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No, actually cancers don't feed on everything you feed on. They must have glucose or they starve.

https://proteinpower.com/drmik...

Protein Power

Could be all the animal fat, which satisfies the metabolism better. I eat all the fat off the roast too. And if you can still see the food, there's not enough butter. :D

All sorts of articles here, but ... eh, recent, lots of stuff distilled into one review:

http://www.proteinpower.com/dr...

This low-cholesterol craze is doing *damage*, especially the damned statin drugs. Look for a wave of statin-induced multiple sclerosis in the future (guess what myelin is largely composed of). It's also been pointed out that statins may increase cancer risks by damaging cell walls (which are also largely cholesterol), allowing cancer-causing viruses to invade where otherwise they could not.

This guy's blog is mostly about the hype and bad science (and sometimes outright cherry-picked fraud) behind the OMG fat-bad cholesterol-bad industry:
http://www.proteinpower.com/dr...
The biochemist in the audience nods and says "Yep, yep, and yep..."

And you are right, "eat as much as you want" fat (and protein) means you won't eat all that much, cuz you'll be satiated much sooner.

[I say, not entirely in jest, that if you can still see the food, there's not enough butter! and I have middling-low cholesterol and am not overweight. So there.]

The Masai and Inuit are famous for showing you can be healthy on a low carb high fat/protein diet, a fact I never argued with.

Excellent, then perhaps I misunderstood your position.

I'd take it a step farther and state that they also give us prominent evidence that ancestral cultures in wildly differing environments tended towards a low carb, high fat/protein diet.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/are-we-meat-eaters-or-vegetarians-part-iii/

Is a guy selling protein supplements really a reliable source for analysis on whether we're naturally meat eaters?

Even then at best he shows that the European paleolithic population ate a lot of meat. But there's a big before and after period and we don't know how relevant the paleolithic diet is to modern nutrition. Certainly most populations will eat fatty meat when available because it's a great energy source, that doesn't mean doing the same when you have unlimited quantities will keep you thin!

Advanced culture who's high carb and low obesity? Japan.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sugar%20consumption%20per%20capita%20in%20USA%20and%20Japan

I never said Japan ate a lot of sugar, I said they ate a lot of carbs.

Primitive cultures who are high carb and low obesity? A bunch of other places in Asia and Africa.

Cite?

I don't know a lot about the site, but here's a bunch of carb heavy communities in China compared with a fat heavy community and there's not much difference. How do you explain that with the paleo evidence? If we're all adapted to high fat then why are all those other Chinese communities healthy? If the Chinese are adapted then how is the high fat community thin?

Injecting insulin not causing obesity? Done with mice.

Human evidence contraindicates.

It does? I assume you're not referring to the evidence that insulin is the mechanism for fat storage in humans, because it plays the exact same role in mice.

Replacing x% of calories from fat with pure sugar not causing obesity? Done with people.

Missing the insulin resistance factor.

People losing weight on high carb diets? Tons of vegetarians do this.

Again, insulin resistance factor.

So as long as you don't become insulin resistant then carbs won't make you fat? How do non-insulin resistant people lose weight on low carb diets then? Do you have to become insulin resistant before you become obese? (Assuming we ignore the non-insulin resistant obese)

If none of this data convinces you then what data possibly could?

Those aren't data, those are assertions.

Every "assertion" (except the vegetarian thing) I backed up in previous posts, often multiple times, with links to studies, journal articles, or blog posts with extensive citations to journal articles. How is that not data?

The Masai and Inuit are famous for showing you can be healthy on a low carb high fat/protein diet, a fact I never argued with.

Excellent, then perhaps I misunderstood your position.

I'd take it a step farther and state that they also give us prominent evidence that ancestral cultures in wildly differing environments tended towards a low carb, high fat/protein diet.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/are-we-meat-eaters-or-vegetarians-part-iii/

The fact you can be healthy on a low carb diet doesn't mean you need a low carb diet.

But it could mean that fat people need a low carb diet.

Advanced culture who's high carb and low obesity? Japan.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sugar%20consumption%20per%20capita%20in%20USA%20and%20Japan

Primitive cultures who are high carb and low obesity? A bunch of other places in Asia and Africa.

Cite?

Injecting insulin not causing obesity? Done with mice.

Human evidence contraindicates.

Replacing x% of calories from fat with pure sugar not causing obesity? Done with people.

Missing the insulin resistance factor.

People losing weight on high carb diets? Tons of vegetarians do this.

Again, insulin resistance factor.

If none of this data convinces you then what data possibly could?

Those aren't data, those are assertions.

Although Taubes did the seminal work "Good Calories, Bad Calories", which references the undisputed biochemistry I've cited, he isn't the guy who actually did the work - he just reported on it. Calling him a "crank" is to misunderstand how we actually got to understand the Kreb's cycle and the role of insulin in fat accumulation.

Now, Stephan Guyenet has an axe to grind against Taubes, and that's fine, but nothing he's written or cited contraindicates the role of insulin in fat accumulation. There's some question as to what triggers initial insulin resistance (since there are a group of people out there who have no fat accumulation problems despite high carbohydrate intake, although other problems invisible to the naked eye do occur), but there's absolutely no question that the mechanism for fat accumulation in the obese is insulin.

There's a big difference between insulin being required for fat storage and insulin regulating fat storage.

My big beef with Taubes is he basically assumes researchers made a mistake in the 50s, and then... well I'm not sure what.

Have they been doing public advocacy the past 60 years and never bothered to do anymore research?

Are they all such spectacularly bad researchers that no one ever noticed insulin was regulating obesity?

Did they have incredible tunnelvision and haven't looked at how insulin reacts with fat at all?

To believe Taubes you need to believe the entire field of nutrition science has been spectacularly incompetent for the past half century, somehow never considering that the hormone that enables fat accumulation also regulates it. Yet some science reporter somehow stumbled on the truth and is giving you a completely unbiased account of it.

Just look at how he responds when asked about the Japanese and their rice consumption. He starts talking about Japanese eating brown rice until 50 years ago and being healthy then. Ok, so what about the Japanese eating white rice now and still being healthy!! He also says that maybe the real problem is sugar. So the goalposts have moved, high carb isn't bad, it has to be high refined carbs, and maybe it isn't even high refined carbs, it has to be actual sugar! So I'm glad that Taubes apparently endorses a primarily brown rice diet as the key to being thin.

Of course, he didn't need to move the goalposts when talking about the Massa, since most people don't really know what the Massa eat it's safe to simply misrepresent their diet.

Indeed. Back in the 50s they started telling the world that all fat was unhealthy. People started eating low fat foods, and instead going nuts with sugary drinks/foods, refined carbs and fries. I hate when something says "low fat!" on the front, but it's like 50% sugar. Who cares about the fat content then?

Read up on Ancel Keys and the Seven Countries Study if you want to see where the idea that fat is bad came from.

I just don't understand any legitimate concern to decline a breathalyzer test.

False positives. For example, here's an article that talks about a guy who was on a low-carb diet and the excessive ketones in his breath caused a breathalyzer to think he was drunk.

if you plan to drink, plan to get a ride. if you werent drinking, you have nothing to fear about a breath test.

Unless, that is, you are diabetic or on a low-carb diet

see here (2nd to last paragraph) on why Ketosis doesn't have to be as dangerous as you suggest. Or so I read.

Historical evidence shows that the transition to agriculture, while allowing for a stratification of society, specialization, and higher population densities, was quite deleterious to human health:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/nutrition-and-health-in-agriculturalists-and-hunter-gatherers/

Fat accumulation is driven by insulin, insulin is driven by blood sugar, and blood sugar is driven by carbohydrate intake. The actual, physical cycle of energy here is very well defined. The myth of obesity being a matter of calories and calories out has no such biomechanical model to point to - the naive view that fat cells only accumulate fat when there is an excess of calories in the bloodstream has been falsified by every study ever done on both animal models and humans.

Well, seeing how it's breath being measured, lets not forget mouth alcohol created from decaying protiens (food stuck in teeth or dentures breaking down) or as a side effect of Ketosis.

Note, the article speaks of diet but certain diabetics will have the same problems as the ketones are primarily a response/byproduct to glucose production.

Bacon, butter, sour cream, cheese... Why not go all the way, just leave out the potatoes, and pour pure fat into your throat? ;)

I guess you're either trolling, or ignorant. Feel free to check out the blog of M.D. Michael R. Eades at http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/ as well as his books, and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes (and a heap of other great books, none of which I can recall at the moment).

Natural fats aren't bad for your health. No, not even saturated fat. Do yourself and those close to you the most important favor you'll ever do and read some science on nutrition instead of gobbeling up the official nutritional guidelines with an unhealthy side-dish of insulin-raising, unnecessary carbohydrates.

Agreed. Some may find this interesting:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/lipid-hypothesis/the-vegetarian-myth/

He touches on some of those same points.

Ketosis. You might be on atkins, you might be diabetic.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/low-carbers-beware-the-breathalyzer/
http://www.avvo.com/legal-guides/ugc/diabetes-and-the-counterfeit-dui

Here's a discussion of a study that supports my point nicely.

As I stated, fully half of people with heart disease have normal serum cholesterol levels. No one denies this. So it's a poor indicator - anyone with a good cholesterol test result still needs to be told that there's an equal chance they have heart disease anyway. There are better indicators such as C-reactive protein that are largely ignored. Even the recent, terminally biased JUPITER study gives that method of detection a backhanded compliment.

I was thinking along those lines too, especially since today's cows have much more acidic stomachs than they naturally have.


"This particularly virulent strain of E. coli comes from the GI tracts of cattle that have been fattened with grain (particularly corn) instead of grass or other silage. Grains and corn are not the natural foods of cattle, and when cattle are fed nothing but in an effort to fatten them, they develop highly acidic GI tracts."

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/2006/09/21/corn-eating-cow-crap-chuckin-up-your-insides-blues/

I'll tell you what's harder than calorie restriction OR exercising, not necessarily for everyone but for many of the people who are having weight problems: undertaking an exercise regimen while eating the same amount of calories as before starting the regimen. Ask around, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll hear stories of "oh I tried exercising, but it just made me voraciously hungry." It's because these people have insulin levels which are too high to extract body fat. Even after exercise, their bodies are depleted of energy but fat deposits are unavailable as a source.

What's _easier_ than calorie restriction or exercising, though, is rebalancing the ratio of insulin and glucagon to one that supports getting fat out of fat cells. This is done entirely through dietary changes. Exercise isn't necessary, but exercise can increase the rate at which fat deposits are metabolied, once insulin is at a low enough level.

This was all covered recently in a really long blog post by Dr. Michael Eades regarding a bit of a feud going on with Anthony Colpo
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/2007/11/15/learn-why-anthony-colpo-is-mad-and-get-a-free-book/
You'll notice that several references are made to Ancel Keys of K-ration fame (the 'K' stands for Keys). Keys was one of the first to use the science of the last 60+ years to study nutrition, and is pretty much solely responsible for the "eating fat makes you fat" mindset that's been plaguing the American diet since before I was born. The Keys saga begins in this post:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/2007/10/10/the-low-fat-diet-cascade/
Essentially, the primary reason we've been led down this path of a national obesity epidemic is that the biggest bully in the study of nutrition was wrong about the science.

I see that I'm getting way off my original point. In summary, control your insulin. Everything else nutrition-wise gets much easier when you do.

I'll tell you what's harder than calorie restriction OR exercising, not necessarily for everyone but for many of the people who are having weight problems: undertaking an exercise regimen while eating the same amount of calories as before starting the regimen. Ask around, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll hear stories of "oh I tried exercising, but it just made me voraciously hungry." It's because these people have insulin levels which are too high to extract body fat. Even after exercise, their bodies are depleted of energy but fat deposits are unavailable as a source.

What's _easier_ than calorie restriction or exercising, though, is rebalancing the ratio of insulin and glucagon to one that supports getting fat out of fat cells. This is done entirely through dietary changes. Exercise isn't necessary, but exercise can increase the rate at which fat deposits are metabolied, once insulin is at a low enough level.

This was all covered recently in a really long blog post by Dr. Michael Eades regarding a bit of a feud going on with Anthony Colpo
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/2007/11/15/learn-why-anthony-colpo-is-mad-and-get-a-free-book/
You'll notice that several references are made to Ancel Keys of K-ration fame (the 'K' stands for Keys). Keys was one of the first to use the science of the last 60+ years to study nutrition, and is pretty much solely responsible for the "eating fat makes you fat" mindset that's been plaguing the American diet since before I was born. The Keys saga begins in this post:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/2007/10/10/the-low-fat-diet-cascade/
Essentially, the primary reason we've been led down this path of a national obesity epidemic is that the biggest bully in the study of nutrition was wrong about the science.

I see that I'm getting way off my original point. In summary, control your insulin. Everything else nutrition-wise gets much easier when you do.

No, a calorie is not a calorie, and you don't get fat from eating calories. There is increasing research evidence, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence, that carbs cause the weight gain, the high cholesterol, the diabetes, the heart disease. Exercise can help, but the basic answer is chemical. The calorie theory is outdated, and anyone who has tried it for the last 30 years knows it does not work. It is simplistic, and easy to conceive, but a physics lie. The new metabolic dynamic is just as simple and plausible, and by all accounts, far more effective. Scientists agree individually that insulin's primary role is to drive fat production, and carbs primary effect is to drive insulin secretion. So why not take the logical next step and treat fat by reducing carbs? Scientists can't seem to follow their own simple, straightforward logic. Taubes is not saying that exercise has no place in health. He is specifically saying that it does not directly cause weight loss. Taubes agrees with the other benefits of exercise and exercises himself. He is just making the point that medical claims need to be checked for validity by research, which they often have not been. Do not just believe what health "experts" tell you to believe. You should not listen to any doctor who still believes in the low-fat or caloric model of nutrition. Taubes is not a researcher, is a journalist. He is just honestly reporting what the research actually says, which has often been covered up, and the medical community is running scared. Taubes is asking for the research to be done, and the research community is desperately resisting it. Something is rotten in Denmark and Taubes is merely exposing it. For more information and reviews of the research, see the follwing medical and general info websites: http://www.weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/ (Regina Wilshire) http://rjr10036.typepad.com/askdrvernon/ (Dr. Mary Vernon) http://www.proteinpower.com/ (Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades) http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/ (Dr. Richard Bernstein) http://www.lowcarb-ca.com/ http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.blogspot.com/ (Jimmy Moore) Read the other reports by Taubes available widely on the web. Read the report by Dr. Ron Rosedale "Insulin and its Metabolic Effects" available widely on the web.

(not the same AC as GPP)

The GI was touched on a while back on the blog of Dr. Michael R. Eades, of Protein Power fame. In addition to learning the reasons why the GI doesn't actually help (it has a lot to do with how the GI is measured, for one -- the measurement does not take into account how long your glucose is elevated, but only by how much at a fixed point in time), by reading the archives you will learn more about nutrition, health, and weight control than you ever wanted to know.

Disclaimer: I am not Dr. Eades. Don't ask me questions that you would want him to answer.

(the captcha is "biology" -- how apropos)