah. Funny how Taubes is NADless in the face of someone like Dr. Oz but grows a pair to slam someone far his intellectual superior to a sympathetic audience.
And this Jack (quac)Kruse wants to write off Stephan's Food Reward series as "a bad day"???? Again. It may or may not be a workable hypothesis depending on one's interpretations, etc. But I think anyone who would write something like that off in this manner is not worthy of being taken seriously.
Comments
I'm not a Taubes evangelist, but I don't share the same animosity for him you do. That said, I thought it was a dick move on Taubes' part, and wondered whether Stephan's comment prompted it.
BTW, you'll want to watch Doug McGuff's BBS presentation. Naught on asks him a question re de novo lipogenesis.
P2.0: It escapes him, but Taubes' hypothesis does not explain the Pima or the various observations in different cultures either. Why only the women get fat for instance when I thought ovarectomized rats were the fatties? There's a contradiction at every turn with Taubes.
I was looking at the setup/schedule and thought to myself how unfair some of the match ups were.
As for animosity? Well, many of Taubes personal communications and public statements about my persona (and not ever about what I'm criticizing about his flawed pseudoscience) have been "dickish" as you would describe it.
Agree. Poor people living on rice and beans look a lot different than poor people living on hot pockets and coke.
Free the animal has some pics of those that attended symposium.
A-men to that. Come to NYC, or any big city, where there are many manual laboring men whom you could observe, on the street. They deliver things, they build things, they repair things. I always watch what they eat on their lunch break, which they take on the street. They buy from guys who sell food on the streets.
Big heaps of carbs (rice, beans) with a side of veg, and meat, and fruit for dessert.
I would bet you any amount of money that virtually everyone who attends these "Paleo" summits works as a desk wuss and that every move they make is volitional.
And the Ancestral Health people need to stop inviting the low-carb Taliban (Taubes, Naughton, Eades, et al) to their functions. The low carb Taliban add nothing but pseudoscience to the Ancestral Health movement.
Wow! Doesn't all this vitriol make you folks tired?
________________
As we all know, high fat / low carb forces your body to use more energy, so in fact since our vitriol is high fat and low carb, it does the opposite of making us tired.
Maybe you're used to high carb vitriol, containing only NAD(r)(tm) ? That would indeed be tiring. Get yourself checked using Dr. Davis's home test kits and follow an archevore[0](r)(TM) plan, and maybe you too can experience the benefits of going NAD-free[1] vitriol.
[0] or more accurately, the jughead-vore plan.
[1] yes you read that right; go NAD free.
http://huntgatherlove.com/node/612#disqus_thread
@Sue - thanks for Melissa's link. Yeah, Quilt sounded like Kruse so I clicked on the profile to confirm that suspicion. It's a peeve of mine when folks use different names on different sites. Second only to being "Anonymous". Pick an ID folks!
@Jenna - pics on PH link?
@Melissa - I've noticed that too. There's something about his website: Dr. Jack Kruse Neurosurgeon that is such a turn off from the get go. It's like we know you're a doctor and the site doesn't seem to be about neurosurgery so it's like Ace Ventura Pet Detective.
(I know, I'm sad, haha)
When it comes down to it, it's very simple. The commonality between a low carb diet that works for weight loss and a high carb diet that works for weight loss is calorie restriction. Has anyone ever seen someone get fatter on low carb? I have. So calories are THE big deal here. The only argument is what helps people reduce their calories with the least amount of pain and suffering. I think the evidence points to increased protein, which is much higher on low carb and paleo diets (I know this has been discussed ad nauseam), but it's very funny how all of the focus is put on carbs physiologically.
Amelia's Shopping List
I've been to several Amelia's stores and their stuff is CHEAP. And easily 2/3 of their space is taken up by processed, high-calorie, nutrient-poor food.
In the U.S., it doesn't take a lot of money to eat a lot of food.
Agreed.
Anyone know if the videos are posted anywhere? I'd like to listen/watch.
