The Carb-Sane Asylum

... one and all!  Wishing everyone who reads this blog a very Happy and HEALTHY New Year. I'm also going on vacation Sunday through the 12th.  Needing some computer access for work and puttering on the net being my morning "veg" ritual, I'll probably pop in from time to time, but posting will be limited if at all. I plan to get me plenty of that natural Vitamin D, indulge my inner water child and eat moderately of all different sorts of food.   Looking forward to this big time.   Hope to see y'all back here when I return.  

Dr. William Davis is touting the success of one of his patients on a No BG Rise After Eating diet.  The post is HERE . So Jack was overweight and: Try as he might, Jack could simply not stick to the diet I urged him to follow. Three days, for instance, of avoiding wheat was promptly interrupted by his wife's tempting him with a nice BLT sandwich. This triggered his appetite, with diet spiraling downward in short order.  Presumably the diet he urged was low carb.  But just going LC and trying to cut wheat lasted only three days.  So the good Dr. Davis told Jack to get a BG meter and strive for 1 hour postprandial glucose levels to be no higher than before eating.  So: If any food or combination of foods increase blood glucose more than the pre-meal value, then eliminate the culprit food or reduce the portion size. For example, if dinner consists of baked salmon, asparagus, and mashed potatoes, and pre-meal blood glucose is 115 mg/dl, post-meal 155 m...

I was reading  Alcohol Revisited on Low Carb  by Dana Carpender and something she said jumped out at me: No doubt, however, that alcohol can be fattening, not only because of the calories it contains, but because it slows metabolism - to quote a medical journal article I read, "Alcohol profoundly inhibits lipolysis." In English this means that alcohol slows fat-burning to a crawl. Like carbs, your body burns alcohol preferentially. Don't expect to burn any fat until you've burned through all your alcohol calories.  First of all, Carpender makes the all-to-common mistake of equating lipolysis with actual fat-burning.  As I summarized in Lip-ocabulary  , lipolysis is the breaking apart of triglycerides to glycerol and free fatty acids.   This occurs constantly in our bodies, inside the fat cells by hormone sensitive lipase (HSL) to release FFA's continually as part of the triglyceride/free fatty acid cycle , and in the capillary beds by lipoprotein lipase (L...

A Diet Manifesto: Drop the Apple and Walk Away .....A few things to understand at the outset: First, despite the happy fact that unlike many in this field, Mr. Taubes is not out to sell you anything (other than his book), it is still a manifesto. Thus, though it is bursting with data, a reader has no way of knowing whether other data has been overlooked or minimized to support the author’s points. Second, the new book is not really a new book at all; it is a sort of CliffsNotes version of “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” a long, dense tome Mr. Taubes published in 2007. With the new, smaller and more focused version, Mr. Taubes openly admits he is aiming for a broader audience and bigger impact. Fair enough, although one does begin to wonder if a line of protein bars is not far behind..... The highlighted statement kinda caught my eye ;-)

This is mostly a bookmarking post to put some links out there. Same poop, different gut  - this one deals mostly with fecal transplants to treat bacterial infections The gut flora as a forgotten organ  - mostly dealing with diseases though touts the promise of obesity relationship The environment within: how gut microbiota may influence metabolism and body composition  - An excellent review of the current understanding of the role of gut flora in inflammation, disease, obesity, etc.  The lead author is the researcher who did the fecal transplant study on obese men that demonstrated improvements in insulin sensitivity (see next link).  I recommend reading this one.  IMO, at this point, finding a bacterial solution to obesity seems to be a long-shot and lots of wishful thinking.   Fecal Transplant Flushes Insulin Resistance   I really look forward to their upcoming publication of this work.  It will be interesting to see the magn...

Mostly based on studies like THIS  (abstract only), there's a new whiff in the air around obesity researchers.  Some go so far as to call gut microflora an "unsung organ".  Some have picked up this ball and run with it to the point of making wild claims that microflora control how much energy we extract from our food and we have no control over "energy in".    Our results indicate that the obese microbiome has an increased capacity to harvest energy from the diet. Firstly, we have correlation here, not causation. Furthermore, this trait is transmissible: colonization of germ-free mice with an 'obese microbiota' results in a significantly greater increase in total body fat than colonization with a 'lean microbiota'. Many have read this and jumped all over it to say this indicates the arrow of causation goes from microflora to obesity.   That seems reasonable until one considers what actually happened here.  Germ-free mice are smaller because they...

If you've read at all on the LC web you'll see that there's an almost grudging hatred (well that might be too strong a word, but ...) towards those who take "the easy way out" getting gastric bypass surgery.  If not aimed at the person who has undergone surgery, a palpable feeling of animosity towards the WLS "industry" and the "pusher" doctors is in the air.  At some point someone will chime in to remind everyone that "you know what kind of diet they eat don't you?", because it is low carb.  The implications of which are that the weight loss is due to going LC so why not forego the surgery.   I tend to agree with this sentiment, somewhat, especially since most WLS candidates must follow a diet and lose a bit of weight before the surgery.  Which begs the question of if one can do this before the surgery, why can't they just keep it going and lose weight w/o the surgery?  It's a fair enough question, but one with no e...