The Carb-Sane Asylum

NOTE  (8/7/2018):     I've edited this post, originally written/published 5/5/2011, to omit the no longer relevant back story and broken links.  I had referred to a discussion on Jimmy Moore's now-long-defunct LLVLC Discussion Board that made me aware of the Eades' post discussed. SUMMARY:  Fat in the blood following a fatty meal is almost entirely due to the fat in the meal. ~~~~~ Several years ago, Dr. Michael Eades wrote the following post:   ABC’s big meal propaganda .  Sadly, the video is no longer available.  It involved subjects consuming a GIGANTIC meal of 6000 calories, after which blood was drawn two hours later.  This "after" blood was very cloudy, and the technician holds this up and identifies the source of the cloudiness as fat.  The meal was deep fat fried mac&cheese, a bacon cheese burger quesadilla and fries and an ice cream smothered giant cookie.  Yes, high in fat and carbs, but favoring the s...

S ummary: BUMPED January 26, 2018 This post was written around three and a half years ago, and through some bizarre twist of dietary fate, somehow ketogenic diets are still trending on Google for everything from weight loss to hang nails.  So I thought I'd bump this post which was my attempt at dispelling some myths regarding ketosis and the role of dietary protein in the mix.   In the end, and some of these points are not made specifically in this post but I'll make them here: Carbohydrate restriction is the greatest determinant of ketogenesis  Protein (various amino acids) can feed into the Krebs Cycle and attenuate the reduction in oxaloacetate that favors ketogenesis from fatty acids. Ketogenesis represents a conversion of fat energy to ketone energy but it is not evidence of the ultimate usage of that energy.   Like glucose, ketones will be burned for energy before fatty acids, so ketogenesis is not an indicator of actual fatty aci...

I am ( STILL ) working on a comprehensive post addressing "The Biggest Loser Regain" study and fallout.  But as I was going along the way, I'm finding some gems that really just need posts of their own.  This is one of them.  I'm also going to do my best to clean out the draft bin for the remainder of 2016!     [If you haven't seen the previous entry referencing this topic, here is a link .  If it is some time past the publish date of this current post, this link should be active for the TBLR post.]

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...

Is Gary Taubes losing it?  His grip on reality, that is?  I submit that it is the only "innocent" explanation for his behavior of late. Gary Taubes and Mike Eades in Better Days for Low Carb "Science"  8/13/2008 direct image link I'll have more to say when I can recoup from the busy time of year in my real job coupled with traveling weekend before last.  But if you haven't heard, two studies conducted by NIH scientist Kevin Hall: The unveiling of the results of the NuSI funded multi-center study at an obesity conference.  See Nutrition Wonk for the most info.  This was a 2 month metabolic ward study. The followup results of a study on The Biggest Loser with some confusing metabolic outcomes.  I say confusing as the numbers don't add up, but that hasn't stopped pretty much everyone from painting a picture of doom and gloom topped with a large dollop of CICO/ELMM is going to destroy your metabolism fatalism.    I will have more...

I just came back from a trip to Kansas City to meet the public (grin) and was immediately bombarded from several sides with the above video.   Nutrition Wonk has transcribed the talk so head on over to see that and the poster!

If you've circulated in the realms of nutritional science or sorcery for any length of time, you've probably heard the phrase ... Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food ... enough for it to have long past turned to the point of cliché.   Whether or not it was actually said by Hippocrates notwithstanding, you've probably seen it misused as often as it is appropriately applied.   This post is about its misuse in the image below. Starving cancer:  Dominic D'Agostino at TEDx TampaBay Screenshot

Sixteen Post Bumps for 2016 ...  No. 2 Update Notes & Summary This post discusses the section entitled  INCREASED PROINSULIN AS THE MAIN BETA CELL SECRETORY DEFECT in the following 2007 article:   PROINSULIN, PROAMYLIN AND THE BETA CELL ENDOPLASMIC RETICULUM: THE KEY FOR THE PATHOGENESIS OF DIFFERENT DIABETES PHENOTYPES .     This is but one of the papers that turned up as I was delving deeper into the progression of Type 2 diabetes and what it really involves.  It was this work that began the research and blogging journey into sorting out what insulin resistance is, if indeed it does exist as it is commonly "understood" from the standpoint of peripheral tissue glucose metabolism.   In the words of the authors of the paper: ... for three decades, the beta cell dysfunction has been shaded by the theoretical construction of peripheral insulin resistance . These researchers have access to roughly 170,000 records of everyone diagn...

Minor Update:  Sorry, sometimes I hit Publish instead of Close when I'm in a rush and want to make sure I have most recent version saved.  I had intended to include this video -- Instant Ketosis -- along with this "report" on the MLM angle in my post --  Pruvit Review – Another Ketones Based MLM Company?    My first thought from that title is a question:  "There are others?"  The tagline on this article reads: Will Pruvit's core products and MLM-modeled opportunity have what it takes to make it in the ketones health space? Let's prove it one way or another for you. I want to also make very clear that I am NOT encouraging anyone to get into this or any other MLM -- matters not the code words used to sell something.  Indeed I warn strongly against such.  If you search on MLM truth, or MLM scams, or MLM fraud, or any number of short phrases, you'll hit on ... well hits too numerous to count.  Here's one I suggest:   MLM-theTruth...

I've been poking around some eating disorder research recently due to the recent Elizabeth Licorish-Tara Lipinski kerfuffle (see also the follow-up ). But something else, that's seemingly always a hot topic when calories are discussed, is this concept of metabolic adaptation.  Quite often this gets referred to as having a "damaged metabolism".   I'm just going to use that term (and w/o quotes), and don't mean to imply that it is necessarily appropriate or justified, just that it's easier than explaining it repeatedly.  The damaged metabolism is thought to develop from frequent, chronic, and/or severe calorie restriction.  The mechanism is that the body down-regulates basal metabolic rate such that a 150 lb person who has dieted down from 250 lbs will require fewer calories to maintain that weight compared with a person whose normal, stable weight is 150 lbs.    So I was looking for some additional references about the "hamster wheel" (i...

When Elizabeth Licorish was 9 years old, she read a skating reference book that revealed that 12 year old Tara Lipinski trained five hours each day, enjoyed a diet rich in spaghetti and marinara sauce, stood 4 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 68 pounds. When she put the book down, did she .... (a) Hop on a bathroom scale (b) Ask Mom to make more pasta with marinara (c)  Request a longer training schedule. The answer to this is the subject of this post.  Apologies for the somewhat longer than intended delay in publishing.  Part I of sorts:   Women, Athletes & Calories -- Does Tara Lipinski Eat Enough? This post was inspired by a reaction piece in Philly Voice by freelance journalist Elizabeth Licorish entitled:   Dear female athletes: Please don’t follow Tara Lipinski’s 1,200-calorie diet.    In Part I, I tried to limit commentary mostly to answering the question in my title, though I did touch on other topics.  I'm h...

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.

In 2004, Jimmy Moore lost 180 lbs on the Atkins diet. In September 2006, here was one week of  menus .

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 .

  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...

Laugh if you get it! In comments on my last Thermodenyics post , I made the following statement: The β-oxidation + Krebs part is the "metabolism" of fatty acids resulting in production of some heat, some ATP, and a large number of so-called "reducing equivalents" that will produce much more ATP (cellular energy currency) in the Electron Transport Chain. You don't see mass escaping your body, but the carbons that were originally contained in the larger fatty acid molecules are exhaled as carbon dioxide. Atkins' original claim was that enough molecules escaped the Krebs cycle and were excreted before being fully metabolized for their caloric content. The vast majority of β-oxidation to burn fat for energy occurs in organs like the heart and skeletal muscle. Once a fatty acid is committed to the β-oxidation pathway they are oxidized completely down to carbon dioxide. In comments , Kindke quoted that last bolded line and inquired: I'm interes...

For the past couple of months, I've been somewhat obsessing about thermodynamics having written the AARR piece and a few blog posts, not to mention revisiting several dating back to near the beginnings of this blog.  I began this a while ago as a single lengthy post, but it's gotten out of hand and finding time to tidy up such a post vs. publishing shorter chunks in parts became impossible.  Not sure how many parts this will have.  This series will put several members of the IHC "on the record" so to speak.  While I've done so in the past, the hope is to have it all in one place. Robert Atkins the Calorie Guy!    Surely Atkins is an honorary member of the IHC, even though he passed away over a decade ago before this community reached the level that it has.  Most of the "greats" have learned something (perhaps essentially everything) they know about low carb diets and tangentially about thermodynamics/calorie theory from the "late great one...

Tom Naughton has weighed in with some random musings regarding ketosis:   Reactions To Arguments About Ketosis .    The more Fat Head talks about nutrition the more evident it becomes that he really has no idea what he is talking about, and really ought not to be educating anyone no matter how entertaining he thinks he is.   Ketogenic diets are stupid because everyone apart from diabetics should be able to consume at least 150 grams of carbohydrate per day. I don’t think the everyone should eat starch argument makes any more sense than the no one should eat starch argument. All humans have the AMY1 gene, which makes it possible to digest starch. That’s one of the many reasons I believe our paleo ancestors ate starchy plants. But some clearly ate a lot more than others. Let’s review a quote from Denise Minger’s book Death By Food Pyramid : It turns out the number of AMY1 copies contained in our genes is not the same for everyone. And the amount ...