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February 27, 2006
Ketosis cleans our cells
In going through and catching up on all the online issues of Science, I finally reached the most current issue, which contains an article of interest. Originally published in 1970 in the journal Nature, this article was featured in the current issue of Sage KE, an anti-aging supplement to Science, as a blast from the past in their Classic Papers section. The paper was the first to show that the accumulation of non-functional, or junk, proteins play a role in the aging process. This article caught my eye because of another I had read recently and had touched upon in a previous post.
Anti-aging scientists are now pretty sure that one of the forces behind the aging and senescence process is the junk protein matter that accumulates in the cells, hampering cellular function. If the junk builds up enough, it basically crowds out the working part of the cell, killing the cell off in the process. As this inexorable process proceeds, more and more cells function less and less well until we, as a being, cease to function. There are other processes driving the aging function besides this accumulation of cellular debris, but if we can make some headway with cleaning out the junk, then we should be able to make the cells, and by extension us, function better for longer.
We have little chemically-operated waste disposal systems in our cells called lysosomes. Cellular debris that gets hauled to the lysosomes and dumped in gets degraded into individual amino acids, which are released into the circulation and used to re-synthesize other, functional, proteins. The process of transporting the junk proteins to the lysosomes is handled by enzymes designed for that purpose found within the cells. As long as the enzymes are working up to snuff, the junk doesn’t accumulate. But as the Nature paper shows, the aging process takes its toll. Random errors in protein synthesis of these enzymes due to the aging process means that some end up being functional while others aren’t. The non-functional enzymes then not only don’t help haul the junk to the lysosomes, they themselves become junk. It’s easy to see what’s going to happen as time marches on.
But how can we slow this process and de-junk our cells?
Stay in ketoses a lot of the time. How do we stay in ketosis? By following a low-carbohydrate diet.
How does ketosis help us de-junk our cells?
A paper was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry last year that tells the story. Ketones stimulate the process of chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA). What is CMA? It is
a cellular process that allows cells to remove proteins, organelles, and foreign bodies from the cytosol [the watery interior of the cell] and deliver them to the lysosomes for degradation.
Why would the body be designed for ketones to stimulate CMA? Simple. Ketosis is one of the signs of long term starvation. Ketones are produced throughout the day and are perfectly normal, but sustained ketosis takes place during starvation and sends a message that the body needs to conserve both glucose and protein. The body begins to conserve glucose by signaling to many of the organs and tissues to start using ketones for energy instead of glucose. The body conserves protein by decreasing its use of glucose because in the absence of dietary carbohydrate (as in starvation) the body makes glucose out of protein. Conserving glucose by switching to ketones allows the body can preserve its protein stores. The other thing the body can do is to make sure that the protein it does break down to use for glucose formation comes from non-essential sources. What more non-essential source can we have than useless junk proteins floating around in the cells?
The ketones themselves stimulate the process of CMA to salvage all the junk protein to be used for glucose conversion. Ain’t nature great?
Now, all we have to do to slow the aging process is to stay in some degree of ketosis most of the time and let nature take her course and clean all the junk out of our cellular attics. How do we do that? Easy. Keep our carbohydrate intake at (or preferably below) 100 grams or so per day. Why that particular number? Let’s figure.
It takes about 200 grams of carbohydrate per day to provide glucose for all the structures in the body that require it. After a period of low-carbohydrate intake or starvation that amount required drops to about 130 grams per day because about 70 grams are replaced by ketones. We never really get below that because certain cells can’t convert totally to ketone use and continue to require some glucose. For instance, the red blood cells must use glucose for energy as do some cells in the kidneys and the brain and central nervous system. But not to worry, the liver can easily make 200 plus grams of sugar per day to ensure that these tissues get all they need. But the liver makes most of this glucose via a process called gluconeogenesis (the generation of ‘new’ glucose) out of protein.
So, if we decrease our carbohydrate intake to below, say, 50 grams per day, the amount advised in Protein Power
But, deep in the bowels of our cells this fact is unknown. All the cells know is that ketones are all over the place, which is the signal to start the CMA process to break up junk protein.
We end up losing body fat, which is both burned for energy and converted to ketones to replace glucose, while at the same time we maintain our needed protein structures because we’re eating protein, and we de-gunk our cells. All while eating steak and eggs and lambchops and ham and"¦
It just one more reason the low-carb diet rules.
Posted by mreades at 9:38 PM | Comments (18)
February 26, 2006
Blink
As I was perusing a recent issue of Science I came across an article that seems to confirm the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Blink
I decided to expound on why the brain can make these snap judgments so accurately. I was pondering this very thing the Friday before Presidents’ Weekend as I was trying to get home and back in a hurry during a brief break in the Renaissance Weekend program. Traffic, which is usually fairly tame in Santa Barbara, was brutal. Cars were backed up to a standstill on the 101, the only freeway running through town. I bailed out and took the back way, but soon found that I wasn’t alone. It appeared that everyone else who knew the alternate routes did the same thing. It was a crazed, driving nightmare. Cars were darting out from everywhere, switching lanes suddenly without signaling, honking, jockeying for position at each intersection, and in general seemed to have an animus directed specifically at me. It occurred to me during all this chaos that if Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson (both smart guys by anyone’s estimation) had been with me, or God forbid, behind the wheel themselves, they would have been terrified. Their Revolutionary War, horse and buggy era brains could not have computed the speeds, closing velocities, turning radiuses, breaking distances or any of the other things we all totally take for granted as we drive in traffic.
As I pondered all this it dawned on me why we can make snap judgments that are so accurate: our brains are really statistical computers.
Let’s take the situation where we’re in a car pulled up to a stop sign at a two way stop. We have to stop but the cars coming from our right and left don’t. As we look both ways for traffic before we cross the intersection and continue on our way we see a car coming from the right, but it’s a several hundred feet from the intersection and we know we can easily make it across without causing the car coming from the right to even slow down. We take a quick look to the left to make sure there is no new traffic coming from that direction, step on the accelerator and cross the intersection in plenty of time to avoid the car closing from the right. This happens hundreds of thousands of times probably each and every hour all across the country. We’ve all done it thousands of times ourselves without giving it a moment’s thought. The stakes are pretty high in this venture because if we happen to be wrong and misjudge the closing speed of the car coming from the right, we could be seriously injured or even killed. But we never are because we easily make it across every time.
How? Think of all the variables involved. We have to estimate the speed of the approaching car and figure how long it’s going to take before it’s on us. We know the acceleration of our own car and have to calculate how quickly we have to cross the intersection to avoid a collision. And we do it all in a split second while listening to the radio and thinking about something else.
