The Carb-Sane Asylum

Hello all! A little while back I recorded a podcast with Antonio Valladares and Scott Kustes of Evil Sugar Radio.  It airs today.  We discuss my book, Restriction Addiction , as well as TWICHOO and Gary Taubes.  We also discuss a bit of paleo craziness.  It was a lot of fun and I hope you'll enjoy! EPISODE 39 Edit:  Apparently over on the website someone left a comment challenging my representation of Stefansson's all meat diet.  From my response: http://owndoc.com/pdf/meat-only-diet2.pdf “During the first 2 days his diet approximated that of the Eskimos, as reported by Krogh and Krogh (3), except that he took only one-third as much carbohydrate. The protein accounted for 45 per cent of his food calories. The intestinal disturbance began on the 3rd day of this diet. During the next 2 days he took much less protein and more fat so that he received about 20 per cent of his calories from protein and 80 per cent from fat. In these tw...

I'm working on a post to tie together some thoughts on calories and what "appropriate" intake generally is for women.  In doing so I came across the following study -- High levels of energy expenditure in obese women -- crunched some of the data into a giant Excel table, and did a few linear regression analyses.  I'm certainly not attempting to create yet another model for all of this, but I did find some interesting things.

A little rant. A friend once said that in the diet and fitness industry it is rarely what you know but who you know.   I'd have to say that on balance, I'd have to agree with that.  There are a few outliers and gems of course.  Whenever you wonder how so-and-so managed to get a book published ... think who they know.  There's usually your answer.  So it is, I believe, with Paleoista Nell Stephenson.  She knows Cordain through some route.  End of story.  No, I haven't read her book.  I do, on occasion, peer at her blog when it pops up on paleobuzz. So it was this morning with:   OMG, OMilk is Omazing .

Previous post:   Insulin Dynamics I - Secretion vs. Sensitivity in Health & Disease/Decline This post will discuss the following paper:   Development of hyp erinsulinemia and insulin resistance during the early stage of weight gain  (Erdmann). This was yet another paper I came across thanks to this recent review: Body Weight Regulation and Obesity: Dietary Strategies to Improve the Metabolic Profile .  I'm efforting the full text of this that I can share here, but in the mean time, here's the context in which the Erdmann paper is introduced in that paper: Overweight and obesity represent a worldwide increasing health problem that seriously raises the risk for the development of severe metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes (T2D) mellitus and cardiovascular diseases (Erdmann et al. 2008, Klein et al. 2004). As with increasing obesity, insulin action decreases, and the system usually compensates by increasing β-cell function and consequently insul...

I have known a number of people personally, including family members, that have had cancer.  I remember a high school friend's mother dying of lung cancer.  I remember a high school class and teammate being diagnosed with pituitary cancer.  Obviously none of these people are me, but I've had a taste from a fairly young age of the disease and what people go through "up close and personal" from early on.   Although no medical treatment is fool proof or works 100% of the time, when, in my 20's, I was working alongside folks with kids in day care, I contracted strep throat quite a few times.  I would go to the doc, they would do the swipe test, and within a short time I would walk out with my prescription for an antibiotic, I'd fill the script, take it, and the infection would go away. Cancer is not like that.  It's different in different organs, there are different types in the same organs/tissues, there's metastasis, different growth rates,...

In observance of the impending imprisonment of "Secrets the Government and Real Doctors Don't Want You to Know" author, late-night infomercial guru and scammer Kevin Trudeau ...  I thought a bump on this post was apropos.   The FTC has been clamping down recently on false claims of miracle cures.  While Trudeau is ultimately being sent up the river more for legal financial issues, I hope this is the beginning of one of those pair of dimes shifts the supplement shills are always talking about.   

In honor of their 3 year anniversary, the good folks at Examine.com are having a sale on their premier resource. CLICK HERE TO BUY   (and support the Asylum in doing so!) I have the inside scoop that the regular price is going up after this sale, to $49 , so if you snag it now, you will effectively be getting it at over 40% discount . 

Over on Facebook, I caught wind of a new paper on obesity -- a review of sorts -- suggesting that reducing postprandial insulin secretion and/or increasing fatty acid oxidation rates may be promising avenues for the prevention and/or management of obesity.  So that led me to a few references that led me to yet another comprehensive review paper on the etiology of diabetes:   Type 2 diabetes: principles of pathogenesis and therapy .  A graphic in that paper reminded me of one from a paper I blogged on almost four years ago:   Mechanisms linking obesity to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes .   (I have this paper, but the link in that post is dead, when I get a FT that doesn't have personal "imprint" I can share.) I decided not to update that old post since it focused on the role that fatty acids play in the scheme.  However I thought I'd start off a focus on hyperinsulinemia insulin in terms of hypersecretion vs. reduced insulin sensitivity.  ...

The announcement for updating the labeling of nutritional info came out a little while ago, and there was some discussion in social media, etc.  But I thought I'd make a few comments here on the blog.   So here are the current and proposed labels: I think the new labeling would be a definite improvement, but I think we can do better.  

True confession:  I ate beef in a stew last night and I'm in that dangerous age range for doing so according to the latest study that came out.  Finally, a study the paleo community can finally agree on about and rally around!  Paleo for the win!  If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can get a dose of sanity here . But before mass media hysteria gifted the paleo community with the great unifier -- another meat is bad study -- it was all up in arms over another media circus:   Paleo on the Dr. Oz show !! That was truly an odd spectacle.  There you had Paleoista, Nell Stephenson, who in her own practice and through her blogging is about as puritanical "paleo" as one could imagine, and Chris Kresser, someone who was at best loosely associated with paleo, but almost from the get-go seemed to be "beyond paleo".

Oh my lordie, last night I went to bed feeling like I had just spent the day in some alternate land of Woo Woo.  I was puttering about the house doing chores most of the day, checking in on the laptop (more than I should have!) from time to time in between.  Every corner I turned it seemed mangled science, marketing schtick and woo woo popped up like some hydra monster determined to relegate me to Grain Brain status.  And then I awoke this morning to find this in my Facebook newsfeed.  It's a link to Dave Asprey's article in some online BeMore magazine article .  You'll want to type 33 in the top middle to go to the article.  I think we need a new award for cramming the most scientific crapola into the fewest number of words or something.  This guy would win, along with scam artist of the year.   Since I'm way under the weather today, let me take a few moments of convalescence to address this shiz.

You hear it all the time -- the randomized controlled trial is the "gold standard" for clinical research.  Unfortunately, just because something is an RCT doesn't make it a good study, not by a long shot.  I blogged recently calling for an end to diet comparison RCTs  because I don't believe this model is productive in identifying what a healthful non-obesigenic diet is for humans.  All of the foods that have been blamed have been around for far longer than this problem has, so, frankly it really isn't the food.  There's no magical macronutrient ratio, no superfoods that will impart you with superhuman powers, and no foods that are inherently fattening or slimming ... even butter and celery, but please no buttered celery.