I see kids on the stocky side of average...maybe even sporting a small McGut by the age of 9 or so...with overweight to obese mothers. I see them standing outside their houses waiting for the bus with a big gulp in their hand at 7:30 in the morning and know it is likely the first of many.
My daughter unkindly jokes with her dad that it should be called fat mom lane. Stereotypes and cliches run amuck. There's no doubt that they consume plenty of sugar.
Kind of a stretch though to suggest they'd have the same results from a bowl of unsweetened or minimally sweetened porridge and a mug of tea.
The more I really turn this food reward theory over in my mind and play with the variables [and challenge some of my low carb indoctrination with facts that confound it] the more I simply HAVE to agree that it's a relevant factor especially when it's not applied only to diet but lifestyle as a whole.
People are willing to endure really shocking levels of physical discomfort [passing out?! nausea?] as a result of being pursuaded that low carb can really work for them. I have to wonder if the discomfort could in some way be a form of stimulation/reward in and of itself. I wonder if people are getting something FROM having something to actively endure [which is distracting imo] and would/do lack that when they are merely eating low reward food to satiation.
I don't remember it all, because it happened so fast, but here's what I recall:
I presented diet and body fat data from the !Kung HGs and Tukisenta horticulturalists in my talk. Gary felt that I was cherry picking cultures that conform to my hypothesis, and ignoring others that don't. He used the Pima as an example, which is particularly ironic since the Pima deep sixes his own carb hypothesis. I explained that the Pima saw a shift from simple grains, beans and squash to white flour baked goods, sugar, salt, canned meats and other processed foods. I don't see why that's incompatible with the food reward hypothesis, although there are probably other factors involved. He also cited a few other cultures and I basically said I couldn't evaluate whether or not they conform to the hypothesis because I wasn't familiar with them.
Then he said the alternative hypothesis is that sugar is responsible for all this. At that point, I explained that the bland liquid diet that caused so much fat loss in multiple studies typically contains a fair amount of sugar, to which he retorted something like "well then why do you think it's low reward?". I explained that drinking flavorless liquid through a straw for 100% of your calories will be very low palatability/reward whether or not it contains sugar.
He then lectured me about how I need to look for observations that disprove my hypothesis rather than choosing only those that support it. My response was "thanks for the advice". I'm sure you can appreciate the irony of him lecturing me about that.
Afterward, many people came up to me and expressed their support, including nearly all of the well-known scientists at the conference whose opinions I respect. I'm not going to name them because I don't want to drag them into the drama.
I feel that Gary did me quite a favor in the end. He made me look good and allowed me to connect more easily with other people at the conference who I respect.
I said hi to him at the hotel bar later that night, and he apologized.
Overall, the tone of the meeting was very collegial. There were others who disagreed with me, but they did so respectfully.
http://paleohacks.com/questions/56701/any-specifics-on-what-gary-taubes-outburst-at-ahs-was-all-about#axzz1UTMCc3mZ
He may have apologized to YOU, but Taubes keeps lying about the Pima. He owes THEM an apology.
I am sick and tired of hearing Gary Taubes misrepresent the Pima tragedy. Haven't these inoffensive people suffered enough?
That he should lecture anyone about looking for data to disprove their hypothesis is the height of chutzpah.
I wrote at length a debunking of how Taubes argues his point, here.
http://carbsanity.blogspot.com/2011/04/flashback-da-bomb-that-started-it-all.html#comments
If I say so myself, I did pretty well, if a bit snarkily and verbosely.
He just as good as says that the Pima became fat as a direct result of starvation, ignoring the fact that a full generation passed between the years of starvation and the anthropological observations that many were fat.
This is outrageous, and he should be forced to acknowledge his errors and apologize. It's like saying the Dutch became fat as a direct result of the "hunger winter" of 1944-1945.
I'm going to start writing letters. He's enraged me.
