The Carb-Sane Asylum

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...

This will be the last of the post with this title, until perhaps sometime in September when Sam Feltham plans to do another publicity stunt the oh so insightful will fawn over and promote as science and whatnot.  However, the post title is a play on "Feast or Famine" and intended to highlight the great disparity between the claims about calories in the "alternate" community and the actual practices engaged in by long time converts to the "opposite of everything we've ever been taught about nutrition" folks.    See:  Fast or Feltham  and  Fast or Feltham II .

The title of this post is a play on "feast or famine".   One of the things about blogging, for me anyway, is that over time you accumulate a draft bin full of posts that never get published.  Some of these are on studies I never got the chance to fully flesh out, others are on the "goings on" during a particular time that never seemed appropriate to hit Publish on by the time they were ready.  They are the closest thing I have to a diary and it can often be interesting to read back through the draft bin.   It is hard to believe that I've been blogging over three years now, and involved in this community for more than another year longer than that.  Barely a blink of an eye compared to some but my how times have changed.  This time four years ago Mark Sisson published Primal Blueprint and Jimmy Moore weighed around 245 lbs after getting down to the mid 230's earlier in the year.  Nobody would have known about or considered eating nothing but egg...

direct image link For those not familiar with "Kimmer", allow me to fill in with a little background.  Kimmer was the screen name used by one Heidi Diaz who started a subscription weight loss site KimKins.com.  The website -- version 3.0 -- lives on.  KimKins is essentially several low carb diets that are also low fat and low calorie.  I think the most severe of them is around 300 cal/day.  Kimmer used pictures of others for fake "after" pictures while remaining obese herself and promoting KK as a successful weight loss plan.  You see, here is the before and apparently a real intermediate pic of Kimmer, and her "after" shot.  Below that we have a montage of before/afters used by Heidi.  It always amazed me that folks were apparently unquestioning of these shots, but maybe it's just me that would look at any of them and at least wonder whether this was the same person or not.  Below right is a split screen of Heidi's before picture and the ...

I'm going to try to make this as short and to the point as possible.  It's just me thinking out loud a bit, drawing on the massive amount of peer review research I've read on the topic -- a mere fraction of which I've formally blogged on -- but without any references so that I can just get this out there.  No ... this is not some manifesto grand theory on diabetes and all that to be analyzed and picked apart as if I'm presenting this as fact.  It's just a plausible analogy for what I think happens when metabolic mahem turns to "diabetes".  I'm also going to simplify things and deal with only glucose and fatty acids here. Our ß-cells metabolize glucose and fatty acids the same way our other cells like muscle cells do for energy.  Essentially this metabolism is part of the mechanism by which the ß-cell senses the circulating levels of these energy substrates.  This metabolism also produces ROS -- reactive oxidative species.  While ROS are often...

I found this study tweeted by a follower, @JuhanaHarju, and the ever helpful MM was able to provide me with the full text. Very-low-calorie diet: a quick therapeutic tool to improve ß-cell function in morbidly obese patients with type 2 diabetes Background:  Caloric restriction in obese diabetic patients quickly improves glucose control, independently from weight loss. However, the early effects of a very-low-calorie diet (VLCD) on insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion in morbidly obese patients with type 2 diabetes are still unclear. Objective:  The objective was to study the relative contributions of insulin sensitivity, insulin secretion, or both to improvement in glucose metabolism, after 1 wk of caloric restriction, in severely obese diabetic patients. Design:  Hyperglycemic clamps were performed in 14 severely obese (BMI, in kg/m 2 : >40) patients with type 2 diabetes in good glucose control (glycated hemoglobin < 7.5%) before and a...