The Carb-Sane Asylum

U nless you've been living under a "rock" in the world of nutrition, you're aware that Stephan Guyenet "debated" Gary Taubes on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. It took me several days broken up to watch/listen to the whole thing. In a nutshell, it was Science & Substance (Stephan Guyenet) versus Stories & Slander (Gary Taubes). Rather than summarize, there were several points made that I'd like to address. In no particular order. I'll include this intro with links to prior topics as this series progresses.

S ummary: Continuing on with discussion of:   Effects of a low carbohydrate diet on energy expenditure during weight loss maintenance: randomized trial Previous posts in this series: Part I: Critique of the Study Design Part II: $12 Million for 12% Weight Loss? Part III: Some "Early" Lessons Part IV: Insulin Resistance Does Not Hamper Weight Loss This post should perhaps have come first, but it has taken a while to look deeply at the data for the primary outcome -- total energy expenditure measured by doubly labeled water -- and related outcomes of intake and resting energy expenditure. In this study, all participants were paid to participate, AND provided free food for ~8 months.  Said food was professionally and meticulously prepped, weighed, measured, individualized to provide each subject with some pretty exact caloric level and macronutrient composition.  The test phase (in other words, the study proper) involved maintaining a consiste...

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...

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....

NOTE: It's no secret that my blogging has fallen off. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them has been that I start some train of thought or down some research rabbit hole, and just never get around to finishing a post to my liking ... then things move on. This post is such a one. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't date drafts (or I didn't note it before I opened the draft with edit), but the original introduction referenced events that would indicate sometime in October 2015!  It was also around that time that Robert Lustig came out with a study on NAFLD in children. Lustig has made a comeback in my comments section here of late. He has parlayed a career as a pediatric endocrinologist into a bizarre career as a celebrity doctor/researcher who blames obesity and all evils on one molecule: fructose. I say bizarre because he makes unfounded claim after unfounded claim after unfounded claim as regards fructose. Many of his offerings are backed by the Uni...

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...

B ump! One would think that the calorie or energy-balance denialists would have gotten a clue by now, but apparently this post needs bumping.   If you make it through this post and still believe calories are some non-entity, that somehow insulin or any hormone can trump energy balance, I don't know what to say. Original Post Date July 1, 2013    Calories ... ... or joules or ergs or foot·lbs or BTUs or eV or ... These are all the same thing folks.  They are all units of energy. That we use different terms in different contexts doesn't mean we are talking about different things.  It's like different languages, be it vida or leben or liv or  อายุการใช้งาน  ... they all mean life. The bastardizing of basic science in the Paleo and LLVLC realms is both ubiquitous and unrelenting.  This is what prompted me to start this blog.  I could really care less about the diet fads that come along that are obvious quackery, but this ...

A quick post here just to get it out there, and I'm already a couple weeks behind the curve.  Oddly haven't heard too much about this, or perhaps it's because I've lost the will to deal with the community that would jump on this?  Who knows :-) There is a new NIH funded study out of Columbia (Rosenbaum & Leibel) published this month:   Models of Energy Homeostasis in Response to Maintenance of Reduced Body Weight I'm going to limit this post to just one of the three experiments conducted: In 17 subjects (14 women, 3 men) weight stable energy expenditure and body composition  was determined following a period of 6-8 weeks of weight stability.  They were then put on an 800 cal/day diet until they had reduced their weight by 10% of initial weight.  This took 7-13 weeks, after which their food intake was increased to achieve weight stability at the 10% reduced weight for 6-8 weeks.  Energy expenditure and body composition were measured her...

Post Overview: In the context of weight loss, maintenance or gain, eventually all roads lead to the acceptance that *calories matter* ... you must be in deficit, balance or surplus respectively. In the wake of the recent The Biggest Loser Regain study , there has been a lot of doom-and-gloom reporting, led by Gina Kolata and Sandra Aamodt  in the New York Times .   I've distilled the results down to the bare bones: Summarized from Table 1 from Fothergill et.al.   14 Contestants (6 Men , 8 Women) The "alarming outcome" was that resting metabolic rate was reduced as might be expected, but seemingly remained suppressed and even further declined despite significant re-gain (70% re-gain/loss for the mean) after 6 years.   However the TEEs -- the TOTAL energy expenditures for the day -- tell a different tale.   These were measured over a roughly two week period by doubly labeled water in free-living conditions. The TEEs remained high at 30 weeks...

Is Gary Taubes losing it?  His grip on reality, that is?  I submit that it is the only "innocent" explanation for his behavior of late. Gary Taubes and Mike Eades in Better Days for Low Carb "Science"  8/13/2008 direct image link I'll have more to say when I can recoup from the busy time of year in my real job coupled with traveling weekend before last.  But if you haven't heard, two studies conducted by NIH scientist Kevin Hall: The unveiling of the results of the NuSI funded multi-center study at an obesity conference.  See Nutrition Wonk for the most info.  This was a 2 month metabolic ward study. The followup results of a study on The Biggest Loser with some confusing metabolic outcomes.  I say confusing as the numbers don't add up, but that hasn't stopped pretty much everyone from painting a picture of doom and gloom topped with a large dollop of CICO/ELMM is going to destroy your metabolism fatalism.    I will have more...

Yes. Blogstress Note:  This post has been brewing ... in my head and in the Blogger draft, for a few days now.  This issue really hit a nerve, but every time I started writing, things got even longer than my usual.    I didn't want it to be unmanageably long, but I also didn't want to start a whole series.  I think I may have found a way to cut this to two somewhat manageable parts, without straying too far off of blog topic. This will be a departure from normal events here, and yet ties in with topics I discuss with some degree of regularity, both in general and within the IHC:  Calories and Eating Disorders. click to enlarge Part I will deal with Calories Part II will deal with Eating Disorders This is going to be female-centric.  Sorry male readers! Without further ado: Yes, something got under my skin the other day on Facebook, and since this is my major outlet for sharing thoughts, I'm blogging about it here.   Apparen...

From his very first foray into the abyss that is "horrible" nutrition science, right on up through today, one thing has remained consistent for Gary Taubes.  Sure, the alpha glycerol phosphate idea where you can't store fat without dietary carb was blasted to smitherines by his own reference decades before the advance for GCBC was paid out.  Nevermind that billions of white rice eaters countered his insulin spiking notions.  Don't even notice the man behind the fructose curtain, a mirage known as the non-insulin spiking carb.   As any good man of science will tell you, Gary Taubes insists that any hypothesis (and thus any supporting mechanisms) must be able to explain all of the observations.  I agree.  Too bad he doesn't hold his own hypotheses up to even a modicum of his own standards, or perhaps we might be congratulating Peter Attia and Gary on their successful opening of the $40Mil Newcastle-in-America Diabetes Clinic.  But instead, NuSI i...

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.

For the past couple of months, I've been somewhat obsessing about thermodynamics having written the AARR piece and a few blog posts, not to mention revisiting several dating back to near the beginnings of this blog.  I began this a while ago as a single lengthy post, but it's gotten out of hand and finding time to tidy up such a post vs. publishing shorter chunks in parts became impossible.  Not sure how many parts this will have.  This series will put several members of the IHC "on the record" so to speak.  While I've done so in the past, the hope is to have it all in one place. Robert Atkins the Calorie Guy!    Surely Atkins is an honorary member of the IHC, even though he passed away over a decade ago before this community reached the level that it has.  Most of the "greats" have learned something (perhaps essentially everything) they know about low carb diets and tangentially about thermodynamics/calorie theory from the "late great one...

On the urgings of a few commenters here on the blog, and even more recently , by Don't-Call-Him-John (Kiefer), I've found myself reading Biological Thermodynamics by Donald Haynie (2nd edition).  [It's #1 on this  Amazon Search  page, just for context that there are others out there.] After reading large chunks of the book -- had a lot of time on my hands without internet access these past couple of weeks -- it has become even more clear as to where some of the biggest misconceptions about thermodynamics in this community come from.  It is not that Haynie is incorrect, however.  There are many statements in the book that read as "off", but on second or third pass through are technically accurate provided one is using his definitions in proper context*.  It is more that his book is so filled with examples that lack relevance to biological contexts as to cloud the picture.  What results is that although somewhere in the text all the relevant "prer...

[Blogstress note:  this article is not similar to that in AARR recently mentioned here]  In the background here I've been doing a lot of thinking and writing on thermodynamics and how the body uses food to produce internal energy to "do stuff".    In the end, we "burn" the macronutrient molecules in our food to release the chemical energy stored in those molecules, and ultimately we use that energy to do "work".   I've said we can mostly ignore entropy in the context of the human body, but in chemical thermodynamics we have the concept of Gibbs free energy:  G.   Most importantly in chemistry, we are concerned with the change in free energy of reactions: ΔG rxn  =    ΔH rxn    - T ΔS rxn ΔH rxn  = change in enthalpy (energy)    ΔS rxn  = change in entropy  ΔG rxn  = change in free energy Free energy is the energy available to do work.  For example to move things such as ...

I'm once again honored to contribute to this month's edition of Alan Aragon's Research Review.   This time I was interviewed and answered the following questions:   This is premium subscription content, but AARR is always worth the price in my opinion!   Plus you'll get access to all archives (including past contributions from yours truly from the May-June issues of 2013 and 2014). I missed getting to have my dedication in there, as I didn't think of it until after submission, but I wanted to dedicate the article to my grad school advisor Dr. Owen F. Devereux.   Dr. D died a couple years back or I would have been proud to send him my writings on thermodynamics.  He wrote a book called Topics in Metallurgical Thermodynamics that was his main area of research.  I called it the bane of my grad school existence, but really it wasn't.  Through applying the concepts of that book to my research I really learned and understood thermodynamics. ...

Part I Fattening Things: (It's been a little while, sorry) ... Before continuing (and completing) this discussion, let me preface this post by saying that there is no single food or macronutrient that is inherently fattening in and of itself.  For any food -- let's say pizza because that is blamed quite often -- you can find obese people that are not big fans, and you can find bean poles who basically live off of the stuff (and wash it down with Coke).   But I do believe certain foods have demonstrated themselves to be problematic for a large enough proportion of the population so as to be designated:   potentially fattening . Try as some may to rationalize against it, the bottom line is that if you eat too much of anything, the body's long term storage facility for that is fat tissue.   Your most potentially fattening foods, therefore, are: Those (generally fat + carb combos) highly palatable foods that are easy to eat a lot of in and of themselves...

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.