As for the low-carbers and ancestral folks speaking at the same event, Jimmy Moore suggested to me on twitter that one of the purposes of the event was to bring the communities together.
http://su.pr/2nwclX
[1] Scrinis G. On the Ideology of Nutritionism. Gastronomica, Vol.8, No.1, February, 2008, pp.39-48.
[2] Pollan M. Nutritionism defined & Nutritionism comes to market. in In Defense of Food. Chapters 2 & 3. Penguin Press HC, 1st Ed. 2008.
[3] Pollan M. Unhappy Meals. The New York Times. 2007.
[4] Schwenkler J. Nutrition and Tradition. The New Atlantis, pg. 125-128. Summer 2009.
[5] Mozaffarian D, Ludwig DS. Dietary guidelines in the 21st century–a time for food. JAMA. 2010 Aug 11;304(6):681-2.
[6] Jen Allbritton. The Low-Carb Low-Down. Vitamin Cottage Health Hotline. July 2003.
The low-carb guys are only looking for the bits of ancestral health that boost their carb/insulin theories while ignoring the rest. The Pima Indians is a perfect example of this. They are an interesting case study in comparing ancestral vs modern diets, but Taubes is so focused on the carbs/insulin theory he doesn’t see this or see how it destroys his own arguments.
The only thing that the low-carbers bring to the table (carb/insulin theory) has been almost totally rejected, and Taubes has pretty much said he has no interest in talking about omega-6s, wheat, food reward, choline, etc…, let alone Real Food.
Bringing the communities together just muddies the water and injects a big dose of stagnant bad science into the Ancestral Health movement.
As long as Taubes is still treated like a guru, then people are still going to talk about macronutrients because that is his one trick pony.
I was just relaying what was said to me without commentary. :P
And that is quite typical of Taubes. He gets on a hobbyhorse, and he rides it for all he is worth.
"People are willing to endure really shocking levels of physical discomfort [passing out?! nausea?] as a result of being pursuaded that low carb can really work for them. I have to wonder if the discomfort could in some way be a form of stimulation/reward in and of itself. I wonder if people are getting something FROM having something to actively endure [which is distracting imo] and would/do lack that when they are merely eating low reward food to satiation."
Yes.
I have a word for you: orthorexia.
Unfortunately, it's now a label the mainstream feels it may freely apply to any person following a diet that doesn't include the usual crap, but, also unfortunately, it's a real thing some people have. A sibling of anorexia and a cousin of OCD and hypochondria.
I've run into a few people that I thought might be likely candidates for that but it doesn't quite fit with the population I'm thinking of.
Let me see if I can do better describing...hmmm.
Ok, try this out. People who are willing to [reasonably] cheerfully endure physical discomfort...nausea, headache, body ache, etc
...but would consider having a 9mm bullet for dinner rather than bland food even though they wouldn't suffer any physical discomfort at all.
Almost the opposite of an orthorexic aren't they?
For me personally I think my problems came down to, 1. Ambiguity in my mind (extending to "magical thinking"), through lack of education in Science, and Critical thinking related subjects. 2. As an extension of the former, the idea that foods have properties that influence your appetite, body/fat ratio independent of calorie control, and energy expended through exercise, and the like which I think, can lend itself to "magical thinking" because admittedly there are so many unknowns (given that Nutritional subjects and knowledge of the inner workings of the human body are in their youth), and vulnerabilities to bias. 3. Misunderstanding (a further extension of point 1, and 2; In my mind I thought I was meant to be fat (like my Mum), so I was always in search of a explanation that could explain why my Mum had failed trying things like everyone else, i.e. calorie control etc, and my siblings were effortlessly and disproportionately skinny by comparison.
