The Carb-Sane Asylum

It seems to me that enough folks, including Kevin Hall PhD himself , have weighed in on the specifics of his recent LC ≠  more [body] fat burning smack down metabolic ward study that I didn't have the need to.  I do, however, have a bit of a retrospective look at things in the works.    But Gary Taubes has seen fit to respond in the New York Times, in most ridiculous fashion:   Diet Advice that Ignores Hunger .   First of all, Gary Taubes is no young whippersnapper, in fact he's a bit older than me.  I remind folks of this not to pick on his age, but to put some context to how ridiculous this notion that hunger on extreme diets has been ignored.  Does he not recall the widespread use of amphetamines and their OTC counterparts in the form of Dexatrim and such?   Seriously ... diet pills to curb hunger have always been around, they've just fallen a bit out of favor due to the inefficacy of most.    If you really want a flashback laugh, go take a gander at this post

The controversy should serve as a warning about meta-analyses, Willett adds. Such studies compile the data from many individual studies to get a clearer result. "It looks like a sweeping summary of all the data, so it gets a lot of attention," Willett says. "But these days meta-analyses are often done by people who are not familiar with a field, who don't have the primary data or don't make the effort to get it. " And while drug trials are often very similar in design, making it easy to combine their results, nutritional studies vary widely in the way they are set up. "Often the strengths and weaknesses of individual studies get lost"   "It's dangerous." Walter Willett MD Speaking about Chowdhury, et.al. (HT: Colby Vorland of NutSci.org ) Yes.  This.  

I have conducted a systematic search on my Twitter notifications for all people who have retweeted a tweet in which my ID has been mentioned.  I then narrowed it down to tweets in which inaccurate claims were made about me and furthermore to whether the retweeter had subsequently blocked me. @zbysfedo O dear. I saw CS deleted all your comments from her blog. Expected a lot, but not that. @CarbSane @Ezzoef — Melchior Meijer (@PolderPaleo) August 22, 2015 I'd draw you all a funky flow chart, but it's not really worth my time.  I did, however construct this nice table. Conclusion:  Inability to answer to criticisms based on the merits of their study.

Screenshot of Meta-analysis lead author Eric Manheimer's article on Cordain's ThePaleoDiet commercial website. Is it that time already?  For systematic review and meta-analysis?  Apparently someone thinks so and managed to get some time at or off of work to do one on the paleo diet.  Seriously?  What even is the paleo diet?  I have asked that question many times here myself.  If a premier expert in paleolithic nutrition cannot provide an answer, then who can? I've also written on this many times.  I believe that THIS POST   is a great place to start as it contains links to the various studies and blog posts I've done on those studies.  I'll repeat some links here in a bit. These were the clinical trials (not all randomized-controlled) to date as of January 2014.   I've included the purported composition of "paleo diets" as well. Direct links to blog posts:   Frassetto , Lindeberg & J ö nsson , Ryberg , Osterdahl

Blogstress Note: I wrote most of the analysis in this post around a year ago when I was looking for some additional examples of what I call "accidental evidences" against the concept of sugar addiction (and food addiction in general), just never got to tidying it up.  Therefore this post will be formatted a little oddly as it's what I have time for.  I'll do some general conclusions as regards sugar addiction, and then include the detail afterwards.  Whatever conclusions one might make vis a vis the minerals involved in this study are welcomed in comments, with the understanding that I'll likely not engage on those points due to time constraints.  In the end it seems difficult to arrive at any consistent conclusion  from the study I'll discuss, as results often contradicted themselves from one of the three experiments to the next. While perhaps not as striking as the image I've chosen here, I believe the size (and thus age) differentials of the animal

High Fat Diets!  I'm going to continue bumping up some of the hundreds of blog posts I've written on studies that support the role of dietary fat in obesity and diabetes.   As I do this I'll make some formatting changes for ease of reading, may fix a typo or awkward wording here or there, but won't alter the content meaningfully.  Instead, I'll insert Ed. Notes where I feel an update or clarification is needed. ORIGINAL POST 8/31/2011 In her piece over at MDA on the How Fatty Diets Cause Diabetes , Denise Minger spent a bit of time discussing the strain of mouse used in the study.  That being the not-uncute fella you see pictured here:  A C57BL/6J mouse.   Denise describes these mice as:   "uber-susceptible to obesity, high blood sugar, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, and all that other fun stuff plaguing modern humans."   This didn't really square with my memory from when I blogged on a study involving this critter.  Took

A quick post.  Sweden has released their latest version of their Dietary Guidelines .  I think Andreas Eenfeldt must be busting all manner of guts by now!!  This includes an activity/lifestyle component, but the recommendations are shocking!   There's no paleo, no low carb.  Two screenshots.

I've been poking around some eating disorder research recently due to the recent Elizabeth Licorish-Tara Lipinski kerfuffle (see also the follow-up ). But something else, that's seemingly always a hot topic when calories are discussed, is this concept of metabolic adaptation.  Quite often this gets referred to as having a "damaged metabolism".   I'm just going to use that term (and w/o quotes), and don't mean to imply that it is necessarily appropriate or justified, just that it's easier than explaining it repeatedly.  The damaged metabolism is thought to develop from frequent, chronic, and/or severe calorie restriction.  The mechanism is that the body down-regulates basal metabolic rate such that a 150 lb person who has dieted down from 250 lbs will require fewer calories to maintain that weight compared with a person whose normal, stable weight is 150 lbs.    So I was looking for some additional references about the "hamster wheel" (i

For today.  Just thoughts.  No references.  Also I will use the term theory, it sounds better, and frankly in the semantics of scientific progression, we've been there for a while now with Adiposopathy (I'll capitalize it for emphasis) anyway. Since offhandedly throwing out the term Adiposopathy in response to a query as to what I consider to be the cause of CVD/diabetes, etc.  -- collectively known as "metabolic diseases" and sometimes "chronic diseases" -- there's been one question raised a few times:  How and/or why do fat cells get "sick".  I think I found the perfect illustration ... take it away Lucy and Ethel ...