Low-Carb: Meet Meat!

Reading Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" has been a minor epiphany in several different areas. It's a 'research review', which is not 'general' reading, you'd have to be a serious reader and seriously into the subject to enjoy it -- but I am.

I feel like someone who has been wandering through the desert for a lifetime, constantly tempted by rapidly vanishing mirages of weight loss promises, distracting myself from the hopelessness by focusing on my feet, and finally I tripped over something real. Something that revolutionizes the way I think about quite a few things, something that makes me look up from the book and holler, "Of COURSE! Yes, that makes sense!"

I've always felt fat was probably a 'symptom' of something (and no, not "eating 12 pounds of bonbons a day" as most seem to assume). Since obesity is associated with all the "diseases of Western Civilization," it makes sense that obesity is a symptom (an illness of a sort) just like all those diseases -- diabetes, heart disease, cancer, alzheimers, etc. -- and that they probably all have the same core causes. It turns out there is over a century of research demonstrating exactly that.

The amazing part isn't that fat is a hormonal, endocrinal, metabolic problem on display. Most of us knew that. The amazing part is how much evidence for this, and against the "healthy high-carb low-fat" hypothesis there really is, that has managed to be marginalized in one way or another.

At this point the agriculture chemical industry (huge), the modern food manufacturing industries (huge), the modern food retail and grocery industries (huge), the the modern pharmaceutical industries for heart issues (huge), diabetic issues (huge), cancer issues (huge), and even pharmaceutical industries for psychological issues research suggests are probably also 'diseases of western civilization' from the same root (depression, schizophrenia, etc.) all have a "vested interest" in keeping the global brainwashing going strong against meat and in favor of carbohydrates.

I think it's making me paranoid on low-carb's behalf: I'm beginning to see new "press releases" on research as literal propaganda. The rift of disconnect between what these studies actually say, and what they are proposed to have said, is getting wider and more astonishing by the day. Quite literally it is getting to the point where I see media examples regularly where a study that specifically did NOT find in favor of carbs, is promoted widely as having done exactly that. "The Big Lie," this is called in politics: say something often enough and loudly enough, and people will accept it. It will seem impossible that anything so "pervasive" could be wrong.

On an only slightly separate topic, Regina Wilshire's blog article "Don't Buy Their Snake Oil" is a good look at a research presentation that nicely examples something not uncommon nowdays: something presented so badly that the word "wrong" doesn't even sufficiently address the issue.

Moving on.

So basically, when you stick food in your body, lots of stuff happens, but concerning fat, it simplifies to one of two things happening:

1 - It is used for energy, or
2 - It is stored as fat.

Pretty simple. So when you see someone fat and sedentary, the obvious (and research supported) conclusion is: that person is not getting the energy from their food. Their body is essentially hoarding it in fat cells, refusing to give it to them.

So, the person will be driven to eat, as they have less energy. They will be more sedentary, because they have less energy. They are likely to eat carbs, because that is 'energy', which will only make things worse, as their insulin-resistance increases. Eating carbs even causes depletion and/or greater need for a variety of vitamins (some Bs, C and E so far, maybe more) which can cause body problems.

All of this not because the person is some kind of societal moral failure, but because their body is processing and reacting to insulin differently than it used to. Some people it starts in early childhood, some not till they are 60, some for genetic reasons, some for 'everything you ingested that came before' reasons, etc.

The bottom line, as Taubes explains, is that most people do not get fat because they keep eating; they keep eating because they are getting fat -- because the food they're taking in is, quite literally, not feeding them the energy they need.

***

After reading about carbs through the entire book, I had a realization at the end. And that is:

Food = meat.

Meat including fish, poultry, etc. of course.

Pretty much throughout history, that's what men ate. Until 10+ thousand years ago when agriculture graced our world.

I thought about this a lot, and came to the conclusion that culturally, I've been brainwashed into expecting several different foods at a time (especially at dinner), and starches constantly.

But in reality, FOOD, is a piece of steak or burger or chicken or pork or fish. Everything else (except fats) is just the details, just the seasonal add-ons.

***

This helped me in a surprising way. I've long had a problem with protein powder, which due to my size and difficulty with eating meat 5x a day, I need to use. But I have the ability to taste the stuff (any brand--I've tried many, good ones) no matter how "buried" it is in other stuff. It is vile, vile, vile, that is all there is to it. Even ice cream and chocolate syrup, when I once went off lowcarb, could not mask the vile taste of protein powder. So since last September when I went lowcarb I have wanted to drink this but I balk. "I don't LIKE it. I don't WANT to eat food I don't like."

Ta-da! Presto, I changed my way of thinking, and protein powder fell out of the food category. Now it qualifies more like maybe a medicine for fat and weakness. Those are supposed to taste bad--big deal. So now I've been having generally two protein drinks a day, adding 76g of protein to my day that is making all the difference in how I feel.

And now when I think about food, I think about -- food. I have burgers, steak, chicken, pork chops, gourmet sausages, I'm planning meatballs. I make eggs, with shredded hard cheese, or sometimes an egg-cream cheese bowl muffin, but generally, I'm eating MEAT. I'm not "Paleo," I'm not avoiding dairy or veggies or anything like that. I'm simply considering food to be MEAT, and if I can't have that, having some protein powder.

For the first time since September 06 when I began low carb, I have actually made all my nutrient counts, ideally no less, for some time now. I've been eating so that I am totally satiated every day, and so I have enough protein to feel strong, and I'm eating truly yummy foods (even a little something fairly sweet), and yet when I really push my food intake to the max, I make nearly 1500 calories, 120++g protein, 60++g fats, and generally less than 20 carbs. And I'm willing to eat 40-50 carbs a day, it's just amazingly easy, when I eat "real food", to keep them low.

My carb intake will be increasing next week with my zucchini and cauliflower experiments in the kitchen, and several new muffin and cookie experiments (using almond and coconut flours, as I now make just about everything gluten-free as well as lowcarb). Still it will remain low and my protein and fats will remain high.

And it's easy. I don't know why it wasn't easy before. I have an old blog post, "Don't Have a Cow, Man" about my issues with getting enough protein. And yet somehow now I'm looking at 160g a day when before I couldn't seem to make 80g very often. Since I can really track my sense of well-being and leg-strength to the protein quantity I've ingested in the 1-3 days prior, that's really important.

And I find that if I have something sweet to eat, I can eat literally 3-4 bites of it and feel like, "Ok, that's enough." I'm not hungry; but I'm not stuffed, either. This is the first time in my life I recall simply feeling "satiated". I'm good at ignoring hunger, and I'm good at feeding hunger, and I'm good at feeling stuffed, but those were the only three options for me until now. Now suddenly it's like my body is just where it needs to be.

Being back on lowcarb again (before long I'll update my on/off LC graph, which as always shows the story so much more eloquently than any words), I'm already reaping the rewards. I can sleep, deeply and fully. I can wake up without feeling I'm under the sea. I can think and function when I wake up. I have energy and feel like getting up. With one exception I have gotten up earlier than usual and done far more for my day by 9am than I used to get done by noon.

And the main thing is, I can get up and cook/eat 5x a day because I want to do well at this -- but mostly, because I have the energy.

The more meat I eat, the more like a stealthy hunter I feel. :-)

PJ
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The Skinny on Being Fat

Why IS it that some people are fat and others are not?

Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, said:

...if you think about it in general terms, you can explain differences in weight in the population based on three possibilities.

...one possibility would be that the obese lack will power; this is a point of view favored by lean people, I generally find.

The second possibility that people consider is that we live in a toxic environment and that it's the environment's fault.

And then the third possibility is that there are biological drives that lead us to eat what we eat, and ultimately weigh what we weigh, in the same way as some of us are tall and some of us are short, others of us are destined to be heavy and others lean.

...I think most moderate scientists believe that of course that all three can be relevant, but that biology has really an underappreciated role in accounting for difference in weight, and we know a lot about the system now and so I think there's a powerful set of data that supports that point of view.

{Ira Flatow: So when people are fat and they're overweight, there is a major genetic factor here. It's not as simple as saying "I have no will power" or "I tried the diet, doesn't work." There could be real hard wiring that's the problem.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: ...some of the most powerful evidence that this is a biological problem and not a "behavioral one" (in quotation marks) is genetics. And so there are a number of ways to assess the genetic contributions to a trait. It turns out if you look for obesity it is probably the second most heritable trait, second only to height, with which it is quite close. Based on estimates that can be done by analyzing twins, 80 percent of the variability in weight can be accounted for by genetic factors.

Good grief! 80%? That's.... huge. So much for the just 'eat less exercise more!' solves-all-fat line.

Friedman points out that the belief in leanness is a modern thing, and implies that the expectation that everyone should be thin is itself nonsense:

...Historically, being obese was the desirable body habit as so. If you go to museums… all the rich people in Egypt would pay extra money to have extra chins put onto their sculpture. Rubenesque figures were the vogue in the 1700s. Renoir's characters were all heavy. In aboriginal societies the chieftains were all quite obese. For reasons that -- you all have as good an idea about as I do I guess –- things changed here about what our views of what was attractive in the 60s and it set up an idealized view of what people should weigh and who they should be that just isn't matched by our genetic endowment.

...The problem is not that small amounts of weight that improve health can't be achievable; I think it can be. The problem is that's not what most obese people want or the public wants. The public wants to be normal weight. And so I would much prefer to see that the dialogue and the issue center on improved health and achievable goals rather than setting up some societal construct that says everybody has to be perfectly wonderfully thin, a wish that really runs counter to almost everything science has to tell us about this problem.

I think people should make their best efforts but recognize, but not be prejudicial about the fact, that for many people most of the things you do aren’t going to work. And so my argument is not "we shouldn’t think about the problem, we shouldn’t address it." The issue has to do with "what are we going to do about it." And so I would argue what we shouldn’t do is fall back on simple nostrums like "eat less, exercise more."

And here he talks a little more about the weird social stigma that obesity has, and how illogical it is from a medical science perspective:

I think that to the extent that increased weight has health consequences, people should do their best. It certainly is a good thing to be fit. And it is a good thing to eat a heart healthy diet. And it’s probably a good thing to make one’s best efforts to keep one’s weight under control. So that means not doing much different than what Hippocrates would have recommended. But I think at the same time we have to recognize that those measures are rather limited in their efficacy and that to make the leap therefore that people who are not successful at keeping their weight off are at fault is just wrong headed. And there are all kinds of attributes about each of us that might draw the next person to draw a conclusion about them. But to draw conclusions about obese people, I think, is unenlightened to say the least about what their personal characteristics are.

(Ira Flatow: So to stigmatize them is sort of making fun of the situation that they don’t have much control over.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: I think that’s right and the ironic thing is that I think the more of an outlier one is for weight, the more obese, the more difficult it would be to actually normalize weight. And so if anyone should be stigmatized it would be someone like me who could easily lose 10 lbs. and doesn’t. I think for the people who are really significantly overweight, it’s just who they are -- to a very, very large extent.

... It’d be much better to forget about the stigma and assume people weigh what they weigh, and then encourage people to do what they can to improve their health.

Back to Genetics, he said:

...So when you see a very obese person walking down the street there’s a very, very significant possibility that that individual just has a genetic alteration that makes them so.

(Ira Flatow: So all those years when you saw a very obese person and they said, "I have a glandular problem," they were telling the truth in a certain sense genetically speaking.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well I think so. They just didn’t know which gland.

Then he got into some interesting stuff about how the functioning of a morbidly obese body is in many cases simply working differently than others. He used gastric bypass patients for this example.

(Question from the audience 1: When someone has a surgical intervention such that a massively obese person of, let’s say, 400 lbs. or 500 lbs. removes part of his colon and attains a weight more normal to his size, for his height. Does that rewire the person or does that then remold itself into the norm and the body strives to achieve the larger weight yet again?)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: ...there’s another feature of this surgery that people, I think, ignore, and it’s this: when you do this procedure you limit the intake of a person to about 700 calories a day. Just so you know, none of you could consume 700 calories a day for very long; it is a very small number of calories. Despite that fact, these people still end up being clinically obese at the other end of the procedure. They lose a lot of weight but they would still on average be definable as significantly obese on average after the procedure.

Now think about it, they’re eating 700 calories a day and they’re still obese. I mean if that doesn’t say that there’s something metabolically different about the obese than the lean, I don’t know what does.

Geez. Me neither.

I can tell people, "I have tracked 3-4 weeks, repeatedly, of my food intake, and my BMR is allegedly like 4000 calories a day minimum, and I'm eating usually <1200 calories a day IF that, AND lowcarb... and not losing weight." And plenty of them think I'm lying. I've actually had people suggest that if only I'd keep a food diary like they do in weight watchers (note: I *do*, or how could I be 'tracking' it??) that surely I would see all kinds of calories I didn't know about. As if 3,000 calories is easy to hide, for someone who has to work hard just to successfully eat 1000-1200 calories a day! My biggest problem is getting my butt into the kitchen to eat anything at all. So it's not like I'm grazing through fields all day and might 'forget' that 'Oh yeah, I ate 3 pizzas or something while grazing through the lettuce greens!', sheesh!

A reference was given me once of a Dr. Phil (I think) episode, where he tells this woman claiming the same thing that she defies the laws of nature, and then "discovers" from her husband that she is drinking thousands of calories a day in soda that she "didn't think counted." What a setup. She's an idiot, yes, but I felt the producers worked hard to find some way to invalidate that and maintain the calorie-myth ... tabloid journalism, essentially.

It's basically insulting. I mean, I've had people argue what they are sure about on-paper. They heard it, or read it. Or, they are a fairly normal metabolism bodybuilder who gained weight from sheer overeating after leaving high school sports or something, and hence when they quit overeating and started working out again, it fell off. It is just not the same.

They think it's a mathematical impossibility. I wish someone would find a way to communicate to the metabolic system how bad it is at math. I'm getting weary of people who would not doubt my intelligence or integrity on any other issue, acting like they're sure I must be lying or deluding myself about what I eat, because they just can't understand the calorie-math and why pounds aren't dropping off me at the speed of light.

The more quantity of food and more often I eat, as long as it isn't excessively of course, the more I lose weight. It's hard to do, after my whole adult life of eating once daily in the evening.

If they’re consuming 700 calories every day they’re going to be expending more than that. And so what you would find, you would expect to see is as long as they’re that imbalanced they’re going to keep losing and losing and losing and losing. That’s not what happens in these people; they plateau and they stop losing weight at what is definable as a significantly obese level. Now, if I had that procedure you probably wouldn’t see me in profile anymore because I would just get so thin. That’s not what happens to these people and it appears that in the face of reduced intake the body shuts down caloric expenditure and they can’t lose any more weight.

But it's all about the 'basal metabolic rate' right? How much exercise you get? He pops the balloon of what I call The Calorie Lie: the belief that to maintain obesity once must eat huge quantities of calories.

This is what sets me off most about conversation with people who seem to assume that every day I proactively DO SOMETHING to STAY fat. Sheesh!

Now this next part is pretty depressing, if eye-opening. This actually goes back to what Jonny Bowden was saying about how they used to measure the detail 'calories burned' by exercise, and it varied radically by person and was way outside what was 'assumed'. According to Friedman, people who are obese and lose some weight (whether this is because they are obese or, more likely I just assume, this is part of WHY they are obese) actually burn FEWER calories in order to maintain the SAME weight as someone else who did not lose weight to get to the same place:

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: So it turns out – and this was some lovely work done by Jules Hirsch here at Rockefeller [this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1996, measured the metabolism of people who lost weight through a precisely controlled diet] --] it turns out they burn many fewer calories than you would predict based on their newer weight.

So let me put a finer point on this. Imagine you’re 250 pounds. and you lose 100 lbs. to 150 lbs. Now you ask how many calories does that person burn compared to someone who started out at 150 pounds.They burn like 300 or 400 calories fewer per day when they’re at that reduced weight. Now think about it. That person is hungry and now can only eat fewer calories than the equal weight person to maintain that weight, despite the fact that they weigh the same amount.

So just like Jonny said about how the calories burned in exercise was not consistent between different people, here Friedman makes clear, that even on a daily overall metabolic ratio (not just a limited exercise event), the amount of calories burned is not consistent between different people of the same weight. So Jane and Nancy, if eating the same things, and exercising the same amounts, may result eventually in a fat Jane and a slim Nancy, with no apparent behavioral difference.

And it's possible that this "biases against Jane keeping that weight off." Because eating identical food with identical exercise at the same body weight at point 1, a year later, Jane would be at least 36.5 lbs heavier. Multiply that by a few years and you have a very fat Jane, who never once needed to ingest pounds of bon-bons regularly in order to end up morbidly obese.

More:

(Ira Flatow: What about the other parts that control metabolism? Is it true that some people burn food faster and so it’s not the brain part and it’s just their thyroid, or whatever it is?

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: A very classic study was done about 15 years ago by a guy named Claude Bouchard. And Claude gathered up a set of identical twins and overfed them 1,000 calories a day for 84 days. And he asked what happened. So these people were in a room, they were given calories, they were forced to eat 1,000 extra calories a day; they should have put on a lot of weight. Some people put on a lot of weight, other people put on hardly any weight at all.

And when they looked, the twins were highly similar to one another, suggesting that there was some genetic predisposition to either put on weight or not put on weight when you were given extra calories. The people who didn’t put on weight activated metabolism because of metabolic circuitry and didn’t put on the weight. And this observation that some people can eat whatever they want and never put on weight and other people put on weight just by looking at it has been more or less proven based on that study, which actually was observed as far back as the 1700s.

Friedman said, regarding the twin studies, that the opposite variant of twins had also been studied, and it STILL comes out to being, at root, a genetic predisposition to gain weight or not, overwhelmingly, not environmental:

...they were then redone with identical twins reared apart compared to fraternal twins reared together. So you’re actually biasing against the identical twins so now the hereditability falls from 80 percent to 70 percent. Still 70 percent -- and the other 30 percent could not be accounted for by the environment for those kids.

And finally, he referred to studies on adopted children, to see if it's entirely about the environment provided by parents, e.g., take a fat mother, with fat children assumedly from "the environment she raises them in," if you put a kid with different genetics in there, will they also be fat?

Another way to look at this, actually, is to take kids who are adopted and ask on average, do they resemble their adoptive parents or their biological parents, making the assumption that some go to one environment, others to the other. They, to a very large extent, resembled their biological parents independent of the environment that their adoptive parents provided.

Well, that's pretty much a measure from all three angles you can measure it, and in every measure, it comes out to be overwhelmingly a matter of genetic predisposition, more than just food intake or exercise.

***

I don't really want to believe this. It sorta makes me want to cry.

And of course, it goes greatly against what we are all indoctrinated with from our dietary plans of choice.

It is not 100% genetics. It is not a 100% failure of people to keep weight off. It's just... 70-80% genetics, and 95-98% failure.

Can I be one of the 2%? Can I modify my eating habits, exercise and lifestyle that the 20-30% can balance out the rest? Can I be the freak of nature that actually succeeds?

Damn. I hope so.

Am I delusional? Probably. The alternative might be suicidal, so it's all I've got.

.

The Obesity Epidemic Hysteria

A few more quotes from Dr. Jeffrey M. Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University, and related thoughts.

Friedman took on some of the hysteria regarding the "obesity epidemic." There's some stuff I didn't realize or hadn't considered.

I actually contacted the epidemiologist named Katherine Flegal, who publishes all the reports that are highlighted in the press every time we hear, in five year intervals, the weight problem has increased dramatically. And I asked her exactly that question. "Well, what about obesity in other countries? Could it be, for example, that the curve in England or Europe has just shifted a little bit to the left?"

Now I asked her the question and she said it might be but no one knows. The data have not been gathered in these other countries in a way that would allow you to compare. So the supposition that this problem is so much worse in the U.S. is not based on actual data.

Regarding the "massive rise in numbers" and "doubling of number of obese" people etc., the foundation of our "obesity epidemic" and related hysteria, he said:

That’s an argument I get all the time because people say, "Well, there’s a huge change in a short period of time in the amount of obesity and that therefore it can’t be genetic." First of all, actually, that’s wrong. Genes in a population can change very rapidly as environment changes. In fact that’s the whole purpose of having variation in a population. As the environment changes in acute circumstances certain variants are selected and then predominate.

But setting that aside actually, I think people have a misconception about the role of environment in this because of misuse of statistics.

Let me explain what I mean. Obesity is distributed in the population. Some people are thin; some people are heavy; most people are in the middle; and you have a curve, a bell-shaped curve.

Now there’s a known phenomenon in epidemiology that when you have a normally distributed trait, meaning a bell-shaped curve, and a fixed threshold that defines a disease, if that average value shifts even a small amount, you get a disproportionate number of people who exceed the threshold.

So let me give you an analogy for IQ here and then I can tell you the actual data for weight. Imagine that 40 years ago the average IQ was 100 and there was a bell-shaped curve. Imagine now that our educational system improves and the bell-shaped curve shifts a little and the average IQ is now 105. With that you could imagine that the number of people who have an IQ greater than 140, so-called geniuses, might have doubled.

Now is it more useful to think about how our education is doing by saying, "average IQ increased 5 points" or "number of geniuses is doubled?" I think probably both are of interest but the former seems to me more informative.

Ok. So how does that analogize to weight? Over the time period that you’ve heard that the obesity rates have quote "doubled" or gone up by 70 percent, the average weight gain is: 7 to 10 pounds.

What?! All this hysteria over "obesity has DOUBLED!" and actually, it only means that the 'average' weight has increased by 7-10 lbs?! But remember that "bell shaped curve". When you move that entire bell-shape on the graph, the number of people it encompasses is huge, so yeah, mathematically, the number of people affected is sort of exponential.

Do you suppose there's a reason why we never hear, "Over the last X years, the average weight has increased 7-10lbs"? Instead of, "The number of obese people has DOUBLED!" Realistically, even a ONE pound shift in that gigantic population bell-curve would have moved a helluva lot of people over that line.

Now I’m not here to argue that that’s not important; it is important from a public health point of view. But if we then say that’s what environment contributes to differences in weight over that time frame, think about the fact that 7 to 10 pounds is almost nothing compared to the hundreds of pounds of difference in weight that you might see in any two people walking around the street today, both of whom essentially have unlimited access to calories.

Some of his comments from a couple years ago sounded similar to what I'm hearing about the current book 'Rethinking Thin'.

...the idea that you can change your weight voluntarily is one that the diet industry has a huge financial interest in. And so anybody can tune into infomercials telling you what you need to do to lose weight is fork over some money to their diet plan, eat it or not eat it and you’ll lose weight. And I don’t think that message and that marketing muscle can be easily counteracted by what scientists have to say about it.

Part of the problem is that that notion fits in with people’s intuition. And this gets very complicated. It’s a control issue; people want to feel like they’re in control of what they eat and what they weigh. But at a certain point you need to ask yourself, "How much am I really in control of it?" Now the problem for feeding is that the time frame with which this drive expresses itself is out weeks to months to actually years. And so by the time the drive exercises its power people don’t recognize it as a drive, and they simply imagine that it’s a loss of will power, not thinking of it as rather an expression of a basic biological drive.

...the available evidence would suggest that the vast majority of people who find themselves at a particular weight -- be it thin, medium, or heavy -- that’s pretty much their weight.

It’s that somehow people think this is something they ought to be able to control. And they accept all these other things you can’t control that are just who you are. But people are very loathe to believe that what they weigh is who they are.

On one of the early ideas about the Fatzi Regime's rush to label children based on their weight, he had a few comments as well:

(Ira Flatow: There was a news item that said New York’s Dept. of Education is considering putting kids weight on their report cards. Talk about stigmatizing kids.)

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Well, you know I would ask everybody, listen to what I have to say and then think about the things you’ll read in the press about obese people and then substitute any other human characteristic in there in place of obesity. You’d never get away with it; you’d get arrested or something. I mean, the things that get said!

I’ll give you a few examples. I was listening to Imus in the political campaign and they were talking about Bill Richardson as a possible vice-presidential candidate and a Newsweek reporter says Bill Richardson is being dismissed as a vice-presidential candidate because he’s too obese. What else could you have said and gotten away with? William Sensenbrenner, a congressman, is quoted in the New York Times as saying to the obese, "Look in the mirror because you’re the one to blame." I could go on and on. You have an opera singer fired because they’re too obese. And she correctly pointed out that this is the last bastion of stigmatization in the country.

And so when you read these things, think about it. Should they be putting a kid’s weight on the report card? I don’t know. Probably not.

And what about age? Plenty of us know people who ate anything and everything up to a certain point in their life, where they suddenly began gaining weight, which exponentially multiplied. Most people in lowcarb would consider it a gradual development of insulin resistance, based on the standard American diet (and I am referring to the USDA diet, not necessarily to chronic junk food). But might some of it relate to age? Or might those factors overlap? And if some of the "increase in obesity" is correlated with age, how might that affect the statistics? And if it affected the statistics, would that feed into the "obesity epidemic" hysteria?

Now, it’s a fact that people and animals get heavier as they age. We don’t understand why that is. It appears that leptin levels go up and some people lose leptin sensitivity as they age. We have no idea why. I’ll just digress to one other point that gets to your issue about the 7 to 10 lb. average weight gain. When you look at these data, they’re not corrected for age, And so, if the population is aging, that could contribute also to the perception that weight is changing.

He is not only blessedly aware of the flaws of the "BMI" as an evaluation, but of the issue related to weight and fitness. If you can take a person who is obese yet who plays three sports and is otherwise completely healthy--and I've known several people (and several teenagers) like this--then clearly obesity and health are not mutually opposing things.

The most important thing is what your general health is. If you’re overweight and not diabetic and not hypertensive and not hypercholesterolemic, then there’s a lot less to think about than if you’re diabetic and hypertensive and hypercholesterolemic. My own opinion, and this is just an opinion, is if you’re overweight and otherwise healthy, I would say try to be fit, try to eat a heart healthy diet and minimize your risk factors and try to enjoy yourself.

If you’re diabetic and have these other problems, then make your best effort to lose weight to the extent that it improves your health, do your best as you would for anything else.

Ira Flatow: So you said, you can be fit and overweight at the same time.

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman: Right.

I'd never actually thought about the 'obesity epidemic' being a sort of overhyped-hysteria. I mean, I think it's good that this increase is recognized, but let's get real, none of the authorities are recognizing the primary factors (sugar/carb overdose from an early age, and some researchers think as much as 50% of the population is probably sensitive to wheat/gluten and other primary foods that the official food pyramid insists be the dominant eating) that are massively contributing to weight gain and insulin resistance and eventual diabetes.

So since they are not even looking at the most fundamental cause for change, yet the hype is endless about this problem, what are we looking at here?

***

Years ago I did a study on media, for my own interest, and discovered that the news in general, on TV and in magazines, is not as much informative as predictive. Literally, when you look at it in retrospect, you actually see such a pattern that you start feeling like everything you were "officially told about" was part of some larger plan to "set up" a situation or presentation for something else that was planned ahead of time. Eventually, when I was watching the nightly news and writing down what was being said, I started asking myself, not, 'Is it true?' but rather, 'Why do 'they' (whomever 'they' is) want me to believe this?' which turned out to be a far more useful question.

So after seeing Dr. Friedman's comments, and this from a 2005 lecture no less!, about how the potential age increase in the population (which we know we have thanks to the baby boomer population) can increase the stats, and how the 7-10 lbs average increase on a bell curve would of course make a big change in the numbers, I started thinking, "Since they don't really want to look at the most legit science for solving it, and since the official recommendations are still corrupted by corporatism, then why is that they want us all to share the hysteria about this change in numbers?"

I think there are probably
-- (a) profitable drugs which will get approved sooner than they should because of this hysteria, and that's being relied on;
-- (b) legislations which will get passed that would never ever fly otherwise, but will get pushed through thanks to this hysteria, and that's being relied on;
-- and surely some things I haven't thought of yet.

It's not really paranoia or conspiracy thinking, it's just "precedent" from having observed news and related trends in the past and seen how it plays out in other subjects. I can't help but wonder if the 'hysteria' is being 'encouraged' behind the scenes because of the "power" it provides.

Remember the recent British report, which had US doctors involved as well, that first suggested radical "intervention" into the lives of children and families including taking kids from parents and even forcing gastric bypass surgery, they actually said OUTRIGHT that they didn't have the evidence to back their recommendations being what was right, but that the urgency of the situation demanded action. In other words: thanks to the hysteria, we no longer even have to prove something is a good idea before we radically invade the rights of the populace.

Maybe a little less hysteria and a few more people like Dr. Friedman would be useful. Not only for education and research, but for the actual political rights of individuals, children and families.

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Respect for Science: The Caveat

The problem with any human endeavor is that, well, humans are the ones running it.

Even in the most admirable pursuits, such as science, this is going to bring human qualities into it -- including politics, marketing, commercialism, information control, power struggles, and the tendency of humans to focus on what they already believe in and to resist change.

A recent discussion on a lowcarb forum included a quote so great that I'd like to include it here.

Reflections On Scientific Dogma

by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm3.htm#oct24
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The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2005

jointly to

Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren

for their discovery of

"the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease"

-----------------

It was good to see these two winning the Nobel Prize, with the key piece of following text appended.

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas.

"Who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas…." A few short words. As if the Second World War could be encapsulated thus, "In the Second World War, the Allies defeated Germany, Japan and a few other countries after a series of successful engagements."

I followed the helicobacter story from pretty early on in the proceedings. At first, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were personally attacked and ritually humiliated for questioning the wisdom of their superiors. When this didn’t have the desired effect, their work was rubbished. Barry Marshal, at one point, was forced to swallow helicobacter pylori himself, then develop ulcers, in order to prove that bacteria could cause ulcers.

As the work of these two became better known, and appeared to be threatening the multi-billion-dollar market in ulcer-healing drugs, the major pharmaceutical companies lined up expert after expert after opinion leader to intensify the attack. It would have been easy to fold under this level of pressure. Good on Marshall and Warren for sticking to their guns.

Their story highlights an issue about science that has bothered me for years. Namely, the incredible, stifling power of dogma. One would hope that scientists have open minds, but the more you study science, and scientific thinking, the more it becomes clear that the minds of most scientists remain firmly, and highly aggressively, shut.

I have tried to train myself to put all ideas into one of three places — probable, possible or unlikely — and never to allow myself to become emotionally attached to any hypothesis. But most scientists, especially medical scientists, seem only to have two places to store their thoughts. They are true or false; right or wrong; sensible or stupid. This is usually supported by the killer scientific argument, “Do you know who I am, young man?” This is knows as Eminence-Based Medicine.

… If I had just one wish, it would be this: that all scientists took the following oath. "I shall always support and encourage new ideas, no matter how superficially idiotic and wrong they may seem. I shall also remember that established and comfortable ideas may well be wrong, and should be attacked and criticized at all times."

The chances of this happening are, officially, fat.

PS: A raised cholesterol level causes heart disease. Ho, ho, ho.

People often ask why others question science; or ask, "Isn't trusting some of the research that supports lowcarb vs. research that doesn't seem to, cherry-picking what you want to believe?"

Concerning skepticism about science, for which I have great respect as a process, I think the above essay is an excellent rejoinder.

For the rest of modern science, I can only say: show me the money. Show me the funder; show me the scientist; and for godssakes, show me the real paper, not just the media presentation, the media gets more wrong or misrepresented in its 5th-grade-level sound-bites than it ever gets right.

And importantly: show me the conditions of that research. Who can forget Dr. Richard Atkins publishing about how more than 30 carbs a day "would not work" to put someone in his "induction" process, and then seeing research done with 55-100+ carbs per day, that did not get the same result obviously, billed as allegedly having "disproved" his findings about his lowcarb eating plan bringing certain body results? Even though technically it only confirmed what he'd already said but on a different facet of the topic? The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, sometimes a bit literally.

Concerning the results of "truth" about lowcarb, I say: show me the weight loss, the blood count improvements, the removal of all kinds of minor medical symptoms, and the great improvement in overall health and quality of life.

I don't have to look farther than my scale or mirror and my own life -- or that of so many other lowcarbers I know -- to see the reality when the rubber hits the road on this question. Lowcarb rocks. Maybe other eating plans work for other people. But lowcarb is saving my life -- and improving my health, mental and physical -- one day at a time. I'll leave the science to the scientists. For me, what counts is what works.
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