About Taubes, Guyanet, Science, AHS and Missing Rulers

From most recent and going back:

Guyanet answers Taubes:  http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/09/response-to-gary-taubes-framing-debate.html

Taubes answers Guyanet conflict from AHS:  http://www.garytaubes.com/blog/

Guyanet describes the conflict at AHS:  The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical...

I'm still trying to digest Guyanet's perspective, which is tough because it is not laid out in a book, but is also less lengthy than Taubes cryptic, 400+ page masterpiece Good Calories Bad Calories.  I found GCBC to be so profound, I read it four times with multiple additional forays into it to answer specific questions as they occurred to me.

I hope it won't take as long to digest Guyanet's description of the wretchedly titled "food palatability" hypothesis.  Here's a summary:
Carbohydrate consumption per se is not behind the obesity epidemic.  However, once overweight or obesity is established, carbohydrate restriction can aid fat loss in some people.  The mechanism by which this occurs is not totally clear, but it has nothing to do with removing the supposed suppressive effect of insulin on fat release from fat cells.  Carbohydrate restriction spontaneously reduces calorie intake (as does fat restriction), suggesting the possibility that it alters body fat homeostasis, but this alteration likely occurs in the brain, not in the fat tissue itself.  The brain is the primary homeostatic regulator of fat mass, just as it homeostatically regulates blood pressure, breathing rate, and body temperature.  This has been suspected since the early brain lesion studies of the 1940s (47) and even before, and the discovery of leptin in 1994 cemented leptin's role as the main player in body fat homeostasis.  In some cases, the setpoint around which the body defends these variables can be changed (e.g., hypertension, fever, and obesity).  Research is ongoing to understand how this process works.

A couple of points in the interim:
1.  They are not arguing about whether or not carb restriction is helpful for people that are over weight.
2.  They are not arguing about whether or not Taubes' message on the faulty science of fat and saturated fat is incorrect.
3.  In short, one thinks the key to treating obesity is by eating to avoid hormonal dis-regulation, aka metabolic derangement.  The other thinks it is about hormonal dis-regulation also - but a different hormone.  One focuses on insulin function, one on leptin.  I'm not at all sure they are not both correct, but can't tell yet.
4.  As Guyanet frames it:  I'd like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabolic health.  Although it doesn't work for everyone, there is no doubt that carbohydrate restriction causes fat loss in many, perhaps even most obese people.  For a subset of people, the results can be very impressive.  I consider that to be a fact at this point, but that's not what I'll be discussing here.  

The good news is that there's a fight between two, smart researchers and they both agree on fat.  The bad news is that this is too much like a couple guys in rain coats yelling "mine's bigger!" but neither can afford a ruler (my thanks to Coach Glassman for the analogy!).  However, aside from ego, it matters not "who's is bigger".  This kerfuffle only starts to matter if it results in the advancement of our understanding of how to use diet to optimize health.

I hope it will come down to this - both will propose a research study design that will test the relevant hypothesis, and those studies will be funded.  From that or those defining studies, we may get useful information about how to help people that are obese get well faster, and we may find out how to help lean, well people stay well if they want to.  There are a number of good intervention studies that show carb restriction is effective.  Perhaps there's a Guyanetesque refinement that will make carb restriction more effective or less restrictive.

On the Guyanet post, many have weighed in to say the equivalent of "I don't mind if you have a way to refine what Taubes is saying, but his book saved my life, don't get too personal in your writing."  I have a similar gratitude to Taubes - his book made an structured understanding of the science of diet possible to a guy like me who would never have a chance to pursue such an understanding via academia - and in a way that serves my style of learning far better than simple reading and test taking.  GCBC was a literal answer to my prayers and I spent two satisfying years digging through it.

I take it as a given that Guyanet has also helped many people, and has a great voice on elements of the paleo model that is not found elsewhere in the blogosphere.

If they do it right, all of us curious onlookers will benefit from the debate, and hopefully they will both be handsomely rewarded for their contributions to our collective understanding.

Brilliantly Simple To Say, Challenging To Do

Thought for the weekend from WHS:

"Don't eat processed crap." 

Can you do it?

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/07/dietary-guidelines-for-americans-my-way.html

Hope your long weekend is prosperous in rest and fun.  Farewell, summer 2012, you were a great one in many ways.  Hello and welcome, fall 2012, and thanks for the hunting season, cooler weather, football games with family and the coming adventures in CrossFit!

