The number one winner going away was Lierre Kieth’s brilliant The Vegetarian Myth.  If you haven’t read it, grab a copy ASAP.  For those of you who don’t know, Lierre was recently the victim of an assault at a San Francisco reading.  Masked thugs came out from behind the stage and smashed her in the head and face with pies laced with cayenne pepper.  After the assault took place, while Lierre was trying to get the burning pepper out of her eyes, the audience (of mainly vegetarians) cheered.  It was truly disgusting.  Richard Nikoley and Tom Naughton reported on the assault here and here.  Jimmy Moore has a  interview with Lierre about the attack here. Tom Naughton proposes a rationale for such behavior here.

It appears that militant vegans have secured  Lierre’s name and other versions of her name on Twitter and are mounting a vicious smear  campaign against her.  Purchase her book to fight back.  Success is her best revenge.

Here are the books in descending order.

#1 The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Kieth.  My review here.

#2 Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.  My review here.

#3 Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes.  My review here.

#4 Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson. My review here.

#5 Control Theory by William Glasser My review here.

#6 The Brain Trust by Larry McCleary, M.D. My review here.

#7 500 Low-Carb Recipes: 500 Recipes from Snacks to Dessert, That the Whole Family Will Love by Dana Carpender

#8 Natural Hormone Balance for Women by Uzzi Reiss.  A mention here.

#9 How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.  MD’s review here along with her entire list of essential cookbooks.

#10 Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson et al.  My review here.

#10 Primal Body-Primal Mind by Nora Gedgaudas

#10 The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick.  My review here.

#10 The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt My review here.

The last four books on the list sold exactly the same number of copies, so they all tied for 10th on the list.  I listed them alphabetically.

Although not a book, sales of the DVD of Tom Naughton’s brilliant film Fat Head would have put it at #2 on the list.  If you haven’t seen this film, order it today.  Here’s my review.

I want to thank all of you who have ordered not just books but all kinds of things through this site.  And I want to encourage you to continue.  The small commission I make on each order helps underwrite the maintenance on this site, which is much higher than I would have thought it would be.  Plus, I’m still paying off the recent redesign.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, any time you order a book or a DVD or a CD or anything (groceries, supplements, tee-shirts, whatever) through Amazon.com, I get a small commission on your order.  But I get this only if you go through one of the Amazon portals on this blog or MD’s blog or anywhere on the website.  What is an Amazon portal?  If you click the picture of The Six-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle at the upper right of this post, you will be taken to the Six-Week Cure page on Amazon.  If you’re looking for something else, just type it in the search window, click the ‘Go’ button to the right, and you will be taken to wherever you want to go, and anything you purchase once you get there will earn me a tiny commission.

This whine for help with Amazon is my own version of those awful PBS fundraising telethons.  The difference is that here it doesn’t cost you anything; you simply have to purchase whatever you were going to purchase through Amazon anyway by going through one of the portals on this blog.  And your free programming will continue.

As some of you may have noticed, I finally removed the tacky Google ads that were at the bottom of each post.  I didn’t even realize they were there until I was having lunch with Mark Sisson one day, and he asked me what my relationship with Atkins Nutritionals was.  I told him I had no relationship with them.  He told me he figured I did because a fairly prominent banner ad for Atkins Nutritionals appeared at the bottom of each of my posts.  I checked myself, and, sure enough, there were the ads.  I looked into it and found out that I was making about $45 per month for these ads (not all were Atkins, but most were) so I ditched them altogether.  Had I been making $1500 per month on these ads, I may have had second thoughts, but as it was, I had no problem giving them the ax.

So, at this point, no ads are cluttering the pages of my blog or MD’s blog.  Other, of course, than those for our own books, which are the previously mentioned Amazon portals.  Order early and order often.

MD and I have taken off a few days and are in Dallas with kids and grandkids celebrating Christmas.  It snowed like crazy all yesterday afternoon, and, according to the newspapers, Dallas has had its first white Christmas since 1926.  And we were here to witness it.  At left is a photo looking out the back door.  Granted, it’s not a New England eight inch snow or a Colorado two foot snow, but it’s a pretty substantial snow for Dallas.  Maybe it’s a harbinger of good things to come, although the last white Christmas preceded the year in which the Great Depression started.

I’ve been absent from posting because MD and I have been incredibly busy with Sous Vide Supreme stuff.  I just thought we were busy during the developmental stage.  The post-developmental era has consumed enormous amounts of our time.  Especially since our invention had such a nice write up in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.  We’ve been inundated with requests for interviews from multiple media sources and for write ups for this and that.  And all that is not to mention a week’s worth of filming in Seattle.  We’re making a true infomercial on the Sous Vide Supreme with emphasis on the ‘info’ part.  So many people are unaware of what the sous vide process is, so we’re going to tell them.

We’ve teamed up with chef Richard Blais, whom many of you may know from Top Chef, Iron Chef America and other TV cooking shows.  He couldn’t be any nicer nor any easier to work with – a really great guy who can cook like you wouldn’t believe.  He will appear with MD on the infomercial that will start running early next year.  Below is a photo of the two of them camping it up on the set.

The infomercial filming went without a hitch, and the food that Richard Blais prepared in the SVS was incomparable.  On the eve of the filming my brother sent me a YouTube of an infomercial that had a few problems.  I forwarded it on to the rest of the team, and fortunately the Sous Vide Supreme functioned a little better than the popcorn popper in the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ve also teamed up with the retailer Sur La Table.  They will be carrying the Sous Vide Supreme in their stores and in their catalog right after the start of the year.  MD and Richard will be doing demos in several of the stores, so if you want to see the SVS in the flesh, so to speak, head on over to a Sur La Table near you and take a look.

This entire sous vide experience has been different than anything we’ve ever done.  It’s really nice to see articles and reviews that are all positive instead of the hatchet jobs we’re used to getting while promoting low-carb.  No one accuses us of being purveyors of dangerous fad diets, of encouraging people to eat more artery-clogging saturated fat, of being doctors of death (which we’ve been called on live radio) or of simply trying to make a quick buck at the expense of the health of those gullible enough to follow our recommendations.  The new experience has been rewarding and a lot of fun but incredibly time consuming.  Thus my absence from my blogging duties.

But I’ve been absent in electrons only.  I’ve been flying all over the place carrying a satchel of scientific papers that I’ve been reviewing and preparing to blog about.  So I’m fully loaded with ammo and ready to write after I’ve taken a fews days of a breather.

I haven’t been totally offline, however.  I’ve been keeping up with the blogs I  read regularly and haven’t been able to resist commenting when something gets under my skin.

Food writer Michael Ruhlman did a great review of the Sous Vide Supreme, and in the comments section someone took me (and the SVS team) to task for profiteering.   As you might imagine, this kind of thing really gets my hackles up, especially since we are still way, way in the red on this project.  I kept myself in check (the good Mike won out as MD would say) and wrote a couple of mild  but informative comments.  You can read them here.

My friend Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, whose blog I read religiously, wrote a funny post on bacon featuring the kind of ill-disciplined child who gives the South a bad name.  Amy, who is an inveterate low-carber, wrote the post from the perspective of how much she likes bacon.  Of course some commenter couldn’t resist slamming low-carb diets in general and Gary Taubes in particular, so I couldn’t resist resorting to form (the bad Mike sort of won out on this one).  If you’re interested, you can read that exchange here (two comments). The guy turned out to be pretty nice and even sent me a friendly email via Amy.

Speaking of Gary Taubes… he tipped me off on an interesting paper on HDL that I’ll post on soon and I’ve uncovered a few others on the fallacy of the lipid hypothesis.  It looks like the mainstream is ratcheting up its jihad against low-carb again with a few spurious papers badly in need of a public dismantling.  I’ll soon be tanned, rested and ready to shred.  And to go after the statinators, the great medical menaces of our time.  Plus I’ll throw in a nice post on how long it might take the low-carb diet to become the diet recognized by all as the correct diet for most everyone.

Until then, I’m going to lay low and try to catch up on my non-scientific reading.  Speaking of which, I got a great book as a Christmas present from my grandkids today.  It is Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson and is about US Air Flight 5149 that went into the Hudson River last January.  Although the book extols the skill and courage of Capt Sullenberger and crew, its main emphasis is on the aircraft they flew: the Airbus 320.

Twenty five years before Flight 1549 took its plunge, a highly intelligent, charismatic French fighter pilot and test pilot named Bernard Ziegler talked the management at Airbus to let him design a plane that almost flew itself.  Ziegler recognized that pilots exhibited a bell-shaped curve in their level of skill and expertise and that some of the less skilled had ended up killing themselves along with all their passengers after getting into situations that more skilled pilots may have gotten out of safely.  He wanted to design a plane with layers of built-in redundancies that would allow all pilots, but especially those less skilled, to worry about the major goal of any pilot who is in trouble – getting safely on the ground – without  being distracted by all the little details of flying.  In other words – and in very simplistic words – if pilots could simply make the decision to land, the plane could almost fly itself.  When pilots get in tricky situations it is sometimes difficult to get out of them without stressing the plane to the point of structural damage.  As the pilots are trying to avoid disaster they have to worry not only about their main problem – a loss of power, say – but have to baby the plane to keep it from breaking up.  Ziegler fixed all that with the Airbus by designing it to perform maximally under control of multiple computers while the pilots tend to the main problem at hand.  Since the computers control these functions of the plane by electricity it’s called flying by the wire.

When Sully and crew brought the plane down safely in the Hudson, they were flying by wire.  And as the author William Langewiesche puts it

They had no choice.  Like it or not, Ziegler reached out across the years and cradled them all the way to the water. His assistance may have been unnecessary, given the special qualities of these particular two [the pilots of Flight 1549], but there is no question the practical effects were profound.  At the moment of the bird strike, when the engines lost thrust, a conventional airplane would have tried immediately to nose down.  It would have wanted to go into a sharp descent, and would have required whoever was flying to haul back on the controls with some strength and to retrim the airplane for a slower, more moderate glide, while disciplining the wings to stay level until the decision could be made to turn around.  None of this is inherently difficult, but it imposes insidious demands on the crew in an emergency, when they are already busy with more important concerns.  It is an accepted reality that the repetitive and menial jobs, associated with baseline control subtly impinge on a pilot’s capacities, and that during periods of truly high workloads, even simple thoughts are difficult to have.

Imagine trying to disarm a bomb while also having to deal with menial chores and talk on the phone at the same time.

This fascinating book doesn’t detract from the skill and heroism of the crew of Flight 1549, but explains in detail why they were able to make it look so easy.

I loved this book.  I opened it in the morning and had it finished before lunch (lunch was sous vide turkey, if you must know).  If you have any interest in aviation, Fly by Wire is a must read.  Despite the fact that the author dissects in detail a number of commercial aviation disasters in the recent past, the book actually makes one feel safer flying, especially in an Airbus 320.

This post is already longer than I had intended it to be, so I wish you all a Merry Christmas.  I’ll be back soon.

Merry Christmas from Dallas

I’ll leave you with a couple more photos.  Below on the left is my Southern grandson testing the snow barefooted.  On the right is MD slicing the sous vide turkey we had for lunch.

Twitter

The sous vide time commitments have put a real hickey on my reading.  I’ve probably read less over the past four months than in any four month period of my life.  Instead of five or six books per week, I’m down to about two or three max.  I hate it.  I’m trying to keep up with my daily medical/scientific journal trawl, but that has even slacked off a bit.  When I do find something of interest, instead of blogging on it as I used to, I stick it up on my Twitter page.  I probably post 10-15 times per day on Twitter, so if you want to keep up on a moment-by-moment basis, follow me on Twitter.  If you have a problem thinking of yourself as a Twitter person, give it a try.  I dipped my toes in the Twitter waters with great hesitation, and now I love it.  I’ve found it extremely valuable because I find all kinds of new stuff daily.  You’ve got to be careful who you follow, however, or you can waste a ton of time.  If you get started, start following people who provide you with information you can use.  I avoid following people who do nothing but tell me what they ate for breakfast that day or what movie they’re going to see that night.  Sign up an give it a go. You don’t have to write anything (or tweet, as it’s called) if you don’t want to.  You can simply lurk and be the beneficiary of a ton of good info.   The Twitter people take you by the hand and get you squared away.  It takes all of about two minutes – if even that.  Literally.

Comments

I have fallen way, way behind on dealing with comments.  As I wrote a while back, I had to stop answering individual comments, and I’ve pretty much stuck to my guns on that.  Problem is, I had about three hundred comments stacked up before I started doing that.

When comments come in and I post them, they go up in by date.  So back when I was spending half my day dealing with them, I would often come across a comment that required some thought and a detailed answer.  If I didn’t have time to deal with it right then, I put it off until later.  Often when later came, I had 20 or 30 more that came in after the one requiring the time.  I didn’t want to answer those and put them up ahead of the one I hadn’t answered, so I simply didn’t deal with any of them.  Now I’ve got about 340 of them stacked up and it gives me heartburn whenever I even get on my blog administration screen.  The sad thing is that some of these comments go back months and months.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do with them, and I’ve finally come to a decision.  I’m simply going to post them as they are.  I’m going to post about 30 of them per day until they’re all up.  Why not all at once?  Because I know many of you are set up to get comments emailed to you when I post them.  I don’t want to clot email accounts with 340 emailed comments all at once, especially since some of these comments are lengthy.  So, I dole them out over the next 10 days or so while keeping up with the new comments as they come in. I won’t start this process for a few days to get those of you who don’t want even 30 of them a day coming in to unsubscribe.

Since many of these hoarded comments contain very good questions, they are a trove of subjects for future blog posts.  As I post them, I’m going to reread them and clip those that would make for good posts into Evernote or my new favorite plaything DEVONthink that I’m just starting to feel my way along with. (See this great Steven Johnson (whom I follow on Twitter) article about the virtues of DEVONthink.)  After I’ve got these blogworthy comments in a format in which I can find them instantly, I’ll start working through them and posting.

Bloggers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

I don’t know how closely blog readers attended to the recent announcement by the FTC that they were going to start riding herd on bloggers, but the bloggers went ballistic.

Among its other duties, the FTC patrols the universe of advertising in this country looking for anyone or any company engaging in, as they term it, deceptive practices.  In other words, the FTC is on the prowl seeking out advertisers who make false claims in order to stop them and punish them.  Which all sounds good in the abstract, but in reality is a whole other story.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, it’s a valuable exercise to read Kevin Trudeau’s first book to see how the FTC operates.  The nutritional and health information he presents is total garbage, but his description of the practices of the FTC is right on the money. (I’ve got to admit that some of the nutritional and health information presented in Trudeau’s first book (the only one I’ve read) is accurate, but I write that off to the law of averages.  He presents so much information that odds are some of it just happens to be true.  So, if you read the book and come across something that is nutritionally accurate, don’t write me about it.  I know a few things are there, but not enough to justify reading the book other than the first part, which is an excellent treatise on the FTC.)

The FTC has the power to absolutely ruin anyone and/or any company it chooses to go after.  If you read the first part of Trudeau’s book, you’ll see how.

