The Carb-Sane Asylum

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 ...

Probably the most annoying calorie discussion I'd come across recently has to be Stefani Ruper's discussion about  this article in Science Magazine,  Have We Been Miscounting Calories? , entitled  They’re Still Doing It Wrong: Have We Been Miscounting Calories?   Read the article first and then Stefani's take.  I sort of wish I had to know if her take came off as badly in that order, but you can't undo.   From the article: In a wide-ranging discussion of how food is digested in everything from humans to rats to pythons, the panel reviewed a new spate of studies showing that foods are processed differently as they move from our gullet to our guts and beyond. They agreed that net caloric counts for many foods are flawed because they don't take into account the energy used to digest food; the bite that oral and gut bacteria take out of various foods; or the properties of different foods themselves that speed up or slow down their journey through the int...

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. 

Richard Feinman announced on his Facebook page a little while ago that he is writing a book on Thermodynamics, and because every now and then he pops up in the hilarious Facebook threads featuring Fred "Super Slow" Hahn, Feinman's FB page is one that's interesting to pop in on from time to time.  Such was Feinman's response to a request from Ian Lane whose blog tagline is "For the frustrated few who want only the truth."  Sigh.  So the request was for Feinman to provide feedback on one of Lane's blog posts, to which Feinman responded (paraphrasing) ' TL;DR, I've been at this for decades Sonny, read my papers!' The Energy In a Gallon of Gas Changes?

Note:  I started this article with the intent of it being a single stand-alone before Smash the Fat's Sam Feltham had done his final summary of his overeating stunt.  Since then, however, he has written said summary and I've written two posts discussing this disconnect between the you-can-eat-all-the-calories claims and the current uber-restrictive low carb plans many long time low carbers are actually following themselves.  See:   Fast or Feltham and Fast or Feltham II Apologies in Advance :  I wrote this with updates/edits over several days and with "new information" coming in the interim.  It could probably use a good bit of editing and crunching down, but as this is just a blog, I'm going to publish it up w/o wasting time on that.  Please forgive the length, repetitiveness, etc.  Thanks!

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...

The detractors of energy balance theory often say something along the lines that thermodynamics goes out the window in living organisms, the rules don't apply.  Nope.  The existence of the Second Law does not violate the First Law! This simply isn't true, and those who say similar must simply not understand these fields.  Humans are not bomb calorimeters or Carnot cycle/combustion engines .  When Dr. Eades tried to discredit Anthony Colpo a while back, he and his compadre Feinman waxed poetic and evoked nightmares of steam tables in their college thermo courses.

Previous post:   More on Calories: A Gallon of Gas is NOT A Gallon of Gas? ... And Other Silly Thermodenyic Arguments The name of Adam Kosloff's website -- Caloriegate -- implies some criminal conspiracy to, I guess, spread a lie about calories.  If he had his way, anyone who speaks the plain truth about the biochemistry that goes on in our human bodies would just STFU already (his words) and count "something else".  Kosloff is a true leech in the IHC.  The guy studied geology at Yale and if his writings are any indication, knows pretty much nothing about human physiology or biochemistry.  He's a ghost-writer, which is an honest profession, but in his own words:

In response to, this post : Fred Hahn  said... I am posting this comment on behalf of Dr. Richard Feinman, professor of cellular biology at SUNY Downstate.  "I never had to go through steam tables but I still teach bioenergetics in biochemistry courses where we think thermodynamics has a lot to do with human metabolism.  Like most chemists and even some physicists, I would be willing to admit I don't understand the field that well but if you have a problem, feel free to write to me directly.  I think it is touching that people get excited about thermodynamics but I expect polite discourse.  Richard Feinman  Professor of Cell Biology  SUNY Downstate Medical Center  feinman@mac.com Here's the discussion at Eades' blog that resulted in my steam table comment: Jim B, March 6, 2010 at 9:41 pm In the last year, or so, I have experienced a re-education on thermodynamics. In the last 20 years or so, there has been a mojor change in the way the sub...

I probably won't be around much longer. You see Con Ed (my electricity provider) contacted me and said that because my usage this past year exceeded what my level payments cover, they will need to recalculate that payment.   Which got me thinking CON Edison.  Hmmmmm sounds conspiratorial.  So I investigated. Well, they are pushing all manner of energy saving schemes!  How can I cut my bill?  And then I look at my bill.  My home intakes kilowatt•hours (kwh) ... but how can I know what to do to reduce that intake when I use:

Since I had the whole metabolic advantage thing on my mind writing my last post, and "Anonymous LC Author" mentioned Feinman and Jequier, I was reminded of something that's bothered me for a while now regarding citations of Jequier's work.  A calorie is a calorie violates the second law of thermodynamics  argues for the potential of a metabolic advantage in low carbohydrate diets.   Oddly enough, they ultimately make a first law argument for the MA, but that's a subject for another day. It was this paper that introduced me to the work of Eric Jequier after which I stumbled upon the subject of my most popular post to date, Nutrient Fates after Absorption  referencing this Jequier paper:   Nutrient effects: post-absorptive interactions .  But the Feinman & Fine paper cites a different Jequier paper to which the TEF values of macronutrients can be ubiquitously traced in LC circles.  That paper being:   Pathways to Obesity .   S...

