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June 20, 2006
Protein sparing effect
I recently received a letter from a reader that asked about the protein-sparing effect of carbs. He sent me the address of a bodybuilding website he had been reading and wanted to know if what the guy who wrote the material said was true.
The basic premise of the piece is that in order to keep from losing muscle during dieting, one has to eat carbs. If no carbs are eaten, then muscle vanishes, or so he would have us believe. Is this true, the reader wanted to know. Let's take a look.
Here are the pertinent paragraphs from the website:
The first thing you may think of is protein. Protein builds muscle. You learned that in the high school weight room. Protein in excess, however, can be used as energy or converted to body fat. Using protein as energy means less body fat is being used as energy. So, having the right amount of protein plus a little extra "just to be sure" you have enough is optimal, but gross overages of protein isn't going to help you build muscle or retain it.
Believe it or not, carbs are key to retaining muscle. Carbohydrates and insulin have been targeted as the deadly duo in obesity and weight loss for very good reasons. However, even though excess carbs will make you gain fat fast, the silver lining is that you gain and retain muscle through the same mechanism.
Even when dieting with a lower than normal carb intake, your carbs can be targeted to help you retain muscle, maintain energy levels, and keep your metabolic rate high.
The anabolic effects of carbohydrates have been well documented since a 1940's study showed them to be "protein sparing." Compared to a fasting group, those with carbs (still no protein) lost only half as much muscle as those without carbs. Throw protein in and you get the same effect just at a higher level. Those with less carbs lose more muscle. Protein is certainly still king in the body's anti-catabolism campaign, but carbohydrates are just as important.
Reading these paragraphs gives meaning to the old saying: "A little learning is a dangerous thing."
Let's look at what we know for sure about biochemistry and see where our bodybuilder went wrong.
What do we need to maintain life? We need a source of energy to keep our bodily functions humming along. We need blood sugar to feed our central nervous systems, red blood cells, and a few other tissues. And we need water.
Let's assume we've got plenty of water, but we have no food to eat. How do we survive? Where do we get our energy and our blood sugar if we don't eat?
We get our energy from the breakdown and release of stored fat. The fat we store away as adipose tissue is our energy reservoir, and that's where we go when we need energy for all our cellular processes. Most of us, even those of us who are not overweight, have plenty of stored fat to last us a long time. Somewhere in one of our books I made the calculation that the amount of fat stored on the body of a 150 pound man was enough to allow him to walk from St. Louis to Miami (at least, I think those were the cities) without eating.
During starvation we get our blood sugar primarily from our muscles. Just as adipose tissue is the reservoir for energy, muscle is the reservoir for blood sugar. We get some sugar from the breakdown of fat, but not much. Triglycerides, i.e., stored fat, are made of three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone. When the fatty acids that we are burning for energy are stripped away from the glycerol, the liver converts these left-over glycerol molecules into glucose. Most of our sugar, however, comes from the breakdown of muscle tissue. The liver converts certain amino acids that make up muscle into sugar in a process called gluconeogenesis.
If we starve, our fat stores gradually 'melt' away as we use the stored fat for energy and our muscle mass diminishes as we breakdown muscle tissue to provide sugar.
Let's say that during our period of starvation we find a bag of sugar. If we eat that sugar in amounts small enough to provide sugar to all the cells that need it, we won't have to break down muscle tissue. We'll be getting our energy from the fat we're breaking down and we'll get our sugar from the sugar, so we'll retain, or spare, our muscle tissue. From this fact of biochemistry has arisen the notion that carbohydrates are muscle or protein sparing, which they indeed are under starvation conditions.
But what about when we eat? What happens under non-starvation conditions? Let's say we're dieting to lose weight. We create a caloric deficit and we burn our stored body fat for energy. If we're on a low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diet we use the carbohydrate to provide the blood sugar we need, but at the expense of driving up insulin levels and stimulating the fat-storage process. If we're on a low-carbohydrate diet, however, where do we get the sugar we need to maintain our muscle mass? From the protein we eat.
It's important to eat plenty of protein while on a low-carbohydrate diet so that the dietary protein can be converted into blood sugar as needed. The author of the bodybuilding piece cautions against consuming too much protein because he believes any excess protein will be converted to fat, which is really stretching the biochemistry. Nature has designed our biochemistry to be efficient. The conversion of protein to fat, although possible, is extremely inefficient, and any excess energy from the excess protein would likely be more than used up in the conversion. As a consequence, dietary protein turning to fat is not something we really need to worry about. Dietary protein will convert to sugar, however, so that dietary protein, like dietary carbohydrate, is protein sparing.
