The Carb-Sane Asylum

*** Can you help a girl out?  Where is the traffic coming from?? Thanks! *** In the past week, I've noticed a sustained trickle of traffic to this post of mine from over a year ago (original publish date 4/28/12) .  Therefore, rather than write another post on a somewhat older topic, I decided to bump this one and add some comments.   For most of this year I have been under attack for posts of this nature and all I can do to counter those is to point out that this post is not a personal attack.  What I've written is as respectful as can be when the subject is someone who, were she promoting veganism or McDougall's diet would be vilified and likely destroyed in the LC community.   Yet I haven't done so even though I believe Laura Dolson is deserved of some criticism for not telling the full story here.

Previous posts in this series:  Biophysical Electrochemistry and Human Metabolism , Part II: Atoms & The Periodic Table , Part III: The Main Group Elements, The Octet Rule and Ions , Part IV: Ionic Compounds, Elements & Oxidation State Defined , Part V: Covalent Bonding & Molecules , Part VI: Electron "Ownership" & Polarity , Part VII:  Chemical Reactions In a lot of the discussions of mitochondria and the various metabolic pathways in general, the term "redox" gets thrown around a lot.  Redox is a contraction of the terms reduction and oxidation.  This generally applies to reversible reactions where one species is oxidized and the other reduced, but it actually applies to all reactions wherein electrons are "transferred" from one element to another.  Where I'm going here (and I don't know when I'll get there, but I will)  is to discuss redox couples and basically how we are electrochemical machines where one chemical reac...

This one I'm bumping for myself, but perhaps some folks might find it interesting.  The red bolding is new. Original Publication:  4/17/10 Looking for some info on protein, I came across this link: http://www.nutrition-partner.com/index.cfm?C27B8FF7FABF494CAA480EF21E0D228D The page focuses on changes in dietary requirements and/or the impact on the body of malnutrition, disease and stress, but I found this site through the following graphic on protein metabolism: Something in the numbers doesn't add up here, but I was surprised to see how much protein is "recycled" in our guts.  Perhaps the total protein synthesis is balanced by catabolism/turnover and that is the missing number?  Not sure.  Here is the quoted text referring to this diagram (my apologies for the messed up formatting).   Protein in the body is not static; protein synthesis and breakdown is constantly taking place. However, the total body protein pool in a ...

Fat Head had a post up yesterday .  In it he has the picture of the dining cart scene from Silver Streak (loved that movie!)   The gist, grandma (and his high school wresting coach) knew it was carbs that were fattening and the diet plates were LC.  I would point out that wrestlers employing various dietary schemes to make weight for competition are probably not a good advertising point for any diet.  Meeting a number on the scale, or in the case of body builders looking ripped for competitions, is not necessarily equivalent to consuming a healthful diet (especially for the long term).  Wrestlers are prevalent among the growing numbers of men with eating disorders.

Japanese style.  I just had two quotes/sayings to share today.  The first is one you may be familiar with: Hara hachi bu :   ( 腹八分 ) , or  hara hachi bunme  (and sometimes misspelled  hari hachi bu ), is a  Confucian   teaching that instructs people to eat until they are 80 percent full.    Roughly, in English the  Japanese  phrase translates to, "Eat until you are eight parts (out of ten) full",  or "belly 80 percent full".

Robb Wolf has another post up complaining  about paleo bashing.  This time it is about this article in Scientific American:   How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked .  Such articles are written because: People, particularly folks in the academic scene, seem to really have their britches bunched over biochemists, MD’s and others using this evolutionary biology concept to look at nutrition and health. Yeah that's it.  The article begins with: image link Meet Grok . According to his online profile, he is a tall, lean, ripped and agile 30-year-old. By every measure, Grok is in superb health: low blood pressure; no inflammation; ideal levels of insulin, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides. He and his family eat really healthy, too. They gather wild seeds, grasses, and nuts; seasonal vegetables; roots and berries. They hunt and fish their own meat. Between foraging, building sturdy shelters from na...

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 .