The Carb-Sane Asylum

Is it just me or has the IHC* gone just totally off even its own loosely secured rails lately?   Between the summits by "functional medicine" practitioners to tell you everything your doctor is hiding from you (a silence bought and paid for by Big Pharma and apparently the only thing they learn in medical school) and this resistant starch vs. keto war waging out there ... it is truly nuts.   I simply don't have time to cover it all between "real life" and projects in the works.   But ... Have you heard?  Good old Fat Head is eating more carbs these days, including resistant starch supplementation, and following the lead of an unlikely diet/health guru in one former astrophysicist named Paul Jaminet, author (with his wife Shou Ching in name only it would appear) of Perfect Health Diet .  It's quite an about face for the former comedian and mocker of starches. you can click to enlarge

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.

Starting sometime in April, I started coming across a deluge of new information related to diabetes -- the classic obesity related T2 diabetes (roughly 80% of T2's are obese, those are the ones I'm talking about here).  There's so much, and by research groups I'd "researched" before, I'm simply amazed I somehow never came across it before.  It's frankly sidetracked me quite a bit from where I was going before the first light bulb over head find, because it all just seemed to fall in place like dominoes fall in some of those intricate arrangements that I'm always intrigued by.   The first discovery was not in a journal article, however.  It was that I finally got my paws on Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, 4th Ed (2004) and 5th Ed (2008).    This book is cited frequently by low carbers due to the fact that in recent years Taubes snickers at how stupid the scientists who wrote the book are with two short excerpts he claims are in conflict....

OK, let's get back to some science here :-)  In comments on my recent query for evidence that insulin blocks leptin in the brain, Kindke posted a link to the following article:   Yin and Yang of hypothalamic insulin and leptin signaling in regulating white adipose tissue metabolism .   ABSTRACT:   Fatty acids released from white adipose tissue ( WAT) provide important energy substrates during fasting. However, uncontrolled fatty acid release from WAT during non-fasting states causes lipotoxicity and promotes inflammation and insulin resistance, which can lead to and worsen type 2 diabetes (DM2). WAT is also a source for insulin sensitizing fatty acids such as palmitoleate produced during de novo lipogenesis. Insulin and leptin are two major hormonal adiposity signals that control energy homeostasis through signaling in the central nervous system. Both hormones have been implicated to regulate both WAT lipolysis and de novo lipogenesis through the...