The best way to lose excess stored fat and maintain (or even build) muscle is to eat plenty of protein to provide the building blocks for new muscle and to convert to blood sugar as needed while keeping overall calories low enough so that fat is burned to make up the energy deficit. The best diet to follow in order to accomplish all this easily is a whole-food low-carb diet. Protein is high, calories are low, and the limited carbohydrate insures that insulin levels remain low so that the fat easily flows from the fat cells and makes its way to the cellular furnaces for burning. (Click here for an earlier post disussing the low-calorie nature of low-carb diets.)
Posted by mreades at 05:59 PM | Comments (13)
June 15, 2006
How things have changed since Revolutionary times
Today's New York Times has an article about a rare Revolutionary War flag sold at auction yesterday for $17 million. I had assumed, I guess, that the Continentals had a flag, but I had never thought much about what it looked like, much less considering what one would now be worth.
Aside from the $17 million, what struck me in the article is the picture below:
Photo by Monica Almeida/ New York Times
I've known a few Civil War re-enacters in my time so I know how much time and effort they spend in achieving accuracy in all manner of uniforms and weapons. I can only assume that Revolutionary War re-enacters do the same. In fact, I would venture to bet that the uniforms pictured above are correct right down to the length of fringe on the epaulets. It's too bad that these guys don't spend the same amount of time, money and effort in trying to recreate the bodies of Revolutionary War soldiers. I seriously doubt that any Revolutionary War combatant living in the conditions of the day and eating the soldier's fare of the day, which in most cases was scavenged game, would look like the guys pictured above. In fact, my bride, who just read over this post, reminded me that we have seen a number of Revolutionary War uniforms in museums and have always commented on how small they looked.
A note to those monitoring my New Year's Resolutions, one of which (#3) was to become more digitally adept: I've figured out how to add pictures to the blog.
Posted by mreades at 11:31 AM | Comments (3)
June 13, 2006
Defending AIDS denialists
In early June of 1981 the CDC released a report of several cases that turned out to be what we now call AIDS. Since this June is the 25th anniversary of the first official notice of this horrible disease most of the media have made mention of it with the New York Times leading the pack. The Times has had multiple editorials about AIDS and HIV (the virus thought to cause AIDS), most simply reminding us of the fact that the disease has been around for 25 years and that, although the number of cases is declining in the US, it still remains a scourge worldwide. One of these editorials entitled 'Deadly Quackery,' however, was disingenuous at best and an outright lie at worst. Let me explain.
Doctors started seeing more and more cases of AIDS after 1981 and scientists began searching for a cause. As more and more research money and attention was directed at the disease many researchers looked for some kind of infectious cause. In due course a retrovirus, the so-called Human Immunodeficiency Virus, was identified as being commonly found in victims of AIDS. Once fingered this virus became the focus of attention of almost everyone and the race was on to connect it indisputably with AIDS. As more an more work was done researchers began to cobble together the following mechanism: a person infected with HIV passes the virus to another person who becomes infected and will ultimately develop AIDS. Pretty much the entire viral research community jumped on this bandwagon and the search was on for a vaccine to prevent it and anti-viral drugs to treat it. This scenario sounds plausible and most everyone believes it represents the reality of the situation. But there is a fly in the ointment.
As more and more people became more and more convinced that the HIV was the cause of AIDS, the most respected retroviral researcher in the world believed differently. Peter Duesberg, a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that HIV is not the cause of AIDS and is nothing more than an innocent 'passenger' virus that happens to be found in many people with the disease. Dr. Duesberg has been problematic for the HIV causes AIDS crowd because of his scientific pedigree: (from his website)
He isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. This, and his subsequent work in the same field, resulted in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He is also the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health.
On the basis of his experience with retroviruses, Duesberg has challenged the virus-AIDS hypothesis in the pages of such journals as Cancer Research, Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS, AIDS Forschung, Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapeutics, New England Journal of Medicine and Research in Immunology.
What does Dr. Duesberg thinks causes AIDS:
He has instead proposed the hypothesis that the various American/European AIDS diseases are brought on by the long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or AZT itself, which is prescribed to prevent or treat AIDS.
In addition to his large number of scientific publications, Dr. Duesberg has written a book for the layman laying out the evidence as he sees it as to the cause of AIDS. His book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, is masterfully argued and has the best description of the peer review process that I've ever read. I recommend it highly.
Now, you would think that when a highly respected researcher from a major institution argues that HIV doesn't really cause AIDS researchers from the opposite persuasion would try to scientifically and objectively evaluate his opposing hypothesis. That's what you would think, but it hasn't worked that way. The scientific community has turned on Dr. Duesberg and instead of considering his hypothesis they have heaped scorn and ridicule on the man himself. Other people who consider Dr. Duesbergs hypothesis are called AIDS denialists with the same venom and disdain used in referring to those who, for whatever reason, don't believe the Holocaust took place: Holocaust denialists. The one moniker can't help but sully the other.
The New York Times editorial goes to great length in bashing AIDS deniers who, the writers claim, are standing in the way of AIDS research and funding. Their ideas (the AIDS deniers) are getting some traction in some places and as a result, according to the editorial, people, especially in third world countries, are dying en mass as a result.
The editorial starts out with a total untruth.
H.I.V. causes AIDS. This is not a controversial claim but an established fact, based on more than 20 years of solid science. It is as certain as the descent of humans from apes and the falling of dropped objects to the ground.
So why reiterate the obvious? Because lately, a bizarre theory has gained ground -- one that claims that H.I.V. is harmless, and that the antiretroviral drugs that curb the growth of the virus cause rather than treat AIDS. Such talk sounds to most of us like quackery, but the theory has emerged as a genuine menace to public health in the United States and, particularly, in South Africa.
Why an untruth? Because Duesberg has been writing about this for at least 20 years, so it's not 'lately' and it's far from an 'established fact.' It is still controversial.
The editorial goes on to identify the people who are leading the AIDS-isn't-caused-by-HIV campaign:
Roberto Giraldo, a New York hospital technologist who says AIDS is caused by deficiencies in the diet...
Another American AIDS denialist, David Rasnick, a regular letter-writer to South African newspapers, absurdly claims that H.I.V. cannot be transmitted between heterosexuals. Mr. Rasnick now works in South Africa for a multinational vitamin company, the Rath Foundation, conducting clinical trials in which AIDS patients are encouraged to take multivitamins instead of antiretrovirals.
Christine Maggiore, a Californian who campaigns against using antiretrovirals to prevent transmission of H.I.V. from mothers to children...
One would believe from reading this editorial that the only people supporting the HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS hypothesis are nuts, weirdos and opportunists. There is no mention whatsoever of the cadre of prestigious scientists who disagree with the editorialists.
The piece goes on to say that
The AIDS denialists use pseudoscience and non-peer-reviewed Internet postings to bolster their false claims about H.I.V.
Anyone reading this editorial and not knowing the situation would think that there is no valid, peer-reviewed material out there supporting the 'AIDS denialist' position. Readers would also believe that no one with any scientific credibility could possibly support such nonsense.
Well, Duesberg has published extensively in the most highly prestigious peer-reviewed journals and he's not alone. Take a look at this list of physicians and scientists (including a couple of Nobel Laureates) who agree with Duesberg. This is the reason this editorial has gotten me so hot under the collar. It is totally dishonest in that it points out only people who appear fruit cakey and none of the dozens of other legitimate scientists that don't support the HIV-causes-AIDS theory.
My position on the issue is that I don't know. I'm not in a high-risk group, so my odds of getting AIDS are negligible, and I have more than I can say grace over in trying to keep up with the literature that is important to me, so I haven't made (and probably won't) a thorough study of the matter. I do know from first hand experience how well the low-carb diet works to treat diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, and a host of other problems better than anything else out there, and I know from first hand experience what it feels like to be called a quack and an opportunist and someone who just wants to sell diet books by the mainstream medical and nutritional people. I know how wrong they can be.
Fortunately, all the new research that has been coming out over the past several years has vindicated me, but I still feel the outrage of knowing I was right and being marginalized as a nut. So, I feel a sort of kinship to Dr. Duesberg and others who don't fall into step with the main stream.
The take home message is that even the venerable New York Times allows totally distorted editorial pieces to reach print. Don't believe everything you read, even if it's in one of the top newspapers in the world.
Posted by mreades at 06:54 PM | Comments (8)
June 12, 2006
Transportation Safety Authority treachery
As a coda to our disastrous recent trip (disastrous on one end, at least) I discovered that I had been pillaged by one of our faithful public servants employed by the misbegotten T.S.A. Before leaving Dallas I had four sleeves of Titleist Pro V1 golf balls in the side pocket of my golf bag. For those of you who don't play golf, Titleist Pro V1s are very good golf balls costing a little over $4 each, so four sleeves of them (3 to a sleeve) are worth about $50. I packed my golf bag into my carrying case, didn't have it out of my possession until I checked it at the America West counter and watched it ride the conveyor belt until it disappeared into the bowels of the terminal. I watched it come off the plane in Santa Barbara, picked it up when they brought it to the baggage claim area (at the dinky Santa Barbara airport you can watch bags come off the planes and be loaded onto a cart and driven to the outdoor baggage claim area) and put it in my car. I kept the golf bag in its carrying bag in the car until we came up to Tahoe. I took it out for the first time since packing in Dallas only to find that my four sleeves of Titleist balls were gone. My only conclusion is that they were pilfered by a golf-playing TSA agent.
