The Carb-Sane Asylum

It appears that Tom Naughton is making the podcast rounds promoting his new nutrition book for kids.  PLEASE, leave the kids out of it!  That goes for the zealots of all extreme camps including vegans and paleo and WAPF and whatever other diet cult imaginable.   Do not indoctrinate children into your eating disordered behaviors. There are rare instances where ketogenic diets are therapeutic in children, and most of them -- epilepsy -- stay on the diet for the shortest time possible where therapeutic efficacy is achieved, and then wean from the diet. You absolutely cannot make a case for children traditionally being raised on any sort of low carbohydrate diet, not even Zone/Ludwig/Hymanesque 40% levels.  In virtually every culture, the children of both genders consume a diet similar to their mother's ... the gardeners and gatherers.  Children of Tom's generation were raised on mixed diets that included processed foods.  Obesity existed but was not com...

Forget the fauxtmeal and n'oatmeal .  For crying out loud, if you like cauliflower (as I do) then eat it ... but it is just NOT a breakfast "cereal".  With this ridiculousness in mind, embrace the latest news from serious anthropological research.   A few media mentions: NPR : Paleo People Were Making Flour 32,000 Years Ago Science (AAAS) :   The world’s oldest oatmeal? IFL Science :  Ancient People Ate Porridge 32,000 Years Ago

Summary: I present here, the unequivocal evidence that the answer to the question posed in the post title is "Yes".   If I were the author of the book Chris Kresser cribbed from, I'd be hopping mad.  This is a very big deal.    I'm also under no delusions that this will amount to much of anything in the Incestral Health Community (the IHC), because Fonzi is in the air !  (Will Sisson selling reverse cave leveraging plans be far behind?)   But you never know.    Plagiarism in general is serious business.  Heck, I hear colleges are even still willing to expel students over the charge (used to be virtually automatic).   What Chris Kresser did was copy the central tenets of The Perfect Health Diet , and pass them of as his own in The Healthy Baby Code -- a $197 multi-media package.   Of this there can be no doubt ... because he copied erroneous material! {ASIDE:  I don't know if folks reading this truly appre...

Summary:    In the Perfect Health Diet books, the claim is made that omnivores prefer a high fat diet along the lines off the PHD macronutrient ratios.  Two studies on mice are cited as evidence in support of a 65% fat diet.  This post discusses those two studies, as well as how the results are more likely to caution against a high fat diet than advocate for it.   NOTE:  This is NOT a comprehensive look at the two studies discussed in the post.  In order to keep the post length managable I've only addressed the points relevant to claims made in the  PHD  books citing these studies.

In the Incestral Health Community, HG stands for Hunter-Gatherer .  If I've heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times over the years:  humans are hunter-gatherers at heart.  True enough.  We are, after all, animals and at some ancient point we behaved just like any other wild animal seeking sustenance.   Fast forward, and most in the IHC think Jared Diamond was correct when he wrote The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race .  In that 1987 article, Diamond lays out his case for why human domestication of both plants and animals for food was not, as is commonly held, progress for our species after all.  In keeping with the HG acronym, the human transition from Hunter-Gatherer to Herder-Gardener has been nothing short of a disaster according to Diamond. Of course the irony is totally lost on the paleos as they sit down to a meal of prime rib topped with ghee and that kale and avocado salad on the side.  Perhaps some 90% cacao...

In Part I , I discussed the first three of four talks at the recent Ancestral Health Symposium that were actually devoted to -- or supposed to be in some fashion -- "ancestral diets".  The IHC has a long history of co-opting select aspects of such dietary practices to fit the current interpretation of the hunter-gatherer-inspired way.  If the deluge of cookbooks from all corners are any indication, there will be no letting up soon of the trend to cauliflow paleoize all "inferior" but nonetheless delicious and often cultural staple foods.   But now, in a most bizarre twist, we've reached the point where imposing "paleofied" versions of ancestral diets on  these very peoples went off without a hitch, or seemingly any notice of the supreme irony of it all. This assault on ancient humanity was culminated in a presentation by Gideon Mailer, PhD.  I took a screenshot of his title slide for visual impact here.  So that you won't need to clienlarge...

Note:  Some of the graphics I'm going to use in this post aren't great, but I don't think I need make much comment as to the changing picture of the so-called Perfect Health Diet.   Paul Jaminet has called his diet the most scientifically sound version of the paleo diet (small caps).  In his tribute to Seth Roberts , Paul wrote: The weaknesses of Seth’s approach to science show up best, I think, in how he ate. Although he considered ours the “sanest” diet book, he didn’t eat our diet. He prized his own experimental results above all else. If an experiment persuaded him that eating something would improve his health, he ate it. To my mind, this led him on a somewhat fanciful peregrination through dietary parameter space. His approach risked two pitfalls: ... ...  most modern health problems take 60 years to develop. So there was no way for Seth to directly appraise whether his diet would generate good health or poor health; ... It is because o...

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

Forget the paleo diet for a moment here. Let's face it, nothing in the modern interpretations ever really came close to whatever that was anyway. Forget hunter gatherers for a moment here.  Let's face it, these cultures are isolated and generally irrelevant in every way to the "modern" agricultural world. Let's even forget the diets of cultures around the globe from 300 or so years ago on back.  Most corners of the world were "contaminated" by trade and transplantation of foodstuffs, livestock and plant species not indigenous to various regions.    No ... I'm talking about traditional regional diets that persisted in practice from the relatively recent past -- within a few hundred years -- through to a few generations ago.   image link How about such diets in cultures that occupied regions that we now call the United States of America?  One of the most disgusting (IMO) things about the so-called "ancestral" health advo...

If this post seems a bit out of the blue, it's because it was written a while ago and I'm currently going through the draft bin attempting to publish up some of that mostly done stuff. First, it is important to note that there are actually three versions of The Perfect Health Diet book (perhaps four, I am unsure if the Kindle version was updated from the first print version, but I'll refer to the self-published Kindle version as v.2).  I mention this because the first ebook was published in 2010 as was the self-published paperback and the latest version was completed late in 2012.  While there are some minor changes, the core of the basis for the PHD has not changed much, if at all and if there were major changes I would expect Paul to highlight them in his various appearances.  So, in v.1 and v.2  the rationale behind the macronutrient content was put forth in a very straightforward manner in a section entitled: Four Reasons to Believe in a 20-65-15 Ma...