Well, I've been meaning to weigh in on the Bray overfeeding study ( Effect of Dietary Protein Content  on Weight Gain, Energy Expenditure, and Body Composition During Overeating ) that made a bit of a splash a little while back. George Bray is especially hated by ardent low carb advocates because he wrote a particularly unfavorable review of GCBC published in Obesity Reviews.   Bray is what Adam Kosloff refers to as a "Calorie Wizard": Regardless of diet, it is a positive energy balance over months to years that is the sine qua non for obesity. Obese people clearly eat more than do lean ones, and food-intake records are notoriously unreliable, as documented by use of doubly labelled water.  Underreporting of food intake is greater in obese than in normal-weight people and is worse for fat than for other macronutrient groups.   Accepting the concept that obesity results from a positive energy balance does not tell us why ...

I'm always amused when a rodent study that seemingly counters the calorie-based theories on obesity comes down the pike.  In predictable fashion, someone in the LC webosphere will pick up on it and use it as an example to counter calorie-based theories on weight/obesity.   A recent example of this is brought to us by low carbers' favorite comedian edutainer, Tom Naughton:  Fat Mice & The Laws of Thermodynamics  that referenced the following study:   Mild calorie Restriction Induces Fat Accumulation in Female c57BL/6J Mice .   Now Tom starts out misrepresenting things by picturing a fat mouse, likely an ob/ob.  This study actually involved females of the strain pictured below: Kind of a cute little critter, no?   The study was also conducted in the context of calorie restriction and its demonstrated increase in longevity of mice.  They are not a mutant strain genetically predisposed to obesity.

ORIGINAL PUBLISH DATE:  October 3, 2015  This post will probably repeat some things I've said before.  But in light of recent events, and with controversy over the US 2015 Dietary Guidelines reaching fever pitch, I wanted to collect them in a semi-coherent summarized fashion.   Mostly I want to discuss the role of governments and industries in the evolution of what we know today as a science.  In many ways, a look back at the early Twentieth Century demonstrates how the more things change the more they stay the same.   Are we doomed to repeat past mistakes in the Twenty-First?

Part I Metabolic and physiologic effects from consuming a hunter-gatherer (Paleolithic)-type diet in type 2 diabetes U Masharani, P Sherchan, M Schloetter, S Stratford, A Xiao, A Sebastian, M Nolte Kennedy and L Frassetto {Apologies in advance:  No idea if this is truly as scattered as I think it might be, but I'm currently working on a number of projects, including "real job" stuff.  So rather than hold this up for perfecting, I'm hitting the publish button!} The Take-Aways, Such as they are ... In this three week trial, researchers used food questionnaires to assess usual intake prior to the study.   ... on the basis of our intake questionnaire and food recall responses, we expected the parameters of the subjects on the ADA recommended diet to remain unchanged from baseline, but in fact they also improved reducing the differences observed with the two diets. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the baseline reporting was, as has b...

I have to give credit where credit is due. In his zeal to dismiss the role of calories in weight (fat) gain or loss, Ian Lane makes a pretty good case for why alcohol is not likely to be the carbon source for accumulated fat .  In doing so, however, he accidentally all but exonerates the lowly carbohydrate.  I don't think he meant to do that ...  The particular post in question was the subject of a couple of blog posts recently, see here and here .   It would appear that it has now been officially (in the title line) "revised" to eliminate all of the overt scientific inaccuracies, and focuses on ethanol, which makes it easier to direct readers of this post to just the part in question!  Ian writes: The molecule I'd like to highlight, which, from my perspective, cannot realistically be stored as body fat, is ethyl alcohol , or ethanol . (That’s not to say that ethanol can’t possibly aid in fat accumulation somehow — see below — rather, the calories in etha...

Bump! Over on Twitter I was made aware that Dr. David Ludwig is coming out with a new book in January (HT Steven Snyder @NoGimmicksNutri) mentioned in this Time piece:   You Asked: Should I Count Calories?    The book is to be called Always Hungry   (affiliate link if you're going to buy it anyway!)   This is a similar title to the NYT editorial Ludwig co-wrote with NuSI's VP of Research last year, discussed in this post.  I also have a friend who attended an obesity conference recently at which Ludwig presented much of the same ideas.  It is repackaged TWICHOO (Taubes Wrong Insulin-Carbohydrate Hypothesis Of Obesity) , and what is most galling about all of this is that much of Ludwig's own research counters this ... Yet he perpetuates it?  From the article: