Thoughts on #AHS12

One of those posts I need to apologize in advance for the length of ...

A goodly portion of this post was written around a week ago, and I was conflicted on whether or not to hit the publish button.  I'm not sure the wisdom of posting this ... but in the end I decided to, and I've interspersed some additional thoughts now that AHS12 is over.  I apologize for the various awkward wordings, typos and case changes that resulted that I just don't have the time or patience to correct.

Let me start by saying that I am amused by the predictable reactions of some about the web to my not going to AHS12.  If I had a dollar for every time I've been accused of  "not having a life" I'd be rich, but when my life outside this blog actually gets in the way?  Well then, now there's really got to be some other reason, ulterior motivation or nefarious cause for my "backing out" of attending the paleo event of the year.  Well folks, it really is as simple as my husband starting a new job, this throwing a monkey wrench in my travel plans, and all sorts of things that now need to get done in August before my own job starts back up.    I have far more scheduling flexibility than most, like my husband who has a "real job" and not a whole heckuvalot of vacation time.  I'm glad I forgot to purchase his ticket to the Barefoot Ball which would have been our only "us" time.  We planned to take a friend of his along so he would have someone to hang out with about Boston while I was doing my thing.  I also wanted to stay at least through Monday as it's been a long time since I've been, and I dunno about y'all, but if I'm spending like $1000 for 4 days and 3 nights that don't include relaxing with my husband, I'm wanting to spend just a bit more to make a true vacation of sorts out of it.  Maybe that's just me, but I'm thinking not. 


But someone even asked the question of whether I had jumped the shark over on Paleo Hacks.  The PH folks deleted that question, but I remembered I get all questions in my feed reader, so I went to look.  First let me say that I always thought the phrase "jump the shark" meant going off the deep end into woo woo terroir, but apparently it's a reference to an episode of Happy Days that epitomized when a TV series had gone on too long and declined in quality and popularity.  So here is the PH question by Tastes Like Chicken:

Not many people seem to have noticed - or cared - but CarbSane's long-promised, much-hyped appearance at AHS12 was cancelled at the eleventh hour for reasons that appear sketchy at best.  [linked to my announcement]

First of all, I got my ticket early and announced at the time that I would be attending AHS12.  Promised?  I'm not aware that I made some sort of sacred promise, and I certainly am not obligated to attend any of these types of events.  The only obligation I felt remains to those who specifically donated towards AHS and that is being handled and made right.  I know there were readers who were looking forward to meeting me, or to my getting in a challenging question or two to some of the low carbers and purveyors of Science Krispies, and some live blogging.  Now, hyped?  Hyped by whom?  Certainly not me.  I've not mentioned it much if at all except to answer the occasional question in the comments here.  It's not like I was regularly tweeting and blogging about going to AHS and eluding to all these showdowns of sorts.  TLC continued:

So we will now forever be deprived of the chance to witness the greatest - or at least most vocal - critic of both Gary Taubes and Jimmy Moore actually come face-to-face with her arch-rivals. It more than likely would have made for quite a show - and it may have even made last year's mini-AHS scandals seem tame by comparison.

I'm not really sure what some were expecting of me at AHS, or whether or not it would even be possible.  Clearly Taubes was going to get in his question to Stephan last year, to the point he famously cut in line to make sure.  I am not that kind of person so unless I camped out at the Q&A mic, getting in a question was never guaranteed.  Unless I missed it (I usually do a search on the page to be sure, but that isn't fool proof) Gary Taubes was not even on the original speaker schedule when I signed up to go, and some names that were slated to speak, did not make it.  Heck, if one of the main organizers himself can cavalierly tweet on July 5 that he's unable to speak at his own symposium ....

  Brent Pottenger ‏@epistemocrat I can't make it to #AHS12 but Professor Daniel Lieberman will be there presenting in my place: http://goo.gl/hghER

While I was looking forward to meeting and chatting with many people, I can assure you neither Gary nor Jimmy were among them.  You think either of those men were going to seek me out?  LOL.  Jimmy was only moderating a panel -- a way to attend for free -- so there would not have been any venue for "professional" contact.   I'm not into PR photo moments and such.  There would have been no teeth gritting photos of me and Jimmy or Gary, though I think you might have been surprised by some of those I have criticized here whom I planned to connect up with.  

