The Carb-Sane Asylum

Due to a recent article in Wired , I think this (6/30/14) post could use a hearty bump.  These words were uttered just over a decade ago by Gary Taubes.  THE COLLAPSE OF A $40 MILLION NUTRITION SCIENCE CRUSADE Seth Roberts :  But you'd seen Nobel-Prize-winning physicists get it very wrong. Gary Taubes:  But what they were getting wrong were subtle; yes, they'd believe incorrectly that they'd discovered elementary particles, but what they were doing was a real subtle game. What they were misinterpreting were extraordinarily subtle aspects of the data.   This obesity screw-up is fundamental; it’s like a grade school error in the interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics.   And I made it as well, up until five years ago. I never thought differently.  But what radicalized me is that they don't care.  If they successfully ward off my threat to their beliefs, then I'm in a very dangerous place.  Then it's, like I sai...

Bump Again! I've bumped this before.  I'm still alive and working on blogging, finishing off an installment about the Sugar Slammers. I think this post is worth a read or re-read.  The Laura and John Arnold Foundation funds several non-profits all engaging in targeting sugar as the ultimate cause of everything. Such funds are obscured as donations to universities.  Additionally other non-profits with clear agendas present themselves as taking no industry funding.  It's a dense mess. ORIGINAL CONTENT PUBLISHED MARCH 16, 2015 I'm working on another post regarding conflicts of interest and such, and this came up on the background gathering.  A number of journals are adopting "noble" policies of no longer accepting industry funded studies. Mind you, many of these same journals appear to have no qualms publishing the works of individuals with clear biases and conflicts. I think this hard line on industry funding is wrong-headed.  Not that I'm...

... it's called that for a reason.   This post was prompted by the discussions in this seemingly non-monumental post -- Are the Dietary Guidelines REALLY So Radical? -- that erupted to over 750 comments. The discussion somewhat culminated in this comment , and there are a few posts forthcoming that require this "backgrounder" on thoughts . I like to blog about science.  I like to deal in science.  I consider myself a scientist in much the same way that formerly practicing MDs still consider themselves doctors.   I used to conduct primary research.  The kind that some of today's "scientists" have never even done outside of the classroom environment , if that   (I refer to the likes of Gary Taubes, Zoe Harcombe and James DiNicolantonio to name a few) .  I studied science (a few disciplines, and some engineering too), and I had a career in scientific research (again a few differing fields and applications).  I "can't help myself" ...

Sometime in June of 2010 , I wrote the following words about Gary Taubes: I'm left to conclude this man is totally bereft of intellectual honesty. Supporters of Taubes jumped at this and claimed I had called the man a liar.  A willful fraud.  But at that time I had never used those words.  I don't believe I flat out accused him of lying until December of 2010 in response to his defense of his then new book Why We Get Fat .  I still try to avoid those words, if only because of the flack I receive when I do.  And yet, the qualifier "intellectual" has been bothering me a lot lately.   Intellectual Dishonesty :   " When one avoids an honest, deliberate and comprehensive approach to a matter because it may introduce an adverse effect on personally and professionally held views and beliefs."

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.

One of those "inside jokes" that will makes sense by the end of this post! It's not like I need to start another series, but I have just reached the tipping point with all the nonsense being circulated around this community in the name of science and medical advice.  I cannot think of anything in real life that is so messed up as these unpara-professionals pretending to be "experts" and giving out potentially harmful advice to people they will never even meet or even exchange a meaningful email with.    When I say "unpara" I am referring to the fact that not only are these self-described experts not paraprofessionals (e.g. a paralegal has some formal training in the law, but they cannot practice it;  nurses are licensed medical professionals, but are nonetheless not trained to practice medicine), but they don't have any professional relevance at all.

As I have been trying to wrap my head around the abomination that is The Big Fat Surprise and the buzz/media blitz surrounding the book, it occurred to me that far too much of the conversation surrounding nutritional research involves the use of one or both of two tactics.   It struck me how this book embodies so much of what I've written about here when discussing specific nutritional research studies.   All too often, a study purporting to investigate a particular diet did not actually study that diet.  This can be through poor interpretation of the diet by the researchers, but more often through poor implementation and compliance by subjects.  This happens almost universally with seemingly no quality control over what is constitutes an acceptable diet in order to use terms like low fat, high fat, low carb, high protein, Mediterranean, paleo, etc.etc. in the title.  