Ultimately I think for me "Orthorexia" came down (and probably still does) to uncertainty about what to believe truer given my reliance on 'Experts' to supply my understanding. And there were and are many viewpoints. I do think knocking things back to basics (i.e. acceptance of the notion of calorie control and expenditure through exercise) has only come about through being able to acknowledge through experience what does not work. I was not able to do that for a long time, and this acknowledgment has only come about through being aware of contradictory information. So, to me my ability to endure a diet that has given me all kinds of health problems, like the development of PCOS, is that I simply didn't know what was better to listen to; my own signals? (when I have been made aware that there is bacteria influencing appetite; properties (i.e. sugar) influencing appetite; differing brain chemistry effecting appetite (vulnerability to addiction like behavior; environmental factors (chemicals, lifestyle, etc); epidemiological influences too. It all seems like pretty complicated stuff, so I don't think its any wonder why people develop such destructive behavior.
He then lectured me about how I need to look for observations that disprove my hypothesis rather than choosing only those that support it. My response was "thanks for the advice". I'm sure you can appreciate the irony of him lecturing me about that.
Sounds like you handled this well from all accounts and he made a right arse of himself. Even many of his acolytes will acknowledge his love of cherry picking!
Keep up your great work!
Heads up folks ... another pic of Stephan and several others can be found here:
http://www.fitbomb.com/2011/08/ancestral-health-symposium-2011.html
I don't mind being called out but I would appreciate you checking your facts before you post a falsehood. As a former New Yorker you could at least extend that courtesy.
Umm ... please do enlighten me what "falsehood" I posted about you?? Also not sure where you or I live/lived has anything to do with it.
~signed Stumped in Seattle
I guarrantee you I eat more carbs than Carb sane.......and less protein too. The people who ate with me at AHS were a bit shocked.
LOL - I dare you to post about this over on LLVLC forum! They seem to be under the impression you are a low carber.
two......I have posted this over on MDA and Jimmy's site. Infact its in many of my blogs that you clearly have not read. You only read what suits you. I think Kurt and Stephen pointed that out back in January about the NEFA issues.
Be honest and be consistent. And it does not matter whart name I use because I clearly ID myself everywhere as I have here.
You're 0-3 now, but the offer for the free CT stands.
Jack Kruse
Two ... you know not where I read. It is true I don't read your blog. From what I've seen it's just not my cuppa tea. There's more to NEFA than the ischemia and I think many could learn from Stephan's and my back and forths on this blog. Kurt isn't worth bothering over. He clearly didn't comprehend what I was saying so it becomes futile at a point to have a discussion with such a person.
I am honest and consistent. SHOW me otherwise. I don't care who you post as, but you do realize that you waste people's time when you make them click on a profile only to realize who you are? Why not just post with one ID. Like I said that's your choice but whatever.
Free CT ... next time I'm in Nashville maybe I'll take you up on that. Gotta love free stuff!
Your name was taken in vain? who you be? The Lawd?
Evelyn didn't actually say you were an LCer, she said you were popular amongst them. Big difference.
But....you say:
"I would also remind many that even within a family it is normal to have disagreements from time to time. I personally think this a good thing that with in a group of like minded folks we can disagree at times."
So, you liken your relationship to the LC crowd to that of a family, and you are of like mind to them.
Hm.
Trying to figure out the sense of that there. The LC crowd is comprised of people who believe in Low Carb, the metabolic advantage, and the harmfulness of the supposedly modern carbohydrate based diet. And you are by your own admission, of "like mind" with them, part of the same family.
OK.
Regarding this: "That means the diet changes as your switches changes." [sic, I think you mean, "as your switches change."]
Can you please translate this into plain English?
What switches? What genes? What specifically do you mean by epigenetic changes, to which genes?
And I'd appreciate it if you could write clearly in plain English, without recourse to ellipses and shorthand turns of phrase that only the initiates can understand.
Your name was taken in vain? who you be? The Lawd?"
@Diana - Watch it, woman. I just lost like 18 CNS neurons due to laughter-induced asphyxiation.
Don't you know?--
Damned is she who dareth to not kowtow to His Holiness The Great Epigenetics-Pioneer-NeuroSavior, for she shall turneth into a pillar of glucoseee! -(The Book of) John (Kruse) 3:14
Mmm (non-low-carb) pie...
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