Low Fat, VitD and Stephanie Seneff

Before I get to Is the metabolic syndrome caused by a high fructose, and relatively low fat, low cholesterol diet?  I thought I'd share a bit about the lead author Stephanie Seneff.  I don't usually look much into the authors of papers and such unless something seems off in the bias/advocacy/etc. area.   Seneff did in this case.  Although Seneff has a biology background, she hasn't been working in that field so I thought it odd that the first author on such a paper was a PhD in Electrical Engineering.  The second author is described as an independent reader of research, which I suppose would be like me?!,  and the third an Italian doctor.   An interesting mix!

One gets a little insight on Seneff when you read her blog a bit.   Clearly her interests lie in gestational and early childhood development area, but I'm also picking up on a feminist angle advocating for acceptance of more body fat on women and not the hyper-lean, model-thin bodies that became more socially accepted in the 70's.  I can't disagree there, but there's a huge disconnect.  No doubt there are some women so concerned over their pencil-thin figures who may have irreparably harmed their unborn children eating a too-low fat diet and such.  However I do not get how this translates to the population as a whole and how this leads to Metabolic Syndrome, etc.  Especially since those women aren't the ones presenting with MetSyn.  I can't get over the reality that on the whole it is Americans who are not following governmental advice and eating "healthy diets" that present left and right with MetSyn. 


More disturbing, however, is how Seneff, according to her bio, "returned to her biology roots" to revisit human metabolism and physiology.  She didn't go back to the textbooks or to current peer review research.  No ...  sigh ... instead she learned from Gary Taubes.   

First, I would like to recommend a great book, Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes [7], for those who want to seriously examine the issues of diet and health. Most of what is written in this section was gleaned from reading that book, although I have added a few embellishments, based on my own reasoning. The main message of the book is that our country has been grossly misled into believing that a low fat diet is a healthy diet. This message is now so thoroughly entrenched that it is nearly impossible to overturn. While his main focus was on diets that would be effective for weight loss, he also argued persuasively that a high fat diet (or at least a low-carb, high-quality fat diet) is a healthy sustainable nutritional practice even when you're not trying to lose weight. He advocates a diet that eliminates as much as possible refined sugars (white sugar) and refined carbohydrates such as white bread, white rice, and pasta.

The biggest problem with these foods is that they are digested too easily. This causes a spike in the blood sugar level which in turn causes the pancreas to get into high gear, overproducing more than enough insulin to break down these sugars, so that they can be stored by the liver as glycogen for future energy needs. One consequence is that the insulin receptors become increasingly less responsive to insulin, leading over time to type II diabetes: an inability to efficiently utilize insulin. Diabetes is easily diagnosed by measuring the levels of sugar in the urine, because the excess sugar that was not broken down due to insufficient insulin eventually is excreted by the kidneys as waste material.

I have yet to see any academic work that says the emphasized statement above.  This is what is so insidious about TWICHOO.  It was all a hypothesis, and this part of the hypothesis came from whole Neels reduction that anything that stimulates insulin eventually leads to insulin resistance.  That is just wrong as decades of research post 1985 have demonstrated.    Knowing what I know now about Seneff, that this is what formed the basis of her understanding that lead to the current hypothesis about fructose (interestingly enough Taubes' latest kick) and cholesterol deficiency causing MetSyn, I am not sure it was worth bothering to look much further into the study.  But I'd already done that and written it up.   See you in a bit!