The Carb-Sane Asylum

This will probably be the last post, other than perhaps dumping articles over in the library, regarding "leptin spikes".  And I don't normally link to and discuss abstracts, but in this case the abstract says it all.   Over on Mercola's hatchet job on starch , as discussed in my previous post , Ron Rosedale MD provided that science he's supposedly bridging over into medicine to support his contention that carbs "spike" leptin.  Here was the first comment addressing yours truly: Because you do not know the science, does not mean that it doesn't exist. This is over 10 years old.  There are many articles subsequently that support and verify this. "Evidence That Glucose Metabolism Regulates Leptin Secretion from Cultured Rat Adipocytes" www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../9449624 Endocrinology,1998 Feb;139(2):551-8 "We conclude that glucose transport and metabolism are important factors in the regulation of leptin expression and secretion." ...

Why do some of these things land in my lap when life gets so busy?  Over on Mercola's site , I've been tangling up a bit with Ron " Spiked Leptinade with my Science Krispies " Rosedale.   Now I don't expect Rosedale to start following my blog or anything, but I did post links to certain posts over there to support my contention that carbs do NOT spike leptin.  By any definition, they do not.  Instead of recognizing this and backing off (and hoping nobody notices, a la Taubes), Rosedale has doubled down on his assertion that carbs spike leptin.  In support of his contention, the science he offers up is ... drumroll please ... a more than decade old study on isolated cultured rat adipocytes .  This wouldn't drip so with irony were it not for the fact that Rosedale shoves his massive clinical experience with live humans in yo' face every chance he gets.  You see, I don't possess his vast clinical experience so I must be in error interpreting the whole blo...

No ... rats have not infested Taubes' batcave replica of the AHS lecture hall.  Rather, Gary steps in it yet again with his discussion of the Cafeteria rat study in one of his lame attempts to debunk Stephan Guyenet's works on food reward.   The Cafeteria rat study he was referring to is, in my opinion, the most relevant animal study on the etiology of the modern obesity epidemic in Westernized countries.   Let's revisit the study with a post of mine:   Why We Get Fat ... Lessons from a Cafeteria Rat .  In short, you can get "normal" rats to become fat by replacing their usual chow with a high fat chow and/or a high sugar-containing chow.  But how do you get them to become really really fat?  Feed them modern American junk foods.  I'll repost some pertinent graphics from that post here.  The so-called "cafeteria rats" were provided ad libitum standard chow along with a rotating selection of three items from the list below:

L*. Ron Rosedale's Church of Scikrispology Creating a chasm between science and medicine. Jimmy's original data dump "debate" over safe starches seems to have taken on a little life of its own of late.  For many of us it merely served to further draw the curtain back to reveal the lack of critical thinking in LLVLClue land.  But it also seems to have ignited a resurgence of another LC guru:  Dr. Ron Rosedale.  Rosedale hogged the most "cyber ink" in Jimmy's post, and also posted advanced snippets on his Facebook page. If the Taubesian-led LLVLC circle seems cultish, you really gotta get a load of Rosedale.  After all, Taubes may surely be enjoying his supreme guru status, but he didn't cultivate it as a populist movement (although he does have delusions of grandeur thinking if only all these idjuts in research and medicine would just listen to him). Rosedale, on the other hand, sees himself as a visionary leader of a  movement.  I had heard of Rose...

Hi Gang! Some have already noticed the new "What I'm Reading & Tweeting" widget over on the right hand side bar.  I got the idea to do this from Chris over at Conditioning Research .   He used to have a scrolling "What I'm Reading" box on his blog, that apparently was a widget from Blogger/Google that let him share selections from his reader.  Apparently that feature is no longer available through Google ... bummer as I was looking for something a little different than a blogroll and such.  So he told his readers that for now to follow on Twitter.  I have noticed many blogs with Recent Tweets widgets.  Lightbulb ... head ... So, I decided to get on Twitter and put that widget here.  My intent at this point is to share with my blog readers those things around the web that I'm reading and find interesting and worth sharing.  I would like to keep the outgoing tweets "clean" in this regard.  A one-way street if you will.  Not to be an...

