Thanks for doing what you do: prior to finding your’s and Gary Taubes’ books, I had not run across any reasonably complete and coherent discussions of the subjects of weight loss and metabolic control. I ate the “healthy” high-carb “balanced ” diet for years, gained weight and eventually started showing other ill-effects. Now I keep my carbs in the 30 – 50 g range, walk ~ 21 miles/week, and feel much better. A complete life change, and -45 lbs to date. I feel like I’ve finally been given a good hammer insead of a small rock to drive the nails of my house.

One request: would you consider giving weight-based (grams & ozs) rather than volumetric nutritional information in the future? My conception of a medium something might be very different from yours, and my mushrooms might pack differently each time depending on how I slice them…

Thanks again.

It was enough for me learning that every nutrient we think we need to get from veggies is also available in animal foods, and that I can’t get vitamin A from vegetables at all unless I’m converting beta carotene. I have no idea whether I’m converting it nor whether I’m converting it *enough.* I do know that I was plagued by menstrual problems for something like three years, and I mean horrid stuff to the point I sometimes could not leave the house for a few days a month for fear of an accident. After three to four months on retinol supplementation from fish liver oil capsules (10,000 IU minimum) daily, suddenly I don’t get the weird pains I was getting the day before it would start. I was curious and went Web-surfing, and turns out other women have found relief the same way.

I’m furious the government lets food companies put a vitamin A value on plant food labels when there’s not a scrap of vitamin A in the food and I’m absolutely LIVID that they allow health “experts” to claim that beta carotene and A are the same thing. I wonder how many people out there are subclinically deficient in A. It’s going to kill them, slowly and unpleasantly.

Actually, I wish LC writers would quit pussyfooting around about the fat issue. Weston Price documented countless traditional cultures eating high-fat diets and NOT being fat and sick. The Inuit lived on mostly fat when they ate their traditional diet. Fat is an important constituent of cell membranes, brain cells and other nervous system tissue, hormones, cardiac tissue and reproductive tissue. I’m sure you know this. That stuff doesn’t just sit there idle either–it’s all living tissue and, as living tissue, continually replenishes itself. It needs the proper building blocks to do so. Restricting fat isn’t going to make those building blocks available.

“Excess” fat in the absence of carbohydrate isn’t even going to be stored. What would be the mechanism? Insulin isn’t elevated, and insulin’s the fat-storage hormone. Also, fat’s stored in the form of triglycerides, and you need a sugar to make the central supporting axis of a triglyceride molecule. So it’s not even about staying slender.

Other points taken from the comments, mostly unrelated to the blog post:

1. Wikipedia – I’ve found mistakes in the World Book Encyclopedia. I’d be willing to bet money I don’t have there are mistakes in Britannica and in other print encyclopedias as well. Every time someone badmouths Wikipedia I say to them, “If you think something is inaccurate, sign up for an account and fix it.” That’s the whole *point* of a wiki. I don’t use it as a be-all, end-all source, but I’m not going to ignore it just because universities don’t want their students using it as a source. What–do we mean the same universities that churn out so-called “scientists” who buy into the low-fat diet myth? THOSE universities? Yeah. Pass. ALL sources are flawed in some way. Every single one.

2. Animal rights groups as domestic terrorist threats – Tell you what. When we’ve done something useful about the terrorist groups who are actually killing people, I might take the hysteria about animal rights groups seriously. I don’t agree with everything they say, mind you, but I do know they go out of their way not to hurt human beings (directly, anyhow; it could be argued they hurt the rest of us indirectly, but I won’t get into that here). And it’s not like they aren’t right about some things, like how horrendous CAFO operations are. Maybe if our government spent some serious time knocking down industrial ag and industrial animal “husbandry” (if I had a husband who treated me like that, I think he’d “accidentally” die in his sleep) instead of going after ELF/ALF/Earth First, this country might be better served.

I’m on the same page as the rest of you on what whackjobs PETA members are, though.

Not that I have an opinion or anything like that.

Interesting. Thanks for the link.

I find the phenomenon of Asperger’s self-diagnosis fascinating. The number of people with no concept of the sensory disturbances that go along with the disorder borders on silly, really. I might be biased because most all of my friends are of the actually-diagnosed variety, but if you’re asocial because you just don’t like people and not because you’re incredibly awkward, all I can really say is that it doesn’t work that way.

Then there’s separating Asperger’s from Sensory Integration Disorder. People on the internet like to try to diagnose other people, and they kept trying to tell me I’m an aspie. I did eventually suspect something was different about my friend because of that, though, and was unsurprised when her therapist sent her off for testing and it turned out she has Asperger’s. On the reading early: I learned how to read a few months before my third birthday, and from what I’ve been told it was probably a process of associating whole words with the sounds people make. It seems to happen more with children who are lucky enough to have their parents read to them where they can see words on the pages. What you should not do with literate preschoolers is force them to babysit other misbehaving children. Do give them medical literature, because it is fun and rewarding. Do not lie if/when they find your porn stash and say you read the magazines for the articles, because they WILL read the articles and wonder about your bad taste.

My current roommate is one step away from being a vegetarian. She whines when I make things like chicken livers, or even medium-boiled eggs. I’m thinking about putting a string through a raw chicken heart and hanging it somewhere just to see what happens.

Almost everyone knows how useful nutrition tracking sites are, but what I never realized is how fun a spreadsheet program could be! I’ve been tracking my weight in an Excel file, and it will tell me where I am in relation for my goal for the day, the offset from the goal, and if the weight is too high, it will pop up a warning in a nearby column. You can even make charts with projection lines based off of current data, and see how you have to adjust things to make it to weight by when you want to. It’s so cool. I’m probably going to make a calorie and macronutrient log and then compare their relationships on even more graphs, because it’s that nifty!

This was much too rambly. At any rate, there are a couple of tests for the self-diagnosed halfwits out there:

Q) What part of a person’s face do you look at, and why?
Answer should be: I don’t if I can help it, but if I can’t, anywhere but the eyes. They fry my brain because there’s just waaaaaaaaay too much going on there. If I look there, don’t expect me to be doing anything else, like listening or talking.

Not: What are you babbling on about?

Q) Why don’t you go out and do things with people?
Answer should be: They are strange, baffling, mysterious creatures, and have no idea how to approach them to do these things. They have rituals that make no damn sense. I would like to, but no one handed me the damn instruction manual.

Not: You’re annoying. Leave me alone before I smash you.

Le sigh.

Hi Karyn–

I do remember meeting. And I’m not holding my breath that the FDA or the FTC will do anything to investigate the PCRM.

From what I read in the rebuttal (well done, by the way!), I would say that you do believe there is some potential for bone health issues, if one eats a zero carb diet. Is the evidence for that strong, and do you indeed feel that to be the case? Thanks in advance.

The evidence comes mainly from observational studies, which are pretty much worthless for determining causality. But just to be on the safe side, I like to add some green and colorful vegetables and berries, which counter the acidic effects of the protein.

“Researchers from Harvard recently reported that subjects could eat 300 calories more per day on a low-carbohydrate diet than those following a low-fat diet and still lose the same amount of weight over a 12-week period. ”

Can you post the link or citation for this study please? I’d like to see it!

Thanks for your always eloquent contribution to the world of sensible, logical, rational nutrition.

This study by Penny Greene at Harvard isn’t a recent study; it’s about 6 years old. Dr. Greene presented the data to an obesity meeting, but it hasn’t been published yet. Don’t ask me why. I heard her presentation and talked with her at length about if after. Here is a link to an article about the study in the Harvard Gazette.