The Carb-Sane Asylum

I really struggle sometimes wondering what goes on in the minds of the staunch low carb advocates.  Something comes along that's just their sort of "red meat" revelation -- you know a "what if everything you thought you knew was wrong" sort of bombshell -- and they just seem incapable of wrapping their head around it because it goes against what they've been told by their LC heroes.  Instead of even trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance, it seems they'd rather just move the goal posts .... just one more time?   I suppose it is easier to believe in fairy tales, to convince yourself that the rebel path you chose on the word of so-called experts is the right one to optimal health and immortality.  The alternative does tend to get rather uncomfortable.   When I wrote Carbohydrates and Diabetes , my intent was to dispel one of the more common remaining myths about carbohydrates.  This is one that, sadly, is embraced by the mainstream as well. ...

Hey everyone!   If everything that's going on with me behind the scenes pans out, I've got quite a bit to share with you in the next few weeks!  {tease} It looks like I will be (finally, actually and for real) migrating to WordPress, but most likely I'll leave existing content here.  We'll see what works best.   My book will be available very very soon, as part of a larger project that I'll let you now about as soon as it's time.  As an incentive to sign up for the newsletter, there will be a special offer or two in conjunction with this so, without further ado ... I was going to wait to have a fancy schmancy newsletter template to send you a welcome email and all that jazz, but time is of the essence to get this ball rolling.  So here's the link! subscribe to  Bits of Sanity   newsletter There's also a quick registration on the right sidebar (it gives an error but works if you add additional info). That's it for now.  ...

Does carbohydrate intake cause diabetes?  How about hyperglycemia in the established diabetic, is that caused by carbs?  Is the only way to fix this without insulin to reduce carbohydrate, perhaps virtually eliminate it? If you've come here from the low carb or paleo realms, you would answer yes, and yes, and an unequivocal yes.   I believe that when you cast aside the hyperbole about rotting scrambled brains, starving cells, toxic sugar and all the rest, the remaining misconception that using insulin causes your pancreas to break down is the most damaging of all. image link Dr. Eades is fond of hunting black swans.  By that I mean, the whole falsifiable hypothesis thing.  If I say all swans are white, then finding all the white swans in the world provides further support for my claim, but it can never be "proven".  However all I need is one black swan for the claim to be falsified.  Too bad those that are so fond of this are unable to d...

.... it means that Mighty (Meta)Mouse is on {cue record scratch sound} A couple of years ago I wrote the following blog post:   Mighty Metabolism Mouse   discussing this study:   A high-fat, ketogenic diet induces a unique metabolic state in mice .  

It's January 18th, and that means if you went with the packs, you are almost 2 weeks into your 21 Day Sugar Detox or, I believe, roughly half way through the torturous Whole30 ®  ... or maybe you took up Amy Kubal's invite to drag the paleo yo-yo out of sleeping dog with Robb's 30 day plan (upon which Whole30 is based). Ya know, if you don't think there's science behind paleo, just ask Robb!  He'll shoot you a Lindeberg or a Frassetto .  Let's look at that latter one for just a bit more than I did HERE .  The Frassetto paleo diet is an outlier in that all of the others ended up spontaneously reducing calories (~1400 to ~1900 cals) while this diet modestly increased calories from baseline to ~2700.   Furthermore, in Frassetto, total carb intake before and after the diet was roughly equal at around 250 grams per day.   They ramped up in three phases for 7 days and then followed the paleo diet for 10 days.  Here are the menus:

Whoa boy! Did you hear? US News & World Report listed the Paleo Diet dead last in their " Best Diets of 2014 " round up ... AGAIN! I warn you, dear readers, that I'm in a mood, and my snark and sarc levels are quite high as I write this.

In the interests of having all of the clinical trials studying the "paleo diet" on the record, I decided to exhume and publish this post up on a small 2008 study by Osterdahl et. al. Effects of a short-term intervention with a paleolithic diet in healthy volunteers This study was small (14 subjects, 5 male, 9 female) and short (3 weeks).   Full dietary records were available for 6 subjects (1 male, 5 female), here is the dietary intake. There were some minor changes in weight (2.9 kg , 6.4 lbs) and lower BP of statistical significance.  Lipids and all other parameters except PAI-1 were not statistically significant.

direct image link Greetings! So with time for a little breather, I'm getting caught up on my reading. I've got three books I plan to review and it's a conundrum which to do first, they are all so bad. Seriously, it's not the style or the writing. It's the content that passes for science these days that is just so mind-numbingly abysmal. The three books are David Perlmutter's  Grain Brain , Jonathan Bailor's  The Calorie Myth  and Chris Kresser's  Your Personal Paleo Code .  I'll save Bailor's for another day, but his poor man's version of  GCBC  somewhat factors into today's post.  I'll also save the reviews of the others for a later date.  For now, let me share my little round about the internet that inspired the post title here ;-)   

Not much, how 'bout you? Actually yours truly has been busy with life and a project and my blogging has been non-existent except for the occasional random bump.  It hasn't been all that long really, but per my usual frequency it's dropped off big time. I hope everyone here had a happy new year and I'm sure hoping that 2014 will be a better year for all.  That goes for those who had rocky 2013's and good ones alike, because there's no harm in optimism :-)   So .... What have I been up to?  Well, I wrote my first book (e-book).  It's called Restriction Addiction and it's about how food addiction is really eating disordered behavior brought on by restricting food, not by foods causing physical dependence like alcohol and some drugs.   For now it will not be released as a stand-alone product as I'm teaming up with a number of people on a project that's bound to be EPIC!  Look for more hints to be dropped soon and a formal reveal somewhere...