Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Gary and me on our front porch. Photo by MD Eades 8/13/2008

A couple of days ago Gary Taubes, who was visiting family in Los Angeles, drove up to Santa Barbara, and he, MD and I got together for a long lunch. We talked about all the things we always discuss, most of which have nothing to do with nutrition or nutritional science. But, as always when we get together, talk did turn to science and the sorry state of nutritional science in the world today.

We discussed a Stanford study that was recently published in the Archives of Internal Medicine demonstrating that those who are runners live longer and have less disability. The paper proves absolutely nothing, yet an enormous number of people, many of whom should know better, profess that this study is the smoking gun that ties exercise to longevity and health.

Read more »

Hello! This is Dr. Mike - If you're new here and you've enjoyed my posts, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

John Tierney, science blogger for the New York Times, was as taken aback by the abject stupidity hostility of the comments to his recent post on fat in the diet that included a response from Gary Taubes about the Israeli low-carb study as I was in my recent post about his post. He decided to post on the subject again, specifically addressing the comments quibbling with the findings on saturated fat. And he included more feedback from Gary.

What we have to keep in mind here is that nutrition is a science (or at least should be) and science is about generating hypotheses, making predictions from our hypotheses, and then seeing if they hold true. The relevant hypothesis here — i.e., what we’ve believed for the past 30-odd years — is that saturated fat causes heart disease by elevating either total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol, specifically. So our prediction is that the diet with the higher saturated fat content will have a relatively deleterious effect on cholesterol. We do the test; we repeat it a half dozen times in different populations. Each time it fails to confirm our prediction. So maybe the hypothesis is wrong. That seems like a reasonable conclusion. No one is proving anything here — as some of your respondents like to decry — we’re just looking at the evidence and trying to decide which hypotheses it supports and which it tends to refute.

The knee-jerk response — as exemplified by quite a few respondents — is to assume that sometime in the not-too-distant past, maybe the 1960s or 1970s, before this low-fat dogma set in, such trials, or far better trials, were done and found the opposite — that the higher the saturated fat in the diet, the lower the cholesterol and the better the cholesterol profile. Or the higher the saturated fat, the greater the mortality. But that’s simply not the case, as I point out in my book. In fact, I’ve been criticized (by Gina Kolata, among others) for going on and on in the book about all the different studies. But I did so precisely because I didn’t want to be accused of cherry picking the data. (I was anyway, but that’s just the nature of this business.) When Ancel Keys, for instance, reported in the 1950s reported that saturated fats raised total cholesterol, which they did in his studies, he based it on comparisons of butter fat to polyunsaturated oils in studies that lasted only two to nine weeks. (He also reported, curiously enough, that the saturated fats had no significant effect on LDL.)

Read more »

Moonrise, Jackson Hole (click to enlarge) photo by Daniel Eades

A study published in the current edition of the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrates once again that the low-carbohydrate diet is better than the low-fat diet in bringing about both weight loss and an improvement in lipid profiles. This study, as published, is not without its flaws, which we will get to in a due course. What I find amazing - or maybe I don’t - has been the press reaction.

First came the television reports (here, here and here), all of which reported the study as the Atkins diet triumphing over the low-fat diet and the beloved Mediterranean diet. TV was made for sound bites and sensationalism, so this report fits right in. Although numerous studies have shown the same superiority of the low-carb diet, the TV media seems to treat these studies in one of two ways: it ignores them or it treats them as a man-bites-dog kind of story. The print media has had a little time to reflect on the situation and is reporting the study in a different way.

Read more »

Aubrey de Grey (here, here and here) is an iconoclastic anti-aging researcher living in Cambridge, UK who approaches the science of anti-aging medicine from an engineering perspective (requires free registration). He lectures extensively and constantly pushes the boundaries of anti-aging research. He isn’t trained in biology or medicine, but as an engineer. His extensive knowledge of medicine and the biological sciences is pretty much self taught. He doesn’t subscribe to any particular medical or scientific ideology, i.e., alternative medicine verses mainstream medicine, or any specific dietary practices other than the idea that caloric restriction has been shown in animal studies to prolong life. But Dr. de Grey isn’t interested in the mere 20-30 percent increase in lifespan brought about by caloric restriction; he’s more interested in increasing lifespan 100 to 200 years or more. Which he believes can be done if we look at forestalling aging from an engineering point of view.

He has written (co-written, actually) a book titled, appropriately enough, Ending Aging describing his theories of aging and discussing the problems that must be overcome to undo the forces of our own biochemistry and physiology that grind us down over time. I read the book when it first came out and found it fascinating. I wouldn’t think it’s a particularly an easy read for one not scientifically inclined. If you thought Gary Taubes’ book was difficult, I wouldn’t recommend this one. If you do get it and are prepared to spend some time really digging in, you will come away rewarded, if not in understanding (which you will certainly get) at least in the knowledge that there are many extremely clever people working to keep us living longer. If you just want to read a little of the book, I recommend Chapter 5, Meltdown of the Cellular Power Plants, which is a virtuoso piece of scientific reasoning. Dr. de Grey published his theory of mitochondrial survival of the slowest, the subject of this chapter, a few years back, and I thought it a brilliant piece of scientific detective work.

Read more »