The 2011 InSanies
The first ever awards to be handed out here at the Asylum. We'll honor here the most insane goings on in the low carb world in 2011. These honors are bestowed with lighthearted humor, even if some were earned for actions of a more serious nature. So, without further delay, in no particular order, I present
The 2011 InSanies
The Nominees are:
- Jimmy Moore for, well, just being Jimmy.
- Amy Dungan for continued promotion of the low carb lifestyle for weight loss
- Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt for poking fun at obese Americans on the LC Cruise
And the Bunny Ears go to ...
Andreas Eenfeldt
Nothing can drip more with irony than a lean young male doctor snapping pictures of fat people at the buffets on the low carb cruise. Are the spotlights that blinding when he's up there lecturing?
For Creepiest Blog Post of the Year ...
The only Nominee is, and the Bunny Ears go to ...
Mike Eades
Who that reads here can forget Dr. Mike's description of females with moist dreamy looks in their eyes? That creepiness only compounded by later encouraging them to wallow in lard and put so much butter tucked under the skin on chicken thighs that it drips down their arms when eating it. I feel creeped out just bestowing this award!
For Hypocrisy in Confronting Conventional Wisdom ..
The Nominees are:
- Tom Naughton for trashing Jillian Michaels while her torso graces his blog via Google Ads
- Dana Carpender for trashing Hope Warshaw and ADA sponsorships with Medifast Ad on her blog
- Dana Carpender for taking HCG and eating 1000 cal/day alternate days to control weight
And the Bunny Ears go to ... {she does look the cutest in them dontcha think?}
Dana Carpender
With specific nods for two issues, and many others in mind, one could look at this as a career achievement award of sorts. After "fighting the lowfat lie" for 15 years, in 2011, Dana turned to HCG and 1000 cal/day fat fasts to drop pounds for TV. Prior to that we learned that Dana takes several medications developed by scientists she slams and suggested by mainstream doctors and organizations like the ADA to treat disease. The hipocrisy of her slamming Hope Warshaw and the ADA's sponsors while her site had an ad for Medifast and she was taking metformin and Victoza is almost unbearable.
For Hypocrisy in a Low Carb Career ...
The Nominees are:
- Jimmy Moore for collecting all those ad dollars off of not so low carb foods all these years
- Zoe Harcombe for being a carb and fiber eating vegetarian for 15 years
- Gary Taubes for accusing Stephan Guyenet of cherry picking scientific data
And the Bunny Ears go to ...
Zoe Harcombe
While this was not a 2011 event, Zoe did comment here on this blog defending herself for promoting Taubesian LC dogma, bashing fruit and veg consumption and grains when she did, indeed, lose some weight and keep it off for 15 years being a porridge and brown rice eating vegetarian.
For Worst Book ...
The Nominees are:
- WheatBelly, Dr. William Davis
- Primal Mind, Primal Body (re-release), Nora Gedgaudas
- 6Week Cure for the Middle Aged Middle (paperback), The Drs. Eades
And the Bunny Ears go to ...
Wheat Belly
All three of the nominees are deserved of this award which is being bestowed for the worst mangling of science in the promotion of a low carb diet plan. Ultimately the fact that Wheat Belly became a NYT bestseller with Davis including the battery acid argument puts him at the top of the heap!
For Worst Blog Post Series or Manifesto ...
The Nominees are:
- Dr. Robert Su for his Diabetes Mellitus Myths series
- Dr. Jack Kruse for the incomprehensible Leptin Reset
- Jimmy Moore for his anti-James Krieger Insulin "Roundup"
- Gary Taubes for his supposed rebuttal of Food Reward
Robert "Carbs Can Kill" Su
I don't blog often about Dr. Su, mostly because he doesn't appear to be all that influential. Still, here you have yet another MD spreading this erroneous notion that eating carbs and postprandial glucose spikes cause diabetes. Here are links to the series: Myth 1, Myth 2, Myth 3, Myth 4, Myth 5, Myth 6, Myth 7. It is for closing gems such as this: "Having understood the relationship between carbohydrate consumption and postprandial blood glucose, tt is safe to say one is likely a pre-diabetic or becoming a diabetic, should he consumes carbohydrates with no restrictions." that Dr. Su has earned the bunny ears.
For Worst Science Blog Post ...
