The Carb-Sane Asylum

U nless you've been living under a "rock" in the world of nutrition, you're aware that Stephan Guyenet "debated" Gary Taubes on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It took me several days broken up to watch/listen to the whole thing. In a nutshell, it was Science & Substance (Stephan Guyenet) versus Stories & Slander (Gary Taubes). Rather than summarize, there were several points made that I'd like to address. In no particular order. I'll include this intro with links to prior topics as this series progresses.

S UMMARY The results of the $12 Million Dollar NuSI-sponsored study, headed up by Dr. David S. Ludwig, are finally out.   Effects of a low carbohydrate diet on energy expenditure during weight loss maintenance: randomized trial While the good doctor is making the rounds touting them as evidence in support of the Carb-Insulin Hypothesis (TWICHOO in these parts), a review of the raw data made available to the public casts grave doubts on his victory lap.  This study built upon the "promising" results of the 2012 study:   Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance    This post focuses on comparisons of Study Design between these two studies, some improvements, and the ultimate failure that renders the primary outcome data suspect, if not outright useless.  (And I don't say that lightly!) Improvements: Study size Length of time on one test diet (20 weeks) vs. 4 weeks crossover on each...

S ummary: Diabetes, whether Type 1 or Type 2, is a dysfunctional, wasteful metabolic state.  As a result, an uncontrolled diabetic either uses or loses more energy than their non-diabetic selves would otherwise use.  As such, the untreated diabetic is essentially "underweight" compared with the body weight that the same energy intake would produce were they not diabetic. There are differences in endogenous insulin production between the two types of diabetes.  In Type 1, there is effectively no insulin production.  In Type 2, there is usually elevated basal insulin production, but a relative deficiency in acute insulin secretion, specifically an impaired early insulin response to glucose (GSIS).  The absolute or relative insulin deficiency results in the following to a greater or lesser degree: Excessive lipolysis resulting in an increased cycling of the Triglyceride/Fatty Acid cycle.   Impaired suppression of glucose production in t...

T his mix of snarkasm and practical advice is brought to you by Facebook Memories reminding me of a post I made around a year ago -- The #LCHF Weight Loss Industry & Evangelizing Low Carb  -- and the upcoming Keto Clarity Academy event featuring Melanie Miller and Jimmy Moore "influencing" people on how to stay healthy for the holidays. The holiday season will be soon upon us, and even those who celebrate no December holidays will likely still have to navigate related social engagements.  Let me preface this by saying that I recognize there are a number of people who absolutely cannot, or probably should not, stray from their dietary regimen.  There are others who, when they do, have a much harder time getting "back on the wagon" compared to whatever issues staying on plan will cause.  If you are any of these people, this blog post is not for you.  This blog post is aimed at all of those who are angst-ridden going into and through the upcoming holi...

B ump! One would think that the calorie or energy-balance denialists would have gotten a clue by now, but apparently this post needs bumping.   If you make it through this post and still believe calories are some non-entity, that somehow insulin or any hormone can trump energy balance, I don't know what to say. Original Post Date July 1, 2013    Calories ... ... or joules or ergs or foot·lbs or BTUs or eV or ... These are all the same thing folks.  They are all units of energy. That we use different terms in different contexts doesn't mean we are talking about different things.  It's like different languages, be it vida or leben or liv or  อายุการใช้งาน  ... they all mean life. The bastardizing of basic science in the Paleo and LLVLC realms is both ubiquitous and unrelenting.  This is what prompted me to start this blog.  I could really care less about the diet fads that come along that are obvious quackery, but this ...

A short post ... something I hit on again in the process of writing another one. Below is a plot of the absolute amounts of protein, carb and fat that Americans claimed to consume from 1965 through 2011 (adapted from Hite & Economic Litigation Consultants, 2015 , blog post ).   All but 1965 is NHANES data, but I'll even "give them" the inappropriate toss-in of the 1965 Sesame-Street-song data point. I've properly lined up the timelines for prevalence of BMI > 25 curve   (that scale -- not shown -- goes from just over 45% to just under 75%. ).   This is the same curve repeated by Adele Hite and so, so many others -- often immediately after chastising Ancel Keys for equating correlation with causation (keep ignoring thqt  he didn't do that  with his infamous plot) -- in an attempt to implicate the Dietary Guidelines in the obesity epidemic.    Even IF one could pin the obesity epidemic on an increase in carbohydrate consumption,...

