The Carb-Sane Asylum

I thought in the interim of doing something more formal, I'd bump this post from October of 2010.  Keith Frayn, for newer readers, is recently retired prominent Oxford scientist who wrote one of the books Gary Taubes likes to use pictures from these days in his lectures (you're welcome Gary, if only you'd read the book more thoroughly).     Metabolic Regulation.    {as textbooks go this one is relatively economical though I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you've got some scientific background in the subject ... or a lot of patience, because it should be manageable if tackled in smaller doses } He lays out the basics of Adiposopathy - pathological fat - sick fat - though doesn't use the term.  The evidence for this is overwhelming, and although this is just an outline of sorts, it only needs some clarifications and fleshing out with evidence of various components and the mechanisms involved.  In that regard, much progress has been made enfor...

When Elizabeth Licorish was 9 years old, she read a skating reference book that revealed that 12 year old Tara Lipinski trained five hours each day, enjoyed a diet rich in spaghetti and marinara sauce, stood 4 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 68 pounds. When she put the book down, did she .... (a) Hop on a bathroom scale (b) Ask Mom to make more pasta with marinara (c)  Request a longer training schedule. The answer to this is the subject of this post.  Apologies for the somewhat longer than intended delay in publishing.  Part I of sorts:   Women, Athletes & Calories -- Does Tara Lipinski Eat Enough? This post was inspired by a reaction piece in Philly Voice by freelance journalist Elizabeth Licorish entitled:   Dear female athletes: Please don’t follow Tara Lipinski’s 1,200-calorie diet.    In Part I, I tried to limit commentary mostly to answering the question in my title, though I did touch on other topics.  I'm h...

After a fair amount of deliberation, I have decided to temporarily close comments on the Malcolm Kendrick post.   This past Spring marked 5 years of blogging here at The Asylum, a milestone I had intended to acknowledge and perhaps even celebrate.  In that time I've published over 1100 posts, and of the 600 in my draft bin, at least 200 of them are blog-worthy, complete or near complete, posts.  Of those, perhaps a third are "vents" I thought the better of publishing up, another third I just felt had passed their "blog on by" date, and the remaining third are "deep science" I never got to spend the time on to articulate fully.  I have a fascinating -- to me anyway -- series in mind discussing intracellular lipid trafficking and lipid droplet organelles that just never gets the attention it deserves.  

I really thought this was a joke, and a silent hat tip goes out to the person who brought this to my attention so's that I don't get them on anyone's bad list for contributing to such a post here at the Asylum.  But OMG . How Many Calories Does Mayo Have? ... now that Mark Sisson is whipping up wonderful mayo, I can get to work on the backlog of tuna salad, pea salad, and deviled eggs I’ve been denying myself. ... I thought I’d enjoy some tuna salad with two heaping spoonfuls of Mark’s zippy mayo—call it research for  lower calorie  meal plans for my new business, the FatBurn Factory.  With the addition of a few capers, instant lunch! But I need to know for, for the sake of my patients, ...    WHAT IS THE CALORIE COUNT OF THIS QUICK AND EASY MEAL  . Yeah I know what you're thinking.  What the heck is pea salad, and is there anyone else on the planet denying themselves of this dish?  

Blogstress Note:  This post has been in the draft bin for some time, most of it written very shortly after the JAMA article that sparked it.  As you'll see, it's more ranty than usual ;-)   I thought about toning it down or adding to it from the NYT editorial, but have just gotten too busy.  So I'm publishing it up -- as is -- before it exceeds its best-if-blogged-by date by too much!  There's probably some repetition with the Percentages post published up in the interim.  Please forgive typos, dropped sentences, incomplete thoughts, etc.  Dunno how many there may be, so here goes ... Let's Do Away With The Dietary Guidelines   The true cause of the obesity epidemic! ... if this is what it takes to save me from being bombarded with one more idiotic editorial in a peer review journal -- like the recent one in JAMA by Dariush Mozaffarian MD,DrPH and David S. Ludwig MD,PhD -- I'm jumping on board.  Oh!!  And this rank stupi...