Does anyone care? OK, so once upon a time CarbSane nearly single-handedly demolished the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis - but is anyone listening anymore? More importantly, is the age of muckraking blogging over?

Is the age of misrepresenting this blog as purely muckraking over yet?   Now that AHS12 is over and one can tally up the hours devoted to speakers who still believe and promote TWICHOO, it seems the debunking work here will have to continue.   If exposing gimmickry and fraudulence and fraudulent gimmickry upsets you, or you don't care about taking advice from folks who make up "science" to sell you something or promote lifestyles that are not working for the advocate (for one reason or another, matters not), then this isn't the blog for you.  My readership fluctuates, but the trend continues upward. 

I realized long ago ... or I most certainly wouldn't still be around ... that you can never please all of the people all of the time, some of the people all of the time, or some people even one time.  And that's OK.  But I do take exception to being lumped in with Durian Rider and even Anthony Colpo and Matt Stone in terms of my blogging style.   It's no secret I'm a fan of and respect AC for his work on cholesterol and his Fat Bible, and while I feel Matt Stone regrettably crossed into woo-ville with his RBTI stuff, I still have a soft spot for the guy whom I believe is well-meaning at heart.   But my style may be comparable in its irreverance, there are some clear differences.  Every now and then I'll use profanity and when I do it is to make a point.  I'll never forget the first time I heard my own mother drop an eff bomb.  It left an impression on me just exactly how effed up the situation she was referring to had to be to elicit the expletive!  Some how folks equate my calling Jimmy Moore (and various other low carbers) obese to others calling him a fat eff, and my mocking of his delusions over calories and his various metabolic mysteries with others' mocking of his weight per se.   Obese is a medical term not a descriptive.    There is nothing hateful or improper about pointing out that those who are famous for their low carb weight loss success perhaps ought not to be any more, as low carb is no longer successful for them.  Someone wrote recently that I have been having a bad summer because Jimmy is losing weight.  Ummm ... my stats say otherwise, and all I have to say is that Jimmy has lost weight on his "latest extreme challenge" many many many many many to the nth=many times before.  The only thing different this time is that he's reporting after the fact rather than throwing down the challenge gauntlet and laying out his intentions ahead of time.   I wish him well that this time he'll succeed in getting the weight off and keeping it off.  Maintenance may be boring, and it is danged difficult (sometimes more than others), but when you have no other qualifications for doing what you do, it is the only thing that ultimately matters ... I'm just not getting excited over it or rushing out to get my ketone meter and flush money down the toilet on expensive blood ketone strips.

Back to me and AHS ... 

The folks behind AHS have some thinking to do.  On their website, they have now communicated publicly that which Jack Kruse hinted at a while back -- founding a scientific journal.  I'll say this without apology ... this thing is (or should be) dead on arrival if they could not even put out an August 2012 Proceedings of AHS12 issue.  And they couldn't.  Too many of the presentations did not even pay lip service to ancestral diet/health/lifestyle, and the selection of speakers was based far more on popularity/celebrity draw than on credentials and content.  I get the whole anti- or outside-the-establishment bent ... but at some point you have to recognize that there's a reason people spend time to earn letters in legitimate academic study, and that means something.  And I say that as an often regretful (because life got in the way) all-but-thesis would be PhD.  Still, my academic study WAS in fields directly related to what I blog most about.  If you're going to have some sort of journal to mimic "peer review" -- what defines, and who are the peers? 

Speaking of credibility and seriousness -- AHS has tried to infer such on this event by managing to hold them at prestigious academic institutions.  But as "recently" as a month ago -- before my husband's job change was a done deal -- I had some other scheduling issues that would have resulted in missing the Barefoot Ball and perhaps at least some of the Thursday talks.  I was always aware that Friday & Saturday were two-track talks/panels, so I went to the website to check the schedule.  If too many of the talks I wanted to attend were scheduled simultaneously or early on Thursday, I may well have had to back out then ... it just would not have been worth it.  When I checked then was the first I noticed that Taubes was even on the agenda ... and he and Peter Attia were scheduled in a time slot together with no topic.  Also at that time, there was TBD in the hour time slot on the track across from the Safe Starches panel.  I wish I'd saved the schedule, but the titles of the talks were also different from what ended up in the final version.  Mat Lalonde was going to talk about something with gliadins in the title, and Nora Gedgaudas to discuss starches.  I'm trying to recall exactly ... stuff changed so many times ... but Lucas Tafur was unable to attend (no doubt at least partially due to prohibitive travel costs).  Lustig didn't provide an abstract at all!!??!!  My point being that this is far different from the way the conferences AHS is trying to emulate work and undercuts its legitimacy pretty severely.  

I know that had I decided to attend I would have been pissed off as all hell when the ultimate schedule came out and they scheduled Chris Masterjohn across from Gary Taubes.  I tweeted that this was a diss to Chris, but this was, IMO, a huge middle finger to a large portion of the attendees as well.  No doubt many speakers were chosen for their attendance draw-factor -- but how dare you schedule one of the few legitimate (now) PhD's who specifically addressed ancestral diets across from someone many would like to attend ... at least to challenge???  For the record, I would have attended Chris' lecture ... hands down and with no deliberation at that.  I suppose the likes of Tastes Like Chicken would have found a way to read into that as well??

WRT Taubes, his title and abstract hinted he'd discuss Ebbeling et.al. quite a bit, but the tweets seem to indicate he rehashed much of the same Adiposity 101 lecture one can see any day and probably all day on YouTube.  Not a single person in attendance learned anything new -- which is usually what happens at such conferences in the real science world.  If the organizers were really interested in simulated academic discourse ... how about a 40 minute Q&A session with Gary Taubes instead (heck, I can dream the man might ever answer his critics on the science).  But how great would that have been?  And schedule that against two 20 minute talks on the mind and/or exercise and/or policy/law so folks could come and gone or not felt conflicted with two talks on the same topic they might be interested in. 

In the end, it came down to this for me:  there were a number of people I was really looking forward to meeting ... and this was really the only reason I was even going.  Even being relatively "local" (it would be a 3-4 hr drive each way, depending on traffic) and staying at a slightly cheaper than The Charles hotel, it would have cost me around $1000 to attend.  While that appears to be chump change to some people,  it would amount to an awfully expensive meet-and-greet that didn't seem remotely worth the money -- whether it be mine or a donor's.  That's where I started thinking along the lines of what if it was all my money, and the decision was a no-brainer.  I've not seen much in the way of comments on how smoothly the 20 minute talks went, but I also imagined that those especially, with only 5 minutes between sessions, there wouldn't even even be much of an opportunity for any Q&A at all.    So in the end, I was quite relieved to have a reason not to attend ... I can think of far more productive ways to spend the time and money and energy.

According to the website:

The Ancestral Health Symposium is a scientific conference serving to foster collaboration among scientists, healthcare professionals as well as laypersons who study and communicate about health from an evolutionary perspective, in an effort to develop solutions to our modern health challenges.

While I certainly "get" the idea of involving laypersons, there just isn't much in the way of delineating who is what there.  If I may offer some unsolicited (and likely unwanted) advice ... why not just have a session or two for meet and greet, Q&A and personal testimonials billed as such?  And you have simply got to ditch the low carb crapola.  The only ancestral bent of Mr. Taubes is his love for pre-WWII obesity researchers and the Black Age of endocrinology science.  You can't get much worse when it comes to discussing ancestral diets vs. modern diets than his continued misrepresentation of the Pima in Arizona ... this alone should disqualify him!  That Taubes is in any way, shape or form associated with paleo is truly a joke.  Peanut oil (roughly 1/3rd O6) is, after all, listed alongside olive oil as an "especially healthy oil" in WWGF.  There's a reason, besides his condescending attitude towards them, that scientists in the field do not take TWICHOO seriously, and it's past time the paleo community wake up and realize this before low carb sinks the paleo ship.  One really has to wonder how it is that someone like Nora Gedgaudas gets elevated to the level of "expert".  What has she done?  Any relevant academic study?  No.  She read a bunch of diet books and a few articles, and wrote and self-published a book incorporating the pop-culture interpretations of these books.  Her renditions of biochemistry and physiology are easily discounted by basic and non-controversial knowledge.  Her image on the AHS page alongside Cordain's is truly what is wrong with AHS!

Which sets the stage to discuss that Safe Starches panel.  After his data dump post on safe starches, Jimmy Moore pitched a panel on the topic to the AHS group.  To be moderated by himself, it was to include Paul Jaminet, Ron Rosedale, Jack Kruse and Cate Shanahan.  C'mon ... is this anyone's idea of a serious panel regardless of one's position on carbs?  In its initial form, it would be 4 against a half.  I say that not to disparage Paul's obvious intellect, but because he is still of the school that carbohydrates should be minimized, just not eliminated, and the other three plus the moderator are staunchly low carb (despite Jack's boasting of carb consumption in the summer).   Here we have 3 MD's, and an astrophysicist moderated by a blogger/podcaster discussing the role of starch in the human diet ... presumably from an ancestral viewpoint?   With all due respect to Paul, why is not Shou-Ching the one who sits on these panels and such?  Her background is at least in a related field.  Could not she have reached out to her Harvard colleagues to find just one scientist that studies metabolic syndromes who might provide some balance to this panel?  I don't see how anyone learns anything when the same old same old is just repeated without substantiation or reasonably balanced challenge.  While I imagine Nathaniel Dominy would probably not travel across the country to participate in such a symposium sans honorarium, surely there's someone of his bent more locally who might consider it?  

The original SS panel epitomizes what is wrong with "the community" and this, the most celebrated event of the year.  It was a gathering mostly of those who agree on just about everything and just look the other way (because paleo is so nebulous anyway) and/or are unwilling to call each other out on where they disagree.  That's how we ever even had a Jack Kruse in the first place.

It is long past time to discuss the final outcome of Krusegate.   For all the hub bub, flurry of emails, phone calls and whatnot, ultimately there was just deafening silence ... well ... but for the sound of the broom sweeping of the whole debacle under the rug.  Only in a community dominated by Science Krispology does a Jack Kruse catapult to the fore in the way that he did in the first place.  Of course "haters" like myself had been speaking out about that quack for quite some time.  I didn't speak much at first, because I found it unfathomable that anyone would take the man seriously so hardly worth the time.  In his first podcast with Jimmy Moore, Kruse made more than enough statements for there to be cause for concern.  Yet this podcast was the springboard for his rise in the community.  There's an important lesson here about celebrity and king makers.  For a very long time Kruse spoke of two things -- 1.  His Jimmy Moore podcast, and 2.  His mega thread on Mark Sisson's forum from which a book deal was in the works.   By the time Jack had made enough gaffes for many to take notice, it appeared too late as the Kruse missile had been launched and appeared out of control.   And, after all, he was "helping people" with his free advice, so what was the harm anyway, right?

Now I understand that controversy in these sort of times in this community is a tricky thing, but that doesn't excuse Krusegate.  Many had a hand in it.  Now I'm not sure what all he said or did at PaleoFX, but that TEDx talk should have been the end of it.  Period.  Look, I don't care what you think of modern medicine and conventional wisdom, the claims made in that talk were just plain over-the-top and nobody need understand a thing about leptin, cold thermogenesis, or any of the science to get that.  Jack Kruse should have been unceremoniously disinvited from being on the LC Cruise and at AHS.   Whoever was behind the ShitKruseSays twitter account was actually doing the community a favor by highlighting the crap this guy was spouting ... and Jimmy Moore followed that account too.  Yet he still just didn't get it, and I suspect he and countless others just didn't want to.  This guy was toxic and magic all in one package ... everyone hoped to trade off the magic and that the toxicity wouldn't bite them in the ass. 

I doubt we'll ever know what really happened with Kruse and the cruise, but Jimmy owes people the truth as he knows it -- and he knows more than he's told because his cabin was five doors down from Jack's.  But nah, despite a tweeted promise of a blog post ... silence.   And Mark Sisson's public response left much to be desired as well.    I know these people have businesses and livelihoods to protect, and certainly Jack's misbehavior cannot be blamed on them, but a definitive, unequivocal denunciation would have been the more appropriate response.  I guess time will tell what happens to the community as a whole as the low carbers still hold positions of prominence and influence.  I dunno, I'm the last person these folks are going to take advice from on this, but if they're too busy to vet the various purveyors of wisdom and science, perhaps I'm just the person they should be listening to.  I wonder sometimes what goes on in the brain of a Tom Naughton as he blogs well past the point when it was obvious Kruse was full of it just to disparage me.  You just don't do shit like that, no matter how much you hate a person.  This includes Kruse's fingerpointing actions as well.

The organizers of AHS would have done well by themselves and the community to publicly disinvite Jack Kruse, expressing in no uncertain terms the reasons why.  That would signal seriousness of purpose and integrity.  They chose not to.  This was a strategic error in my opinion.

Which brings me to Richard Nikoley.  If the Safe Starches panel highlights what's wrong with the community in terms of its blinkered low carb bias, Angry Dick speaking epitomizes what's wrong with the rest.  I get the layperson angle, I don't get the celebration of crude.   After the fallout from Krusegate -- that included various threatening tweets, posts and comments -- it should have been a no-brainer to disinvite him as well.   I'm trying to imagine Taubes calling Kolata any of the names I was called and still being invited to speak at another serious venue once organizers were made aware of the behavior.   I wrote Brent Pottenger and Aaron Blaisdell about this and included many of the tweets and comments.  I received no response -- not even a patronizing dismissal.

What these people don't seem to realize is that people are paying for their conference and it's not chump change for most either.   Even if I lived a stone's throw from the venue, as the person who purchased my ticket does, the registration fee + ball came to over $300.  While that is considerably less than many real conferences, it's still boils down to the fact that attendees are paying -- supposedly for quality content from reputable presenters.   Taking this out of the realm of nutrition, it's like having an irreverent political blogger come speak at your university -- you wouldn't want that individual to be one who would be fired or expelled from that institution for behavior that doesn't comply with their code of conduct.  That's pretty much what the vulgar and threatening rants unleashed against me by Nikoley boil down to.  It shouldn't have mattered that I was a ticket holding potential attendee, he should have been disinvited.  But that I was, and another target of his vulgarity (Emily Deans) was a scheduled speaker, and still he's on the docket?  Well, it doesn't look good for AHS.  Not as a serious symposium anyway.   To the best of my knowledge, volunteers and speakers are only waived the attendance fee (and perhaps the ball?) but pay their own travel -- oh they are treated to a reception.  I'd say the organizers owe all who have invested considerable funds to attend  far better than 20 minutes of Angry Dick.   YMMV in terms of his involvement with AHS, but no amount of lessons in the fine art of working nasty words into conversations will change the fact that his behavior was simply unacceptable.

I don't know how well attended his talk was, but it was sparsely tweeted on the #AHS12 hashtag.  Apparently he admonished the audience to tune out the news, it will come to you, and that voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.  Man that makes me long for plagiarized Krusims!  A few folks seemed to think it was fab that RN talked about the mind.  Huh?  Last I checked, the majority of humans to this day don't get to vote in meaningful fashion and 24hr cable news and such is a relatively recent invention.  But no, a slot for this man had to be slated from the very inception.  Yes, I know, I'm fat and ugly and a bitch who has no value to add to Nikoley's world.   I'm also not selling a book curated from my blogging on losing fat eating a paleo diet. 





The image above is screenshot & rearranged from this pic.  You need to be an approved follower of Jimmy Moore to view any direct links, but on the #AHS12 feed (search #AHS12+Nikoley and narrow the hits down big time!) you can view it w/o following.

Talk about images worth 1000 words in so many ways.



So, the past two days I found myself unexpectedly with far less time on my hands to blog and work on the Palisades Shore series.  I kept a few tabs on the #AHS12 hashtag on Twitter, and boy oh boy most of what I was reading assured me I wasn't missing out on too much that attending would have made any different.  As already mentioned, I would not have attended the 1000th rendering of Adiposity 101, and Rosedale apparently hogged the A of the Q&A part of that Safe Starches panel.  Sounds like Chris & Paul made the more convincing argument to the tweeters ... kudos!  Apparently many were disappointed in the food, or rather lack thereof at the Barefoot Ball.  Lustig delivered some conglomeration of his various YouTube videos and assorted interviews with a dose of defending El Bloombito's soda cup size nonsense.  Many tweeted the ridiculous nonsense that Eenfeldt talked about constipation being an imbalance of eating and defecation.  Sheesh how silly.

A few other observations on the twitter feed.  How many handles had some sort of paleo or caveman or such in them?  Lots.  But what IS paleo anymore?  It seems to be whatever someone wants to define it as.  What it is most certainly not is anything resembling how paleolithic humans ate -- even if one were to average out the estimated diets.  You see dairy is OK by some, but not grains or legumes.  And fat is super controversial.  As Charles noted in comments recently, Terry Wahls' diet is (was?) low fat ... heck ... the single most cited man in paleo -- S.Boyd Eaton -- apparently gave a rather endearing talk on his n=1 30 years eating paleo.  "Where's the bacon" many asked!  Many lamented how they could not live without their bacon ... totally missing the point that bacon ain't paleo either.  Meanwhile, the number of tweets about coffee consumption and tables giving away/selling chocolate -- and chocolate covered bacon if I read correctly -- is astounding.  These are not paleo foods.  Period.  I also thought ancestral was not intended to be synonymous with paleo, and yet not to the attendees.

Where does this leave me and the community?  Well, since I'll probably never be invited to speak at such events, it's highly unlikely (though not out of the question) that I'll sign on to attend any if there's nothing to be learned or truly professional networking to be had.  If we're just meeting and greeting, perhaps as I travel for recreation I can organize meet-and-greets of my own or just arrange to meet up with individual internet acquaintances here or there.  Sounds like way more fun to me!   And I can spend time out in the sun working on my own content rather than in darkened rooms likely gnashing my teeth  in frustration over the repetitive chant of "insulin sucks".  Seems a much more productive use of my time, all the way around. 

But if AHS and similar are truly sincere about trying to spread some message to the mainstream, they will need to start with cleaning some serious house.  I understand the need to balance "meat" with name-recognition draw and all that.  But if AHS13, wherever it is held,  is just 70% AHS12 + 20% AHS11 who didn't make it to Cambridge and 10% new folks including some blogger who rises to fame on the paleo flag, this will forever solidify AHS as a non-serious pow-wow.  I understand the organizers are not in the position to offer honoraria and such, but cast your net out to the local academic community and you may well be pleasantly surprised.  I'm willing to bet there would have been  any number of academics within a 2-3 hour radius drive of Cambridge who would have come to give a talk and mix that with a family vacation down to the Cape or up to Portsmouth.  But you'll never know because you didn't really ask.  There was never even an up front, easy to find, clear call for abstracts complete with guidelines and deadlines.  That's not how serious conferences operate.  Heck I received emails telling me I could be a volunteer and there wasn't even a straightforward way to go about doing that.  I felt like it was high school yearbook time all over again when it came to who was voted what and what pictures from which activities made it to the final copy -- e.g. friends of the yearbook committee were heavily featured any opportunity that presented.  It makes no real difference to me ... I'm not invested in this.  But for those that are, some deeper thinking on this is sorely in order.

Before signing off, a quick programming note on Palisades Shore.  I will have two more episodes and then do a data dump out-takes style post for the rest.  I didnt end up with the time to do what I wanted after all, and I'd rather pursue other content here.  Still, the Swedish heritage one uncovered some very interesting informtion of personal interest to me (I am of Bavarian German and Scandanavian descent) and I was about 2/3rds done with other content that included a great paper that looked at the digestion of starches in native plant foods that is worth finishing up.