The Carb-Sane Asylum

Blogstress Note: I wrote most of the analysis in this post around a year ago when I was looking for some additional examples of what I call "accidental evidences" against the concept of sugar addiction (and food addiction in general), just never got to tidying it up.  Therefore this post will be formatted a little oddly as it's what I have time for.  I'll do some general conclusions as regards sugar addiction, and then include the detail afterwards.  Whatever conclusions one might make vis a vis the minerals involved in this study are welcomed in comments, with the understanding that I'll likely not engage on those points due to time constraints.  In the end it seems difficult to arrive at any consistent conclusion  from the study I'll discuss, as results often contradicted themselves from one of the three experiments to the next. While perhaps not as striking as the image I've chosen here, I believe the size (and thus age) differentials of the animal...

An important result was that motivation to lever press was impairednot only in food-restricted rats working for food reinforcement (sucrose), but also in water-restricted rats working for water reinforcement.  The non-specificity of the impairment suggests that the REF diet affected general mechanisms of motivation rather than those specific to the feeding behavioral system. Taken together, these findings lend support to the hypothesis raised by scientists [28,29] and journalists [30] that obesity may not be the result of impaired motivation (lethargy).  Rather, an obesogenic diet, such as that consisting of highly processed, refined foods, may induce obesity and disrupt motivational mechanisms of the central nervous system.   This hypothesis awaits further empirical  scrutiny and does not necessarily rule out the lack of will power as a contributing  factor to obesity. Three guesses who/what reference 30 is, and the first two don't count.  Oh my. ...

Over the past several months I have fallen down more PubMed rabbit holes than I care to admit to ... and that's just for the Restriction Addiction book (which, by the way, I'm putting the finishing touches on for republishing the updated and expanded version). Research for that book was overwhelming at times because of the sheer volume of studies out there on food addiction, dopamine, food reward, obesity, eating disorders, etc.etc. A ton of them in rats. No ... my book is not a lengthy compendium with 1000 references. There are a few seminal reviews that illustrate key points. One of these is the following from Nicole Avena PhD. :   Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake.   The PDF for this is more like a mini-book, complete with sections and content navigation.  So when I was perusing the schedule for the upcoming New Age Paleo CONference and MLM Expo (aka PaleoFX) and saw her name among th...

Hello all! A little while back I recorded a podcast with Antonio Valladares and Scott Kustes of Evil Sugar Radio.  It airs today.  We discuss my book, Restriction Addiction , as well as TWICHOO and Gary Taubes.  We also discuss a bit of paleo craziness.  It was a lot of fun and I hope you'll enjoy! EPISODE 39 Edit:  Apparently over on the website someone left a comment challenging my representation of Stefansson's all meat diet.  From my response: http://owndoc.com/pdf/meat-only-diet2.pdf “During the first 2 days his diet approximated that of the Eskimos, as reported by Krogh and Krogh (3), except that he took only one-third as much carbohydrate. The protein accounted for 45 per cent of his food calories. The intestinal disturbance began on the 3rd day of this diet. During the next 2 days he took much less protein and more fat so that he received about 20 per cent of his calories from protein and 80 per cent from fat. In these tw...

Not much, how 'bout you? Actually yours truly has been busy with life and a project and my blogging has been non-existent except for the occasional random bump.  It hasn't been all that long really, but per my usual frequency it's dropped off big time. I hope everyone here had a happy new year and I'm sure hoping that 2014 will be a better year for all.  That goes for those who had rocky 2013's and good ones alike, because there's no harm in optimism :-)   So .... What have I been up to?  Well, I wrote my first book (e-book).  It's called Restriction Addiction and it's about how food addiction is really eating disordered behavior brought on by restricting food, not by foods causing physical dependence like alcohol and some drugs.   For now it will not be released as a stand-alone product as I'm teaming up with a number of people on a project that's bound to be EPIC!  Look for more hints to be dropped soon and a formal reveal somewhere...