Wasn't sure where to discuss this, but I figured it might as well be on the blog.  A week or so ago, I blogged on Paleo Water .  James Fell also blogged on this atrocity that popped up in ads on Jimmy Moore's Livin la Vida Low Carb blog.  His post:   Paleo has jumped the shark .   At that time, the Paleo Water page was green and looked like a spoof.  There was a caveman top left, Jimmy Moore's eight year old "thinker pose" photo on top right with “As recommended by Jimmy Moore of Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb” .  It then listed, along with alkalinity, all the ways paleo water was more like the water our paleolithic ancestors drank.  Free of bacteria and parasites, the water was touted as "as close as scientifically possible to the water our genetic blueprint demands – but no longer receives".  

I changed the title of this post entirely for obvious reasons.   So, in T-minus 4 days the world will finally achieve Cholesterol Clarity !  Thanks to NYT Bestselling (hopeful is he) author Jimmy Moore.   The banner states that: So I looked at the list of experts and recalled this post highlighting how one of them, Dr. Cate Shanahan, blamed carbs for being turned into LDL and then make us fat.  You can browser search to "Skip to here!" and skip the intro stuff.   You might also be interested in my notes from the full presentation, HERE .  I've also had a chance to see what she says about LDL in her book Deep Nutrition, a whole 'nother theory there, and her interview with Jimmy  for the book was quite enlightening.  Beware the shaman lab tech and doctor trying to read your bloodwork tea leaves!  If you don't get hungry between meals you are a healthy fat burner ... don't worry, be happy.  

I don't follow Jack Kruse's antics much any more.  Every now and then, however, he comes up in a social media or email note.  He's still at it -- though there is no longer an answer at his practice phone number, so hopefully that means he's no longer actively performing neurosurgery.  From a Krusite on FB :   Humans are designed to eat an electron dense diet because they have a shortened gut and expanded brain that steepens their energy needs and restricts their sleep needs to 7.5- 8.5 hours. This implies that humans must have evolved around a diet high in electron density from food and their environment. It is hard to believe Jack has been talking this electron nonsense for going on two years now.  I suppose this is what happens in a community that fails to police itself when it comes to science ... but I digress. In any case, I have apparently missed the first however many incoherences Jack has created in his EMF series but since he's still on the ...

Around a month ago, I was alerted to Jeff Volek's involvement with a company called UCAN that markets sports drinks containing SuperStarch.    I blogged on this here .  The SS is touted as being made by a "patent pending" heat/moisture process.  So a little digging was done by Lerner and then I followed the trail, and lo and behold, Volek himself is not on the patent app for SS -- that is the Scottish company that developed it.  No, Volek's patent is (links in comments on that post):    "The present invention is directed to a method of controlling serum insulin levels in an individual, the method comprising the step of administering to the individual a food composition comprising heat and moisture treated starch (HMT starch)." Now I questioned this in the comments.  What would the meaning be of such a permit?  Nobody else could administer UCAN to fat-adapted ultra-marathon runners?  It makes no sense.

INTERVIEWER Marc Hellerstein thought that the obesity epidemic was caused by people being sedentary? TAUBES He believed that the key is whether you’re sedentary compared to how you used to be. When I told him about the Pima and the Sioux Indians and this 1981 study of obesity in oil field workers, he had an excuse for everything. So the Pima and the Sioux Indians, they lived on reservations, so they could be obese because they were relatively sedentary, at least more sedentary than they used to be. And the oil field workers, well, they're Mexican-American, so they have some kind of "thrifty" gene going. You know this is what pathological science is: a field in which you can find a reason to explain away all negative evidence. In pathological science, it’s no longer possible to refute the hypothesis. Remember, science is about trying to test your hypothesis and refute it, but in a field like this, if you test it and come up with a counter-example, the counter-exampl...

Gary Taubes and Peter Attia were among the guests on a John Stossel program entitled Food Bunk a little while ago.  You may still be able to catch reruns if you so desire.   Long story short, Stossel discusses the role of government in regulating and recommending foods and nutrition.  It's worth a watch if you can find it, more for some of the other guests and information.  But thanks to Eenfeldt, I was made aware of the 8-minute appearance of the Lipidic Duo of Taubes and Attia, speaking of course on how our government is/was wrong about fats and the nutritional guidelines.   (I've decided I need a new Lego superhero look for Attia, the old one just had too much hair, please excuse the coloring on the face/head there, it was a quick job.)

Boy Wonder Attia has called off his war on insulin, but his character lives on Well Gary Taubes and Peter Attia -- or, if there was ever a time to refer to them by their superhero Asylum names, Fatman and Glucagon  -- have launched their project, NuSI, the Nutritional Science Initiative. Finally!  Some real proper science will get done, free from the stranglehold of bias inherent in the evil entanglements of government and industry -- oh, and idiot scientists operating with suboptimal intelligence. .   Why any scientist would even apply for a grant from an organization headed by a man with such disdain for them is really beyond me, but ...