I've heard a couple of TV commentators discussing the problem of TSA thievery and I had a friend who had his nice, expensive leather shaving kit stolen from his checked bag. Now I've been victimized myself. $50 isn't the end of the world, but it does aggravate me and disappoint me to no end to realize that our public servants, hired to keep us safe from terror, are, in many cases, themselves nothing more than common thieves. It's also a real pain to have to worry not only about your checked bags arriving when you do but the depredations of our supposed protectors. So caveat bag checkor.
Posted by mreades at 07:20 AM | Comments (7)
June 07, 2006
Update on comments and other miscellaneous
I got up this morning and deleted 137 spam comments from the unpublished comments file. It was made a little easier because these spam comments were directed to the 'Junk" folder. Unfortunately a couple of real comments were directer there as well. I had to fish those out and transfer them back to the legitimate comments folder. MD and I have been getting so many spam comments that it takes us a fair amount of time to deal with them daily. We added a plug in to this blogging software that asks for anyone making a comment to type in the password that is shown. Anyone typing in the password has his or her comments directed to the legitimate comments folder. Anyone who doesn't has his or her comments directed to the junk file. Since spammers generating their spam via machine won't be able to type in the password, their stuff goes directly to junk and I can ditch it with a keystroke.
If a legitimate reader makes a comment and doesn't type in the proper password his or her comment will suffer the same fate as the spammers: it will be automatically consigned to the junk pile. If rooted through this junk for the past couple of days and ferreted out the several legitimate comments and transferred them back, but I can't keep on doing that because it takes a lot of time. So, if you comment, please type in the password that is right there by the comment box and you will be golden. Thanks for your help.
MD and I have to drive for about 8 hours today (God help us) to get to our actual home in Nevada. We will be set up and operational tonight.
I caught up on all my weekend reading and found a mother lode of blogworthy material that you will be reading about shortly. There was an absolutely infuriatingly dishonest editorial on AIDS written more as an information piece in the New York Times that I will dissect. I plan to present my views on the latest convictions in the Exxon case as a real cautionary tale for all of us. An illuminating article on hydration appeared in a special section of the Sunday New York Times that both confirms and flies in the face of what MD and I have written in the past--I'll go over where we agree, where we don't, and if and how our minds have changed. The Wall Street Journal has an incredible article on how growers are trying to capitalize on the American sweet tooth and the recommendation to eat more fruit by, you guessed it, developing fruit that has a higher sugar content. And I'm going to review Michael Pollan's new book The Omnivore's Dilemma
There is all that and much more to come, so stay tuned.
On a final note, several people commented on the fact that I wrote a blog taking America West to task only to find advertisements for America West on my blog thanks to the Google search-for-significant-word webcrawler. Well, so be it. The few pennies I might make from someone clicking their ad will in some small measure reimburse me for the nightmare experience they caused me.
The whole Google ad situation is an interesting one. I like to BARE all my NAKED thoughts on my blog without regard for the SEX or age of the person reading them. I see myself as the LONELY philosopher who rides his ASS from village to village spreading illumination. My views are probably like an X-RATED movie; they're not for everyone, especially not for the BOOBS who are believers in low-fat diets. To those folks I'm sure my views are TRIPLE X (that is XXX), and I'm sure they think I'm wallowing in SIN. But all I can say to all of them, from YOUNG GIRLS to old men, is that I'm just calling them as I see them, I never MASSAGE the data to my own purposes.
There, that should give the Google crawler something to go after. Let's see what pops up.
Posted by mreades at 08:11 AM | Comments (4)
June 05, 2006
Much better trip back
For those of you who wondered...the trip back from Dallas to Santa Barbara went as smoothly as the trip out was screwed up. All planes were on time; all the various staff were friendly and helpful; all in all this trip was just the way you want an airline trip: without incident.
Posted by mreades at 10:23 PM | Comments (3)
Summer Travel Nightmare
A cautionary tale if you plan to travel by air this summer...
