The Carb-Sane Asylum

LC Biomarker Bingo OK ... before I begin on this, let me say this has languished in the draft hopper probably past it's usable publish date :-)  So first, I'll give a belated shout out to Kevin Klatt over at Nutrevolve blog for taking a close look at this study and "getting it out there" in rapid time!   Carbs, SFAs, and Circulating Fatty Acids . Effects of Step-Wise Increases in Dietary Carbohydrate on Circulating Saturated Fatty Acids and Palmitoleic Acid in Adults with Metabolic Syndrome I confess to skimming it b/c the last time he scooped me Kevin wrote so much of what was in my head I wasn't sure how to formulate the parts I still wanted to discuss without sounding repetitious.  For me, this study and its media blitz has hit a nerve and awoken my interest in a topic I had gotten a bit side tracked from.  It's almost a perfect ending to this year of what can only be described as utter insanity in the nutrition world.   So, with that said, ...

Hello all!  A quick follow-on post to yesterday's offering on the Ma-Pi2 diet for diabetes.  This diet is vegan, grain based (brown rice, millet, barley), includes legumes and copious veggies, and "macrobiotic" foods like seaweed and green tea.   Recent Post:   Vegan Ma-Pi Diet Bests "Conventional Treatment" for Diabetes in Recent RCT Previous Posts:   Carbohydrate and Diabetes , Carbohydrate and Diabetes II I want to make clear that my purpose for blogging on this particular diet is not one of advocacy.   I don't believe there is any evidence for humanity avoiding all animal derived sustenance and, sorry, but the Ma-Pi diet does seem a rather austere one to me.   Furthermore, I am offering no comment on the "macrobiotic" claims and whether the inclusion of some of these special foods is integral to the success of these programs.  When looking at the success of programs such as native Hawaiian diets (discussed here ), and others, which...

What happens when you take 25 overweight-to-obese, type 2 diabetics and: increase their carbohydrate intake by around 100 g/day   increase their absolute carbohydrate intake by 45%  increase their carbohydrate percentage in the diet by over 25% of total calories have them consume over 300 grams of carbohydrate in a day decrease their caloric intake modestly (< 200 cal/day*) cut 50 g/day of fat from their diet reduce absolute fat intake by over 60% reduce fat to only 15% of total calories cut protein by almost 40 g/day cut absolute protein intake by roughly 40% accomplish all of this on a grain-heavy vegan diet What happens?  Do they get fatter?  See their glucose spiking and soaring and fear imminent amputation and blindness?   No.  What happened is this: This after only three weeks.  Oh ... and 70% of the Ma Pi group dieters taking oral diabetes drugs at onset were able to get off their drugs.

I had written the bulk of my last post of similar title, The Second Law in Classical vs. Chemical Thermodynamics , a while ago, and wasn't sure whether to do my usual tidying up (sorry, that generally doesn't include editing for word count!) and hit publish, because it seemed a bit tangential. Richard Feinman to the rescue! That heading links to a public Facebook post by Richard "Entropy & Mirrors" Feinman  [even if you're not on FB you should be able to read it, however just in case, I printed to PDF and uploaded to my online drive ].   Before I go on, here is a short video by Feinman from which I've derived his new nickname of Entropy & Mirrors.  If you refer back to my prior post, it should start to become clear just how confusing Feinman's interpretation is here.   I think that Feinman likes to weave his "relationship" to Richard Feynman in whenever he can.  He even posts to feinmantheother.com ... as if havin...

I have blogged quite a bit about how the concept of entropy and heat evolution have been erroneously equated. I'm not going to rehash that here, but rather set that aside and look at how the perspective of the Second Law of thermodynamics can lead to another misconception regarding the loss of energy.  Classical Thermodynamics  Here is a formal definition of thermodynamics . It is the most literal and narrow one I could find. It applies pretty specifically to systems like a combustion engine, where heating a gas causes it to expand, and this expanding gas is contained in such a way as to do mechanical work by moving an object (in an engine this object is the piston). When fuel is combusted, an amount of heat is released equal to the difference between the chemical potential energy stored in the bonds of the reactants and the products. We can think of this "heat in" or "energy in" to the gas.

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