So, the FTC opined that they planned on monitoring bloggers to see if they disclosed the fact that they were paid to do reviews on products.  Apparently, many bloggers make money by doing paid reviews on products without disclosing such, and the FTC doesn’t like it.

I’ve never reviewed products for pay, but I have read enough about it to know how it works.  Companies provide bloggers products, then pay these bloggers for reviews of the products.  I guess the fact that bloggers are given the products and possibly paid for the reviews as well might induce them to write positive reviews of products that they thought sucked.  And I assume that’s what the FTC is concerned about.

The FTC’s actions certainly got the blogosphere in an uproar.  So much so, in fact, that the FTC started to crawdad, which I never thought would happen.  Just goes to show that if you turn the spotlight of public awareness on even the most aggressive and powerful of all government agencies, you can get results.

Not that I fear the FTC on this (at least not at this point), I’ll go ahead and disclose where I get dinero from this blog.  Virtually all of the money that comes to me through the blog comes from readers buying products through Amazon.com.  When they buy a book I recommend or go through one of the book thumbnails of Protein Power or the 6-Week Cure up at the top right or any of our other books I have up on the site, I get a little bit of lucre for it.  And I get a little more if they buy anything else after entering Amazon through one of the portals in this blog.  In a good month, it’s enough to cover my hosting and web guy expenses; in a bad month (as this one is turning out to be), it’s about enough to cover the hosting of the site and maybe an hour or so of the web guy time.

Google ads

I get a little income from Google ads, but I’m trying to get them off the site.  I’ve had several web guys working on the site over the years, and I guess code for these Google ads is stuck all over the place.  I get rid of them in once place, it seems they pop up somewhere else.  When I had Google ads everywhere, I made about $150 per month, which, in my opinion, isn’t enough to justify tacky-ing up the site with a zillion ads.  Plus, I don’t have time to go through and spend time trying to figure out which ads to block.  Many people, I’ve learned, don’t realize that these ads aren’t part of the site, and they wonder why, when I’ve just spent 2000 words bashing statins, an ad for a statin pops up.

A while back I was having lunch with Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple when he asked me what kind of a deal I had going with Atkins Nutritionals.  I told him I didn’t have any kind of deal going with them whatsoever.  I asked him why he asked.  He told me that he gets my blog posts by email, and that at the bottom of each one is a banner ad from Atkins.  I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know you could get the posts by email and that I didn’t have a clue why the Atkins ads were there.  I went home and pulled up the blog (I usually never look at the actual blog – only the admin page), and sure enough, there was a way I could get the posts by email.  I signed up to get my own posts, wrote one, and sure enough, here it came with an Atkins ad at the bottom of it.  I thought I had it all taken care of, but I just looked moments ago and there is still a banner ad at the bottom of the emailed post.  I’ve added it once more to the list of things to have my guy deal with when I get with him on Monday.

Book recommendation

While on the subject of Amazon.com, books and book recommendations, I might as well recommend one.
I finished a terrific book not long ago called A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers. As the title implies, this is a treatise about the fall of the House of Lehman, one of the country’s oldest investment banks, and is written by one of the vice presidents who names names and points the finger.

Not only is this book chock full of great information about how Lehman Bros, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and others operate, it is extremely well written.  The ‘author’ realized he didn’t have the skills to tell his own story in a readable manner, so he hired a writer.  But he didn’t just go out and hire one of the non-fiction write-for-hire folks that are swarming around out there, he hired Patrick Robinson, a best-selling thriller writer.  As a consequence, the book is absolutely gripping. Not only do you learn a ton about how the financial crisis developed, you learn it in a gripping, racing-through-the-pages fashion.  You’ve heard people say about certain books that they read like a novel.  Well, this one does.  I had real trouble putting it down.

After reading this book, you will know exactly why we’re in the boat we’re in now and will be stupified at the mismanagement at the top.  As I read through and learned about the perfidy of Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and the other financial rating outfits that gave the most worthless financial instruments triple A ratings, I was stunned that these companies hadn’t been prosecuted.  Without their complicity, the whole house of cards couldn’t have been erected because no one would have purchased the products.  I was interested to read in today’s Financial Times that at least  Ohio is going after them.  I suspect Ohio won’t be the last.  According to the author, these companies made billions while failing to do their due diligence before passing out AAA ratings like they were candy at Halloween.

Not long after I read the book, I came upon a piece by Calvin Trillin in the editorial section of the New York Times that summed up the situation nicely.  The problem was the enormity of the amounts of money waiting to be made drew smart people to Wall Street.  A funny but insightful short essay.

After you read the book and Trillin’s piece, take a look at this video I posted about a year ago.  It will make it all that much more funny.  And sad.

The 6-Week Cure blog

All I can say is that it’s about up.  And apologies for not having it up sooner.  I hope we’ll have it operational this week and populated with a few posts.

Another vegetarian myth

I wrote in a bookish post (or maybe in answer to a comment on a bookish post – I can’t remember) a while back that I had read most of the mystery novels out there and was looking for a new series to sink my teeth into.  Someone suggested the DI Charlie Priest mysteries by Stuart Pawson.  I got one and liked it, so I’ve been motoring through those as time allows.

The last one I read was Deadly Friends about a murdered doctor, a serial rapist and a host of other minor villains. At a point about midway through, DI Priest and one of his underlings are walking around scoping out a pharmacy prior to entering to get info about the dead doctor.  All these books – at least the four or five I’ve read so far – are written in the first person, so everything is from Priest’s perspective.  Here’s what he says:

We completed our circuit of the block.  Passing the back of the butcher’s I tried not to inhale and wished I had the willpower to go vegetarian.  Trouble is, I like my steaks.

AAARRRGGGHHHH!  Even in mystery novels I’m being reminded of how deep the vegetarian mantra has wormed its way into our collective brains.  How many times have we all heard variations on this theme?  One of the ideas the vegetarian movement has managed to get firmly implanted in the minds of many is that vegetarianism is a more healthful way to eat.  I’ve heard numerous people wistfully say they really would like to be able to follow a vegetarian diet because it’s so much more healthful, but they just like meat too much to do it.

The truth is, as we all know, that vegetarian diets are decidedly less healthful than diets containing animal protein. But the great unwashed masses don’t seem to have figured this out.

But I’ve got to hand it to the vegetarian brigade: they’ve managed to successfully propagandize most of the population.  And they’ve done so without any real science behind them.  The most they can point to is a sheaf of observational studies that don’t prove squat.

The low-carb/Paleo movement, on the other hand, is producing more data almost daily that a lower-carb, higher-fat, higher-protein diet is infinitely better for a majority of the population.  But, we don’t get the message out as well as the other side does, I suppose.  I went to a Borders Books the other day and found an entire collection of free booklets written for children telling of the horrors of factory farming and encouraging them to go vegetarian.

We are starting to make some inroads into this nonsense, however, with the help of some former vegetarians who have seen the error of their ways.  If you haven’t read Lierre Kieth’s book yet, add it to your Christmas list.

I’m girding my loins for all the hostile comments I’m sure to get from angry vegetarians.  These comments will be from vegans telling me how healthy they are and how many miles they can run and how they could kick my butt in any endeavor I might wish to engage them in.  And they’ll reference the idiotic China Study and a host of other meaningless observational junk.  But wait.  I don’t have to gird my loins.  I’m not dealing with these comments any more.  I’m just posting them as they come in.  Give it your best shot.

To see under what conditions our genome developed, read on.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle

Just to wrap this long, meandering post up, I want to end with a link to a great article in the December 2009 National Geographic.  And to bring this post full circle, I’ve got to let you know that I found this article on Twitter.  I wouldn’t have discovered it otherwise. At least not as quickly as I did.

The long article is about the Hadza who follow a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in remote Tanzania.  The area the Hadza roam is being encroached upon by all kinds of agricultural and tourist businesses, and the author doubts these indigenous people can maintain their lifestyle for much longer.
The men hunt and the women gather.  The Hadza went on a nighttime baboon hunt and took the author along.  His account of the hunt makes for a riveting read.  Once killed, the Hadza haul the baboon back to what serves as a camp and prepare to serve it up.  I’ll leave you with the author’s description of the meal.

Ngaola skins the baboon and stakes out the pelt with sharpened twigs. The skin will be dry in a few days and will make a fine sleeping mat. A couple of men butcher the animal, and cuts of meat are distributed. Onwas, as camp elder, is handed the greatest delicacy: the head.

The Hadza cooking style is simple—the meat is placed directly on the fire. No grill, no pan. Hadza mealtime is not an occasion for politeness. Personal space is generally not recognized; no matter how packed it is around a fire, there’s always room for one more, even if you end up on someone’s lap. Once a cut of meat has finished cooking, anyone can grab a bite.

And I mean grab. When the meat is ready, knives are unsheathed and the frenzy begins. There is grasping and slicing and chewing and pulling. The idea is to tug at a hunk of meat with your teeth, then use your knife to slice away your share. Elbowing and shoving is standard behavior. Bones are smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost comically loud.

I’m ravenous, so I dive into the scrum and snatch up some meat. Baboon steak, I have to say, isn’t terrible—a touch gamy, but it’s been a few days since I’ve eaten protein, and I can feel my body perking up with every bite. Pure fat, rather than meat, is what the Hadza crave, though most coveted are the baboon’s paw pads. I snag a bit of one and pop it in my mouth, but it’s like trying to swallow a pencil eraser. When I spit the gob of paw pad out, a young boy instantly picks it up and swallows it.

Onwas, with the baboon’s head, is comfortably above the fray. He sits cross-legged at his fire and eats the cheeks, the eyeballs, the neck meat, and the forehead skin, using the soles of his sandals as a cutting board. He gnaws the skull clean to the bone, then plunges it into the fire and calls me and the hunters over for a smoke.

The day after Labor Day (six days from today) our new book comes out, and our publisher finally gave us permission to excerpt it.  I’m going to post the entire introduction so you’ll know why we came to write this particular book.

The story you will read will be true and the names won’t be changed to protect the ‘innocent.’  Until the events transpired that you will soon be reading about, I was not especially a proponent of fast weight loss.  I mean a low-carb diet will make people lose weight quickly, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the people who used to come into my office saying, “I’ve got my high school reunion in a month.  How much weight can I lose by then?’  I always considered these as fairly ludicrous requests because the requesters clearly weren’t concerned about health issues, but simply about how they would look in the short run, without an eye to maintaining their lifestyle.

As a consequence of dealing with so many of these patients, I really developed an aversion to the notion of quick weight loss to meet some sort of deadline where appearance counted.  But, as with so many things in life, it’s easy to pontificate until you find yourself in the same position as the people to whom you’re pontificating.

Go ahead and read this excerpt so you can see what I’m talking about, and we’ll pick up this conversation after.  This excerpt is from the manuscript version and not from the actual book so there may be slight differences, if you’re comparing the two.  I used the manuscript version because I could paste it in – had I used the actual book version I would have had to type it in.

Bob Hope famously quipped that middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle, and the audience always obliged him with a hearty laugh.  But for millions of adults the sad irony of the middle-aged middle is anything but funny.  Except for a select few metabolically-gifted individuals, crossing the threshold into middle age heralds the beginning of a battle of the bulge that seemingly never ends.  Granted some reach that threshold sooner than others; some acquiesce to the larger belt and the broader silhouette with some degree of aplomb, while others rail against time and fate. They take up and discard first one diet and exercise program and then the next in a frustrating quest to recapture the slender waist they can still recall, but no longer see in the mirror.

We’ve spent the majority of our medical careers helping people of every description with just this battle, combating overweight and weight-related health issues.  Although some were in their teens and twenties and some were in their seventies and eighties, the vast bulk of the many thousands of patients we guided to better health and lower weights were in middle age.  What we learned from these many years in the diet trenches is that middle-aged weight is stubborn; it’s different to deal with; it doesn’t respond readily to modest dietary changes or the incremental increases in exercise usually recommended by the purveyors of received medical and nutritional wisdom.  The factors driving middle-aged weight gain—which really does go straight to the middle—are like a perfect storm, metabolically speaking.  A confluence of changes in hormones, stress, lack of sleep, alcohol intake, medications, fat and cholesterol phobias, and a mountain of other nutritional misinformation combines to create a mid-life tsunami that seems to swamp the metabolism and fill every nook and cranny of the middle of the body with fat.

For more than twenty years we have researched this area of science, refining the tools to deal with it effectively, writing about it, lecturing on it, so you’d think that our expertise would make protect us from the tsunami, if it came our way.  But it didn’t.  Like everyone else, when the middle-age wave hit, we found ourselves floundering in the tide, paddling as fast as we could, and still not making much headway.  At least not until we dug back into the medical bag of tricks we had used with success in our middle-aged patients and applied them to ourselves.  Here’s how it all began.

Mike’s Story

Our wake up call came the morning we walked onto the set to film the pilot for our TV cooking show. Years before, I had gained a tremendous amount of weight while pursuing my career as a busy, practicing physician, then lost it on a diet I cobbled together from information I got rereading my old medical school texts and delving into the medical literature.  My weight loss did not go unnoticed by my patients, and soon many were clamoring for me to put them on the same diet I had developed for myself.  I did so with great success.  In short order my practice changed.  My wife, Mary Dan, left her busy family practice and joined me in what became a huge bariatric (the treatment of obesity) practice.  We refined the original diet and wrote about our methods in Protein Power, a book that sold nearly 4 million copies.  During the never-ending promotion of the book, we met a producer who proposed that we star in a TV cooking show designed around the precepts of our diet and a cookbook we had written.   We said “Let’s do it.”  He put the deal together and set the shooting schedule for the pilot.

We walked onto the set in sunny Southern California one morning filled with both enthusiasm and apprehension.   As we wandered through the semi-organized chaos that is a film studio, stepping over giant cables, ducking under the scaffolding for the overhead cameras, and dodging production assistants darting here and there, we began to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.  The whirlwind of activity and the 30 or so people on the set were intimidating to say the least.  We had done countless live and taped television and radio interviews in the previous years, but never a project in which we were the sole actors on the stage, the ones who had to carry the entire show on our own shoulders.  A young man recognized us and directed us to the Green Room, telling us the director would be in to talk with us shortly.

The director, a total stickler for every aspect of the production, didn’t mince words when he joined us in the Green Room.  “We’re going to have to do something,” he said, “you guys are too fat to be starring in this kind of a cooking show.”

We were stunned.  I was a much lesser version of my former fat self and thought of myself as pretty slender.  Mary Dan had gained a little weight in the ten years since the publication of Protein Power, but certainly wouldn’t have been considered fat by anyone’s estimation.  People we met at lectures, book signings, and other appearances uniformly commented on how thin and healthy we looked and always added that we were good advertisements for our diet.

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t work that way on TV,” said the producer.  “If you’re the stars of a show on healthy eating, you’ve got to be thin.  Granted, you look better than the average Joes and Janes out there, but they don’t have their own health show.  TV is a youth-driven medium.  You’ve got to look young to make it on TV and young means thin, especially around the middle.  It’s like the golfer, Lee Trevino, says, the young guys are the ‘flat bellies.’  You’ve got to have a flat belly if you want to make it in this biz.  The camera is going to put 10 pounds on you and you’ve both got bellies starting out.  Imagine 10 pounds added to that.”

Bellies…?

“When you do lectures you’re dressed up, right?  You wear suits, don’t you?”

We nodded.

“At book signings you sit behind a desk, shake a few hands and sign books.  It doesn’t work that way on TV.  You’re going to be moving around, bending over, putting stuff in the oven; you’re going to be seen from all angles.  If we try to hide the fact that you’ve got a little extra weight around the middle, which will be hard since the camera will magnify it, the viewers will know.  Putting you in baggy sweaters or loose clothing will just make them think you’re fat and trying to disguise it, and the show will lose all credibility.”

In a flash, Mary Dan and I had both gone from being confident in our own 50-plus-year-old bodies to being aware of the small paunches that had suddenly seemed to materialize out of nowhere.  What before had seemed nothing more than a little tightening of the waistband now suddenly assumed Falstaffian proportions.

“What can we do?” we asked. “If we try to hide it, they’ll think were fat; if we don’t, they’ll know for sure.  It’s a Catch-22.  We can’t win.”

Our director said, “I haven’t worked in this biz for over 40 years and not learned a trick or two.  Here’s how we’re going to make this work.  Since you, Mary Dan, are going to be the main cook, we’ll keep you standing behind the counter.  You’re short enough that with the height of the counter and a little work with wardrobe we can keep you covered without appearing to do so.  Mike, we’ll have you do all the moving and bending, so you’re going to have to take the bullet.”

“Take the bullet?  What do you mean?”

He reached into his large canvas bag and pulled out what appeared to be a giant piece of black foam rubber.  “Before you go to wardrobe, let me help you put this on under your t-shirt.”The giant piece of foam rubber turned out to be a device called an abdominal censure; in other words, a giant girdle.

“I can’t wear that…” I said.

“Hey, don’t think you’re the Lone Ranger,” he replied, “why do you think I have this?  I didn’t buy it just for you.  A surprising number of the people you see on TV daily are wearing one of these.  Lift up your shirt.”

“Who?” I asked.

“I’m not going to tell anyone about you and I’m not going to tell you about anyone else.  Lift your shirt.”

I lifted my t-shirt; he wrapped the thing around my abdomen and put his knee in the middle of my back to cinch me in.  Feeling a little like the male equivalent of Scarlett O’Hara in the corset scene, I dropped my t-shirt down and looked in the mirror.  I had to admit, I looked better.

I wore the girdle and Mary Dan stayed behind the counter for the two days it took to film the pilot.  (Now we shoot two shows per day, but then we were raw beginners.)  Our show got picked up by PBS and we scheduled to start shooting about three months later.  Fortunately, the pilot was only shown to others in the industry, and now the show with me squeezed into neoprene and Mary Dan cloistered behind the counter has been relegated to the never-to-be-shown file.  What we took away from that day was the certainty that something had to be done and quickly…but what?

Not long after returning home from this experience we attended a large charity event at which we were seated at a table with several middle-aged women.  One was significantly overweight, but the others would be considered within or close to their normal weight range.  The discussion turned to weight loss.  The constant thread through the conversation was how much easier it was to lose weight overall, compared to the difficulty of losing it in the waist.  All the women bemoaned their stubborn middles.

Meanwhile, still stinging from our recent brush with abdominal truth, we had begun looking at the mid-sections of non-obese middle aged men and it quickly became clear that they all had paunches of various sizes.  It appeared that there were no (or damned few) middle-aged flat bellies out there of either gender.  Young people who were a little overweight didn’t seem to have protuberant guts; they carried their excess weight all over.  But in middle age, it went straight to the middle.  Even young people with guts don’t look the same as middle-aged people with big bellies; there is a difference, easily recognized.  We realized that our director had been right; it’s not just normal body weight, but a flat belly that is the real sign of youth, so we set out to get one, too. .  Drawing on two decades of experience in clinical practice, helping thousands of patients of all ages, we dusted off and examined every weight loss trick in our armamentarium. We did the same thing we had done years before when we did our research for Protein Power, combing the worldwide medical literature for insight and scientific substance, but instead of concentrating on weight-loss in general, we focused our search on abdominal weight loss, more specifically abdominal fat loss.  We discovered that, although spot reducing is impossible, the diameter of the mid-section can be reduced quickly with the right nutritional tools.  Fortunately, many of those tools dovetailed perfectly with those we’d used successfully over the years with patients in our clinical practice.  After a couple of weeks of intense effort, we put together a flat-belly program for ourselves that combined a reworking of our old Thin So Fast and Protein Power diets that we had used in many thousands of patients, a number of nutritional supplements we had learned about from our wide-ranging medical research in the intervening years, and a unique, but simple, abdominal exercise plan, based on the laws of physics.

We had exactly 6 weeks before our next shoot, so we launched into the program with full vigor, with the goals of avoiding the dreaded cinch and the safety of the counter.  The regimen vastly exceeded our expectations.  The greatest changes occurred in the first two weeks with smaller, but still significant, changes taking place over the course of the next 4.  We appeared for the shoot with flat bellies, much to the delight of our director.  and were able to move from refrigerator to sink to counter, showing full physique and with nary a trace of neoprene.   We no longer had to suck it in every time we changed positions for fear that the camera might catch our mid-sections at an unfavorable angle. The regimen had been a slam dunk.

It’s been a little over two years (and 26 episodes of our show) since we developed and took The 6-Week Cure ourselves, but our success has inspired countless readers, viewers, relatives, patients, friends, and friends of friends to want to know exactly how we did it.  This book provides those answers.  In it, you will discover not only what happens in middle age that drives fat into your middle body, but more importantly, what you can do, physically and nutritionally, to harness the metabolic forces at work and turn the tide.  With a little hard work over a very short stretch, you, too, can regain a more youthful silhouette. When you do, we’re sure you’ll agree with what we discovered: there’s nothing that restores youth like curing your middle-aged middle.

MD and I have been on a low-carb diet (sometimes stringently; sometimes not so stringently) for about the last 25 years, so some may take this story to be a repudiation of such diets, but it isn’t.  Our diet wasn’t really at fault; it was the inexorable creep of time that caused the problem.

As we age, things change.  What worked 25 years ago, doesn’t work exactly as well now.  Especially when we get a little sloppy with it.  One of the problems with carb restriction is that people who do it for a while, get good at it.  They become experts at both abiding by the carb restriction yet consuming a lot of calories and tending to overlook small carb indiscretions—a small piece of bread at dinner, just a bite or two of dessert, an extra glass or two of wine or beer—that they would have scrupulously avoided during the first heady days of low-carbing.  We were certainly experts on low-carb diets and we fell into those traps.   And time marched on making us even more susceptible to little indiscretions and to carb creep.

Now, we never came close to Orson Welles or Mamma Cass proportions – in fact most people would have described us a slim – but we had picked up little middle-aged middles.  So we set out to lose them.  Fast.  To do so, we relied upon our 25 years in clinical practice, pulling out every tool we had learned to help solve stubborn cases of middle- aged overweight.

As we describe in the book, the kind of fat people pack on around their middles in middle age is different than fat packed on earlier in life, which is both good news and bad.  Middle-aged fat is, by and large, visceral fat, the kind that accumulates within the abdominal wall and around the organs.  The bad news is that it is a dangerous kind of fat – the good news is that it’s relatively easy to lose.  Especially if you do it the right way.  Which is why you can make enormous strides in only six weeks even if you have a lot to lose.

Although it does contain plenty of information you’re not likely to have read before, this book isn’t intended as a giant treatise on everything known about health and weight loss.  It’s, quite simply, a primer on how to get rid of middle-aged abdominal fat fast and safely.  We solved our own problem.  I hope those of you who grab a copy and give it a try achieve the success that we did.  And I hope you give us your feedback so that we can improve future editions.

I can probably muster up the gumption to do it annually, so here is the list of the bestselling books from 2008.  These are the books that readers of this blog purchased through Amazon by clicking on the links or book icons on my blog, MD’s blog and the home page of the website.  I’ve listed only books not written by MD and/or me.

The number one bestselling book was Mistakes Were Made, which is one of the better books that I’ve read in a long, long time.  It’s now out in paperback, so if you haven’t read it, get a copy.  It explains in an easy-to-read way how the confirmation bias works and why we all need to carefully examine why we believe what we believe.  And it shows the validity of Stuart Chase’s famous quote:

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.

I’ve read a slew of books on the confirmation bias and why we believe what we believe, but, in my opinion, Mistakes Were Made is by far and away the best of them all.

Here are all the books in descending order of sales:

#1. Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (my full review)

#2. Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (my review)

#3 Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson et al (my review)

#4 The Brain Trust Program by Larry McCleary, M.D. (my review)

#5 500 Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

#6 The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick, M.D. (my review)

#7 200 Low-Carb Slow Cooker Recipes by Dana Carpender

#8 Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution by Richard Bernstein, M.D.

#9 How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman (MD’s review)

#10 The Low-Carb Baking and Dessert Cookbook by Ursula Solom

As always, I appreciate all of you who have supported this site by purchasing your books, CDs, DVDs, clothing, electronics and all the other stuff you’ve purchased through the Amazon portal on this site.

For those of you who don’t realize how this all works, you can click on one of the above links or one of the book icons on the front page of this blog or the home page of the website and you will be taken to that particular book’s page on Amazon.com.  Once there, you can search for anything Amazon has available, and if your purchase it, I get a little kickback for providing the entry portal.  It is one of the few truly win-win deals out there.  You get your book (or whatever) at the regular (usually heavily discounted) Amazon price, and I get a little dinero to help pay the web guys who keep the site updated and running.  In looking over last year’s records, I was able to pay about two thirds of my tech bills with my Amazon kickback (I hate that word, but I can’t think of a better one), so thanks very much to all those who helped.

I’m constantly telling my own family members, most of whom order a lot of stuff from Amazon, to go to Amazon through the portal on this blog instead of just logging in on amazon.com and buying away.  But it often falls on deaf ears, so maybe I’ll have a little better luck with readers here.  I know it’s a little extra hassle to pull up this blog and click on one of the books to get to Amazon than it is to simply click on Amazon directly, but if you do take the extra couple of seconds, you’ll make an old man very happy.

In the fall of 1898 Sir William Crookes (right) gave his inaugural address as the incoming president of the British Academy of Sciences.   Unlike the typical such speech, this one was prophetic and alerted the British populace for the first time to a real and growing problem.  And the populace began to worry, because Sir William was the Al Gore of his day, alerting his country (and the world) to a looming danger.

Other than prophesying disaster, however, there were a few notable differences between Sir William and Al Gore.  First and foremost, Sir William was a true scientist, not a bloated former politician with no technical training.  He was the inventor of the predecessor of the tubes later used in televisions and radios and had discovered and added thallium to the periodic table.  The second major difference is that his worries were valid.  They weren’t concocted from a gibberish of people hoping to cash in on the public’s fears of an imaginary melting of the earth, but were born of a serious concern for the continued success of the human race.  Or at the very least, the continued success of the people of Great Britain.

Sir William Crookes was deeply (and rightfully) concerned that the world would soon run out of the ability to fertilize crops, and that, as a consequence, millions would die.  At that time Britain was importing guano (the droppings of sea birds) from islands off the coast of Peru and from the nitrate fields of Chile, but those sources were finite, and Sir William realized they would at some point run out.  (He predicted sometime in 1930 as doomsday.)

To those of us today who can go to our local hardware or garden store and grab all the fertilizer we can afford to pay for, this hand wringing seems a bit melodramatic, but at the time, it was of real concern to many scientists.  The world’s population was growing rapidly, and, like today, the vast majority of the world’s population depended upon grains – mainly wheat – for sustenance.  Most grains suck nitrogen from the soil to fuel their growth, and once that nitrogen is gone, it takes a long time to get back.  And until it does, most any crop grown in nitrogen-depleted soil fails to thrive, and yield per acre falls dramatically.

The fact that nitrogen is lacking in the soil seems strange since we all walk around breathing air that is about 80 percent nitrogen.  But the nitrogen in the air can’t get into the soil in a form plants can use unless it is ‘fixed.’  Which I guess isn’t so strange when you consider that we ourselves need nitrogen to grow and repair our tissues, but we can’t get it from the air we breathe either.  We have to get it from the protein in our diets.

Nitrogen-fixation process

Bacteria that live symbiotically with the roots of certain clovers and legumes (the so-called green manure) are able to fix nitrogen from the air and covert it to the form plants can use.  Over the years farmers had figured this out and planted clovers and legumes in fields for a year or two to replace the nitrogen and make the fields fit to grow cash crops.  Or they could use manure or compost – both traditional sources of nitrogen – to replace that needed for growth, but they needed a lot because these were not particularly rich in fixed nitrogen.  Consequently, crop rotation and spreading manure/compost wasn’t a particularly efficient way of keeping a profitable farming business growing.  A more rich and readily available source of nitrogen was needed.

When enormous deposits of guano -  about 10 stories high, extremely rich in nitrogen, and taking literally centuries to accumulate – were discovered off the coast of Peru, a bustling shipping business grew up hauling the stuff from there to Britain.  As those supplies started to dwindle, explorers found fields of nitrites in Chile that began to replace the guano.  But, as Sir William observed, those sources were finite as well, and would at some point be gone.  If nothing was done or no other sources discovered by time the Chilean fields ran out, then the world would be in real trouble.

Sir William pointed out that the populations of all the great wheat-eating peoples, the Brits, the United States and Europe mainly, would outstrip their grain of choice, resulting in the deaths of thousands and perhaps even millions.  He announced in the most racist of terms (common at the time) that if a solution of this problem weren’t discovered, and discovered fairly quickly, “the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to which wheaten bread is not the staff of life.”

“It is through the laboratory,” he pontificated, “that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty.”

I don’t know what the population at large thought about Crookes’ speech, but the scientific community took it seriously.  In Germany, a Jewish scientist named Fritz Haber, after years of work, developed a desktop working model of a machine that could convert the nitrogen from the air into ammonia, which is basically the form needed for both fertilizer and gun powder.  Other scientists thought Haber’s contraption was interesting but impractical in that the temperatures and pressures required couldn’t be produced with the technology available then in any kind of industrial-sized plant.  One non-naysayer was Carl Bosch, an engineer at BASF, the giant German chemical company.  Bosch thought he could make Haber’s machine work, and after intense effort he succeeded on a giant scale. Now Haber-Bosch machines use about one percent of the earth’s resources and provide the nitrogen that sustains around 40 percent of the earth’s population.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that these machines allow us to live in a carb-dominant world, rich in wheat and corn. Had this technology never have been invented, who knows how the nutritional history of the world would have progressed.

The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager is the fascinating story of the development of the Haber-Bosch system as told through the lives of the main players.  The secrecy, the infighting, the suicides, the war-time intrigue – all provide high drama in this fascinating story.  What I found particularly interesting – not to mention germane for us today – was how Bosch, who could apparently do just about anything chemical engineering-wise, developed a method to make gasoline out of coal.  By the end of WWII, 35 percent of Germany’s gasoline and all of its gunpowder came from plants developed and built by Bosch.  Why aren’t we looking at this technology that’s already existent to help wean ourselves from foreign oil?

If a technical book is more your style, then grab a copy of Enriching the Earth by Vaclav Smil.  You will learn more about the science of ‘fixing’ nitrogen and less about the personal dramas of the main players on the stage.  I read both and found them complementary to one another.  If you read both, you will know just about everything there is to know about fertilizer and nitrogen. But if you just read one, make it The Alchemy of Air.

Below is a photograph of a Haber-Bosch plant operating in the United States today.

Fertilizer factory using the Haber-Bosch process

Let’s jump subjects and move into the world of fiction.  Mystery fiction, to be precise.  I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, and I catch up on my ever-growing stack of crime novels while on the airplane.  I enjoy all kinds of mystery fiction, but lately I’ve had a run of British police procedurals along with an Italian one and a few German ones thrown in the mix.

I just finished Peter Robinson’s All the Colors of Darkness, which I found so so.  I thought it a wee bit contrived, much more so than his previous books, which are good books to start with if you’re unfamiliar with the British police hierarchy.  The author was born and grew up in the UK, but has lived in Toronto for years. He writes with the knowledge that his readers won’t be up with all the British police jargon, so he goes easy on them.

Despite my ho hum feelings about this book, I did find a paragraph that caught my eye.  The paragraph describes a lazy, off-duty Saturday morning routine (which, after this setup, you know ain’t going to last long) followed by Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the protagonist of the series:

Banks stopped at the newsagent’s and bought The Guardian, which he thought had the best Saturday review section, then headed to the Italian café for his espresso and a chocolate croissant.  Not the healthiest of breakfasts, perhaps, but delicious.  And it wasn’t as if he had a weight problem.  Cholesterol was another matter.  His doctor had already put him on a low dose of statin, and he had decided that that took care of the problem and allowed him to eat pretty much what he wanted.  After all, he only had to be careful what he ate if he wasn’t taking the pill, surely?

I suspect the author of this series takes a statin.  From his photos he doesn’t appear to be overweight.  I would be willing to bet that he, like his character, takes a low-dose statin (what with all the statinators around, who doesn’t these days?) and probably doesn’t watch what he eats because the statin makes him feel safe.  Bad mistake, probably, but one I’m sure more than a few who feel themselves invincible on statins make. (Who would’ve thought I could dredge an anti-statin blog out of a mystery novel?)

If you want to get started reading Peter Robinson, find a few of his earlier books.  Try Gallows View or Hanging Valley or Past Reason Hated.  Any of his books are a good introduction for the US reader into the intricacies of how the UK police works.

I read recently the second novel in Susan Hill’s mystery series, The Pure in Heart, which is a much different kind of book than the Peter Robinson books.  Susan Hill is a prolific writer of note who sticks mainly to contemporary fiction with the occasional ghost story thrown in.  The detective novel is a departure from her normal course of work, but she adds her own creative touch to the genre.  If you decide to read this book, read the one before it, The Various Haunts of Men, first or you will learn something in The Pure in Heart that will give away a big part of the plot in the previous book.  As I say, these aren’t your regular mysteries, but that’s what makes them nice.

If you want a mystery that’s a series you can get into and that is quick and fun to read, have a go at any of the novels by Andrea Camilleri about Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano.  I’ve read most of these books and just finished the most recent one, August Heat.  With this series, you can start anywhere.  These novels will certainly show you the difference between the police systems in the UK and in Italy. I don’t know where I would rather be arrested, but I do know that I wouldn’t want to have been arrested in Germany in the 1930s.

If you really want to go back to pre and post WWII Germany, read the wonderful series of books by Philip Kerr about Berlin detective Bernie Gunther.  I am currently reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (I always have a long, serious book going that I dip into read a little of daily. Right now I have two: The Rise and Fall and Dawin’s On the Origin of Species.), and Kerr’s novels describe pre WWII Germany to a tee.  If you want to see what life was like for Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and others living in Germany as Hitler came to power, you’ll do no better than to read these novels.  The first three books in the series, referred to by aficionados as the Berlin Noir trilogy are March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem.  You can get all three now in one large paperback, but I would save it for last.  As far as I’m concerned, the best way to read these books is from last, to second to last, then the trilogy.  In other words, in opposite order in which they were written.  Start with the last book, A Quiet Flame, move on to the next-to-last one, The One From the Other, then finish with the trilogy.  You won’t be disappointed.

As I’m sure most of you know, I read a lot.  I’ll be happy to post from time to time about some of the books I enjoy if most everyone is game.  Let me know in the comments if you like these little book reviews.  And, please, feel free to recommend any of your own favorite books.

Thanks to ALLIED 2008 151 for the photo of the fertilizer plant

I usually try to put up a best seller list of all the books readers of this blog ordered through the Amazon links every quarter.  I just realized that I missed a quarter, so I’ll do the list for the last two quarters as one.  I love bestseller lists, so I assume everyone else does, too.  It’s nice to know what your fellow low-carb enthusiasts are reading.

These are books purchased through the Amazon links on this blog, MD’s blog, and the Protein Power website.  As always, the rules for selection are that no books authored  or co-authored by MD and/or me are included.  Only those written by others.

The number one book on the list was Crucial Conversations, a book I reviewed back in June.  This a tremendously good book that you should grab a copy of and read if you haven’t.  It’s one of those books that truly can change your life.

Here are the books in descending order of sales.

#1 Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson et al (Review)

#2 Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Review)

#3 Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (Review)

#4 The Brain Trust Program by Larry McCleary, M.D. (Review)

#5 500 Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

#6 15-Minute Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

#7 200 Low-Carb Slow Cooker Recipes by Dana Carpender

#8 The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick, M.D. (Review)

#9 Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. (Review)

#10 Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution by Richard Bernstein, M.D.

These are the books your fellow readers are reading.

I thank all of you who have purchased books, clothing, music, DVDs, household goods, sunglasses (several pairs), and even a wood chipping device through the Amazon portals on this site.  I really appreciate it.  The income from these Amazon purchases goes toward maintaining this site, which costs me about $800 per month.  The Amazon take covers about a fifth of that.

If you’ll indulge me a little, I’ll make on of those maddening pitches that fundraisers use on public TV and radio.  (MD and I actually did one of those phonathons once to raise money for Milwaukee PBS, which filmed our Low-Carb CookwoRx PBS series.  It was dreadful.  We had to be interviewed and beg for money on behalf of the station.  Not really my cup of tea.) But, here I am with hat in hand.  I don’t know if you know it or not, but if you go to Amazon through one of the links on this site (this blog, MD’s blog or the PP website) and shop for anything – not just the books linked on the blog, but anything – we get a tiny piece of the action just because you went there through our site.  It doesn’t cost you anything more, just the effort to go to this site and click one of the little book icons for our books to enter Amazon, and start shopping.  And, as I’ve said before, all I get is a list of stuff that was purchased and what my tiny cut of it is – I can’t tell who bought what.  So, if you’re contemplating a naughty book or video, don’t hesitate to purchase it through this site.  I’ll never know who you are, just what you bought. I can tell you, though, that readers of this blog are a clean minded lot.  I don’t think there has ever been an offcolor book or video purchased.  There it is.  My whinathon for help to keep this site paid for. Thanks for listening.

I’ve gone through and compiled a list of the most common questions and presented them to Gary.  Here are the questions followed by his responses.

The most commonly asked question was how do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences?

