The Carb-Sane Asylum

I recently stumbled across this video.   It's a tough watch, but *this* epitomizes ALL that is wrong with the low carb weight loss industry.     For starters, diet really is religion for these folks as this get-together, marketing stunt for Dr. Eric Westman's HEAL Clinics/care, was held in a church.  There was prayer, there were references to God, and a collection, and paying it forward.   If you can't stomach too much of it (I don't blame you), I'll list a few time-stamps.  If anyone cares to give time stamps for various gems and ridiculous claims, please do so in comments! 11:35 Prayer ... 17:25 Melanie Miller takes the stage ... 17:33 Introduces Dr. Mark Cucuzzella ... 20:36 Dr. Mark speaks, thanks Jimmy Moore, talks about the movement, calls obese people in audience paradoxes! ... 23:30 Dr. Mark shares analogy that losing weight is like holding a beachball under water, don't try to hold it too far down!  ... 30:00 Success Story parade up on...

A few years ago now, researchers led by George Bray of Pennington did a classic overfeeding study, to interesting result.  I blogged on that study in some depth here , but I'll include a brief summary now: Metabolic ward study Determined weight maintaining caloric intake over a period of 13-25 days on a standard diet P/F/C% of 15/25/60% The average maintenance calories for all participants was 2414 cals.  Overfed ~40% of calories or ~950 cal/day for 8 weeks. Carbs in the overfeed were slightly less than absolute amount at baseline, and were 40% of total overfeed calories. Total caloric intake for overfeed averaged 3375 cal/day, where excess calories came from fat and protein only.  The macro ratios of the overfeed diets in P/F/C% were: LP-6/52/42, NP-15/44/41 and HP-26/33/41. Below is the summary table I made for the calories and absolute quantities (grams) of the three macros: