The news is abuzz with reports of the latest study to come out showing that eating meat, especially red meat, kills us off before our time.  (You can read some of the reporting here, here, here and here.)  Google shows 547 new articles about this study.

Although this study is totally worthless from a causality perspective because it is an observational study, it does serve to confirm the biases of those non-critical thinkers who have already bought into the idea that meat is bad.  To give you an example of such a soft thinker, here is the second comment on the blog post about this study in the New York Times.

I could have told you that 30 years ago. I been a vegetarian for 47 years and I have never seen vegetarians die from heart disease or cancer. They died from basic infectious diseases and malnutrition. Make no mistake it is harder to be a vegetarian than a carnivour but your body does not expel everying [sic] that is in the meat especially red meat.

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Detail from Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death

The Dark Ages were an inglorious period of human history bounded on the one side by the Classical Age and by the Renaissance on the other.   These grim times began when a classical empire was savaged by barbarians plunging the world into a long era of darkness ruled by ignorance, superstition and fear, and ended finally by the intellectual stirrings of the Italian Renaissance.

I believe that the latest dietary study published in the New England Journal of Medicine is an early indicator that our own era of dietary darkness may be coming to an end.

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I’ve had a number of people email me about a new study appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine purportedly showing that statins really do provide benefit to those who take them regularly.  As you can see from the heading of an email piece I pasted above, even Medscape is all over this article and blasting it out to physicians all over the world.

I’m sad to say that this is the same kind of paper I would have been taken in by 20 years ago before I really understood how to read the scientific literature critically.  In fact, I would have used it myself to justify giving statins to all kinds of people, and I’m sure other physicians are doing so right now.  But I would have been in error to base my prescribing on this paper, and all the other docs out there giving statins like they were candy are in error as well.

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Despite the title of this post, it isn’t really about why low-carb is harder the second time around per se. It’s more about attitude toward dieting and why diets in general are difficult, sometimes even the first time.  What with it being a new year and all, I figured I would go ahead and get things stirred up early with my thoughts on the psychology of dieting.

I can’t begin to count the number of people whom I have seen in my office who have fallen off the wagon and who told me that they just couldn’t stick with their low-carb diet for any number of reasons.

A typical conversations goes something like this:

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