You must have interesting definitions of 'working' and 'pretty well'
Note: Using your own apparent definitions the following is also true:
No country on the entire planet has a working public health care system.
On the other hand there are a number of countries that do pretty well with private systems.
Really? As a Canadian I'll gladly say we have a working public health care system, there's issues with wait times for certain procedures but it's not critical, and if we really did care we'd allocate more funds towards reducing those wait times.
My Dad has had terminal pancreatic cancer for almost a year and it hasn't been that bad. It's obviously tough watching him go, but when he wanted palliative chemo we drove in a couple times a week, did the appointment, and left. When he discontinued the chemo is was because of the side effects and quality of life and nothing to do with cost. When he needed daily injections for a blood clot a home care nurse stopped by. It's made easier by the fact he's retired so doesn't have to worry about lost income from non working, but whenever I see a story about cancer from the US there's all this talk of medical bills and HMOs. All we've had to worry about is my Dad's welfare.
So that sounds like a reasonable mechanism but that's a long way from showing that it's a significant factor in the human population.
If cattle feed does affect the fat ratios in a specific way that sounds like a potentially promising experiment. For a few months feed one group of participants with beef fed with grass and the other beef fed with soy, if your theory is correct the grass fed group should have a delectably lower body fat % by the end?
If the Japanese are eating more omega 3 that might be part of the explanation for why they have a lower rate of obesity, but if simple carbs are particularly fattening than the effect of the seafood would have to be massive to offset the rice they're ingesting. There's also low obesity rates in mainland China where they don't have access to seafood, and they don't really vary depending on whether the diet is rice heavy or meat meat heavy.
I'm pretty sure they could tell the pearls from the crap since they did three movies of almost entirely pearls. The problem is they couldn't create pearls fast enough to fill up the schedule, so they had to let in some crap as well.
But more to the point as to their humour, I don't think the term "genius" really does it justice. There's a lot of genius in comedy but what they brought was an outrageous creativity. You said they were outside the box but I don't think that really captures it. Look at Mitchell and Webb, probably the best sketch show I've seen since Kids in the Hall. It's hilarious, but like all sketch comedy it uses a very standard model. Outrageous characters, odd jobs, weird setting, funny observations, and witty dialogue. It's really hard to break out of those standard models.
But look at the things Monty Python did like the Fish Slapping Dance or the Philosopher's Football match. The first part of the Argument clinic could be been done by most shows, but they would have ended when he stormed out of the argument clinic. Monty python keeps going to complain and get hit on the head, they're not just joking about not having a proper ending, they actually had one and ignored it. I simply can't think of another sketch troop that's shown a remotely comparable level of creativity.
The page mentions adipocyte differentiation but nothing I saw beyond that, and I did a quick search for papers linking fatty acids and reducing obesity but all I could find was mitigating the effects of obesity. Fatty acids could be a part of the puzzle but probably no more than a small part.
There's only one factor that's common to all obese cultures, an industrialized population. Ancestoral populations, regardless of diet, have virtually no experience with obesity. The main answer must lie in processed food and lifestyle because those are the only two variables shared by all obese cultures.
First, is this a surprise to climatologists? I've heard talk of heat maybe getting lost in the ocean, I've also heard about ice caps melting. If the climatologists are shocked by this finding I'd be nervous, not enough to seriously jeopardize my belief in AGW, but enough that I'd be a bit more skeptical of their regional projections. But if this is something they largely suspected but didn't know how to properly measure I wouldn't mind too much.
And assuming it's not a surprise I'd question whether the global temperature readings were deliberately conservative. There's denialists that still go on about the easily disproven urban heat island effect, I can easily see scientists ignoring speculative signs of heating that they can't unambiguously prove in an effort to avoid giving denialists ammunition.
One criticism I've heard of the IPCC process from scientists is it leads to overly conservative conclusions, rather than being the voice of extremists it's the voice of the most conservative elements of the community. If widely published AGW reports are proven wrong there's a strong bias to them underestimating rather than overestimating the issue.
AFAIK micronutrients, or different types of fats, while important for general health, aren't a factor in obesity. It makes sense that our body could develop cravings if it was missing nutrient X and cause us to overeat, but as far as I'm aware there's no evidence for that.
I think there's a couple factors that could explain why the Japanese get fat after adopting a western diet.
1) Japanese food could be less fattening for other non-carb reasons. Western culture has spent the last 50 years creating foods designed to be as tasty and addictive as possible, chips, cookies, hamburgers, sugared breakfast cereal, soups with a heavy cream or butter base, basically foods with added sugar, salt, and fat. It's unsurprising that food designed to be as tasty as possible also lead us to overeat and get fat.
2) Japanese culture is very anti-fat, they're fanatical about physical activity and have very strong social pressure to stay thin. It's shown that people get fat and thin with their friends. People move west, get surrounded by fat people, and the social pressure to stay thin is relaxed and the diet and lifestyle is more conducive to causing obesity.
The rice eaten in Japan is overwhelmingly white rice, which has a high insulin score
How do they cook it? IIRC, Vinegared rice is rinsed, which may remove some starsh. And vinegar is known to lower glycemic index.
Even assuming ALL the rice they ate was with vinegar according to this paper that would lower the Glycemic Index by 20-40% (assuming you and the paper both mean the same thing with vinegar).
That would bring the rice roughly in line with Mars bars.
Beef has an insulin score of 51 ± 16, pasta 40 ± 5, which contains more carbs?
That result is interesting: I knew pasta contained resistant starch (counted as digestible calories, but not digested... unless your gut bacteria do it for you), but I did not imagine it was so low
.
That is a possible explanation for rice in Asia not feeding obesity, as you noted. What rice is it, how is it cooked, and are there resistant starch there?
The rice eaten in Japan is overwhelmingly white rice, which has a high insulin score and a crappy satiety score oddly enough.
The baked potatoes got their crazy insulin score under the same conditions they got their crazy satiety score.
I would not bet on that, since the ability to digest varies among individuals, and is also influenced by other aliments in the meal (hint: fibers).
On glucose vs insulin response: we know that some proteins will amplify the insulin response to glucose. This is well known for whey, for instance. But there there must be carbs in order to raise insulin. Eating meat, cheese and eggs will not raise blood glucose and insulin in any significant way. The wikipedia page notes protein-rich beans raise insulin, but beans also contains carbs.
Beef has an insulin score of 51 ± 16, pasta 40 ± 5, which contains more carbs?
It's just because you are addicted and lack imagination:-)
On a serious note the explanation I like the most is the palatability hypothesis. Basically the tastier a food is the hungrier you get and more you want to eat (when's the last time you got full eating ice cream?). I don't know how much of the obesity epidemic it's responsible for but it's certainly a factor. It's actually an effective approach if a disappointing one, it's hard to get fat eating bland tasteless food.
This is easy to debunk: paper contains a lot of calories, but eating 100g of paper a day will not make you fat. The same amount of calories from sugar will.
I think we can assume that they're properly calculating calories as things we can digest?
This is just wrong. Convertingaminoacids into glucose is a slow process, a high aminoacid intake will not create high blood sugar
The thing that does stand out is the satiety score, the winner in a land slide are starchy baked potatoes, they also win the glucose title as well! What's on the bottom as the least satiating things? Croissants, cake, peanuts, ice cream, basically things that are really yummy. One of the other reasons why low-carb works is it's hard to find really yummy things without carbs.
And cortisol, and thyroid hormons, and leptin, and ghrelin... but that runs amok when your diet has nothing to do with what your body is designed for, and high carb diest does just that.
So explain Japan and China eating loads of white rice, explain the Kuna, who eat almost as much white sugar as us.
Sugar and white bread contribute to obesity, no one will argue that. But the story is far more complicated than high carb=>fat.
Your imaginary experiment is actually unrelated to what I said.
I've never denied that low-carb diets cause weight loss, and they do that due to spontaneous reduction in ingested calories. I explicitly and consistently said that ingesting same number of calories will have the same effect on body weight regardless of their source.
And I don't believe the success of the low-carb diet is due to the mechanism from your thought experiment, protein triggers a rise in blood glucose that's comparable to carbs (think it comes from glucagon breaking down the protein into sugars), but most of the success of low carb diets seem to be because people replace the carbs with protein which is more satiating.
Hunger is a lot more complicated than simple blood sugar, that's why we have hormones like insulin and glucagon, so our brain is able to regulate hunger appropriately.
If you include long term unemployment benefits I suppose that does become a basic income guarantee, and it's something I wouldn't mind though I'm not sure they are a necessary pairing particularly since minimum wage should be higher than the unemployment for the bottom workers.
Let's be honest. Minimum wage is basically an attempt to sneak in universal basic income under a different name, and with a few irrelevant strings attached to attempt to satisfy the conservative "must work to live" crowd. If we lefties are honest with ourselves, we should be open about what we actually want, and just say that society has a moral obligation to provide a basic quality of living for every of its members - and implement this directly. Mincome FTW.
I think it's different from a universal basic income since the requirement of a job is hardly an irrelevant string.
I see it as an assumption that the lowest income workers don't have the bargaining power to receive a fair wage, so the government steps in and makes sure they get that wage. I also see it as a moral belief that if you work full time you should be able to afford to support yourself.
I don't deny that low-carb generally causes weight loss, I actually confirmed that in another comment. But the experiments I'm aware of suggest this is due to people eating fewer calories on a low-carb diet.
Claiming that ingesting the same number of calories will cause you to lose weight if they come from non-carbs is a different claim entirely.
I asked because I've done the research previously and I know the scientific consensus says that for a healthy person in normal circumstances the macro nutrient balance doesn't really matter (at least when it comes to the ingesting the same number of calories).
If he has evidence that argues against what I believe to be the consensus than I'm interested in hearing.
There will certainly be some labour reduction via mechanization but the same mechanization often creates new jobs in other fields. And the unemployed people either take those new jobs or the jobs vacated by the people who took those new jobs.
For some of the domestic stuff those are mostly jobs that would not have existed otherwise (though I'm not sure if it's expected for minimum wage to apply to 'odd jobs' anyways). But for farming the fruit would still get picked, it would just get picked by more mechanized and higher priced labour. The jobs would still be there, the food would simply get a bit more expensive.
Diabetic patients are told to eat low carb diets. Even people who have been fat all their life start following a strict low carb diet, they become thin.
There was a discussion regarding some experiments on this. One doctor had diabetic patients that were getting too thin, "wasting away" as they said and wanted to put some meat on the bones. The doctors prescribed drinking olive oil shots. The patients didn't gain any weight. So, he doubled the amount of olive oil to be drunk like medicine. Still no weight gain. He doubled it again. Nothing again. At the end, patients were consuming over 2000 calories in olive oil shots and not gaining any weight (this in addition to their strict low carb diet for diabetes).
The whole "insulin" as the fat hormone I think was popularized by the book "Good calories, bad calories" by Taubes. There is no scientific consensus about insulin though. Taubes does cite a lot of work on his book and one of the most dramatic is the topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections.
Low-carb seems to be the best of all the weight loss diets when examined experimentally. There are a plethora of theories regarding why low-carb seems to be the best. Since low-carb diets were popularized by the diabetes doctor Atkins, there has been a strong suspicion that it is through insulin.
Diabetics are an interesting piece of data but they're a slightly different case because they have a malfunctioning metabolism. I'd be curious to see what was happening with the olive oil case study though.
AFAIK the studies indicate that low carb causes weight loss because people spontaneously eat fewer calories, and high protein seems to work better than low-carb.
As for Taubes I'm actually very skeptical of his work, including how he's misrepresented and cherry picked tribal populations, suggested vegetarians were fat, and seems to have forgotten about Asia.
The topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections prove what everybody agrees, that insulin is the mechanism that causes glucose to be stored as fat. But that's very different from insulin driving appetite or insulin injections increasing total body fat % in a healthy person. Insulin is mostly there to regulate blood glucose levels, saying insulin causes obesity is a bit like saying a car's engine is responsible for it speeding. It's a necessary component but the cause of the excessive speed is something else entirely (the driver). Researchers who study obesity don't believe insulin is a primary driver of obesity.
Yes, like all the people pumping gas, filling grocery store bags, etc. Full employment!
Or... not. If you a make a job economically unproductive, it goes away. Businesses don't pay to lose money.
I understand and have sympathy for that argument. But in practice even a free employee needs things like paperwork, supervision, and co-workers. An employee so unproductive as to not justify the minimum wage could easily cause negative revenue.
There's a reason not every business accepts unpaid interns, lowering/eliminating the minimum wage probably won't make an appreciable dent in unemployment.
Summary notes that he lose weight at 2400 kcal/day, which is relatively high. This is not surprising: fat storage or burning is controlled by insulin, which is controlled in healthy subjects by blood glucose level. If the food does not rise blood glucose level (either because it is low carb, or because it contains carbs that take time to digest), insulin remains low, and fat is burnt.
If the food doesn't raise blood glucose levels that means the calories get come from places other than simple carbohydrates, and those calories get broken down into what the body needs, and if there's extra it gets stored as fat.
On what evidence do you base your claim that the same number of calories per day will make you thinner if they come from a source that doesn't raise blood glucose?
Not to go all ad-hominem but could you find a source supporting the Ketogenic diet that isn't called ketotic.org?
It might be a great resource, and their literature review might be unbiased and very high quality. But they could also be a pair of diet evangelists outside of their field of expertise who are cherry picking and misrepresenting studies (intentionally or not).
They could be completely accurate and reliable, but they've also got all the hallmarks of YAIC (Yet Another Internet Crank).
Minimum wage is a bit of a weird thing economically. In the standard way of thinking it punishes the poor because they're unable to generate enough revenue to justify the minimum wage and thus go unemployed. In practice it tends to work differently since employers hiring bottom level employees aren't calculating the additional revenue as much as they're looking to fill a hole in their business.
They'll generally pay whatever is required, within reason, to fill that position. If the minimum wage goes up all those people at the bottom get a raise. If necessary prices go up as well and you get some inflation to compensate but the main effect is a mild wealth transfer to the poor.
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You must have interesting definitions of 'working' and 'pretty well'
Note: Using your own apparent definitions the following is also true:
Really? As a Canadian I'll gladly say we have a working public health care system, there's issues with wait times for certain procedures but it's not critical, and if we really did care we'd allocate more funds towards reducing those wait times.
My Dad has had terminal pancreatic cancer for almost a year and it hasn't been that bad. It's obviously tough watching him go, but when he wanted palliative chemo we drove in a couple times a week, did the appointment, and left. When he discontinued the chemo is was because of the side effects and quality of life and nothing to do with cost. When he needed daily injections for a blood clot a home care nurse stopped by. It's made easier by the fact he's retired so doesn't have to worry about lost income from non working, but whenever I see a story about cancer from the US there's all this talk of medical bills and HMOs. All we've had to worry about is my Dad's welfare.
It doesn't have to cattle but an experiment where everything but the ratio was held constant would be ideal.
So that sounds like a reasonable mechanism but that's a long way from showing that it's a significant factor in the human population.
If cattle feed does affect the fat ratios in a specific way that sounds like a potentially promising experiment. For a few months feed one group of participants with beef fed with grass and the other beef fed with soy, if your theory is correct the grass fed group should have a delectably lower body fat % by the end?
If the Japanese are eating more omega 3 that might be part of the explanation for why they have a lower rate of obesity, but if simple carbs are particularly fattening than the effect of the seafood would have to be massive to offset the rice they're ingesting. There's also low obesity rates in mainland China where they don't have access to seafood, and they don't really vary depending on whether the diet is rice heavy or meat meat heavy.
I'm pretty sure they could tell the pearls from the crap since they did three movies of almost entirely pearls. The problem is they couldn't create pearls fast enough to fill up the schedule, so they had to let in some crap as well.
But more to the point as to their humour, I don't think the term "genius" really does it justice. There's a lot of genius in comedy but what they brought was an outrageous creativity. You said they were outside the box but I don't think that really captures it. Look at Mitchell and Webb, probably the best sketch show I've seen since Kids in the Hall. It's hilarious, but like all sketch comedy it uses a very standard model. Outrageous characters, odd jobs, weird setting, funny observations, and witty dialogue. It's really hard to break out of those standard models.
But look at the things Monty Python did like the Fish Slapping Dance or the Philosopher's Football match. The first part of the Argument clinic could be been done by most shows, but they would have ended when he stormed out of the argument clinic. Monty python keeps going to complain and get hit on the head, they're not just joking about not having a proper ending, they actually had one and ignored it. I simply can't think of another sketch troop that's shown a remotely comparable level of creativity.
The page mentions adipocyte differentiation but nothing I saw beyond that, and I did a quick search for papers linking fatty acids and reducing obesity but all I could find was mitigating the effects of obesity. Fatty acids could be a part of the puzzle but probably no more than a small part.
There's only one factor that's common to all obese cultures, an industrialized population. Ancestoral populations, regardless of diet, have virtually no experience with obesity. The main answer must lie in processed food and lifestyle because those are the only two variables shared by all obese cultures.
Possibly but there's a couple caveats.
First, is this a surprise to climatologists? I've heard talk of heat maybe getting lost in the ocean, I've also heard about ice caps melting. If the climatologists are shocked by this finding I'd be nervous, not enough to seriously jeopardize my belief in AGW, but enough that I'd be a bit more skeptical of their regional projections. But if this is something they largely suspected but didn't know how to properly measure I wouldn't mind too much.
And assuming it's not a surprise I'd question whether the global temperature readings were deliberately conservative. There's denialists that still go on about the easily disproven urban heat island effect, I can easily see scientists ignoring speculative signs of heating that they can't unambiguously prove in an effort to avoid giving denialists ammunition.
One criticism I've heard of the IPCC process from scientists is it leads to overly conservative conclusions, rather than being the voice of extremists it's the voice of the most conservative elements of the community. If widely published AGW reports are proven wrong there's a strong bias to them underestimating rather than overestimating the issue.
AFAIK micronutrients, or different types of fats, while important for general health, aren't a factor in obesity. It makes sense that our body could develop cravings if it was missing nutrient X and cause us to overeat, but as far as I'm aware there's no evidence for that.
I think there's a couple factors that could explain why the Japanese get fat after adopting a western diet.
1) Japanese food could be less fattening for other non-carb reasons. Western culture has spent the last 50 years creating foods designed to be as tasty and addictive as possible, chips, cookies, hamburgers, sugared breakfast cereal, soups with a heavy cream or butter base, basically foods with added sugar, salt, and fat. It's unsurprising that food designed to be as tasty as possible also lead us to overeat and get fat.
2) Japanese culture is very anti-fat, they're fanatical about physical activity and have very strong social pressure to stay thin. It's shown that people get fat and thin with their friends. People move west, get surrounded by fat people, and the social pressure to stay thin is relaxed and the diet and lifestyle is more conducive to causing obesity.
The rice eaten in Japan is overwhelmingly white rice, which has a high insulin score
How do they cook it? IIRC, Vinegared rice is rinsed, which may remove some starsh. And vinegar is known to lower glycemic index.
Even assuming ALL the rice they ate was with vinegar according to this paper that would lower the Glycemic Index by 20-40% (assuming you and the paper both mean the same thing with vinegar).
That would bring the rice roughly in line with Mars bars.
Beef has an insulin score of 51 ± 16, pasta 40 ± 5, which contains more carbs?
That result is interesting: I knew pasta contained resistant starch (counted as digestible calories, but not digested... unless your gut bacteria do it for you), but I did not imagine it was so low
.
That is a possible explanation for rice in Asia not feeding obesity, as you noted. What rice is it, how is it cooked, and are there resistant starch there?
The rice eaten in Japan is overwhelmingly white rice, which has a high insulin score and a crappy satiety score oddly enough.
The baked potatoes got their crazy insulin score under the same conditions they got their crazy satiety score.
I would not bet on that, since the ability to digest varies among individuals, and is also influenced by other aliments in the meal (hint: fibers).
On glucose vs insulin response: we know that some proteins will amplify the insulin response to glucose. This is well known for whey, for instance. But there there must be carbs in order to raise insulin. Eating meat, cheese and eggs will not raise blood glucose and insulin in any significant way. The wikipedia page notes protein-rich beans raise insulin, but beans also contains carbs.
Beef has an insulin score of 51 ± 16, pasta 40 ± 5, which contains more carbs?
It's just because you are addicted and lack imagination :-)
On a serious note the explanation I like the most is the palatability hypothesis. Basically the tastier a food is the hungrier you get and more you want to eat (when's the last time you got full eating ice cream?). I don't know how much of the obesity epidemic it's responsible for but it's certainly a factor. It's actually an effective approach if a disappointing one, it's hard to get fat eating bland tasteless food.
This is easy to debunk: paper contains a lot of calories, but eating 100g of paper a day will not make you fat. The same amount of calories from sugar will.
I think we can assume that they're properly calculating calories as things we can digest?
This is just wrong. Convertingaminoacids into glucose is a slow process, a high aminoacid intake will not create high blood sugar
I overstated a bit, some of the glucose scores are comparable but the Insulin response is actually pretty comparable.
The thing that does stand out is the satiety score, the winner in a land slide are starchy baked potatoes, they also win the glucose title as well! What's on the bottom as the least satiating things? Croissants, cake, peanuts, ice cream, basically things that are really yummy. One of the other reasons why low-carb works is it's hard to find really yummy things without carbs.
And cortisol, and thyroid hormons, and leptin, and ghrelin... but that runs amok when your diet has nothing to do with what your body is designed for, and high carb diest does just that.
So explain Japan and China eating loads of white rice, explain the Kuna, who eat almost as much white sugar as us.
Sugar and white bread contribute to obesity, no one will argue that. But the story is far more complicated than high carb=>fat.
Your imaginary experiment is actually unrelated to what I said.
I've never denied that low-carb diets cause weight loss, and they do that due to spontaneous reduction in ingested calories. I explicitly and consistently said that ingesting same number of calories will have the same effect on body weight regardless of their source.
And I don't believe the success of the low-carb diet is due to the mechanism from your thought experiment, protein triggers a rise in blood glucose that's comparable to carbs (think it comes from glucagon breaking down the protein into sugars), but most of the success of low carb diets seem to be because people replace the carbs with protein which is more satiating.
Hunger is a lot more complicated than simple blood sugar, that's why we have hormones like insulin and glucagon, so our brain is able to regulate hunger appropriately.
If you include long term unemployment benefits I suppose that does become a basic income guarantee, and it's something I wouldn't mind though I'm not sure they are a necessary pairing particularly since minimum wage should be higher than the unemployment for the bottom workers.
Let's be honest. Minimum wage is basically an attempt to sneak in universal basic income under a different name, and with a few irrelevant strings attached to attempt to satisfy the conservative "must work to live" crowd. If we lefties are honest with ourselves, we should be open about what we actually want, and just say that society has a moral obligation to provide a basic quality of living for every of its members - and implement this directly. Mincome FTW.
I think it's different from a universal basic income since the requirement of a job is hardly an irrelevant string.
I see it as an assumption that the lowest income workers don't have the bargaining power to receive a fair wage, so the government steps in and makes sure they get that wage. I also see it as a moral belief that if you work full time you should be able to afford to support yourself.
I don't deny that low-carb generally causes weight loss, I actually confirmed that in another comment. But the experiments I'm aware of suggest this is due to people eating fewer calories on a low-carb diet.
Claiming that ingesting the same number of calories will cause you to lose weight if they come from non-carbs is a different claim entirely.
I asked because I've done the research previously and I know the scientific consensus says that for a healthy person in normal circumstances the macro nutrient balance doesn't really matter (at least when it comes to the ingesting the same number of calories).
If he has evidence that argues against what I believe to be the consensus than I'm interested in hearing.
There will certainly be some labour reduction via mechanization but the same mechanization often creates new jobs in other fields. And the unemployed people either take those new jobs or the jobs vacated by the people who took those new jobs.
Not really.
For some of the domestic stuff those are mostly jobs that would not have existed otherwise (though I'm not sure if it's expected for minimum wage to apply to 'odd jobs' anyways). But for farming the fruit would still get picked, it would just get picked by more mechanized and higher priced labour. The jobs would still be there, the food would simply get a bit more expensive.
Diabetic patients are told to eat low carb diets. Even people who have been fat all their life start following a strict low carb diet, they become thin.
There was a discussion regarding some experiments on this. One doctor had diabetic patients that were getting too thin, "wasting away" as they said and wanted to put some meat on the bones. The doctors prescribed drinking olive oil shots. The patients didn't gain any weight. So, he doubled the amount of olive oil to be drunk like medicine. Still no weight gain. He doubled it again. Nothing again. At the end, patients were consuming over 2000 calories in olive oil shots and not gaining any weight (this in addition to their strict low carb diet for diabetes).
The whole "insulin" as the fat hormone I think was popularized by the book "Good calories, bad calories" by Taubes. There is no scientific consensus about insulin though. Taubes does cite a lot of work on his book and one of the most dramatic is the topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections.
Low-carb seems to be the best of all the weight loss diets when examined experimentally. There are a plethora of theories regarding why low-carb seems to be the best. Since low-carb diets were popularized by the diabetes doctor Atkins, there has been a strong suspicion that it is through insulin.
Diabetics are an interesting piece of data but they're a slightly different case because they have a malfunctioning metabolism. I'd be curious to see what was happening with the olive oil case study though.
AFAIK the studies indicate that low carb causes weight loss because people spontaneously eat fewer calories, and high protein seems to work better than low-carb.
As for Taubes I'm actually very skeptical of his work, including how he's misrepresented and cherry picked tribal populations, suggested vegetarians were fat, and seems to have forgotten about Asia.
The topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections prove what everybody agrees, that insulin is the mechanism that causes glucose to be stored as fat. But that's very different from insulin driving appetite or insulin injections increasing total body fat % in a healthy person. Insulin is mostly there to regulate blood glucose levels, saying insulin causes obesity is a bit like saying a car's engine is responsible for it speeding. It's a necessary component but the cause of the excessive speed is something else entirely (the driver). Researchers who study obesity don't believe insulin is a primary driver of obesity.
Yes, like all the people pumping gas, filling grocery store bags, etc. Full employment!
Or ... not. If you a make a job economically unproductive, it goes away. Businesses don't pay to lose money.
I understand and have sympathy for that argument. But in practice even a free employee needs things like paperwork, supervision, and co-workers. An employee so unproductive as to not justify the minimum wage could easily cause negative revenue.
There's a reason not every business accepts unpaid interns, lowering/eliminating the minimum wage probably won't make an appreciable dent in unemployment.
Summary notes that he lose weight at 2400 kcal/day, which is relatively high. This is not surprising: fat storage or burning is controlled by insulin, which is controlled in healthy subjects by blood glucose level. If the food does not rise blood glucose level (either because it is low carb, or because it contains carbs that take time to digest), insulin remains low, and fat is burnt.
If the food doesn't raise blood glucose levels that means the calories get come from places other than simple carbohydrates, and those calories get broken down into what the body needs, and if there's extra it gets stored as fat.
On what evidence do you base your claim that the same number of calories per day will make you thinner if they come from a source that doesn't raise blood glucose?
Not to go all ad-hominem but could you find a source supporting the Ketogenic diet that isn't called ketotic.org?
It might be a great resource, and their literature review might be unbiased and very high quality. But they could also be a pair of diet evangelists outside of their field of expertise who are cherry picking and misrepresenting studies (intentionally or not).
They could be completely accurate and reliable, but they've also got all the hallmarks of YAIC (Yet Another Internet Crank).
Maybe the Gut bacteria found the soylent concoction particularly tasty and were eating more of it than the human, hence the weight loss.
You actually just gave me a great idea for a weight loss pill that's simply a capsule filled with tapeworm eggs.
Minimum wage is a bit of a weird thing economically. In the standard way of thinking it punishes the poor because they're unable to generate enough revenue to justify the minimum wage and thus go unemployed. In practice it tends to work differently since employers hiring bottom level employees aren't calculating the additional revenue as much as they're looking to fill a hole in their business.
They'll generally pay whatever is required, within reason, to fill that position. If the minimum wage goes up all those people at the bottom get a raise. If necessary prices go up as well and you get some inflation to compensate but the main effect is a mild wealth transfer to the poor.