The Carb-Sane Asylum

Sixteen Post Bumps for 2016 ...  No. 1 Post Summary The main role of insulin in the body is to inhibit processes that release energy substrates into circulation on an otherwise "always on" continual basis.  Insulin plays a stimulatory role in the clearance of glucose from circulation, but this is secondary to its inhibitory role, and may not even be physiologically important.  The generally accepted progression of "insulin resistance" -- beginning with impaired uptake of glucose in response to insulin stimulation, leading to a "backing up" of glucose into circulation, and requiring more and more insulin to clear the glucose -- is almost certainly incorrect. Radiolabel studies have demonstrated that in both T1 and T2 diabetics, glucose uptake is not impaired , and indeed may even be greater than normal. Hyperglycemia is due to  relative insulin deficiency even if overall insulin levels are high .  This deficiency is due to failure of the pa...

Politics swirled this week, and as a scientist I wept.    Much more to come here, check out recent posts if you missed them!   As billionaire pescatarians Laura and John Arnold   bankroll meat industry spokesperson  Nina Teicholz via their lobbying 501(c)s Action Now Initiative & Nutrition Coalition  it is easy to lose sight of the actual nutrition surveys and science we are talking about. The hand-wringing, panty bunching, and other various "ings" going on over the impending issue of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines is almost assuredly not about the scientific rigor of the process or the guidelines themselves.  Are they perfect?  No.  Are they really all that radical or far off from what would be healthful eating, on a population-wide basis, for the United States of America?  Again, no.   Setting aside the particular foods themselves for the time being, the main argument is that this grand low-fat experiment has been a g...

Hello all!  A quick follow-on post to yesterday's offering on the Ma-Pi2 diet for diabetes.  This diet is vegan, grain based (brown rice, millet, barley), includes legumes and copious veggies, and "macrobiotic" foods like seaweed and green tea.   Recent Post:   Vegan Ma-Pi Diet Bests "Conventional Treatment" for Diabetes in Recent RCT Previous Posts:   Carbohydrate and Diabetes , Carbohydrate and Diabetes II I want to make clear that my purpose for blogging on this particular diet is not one of advocacy.   I don't believe there is any evidence for humanity avoiding all animal derived sustenance and, sorry, but the Ma-Pi diet does seem a rather austere one to me.   Furthermore, I am offering no comment on the "macrobiotic" claims and whether the inclusion of some of these special foods is integral to the success of these programs.  When looking at the success of programs such as native Hawaiian diets (discussed here ), and others, which...

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...

I have blogged quite a bit about how the concept of entropy and heat evolution have been erroneously equated. I'm not going to rehash that here, but rather set that aside and look at how the perspective of the Second Law of thermodynamics can lead to another misconception regarding the loss of energy.  Classical Thermodynamics  Here is a formal definition of thermodynamics . It is the most literal and narrow one I could find. It applies pretty specifically to systems like a combustion engine, where heating a gas causes it to expand, and this expanding gas is contained in such a way as to do mechanical work by moving an object (in an engine this object is the piston). When fuel is combusted, an amount of heat is released equal to the difference between the chemical potential energy stored in the bonds of the reactants and the products. We can think of this "heat in" or "energy in" to the gas.

Links to scientific background and calculations below.   Oh ... and more teaspoons :-)

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a comment on my recent post --  More on Calories: A Gallon of Gas is NOT A Gallon of Gas? ... And Other Silly Thermodenyic Arguments  -- from David Pendergrass, PhD.  Pendergrass has been a speaker at AHS, and last year his talk was: The Physiology and Biochemistry of the Paleolithic Diet for Weight Reduction :   The physiology and biochemistry interactions of an individual using Paleolithic nutrition will be compared to an individual on the USDA recommended diet to demonstrate why Paleolithic Nutrition results in a success weight loss. Bio: Director of Applied Science at the University of Kansas. He conducts a yearly seminar on appetite regulation. He is the author of the Smartest Loser program. He founded the Paleo Nutrition Foundation and a Paleo Nutrition Certification program online. 

Previous post:   More on Calories: A Gallon of Gas is NOT A Gallon of Gas? ... And Other Silly Thermodenyic Arguments The name of Adam Kosloff's website -- Caloriegate -- implies some criminal conspiracy to, I guess, spread a lie about calories.  If he had his way, anyone who speaks the plain truth about the biochemistry that goes on in our human bodies would just STFU already (his words) and count "something else".  Kosloff is a true leech in the IHC.  The guy studied geology at Yale and if his writings are any indication, knows pretty much nothing about human physiology or biochemistry.  He's a ghost-writer, which is an honest profession, but in his own words:

Richard Feinman announced on his Facebook page a little while ago that he is writing a book on Thermodynamics, and because every now and then he pops up in the hilarious Facebook threads featuring Fred "Super Slow" Hahn, Feinman's FB page is one that's interesting to pop in on from time to time.  Such was Feinman's response to a request from Ian Lane whose blog tagline is "For the frustrated few who want only the truth."  Sigh.  So the request was for Feinman to provide feedback on one of Lane's blog posts, to which Feinman responded (paraphrasing) ' TL;DR, I've been at this for decades Sonny, read my papers!' The Energy In a Gallon of Gas Changes?

I have known a number of people personally, including family members, that have had cancer.  I remember a high school friend's mother dying of lung cancer.  I remember a high school class and teammate being diagnosed with pituitary cancer.  Obviously none of these people are me, but I've had a taste from a fairly young age of the disease and what people go through "up close and personal" from early on.   Although no medical treatment is fool proof or works 100% of the time, when, in my 20's, I was working alongside folks with kids in day care, I contracted strep throat quite a few times.  I would go to the doc, they would do the swipe test, and within a short time I would walk out with my prescription for an antibiotic, I'd fill the script, take it, and the infection would go away. Cancer is not like that.  It's different in different organs, there are different types in the same organs/tissues, there's metastasis, different growth rates,...

I was truly baffled beyond all bafflement (is that a word?) that Feinman & Fine wrote  "A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics , let alone that it passed the peer review process to be published in any reputable journal.  In the abstract they write: Here, we propose that a misunderstanding of the second law accounts for the controversy about the role of macronutrient effect on weight loss and we review some aspects of elementary thermodynamics. Here I propose that it is their apparent misunderstanding of thermodynamics, as put forth in this "study", that accounts for most of the gimmickry surrounding low carb diets in the community.  In the section entitled  "Thermodynamics" , they write: