The Carb-Sane Asylum

Don Matesz had an interesting blog post the other day that I tweeted:   Grass-Fed Animal Products Prevent Obesity and Cardiovascular Disease?   He writes: Not for Mongolians. Mongols eat a diet largely composed of milk products, meat, and fat from free-ranging, organic, grass-fed animals. They consume few plant foods because few edible plants grow in the cold continental climate of Mongolia. The climate forced them into a natural experiment in low-carb nutrition based on grass-fed animal products. I have an interest in Mongolians because there's definitely some influence of these people in my husband's ancestral line.   I went looking for any peer review literature that might address the Mongolians and found an interesting article.  But before that, I also found some other info.  Don points out in a note to WAPF (presumably aimed at their promotion of raw milk) that the Mongols boiled their milk and made cheese from it.  But one of the accoun...

How many times have you heard some version of the following? Sure starches are OK for 20-something CrossFitters My body just can't tolerate carbohydrates If I hadn't damaged my metabolism, maybe I could eat carbs now, but I can't I used up my carb allotment as a kid so I can't eat them now (I blew out my pancreas) Type II diabetes is a disease of carbohydrate intolerance The list could go on.

I’ve read that [he] has regained quite a bit of the weight. When I’ve seen him [in pictures] lately, it’s only from the shoulders up. Questions: Who is "he"? Who said this? What is he/she implying about the subject?

In my opinion, childhood obesity is THE single health issue of our day.  If for no other reason, but because obesity is so darned difficult to reverse.  In Utopia, all children are raised in loving environments, taught the wisdom of the world, and when they reach adulthood have equal footing to make their way in this world.  Now that's Utopia, but I think we can strive for as many children as possible to reach adulthood in a position to put their best individual foot forward. I'm a child of the 60's.  My parents were born and raised in the Depression and WWII.  I believe this influenced not only how they parented, but how this generation formed policies based on their priorities.  Nutritional guidelines, RDA's and all such related things were born out of efforts to prevent malnutrition and disease.  Diseases of deficiencies were real "in their day" and in the true form of forging a better life for one's children, this was a priority for them. ...

... locally farm-grown and raised coconut oil!  This was too long to tweet, but Jimmy Moore is at it again stirring up contention in the Paleo community.   We’d certainly be a lot better off in our weight and health as a society with less need for pharmaceutical medications and chronic disease management if everybody just started consuming foods they recognize as being grown, raised and harvested by local farmers in their communities. Of course, it wouldn’t happen overnight as sustainable farmer Nick Wallace shared in my recent podcast interview with him. But getting a good percentage of people to choose real foods like grass-fed beef, pastured eggs, coconut oil, green leafy vegetables and more would certainly be a great step in the right direction of where we need to go nutritionally-speaking in the years to come to prevent a total healthcare meltdown from happening. I see this as a common mode of thinking that permeates through both the low-carb and Paleo communitie...

More trippin' down memory lane, this one for all ages!  Some questions -- feel free to answer as few or as many as you want to or can!  Please distinguish grade school from middle and/or high school where appropriate.   How often did you eat lunch at school?   Did you bring lunch, buy lunch or have lunch provided by the school? If lunch was provided by the school, was this for everyone or a need-based program? What was a typical lunch for you (younger and older if applicable)? Looking at tables if need be, how many calories did you eat at lunch (again, specify for age ranges as needed)? Other foods Did you eat other meals or snacks at school? If so, were these brought from home, purchased (vending or cafeteria) or provided? What did you drink at school? Thanks in advance!!

I haven't forgotten my Egg Survey!  Thanks to all who participated, and essentially confirmed my memories of this aspect of childhood were quite "average".   There were also quite a few new names amongst the responders so I'd like to extend my belated welcome to the Asylum!  First my own answers (and for my husband as well), and then a brief summary:

In this series of who knows how many posts, I'm just going to put out graphs either directly obtained from  U.S. Per Capita Food Supply Trends , or constructed from data upon which this report was prepared from the USDA.  Now there's no right or wrong data set, but I tend to believe supply data over self-report consumption data, given the plethora of data showing wide discrepancies between reported and actual intake.  While we Americans can be a wasteful sort, the USDA has adjusted the supply data to include waste from 1970 forward.  And for all the flack over food being big business, we also know that what doesn't get sold (and consumed) eventually doesn't get produced any more.  Thus while actual consumption may not be determined with great accuracy, there's little reason to believe that they don't track to the availability/supply. So, that said, one of the discussions that was going on in comments was about the cost of foods,  so I thought I'd put ...

... (or is that phalluses?).   I about spit out my coffee when I clicked on a graphic from NuSI that Josh linked to in comments in another post.  (BTW, an aside, I try to keep the blogging up at the expense of responding to comments so I apologize for getting quite behind of late.)  So I decided to use my crudely constructed "arrows" at right in my graphics.   Yes, that's Rick Moranis from Space Balls there!

Imagine if you will, that a decade or more ago someone told you that if you really wanted to build your journalism career tearing down scientists, you needed to look at diet and nutrition research.  You picked up a copy of Atkins and lost a couple of pounds.  You began cultivating your schtick that simple obesity (the kind of the epidemic) was not about overeating or sedentary behavior, it was something else.  And you received three-quarters of a million dollars to research and write a book.  The book was a best seller and garnered you a cult following in certain circles and you were off to the races giving talks around the globe.   There were doctors and others who bought into your hypothesis, spreading the word as fact and growing the movement.  But a following from one segment of the population remained elusive:  scientists.   Rather than address the reasons why (serious holes in your hypothesis), you double down and trash scientists more open...

I weighed in with some initial thoughts on Gary Taubes and Peter Attia's new venture NuSI here .  Yeah, I'm going all wet blanket on this deal, but for good reasons grounded in reality in my opinion.  I'll leave it to all the others to get all excited about this venture and all the "real science" we'll see come from it.   As Gary says of NuSI : Its purpose is to facilitate and fund rigorous, well-controlled experiments targeted at resolving unambiguously many of the outstanding nutrition controversies — to answer the question definitively of what constitutes a healthy diet. A bar too high? What would constitute a rigorous, well-controlled experiment?  Well, as I pointed out in my last post, the biggest "knocks" the NuSI gang make on existing research are not really with experimental design per se, but rather with practical limitations in doing human clinical trials.  These are: The inherent lack of compliance control in free-living studies. Th...

You've been punked.  Oh .... and your version of Krusegate contains a blatant lie, not to mention that you put the smears out long past when the facts of his lies were out.   Of course my comment went directly to your trash.  I on the other hand have the balls you so clearly lack to discuss things here.  You can comment, really.  I'm not afraid of you, but you apparently are of me for some reason....  Shall we speculate as to why??   LOL

Boy Wonder Attia has called off his war on insulin, but his character lives on Well Gary Taubes and Peter Attia -- or, if there was ever a time to refer to them by their superhero Asylum names, Fatman and Glucagon  -- have launched their project, NuSI, the Nutritional Science Initiative. Finally!  Some real proper science will get done, free from the stranglehold of bias inherent in the evil entanglements of government and industry -- oh, and idiot scientists operating with suboptimal intelligence. .   Why any scientist would even apply for a grant from an organization headed by a man with such disdain for them is really beyond me, but ...

From Heartwire (free reg):   Obesity paradox strengthened by new SCAAR data in ACS .  Lest the acronyms drive you nuts, they are not mine (for a change!).   SCAAR =    Swedish Coronary Angiography and Angioplasty Registry ACS = Acute Coronary Syndromes PCI =  Percutaneous coronary intervention  (coronary angioplasty, angioplasty) From the article: Those who were deemed overweight or obese by body-mass index (BMI) had a lower risk of death after PCI than normal-weight or underweight participants up to three years after hospitalization ... "In patients who have a chronic disease, obesity seems to have some kind of protective effect—what this is we don't know, it's difficult to say," coauthor of the new research, Dr Kristjan Karason (University of Gothenburg, Sweden), told  heartwire . ... Drs Stephan von Haehlin, Oliver Hartmann, and Dr Stefan D Anker (Charité Medical School, Berlin, Germany) agree that this research strengthens the existing eviden...

Recently Adele Hite wrote a blog post entitled Just Asking the Question .  In it she posits: So wouldn’t it be cool if we could ask folks on the street what they think caused the obesity crisis, and then show them this and ask them again? The implication, of course, is that the misguided USDA Dietary Guidelines obviously caused the obesity epidemic. The next image was part of a compilation put together by PaleolithicMD Ernie Garcia.    Note: his caption was: Carb Consumption/Obesity DIRECTLY Proportional  WOW ... this looks pretty damning for the carbohydrate, a poster to replace Farrah Fawcett on a teenage Gary Taubes' wall!!  I'll come back to this one later in the post.

The other night my husband and I settled in for some relaxing comic relief in the form of reruns of Big Bang Theory.  I just love this show ... on so many levels ... and our DVR is now close to its capacity with episodes we just have to save they are so funny.   We watched the episode this clip comes from the other night:

Question for you all, and I'm going to limit this to the 40+ members of the audience (or if your parents really did just ignore the egg/cholesterol scares).   When you were a kid, say in the 4-12 year old range, did you: Eat eggs regularly for breakfast? If so, how many? Eat eggs for protein at other meals? If so, did you also eat eggs at breakfast? How many eggs per week did you eat as a kid? Feel free to add other details.  Thanks in advance for participating!

In comments on my recent post on Negative Ion Therapy , George asked what I thought about the  "Forest AC" Air Conditioning System  his Nissan vehicle is equipped with.   I started composing comments a few times and ended up losing them b/c I closed the browser window and got a bit distracted by a wound-licking omega animale yesterday ;-)   So I decided to make a blog post where I can imbed pictures, etc., since I was reconstructing the response anyway.   I'm only going to address this part of the system: The Forest AC's new-generation plasmacluster ion system generates and supplies plasmacluster ions (through ventilation system) at higher densities than previous systems. These ions maintain cabin air quality, not only improve reduction of airborne microbes, also minimize adhere [sic] odors on the interior trim surfaces (odor substances are destroyed by OH radicals produced from the ions). This Plasmacluster Technology  was developed by Sharp, and is avail...

Back to our regular programming ... In the last post in this series I discussed covalent bonding, the type of bonding involved in most biologically relevant compounds.  Covalent bonds: Are formed between non-metals Are formed such that each constituent atom "feels complete" with 8 e's in its valence shell (H = 2e's) Involve the overlap of valence orbitals Involve the sharing of unpaired electrons to form bonding pairs Can involve one, two or three pairs of shared electrons to form single, double or triple covalent bonds In this post we'll discuss one of the concepts that makes the world go round.  Well, it's not responsible for the rotation of the earth, but in terms of properties of compounds -- how they behave  with other compounds, react, have a propensity towards oxidation, etc. and molecular structure (e.g. think protein folding), polarity plays a key role.   And it all starts with the unequal sharing of electrons in covalent bonds.

UPDATE II:   Since Richard Nikoley has "declared war" on me and linked to this post, let's keep it all here shall we?  I'm going to keep this short and simple: It is simply mind boggling that someone who threatened me from the get go  and called me all manner of names throughout, finds anything inappropriate in my -- gasp!! -- calling him a misogynist.  Which is really the worst thing I've said about him.  It is rather amusing to see how it seems to have affected him over the past months, however. This is not a threat, it is a promise that I will make good on in my defense.  In his post, Nikoley made some things clear: Accordingly, and as it is a "war," I go "nuclear and chemical-biological" early. I will make zero pretense at "objectivity." This is for the purpose of  smear and annihilation  in words and images, with no mercy. I have no intention of fact checking, caring a lick about context, posting a scintilla of extenuating...

I've been asked by a few people to weigh in on a recent NYT article,  Debunking the Hunter-Gatherer Workout , that discusses the following study (free full text):   Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity .  I didn't have a whole lot to say until I wrote this, and now it's rather long ... so I guess I did have quite a bit to say after all ;-)   But first, a little link love for Colby Vorland of nutsci.org who discussed this back in July:   Westerner energy expenditure compared to a hunter-gatherer population is equivalent .  In addition, Colby had discussed  Energy expenditure and physical activity level are not higher in developing countries compared to industrialized .  I encourage reading both. So from the NYT article: We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States. We ran a number of statistical tests,...