In my last post , I discussed a study demonstrating that mice on a ketogenic diet ate the same number of calories as both mice on standard chow and the obesogenic high fat+sucrose diet, but lost body weight comparable to that seen in mice constricted to eating 66% of the standard chow calories.  I dubbed this a metabolic Mighty Mouse of sorts, MightyMeta Mouse.  I don't think we'll have enough installments of this to warrant an acronym -{grin} - I'll just use short nicknames when I tire of typing it out.   In any case, this study seems to validate some of the magical metabolic claims made by those who are able to eat thousands of calories on VLC diets while having been unable to lose or in some cases even maintain weight eating standard CRD level calories.  Well, I did the math in the prior post, and although Mighty does seem to manifest a metabolic advantage of sorts, this would not translate to much for the humans in question.  A couple of hundred calor...

HERE I COME TO SAVE THE DAY ( for TWICHOO )!! Thanks to Amber for bringing the following study to my attention:  A high-fat, ketogenic diet induces a unique metabolic state in mice .    Does it appear that MightyMeta Mouse is on his way??  Perhaps ...  for mice anyway.  The KD fed mice attained the same reduced body mass as the calorie restricted (to 66% ad libitum of control chow fed) mice.  A fourth group were fed the usual high fat + sucrose diet to induce obesity.  Anthony Colpo ... pay up!?*

As predicted, when I posted my challenge  a few days ago, the anecdotal magic metabolism or two came out to play.   There is certainly a cadre out there who believes: VLC   → lower insulin  → faster fat burning metabolism Some version of this is the purported Metabolic Advantage championed most prominently by Dr. Mike Eades.  The nutshell version of this is that when you are low carb, excess fat consumed will be "blown off" through futile cycling and uncoupling.  Despite admitting to eating a "starvation calorie level" diet himself, Eades perpetuates this myth of low carb magic.   What sparked this post, was a very well referenced post by Ambimorph over on PaleoHacks:   Is lowered T3 resulting from a low carb diet problematic?   She, along with another respondent on the thread, provides a long list of studies that show VLC lowers T3.   Dr. Ron Rosedale (of Science Krispie Leptinade fame here at the Asylum)  weighed in.  ...

In his second blog installment in a series that says nothing about its purported purpose (to debunk the food reward hypothesis so we can all return to eating our high reward Science Krispies ), Gary Taubes cites the following study: Consumption of fructose-sweetened beverages for 10 weeks reduces net fat oxidation and energy expenditure in overweight/obese men and women C L Cox, K L Stanhope, J M Schwarz, J L Graham, B Hatcher, S C Griffen, A A Bremer, L Berglund, J P McGahan, P J Havel* and N L Keim Background/Objectives: The results of short-term studies in humans suggest that, compared with glucose, acute consumption of fructose leads to increased postprandial energy expenditure and carbohydrate oxidation and decreased postprandial fat oxidation. The objective of this study was to determine the potential effects of increased fructose consumption compared with isocaloric glucose consumption on substrate utilization and energy expenditure following sustained consumpt...

Narrated by CarbSane Starring Gary Taubes as himself "A delightful drama about the journey from amateur boxer, to physics major turned journalist, to renowned 'expert' on obesity and human metabolism.  The protagonist is befallen by a nasty case of egomonomaniacalis   dunshütinfüt but ignores his obesity-researcher-turned-MD's advice when he prescribes digaholedypur arrestin .     This disease is a silent killer of reputations, and left unchecked might do just that.   Will Gary survive the disease?  Or will Gary debunk Taubes?"       or maybe Leptin Man will save the day? It's really rather amusing when a new Taubes blog post lands in my feed reader, and apparently since he promises a lengthy five part series of posts every few days, I'm guessing there will be no end to my amusement any time soon.  This has inspired another series of posts that from hereon will be dubbed Gary Debunks Taubes.   What?  Another series?  ...

The fact that the brain, or centralized neural complexes, even exists in multicellular higher organisms is indicative of it's over-arching governing function.  Sure, we have feedback loops in our bodies that seem to have little if any mediation by centrally produced signals, but ultimately our organs, including our fat tissue, ultimately relay information to our brains.  Our brains then send out signals back to the organ, and to other organs.  Renowned endocrinologist Julius Bauer -- heralded originally by Gary Taubes in GCBC, and now in a recent blog post -- said as much.   I've been reading a lot of truly nasty commentary about the web ever since Stephan began rolling out the food reward series.  Apparently a lot of people have hurt feelings and think that Stephan is now yet just another young skinny male just looking to blame fat chicks for their obesity, by -- gasp! -- discussing how leptin alters appetite and food intake in the brain.  Ya know, I do s...

It's comical.  Every time Taubes comes out with something new, somehow folks with magic metabolisms come out of the woodwork as well.  You know the type.  They could not lose weight eating a starvation diet of 1000 cal/day for weeks on end doing hours of cardio a week.  Some even claim to gain weight on such regimes!  Worse yet they were hungry all the time.  But then they read GCBC and went low carb and stopped exercising!  Suddenly, they were never hungry, but managed to wolf down 2000 cal/day of fat and protein and lost 20,30,100 or more pounds effortlessly in a week/month/whatever unbelievably short timeframe. This is utter nonsense.  Even Taubes acknowledges ultimately that if someone gains fat mass they are in caloric surplus and if someone loses fat mass they are in caloric deficit.  He just claims that you are eating more because your fat cells have gone rogue and hog your energy, and if you're losing weight, you are eating less beca...

The following is a quote from Good Calories Bad Calories: Bergmann and Julius Bauer, the “noted Vienna authority on internal diseases,” as the New York Times called him, were the two most prominent proponents of the lipophilia hypothesis, but only Bauer wrote about the hypothesis in English, attempting to influence how obesity would be perceived by physicians in the United States. Bauer’s expertise was in the application of genetics and endocrinology to clinical medicine, a field he arguably pioneered in a 1917 monograph entitled Constitution and Disease. Bauer had taken case histories from 275 obese patients and reported that nearly 75 percent had one or both parents who were also obese. He considered this compelling evidence that the condition had a genetic component, which in turn implied the existence of genetically determined hormonal and metabolic factors that would bestow a constitutional disposition to put on excessive fat.  “The genes responsible ...

It's been a wild and wonderful ride.

I have to admit, my eyes glaze over reading most of what Gary Taubes has to offer these days.  His latest seemed so much more of the same old same old.  Old paradigm, new paradigm ... research will never move forward until they embrace the new paradigm.  Thousands of scientists can't be right when Gary Taubes knows they're wrong.   But Taubes tucked something new into his latest post that I missed on the first read: In this paradigm, meals stimulate hormonal responses—insulin, in particular, either in the short term (glucose) or the long term (fructose)— and this in turn directly influences both the storage of fat and the oxidation of fatty acids elsewhere in the body. In recent lectures Gary has been turning his ire towards fructose/sugar as the ultimate cause of obesity.   He has in the past tried to explain the Japanese away by claiming they eat very little sugar.  I suppose compared to the SAD this is true, but they do eat sugar (and the...

Catching up , yada yada I see the website has been reformatted a bit.  Priorities, priorities. Eh ... is there much to say about this one?  Not really.  Except to highlight this: A caveat here: I’m willing to be convinced that this hypothesis is not an energy balance hypothesis, and so not a brain-rules-and-the-fat-passively-follows notion, but so far I haven’t seen an argument that’s convincing. I confess, though, that I find the hypothesis surprisingly difficult to understand, which suggests that either I’m losing my intellectual facilities in my dotage — always possible — or that I’m so blinded by my love of my own hypothesis that I refuse to understand it —at least equally likely — or maybe, just maybe, that Dr. Guyenet and other proponents of the hypothesis don’t really understand it either. Bingo Mr. Taubes.  Rather than several more parts trying to unravel Stephan's work, perhaps just one that actually addresses the problems he (and others, like ...

There's a popular diet plan out there that is supposed to melt the pounds off of you.  Inject yourself with HCG  a hormone produced by the placenta of pregnant women.  This has been around since the 1950's when Dr. Simeon devised the original program.  Perhaps spurred by Kevin Trudeau's 2007 book on the diet, it seems to have experienced a resurgence in recent years.  The diet itself lasts for several weeks where someone eats 500 calories/day in two meals.  Here's Simeon's original plan : 125 I.U. of HCG daily (except during menstruation) until 40 injections have been given. Until 3rd injection forced feeding. After 3rd injection, 500 Calorie diet to be continued until 72 hours after the last injection. For the following 3 weeks, all foods allowed except starch and sugar in any form (careful with very sweet fruit). After 3 weeks, very gradually add starch in small quantities, always controlled by morning weighing. This amounts to 3 days of overfeeding,...

Yes, as 2011 comes to a close, like other bloggers I look back on what has transpired this year. So, what's a blog like the Asylum if not to have a little fun, eh?  And so I'm announcing today that some time in December I'll be announcing the awarding of my first annual Un-Sanies.   I'm not really sure yet if I'll choose a top 5,10,whatever format or have categories (e.g. most Un-Sane book, blog post, quotation, etc.).  I.'m not even sure I've settled on the Un-Sanies (In-Sanies were another option).  But I'd like to identify some of the most outrageous statements -- in print or otherwise on the net -- made in the promotion of or defense of radical carbohydrate restriction.  Off the top of my head Wheat Belly's battery acid, Eades' just totally "eew creepy" reference to moisture and young ladies, and more recently the reference of Joel Osteen impersonator Ron Rosedale to all of us as some degree of diabetic are worthy of consideration....

Regulation of fatty acid transport and storage: influence of acylation-stimulating protein Katherine Cianflone and Sabina Paglialunga, 2006 Commonly, the dietary sources of fat exceed the actual needs and the tissues are faced with dealing with the excess. Under these circumstances, the removal process of dietary triglycerides and fatty acids becomes overloaded, resulting in excessive postprandial lipemia and accumulation of chylomicrons, remnant particles and non-esterified fatty acids. These particles are associated with disruptions in lipoprotein metabolism and changes in inflammatory factors, thus their association with cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome and diabetes is not surprising. Dietary factors, not just fat, influence postprandial fluxes. This leads to the question: do we need a standardized fat tolerance test? I've been reading a lot of studies lately dealing with postprandial clearance of fats from the blood and it certainly seems to me that these are coales...

I overheard a student the other day discussing her, apparently mandatory, meal card.  I remember that well.  All freshmen living in dorms at almost every college/university must participate.  My first semester I rarely ate in the cafeteria because the food sickened me. So one of my students was saying that she had over $1000 on her meal card.  WOW!  I can't help but think what that amount of money can buy.  I find this so very sad. Why do I feel so old?  Well, because I can't help but think about the costs of things.  In my day most rented those little cubicle dorm fridges for like $50/year or semester even.  Now?  You can buy a small fridge/freezer that is separate for not much more!!  There were no Home Depots, Lowes, WalMarts, Costcos, Sam's Club, BJ's back then. And yet with all that they have available, *kids* these days are (a) on the one hand still forced into ridiculous mealplans and such , and (b) on the other hand so a...

One of the things I've been doing regularly for the past year or so is making carcass broths and bone broths and making stews and soups with it.  I make the distinction of carcass v. bone because I mostly make two versions:  (1) pork from pork shoulder bones my amazing pork guy provides me free by the bagful (so I don't have to save up bones in the freezer which is a huge bonus!) and (2) chicken from the whole carcass from chickens or everything from the parts -- e.g. a fair amount of skin and cartilage and "stuff".   There was a question about pork rinds and satiety the other day on PaleoHacks that reminded me of a few things.  One was that whenever I would hear of the health bennies of gelatin protein, I always remembered reading that it was not a good major protein source because it is not a complete protein.  Well, the protein from such broths may not be complete, but it is special indeed.  I'm not one for anecdotes but my less-than-perfect-diet hubby ...

Something has been "egging me" since I wrote my last two blog posts ( Some Spiked Leptinade with My Science Krispies Please!  and  Keep the Leptinade flowing! I'm going to die from my glucose anyway ... ) on two of the studies Dr. Rosedale cited in support of his starch-is-never-safe stance.  Put another way,  in his own words ,  ...there is really no totally safe level of blood sugar that will not cause non-enzymatic glycation or damage. The thresholds for diagnosing diabetes are arbitrary numbers. As such, I consider most everybody to have diabetes; just different degrees. I'm a little confused over Rosedale's stance, but I can't really get bogged down because, frankly, he's not talking straight.  He seems to be saying hyperglycemia is not diabetes it's the underlying hormonal imbalance, insulin and leptin resistance specifically.  He seems to be under the mistaken notion that  When one is relatively young or pre-diabetic, the secretion of...