Post Overview: In the context of weight loss, maintenance or gain, eventually all roads lead to the acceptance that *calories matter* ... you must be in deficit, balance or surplus respectively. In the wake of the recent The Biggest Loser Regain study , there has been a lot of doom-and-gloom reporting, led by Gina Kolata and Sandra Aamodt  in the New York Times .   I've distilled the results down to the bare bones: Summarized from Table 1 from Fothergill et.al.   14 Contestants (6 Men , 8 Women) The "alarming outcome" was that resting metabolic rate was reduced as might be expected, but seemingly remained suppressed and even further declined despite significant re-gain (70% re-gain/loss for the mean) after 6 years.   However the TEEs -- the TOTAL energy expenditures for the day -- tell a different tale.   These were measured over a roughly two week period by doubly labeled water in free-living conditions. The TEEs remained high at 30 weeks...

Bump! Over on Twitter I was made aware that Dr. David Ludwig is coming out with a new book in January (HT Steven Snyder @NoGimmicksNutri) mentioned in this Time piece:   You Asked: Should I Count Calories?    The book is to be called Always Hungry   (affiliate link if you're going to buy it anyway!)   This is a similar title to the NYT editorial Ludwig co-wrote with NuSI's VP of Research last year, discussed in this post.  I also have a friend who attended an obesity conference recently at which Ludwig presented much of the same ideas.  It is repackaged TWICHOO (Taubes Wrong Insulin-Carbohydrate Hypothesis Of Obesity) , and what is most galling about all of this is that much of Ludwig's own research counters this ... Yet he perpetuates it?  From the article:

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 crit...

Another timely bump to go with the Three-Year "Update" for Jimmy Moore.  Seems he is receiving the expected backlash from the recent Paleof(x) CONference, and his pre-game post failed to stave off the gasps and criticisms.  Andreas "look at all the fat people on this cruise" Eenfeldt has just posted a short recap video from the event.  The comments on his blog are interesting to say the least.  Seems to have a strange thing going with Jimmy, kind of like Tom Naughton.  They both post unflattering images, etc. of their "friend".  The absolute worst light to show Jimmy in is a profile, and yet this is what his "friend" Andreas chose to use a lot of.  Eh ... their dysfunction. [P.S.  After this post, a troll by the name of EatLessMoveMoore started commenting on various blogs using some of my terminologies like "webpire" and such.  This was NEVER me despite repeated accusations.  Even Nikoley had the decency to publicly note that i...

  Every woman knows that carbohydrate is fattening  Most wouldn't even need to do a search on that phrase and Taubes to recall how frequently Gary Taubes mentions this quote.  Here is the highlight in Good Calories, Bad Calories . {Kindle Location 7624} Taubes repeated this quote in relatively recent editorials in the New York Times , and even the British Medical Journal .   Innumerable others have dragged it out in their own iterations of Taubes' so-called Alternate Hypothesis.   It was indeed a quote published in the British Journal of Nutrition.  So far so good.  What is not featured prominently, per usual for Mr. Taubes, is the nature of the source:   Observations on the respiratory quotients and weight gain of man after eating large quantities of carbohydrate .

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...

On the urgings of a few commenters here on the blog, and even more recently , by Don't-Call-Him-John (Kiefer), I've found myself reading Biological Thermodynamics by Donald Haynie (2nd edition).  [It's #1 on this  Amazon Search  page, just for context that there are others out there.] After reading large chunks of the book -- had a lot of time on my hands without internet access these past couple of weeks -- it has become even more clear as to where some of the biggest misconceptions about thermodynamics in this community come from.  It is not that Haynie is incorrect, however.  There are many statements in the book that read as "off", but on second or third pass through are technically accurate provided one is using his definitions in proper context*.  It is more that his book is so filled with examples that lack relevance to biological contexts as to cloud the picture.  What results is that although somewhere in the text all the relevant "prer...

Edited and Updated post recording ;-) Do Calories Count with CarbSane   ( direct video link ) Well, we didn't get to chat as much about calories per se as I'd thought, but it was a nice discussion nonetheless, I believe.   Sam is a good sport even though he knows I've been critical of his calorie experiments and even encouraged folks to come check out these posts:   That 5000 Calorie Jokesperiment and Low Carb Circus Acts , for example.    In some ways I'm frustrated a bit because Sam's schtick is objectively of the calories don't count variety.  Further, his first experiment was specifically about not gaining weight overeating a low carb diet, so there's a bit of evasive maneuvering going on IMO.  However he is not alone in this -- Exhibit A being Jonathan Bailor -- in dialing it back when discussing it with a critic.  So of course calories count, and I'm not sure how well I articulated it (note to self:  don't schedul...

