The Carb-Sane Asylum

Now that I have your attention ... Guess what?  There is no single optimal diet to treat/manage the disease.  I don't often do short bookmarking posts here much anymore, but I thought this paper that I found down a PubMed rabbit hole the other day was worthy of more than just a link in the library.   Is there an optimal diet for patients with type 2 diabetes? Yes, the one that works for them! Most importantly there is evidence that adherence to any given dietary approach is more important than the macronutrient prescription. So the best diet for those with type 2 diabetes is the one that works for them, and critically the one that they can maintain in the long term. How many times, tucked somewhere in the discussion of the latest diet comparison clinical trial, or mumbled by the researcher in the press conference, have we heard that in the end, adherence was the single best predictor of whatever-the-heck-health-weight-measure-improvements regardless of ass...

Chris Kresser got in with the right publisher!  How else do you get quite such a book tour and to present "paleo" when up relatively recently you didn't even call yourself that?   But there he was on Monday, the latest to make that always-panned-as-pseudosci-hype-unless-you-get-on-it show:   Doctor Oz .  When the paleo diet last made the "big time" it was with Paleoista Nell Stephenson and capital T, The Paleo Diet® author Loren Cordain PhD Exercise Science.   I blogged on that previously .   Now, anyone who has ever skimmed more than two blog posts of Paleoista  knows that Nell is one of the remaining few hard core purists.  She has taken to calling this True Paleo, or as she said on the first episode : ... there are no inflammatory foods so there is no dairy,  no grains, no legumes, no refined sugars.  She again went on the Oz show with her "Cheater Plan" whereby you eat strict paleo per this screenshot compilation.   ...

Hello all! Just a quick follow on post to my previous one on caloric needs inspired by a recent diet comparison RCT.   In comments there, Yoni Freedhoff of Weighty Matters blog (and author of the new book  The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work ) made the following comment: The Journal of the American Dietetic Association (I believe) once had a study looking at all of the various calculators (not including Hall's) and it crowned the Mifflin-St Jeor the best as compared with indirect calorimetry results.

Researchers in Sweden have just published the results of a two year dietary intervention involving obese postmenopausal women.   The results and implementation leave much to be desired in terms of providing any useful information vis a vis the diets tested.  I blogged on this HERE .  But if one looks past the diet comparisons, I believe there is some useful information to be had.  I would like to highlight this in this post and however many more I have the time for or choose to break it up into.   The study began with 70 mildly obese women as assessed by BMI.  Here's the tabulation:

1. Get the full text of the study and at least skim it (hint: start with the tables and graphs in the results section, then work your way back through the methods, etc.)  before taking to social media or your blog to tout it.   Don't have access?  Here are my tips to get it: First check if it is free.  Sometimes it is!  NO excuses there!   Use scholar.google.com to search on the title.   Look in the column on the right   See that [PDF]?  Click on that link ... someone is already sharing it. Ask the person who Tweeted, messaged, blogged, etc. for it. Ask a friend who might have access.  (I have an extensive network at this point.  Cultivate your own, but if you consider me a friend and I you, well ... you know the drill). Email the corresponding author and ask.  It will usually land in your Inbox shortly.  I reserve this as a last resort because I don't want to take up researchers' time, but the few times I hav...

Random Bump & Flashback! Because someone just asked me about this Eco-Atkins vegan vs. Ovo-lacto vegetarian study on Twitter:   Effect of a 6-month vegan low-carbohydrate (‘Eco-Atkins’) diet on cardiovascular risk factors and body weight in hyperlipidaemic adults: a randomised controlled trial Pretty much all of the paleo, WAPF and Weizen Wampe dick und krank demon foods included!!  Veggie oils ... check!   Gluten ... check!   Soy ... check and check!   Heck, even 21 Day Sugar Detox no nos ... those sugar habit triggering cashews!   As with the previous metabolic study, participants were encouraged to eat only 60% of their estimated caloric requirements in order to continue the body weight reduction started on their metabolic phase. 38–40 The prescribed test diet was a low-carbohydrate vegan diet containing 26% of calories from carbohydrate, 31% of calories from vegetable proteins and 43% from fat (primarily vegetable oils).

As I mentioned in my last post , there's a new paleo diet comparison study out!  Long term ... two years!  Woo hoo!!  

just cuz it's cute You might have heard ... There's a new "paleo diet" comparison study out this month:   Long-term effects of a Palaeolithic-type diet in obese postmenopausal women: a 2-year randomized trial .  In the interests of completeness, I'll probably throw up a short post on this in the next week or so.  Ho hum ... nothing much to write home about. Which is nothing new.   The baseline diet of these women consisted of roughly 2000 calories/day, 17% protein, 45% carb and 34% fat  (presumably the rest alcohol).  The paleo target was 30% each protein and carb, and 40% fat, while the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations diet aims were 15% protein, 55-60% carb and 25-30% fat.    Care to guess what the diets really were?   For the paleo diet:  at 6 months protein was about 23.5%, only about half way to the 30% target, they did make the 30% carb, but overshot the fat to 43.5%, at 24 months they were at 22/33.5/40.5  for...

I've got the teaspoon gang on the mind after my last post, and I'm making my way through some 1960's diabetes research at the moment.  In a study older than me (that's more than a half century old!) two of Taubes' oft-cited diabetes researchers, Solomon Berson and Rosalyn Yalow, reported in the peer review literature something that might be of interest. You know the drill by now,  That's a little more than 1 teaspoon of sugar:  1 teaspoon  = 4 grams    (that would be 80 mg/dL).