I read an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago about how terrible air travel was going to be this summer. The gist of the article was that most airlines are in real financial trouble and that their management teams are desperate to preserve their bottom lines. They are cutting costs by, among other things, eliminating unprofitable routes and cutting back on employee pay benefits and salary increases. So summer is shaping up to be a powder keg of disgruntled, resentful airline employees coupled with severely reduced flight availability just waiting to be ignited by a horde of travelers at peak travel season.
It's one thing to read about it, it's another thing entirely to be victimized by the situation.
MD and I were flying to Dallas a few days ago for a few days with the kids when our nightmare began. We were flying out of Santa Barbara on America West Airline, which many people refer to as America's Worst Airline (which, we discovered, is not without cause). When we fly to Dallas from Santa Barbara we usually take the early morning flight on a small jet to Phoenix where we then catch a larger jet into DFW. The early flight out of Santa Barbara leaves at 6:30 AM so we have to be up at 4:30 AM to get our stuff together and get there, check bags, go through security, etc. We duly arrived at the airport at about 5:45 (the Santa Barbara airport is tiny and requires arrival at a reasonable 30-40 minutes before the flight verses the hour or more required at most larger airports) only to be informed that the plane taking us to Phoenix wasn't there.
This plane comes in from Phoenix at 9 PM or so the night before and stays overnight at the airport awaiting the 6:30 AM flight. So, it was no surprise to anyone at America West that our flight was going to be delayed, since someone there had known about it at least since 8 PM the night before when the plane didn't leave from Phoenix to Santa Barbara. Since I had to leave a contact number when booking the flight (as, I would assume, everyone else who booked that flight as well) it would have been nice for someone at America West to have called the night before to tell us that there was a problem. As it was, we, along with an entire plane full of other passengers (who also got up at 4:30 AM), were left to stand around at the airport while the minuscule staff at the America West terminal (who didn't know there was a problem either until they showed up for work that morning and saw no plane out on the tarmac) tried to rebook everyone.
Our option was to wait until later in the afternoon and get in Dallas late, which we didn't want to do since we had plans that afternoon or take a shuttle to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and catch an American Airlines flight from there directly to Dallas. We opted to take the shuttle. We were given vouchers for the shuttle and vouchers for the American flight and told to go directly to the American check in counter, present our vouchers, and we would be checked in.
The shuttle turned out to be a taxi cab, the driver of which, God bless him, drove like a maniac for almost two hours to get us there in time to catch the American flight we were scheduled on. We got there in the nick of time (we foolishly thought), sprinted to the American check in counter, presented our vouchers, and precipitated a huddle of airline employees of various levels of management. The huddle broke and a manager informed us that the voucher wouldn't work because we needed an actual paper ticket from America West to go along with the voucher. The voucher would have worked at the Santa Barbara airport (so they told us), but not at LAX. The manager told us that they would call America West and have an Ameica West agent hand carry the ticket to them at the American counter at which point they would get us on the next flight with seat availability. We asked if we could go pick up the tickets ourselves and not rely on the unreliability of the staff at America West. Sure, we were told, but we were warned that we would have to go both ways (if you've never been there, the LAX airport is huge with multiple terminals; the America West terminal is as far away from the American terminal as it can possible be) whereas the America West person would have to travel just one way to get the tickets to us. We had already missed the flight the bozos from America West in Santa Barbara had scheduled us on, and if the agent from the America West counter couldn't get us the tickets to trade in within a half hour we would miss the next flight. We waited and just before the half hour expired we went to the America counter to see if the America West agent had slipped in without our seeing.
The American agent told us that the America West agent had radioed that he was on his way with the tickets so we could go ahead and check our bags. Why the American agent didn't come tell us that when he found out instead of making us sweat an extra ten minutes I don't know. We were right there waiting in full view of him the entire time.
We checked our bags, the America West agent finally arrived, we got our tickets, and headed for security. As luck always seems to have it at times like this we were both selected (by something encoded on our tickets) to go through the entire pat down and baggage search. One security person (or personnel, as they would say) searched our persons while another rummaged through our carry ons.
We finally made it to the plane only to find someone else in my seat who was demanding that I sit somewhere else. We finally resolved the seat situation, the plane took off, and the guy right in front of me threw back his seat and slept all the way. The real indignity was that we rode (me with a seat back in my face) in knees-under-chin class while our original America West tickets were first class (the leg from Phoenix to Dallas) that we had upgraded with miles.
We have to fly back tonight from Dallas to Santa Barbara on America's Worst Airline on the second half of our trip. We're already experiencing some angst because when we tried to check in online last night a message came up that said: see airport personnel tomorrow. Who knows what kind of nightmare awaits. Pray for us.
Posted by mreades at 11:30 AM | Comments (3)