The Carb-Sane Asylum

The Noakes Foundation has put out a new book entitled Diabetes Unpacked * , edited by Dr. Zoe Harcombe PhD.   It is a compilation of chapters written by a who's who of the low carborati.  This installment deals with Chapter 3 by Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist masquerading as an obesity specialist and diabetologist.  He has no formal training in either, and his grasp of some pretty basic physiology is tenuous at best.  That latter "charge" can be backed up by fact checking (or attempting to fact check that which isn't simply Fung POOP (Pulled Out Of Posterior) ) any of his various blog articles, books, podcasts or YouTube videos.   * That's my Amazon affiliate link This post will be an evolving one of sorts that I'll bump if and when content is added.  I've avoided giving Fung much "ink" here, frankly because I never thought anyone would take him seriously enough to deserve it.  Clearly I was wrong.  There's apparently no lim...

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.

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...

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...

Alternate Title:  Baffling with Bull $#!† This post discusses two "research articles" recently published in peer review journals, and how their use of statistical terminology: imparts undue scientific seriousness to the content of the paper obscures the fact that there is nothing new in the paper to make it even worthy of publication, and allows the authors to assign scientific significance to editorial opinions that are at best not supported by the statistical analysis in question, at worst directly contradicted by it. These two "studies" both boil down to exploiting statistical jargon and methodology to further an agenda.  It's a darned shame the quality of the peer-review process has declined so precipitously in recent times as to allow such obvious examples to get through.  

Here's a pop-quiz: 1.  When were the first official Dietary Guidelines released to the American public? 2.  When did the Dietary Guidelines first include the specific recommendation to cut overall dietary fat to 30% of total calories, and saturated fat to 10%? GRATUITOUS SPACER IMAGES  As participants and attendees at the #LCHF 2015 "Summit" in Cape Town, South Africa noshed on gourmet fare such as filet mignon and duck confit, the group's sight-seeing trip took them to the paleo side of town where  the "nose-to-tail" stuff is sold out in the open.     "THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF MEAT WE ADVOCATE FOR"     ~ Jimmy Moore  

Thank you to everyone for contributing to my little survey !  I wasn't trying to trick anyone or anything, just get an idea of whether or not there is any so-called macronutrient confusion across the pond (and/or in other countries that have adopted similar nutritional recommendations). Where'd that come from?  I had a random page hit from a blog discussing a paper by Zoe Harcombe where a commenter had linked to my  discussions  of Harcombe's  credentials .    Yes, Zoe Harcombe -- obesity researcher extraordinaire -- did indeed publish a paper in a "peer reviewed" journal back in March of this year:   Food for Thought: Have We Been Giving the Wrong Dietary Advice? .    In it she, and coauthors, lamented some so-called macronutrient confusion in the UK. I was wondering if it did, indeed, exist.

Sam Feltham and Zoe Harcombe "battle it out" over 5-a-Day! UPDATE:   @CarbSane @zoeharcombe Thank you for the critique Evelyn but that Sky interview was last year and my opinions have evolved from then... — Sam Feltham (@samfeltham) June 22, 2013 I've now asked him how he was eating in 2010.  He's already, in another tweet, said he was lifting 2X/day back then for a competition in Men's Health.  Due to time constraints he only lifts 12 min/week now.  

Note:  I started this article with the intent of it being a single stand-alone before Smash the Fat's Sam Feltham had done his final summary of his overeating stunt.  Since then, however, he has written said summary and I've written two posts discussing this disconnect between the you-can-eat-all-the-calories claims and the current uber-restrictive low carb plans many long time low carbers are actually following themselves.  See:   Fast or Feltham and Fast or Feltham II Apologies in Advance :  I wrote this with updates/edits over several days and with "new information" coming in the interim.  It could probably use a good bit of editing and crunching down, but as this is just a blog, I'm going to publish it up w/o wasting time on that.  Please forgive the length, repetitiveness, etc.  Thanks!

I received a link to this interesting post by Zoe Harcombe in the Inbox the other day:   What's this 'trying to eat more fat'?!   Zoe writes: Hi all - I've spotted a couple of comments from people saying that they're trying to eat more fat and the second one got me worried enough to start a thread. ... The Harcombe Diet is a diet based on a 5 day Phase 1 which is mostly meats and veggies (unless you are, as Zoe was for 15 years, a vegetarian, then you can substitute some brown rice, which makes no sense from a protein standpoint, but whatever).  Once you've cured your candida overgrowth which is one of the  prime reasons for obesity according to Harcombe, you move to other phases of the diet.  Harcombe believes in the separation of fats and carbs at meals on a metabolic "food combining" basis.  You don't want to eat carbs with fat because ... well ... the insulin!  Despite negativity about low fat diets, Harcombe counsels food separation and ...

Since I had the whole metabolic advantage thing on my mind writing my last post, and "Anonymous LC Author" mentioned Feinman and Jequier, I was reminded of something that's bothered me for a while now regarding citations of Jequier's work.  A calorie is a calorie violates the second law of thermodynamics  argues for the potential of a metabolic advantage in low carbohydrate diets.   Oddly enough, they ultimately make a first law argument for the MA, but that's a subject for another day. It was this paper that introduced me to the work of Eric Jequier after which I stumbled upon the subject of my most popular post to date, Nutrient Fates after Absorption  referencing this Jequier paper:   Nutrient effects: post-absorptive interactions .  But the Feinman & Fine paper cites a different Jequier paper to which the TEF values of macronutrients can be ubiquitously traced in LC circles.  That paper being:   Pathways to Obesity .   S...