The Nominees are:
- Wheat Belly for the Oatmeal = Battery Acid post
- Petro Dobromylskyj for blatantly cherry picking data
- Tom Naughton trying to teach us Thermodynamics
And the Bunny Ears go to ...
Peter / Hyperlipid
I don't think anyone has so badly damaged their credibility with their own actions this past year than Peter. Not even Gary Taubes with all his machinations trying to defend TWICHOO comes close to Peter's shenanigans of openly throwing out data points and the ensuing analysis passed off as serious and scientific.
For the Most Ridiculous Advocacy of High Fat Eating ...
The only Nominee is, and the Bunny Ears go to ...
Jimmy Moore
Nothing says delusion like getting a take home message about high fat diets Jimmy claimed to have taken from the Swedes on the 2011 LC Cruise. What but delusion or a butter addiction possesses someone to put 2T CO and 4T butter on a pound of fatty ground beef. Yes folks, it really is a mystery why he regained his 2011 losses.
For Worst Internetiquette ...
The Nominees are:
- Jimmy Moore for grossly misrepresenting me on the shownotes, blog post and discussion board posting announcements for my podcast
- Jimmy Moore for sandbagging James Krieger with his Insulin roundup
- Jimmy Moore for publishing so many responses to Paul Jaminet that had nothing to do with safe starches
- Tom Naughton for accusing me of stalking him and being mentally unstable because I dared post a handful of comments at his site
And the Bunny Ears go to ...
Fat Head
It was a close one, what with only three examples of Jimmy's poor internetiquette making the cut, but Tom really took the almond meal and stevia cake in response to a few comments I attempted to make on his blog. Want to see what earned Tom the InSanie? I blogged on this here.
For the Most Hilarious Blog Post Intended to be Serious ... The only Nominee is, and the Bunny Ears go to ...
Jack Oughton
Who? Jack was the author of a guest post on the LLVLClue blog: Why Critical Thinking Is Essential For Your Health And Diet . In what reads like a really bad episode of Seinfeld, when you expect to check the URL and any minute find you were redirected to The Onion, Jack extolls the critical thinking virtue of low carbers. It's worth a laugh or two.
The Nominees are:
- Jimmy Moore for his offensive posts about Jessica Biel and diabulimics showing he just doesn't get it about ED
- Peter/Hyperlipid for telling his readers not to respond to me in his comments section
- Dr. Jack Kruse aka The Quilt for hovering at 30,000 feet, speaking in tongues (levee terroir) and generally consulting www.pullitfromyourass.com for scientific facts
- Gary Taubes for his behavior at the Ancestral Health Symposium, cutting in line to grill Stephan Guyenet and accuse him of cherry picking science, and letting the clock tick here at the Asylum
And the Bunny Ears go to ...
Gary Taube$
What??
Was there ever any contest??
So there you have it. I'm sure I missed a few so I reserve the right to make up my own rules and award in special recognition in 2012. And yes, a few were all about moi -- but it is my blog after all!! Hope you enjoyed!
(Yes, I'll be posting a 2011 in review type post, but might be a day or so delayed.)
Comments
dit-da-da-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
EVELYN ! (rimshot, laugh track)
> I'm taking their message to heart by adding MORE butter and coconut oil to my diet to see how it positively impacts my health
Gotta love those double blinded, unbiased studies.
I had forgotten this
> notion of listening to your body is one of my major pet peeves. In fact, just hearing those words makes me want to puke. In my experience, they are usually uttered by females with moist, dreamy looks in their eyes
_____________________
I don't recall ever reading/hearing that from a woman doc Eades. I've been hearing (podcasts) and reading (forums, blogs, ebook freebies) it a lot from
1. strength coaches (Pavel, Dan John, Gray Cook, Brett Jones ...)
2. strong guys (currently competing powerlifters, "highland games" type d00dZ, sane Crossfitters, the ones that don't get rhabdomyolysis (rimshot, laugh track)
3. bodybuilders (who don't necessarily train strength, and while many are strong I put them in a different category)
4. some real innovators (Moshe Feldenkrais), neurologists (plasticity and motor sensory maps)
Quite a disconnect between me & the Doc ...
> You can read more about Lt Schwatka, low-carb adaptation, and his time with the Inuit in a post I wrote a few years ago
But not ONE recent olympian, next to no current pro athletes ... (I don't know of one, the "next to" is just because there's bound to be a genetic anomaly who can do it, although if there was, why do they need to keep trotting out century old anecdotes ...)
"Dr. Jack Kruse aka The Quilt for hovering at 30,000 feet, speaking in tongues (levee terroir) and generally consulting www.pullitfromyourass.com for scientific facts."
LOL
Happy New Year, E!
Says the gal who actually rather enjoyed WHEAT BELLY, really. Don't throw anything at my moistly dreamy self, k?
His switch to "low carb Paleo" must not be producing the desired results as it's been several months now and no mention of any pounds lost. Instead he has been searching for something else like the recent testosterone cream he's now trying.
Actually, I'd bet the testosterone angle is probably going to be more evidence of self-delusion. The low testosterone itself is probably caused by his crazy diets and lazy lifestyle.
So he'll probably end up gaining more weight because each night as he rubs that testosterone cream onto his thighs, he'll think of how it's going to help heal his "deranged metabolism" so even if he ate a little more than usual that day, it didn't really matter. And on days a little more turned into a lot more, well, he can rub some more testosterone cream on and it'll be all good. I really wouldn't be surprised to see a weight gain.
I recently read an article that referred to a decades old study done with bread, showing that even processed starch like bread wasn't all that bad. People lost weight! Better not let Gary Taubes or Peter Hyperfat see this one!
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2011nl/dec/eatmorestarch.htm
In 1979, researchers from the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at Michigan State University (my alma mater) reported the results from asking 16 moderately overweight college-age men to add 12 slices of white bread (at 70 calories a slice) or high-fiber bread (at 50 calories a slice) to their diet daily.1 On average, subjects eating the extra white bread lost 16 pounds (6.26 Kg) and those adding the high-fiber bread lost 23 pounds (8.77 Kg) over the next eight weeks. There was no change in their physical activity or exercise. “Thus, weight loss of both groups of subjects occurred without alteration in life-style except for the supplementation of food intake with breads,” according to these investigators.
Even with WHITE bread they lost weight! Of course, it makes sense when you realize that the extra bulk in their diet caused them to spontaneously decrease their calorie intake.
What's sad is that something like the above dietary change (it's not even a diet itself, just adding starch to an existing diet) is something Jimmy Moore and other plateaued-or-rebounded-low-carbers-with-self-declared-deranged-metabolisms will not try because it can't work for them, they KNOW it can't work because it has CARBS! Jimmy Moore knows it can't work because he ate doughnuts and Little Debbie cakes and got fat. He ignores that both of those are junk foods with half the calories from fat and thus very easy to overeat. But no, it means carbs are off limits!
Insane! But hey, more fodder for next years awards?
Mc Dougall quotes “Thus, weight loss of both groups of subjects occurred without alteration in life-style except for the supplementation of food intake with breads,” according to these investigators.
"caused them to spontaneously decrease their calorie intake" ?? NOT spontaneous.
I clicked thro' from McDougal and read the paper.
These young men did "alter their lifestyle" as they were asked/required to reduce their intake and did so - from about 3200 to 2350 kcal.
Their intake was not "ad libitum" and most reported overnight hunger.
The "extra bulk" did not "cause" anything!!
_________
"without insulin and therefore without carbohydrate fat cells can't store fat"
"no carb, no obesity"
"eat without restriction - as long as it's low carbohydrate, you will lay down no fat"
And most scientifically convincing of all:
"Fred Hahn and Gary Taubes told me, so neener neener neener, I get to have more butter"
_________
I think the real conclusion is that if he ate just enough fat and protein to maintain his weight, he would still be hungry, but if you gave him the same number of calories as plain ol' boring starch, he probably couldn't finish it all. This is the point that the ideological low-carbers don't seem to intuit.
JM probably will advertise testosterone on his site and make money from it.
Kruse is writing a book with Sisson on leptin I presume - hope Sisson edits the shit out of it so it is comprehensible. Don't know why but Kruse just gets to me for some reason.
@Princess -- I promise not to throw things atcha :)
@Morris -- Don't be so cryptic. What is it you want to say here?
@BHI: I tried to spread the love around and try to ingratiate myself to as much of the community as possible (rimshot, love ya Sanjeev!)
http://drcate.com/your-2012-weight-loss-resolution-become-a-better-fat-burner/#more-2196
@ Sue, something on Kruse site ticks me off too, after checking it, I stopped coming, can't say much.
