The Carb-Sane Asylum

BUMP - and due to time constraints but lots of comments already here, I've changed my mind on starting a Fat Summit thread and retitled this one.  I hope to put a "best of" video together in response to this tentatively titled The Fact Summit.  Thanks for all your participation! EDIT:  As of 2/16/16 we're at over 1200 comments (fun times!!) and for me, Disqus is slow to load in blogger.  To engage, you may wish to read/comment using this link   which goes directly to disqus. Lent begins on February 10th this year, so I have decided to engage in a 40 day fast beginning today, January 15th.   The fast officially ends on Valentine's Day at which point I will return to eating like 99% of humans on the planet. What will I be consuming during this fast?  Well I wouldn't want to kill my gut flora or get my electrolytes outta whack, so I have decided to include 1 cup (which might be two if my body tells me it needs it) of The Faker Foodie's organic, ...

ORIGINAL PUBLISH DATE:  October 3, 2015  This post will probably repeat some things I've said before.  But in light of recent events, and with controversy over the US 2015 Dietary Guidelines reaching fever pitch, I wanted to collect them in a semi-coherent summarized fashion.   Mostly I want to discuss the role of governments and industries in the evolution of what we know today as a science.  In many ways, a look back at the early Twentieth Century demonstrates how the more things change the more they stay the same.   Are we doomed to repeat past mistakes in the Twenty-First?

not paleo The underlying premise of the paleo diet is that we are supposedly consuming foods that our physiologies did not evolve to consume.  In order to get our diets back into concordance with evolution, it is necessary for us to look back. Waaaaaay back.  Nevermind that most of the problems are extremely modern -- as in within the past century modern, often even a matter of a few decades modern.  No ... we must look back millenia and tens of those to the paleolithic times.  Because ... evolution. But even since I first heard of the paleo diet, and began reading about all of these remote ancestral tribes and cultures, there has been this nagging voice asking me how these populations can be translated back into the paleolithic.  Some of these tribes are decidedly neolithic despite their "primitive" cultures.  Any domestication of animals or cultivation of vegetation would be counter to the HG existence we are told we evolved through.  So in a...

True confession:  I ate beef in a stew last night and I'm in that dangerous age range for doing so according to the latest study that came out.  Finally, a study the paleo community can finally agree on about and rally around!  Paleo for the win!  If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can get a dose of sanity here . But before mass media hysteria gifted the paleo community with the great unifier -- another meat is bad study -- it was all up in arms over another media circus:   Paleo on the Dr. Oz show !! That was truly an odd spectacle.  There you had Paleoista, Nell Stephenson, who in her own practice and through her blogging is about as puritanical "paleo" as one could imagine, and Chris Kresser, someone who was at best loosely associated with paleo, but almost from the get-go seemed to be "beyond paleo".

Chris Kresser got in with the right publisher!  How else do you get quite such a book tour and to present "paleo" when up relatively recently you didn't even call yourself that?   But there he was on Monday, the latest to make that always-panned-as-pseudosci-hype-unless-you-get-on-it show:   Doctor Oz .  When the paleo diet last made the "big time" it was with Paleoista Nell Stephenson and capital T, The Paleo Diet® author Loren Cordain PhD Exercise Science.   I blogged on that previously .   Now, anyone who has ever skimmed more than two blog posts of Paleoista  knows that Nell is one of the remaining few hard core purists.  She has taken to calling this True Paleo, or as she said on the first episode : ... there are no inflammatory foods so there is no dairy,  no grains, no legumes, no refined sugars.  She again went on the Oz show with her "Cheater Plan" whereby you eat strict paleo per this screenshot compilation.   ...

You know the drill.  Beans and such have evil things in their skins, so traditional societies diligently soaked them to remove said evil things.  Furthermore, sprouting is known to improve digestibility and quality of the protein.  So soak and sprout your beans! I don't disagree with any of the above, I just -- taking off scientist hat -- wonder out loud if that's really why traditional cultures did these things. First off, I'm thinking that pretty early on, humans figured out that if you dried things, they tended to last a really long time in storage without spoiling.  Further, certain things may well have been discovered in already dried forms!  I planted green beans one year and went on vacation in August.  Well, you can guess what happened.  I imagine the "bean" part could have been saved and eaten, however.  I also think there's no better snack than snap peas picked fresh, so I plant those almost every year even if I don't bother w...