The Carb-Sane Asylum

Random bump because this is making the rounds again due to being published in the IJES this month:  Unrestricted Paleolithic Diet is Associated with Unfavorable  Changes to Blood Lipids in Healthy Subjects Original Publish Date:  5/14/2013 A student, Eric Trexler , at Ohio State did a study on the paleo "lifestyle" for what appears to be an undergraduate honors thesis towards his degree in Exercise Science.  Here is the link to the full text:   Paleolithic Diet is Associated With Unfavorable Changes to Blood Lipids in Healthy Subjects .  So I thought I'd put up a quick blog with some thoughts, because a tweet is just a tweet and I've seen a few comments reading into my supposed motivations for tweeting this.  So ... let's discuss a bit and include some criticisms I've seen elsewhere on the web. 1.  It's not a peer reviewed article or a graduate thesis.   This is true so it hasn't undergone rigorous scrutiny, that shouldn'...

OK folks, this is the best I can do about the conversations I felt didn't belong in my book review.  Here is a PDF of them "printed out".  Please feel free to continue the discussion here.  Thanks!

An important result was that motivation to lever press was impairednot only in food-restricted rats working for food reinforcement (sucrose), but also in water-restricted rats working for water reinforcement.  The non-specificity of the impairment suggests that the REF diet affected general mechanisms of motivation rather than those specific to the feeding behavioral system. Taken together, these findings lend support to the hypothesis raised by scientists [28,29] and journalists [30] that obesity may not be the result of impaired motivation (lethargy).  Rather, an obesogenic diet, such as that consisting of highly processed, refined foods, may induce obesity and disrupt motivational mechanisms of the central nervous system.   This hypothesis awaits further empirical  scrutiny and does not necessarily rule out the lack of will power as a contributing  factor to obesity. Three guesses who/what reference 30 is, and the first two don't count.  Oh my. ...

Over the past several months I have fallen down more PubMed rabbit holes than I care to admit to ... and that's just for the Restriction Addiction book (which, by the way, I'm putting the finishing touches on for republishing the updated and expanded version). Research for that book was overwhelming at times because of the sheer volume of studies out there on food addiction, dopamine, food reward, obesity, eating disorders, etc.etc. A ton of them in rats. No ... my book is not a lengthy compendium with 1000 references. There are a few seminal reviews that illustrate key points. One of these is the following from Nicole Avena PhD. :   Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake.   The PDF for this is more like a mini-book, complete with sections and content navigation.  So when I was perusing the schedule for the upcoming New Age Paleo CONference and MLM Expo (aka PaleoFX) and saw her name among th...

A short "image park" in my ongoing effort to document the state of the textbook science of fat storage, obesity and adipocyte function circa the writing of a three PhD thesis worthy tome.   This from Marks' Basic Medical Biochemistry , 2nd Edition, 2005.  Thus, although activation of hormone-sensitive lipase during fasting results in the release of fatty acids from adipocytes, the release is carefully modulated through glyceroneogenesis and re-synthesis of triglycerides.

Talking Back to Health Gurus: An Un-revolutionary and Un-sexy Guide to Fat Loss     by Mike Howard Note: This might look/sound familiar, because Mike's book was in the Superhero bundle my book was a part of. I hope several others will become available individually as well for those that weren't interested in a bigger investment.  Talking Back to Diet Gurus: An Un-Revolutionary and Un-Sexy Guide to Fat Loss

A lot of the metabolism-focused cancer talk seems to coalesce around insulin and its cousin IGF-1  (see for example  colon cancer  ,  breast cancer , or do any Google Scholar search on the topic).   Moreso than glucose lowering or ketone producing, the keto for cancer folks seem to be trying to reduce insulin (see this recent blog post ).   So yesterday when I relistened (because sometimes I just torture myself) to Gary Taubes' walk back his G3P argument, something else caught my ear at the end, especially in light of the earlier convo in the podcast about protein and insulin.  Have a listen [I cropped together just 4 minutes for you :-) ]

Jonathan Bailor has earned himself a high dishonor of his own blog post linking to the bad science in his books.  He earned this because he has perpetuated past 2010 the flawed alpha glycerol phosphate aka glycerol 3 phosphate aka G3P part of Gary Taubes' fairy tales on obesity.  

This paper was posted by Denise Minger on Facebook last night: Low copy number of the salivary amylase gene predisposes to obesity It has been known for some time that humans carry different numbers of copies of the genes responsible for producing amylase.  Amylase is the enzyme in human saliva that begins the breakdown of starches in the mouth.   Obligate carnivores, such as cats, lack salivary amylase.   The copy number of the AMY 1 gene in humans range from 2 to 12 in this study (on FB, Denise states that it can vary from 1 to 15).  Want more information on this, try Chris Masterjohn's presentation from AHS12.  The amylase part is pretty near the beginning.