My problem with JM bashing is that it is sounds often for me like LC criticism more than JM's approach criticism. His story is not the proof that LC weight loss is not sustainable. I am reading Tom's blog (sorry, Evelin, for bringing the example that you distaste) and while he sometimes describes reach fatty meals he eats at restaurants on special occasion, often he mentions that he eats very infrequently. Yes, agree, Tom is not in Jimmy's weight league. Jimmy is criticized here mostly for adding fats , while I think his mistake in eating too much in general. From my perspective he doesn't utilize the main advantage of LC diet - the diminishing of hunger. Normally people will be able to eat almost nothing else after 1 lb of meat with added butter and coconut oil, while Jimmy is able to consume more square meals. I comment on his blog about my opinion but got dismissed. He indeed is good in a self-delusion.
You would think publishers would avoid him like the plague if they became aware of his habit.
As I understand it, during the research for Fat Head, Naughton stumbled upon the Drs Eades and Taubes (through his book?) and the film went in that direction (insulin drives fat storage, which drives weight gain).
Although he and Jimmy Moore both went to low-carb as a life style, I think that's where any similarities end. Naughton has maintained his weight and health as he always did (I recall that he is still in the 200-205 range?). But if the film shows anything, it's that he's a fairly organized and responsible eater who can keep to a diet plan.
@Tonus: I just watched Fat head. Gosh it is so full of contradictions, but yeah, the Eades sound so convincing with their BS. I should have watched it long ago when it came out free on hulu. Perhaps worth blogging on. Is it just me or does it seem like high fat eating males get fatter in the chin as time goes on? Tom seems to have gotten fatter in the face/neck while losing a few pounds (looks like in the "love handle" area mostly).
One of the things about naming names is that there are lots of familiar "faces" in the blogosphere, like for example you, who are for all intent and purposes anonymous. So for me to blog about Galina would be absurd (I know you don't advocate eating a lot). But there were lots on Jimmy's forum who talk about eating spoons of bacon grease, etc. There's folks over on PaleoHacks with jars of CO or sticks of butter on their desks at work that they eat and wonder why their not losing weight.
I guess it comes down to Taubes' nonsense that calories don't matter (that's his position at this point) and his mission is to get everyone to think along those lines that needs to be countered. And I do believe that caloric excess is the real MAD -- Anthony Colpo uses that for metabolic derangement, I'll use it as a take-off on NAD, MAD = Modern Agent of Disease.
Funny set of posts Evelyn. :-) I've got to agree about Kruse, him and Rosedale appear to be better poets than anything else.
Marilyn: I know this is a lovely subject, but I haven’t seen a lot of mention of it: “Calories in/calories out” seems to assume that digestion will always be perfect. But for some people, “calories in/calories out” might be just that. For a person with major digestive issues, many of those calories will simply wave as they pass by. I would guess that for the majority of the population, digestion is somewhere between perfect and very imperfect, which would make those “calories in” more or less available for all the things we’ve been considering — adding fat, heating, tissue repair, etc.
Fat Head: Interestingly, I recently had an internet stalker — who has an obsession with disputing Gary Taubes and who insists it’s all about calories, calories, calories, it’s calories in vs. calories out period end of story, eating too much is the cause and not the effect and anyone who believes otherwise just hasn’t read the research, etc. etc. etc. — explain away the fact that I didn’t gain an ounce on a very high-calorie, high-fat, zero-carb diet by suggesting I had “fat malabsorption” issues. Really? Then where the heck did the unabsorbed fat go? If my body can simply dump fat calories — which wave goodbye on the way out, as you put it — then it’s not a simple matter of how many calories we eat. (We don’t eat calories, anyway. We eat food, some of which is combusted and produces energy measured in calories.)
The author of the ''optimal diet'' (I forget his name) believes fat absorption is regulated so above a certain amount per hour is not possible. He has much more experience with very high fat diets than Naughton. :-)
I'll stick with what can be verified in clinical settings, not the fairy tales of magical metabolisms.
I also suggest Kevin Trudeau
Also Amway
Don't forget to check out Scientology (follow their directions to find the local group, take the personality test too)
I think it exposes people like Tom and Gary for how fragile their case is when someone like you comes along poking holes and asking questions and they react like they have. A person who is sure of themselves and their work will stand strong and respond constructively to their critics. Their empire is truly made of straw, why else would they be so afraid of someone with a lighter?
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