[Blogstress note:  this article is not similar to that in AARR recently mentioned here]  In the background here I've been doing a lot of thinking and writing on thermodynamics and how the body uses food to produce internal energy to "do stuff".    In the end, we "burn" the macronutrient molecules in our food to release the chemical energy stored in those molecules, and ultimately we use that energy to do "work".   I've said we can mostly ignore entropy in the context of the human body, but in chemical thermodynamics we have the concept of Gibbs free energy:  G.   Most importantly in chemistry, we are concerned with the change in free energy of reactions: ΔG rxn  =    ΔH rxn    - T ΔS rxn ΔH rxn  = change in enthalpy (energy)    ΔS rxn  = change in entropy  ΔG rxn  = change in free energy Free energy is the energy available to do work.  For example to move things such as ...

Part I Fattening Things: (It's been a little while, sorry) ... Before continuing (and completing) this discussion, let me preface this post by saying that there is no single food or macronutrient that is inherently fattening in and of itself.  For any food -- let's say pizza because that is blamed quite often -- you can find obese people that are not big fans, and you can find bean poles who basically live off of the stuff (and wash it down with Coke).   But I do believe certain foods have demonstrated themselves to be problematic for a large enough proportion of the population so as to be designated:   potentially fattening . Try as some may to rationalize against it, the bottom line is that if you eat too much of anything, the body's long term storage facility for that is fat tissue.   Your most potentially fattening foods, therefore, are: Those (generally fat + carb combos) highly palatable foods that are easy to eat a lot of in and of themselves...

I have to give credit where credit is due. In his zeal to dismiss the role of calories in weight (fat) gain or loss, Ian Lane makes a pretty good case for why alcohol is not likely to be the carbon source for accumulated fat .  In doing so, however, he accidentally all but exonerates the lowly carbohydrate.  I don't think he meant to do that ...  The particular post in question was the subject of a couple of blog posts recently, see here and here .   It would appear that it has now been officially (in the title line) "revised" to eliminate all of the overt scientific inaccuracies, and focuses on ethanol, which makes it easier to direct readers of this post to just the part in question!  Ian writes: The molecule I'd like to highlight, which, from my perspective, cannot realistically be stored as body fat, is ethyl alcohol , or ethanol . (That’s not to say that ethanol can’t possibly aid in fat accumulation somehow — see below — rather, the calories in etha...

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a comment on my recent post --  More on Calories: A Gallon of Gas is NOT A Gallon of Gas? ... And Other Silly Thermodenyic Arguments  -- from David Pendergrass, PhD.  Pendergrass has been a speaker at AHS, and last year his talk was: The Physiology and Biochemistry of the Paleolithic Diet for Weight Reduction :   The physiology and biochemistry interactions of an individual using Paleolithic nutrition will be compared to an individual on the USDA recommended diet to demonstrate why Paleolithic Nutrition results in a success weight loss. Bio: Director of Applied Science at the University of Kansas. He conducts a yearly seminar on appetite regulation. He is the author of the Smartest Loser program. He founded the Paleo Nutrition Foundation and a Paleo Nutrition Certification program online. 

Previous post:   More on Calories: A Gallon of Gas is NOT A Gallon of Gas? ... And Other Silly Thermodenyic Arguments The name of Adam Kosloff's website -- Caloriegate -- implies some criminal conspiracy to, I guess, spread a lie about calories.  If he had his way, anyone who speaks the plain truth about the biochemistry that goes on in our human bodies would just STFU already (his words) and count "something else".  Kosloff is a true leech in the IHC.  The guy studied geology at Yale and if his writings are any indication, knows pretty much nothing about human physiology or biochemistry.  He's a ghost-writer, which is an honest profession, but in his own words:

Richard Feinman announced on his Facebook page a little while ago that he is writing a book on Thermodynamics, and because every now and then he pops up in the hilarious Facebook threads featuring Fred "Super Slow" Hahn, Feinman's FB page is one that's interesting to pop in on from time to time.  Such was Feinman's response to a request from Ian Lane whose blog tagline is "For the frustrated few who want only the truth."  Sigh.  So the request was for Feinman to provide feedback on one of Lane's blog posts, to which Feinman responded (paraphrasing) ' TL;DR, I've been at this for decades Sonny, read my papers!' The Energy In a Gallon of Gas Changes?