 

Fat Loss, Exercise, and Food

From a note I received from http://www.precisionnutrition.com/:
Outside of the 3-5 hours you exercise per week, what are you doing with a good chunk of the other 165 hours?  You’re eating. 

That’s why an exercise program is never enough to see real, honest-to-goodness body transformation - and why knowing how to change the way you eat is so vital to changing your life.

And here’s the exciting part: fitness professionals are finally figuring this out. And as a result, we’re seeing some welcome changes in the fitness industry.

In five years, knowing how to help change a clients’ eating habits will be what separates the "personal trainer" from the person who changes lives.

I was first exposed to this idea about four years ago via a discussion board post from CrossFit's founder, Greg Glassman.  Alwyn Cosgrove repeatedly says "You cannot out train a bad diet."  Many folks have a hard time believing this, because the opposite idea has so often been stated, it is believed, despite being unproved:  "Just exercise enough and you will lose weight."  That this strategy can work for some makes it all the more confusing for the many - who find they do not achieve their body composition and/or health goals via exercise alone. 

While it is not debatable that body fat accumulation reflects the First Law of Thermodynamics - energy cannot either be created or destroyed - therefore, if one accumulates a pound of fat, then one must have ingested more calories than one has expended.  What the "first law" does not account for is "why". 

Human behavior is complex and defies any simple analysis which might invoke will power, calories-in-calories-out, or "just burn a few more calories daily".  In complex systems, causality is rarely linear. 

An example goes as follows:

I propose fat accumulation is the result of a complex series of interactions between external demands on the human (do you have to work ten hours a day in the fields to grow/harvest/store/process your food?), internal hormonal signals (high carb consumption requires a series of responses to prevent damage to the organism from excess blood glucose), and information available to the human in question (do you know how to avoid hormone disregulating foods?  Do you know how to associate pain instead of pleasure to your unconscious mind's response to foods you think you should avoid?  Have you learned which foods result in satiety, and supress hunger for long periods, and which result in rapid return of hunger?). 

Restated - there are external circumstances which result in weight loss which are not related to human choice at all - for example, once you are in boot camp, you'll eat what you can and do your best to keep moving as directed.  There are internal responses which are not directly related to calorie intake which still result in fat accumulation.  And the more a human knows, the more likely they are to be able to impact the variables that result in fat accumulation.  Due to these variables and others, human fat accumulation is complex and not likely to be the same for most of those who suffer from either too much fat or too little.

This is a very, very general model, and the details could be worked out in a number of ways.  Hopefully, science will work its way through those details in my lifetime!  In the near term, we have to rely on human experience, which works much more rapidly than science, though is plagued by superstition, and about a million other truth distorting tendencies towards bias.

While short, intense exercise is therapeutic in a variety of ways and worth doing for its own sake regardless of weight loss intentions, I am not one who believes it is a requirement for fat loss - at least not for everyone.

If you would like to jump start your body recomposition effort, or have determined it is time to take your health into your own hands, call me today!  Like CrossFit, I will help you achieve faster results with less frustration!

901-517-0085, ask for Paul

I Know It's Only High Cholesterol But I Like It ...

If you can hear the Rolling Stones tune in that title ... you are really good.

Take a look at Chris' videos, they tell a good tale.

http://chriskresser.com/i-have-high-cholesterol-and-i-dont-care

Causation or Correlation?

Women who gave birth to two or more children had a 50% associated increase in aggressive ER-/PR- cancer, but the association was not found when the women had breastfed. Other studies have also found an association between breastfeeding and decreased cancer risk.

The results were “strikingly different” when researchers compared the number of births and breastfeeding among women with hormone receptor positive cancers. Women who had two or more children had lower associations of ER+/PR+ cancers, and breastfeeding didn’t change that association.

http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/16/births-breastfeeding-rates-may-explain-breast-cancer-disparities/

It's tempting to believe that this is true, and it would comport with the paleolithic model, but there are so many confounding factors that I doubt the researchers have identified them all - which is why these types of studies cannot be used to prove causation.  Intervention studies on these populations are problematic for several reasons. 

Best anyone can say from this is if you can breast feed a baby, there are many reasons why you should.

And As Long As We're Talking About ...

... something as horrifying as cancer, here's another:

So it's disappointing news indeed that the Food and Drug Administration has deemed that tomatoes, so rich in antioxidants and other good things such as beta carotene, may not protect against many types of cancer after all, as some earlier studies had found.