Sigh ... I see Mark Sisson has addressed the concept of ion therapy in a recent post .  I had ions on the mind while constructing my last post and just had to weigh in here.  In it he makes the following statement: Because they are either positively or negatively charged, ions are “mobile.” Umm ... say what?  I think he's referring to dissolved ions that move within the solvent liquid (usually water).  They do this by means of diffusion in still water, or by going along for the ride in a moving liquid such as a babbling brook or your shower.  But I'm sitting here staring at a bunch of ions in my salt shaker and they're looking rather sedentary to me.   If by "mobile" he means they jump out into the air, then this an even more misleading statement. He then says (bolded emphasis his) Negative ions generally appear in natural settings in greater numbers than positive ions.

Well ... I wasn't really going to weigh in further past using that recent JAMA article  (EDIT:  full text no longer free at JAMA, see link below) as an example of where statistics can lead us astray.  But ... as is probably expected, this study has kicked up some dust in the community.  I'm sure I'll miss a few, but here's the weighing in so far: Stephan Guyenet Anthony Colpo Marion Nestle Don Matesz Fat Head That's just the blog posts, not the tweets, FB postings or other social media buzz ... and I'm happy to edit in more, just drop the hint in comments.  And here's the full text of the study:   Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance

The topic of this post is a piece by the BBC in advance of blaming two American men for the obesity epidemic in the world today.  So the title comes from that.   So Jacques Peretti weighs in with another piece on how Americans sabotaged the world with sugar  with:   What caused the obesity epidemic in the West?   Jacques is pictured at right behind a ginormous platter of food.  For a piece blaming sugar, one would think the picture would feature pastries and a Big Gulp, but no, it's bread surrounding what appears to be a bunch of dippy fatty stuffs.  Oh ... and we don't just eat too much food, right?  In this latest piece of pseudoscience journalism run amok, Peretti focuses heavily on quotes from Lustig.  I'll come back to some of the rest of that when I get to critiquing the "science" in Part III of the Skinny on Obesity series.  And let's just mention but move on from the most ridiculous statement in that article now shall we?

Staying true to one of the founding missions of the Asylum, there's a YouTube series entitled The Skinny on Obesity, from University of California, that deserves critical attention.   If you're going to put forth science to explain obesity and associated disease, especially in the affirmative sense ("fact", "we know", "is" rather than "possibly", "probably", "evidence supports"), it should be correct to the best of current knowledge.   I've made it through five of the episodes to date, and sad to say, this series falls far short of that mark.   Thus far, there have been three contributors:  Dr. Robert Lustig, Elissa Epel, and Barbara Laraia.  Almost everyone is familiar with Lustig, the last two listed as affiliated with The Center for Obesity Assessment and Study at UC but we learn nothing about their backgrounds.   By far the major contributor to the science is Lustig and he gets some basic things so horrib...

I've been musing a bit in comments and asides lately over the low carb movement.  When I discovered the LC internet community in early 2009 those were some still heady days.  In retrospect I'm not sure how much it was really growing vs. the hype of same, but it was a thriving community with well traveled blogs and discussion boards.  The number of "big names" touting Taubes' alternate hypothesis was staggering, really, and reports of how the mainstream was finally catching on were frequent.  Looking back, it seems the year or so before were even headier times for low carb.   Fast forward and in 2011 many big names jumped ship, not to mention the readership of blogs like this one increased dramatically.  Even many who remain wedded to LC as the only superior answer to all ills no longer believe TWICHOO to be correct.   Many have retooled their message, clarified their positions, etc.etc.  This is clearly more difficult for some than others -- it'...

Confession time.  I found out about that recent LC v. LF diet study from Andreas Eenfeldt's blog.  Andreas seems woefully misguided into thinking that obese Americans got that way listening to US Government guidelines and eating a low fat diet.  Any and every study that shows some advantage for LC is rapidly added to his list demonstrating that LCHF is superior and LF diets are nothing short of criminal at this point.  I'll have some personal things to say about all of this at the end of the post.  Gossip Mongers can skip to there if you like ;-) (scroll down to line, or browser search on "And so now") In any case, in a blog post entitled  New Study: High Fat Food is Good for Diabetics , Andreas cites this "news" article:   High-fat diet lowered blood sugar and improved blood lipids in diabetics .  Another low carb advocate, Dr. Eades, also tweeted the following :   RCT shows better glycemic control & improved lipid labs seen in diabetic...