The Carb-Sane Asylum

[no I'm not retiring the blog] TLDR:  Rather than dragging things on by dismissing more black swans, Gary Taubes could eat crow and go quietly into the night. After a long hiatus from any meaningful new content, and monumental blows to TWICHOO (Taubes Wrong Insulin Carbohydrate Hypothesis Of Obesity -- c'mon, it has a much better ring to it than the Ludwigian version), , Gary Taubes has gotten back to blogging a bit.* He has apparently been reading (in fits and starts, in other words, probably not really reading) obscure books about obscure cultures from long, long ago.  Mind you, that in five years plus of arduous and comprehensive research put forth in Good Calories, Bad Calories , there was no mention of the Yahgan people he's about to discuss.   One wonders why not.  Heck, this is right in his time period of excellence for nutritional research and reporting!  ( Uttermost Parts of the Earth , this is to a 2007 version of a book Taubes...

Preface: I have to say this.  Sorry, not sorry.  If you have children, and you want to help them with nutrition and health as they grow, teach them about food and teach them how to cook.   Get your own weight and health under control (if it's a problem) so that you can pass down good habits to your children.  Or do nothing.  None of my business.  But whatever you do, do not buy your child a copy of Fat Head Kids or let them within 50 yards of a showing of the Fat Head Kids movie if it ever comes out.  Put a block on your Hulu or whatever streaming service it is eventually on.  I cannot recommend more strongly against this. Every time I have watched snippets of some video of Tom talking about this book, or read the preview content on Amazon, I just get utterly creeped out by the whole thing, and Tom Naughton specifically.  Books for children should not include shirtless pictures of the middle aged author who goes on about boy boobs....

This post brought to you by Duck Dodgers' arrogance.  If there ever were an example of what is wrong with science in the Incestral Health Community, it is the phenomenon that is "Duck Dodgers" and his comments here.     A seemingly non-controversial post -- on how the US Dietary Guidelines were never any radical departure from the way humans around the globe have eaten for thousands of years -- went viral, at least in part because of Duck's return.   What rubs me personally the wrong way about this person (or persons, though I've been told it is only one person who posts with that ID in comments here so I operate on that assumption) is his response to any challenge to "How Food Enrichment Made Us Fat, Diabetic, and Chronically Diseased" otherwise known as the "Iron Food Enrichment Hypothesis" .  Despite doubling down on the whole fortification thing at the off-the-grid web rental only around a month ago, this guy comes on here and plays...

... 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" ...

Just a listing of all posts with significant content related directly to her writing or other statements.  It is my hope that I can add small descriptions of each post, but I wanted to put relevant links in one place so as to be able to link to it in the Change.org petition I am setting up for the recent BMJ article.   Ladies and Gentlemen I present .... The new Gary Taubes. Nina Teicholz  Book Review ~ Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz No Big Surprise ... A Compendium of Errata Etc. from The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz Quotable Quotes: Tei¢holz and Taube$ Nina Tei¢holz, Shai'ster Series:   Posts discussing Teicholz's downplaying of other research while holding the 2008 Israeli DIRECT study led by Shai as a definitive work establishing the superiority of high fat diets. Part I: The Diets of Shai et.al. and Extrapolating from Weight Loss Studies Part II: Applicability of RCTs to the General Population Part III: Well Implemented Cl...

Context is important ... always.  But never so important, it seems, as when we're talking about fructose.  The vast majority of studies used to demonize fructose involve either: Very high doses, and/or An increase in energy intake or overall energy surplus Doing some math, let's use some 500 cal/day increments, a few percentage levels, and  a traditionally sugar sweetened beverage, Sierra Mist ( 26g sugar in 8 oz , or 3.25 g/oz).

Summary: If A and B are significantly correlated, then: A  MAY  cause B, or B  MAY  cause A, or Any number of other factors could correlate with A and B such that these two variables "track" together. If A and B are not correlated, then it is exceedingly improbable that any of the above are true.    Shorter Summary: Correlation does not equal causation, but without correlation, there's no causation.

I am going to use diet comparison studies for examples throughout this post.  In a previous post, A Matter of Control , I discussed the concept of control in experiments compared with the general English language meaning of the word. Therefore, when using the word control it has no meaning with respect to how well implemented a particular study is with respect to compliance, completeness of data, etc. I do want to stress, however, that the "proper" usage of the term in clinical trial design can be rendered all but meaningless if the compliance cannot be properly assessed and verified.  Without this, we have GIGO = Garbage In, Garbage Out.   If you are studying the effects of a daily pill, you can have a perfect experiment, but if the subjects don't take that pill according to schedule, the outcome will always be shadowed with doubt. Before I go on, I also want to make it clear that this is in no way intended to be a detailed discussion of statistical methods, et...

In advance of my next installment of Nina Tei¢holz, Shai'ster, wherein I will discuss her claims that the Shai/DIRECT study was "rigorously controlled", I thought I'd give this post a bump. Original publish date Dec. 10, 2011 Control. It seems to me that many people misinterpret -- at least in their minds -- the meaning of this word when it is used in the scientific context.   While most of those no doubt understand the concept, after hearing the term enough, it just seems it comes to mean something else to them after a while.  I submit as evidence, statements made by two popular bloggers.   First up, J. Stanton at gnolls.org with  How “Heart-Healthy Whole Grains” Make Us Fat .  Wait!!  Did you click that link already?  I forgot to caution you that the post you are about to read contains science, so you might want to proceed with caution.  < / sarcasm > .  Anyway, the study he discusses in that post is:   High G...

It's not often I share journal articles without comment here anymore, but I just wanted to share this with my readers. Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims   from Nature .

Have a listen to just 30 seconds of Robb Wolf, Diplomat Extraordinaire for Paleo™ from his recent podcast on the Christina Warinner  Debunking Paleo video ... transcript here .   Hosted by Kiwi6 file hosting Alan Aragon, highly respected author of the popular and informative Alan Aragon's Research Review , spoke recently at a conference of the National Strength and Conditioning Association, NSCA. They recently put the slides from his presentation online HERE .  Please do expend some "skull sweat" as Robb calls it to inform yourself of the full content of Alan's presentation.  Do especially take note of slide 53 which summarizes the paleo studies (some of which) Robb makes frequent reference to (and most of which I've discussed here).  Also take note that 

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...

... it's not a competition, the compliant/successful are analyzed separately, and while we're at it, perhaps we can do away with this notion that any single outcome or cluster of outcomes is somehow more important because we've designated them as "primary" ahead of time. Such is where I find my thoughts wandering as the Look AHEAD diabetes trial passes in and out of my head as I absorb the discussions of it here and about the web.  

I weighed in with some initial thoughts on Gary Taubes and Peter Attia's new venture NuSI here .  Yeah, I'm going all wet blanket on this deal, but for good reasons grounded in reality in my opinion.  I'll leave it to all the others to get all excited about this venture and all the "real science" we'll see come from it.   As Gary says of NuSI : Its purpose is to facilitate and fund rigorous, well-controlled experiments targeted at resolving unambiguously many of the outstanding nutrition controversies — to answer the question definitively of what constitutes a healthy diet. A bar too high? What would constitute a rigorous, well-controlled experiment?  Well, as I pointed out in my last post, the biggest "knocks" the NuSI gang make on existing research are not really with experimental design per se, but rather with practical limitations in doing human clinical trials.  These are: The inherent lack of compliance control in free-living studies. Th...

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 ...

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...

In light of recent events, I thought I'd do a little bump fest.  My apologies to my regulars.  I will be putting out new material very soon. Original post date:  9/29/11 Oh CarbSane, why must you constantly criticize my favorite guru?  After all: He/she helped me lose XX lbs He/she is right about ABC & LMNOP He/she is just trying to get the studies done He/she saved my life! He/she has helped me finally understand why I'm fat He/she cured my XYZ The mainstream is wrong, we need more like him/her, don't discourage them Ad Hominem!!!! etc. etc.

From Matt Metzgar Scientific habits of mind, or the scientific process, can be succinctly summarized as the use of evidence and reason to arrive at conclusions. This sounds simple but it’s a demanding code: Take nothing for granted, form conclusions on the basis of careful observation and honest thinking, and be willing to modify those conclusions in the light of new experience. Art Hobson, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Arkansas I copied this here because I think this is a far better description of what science is, or should be, than the black swanning meme I keep hearing.  By that I mean I get pretty tired of hearing the various versions of the "a good scientist tries to disprove their hypothesis" nonsense.  Any research scientists in my audience believe that?  This is why I've said all along that there was never a need for an alternate hypothesis to explain the obesity epidemic, and further that the alternate hypothesis put forth anyway was never formu...

Link:  Mat Lalonde Title:  An Organic Chemist’s Perspective on Paleo ? Ratings:      ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼       just go watch/listen!!     OK folks ... I've got me a new sci-crush!  This guy is saying what I've been saying for a long time now -- if you're gonna make claims about something, you better have the stuff to back it up.  Mat, there is no problem with your delivery man, don't change.  Your detractors are obviously those "doth protesting too much" who know they've just been called out without being named.

The purpose of this post is to have a sort-of "disclaimer" to link to (if I can remember) whenever I discuss a rodent study here at the Asylum ... A small manifesto if you will, on my feelings on the utility and limitations of rodent studies in relation to human beings.   Also, I look at this post as a way to remind older readers and/or inform newer readers as to my background.  I spent roughly five years in the company of countless rats and mice, working for Big Pharma, and when I speak of rats, I'm not talking about my colleagues ;-)  My job was half analytical chemistry, half metabolism.  I worked on mostly discovery level drug candidates (a level before development) characterizing the absorption, metabolism and routes of excretion of these drugs, mostly antidepressants.  As such I've chopped the heads off of more rats than I care to recollect, opened up countless abdomens of mice to get maximum blood samples from the vena cava, removed/homogenized and analyz...