The agency responded Tuesday to applications from two tomato-product groups, including H.J. Heinz Co., which planned to tout the anticancer benefits of tomatoes on their product labels. After a review of dozens of studies, however, the FDA found that there was "very limited evidence" to support any association between tomato consumption and reduced risks of prostate, gastric and pancreatic cancers. As for the believed cancer-fighting effects of lycopene, the key anti-cancer fighting ingredient in tomatoes, the FDA was even more discouraging, saying there was "no credible evidence" to suggest that the chemical could reduce the risk of such cancers of the prostate, lung, colon, breast, ovaries or pancreas.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1642152,00.html#ixzz1WRTkcKlu

I'm all for ditching the FDA, which mainly serves to re-enforce the bond between government and the government crony capitalists we all depend upon to supply our food and medicine.  But if they are going to reel in this kind of "inconclusive science", I sure wish they would do that with all the other inconclusive science.  There's no conclusive science on the benefit of a low fat fad diet, for example, but the FDA does not typically trumpet that when they are trying to get you to eat less meat and more grain and 300 servings of fruits and vegetables every five minutes.  But hey, what could go wrong with a diet that requires mankind to destroy the ecosystem through plowing, poisoning and dumping oil (ammonium nitrate) all over creation in order to provide mankind with an amount of vegetables and grain, and their industrial by products ("vegetable oils" and soy products and grain products, processed to kingdom come) that are completely novel to the genome?  Why would anyone need research to know THAT'S A GREAT PLAN!  OF COURSE IT IS A GREAT PLAN!

(Please forgive that temporary digression, we'll now return to our regularly scheduled blog post)

As to the tomato theory of cancer prevention, when I read about some magic ingredient that's going to save us all from everything, it always makes me step back and ask: "Why did cancer prevalence follow the advent of agriculture around the world?  Could this ingredient be connected to the paleolithic model?" 

If an ingredient no kidding prevents illness, I don't care what its place in any model is.  But in general, most of the claims of magic dietary bullets are proved false - no proof that anti-oxidant intake benefits real humans and/or "protects" from cancer; no proof high fiber intake benefits humans and/or "protects" from cancer; no proof that high fruit/vegetable intake benefits humans and/or "protects" from cancer.  In fact, some studies show the opposite is as likely - deliberate feeding to get more nutrients quite likely feeds cancers.  The only strategy that works across all species, humans too, for extending life, which by default means reducing the incidence of cancers, is under feeding.  In theory that indicates that any diet which reduces intake without resulting in chronic nutrient deficiency is the diet most likely not to interfere with the healthy expression of the human genotype, in which people live well, and live into their 80s with normal function.

Sometimes, the magic ingredient is just the ingredient that we've processed out of our diets, or eliminated through modernity - like vitamin K (grass fed beef or wild caught fish liver, anyone?), or vitamin D (yes, complete elimination of "cancer causing sunlight" does cause cancer), all the other vitamins (present in adequate amount in paleolithic foods, and not subject the "anti-nutrient" qualities of neolithic foods), or magnesium (used to get all we could stand in the water, now we get none).  Most of the time, the magic ingredient does no good at all upon further review - exempli gratis:  fiber, additive anti-oxidants, and lycopene.  And this makes perfect sense.  The genome is not likely to be adapted to and/or manipulable by some strange, exotic ingredient. 

So here's the question for those who have actually read this far, which I'm sure most of you are on to in any event - what's the most nutrient dense diet, which does the best job of managing appetite, and therefore allows you to most easily eat the least amount of food while getting the minimum required amounts of essential nutrients? 

I know there's not much drama here because you read this so often:

Meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, and no sugar/wheat.

What Is CrossFit?

"I think CrossFit can be for everyone," says Val Voboril (who is pictured in the handstand, 9 months pregnant, below). "It made my pregnancy easier," she contends, as the "strength, conditioning, and endurance," helped her deal with the added weight of carrying another human being.

At CrossFit, however, men aren't always the alpha dogs, such as 106-pound Ting Wang, who deadlifts nearly 3x her body weight in the video below (I still can't deadlift double my own weight).

http://www.fastcompany.com/1771136/crossfit-where-navy-seals-and-pregnant-soccer-moms-get-ripped

Great write up, and several great videos!