The Carb-Sane Asylum

image link UPDATE 8//23/2021 The company class action law suit regarding scientific claims made about this product. UCAN Class Action Suit I wonder if Peter Attia will get any payout?  LOL ORIGINAL CONTENT published 11/19/2012    How on earth did SuperStarch fly under my radar?   Thanks to Lerner, I was made aware of the connection between Jeff Volek -- of nutty ketosis and Atkins Nutritionals fame -- and the UCAN Company marketing a new type of sports drink containing SuperStarch (TM and all that near as I can tell, though the term is not unique to the company).    When I think of SuperStarch, the image of Molly Shannon's Mary Katherine Gallagher character from SNL just popped into my mind complete with her "superstar" exclamation.  Suparstarch(aching?)  Methinks so! The bottom line of what I'll abbreviate as SS, is that it is supposedly better for performance -- presumably specifically in endurance activities -- because it effectively ...

BUMP! In addition to blogging on several topics raised during Stephan Guyenet and Gary Taubes recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast , I've decided to bump some of the past content on this blog relevant to some topics discussed and/or research studies mentioned.  I'll include a little commentary with each. At around the 12 minute mark, Stephan makes a great opening play, and then gets distracted or flustered into fumbling the football.  Stephan asks what it is about the food environment, etc. that causes obesity, and distills it down to the simplest of questions (paraphrase): Q:  What is the most fattening diet on the planet? A:  Human junk food. Nail.  Head.  Boom.  He then calls out some numbers from the research summary he posted on his blog in advance of the podcast .   The study I discuss in this blog post is the one included in "#52" that he's discussing in the podcast.    Joe seemed perplexed by thi...

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: Continuing on with discussion of:   Effects of a low carbohydrate diet on energy expenditure during weight loss maintenance: randomized trial Previous posts in this series: Part I: Critique of the Study Design Part II: $12 Million for 12% Weight Loss? Part III: Some "Early" Lessons Part IV: Insulin Resistance Does Not Hamper Weight Loss This post should perhaps have come first, but it has taken a while to look deeply at the data for the primary outcome -- total energy expenditure measured by doubly labeled water -- and related outcomes of intake and resting energy expenditure. In this study, all participants were paid to participate, AND provided free food for ~8 months.  Said food was professionally and meticulously prepped, weighed, measured, individualized to provide each subject with some pretty exact caloric level and macronutrient composition.  The test phase (in other words, the study proper) involved maintaining a consiste...

       C ontinuing on with discussion of: Effects of a low carbohydrate diet on energy expenditure during weight loss maintenance: randomized trial No summary for this post.  Here are links to earlier parts in this series: Part I: Critique of the Study Design Part II: $12 Million for 12% Weight Loss? Part III: Some "Early" Lessons :   In this most recent post, I discussed the relationship between measures of insulin (both fasting and 30 minute OGTT response) and weight loss during the Run-In Phase.  

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...

[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...

Due to a recent article in Wired , I think this (6/30/14) post could use a hearty bump.  These words were uttered just over a decade ago by Gary Taubes.  THE COLLAPSE OF A $40 MILLION NUTRITION SCIENCE CRUSADE Seth Roberts :  But you'd seen Nobel-Prize-winning physicists get it very wrong. Gary Taubes:  But what they were getting wrong were subtle; yes, they'd believe incorrectly that they'd discovered elementary particles, but what they were doing was a real subtle game. What they were misinterpreting were extraordinarily subtle aspects of the data.   This obesity screw-up is fundamental; it’s like a grade school error in the interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics.   And I made it as well, up until five years ago. I never thought differently.  But what radicalized me is that they don't care.  If they successfully ward off my threat to their beliefs, then I'm in a very dangerous place.  Then it's, like I sai...

W ith publication of the results of the second of the "Original 3" NuSI funded studies, I'm finally getting around to publishing up this post (and perhaps a second one shortly) regarding the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), founded in 2012 by Peter Attia, MD and "science journalist" Gary Taubes. Bottom line ... for NuSI, it was "all over but the crying" a couple of years ago now. 

Summary: In the Women's Health Initiative, a 2017 analysis of the energy density of baseline diets, stratified to quintiles, revealed several correlative components of an energy dense diet (comparing the top quintile (Q5) to the bottom (Q1).  The energy density, in kcal/gram of food, nearly doubled in Q5 vs. Q1 corresponding to a nearly 50% increase in caloric intake.  The dietary components correlating with this are: Fat:  Fat content is by far and away the greatest contributing factor to consuming an energy dense diet.   Absolute intake more than doubled (2.5X) from Q1 to Q5, and comprised roughly 90% of the increased caloric intake. Animal Protein:  As protein intake from plant sources remained relatively constant, animal protein intake increased by 40% resulting in an increase in total protein of 25%.  Therefore animal foods are a considerable contributor to increased energy density of the diet. Added Sugars:  Added sugar comprised 11...

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...

I think this post has needed a bump for a while.     I also think the data on growing animals eating a keto diet should be cause for at least caution in encouraging such diets for kids, teens or even young adults. ORIGINAL POST DATE 3/20/2012 One of the more difficult things to sort out from the enormous amount of information out there is the actual effect, if any, of dietary composition on resulting body composition.  This is complicated from the get-go by many rodent studies that are done on reproductively mature animals that are still growing.  How to compare this to humans who cease growing vertically once they reach adulthood?  Next we have to sort through the studies that are done, and the implications of them, in the context of weight loss/underfeeding vs. those in the context of weight gain/overfeeding.  Clearly there are compensatory mechanisms at play in both situations that are drastically different.  Lastly, and here's where we probab...

S ummary: A white paper has been published by the True Health Initiative attempting to set some things straight vis a vis Ancel Keys and his Seven Countries Study Such discussions will always involve the erroneous conflation of that 1970s study and Keys' 1953 "Six Countries Plot" ANCEL KEYS DID NOT CHERRY PICK.   In 1953, it was "possible to get fully comparable dietary and vital statistics data from 6 countries" from 1948-9.   Yerushalmy originally put forth data from 12 and then 22 countries.   These data were from different sources and for different classifications of disease vs. that used by Keys. NEITHER set of data used by Y&H even existed in 1953, so it could not have even been available to Keys. Zoe Harcombe is a terrible researcher at best.  Some institutions will give a PhD to pretty much anyone these days.

Preface: I have to say this.  Sorry, not sorry.  If you have children, and you want to help them with nutrition and health as they grow, teach them about food and teach them how to cook.   Get your own weight and health under control (if it's a problem) so that you can pass down good habits to your children.  Or do nothing.  None of my business.  But whatever you do, do not buy your child a copy of Fat Head Kids or let them within 50 yards of a showing of the Fat Head Kids movie if it ever comes out.  Put a block on your Hulu or whatever streaming service it is eventually on.  I cannot recommend more strongly against this. Every time I have watched snippets of some video of Tom talking about this book, or read the preview content on Amazon, I just get utterly creeped out by the whole thing, and Tom Naughton specifically.  Books for children should not include shirtless pictures of the middle aged author who goes on about boy boobs....

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...

This post may be added to from time to time, to collect in one place evidence against the concept of sugar/fructose addiction.   When added to it will be bumped, and the "skip to using browser search" table of contents below will be updated.   Accidental Experimental Evidences Mice Fed 18% Fructose Mice Fed 60% Sugar or Starch Unmotivated Fat Rats

NOTE: It's no secret that my blogging has fallen off. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them has been that I start some train of thought or down some research rabbit hole, and just never get around to finishing a post to my liking ... then things move on. This post is such a one. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't date drafts (or I didn't note it before I opened the draft with edit), but the original introduction referenced events that would indicate sometime in October 2015!  It was also around that time that Robert Lustig came out with a study on NAFLD in children. Lustig has made a comeback in my comments section here of late. He has parlayed a career as a pediatric endocrinologist into a bizarre career as a celebrity doctor/researcher who blames obesity and all evils on one molecule: fructose. I say bizarre because he makes unfounded claim after unfounded claim after unfounded claim as regards fructose. Many of his offerings are backed by the Uni...

It appears that Tom Naughton is making the podcast rounds promoting his new nutrition book for kids.  PLEASE, leave the kids out of it!  That goes for the zealots of all extreme camps including vegans and paleo and WAPF and whatever other diet cult imaginable.   Do not indoctrinate children into your eating disordered behaviors. There are rare instances where ketogenic diets are therapeutic in children, and most of them -- epilepsy -- stay on the diet for the shortest time possible where therapeutic efficacy is achieved, and then wean from the diet. You absolutely cannot make a case for children traditionally being raised on any sort of low carbohydrate diet, not even Zone/Ludwig/Hymanesque 40% levels.  In virtually every culture, the children of both genders consume a diet similar to their mother's ... the gardeners and gatherers.  Children of Tom's generation were raised on mixed diets that included processed foods.  Obesity existed but was not com...

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 ...

Bump Again! I've bumped this before.  I'm still alive and working on blogging, finishing off an installment about the Sugar Slammers. I think this post is worth a read or re-read.  The Laura and John Arnold Foundation funds several non-profits all engaging in targeting sugar as the ultimate cause of everything. Such funds are obscured as donations to universities.  Additionally other non-profits with clear agendas present themselves as taking no industry funding.  It's a dense mess. ORIGINAL CONTENT PUBLISHED MARCH 16, 2015 I'm working on another post regarding conflicts of interest and such, and this came up on the background gathering.  A number of journals are adopting "noble" policies of no longer accepting industry funded studies. Mind you, many of these same journals appear to have no qualms publishing the works of individuals with clear biases and conflicts. I think this hard line on industry funding is wrong-headed.  Not that I'm...