The Carb-Sane Asylum

S UMMARY The results of the $12 Million Dollar NuSI-sponsored study, headed up by Dr. David S. Ludwig, are finally out.   Effects of a low carbohydrate diet on energy expenditure during weight loss maintenance: randomized trial While the good doctor is making the rounds touting them as evidence in support of the Carb-Insulin Hypothesis (TWICHOO in these parts), a review of the raw data made available to the public casts grave doubts on his victory lap.  This study built upon the "promising" results of the 2012 study:   Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance    This post focuses on comparisons of Study Design between these two studies, some improvements, and the ultimate failure that renders the primary outcome data suspect, if not outright useless.  (And I don't say that lightly!) Improvements: Study size Length of time on one test diet (20 weeks) vs. 4 weeks crossover on each...

This post was prompted by the following article on Medscape Why Aren't We Prescribing Pills for Obesity? It is written by Caroline M. Apovian, MD  I'd encourage you to read this whole thing first, as I'm genuinely interested in that response. Additionally I'm curious as to whether or not your response changes after reading this blog post (or other sources I'm about to link to).

Rather than formally reviewing Real Food Keto -- an abomination of a book written by Jimmy Moore and his "Nutritional Therapy Practitioner" wife Christine Moore -- I've decided to compile a collection of my tweets here in a blog post.  I'll sort from most recent, with the newest before the "page break" after each update.  Feel free to comment here, but I'm also embedding tweets if you wish to go respond on Twitter.   Some may include additional commentary, others just the tweet. Enjoy! This book is littered with nonsense about how low stomach acid causes everything from ass itching  to zygomycosis.   No doubt there will be more of these tweets coming! Fun #RealFoodKeto "facts" from @livinlowcarbman and his NTP wife. FACT: Lemon juice (mostly citric acid) gives it a pH ~2.  Add some to neutral water (pH 7), the lemon water will be less acidic (e.g. higher pH, closer to 7) but will not become alkaline (pH >7) #LCHF -raud pi...

[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...

NOTE  (8/7/2018):     I've edited this post, originally written/published 5/5/2011, to omit the no longer relevant back story and broken links.  I had referred to a discussion on Jimmy Moore's now-long-defunct LLVLC Discussion Board that made me aware of the Eades' post discussed. SUMMARY:  Fat in the blood following a fatty meal is almost entirely due to the fat in the meal. ~~~~~ Several years ago, Dr. Michael Eades wrote the following post:   ABC’s big meal propaganda .  Sadly, the video is no longer available.  It involved subjects consuming a GIGANTIC meal of 6000 calories, after which blood was drawn two hours later.  This "after" blood was very cloudy, and the technician holds this up and identifies the source of the cloudiness as fat.  The meal was deep fat fried mac&cheese, a bacon cheese burger quesadilla and fries and an ice cream smothered giant cookie.  Yes, high in fat and carbs, but favoring the s...

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...

R ecently (May 2018) comments about obesity at a Pediatric conference have made the rounds. Specifically: Obesity Is a Disease, Not a Choice, Experts Advise .  Here is link to the full text in   "print version" . The AMA classified Obesity as a disease in 2013. Five years later we've made little to no progress, likely because we've got "experts" pontificating and arguing over semantics and false dichotomies.  The false dichotomy of Disease vs. Choice is right out of whatever master playbook teaches that if you keep the "masses" arguing, they might not notice you're full of it.  It's really the only explanation I can think of for the circular arguments made with nary a tinge of irony on board straight faces. I have a bunch of stuff in the draft pile here on this topic, but cannot seem to organize it. I decided to start a series.  In no particular order.    This installment deals with the following statement from the 2013 R...