There has been a spate of studies and commentaries coming out of late related to plasma saturated fatty acid content, dietary sat fats and carbohydrates.  It gets mightly frustrating to hear the same arguments made over and over, when some basic calculations and critical radiolabel-tracer studies have shown otherwise for over 15-25 years now (and longer, I'm talking major summary papers and supporting studies).  And still .... What Happens to the Carbs Kendrick is a Scottish physician, author of The Great Cholesterol Con , hence my title.  He's also a card carrying member of  and spokesman for THINCS:  THe International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics.    Sadly, his skepticism and paranoia have turned him into quite the con artist ... feet planted firmly in denial. Professors, who shall be nameless, appear unable to admit how basic human physiology works. For example, they may concede a few steps here and there, but they will never...

image link Percentages are Often Meaningless    Summary: You can reduce the percentage of one item by increasing the total amount of all items.  This can give the illusion that you've reduced the amount of the item in question, but is just that ... an illusion. That previous post on this was inspired by yet another round of Fun with Numbers, this time courtesy of David Ludwig and Dariush Mozaffarian in JAMA ... and now the NYT    (I'm beginning to see a pattern here.  NYT is the publicity outlet for all JAMA editorial nonsense, much like Time is the outlet for BMJ's Open Season on Science Heart journal.)

Yes. Blogstress Note:  This post has been brewing ... in my head and in the Blogger draft, for a few days now.  This issue really hit a nerve, but every time I started writing, things got even longer than my usual.    I didn't want it to be unmanageably long, but I also didn't want to start a whole series.  I think I may have found a way to cut this to two somewhat manageable parts, without straying too far off of blog topic. This will be a departure from normal events here, and yet ties in with topics I discuss with some degree of regularity, both in general and within the IHC:  Calories and Eating Disorders. click to enlarge Part I will deal with Calories Part II will deal with Eating Disorders This is going to be female-centric.  Sorry male readers! Without further ado: Yes, something got under my skin the other day on Facebook, and since this is my major outlet for sharing thoughts, I'm blogging about it here.   Apparen...

Summary: I present here, the unequivocal evidence that the answer to the question posed in the post title is "Yes".   If I were the author of the book Chris Kresser cribbed from, I'd be hopping mad.  This is a very big deal.    I'm also under no delusions that this will amount to much of anything in the Incestral Health Community (the IHC), because Fonzi is in the air !  (Will Sisson selling reverse cave leveraging plans be far behind?)   But you never know.    Plagiarism in general is serious business.  Heck, I hear colleges are even still willing to expel students over the charge (used to be virtually automatic).   What Chris Kresser did was copy the central tenets of The Perfect Health Diet , and pass them of as his own in The Healthy Baby Code -- a $197 multi-media package.   Of this there can be no doubt ... because he copied erroneous material! {ASIDE:  I don't know if folks reading this truly appre...

Sometime in June of 2010 , I wrote the following words about Gary Taubes: I'm left to conclude this man is totally bereft of intellectual honesty. Supporters of Taubes jumped at this and claimed I had called the man a liar.  A willful fraud.  But at that time I had never used those words.  I don't believe I flat out accused him of lying until December of 2010 in response to his defense of his then new book Why We Get Fat .  I still try to avoid those words, if only because of the flack I receive when I do.  And yet, the qualifier "intellectual" has been bothering me a lot lately.   Intellectual Dishonesty :   " When one avoids an honest, deliberate and comprehensive approach to a matter because it may introduce an adverse effect on personally and professionally held views and beliefs."

I posted something like this on my Facebook page a while back.  Rather than find it, I've decided to recreate it here. Let's say that I take home $4000 per month.  Let's say my "basic" living expenses for home and car including all operating costs, insurances and whatnot are $2500 leaving me $1500 to live on.  Of that I spend $600 on food and clothing, $600 on entertainment and save $300.    My entertainment budget is currently 15% of my take home income. At my annual visit to the financial planner tax person, I'm told that I really ought to cut back on my entertainment expenses so that I can put away more for retirement.  A somewhat dramatic one-third cut from current entertainment expenses is suggested.  This would amount to 5% of my current income and bring entertainment down to 10% of the total.    Then I had a brilliant idea, I would buy a new car and move to a more expensive home in a more expensive neighborhood so that my...

Just a quick note to commenters here.  I was traveling for the past several days and unfortunately don't always catch every comment that goes to moderation.  Most comments are automatically posted, but some -- even w/o links -- get held up even when I whitelist someone.  I just approved roughly a dozen, which is all of the comments in the "Pending' folder.  Sorry!  I try to keep the flow going here and greatly appreciate interaction.