The Carb-Sane Asylum

[no I'm not retiring the blog] TLDR:  Rather than dragging things on by dismissing more black swans, Gary Taubes could eat crow and go quietly into the night. After a long hiatus from any meaningful new content, and monumental blows to TWICHOO (Taubes Wrong Insulin Carbohydrate Hypothesis Of Obesity -- c'mon, it has a much better ring to it than the Ludwigian version), , Gary Taubes has gotten back to blogging a bit.* He has apparently been reading (in fits and starts, in other words, probably not really reading) obscure books about obscure cultures from long, long ago.  Mind you, that in five years plus of arduous and comprehensive research put forth in Good Calories, Bad Calories , there was no mention of the Yahgan people he's about to discuss.   One wonders why not.  Heck, this is right in his time period of excellence for nutritional research and reporting!  ( Uttermost Parts of the Earth , this is to a 2007 version of a book Taubes...

... an acronym most closely associated with Sean Croxton.   [ Or as I call him in my head:  Sean Ton of Crocks, because Croxton is the king of the alt func med summit marketeering spree].  But now it looks like Croxton is in the processed convenience food biz, releasing a J.E.R.F. bar!   screenshot of today's JERFbar.com home banner One of the things that most annoys me about Noakes and his "Real Meal" revolution.  Many in paleo talk about eating "real food", and many exclude from this definition foods that aren't part of their restrictive food paradigms.  You know, such UNreal aka fake foods like whole grains and legumes for the low carbers,  soy and veggie oils for the "ancestrals", maybe dairy for the vegans, regular sugar for just about everyone.    "Real food" is a foolish label.   If what you mean by *real* is "whole" foods, then concoctions don't fly, no matter how "clean" the ingredients list ...

In light of the recent brash of coconut oil articles following the Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association , I thought I'd bump this post.  Of course all the coconut oil advocates are up in arms over this.  Mind you, coconut oil is the most nutritionally bereft oil out there ... "empty calories".  This post discusses a study in the Sixties on two Atoll island populations that live in virtually the same environment, etc. but with nearly opposite diets in terms of total fat content, where the majority of fat comes not from coconut oil, but the more nutrient dense coconut meat and embryos. One Line Summary :   The increased fat content in the Tokelauan diet correlates in increased adiposity in this population as compared to nearby Pukapuka.   While the cited study abstract says the following: Vascular disease is uncommon in both populations and there is no evidence of the high saturated fat i...

ORIGINAL PUBLISH DATE:  October 3, 2015  This post will probably repeat some things I've said before.  But in light of recent events, and with controversy over the US 2015 Dietary Guidelines reaching fever pitch, I wanted to collect them in a semi-coherent summarized fashion.   Mostly I want to discuss the role of governments and industries in the evolution of what we know today as a science.  In many ways, a look back at the early Twentieth Century demonstrates how the more things change the more they stay the same.   Are we doomed to repeat past mistakes in the Twenty-First?

Forget the fauxtmeal and n'oatmeal .  For crying out loud, if you like cauliflower (as I do) then eat it ... but it is just NOT a breakfast "cereal".  With this ridiculousness in mind, embrace the latest news from serious anthropological research.   A few media mentions: NPR : Paleo People Were Making Flour 32,000 Years Ago Science (AAAS) :   The world’s oldest oatmeal? IFL Science :  Ancient People Ate Porridge 32,000 Years Ago

Summary:    In the Perfect Health Diet books, the claim is made that omnivores prefer a high fat diet along the lines off the PHD macronutrient ratios.  Two studies on mice are cited as evidence in support of a 65% fat diet.  This post discusses those two studies, as well as how the results are more likely to caution against a high fat diet than advocate for it.   NOTE:  This is NOT a comprehensive look at the two studies discussed in the post.  In order to keep the post length managable I've only addressed the points relevant to claims made in the  PHD  books citing these studies.

It's hard to believe that Tim Noakes actually gave the presentation in the embedded YouTube video over two years ago.   It's even more difficult to believe that anyone has taken him seriously since.   For the topic of this post, one needs only devote ~ 6 minutes to listening to Noakes read to you about human evolution and how Ancel Keys destroyed the world.  This begins at roughly 3 min 36 seconds.   If you can't tolerate the video, or simply wish to follow along with a written form, the South African Journal of Clinical Nutrition has dramatically lowered their standards and published Noakes' heavily fortified "transcript" (at least 25 references date to after the 2012 delivery of this speech) without any peer review .  His references, regardless of date, are enlightening, so I'm glad they were provided, however the journal should put a heavy disclaimer directly in/on the paper in question (and fix the oversight that allowed the peer reviewed ...

PREEMPTIVE UPDATE:  A few days before finishing up this post, I noticed that the Bubba Yum Yum book has finally been self published in iBooks.  It will be interesting to see what the final published formula is though and if they added any carbohydrate (somehow I doubt it from the preview pages available of other recipes). Background Posts & Prior BabyGate Files: Mammalian Infant Food Macronutrients ~ Especially Human Common Themes: The Chef Evans & Prof. Noakes Controversies, and Robb Wolf vs. North Carolina The Obesity Paradox The BabyGate Files: Tim Noakes Blames Gerber for Baby Cereals (this post contains historical breast milk alternatives and weaning practics) The BabyGate Files: Tim Noakes Just WRONG on Protein (discusses "early protein hypothesis" link to increased adiposity later in childhood.) The BabyGate Files: Pete Evans' Bubba Yum Yum ~ There's a Macro Missing!   (key to this post, they claim adaptation from WAPF recipe) ...

In 1985, S. Boyd Eaton and Melvin J. Konner wrote a seminal paper, in the New England Journal of Medicine , that would "start it all" for the modern paleo diet:   Paleolithic Nutrition: A Consideration of its Nature and Current Implications .  Also that year, they would publish, along with Konner's late wife Marjorie Shostak, The Paleolithic Prescription .  [Some links:  Links to full texts of many paleo papers are here , I discussed the book here .]   Unfortunately the PDF is not digitized so I can't quote here, so I've simply screenshot the introduction below.  If you need to enlarge to read, click on the image and do your thing with the browser!  

gratuitous image of the Drs. Eades, early 2015 A little while back I wrote  Nutritional Ketosis is an Oxymoron .  I was taken to task a bit in comments for the inappropriate use of oxymoron, but I'm going to plead for leniency in the spirit of the use of the term.  The crux of that post was that the terms nutritional (as in being in a calorically sufficient, weight stable state) and ketosis are metabolically contradictory.  This is perhaps evidenced in no more profound manner than the extremes required to produce and sustain such a state, and the ease with which it is abolished. Ketowars rage on as the standard bearer appears to be imploding on the sidelines ...  I got into a discussion on Twitter with Dr. Eades about a side issue, and here you go ... SUMMARY: Starvation ketosis is distinctly different from nutritional ketosis. No human populations in sustained nutritional ketosis (not even the Inuit). Dietary reasons why the Inuit weren't in nu...

I've done a couple of background posts on this topic, and I've decided to dub it BabyGate. In doing so, I now have the freedom to launch another unending series of related posts. (Read: I might actually get to posting what I want to in some timely fashion!)  Background posts:   Mammalian Infant Food Macronutrients ~ Especially Human Common Themes: The Chef Evans & Prof. Noakes Controversies, and Robb Wolf vs. North Carolina   (use your browser to search on Tim Noakes for background on this specific situation) Today's Focus:   Tim Noakes, outspoken advocate of Banting (sic) #LCHF diet -- apparently for all! -- has been called to a hearing by the HPCSA.  The issue is a complaint filed by the dietetics board in South Africa alleging inappropriate conduct on social media for tweeting advice to a mother to wean her baby onto a low carb, high fat diet or "real foods".  According to this report : "By implication I was saying that the child...

[Bumping for new content #s 4 and 8] Just links to the full text peer review articles on the nature and composition of the diet consumed by paleolithic humans.  In reverse chronological order of publication.  This is by no means a comprehensive list, and to be considered a "work in progress" in hopes of someday compiling a comprehensive list of citations characterizing the paleolithic diet, for which I can provide links to full-text articles.   As such, if you have anything to contribute, please do so in comments, I only ask that only articles for which full texts are freely available be included ... abstracts will likely provide nothing in addition to the already accrued list.   Also, I would greatly appreciate you letting me know if any of the links go dead.  For some articles, I have put a link to request a share through Google Drive, please only use this option if the primary link no longer works, thank you.

As I found myself debating whether to tackle which controversy to publish up first, I kept running into trouble with some background and tangents to discuss one, that really could apply to either case.  And then my good friend [sic] Robb Wolf wrote a blog post about a proposed North Carolina law that seems pertinent as well.  So I'm going to write a post on the commonalities, and then, as time permits, a separate followup post for the Pete Evans and Tim Noakes controversies that raise some similar but distinct issues. For those who are not aware of what has transpired recently, allow me to summarize: Pete Evans Pete Evans is a celebrity chef in Australia who has become popular through cooking shows and such much like Gordon Ramsey or many of the Food Network stars in my country.   Evans has apparently been into nutritionism for some time (activated almonds anyone?), but as recently as 2012,  Pete was writing popular cookbooks on making healthy pi...

There have been two major stories in the IHC-News of late, a mega-Facebook thread that has raised the issue of PUFA in baby formulas, a minor altercation between moi and Matt Stone on Facebook about a study on "autistic rats", and quite a few conversations on this blog involving PUFA of late that has prompted this post.  It is a prelude to at least two posts on the issue to come:  (1) The Pete Evans / Paleo Way / WAPF-inspired / Nora Gedgaudas defended liver-based baby formula controversy, and (2) Tim Noakes' recommendations of "LCHF" for babies.

New Study!!! Metabolic and physiologic effects from consuming a hunter-gatherer (Paleolithic)-type diet in type 2 diabetes U Masharani, P Sherchan, M Schloetter, S Stratford, A Xiao, A Sebastian, M Nolte Kennedy and L Frassetto Why Frassetto Paleo? The first thing I do when I see a new paleo diet study is try to find out WHAT the diet actually was.  So even before I got the full text, I saw the "group" author and the description of the ramped up diets and knew it was her brand of paleo.  Here's a summary from  this post , which has links to individual posts I've done on the other various studies.  

Howdy all!  This one's been languishing in the draft bin for a bit as I hadn't had the time to round out the continuing saga of buffalo hunters.  It certainly belongs in the "I don't call it the Incestral Health Community for nothing" file!  As I was publishing up the Buffalo Roaming post the other day, "news" came across Jimmy Moore's Instagram feed that Stephen Phinney was unloading some ancestral dishonesty on the attendees of the CONvention of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians (or was it the Nutrition and Metabolism half of the event, who cares, same general schtick, over and over).  I include a screenshot of the slide here to confirm that this is the same slide I'd seen Phinney use before as you'll see here in a bit.  Essentially, this appears to be the same talk, different CONference.

 {If you came here from social media looking for the PaleoFX [ ... excuse me ... Paleo f(x) ]  related content, do a quick browser search on "Deer Play" to skip on down.} Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam Where the deer and the antelope play Where seldom is heard a discouraging word And the skies are not cloudy all day Home, home on the range Where the deer and the antelope play Where seldom is heard a discouraging word And the skies are not cloudy all day ..... I want to thank Nina Teicholz.  This is a serious thank you, although I doubt she'd take it that way.  But for her  referencing shenanigans , I would have never had the slightest inclination to read W.W. Newcomb Jr.'s  The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times .   I'm not going to describe this dense book as a page turner, and Newcomb's language is of an era when his chapter titles were acceptable.  But none the less it's been quite informational...

This is going to be a rather short post, and I'm not going to reference it.  I simply don't have time.  (As always, feel free to contest any claims you feel are erroneous in the comments.)  But something has been bothering me for a long time about the whole nutritional ketosis thing, or what I call NuttyK, and I just couldn't put my finger on it.   And then it hit me, as I was looking into the buffalo hunting thing ... Humans likely  do  have a long history of being in ketosis for periods of time.  Ketosis ... as in the metabolic adaptation to starvation to preserve lean mass and reduce glucose consumption by the brain by providing a fat-derived alternative fuel.  These humans were in prolonged periods of caloric deficit without a "need" to be ... in other words they weren't overweight dieters getting most of their energy from surplus stores.  They were in  starvation ketosis .

Ahh the trails that Nina Teicholz leads me down ...   Image Summary of Post:   adapted from  source gray values are calculated from original data While the males of the Masai tribe consume 3040 cals/day of approximately 39%P : 47% F : 13% C, the females consume 2450 cals/day of approximately 27%P : 33% F : 40% C. Got that?   Masai women, ate a "low fat" diet.   This data comes from a sourced cited in The Big Fat Surprise . The "near-vegetarian" diet of the neighboring Akikuyu tribe is more likely attributable to micronutrient deficiences, more pronounced in males due to their avoidance of "effeminite" leafy greens.

direct link   African Buffalo I have recently revisited Chapter 1, The Fat Paradox, in The Big Fat Surprise , and it's safe to say that Nina Teicholz's contentions about the diets of Native Americans are grossly inaccurate.  The "all the Indians ate meat" is rounded out by a British physician named Prentice who visited South Central Africa and attributed rampant meat eating to the natives there as well.  An then (begins at location 327 of 12033 in Kindle version) : ... no savvy heart disease researcher can read these historical observations without raising a standard and reasonable objection, namely, that the meat from today’s domesticated animals is far more fatty— and a greater proportion of that fat is saturated— than was the meat from wild animals roaming around a hundred years ago. Experts argue that the meat from wild animals contained a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats, which are the type found in vegetable oils and fish. IV   If wild anim...