The Carb-Sane Asylum

This post brought to you by Duck Dodgers' arrogance.  If there ever were an example of what is wrong with science in the Incestral Health Community, it is the phenomenon that is "Duck Dodgers" and his comments here.     A seemingly non-controversial post -- on how the US Dietary Guidelines were never any radical departure from the way humans around the globe have eaten for thousands of years -- went viral, at least in part because of Duck's return.   What rubs me personally the wrong way about this person (or persons, though I've been told it is only one person who posts with that ID in comments here so I operate on that assumption) is his response to any challenge to "How Food Enrichment Made Us Fat, Diabetic, and Chronically Diseased" otherwise known as the "Iron Food Enrichment Hypothesis" .  Despite doubling down on the whole fortification thing at the off-the-grid web rental only around a month ago, this guy comes on here and plays...

The purpose of this post is to have a sort-of "disclaimer" to link to (if I can remember) whenever I discuss a rodent study here at the Asylum ... A small manifesto if you will, on my feelings on the utility and limitations of rodent studies in relation to human beings.   Also, I look at this post as a way to remind older readers and/or inform newer readers as to my background.  I spent roughly five years in the company of countless rats and mice, working for Big Pharma, and when I speak of rats, I'm not talking about my colleagues ;-)  My job was half analytical chemistry, half metabolism.  I worked on mostly discovery level drug candidates (a level before development) characterizing the absorption, metabolism and routes of excretion of these drugs, mostly antidepressants.  As such I've chopped the heads off of more rats than I care to recollect, opened up countless abdomens of mice to get maximum blood samples from the vena cava, removed/homogenized and analyz...

This is mostly a bookmarking post to put some links out there. Same poop, different gut  - this one deals mostly with fecal transplants to treat bacterial infections The gut flora as a forgotten organ  - mostly dealing with diseases though touts the promise of obesity relationship The environment within: how gut microbiota may influence metabolism and body composition  - An excellent review of the current understanding of the role of gut flora in inflammation, disease, obesity, etc.  The lead author is the researcher who did the fecal transplant study on obese men that demonstrated improvements in insulin sensitivity (see next link).  I recommend reading this one.  IMO, at this point, finding a bacterial solution to obesity seems to be a long-shot and lots of wishful thinking.   Fecal Transplant Flushes Insulin Resistance   I really look forward to their upcoming publication of this work.  It will be interesting to see the magn...

Mostly based on studies like THIS  (abstract only), there's a new whiff in the air around obesity researchers.  Some go so far as to call gut microflora an "unsung organ".  Some have picked up this ball and run with it to the point of making wild claims that microflora control how much energy we extract from our food and we have no control over "energy in".    Our results indicate that the obese microbiome has an increased capacity to harvest energy from the diet. Firstly, we have correlation here, not causation. Furthermore, this trait is transmissible: colonization of germ-free mice with an 'obese microbiota' results in a significantly greater increase in total body fat than colonization with a 'lean microbiota'. Many have read this and jumped all over it to say this indicates the arrow of causation goes from microflora to obesity.   That seems reasonable until one considers what actually happened here.  Germ-free mice are smaller because they...

A while back I listened to an interview with Steven Guyenet of Whole Health Source blog where he mentioned a study where the gut bacteria were transplanted from obese mice to normal mice that had no endogenous bacteria.  The normal mice gained more weight.  Microflora differences have been identified between normal and obese humans and normal and anorexic humans.   This has led to much speculation that changes in microflora could be a causative agent in obesity. This is one such study:    An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest I look at such studies and consider them to be interesting, but of all the alternate theories out there, I'm probably most skeptical of this one as being a significant  cause  of obesity.  I'll deal with the energy balance aspects and some related math in future post.   This post will focus on the differences between rodent and human digestion that lead me to believe th...