How can we do this? We can do it because we’ve been there before. Odds are when we first started driving we would have waited for the car coming from the right to pass before we attempted to cross because we hadn’t seen that situation many times before and weren’t capable of making a reasonable judgment as to how fast the car was closing on us. Every time since that we’ve pulled up to an intersection and seen cars coming from the right or left we have gained experience. If we see a car way to our right and wait for it, we say, I could have made it. And our brain remembers. If we dart out in front of an approaching car that has to hit the brakes to avoid a collision, our brain remembers that, too. After we have confronted many intersections and have witnessed countless cars coming from all directions, our brains learn to compute the approaching speeds and make incredibly accurate go-no go decisions. Where Benjamin Franklin would be paralyzed with fear, we cross the intersection well in front of a three thousand pound chunk of metal hurtling at 45 miles per hour in our direction. And we do it without a second thought. Our confidence level that we’re going to make it is much higher than the 95 percent confidence level used statistically in most studies. We have, in fact, virtually a 100 percent confidence level.
Since over the course of our lives our brains have been programmed by not just approaching cars, but by the totality of all our experiences, it makes sense that we should be able to make fairly sophisticated decisions with just a moment’s thought.
For example, in my own case it took only a glance to let me know I didn’t like Dean Ornish.
Posted by mreades at 11:12 PM | Comments (5)
February 23, 2006
Another one bites the dust
Another what bites the dust? Another one of the shibboleths of "healthy living" that the nutritional establishment has been pounding us over our heads with for decades: the idea that salt is bad for us.
Now, in the wake of the three Woman’s Health Initiative studies showing that fat doesn't seem to cause heart disease nor cancers or the breast or colon, comes a study from the venerable NHANES II data showing that not only does salt intake (or to be more precise, sodium intake) not cause premature death from heart disease it actually seems to protect against it. And consuming more sodium appears to protect against premature deaths from not just heart disease but from all other causes as well. It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the holier-than-thou crowd.
In the current issue of The American Journal of Medicine is a study filled with much interesting information that gives a peephole into the way the pinheads in the government issue edicts that affect the health of all those ignorant enough to abide by them. This study shows that the subjects who consumed the least sodium in the late 1970s had greater rates of death from cardiovascular disease and from all other causes than those who consumed more sodium. Before we delve into all that, however, let’s look at what the paper shows about how government works.
The US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture 2005 nutritional guidelines (click here to read in full in a large pdf download) recommend that Americans consume less than 2300 mg of sodium per day (which is less than the 2400 mg recommended in the 2000 guidelines) in order to "prevent or delay the onset of high blood pressure.." and "to lower elevated blood pressure" Seems rationale enough until one considers that there is really no good evidence that sodium intake causes blood pressure to increase other than that shown in short-term clinical trials, a number of which are inconclusive or contradictory. It’s just like with the idea of low-fat: somewhere, sometime, someone got it into his or her head that dietary sodium is bad, the word spread, and researchers start doing studies to prove it. As long as a study here or there confirms this bias, then the idea is held in the minds of many people not simply as an hypothesis, but as a truth. In the case of the nutritional guidelines, the scientific committee making recommendations did so
largely based on the blood pressure reduction associated with lower sodium in short-term clinical trials. However, these trials could not assess the long-term cardiovascular morbidity and mortality consequences of lower sodium. Of concern is that lower sodium intake can generate increased activity of the renin-angiotensin and sympathetic nervous systems, and possibly increased insulin resistance, and each of these could have adverse cardiovascular effects. Morbidity and mortality outcomes will be influenced by unfavorable and favorable effects, as well as the unknown consequences of a diet altered to achieve lower sodium intake. In the absence of clinical trial data, several observational studies, with contradictory results, are available.
So, it’s not even really a case of unintended consequences. The scientific committee chose to overlook evidence clearly showing that there could easily be a downside to sodium restriction in favor of their built-in bias against salt. In fact, based on no good evidence they lowered the recommendation from that of the time before. Gives one a lot of faith in the nutritional guidelines, doesn’t it?
Basically here is how the study was done. Researchers used the data from NHANES II study (a large pdf of the NHANES II study can be downloaded by clicking here) to determine if sodium intake correlated with premature death. The NHANES II researchers interviewed and examined participants and collected data in 1976-1980. The nutrient intake data came from one 24 hour recall done by trained interviewers, which isn’t as good as a 3 or 4 day food diary, but is better that a food frequency questionnaire. The study was followed up by evaluating the mortality statistics as of December 31, 1992 to determine the numbers of deaths in the study subjects and their causes. As the researchers put it in reference to these study subjects without a hint of tongue in cheek:
Those not found to be deceased were assumed alive at that date.
Indeed. I wonder if there were another choice.
The researchers set the breakpoint of their data analysis at the 2300 mg of sodium recommended in the nutritional guidelines. After analyzing the nutritional and mortality data on this basis it turned out that those subjects who consumed less than 2300 mg of sodium per day had a 1.37 times increased risk (95% CI 1.03-1.81, P=.033) of dying from heart disease and a 1.28 times increased risk (95% CI 1.1-1.5, P=.003) of dying from all causes as compared to those who consumed more than 2300 mg of sodium per day.
As the authors of the study put it:
The principal finding in this representative sample of US adults is that sodium intake, measured as a continuous variable and adjusted for calories by each of three distinct methods, had a statistically significant and inverse association with CVD mortality, independent of known cardiovascular risk factors. Results were consistent for all-cause, CHD, and cerebrovascular-specific mortality, although these latter associations were not statistically significant. In addition, individuals reporting consumption of sodium consistent with the most recent US dietary guidelines of <2300 mg had 37% higher CVD mortality and 28% higher mortality from all causes, compared with those whose reported sodium intake exceeded 2300 mg.Makes you glad you spent all that time watching your salt doesn’t it?
I have a little different take on the results of this study from a statistical standpoint. Harkening back to the long and complex post about confidence intervals a while back you might remember that the parenthetical expression after the risk ratio shows what the range is statistically with 95% confidence that it will actually fall in that range. In the case above for the cardiovascular mortality risk of 1.37 what those figures actually mean is that there is a 95% probability (not 100%) that the actual risk will fall into the range of 1.03 to 1.81. In other words we can say that with 95% confidence if you consume less than 2300 mg of sodium per day you have somewhere in the range of 1.10 to 1.81 times greater risk of dying prematurely from heart disease than if you consume more than 2300 mg of sodium per day.
Because of the 5% uncertainty (100% minus 95%) and the fact that it could just as easily be the 1.1 figure as the 1.81 figure for risk I don’t like to take these things as gospel unless the risk ratio is at least 2.0. But that’s just me. Others who are less statistically nit picky are more than happy to go with the lower risk ratios.
Based on my more statistically rigid interpretation of the data, I can conclude that at the very least it doesn’t make any difference how much sodium you consume. To me, that’s the take home message.
Oh, one other take home message: don’t believe scientific committees. In the discussion part of this paper the authors laid out a sampling of studies looking at sodium intake verses disease:
Eight previous observational studies examined clinical outcomes associated with sodium levels. Sodium intake was inversely and significantly associated with higher CVD mortality for the entire sample of NHANES I, with myocardial infarction among male participants in a prospective cohort study of treated hypertensives and with all-cause mortality in men in the Scottish Heart Study. By contrast, a statistically significant direct association of sodium with CVD and all-cause mortality was observed in a Finnish community sample, among the overweight subset of NHANES I, with CHD incidence among women in the Scottish study, and with stroke in a community sample in Japan. No statistically significant associations were reported either among Japanese-American men of the Honolulu Heart Study or in the MRFIT cohort.
All these studies were done and published long before the scientific committee made their recommendations for the nutritional guidelines and were inconsistent and inconclusive at best, so how could the recommendation to lower sodium even further be even contemplated much less done? Bias. Or its synonym prejudice.
Ambrose Bierce (one of my favorite writers) defined prejudice as:
A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
Please pass the salt.
Posted by mreades at 6:10 PM | Comments (4)
February 22, 2006
When good sense prevails
When good sense prevails you don't eat breakfast cereal for a midnight snack (or any other time, as far as I'm concerned). My mother put me on to this interesting piece in her local paper about a woman who did just that - ate cereal as a bedtime snack. And paid the price.
Fortunately, there are more and more doctors out there who have embraced the low-carb diet, and so this woman's story has a happy ending.
The wistful note she sounds at the end about how she really liked her corn flakes better than what she gets on the low-carb diet makes me think that those who have recovered from some form of narcotics addition probably have those same longings. But to give in is to take a big step backward. I hope this lady holds true.
Posted by mreades at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2006
Renaissance Weekend
MD and I just got finished with Renaissance Weekend late yesterday and have spent the time since trying to catch up. We’ve been invited to attend one of these gettogethers for the past several years, but haven’t been able to work it in with our schedules. This Presidents’ Day the organizers had the meeting in Santa Barbara, it worked for us schedule-wise, so we went. We’ve both been kicking ourselves since for not attending earlier. (Click here for more information)
It was one of the most intellectually stimulating weekends (very long weekends) I’ve ever spent. There were a handful of Nobel laureates in attendance along with presidents of major universities, CEOs of giant corporations, MacArthur Grant recipients, presidential speechwriters, former cabinet members, directors, producers, actors, federal and state judges, historians, Olympic athletes, and a host of other accomplished people. All attendees participate in lectures, panels, and group discussions. Despite the diverse political viewpoints and the large number of political discussions, the entire affair was conducted with perfect civility.
There was much interest in the low-carb diet, and MD and I made our case every opportunity we had. The one thing that struck me was the abysmal level of ignorance in basic nutrition found in otherwise very, very smart people. I can’t tell you how many people I had ask me to tell them exactly what a carbohydrate is. In going back to an earlier post, people have been pounded for so long with the fat-is-bad hammer that they all know what fat is, but many still don’t have a good grasp of carbohydrates. MD and I did our best to educate.
I thought I was going to have time to blog and do a whole lot of other stuff while this meeting was going on, but I was soon disabused of that notion. The program started at 7:30 AM and ran until about 10:30 PM. Then the socializing began. Thank God our dietary regimen allows for alcohol (in moderation, of course).
We’ve come home to a giant stack of snail mail, email, blog comments, and phone messages. I’m trying to get through my share of all this backlog and get to blogging. I’ll try to get caught up on all the comments and get a real post up tomorrow.
If you get the opportunity to attend a Renaissance Weekend, I highly encourage you to take it.
Posted by mreades at 10:51 PM | Comments (5)
February 16, 2006
Winners of the Mother Nature ad contest
What product was sold on the It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature ads?
The correct answer is: Chiffon margarine.
Congratulations to Malcolm Scott who got the correct answer first. He gets a free one year subscription to this blog.
Second place goes to Walt Kania and BD, both of whom got the correct answer in at about the same time. They both get two year subscriptions to the blog.
If you would like to see the legendary commercial for Chiffon that won tons of awards and lodged in the minds of millions of people yet didn't sell much product, click here.
Posted by mreades at 9:57 AM | Comments (7)
February 14, 2006
Incredible Honda ads
If you haven't already seen these ads, take a look here (there are two).
These ads are clever and took God only knows how much time, effort and money to make. But will they make you buy a Honda?
It seems to me that the purpose of advertising is to move people to purchase whatever it is that is being advertised. And I don't know if these ads do that. I've watched them both at least ten times and I'm still not persuaded to buy a Honda. At least not by these ads. Even though I marvel over what it took to make these ads I don't want to buy a Honda any more or any less than I did before watching.
I suspect that the highway to business bankruptcy is littered with the roadkill of expensive, award winning ads that failed to move product.
Those of us of a certain age remember the old TV commercials with Mother Nature. The ones where Mother Nature gets fooled and wreaks havoc with the environment. The ads end with a voice over saying, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature." Great ads, but does anyone remember the product?
The first reader who sends the correct response through the Comments wins a free year's subscription to this blog.
Posted by mreades at 6:12 PM | Comments (19)
Brillat-Savarin on carbohydrate in the diet
The New York Times just can't quit. After practically nonstop coverage of the JAMA studies showing that dietary fat doesn't seem to be the cause of breast or colon cancer or heart disease, there is yet another giant article covering more than one-half of the front page of the Science section.
I encourage everyone to read the article because it's kind of a fun ramble through the history of diet along with some commentary from modern day researchers on the surprising (to them, at least) findings of the JAMA studies.
I want to excerpt one little section containing a quote from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French lawyer and food writer from the early 19th century whose book The Physiology of Taste
I love this quote because I know just how Brillat-Savarin felt. He, as I have often done, informed people that if they want to lose weight and get healthy, they must reduce the carbohydrate in their diets. Brillat-Savarin obviously got the same response that I've gotten so many times.
'Oh Heavens!' all you readers of both sexes will cry out, 'oh Heavens above. But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we must love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard's cakes and those cookies, and a hundred things made with flour and butter, with flour and sugar, with flour and sugar and eggs!
He doesn't even leave us potatoes or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant?
'What's this I hear?' I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. 'Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly and thick, and asthmatic, finally die in your own melted grease.
Perhaps that's what I should say to people when I suggest low-carb diets to them and they tell me, 'Oh, no, I could never do that. I couldn't live without bread or pasta. I love those carby foods. I need a different kind of diet.'
A bunch of new scientific papers have come out on low-carb, so stay tuned. If the New York Times will quit publishing stories on the failure of low-fat that I feel compelled to share, I'll get to this other exciting research.
Posted by mreades at 3:32 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2006
ASBP weighs in
The ASBP, the American Society of Bariatric (weight-loss) Physicians, has released a statement about the recent studies showing the ineffectiveness of low-fat diets. The thrust of the statement is that the ASBP worries that these JAMA studies will cause all the people who have been struggling to do the right thing and stay on their low-fat diets to make a beeline for the nearest Ben & Jerry's and go face down. The message between the lines is that if you tell people that fat isn't really the problem, these people may go out and, well, eat fat.
It was apparent to me that my friend Mary Vernon, M.D., who is now the president of the ASBP, had a hand in the writing of this statement when I read the following part:
One side of a worthy study was not done - that of evaluating the effect of restricting carbohydrates and total calories or identifying which types of dietary fats should be included in the eating plan.
Those words, especially the ones about restricting carbohydrates, would not have been written by anyone at the ASBP I used to know. MD and I were both members for many years, but it became way too much of a drag to attend meeting after meeting where the presentations were all about how to cut even more fat from the diet, why fat is bad, and, when your patients fail on low-fat diets, how to start them on weight-loss drugs.
Dr. Vernon is the author of the latest Dr. Atkins book, Atkins Diabetes Revolution
Change comes slowly, but it finally comes.
Posted by mreades at 3:55 PM | Comments (1)
Who would have thought it?
The New York Times strikes again.
In an editorial in yesterday's paper entitled "The Great White Way" Nina Planck decries the fact that markets even in the poorest districts are promoting 1 percent milk. And that schools are doing the same thing with their school lunches.
Ms. Planck makes the point that whole milk is a whole food containing, among a host of good nutrients, vitamins A and D, both of which require fat for their absorption. If you drink 1 percent milk, whatever vitamins A and D you do get, won't be absorbed.
But what about that awful saturated fat that is in whole milk? Says Ms. Planck:
Scientists are increasingly finding that whole milk and saturated fats have been given an undeserved bad rap. Many experts say the evidence blaming saturated fats for heart disease is surprisingly weak. Indeed, the main effect of eating saturated fats is to raise high-density lipoproteins, or H.D.L., the so-called good cholesterol. And with H.D.L., the higher, the better.
Then she writes the words I've been waiting to read:
What about recommendations that we should drink low-fat milk to prevent heart disease? A federal study released last week, the largest study of its kind, found that low-fat diets do not prevent heart disease.[my italics]
Sweetness!
I'm eating this with a spoon. The ink is barely dry on these studies, and they're already being quoted as gospel.
No more can the low-fatters lord it over us with their condescending sneers of, 'Well, sure low-carb diets make you lose weight better, but at the expense of clogging your arteries.' Now all we have to do is invoke THE STUDY. It will be like shoving a cross in a vampire's face. If they can't figure out on their own that these are fairly crappy studies, I'm not going to tell them.
Posted by mreades at 3:28 PM | Comments (3)
February 12, 2006
I scooped the New York Times on aspartame study
Just before Christmas I posted on an Italian study of the artificial sweetener aspartame. In this study researchers gave rats doses of aspartame equivalent to amounts regularly consumed by humans and found that the rats developed cancers at a greatly increased rate. One of the hallmarks of this study was that the rats were allowed to live out their normal lives whereas with other aspartame studies the rats were killed and examined for tumors at a human equivalent age of about 53. Critics claimed that terminating the studies early didn't give the aspartame its chance to fully promote the formation of cancers. This new study overcame this problem and showed that the rats taking the aspartame really did develop many more tumors than those taking placebo. But there was a problem as I pointed out in my post that the authors of the study played down: namely that the rats taking the aspartame lived longer.
Today's New York Times featured a long story about this same study on the front page of the business section that is well worth reading in its entirety. According to the article entitled "The Lowdown on Sweet?" various people and activist groups have interpreted the data from this study in a way that furthers their particular aims.
As I read through all the posturing and finger pointing, a couple of things jumped out at me.
First, the director of the study, Dr. Morando Soffritti, was reported by another researcher as refusing to allow outside pathologists to review the cancerous samples.
Dr. Russo, however, criticized the Ramazzini study for not allowing outside pathologists to analyze all of the tissue samples where cancerous tumors were found. "People need to see every tumor," he said.
What's even worse as far as I'm concerned is the admission of a collaborating scientist that not all of the tumor slides were evaluated.
Dr. Bucher of the National Toxicology Program said pathologists at the program, with which Ramazzini collaborates, looked at 70 tumor slides. But with the study producing over 9,000 tumor-containing slides, James Swenberg, professor of environmental science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that this falls short of standard practice.
These problems combined with the fact the aspartame rats lived longer than the control rats are enough as far as I'm concerned to raise serious issues with this study. I certainly don't think there is evidence enough to cause any kind of panic over aspartame based on these findings.
But, if all the nefariousness the New York Times article states happened during the approval process for aspartame actually happend as reported, I do believe it warrants a closer look.
For example:
A 1976 report from an F.D.A. task force, for example, found that Searle's [the manufacturer of aspartame] studies on aspartame and several of the company's pharmaceutical drugs [the Times article doesn't say if this complaint is aimed at aspartame or was a complaint about Searle's research methods in general]were "poorly conceived, carelessly executed, or inaccurately analyzed or reported." It cited what it called a lack of training by the scientists analyzing tissue samples, a "substantial" loss of information because of tissue decomposition and inadequate monitoring of feeding doses.
In response to the report, the F.D.A. asked the Justice Department to open a grand jury investigation into whether two of Searle's aspartame studies had been falsified or were incomplete. In a 33-page letter in 1977, Richard A. Merrill, the F.D.A.'s chief counsel at the time, recommended to Samuel K. Skinner, then the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, that a grand jury investigate the company, which was based in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, for "concealing material facts and making false statements in reports of animal studies conducted to establish the safety of the drug Aldactone and the food additive aspartame."
A grand jury was never convened, however. Shortly after the letter was sent, Mr. Skinner left the Justice Department to join Sidley & Austin, a law firm that represented Searle. After 12 years at that firm, now Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood, Mr. Skinner was appointed to be President George H. W. Bush's transportation secretary; later he became his chief of staff. In 1978, a year and half after Mr. Skinner left the United States attorney's office in Chicago, his deputy, William F. Conlon, also left to work at Sidley & Austin.
This is but one of several such incidents reported in the article. It certainly does makes one wonder.
Another section of this long article discusses another subject that I posted on a few months ago, namely the idea that studies tend to show whatever it is that whoever pays for the studies want them to show.
In an analysis of 166 articles published in medical journals from 1980 to 1985, Dr. Ralph G. Walton, a professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine found that all 74 studies that were financed by the industry attested to sweetener's safety.
Of the 92 independently funded articles, 84 identified adverse health effects. "Whenever you have studies that were not funded by the industry, some sort of problem is identified," said Dr. Walton, adding that he has not looked at studies performed since 1985. "It's far too much for it to be a coincidence."
Hmmm. Gotta watch the funding on those studies.
On a clinical note, the same Dr. Walton
has studied aspartame from a neurological perspective, said he had also seen problems from the sweetener firsthand. At Safe Harbor Behavioral Health, a mental health facility in Erie, Pa., where he is clinical director, Dr. Walton said he had observed that for many people with mood disorders, such as depression or bipolar disorder, aspartame exacerbates the condition. "For people with panic disorders, for instance, we've seen that when we eliminate aspartame, it's much easier to control their illness," he said. "The number of panic attacks goes down."
In our clinical experience MD and I have seen a number of aspartame-consuming patients with these kinds of problems as well as some others. We've seen headaches, acute abdominal pain, and short term memory loss if my own short term memory is standing me in good stead. These problems resolved when the patients involved laid off the aspartame. I will be the first to admit that these are anecdotal findings with little clinical significance, but when you've seen them a few times and seen them resolve when aspartame is abandoned, it makes you wonder.
As per usual, the New York Times turned to its favorite nutritional activist Dr. Michael F. Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (aka the misguided food police), for a comment. Dr. Jacobson opined that he didn't think the Italian study was definitive, but that the aspartame situation should be reviewed carefully. Said he:
For a chemical that is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, it should be absolutely safe. There shouldn't be a cloud of doubt.
This is the only time to my knowledge that I have ever agreed 100 percent with Michael Jacobson. And that makes me worry.
Remember, you heard if here first.
Posted by mreades at 6:30 PM | Comments (3)
We don't need more time on the low-fat study
Check out Regina Wilshire's blog to find out why we don't need more time and/or more studies to 'prove' that low-fat dieting really works.
Posted by mreades at 6:27 PM | Comments (0)
George Will on Tom Coburn's efforts to kill earmarking
George Will weighed in today in his column on Tom Coburn and his efforts to dismantle the process of pork barrelling.
Coburn is the most dangerous creature that can come to the Senate, someone simply uninterested in being popular. When Speaker Dennis Hastert defends earmarks -- spending dictated by individual legislators for specific projects -- by saying that a member of Congress knows best where a stoplight ought to be placed, Coburn, in an act of lese-majeste, responds: Members of Congress are the least qualified to make such judgments.
Recently, when a Republican colleague called to say ''his constituency'' would not allow him to support Coburn on some measure, Coburn tartly told the senator that ''there is not one mention in the oath (of office) of your state.'' Senators are just not talked to that way under the ponderous rituals of vanity that the Senate pretends are mere politeness.
Says Dr. Coburn of his efforts to root out earmarks:
I'm not liked very well,but I'm like the gopher that's going to keep on digging until someone spears me or traps me. I'm going to keep on digging the tunnel under spending.
I'm an American long before I'm a Republican, and I'm a granddad before I'm either one of them.
Posted by mreades at 6:17 PM | Comments (0)
Just say no to earmarks
The junior Republican Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, is causing a bit of consternation within that august body because of his unremitting attacks against the pernicious process of earmarking.
Earmarking - also called pork barrelling - is the tacking on of a monetary allocation for a particular legislators pet project to a major appropriations bill. That's how we got the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska that I posted about a while back.
Many people often wonder how legislators can, in good conscience, add these superfluous spending bills to major legislation that is almost sure to pass. It would seem to a reasonable person that anyone would understand that if enough of these earmarks are added, the whole edifice would tumble. But that's not the way it works. These folks are basically buying votes just like you and I buy books and clothes and cars and other stuff. If we look at it that way, it's easy to see how legislators fall prey to the lure of earmarks.
Imagine that you are one of a group of 100 people and that you are given a VISA card. You can use the VISA card as often as you want, but the whole group pays the bill at the end of the month. Now if you use your own VISA card for purchases, then the bill comes due at the end of the month, and you have to pay it. The amount of money you can afford to pay sets your spending limit. Not so if your part of the group of 100. Your strategy changes. Since the whole group splits the bill equally at the end of the month, your share is only one one hundredth of the total bill. In essence you are getting to pay off your purchases (votes if you are a legislator) for one cent on the dollar. Your best strategy then becomes to spend as much as you can so that you can pay for it with cheaper dollars.
Of course all the members of the group of 100 (carefully selected to mirror the number of senators) have that same strategy and so when the end of the month comes the bill is huge and unaffordable by any individual. But the strategy stays the same, if you spend more than anyone else, you get to pay for your spending at a discount. Since everyone knows that, spending runs amok. Is it any wonder that the federal budget is out of control?
Tom Coburn is trying to do something about it and is catching a lot of flak from his fellow senators from both parties.
As he points out in his editorial in Friday's Wall Street Journal:
The most vocal opponents to a zero-tolerance approach toward pork are, sadly, the bipartisan leaders of the House and Senate. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to his credit, has issued only a mild defense of earmarking by stating we should "mend, not end" the practice. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Denny Hastert, on the other hand, have been enthusiastic in their defense of pork. Sen. Reid offered a fictional account of American history when he said the pork process "has been going on since we were a country." He and other pork apologists ignore the reality that pork as we know it today didn't exist 20 years ago. In 1987, President Reagan vetoed a spending bill because it contained 121 earmarks. The number of earmarks has skyrocketed over the past decade, from 4,126 in 1994 to 15,268 in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Nowhere in our founding documents is a justification for today's out-of-control earmarking. In fact, Madison and the other framers were clear that the general welfare clause of the Constitution should never be construed as a blank check for Congress. Pork is a modern indulgence, not an ancient or noble tradition.
Speaker Hastert, for his part, has said pork is "what members do" and that members are best positioned to know where to put a "red light in their district." This vision of an imperial Congress, where urban planners in state and local governments can be usurped by individual congressman and their 20-something staffers, is unsettling. And every hour members spend on parochial obsessions is an hour they can't devote to oversight, balancing the budget or serious national security issues.
Unless we want the federal budget to zoom totally out of control we all should get behind Dr. Coburn's (he is a practicing physician) efforts to eliminate earmarks. I know based on comments I've received that readers of this blog span the political spectrum from the far right to the far left. I've figured a way to rationalize helping Dr. Coburn that will set well with everyone's spirits.
If you are a far right Republican, you can go for these efforts because, after all, the right wing wants limited government and limited spending. If you are far left, you've got to be cognizant of the fact that Republicans control both houses of congress (and are likely to do so for some time), so most of the pork barrel projects being cut are those used to buy Republican votes.
See, we can all agree on something politically.
Posted by mreades at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2006
Man Bites Dog II
Well, the fallout continues over the sloppy JAMA studies purporting to show that reducing fat in the diet doesn’t prevent heart disease, colon cancer or breast cancer.
The New York Times followed up the front page, main headlined article with the lead editorial the next day entitled "Low-Fat Diets Flub a Test" devoted to the same topic.
The editorial starts off
The more we learn about nutrition, the less we seem to know. That is the clearest lesson to emerge from a large study of low-fat diets that has left diet aficionados thoroughly confused.
For decades or more, medical lore has suggested that a low-fat diet can yield substantial health benefits. Millions of Americans have tried to reduce the fat in their diets, and the food industry has obligingly served up low-fat products. Yet now comes strong evidence that the war against all fats was mostly in vain.
As far as I can tell, the only "diet aficionados" who are "thoroughly confused" are those pinheads who bought into the low-fat diet to begin with. The New York Times has it right in the second paragraph: "For decades or more, medical lore has suggested (my italics) that a low-fat diet can yield substantial health benefits." Precisely. Medical lore, not science. And has suggested, not has shown.
The Letters section of the paper carried a number of missives from outraged low-fatters who have refused to go down swinging. Their anguished cries almost leap off the page.
I’ll excerpt a few quotes from physicians.
A doctor at the Yale School of Medicine writes:
The difference in these interventions was modest; the advice to cut fat without attention to kinds of fat, questionable; and subject compliance, limited.
My convictions in the fundamentals of a healthful diet [read: low fat] are unshaken.
A couple of docs from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center opine:
The results of the Women’s Health Initiative study cannot be regarded as proving that eating less fat does not reduce a woman’s risk of getting breast cancer.
It is too soon to dismiss these findings as negative, and further follow-up of women on this trial is needed.
A physician from Indianapolis weighs in:
Reports on the study of a low-fat diet on breast cancer would have more appropriately stated that the study was flawed in implementation since participants were unable to maintain a low-fat diet.
As a consequence, wide reporting of the results of this study as if it had been properly executed could have widespread health consequences, like reducing the availability of lower and no-fat foods.
Now the funny thing about all this is that these folks are all acting like it’s been proven that the low-fat diet is the healthiest diet around. They know in their hearts that this is the case, and now comes this study saying it might not be so.
I’ve got a newsflash for them. The low-fat diet has never, ever been shown to be the optimal diet. It was all an hypothesis to begin with. It sounded like a good thing, so based on virtually no evidence the nutritional establishment began issuing edicts that to be healthy everyone should restrict the amount of fat they eat. We’ve all been part of a giant experiment, the hypothesis of which is that the low-fat diet is good for us, for the last 25 years. And what have we learned from this giant national experiment? Well, obesity has more than doubled, type II diabetes is now at epidemic proportions, the incidence of cardiovascular disease hasn’t declined and we’re, in general, a much less healthy lot.
If you want to see the shoddy science (or even the lack of any science, shoddy or otherwise) that went into the formulation of the low-fat scheme we’ve all been enmeshed in, read Gary Taubes’ article "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat", which was published a few years ago in Science, America’s most prestigious and influential scientific journal.
As I reported yesterday, I don’t think these are particularly good studies. They are indeed flawed. But I’m glad that they are getting the coverage they’re getting because the low-fat diet has gotten a free ride for far too long.
The power of the New York Times to influence the entire nation can not be underestimated. Let me show you what I mean.
Forget about Banting, Brillat-Savarin, Thompson, Cleave, Pennington, Yudkin and all the rest of the old timers. Let’s start with physicians using and writing about low-carb dieting since the 1960s. In 1961 Herman Taller, M.D. wrote Calories Don’t Count, followed by Blake Donaldson, M.D. who wrote Strong Medicine. In 1967 Irwin Stillman published his mega bestseller The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet, then came Robert Atkins, M.D. with his Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution in 1972. Herman Tarnower, M.D. came along shortly thereafter with his The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. There was a long dry spell, then MD and I published Protein Power in 1996. All these authors are (or were) practicing physicians who had adopted a low-carbohydrate diet into their practices and found that it worked beautifully. They all wrote books based on their experiences and described in what form the low-carb diet had worked best for them and their patients. And although some of them sold more books than others, none had really put low-carb on the map other than as some kind of fad diet out on the fringe.
Now, remember, all these above mentioned physician authors had been to medical school and post graduate training, had had hands on experience with thousands of patients, had somehow stumbled into the low-carb diet, discovered its efficacy, and judiciously used it to treat patients. And they were all called frauds, quacks, hucksters, fad diet promoters, and worse. And were for the most part ignored.
Then on Sunday, July 7, 2002 an article appeared in the New York Times Magazine entitled "What if it’s all Been a Big Fat Lie," written by Gary Taubes, a journalist. Suddenly, virtually overnight the low-carb diet was in. It was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And all because a journalist at the New York Times said it was okay.
Now, I know Gary Taubes pretty well, and I can tell you that he is an extremely bright guy. But he isn’t a physician; he’s a journalist. He’s never taken care of a single patient and never will, but he’s the direct cause of more people going on low-carb diets than anyone in history because he had the New York Times as a platform.
Given the power that the New York Times wields, it’s easy to see why all the low-fatters are uneasy. Their goose is cooked because the New York Times has put its reverse imprimatur on their beloved low-fat diet.
And the New York Times continues to pile on. As I write this at 10:30 PM Pacific Time tomorrow’s paper is already online, and there is yet another article bashing the low-fat diet. This one, entitled "Another Fad Hits the Wall" relegates the low-fat diet to fad status. The death knell for low-fat products is ringing.
Last year, 12.8 percent of all the new products churned out by food companies were emblazoned with a low-fat or fat-free label, according to ProductScan Online, everything from low-fat tortilla chips to cheese slices, peanut butter, refrigerated dip and hot dogs.
But with a new study this week indicating that a reduced-fat diet may not help ward off heart disease or cancer, marketing experts and some food companies say that the days of the low-fat phenomenon are numbered.
"It’s over," said Linda Gilbert, president of HealthFocus International, a market research firm that specializes in health trends. "Interest in low-fat foods is way down from where it was at its peak."
If the low-fatters hadn’t had such a long run I might actually feel sorry for them.
But they aren’t giving up. Now the shift is going to be away from focus on fat content to focus on types of fat, specifically saturated fats and trans fats.
As the New York Times editorial stated:
Meanwhile, experts in nutrition and chronic diseases have moved on to a new consensus: it is not the total fat but the kind of fat you eat that is important. Many groups recommend that people cut their intake of "bad" fats, like saturated fats and trans fats, and increase their intake of "good" fats, like those found in vegetable and fish oils.
And that’s just what worries me. They can count me on their side on the trans fats issue, but not the rest. I’m firmly convinced that saturated fats, far from being unhealthy, are actually good for us. And I’m worried that this shift of focus in the direction of kinds of fats instead of amounts will lead people to increase their intake of vegetable fats, which I think are dreadful.
These are interesting times nutritionally in which we live.
Posted by mreades at 11:34 PM | Comments (8)
February 9, 2006
Man bites dog
Newspapers are always on the lookout for man-bites-dog kind of stories to sell papers. The more off beat the story, the more it flies in the face of what seems normal, the more newsworthy it is, at least in the eyes of the inky wretches who publish the dailies. It shows just how deeply ingrained in the minds of so many is the notion that dietary fat is bad for us when a series of studies showing that cutting fat from the diet doesn’t do squat makes the front page headline of the New York Times, the country’s most influential paper. And I don’t mean just the front page, but the actual top-of-the-page, main headline. The idea that fat might not be harmful is apparently a man-bites-dog story of the highest order.
Here’s the headline, right up top.
Low Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Report Says
The first paragraph of the accompanying article sums it up pretty nicely:
The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.
USA Today weighed in with an article entitled
Cutting Fat Alone Isn’t Enough, Women Advised
The Knight-Ridder news service, the providers of copy to many local papers including ours headlined their article
Low-Fat Diet Fails to Cut Risk
The reports referenced in these articles were three studies appearing in this week’s The Journal of the American Medical Association detailing the results of a massive, government-funded ($415 million) study, The Woman’s Health Initiative, showing that postmenopausal women who followed a low-fat diet for 8 years suffered the same rates of heart disease, colon cancer and breast cancer as those who ate what they wanted.
Almost 50,000 overweight women aged 50 to 79 were divided into a study group (the low-fat group) and a control group. The study group was given intensive dietary counseling and much hand holding. Subjects in this group were instructed to reduce their fat intake to 20 percent of their total caloric consumption and to increase the amount of fruits and vegetables to at least five servings daily and grains to six servings daily. This group
received an intensive behavioral modification program that consisted of 18 group sessions in the first year and quarterly maintenance sessions thereafter. Each group had 8 to 15 women and was led by a specially trained and certified nutritionist. Each participant was given her own total fat gram goal based on her height. The intervention emphasized self-monitoring techniques and introduced other individually tailored and targeted strategies, such as motivational interviewing.
The members of the control group were given a copy of Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans and sent on their way.
All the heavy duty counseling paid off in that the women in the study group did manage to reduce their fat intake from about 38 percent to 24 percent of calories by the end of the first year and to 29 percent by the end of the study. The women in the control group, who also started at 38 percent, reduced their fat intake to 35 percent by the end of the first year and had drifted back up to 37 percent.
When the study ended and the incidence of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and colon cancer in the two groups was tallied, there was virtually no difference between the two groups.
I felt that the New York Times had the most even-handed coverage of these reports, although, as we will see, they didn’t do their homework very well. The paper quoted extensively from Dr. David A. Freedman, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, who isn’t connected with the study but has published extensively on the design and analysis of clinical trials. Dr. Freeman, who basically opined that the results should be taken seriously, opined:
The studies were well designed and the investigators tried to confirm popular hypotheses about the protective effect of diet against three major diseases in women.
But, the diet studied here turned out not to be protective after all.
We, in the scientific community, often give strong advice based on flimsy evidence. That’s why we have to do experiments.
Needless to say, these findings were a huge shocker to the reduce-your-fat-intake-and-you’ll-decrease-your-risk-for-everything crowd. And, as you might imagine, excuses were thick on the ground.
Dean Ornish, who is fast aboard the low-fat freight train hurtling pell-mell toward irrelevance and oblivion, complains that the women didn’t lower their fat intake enough, and that they didn’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, and that the study wasn’t long enough. If it had gone on for a few years more, says the author of a number of low-fat books, a difference between the two groups might have immerged.
Yeah, well ‘might’ won’t feed the whippet.
I was struck by the realization of exactly how difficult it must be to reduce fat in the diet to the 20 percent range. These women who all had loads of hands-on counseling and care during the first year could reduce their fat intake to 24 percent and no lower.
After a careful review of these papers a couple of other things caught my attention.
The first thing was that although the women in the study group reduced their fat intake, not only were they not protected against disease, they didn’t really lose any weight to speak of. Most of the cut-your-fatters such as the above mentioned Ornish believe and propound that reducing fat will bring about weight loss. Ornish’s best-selling book Eat More, Weigh Less
Sorry, Deano, but these studies prove you wrong even there. But, who knows, maybe if the studies had lasted a little longer, the weight loss would have become apparent.
The other thing I noticed was that not only did the women in the study group cut the fat, they cut the calories. At the start of the study the women were consuming 1790 kcal per day. After one year their intake was down to about 1500 kcal daily and continued to drift down a tiny bit more to 1431 kcal by the end of the study. So, these women consumed roughly 300 fewer kcal per day over the course of the study, which calculates out (300kcal/day times 365 days/year times 8 years) to a reduction of about 876,000 kcal in all. If we divide that 876,000 kcal reduction by 3500 (the number of kcal in a pound of fat), we find that these women should have each lost about 250 pounds, which would have been difficult since they started with an average weight of about 170 pounds. Well, not only did they not lose 250 pounds, they didn’t lose any weight at all. So what happened?
Obviously something is amiss.
In going through the paper on cardiovascular disease I came upon the following paragraph about how the caloric intake as well as the macronutrient intake was determined in the Methods section:
All participants completed an FFQ (food frequency questionnaire) designed specifically for the study at baseline and 1 year. Thereafter, one third of the participants completed the FFQ each year in a rotating sample: completion rates were 100% at baseline and 81% thereafter. Data on follow-op dietary intake were computed from FFQs administered from years 5 through 7 (designated as year 6 follow-up), thus including all the participants.
Here is an interesting note:
Four-day food records were provide by all women prior to randomization.
As we saw in a post not too long ago, FFQ are next to worthless. Four-day food diaries are much more accurate, but much more costly. The directors of these studies spent $415 million to do this part of it. I’m sure they spent a bunch getting and evaluating the baseline intake, which at about 1800kcal/day sounds right for 50-79 year old women. Then they went the cheap route to get the follow up data. The fact that according to their data these women were consuming roughly 17% fewer calories per day over the course of the study and not losing weight didn’t tip the researchers off that something was amiss.
Not only didn’t it tip them off, they thought it was a helluva study. Dr. Michael Thun, a director of research for the American Cancer Society, was quoted in the New York Times as describing these studies as being so large and so expensive that they were
the Rolls-Royce of studies.
Someone needs to tell Dr. Thun that it’s not the amount of money spent, but the quality of the data that makes a good study.
The only thing that keeps me from writing these studies off as a waste of time and money is the fact that the control group also consumed way, way fewer calories as determined by their FFQs and didn’t lose any weight over the 8 years. I guess we can make the assumption that the subjects in both groups fudged their FFQs proportionately and so at least the differences in macronutrient composition are relatively valid.
So with all due respect to Dr. Freedman, the statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, I don’t believe the studies were particularly well designed. I would feel a whole lot better about them if they had used a different methodology to obtain their dietary data.
It’s a real shame to spend $415 million of our dollars—yours and mine—and not get anything better than this.
Posted by mreades at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
February 7, 2006
New studies hammer low-fat diet
Today’s JAMA contains three papers showing that the low-fat diet does not reduce the risk for colon cancer, heart disease or breast cancer.
Data from the giant Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial show that after 8 ½ years post menopausal women consuming a diet meant to contain about 20 percent of calories as fat, but in fact containing about 28 percent of calories as fat, showed no decrease risk for breast cancer, heart disease or colon cancer compared to a control group of women consuming their regular diet.
To read the full text of the paper on breast cancer click here.
To see the abstracts of the other two papers click here and here.
This same issue contains two editorials that show the bias of the editorialists in the direction of the low-fat diet. In one in the very last paragraph the authors just can’t help themselves. Despite these studies showing no benefit to the low-at diet, these guys just can’t leave it at that.
Despite null findings from the WHI Dietary Modification Trial, dietary changes can have powerful, beneficial effects on CVD risk factors and outcomes. To reduce the risk of CVD, individuals should maintain a desirable body weight, be physically active, avoid tobacco exposure, and eat a diet consistent with national guidelines [the low-fat diet]. Additional results from the WHI Dietary Modification Trial, likely forthcoming, should provide valuable evidence that will refine these recommendations and further enhance CVD prevention efforts in women.
So, what they’re saying is that despite these studies showing no benefit to low-fat diets it is advisable to follow a low-fat diet. Hmmm.
Many thanks to Regina Wilshire (her excellent blog is Weight of the Evidence) for giving me the heads up that these studies were coming out.
I’ll have much more to say later after an exhaustive evaluation of all these papers.
MD and I are flying back home tonight, so I’ll be back at it at full speed in short order.
Posted by mreades at 2:00 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Synchronicity again
Last Friday I was having lunch with our oldest son Ted at a restaurant in Dallas when a well built, nice looking guy got up from a table across the way and made his way out, stopping by several tables to shake hands along the way. Ted asked me if I knew who the guy was. I said I didn’t. He told me it was Mike Modano, the all-star captain of the Dallas Stars hockey team.
I craned my neck to get a look at what he had for lunch because I’m always curious as to what elite athletes eat, but the staff had already cleared his table.
I didn’t think much more about it and finished my own meal (for inquiring minds, I had a prime rib sandwich without the bread along with some sautéed zucchini and a light beer).
Two days later I opened up my Sunday New York Times only to find a special section about athletics with an article entitled "Skate or Diet" about the diet of non other than Mike Modano.
Seems that Mr. Modano had been slowing down over the past couple of years (he’s 35) and sought the advice of a sports nutritionist. The nutritionist, one Paul Chek, used a questionnaire to evaluate Mr. Modano and pronounced him a "protein" metabolic type. in my opnion Mr. Chek has bizarre ideas about how metabolism works. He identifies his clients as having
one of three "metabolic types": protein, carbohydrate or mixed. Because people metabolize food differently, he says, diets should be optimized to provide foods that aid digestion and boost energy. Chek has found that most athletes — especially those in what he calls "explosive sports," like hockey — are protein types and should get about 45 percent of their calories from protein sources (a carb type, like a typical marathoner, should get 70 percent of his calories from carbohydrates).
Which is all nonsense, of course. Humans have human metabolism just as horses have horse metabolism and cats have cat metabolism. There is no "metabolic type." We have evolved to do best on a diet that is high in protein and fat and low in carbohydrate. Some people can tolerate more carbohydrate than others just as some people tolerate alcohol better than others. That doesn’t mean that those that tolerate alcohol better are "alcohol" metabolic types.
At any rate, fortunately for Mr. Modano, he was deemed a "protein" type and put on a high-protein diet, which apparently hasn’t hurt him. Since switching over he
feels stronger and recovers faster. He also has a new five-year contract and was recently named to his third United States Olympic hockey team.
Late yesterday afternoon my kid called from work (he’s a lawyer with a giant law firm) telling me that he had been given a couple of tickets to a Stars game and wondered if I wanted to go. Although I played hockey some as a teenager I have never been to a pro hockey match so I said "Sure." Off we went last night and I got to see Mike Modano score a goal as the Stars pounded the Nashville Predators 4-2.
I went from not knowing Mike Modano existed to seeing him at a restaurant to learning about his diet to watching him play all in the space of three days. What a world we live in.
Mike Modano’s Diet
BREAKFAST
3 to 4 eggs, flash-cooked in the pan or poached, 4 strips bacon or 4 sausage links, 8 oz. of apple juice, 1 liter of water (about 34 oz.)
SNACK
1 apple or a few coconut slices
LUNCH
1 small salmon fillet, 1 cup of brown rice, 1 cup of cauliflower, 16 oz. of kombucha gingerade, 1 liter of water
DINNER
Organic T-bone steak, grilled rare ½ baked potato with a lot of butter, 1 serving of spinach salad, 1 serving of asparagus, 1 slice of cheesecake (about two or three times a month), 1 liter of water 1 glass of wine (occasionally)
Posted by mreades at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
February 2, 2006
The low-fat hammer
MD and I have been traveling all over the place for the past couple of weeks and we have noticed an interesting phenomenon. People everywhere—even many of those who profess to do low-carb—are still in the grip of all the low-fat nonsense. It always amazes me that despite all the information coming to light showing that fat in the diet doesn’t really matter a rat’s derrier as far as cardiovascular health is concerned so many people are making an effort to avoid fat. Even many low-carbers seem to feel the necessity to try to make their low-carb diet a low-fat one as well.
I think I now know why.
I have a good friend named Roy Williams who is an advertising and marketing genius. He has resurrected so many failing businesses and helped so many others reach unimaginable success that he has been deemed the Wizard of Ads.
Roy has written a number of books about his ideas and methods of advertising that are all terrific. I recommend them even if you’re not in the advertising business yourself or even if you have no need for advertising. They are wonderful learning tools about how humans function perceptionally. And they are great reads.
What does all this have to do with low-fat? Below is an excerpt from Roy’s first book, The Wizard of Ads
The mind of your prospective customer is like a seasoned piece of hardwood. Your message is like a nail. The rhythmic stokes of the hammer represent the number of times your message—your unique selling proposition (USP)—is heard by the prospect.
Sleep is the hammer’s claw. (Sleep: God’s gift to the human race, purging our minds of the noise of the day. Sleep: the eraser of all advertising.)
Your goal is to drive the nail through the board and then clench it on the other side. Messages that are clenched are remembered for a lifetime. Tap, tap goes the hammer. But during the night the claw pulls the nail back out of its little hole! The following day you find nothing more than a faint indentation in the board. The nail is no longer in it. Your message is forgotten.
Using the hole you started the previous day, you position the nail again. Tap, tap goes the hammer. But again falls the veil of darkness, eyes close, and the claw does its work once more. Day after day, this scene is repeated; but ever so slowly, the hole gets deeper.
Driving the nail of your USP into the hardwood of the mind is like climbing a muddy mountain: three steps forward, two steps back, over and over again.
The frustration is simply too much. You believe advertising should pay off immediately! "It must be time to change the USP, because this one doesn’t seem to be working."
But to change your USP is to start a new nail in a completely different spot on the board. The hole in which you have invested is now wasted. Why do you do this? Do you think there’s a soft spot on the board somewhere? There is not. You can sharpen the nail (with better writing), but there are no soft spots on the board. Stay with the hole you’ve started.
Sharpen the nail.
For the past thirty years the nutritional powers that be have been hammering the low-fat nail into the psyches of all of us. With that much repetition of the same low-fat message it’s easy to see why it has finally gone through the board of the brain of so many and been clenched off on the other side.
In order to pull it out and replace it with the low-carb nail is going to require a whole lot of repetition, so don’t hold out hope for any big changes any time soon.
Our website (along with this blog) is hosted on the server at Roy’s facility in Austin, Texas where I’ve been the last couple of days. I caught up with Roy briefly yesterday, and we talked a little about all of this. He said that things get driven into long-term memory by the combination of salience and repetition. If the salience is high, then not a lot of repetition is needed. If the salience is low, it takes a lot of repetition to get anything to finally embed in long-term memory.
For example, 9/11 had a lot of salience. Even without the constant repetition we all lived through it would still have made it into our long-term memories. The low-fat diet doesn’t particularly have a lot of salience, but it’s been repeated constantly over the past thirty years. As a consequence, it has made its way into the long-term memories of a whole lot of people.
It’s the job of all of us who know from experience the efficacy of the low-carb diet to start our own hammering day after day. I think it’s the only way things are ever going to change.
Posted by mreades at 3:11 PM | Comments (9)