The Asian question first. I do address this in the book and I address it again in the afterward of the paperback. There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem. Ultimately we can only guess at causes using this kind of observational evidence. To know anything with certainty we’d need the kind of randomized controlled trials I yearn for in the epilogue of GCBC.

What is your opinion on leptin in the grand scheme of obesity and fat storage?

I mostly ignore leptin in the book because I think leptin is primarily a signaling molecule and so a downstream effect. In other words, leptin is secreted from the fat cells; it doesn’t regulate directly the amount of fat that accumulates. Moreover, if the primary regulator of fat storage is insulin, which it is, and leptin is secreted in proportion to the amount of fat stored, which it is, then insulin has to regulate leptin.

Where leptin may play a primary role is in the liver. A few years ago Jeff Friedman of Rockefeller University published an article in Science showing that leptin down-regulates SCD-1 in the liver (the only place they looked), which worked in turn to increase oxidation of fatty acids. This makes sense homeostatically: if leptin is released in proportion to the fat accumulated then it is a signal of how much fat we have in reserve. So long as the mitochondria in our lean tissue and organs know that we have fat in reserve, they can continue to burn it without fear of systems failure should they run out of fuel completely. Leptin resistance would then work, like insulin resistance, to make us burn less fat and store more, while the rest of the body would have to rely on carbohydrates (blood sugar) for fuel.

In general, though, I’m interested in the cause of obesity and I don’t think discussing leptin adds much. Here’s what I say about this issue in afterward of the paperback edition of GCBC:

“Another variation on the can’t-possibly-be-so-simple argument that I have heard frequently since Good Calories, Bad Calories was published is the molecular biology theme. The last fifteen years, since the discovery of the hormone leptin in 1994, has seen obesity research become a sub-discipline of molecular biology. As a result, a search of the keyword “obesity” in the National Library of Medicine database will now identify over 100,000 relevant articles in the professional journals (nearly 20,000 review articles alone), a large proportion of which focus on the fruits of molecular biology research and the science of genomics.: It’s a burgeoning field with a cast of thousands, including the role of obesity-related gene variations known technically as polymorphisms, of signaling molecules with names like adiponectin, leptin and grhelin, of the receptors for those signaling molecules and the inhibitors for those molecules and inhibitors of the inhibitors, and so on. The obvious question is how can this research be so extraordinarily fruitful, and yet mostly irrelevant to the cause of obesity? It’s hard to imagine it’s not, and so, as I’ve frequently been told, any discussion of the cause of obesity that doesn’t discuss these molecules, receptors, inhibitors, etc. must be considered amateurish and woefully inadequate. The truth must be complicated.

“Again the counter-argument seems itself simple and straightforward: if you’re hit over the head with a hammer, it will cause both pain and inflammation. The mechanisms of pain and inflammation have also yielded up a wealth of knowledge to the tools efforts of the molecular biologists. These physiological phenomena are understood to be mediated via signaling pathways and molecules (in this case, prostaglandins, tumor-necrosis factors, etc.) that emerge in response to the damage done. The more researchers learn about these responses and the molecules involved, the more complex the pathway from hammer to pain and inflammation to healing will appear. But the relevant fact to all those immediately involved is that both the pain and ensuing inflammation were caused by the hammer and perhaps the person who swung it. Everything else is downstream and may be relevant only to the question of which drugs will best deal with the pain and perhaps accelerate the healing process. “

A number of questioners asked why you think it is more difficult to lose weight the second or third time around on a low-carb diet?  And why it seems more difficult to lose on low-carb with increasing age?

I’m curious whether this is in fact true. Another possibility is that it’s more difficult to lose weight on low-carb as we get older; that the carbs effectively do chronic damage to our tissue and so the longer we’ve been overweight or obese, the harder it is to lose weight. I can imagine a scenario in which the fat tissue becomes hypersensitive to the insulin we secrete, or the pancreas becomes hypersensitive to the carbs and secretes even more insulin, or the insulin resistance in the lean tissue becomes less tractable, and so the longer we remain fat, the more our fat tissue compensates when we restrict carbs. It’s also possible that repeated low carb dieting somehow exacerbates this process, but I’d want to see definitive studies (and on all this speculation) before I believed it.

Several people asked for a comment on any important studies that you may have left out of GCBC.

The issue isn’t leaving out studies so much as not wanting to get into the he-said, she-said game of quoting particular studies that support my preconceptions. In this business, you can always find studies that support a particular hypothesis, or at least seem to if you selectively interpret the data. So when I had to make a point about the efficacy of a particular treatment — exercise, for instance, or semi-starvation diets — used meta-analyses or Cochrane Collaboration systematic reviews, which are designed to minimize author bias, to make the general points. When I discussed the saturated fat/cholesterol/heart disease hypothesis in the first few chapters, I did indeed mention virtually every study and certainly every meaningful clinical trial, because I knew if I left anything out I would be accused of cherry picking the data (which, of course, I was anyway). I did omit much of the observational epidemiology on the nature of a healthy diet because I find it meaningless and impossible to interpret correctly, in part for the reasons I discussed above about the Asian diet issue.

When I cut the book down from the initial 400,000 word unfinished draft, a lot of what was removed were indeed the counter- and counter-counter arguments. For instance, obesity researchers will argue that obesity causes hyperinsulinemia, not the other way around. That way they can still say that obesity is caused by over-eating and once we get fat, that causes insulin resistance and jacks up insulin levels. I spent, literally, months writing a lengthy section explaining how this view came about and what the evidence actually did and did not demonstrate. Then when I realized the book had to shrink dramatically, and with the benefit of sage advice from my editor, I decided that it was unnecessary to explain why the mainstream researchers would disagree with my take and then spend yet more space explaining why they were wrong to disagree. One thing I did cut from the book that I regret was a section linking gout to fructose and uric acid, and discussing the history of gout and how it’s frequency in populations and socioeconomic groups paralleled the spread of sugar. Nobody had ever made that point before and I wanted to make it, considering that people have been speculating on what aspect of diet or lifestyle causes gout back to Hippocrates. Still, my friends rightly argued that when your book is a few hundred thousand words long, you can’t afford to keep a section about gout, even if a lot of people get gout these days and, of course, they’re more likely to get it if they’re overweight or obese. Along these lines Dan Harrington asked why his gout goes away on the Atkins diet and that’s my answer: no sugar, primarily, means no fructose and so no fructose-induced hyperuricemia. In other words, fructose raises uric acid levels and gout is caused by the elevated uric acid in the blood stream.

It is true that you can find studies in the literature that seem to contradict the hypotheses in GCBC but are not mentioned in the book, When Gina Kolata reviewed my book in the NY Times, she evoked a study by Jules Hirsch and Rudy Leibel, then both at Rockefeller, suggesting that nutrient composition of the diet has no effect on weight. As I explained in a letter to the Times, the study failed to refute the carbohydrate/insulin hypothesis of weight regulation for a variety of reasons — the subjects, for instance, could have gained as much as 15 pounds a year on one particular diet composition but not another, and the study would not have detected it. And the subjects, almost exclusively, were lean middle-aged individuals. What we’re interested in here, though, is why why people predisposed to obesity get fat, and that may not be something you can study in people who have remained lean into their 40s and 50s. Would Leibel and Hirsch have obtained a different result if they had used, say, obese subjects who had first been slimmed down by some kind of diet (Atkins or a starvation diet)? These types of subjects are considered pre-obese, since they’re so highly likely to go back to being obese. And if Leibel and Hirsch had used them, they might have found that they stay relatively lean on a low carb diet and put on weight easily on a high carb diet. Anyway, rather than get into this kind of too-and-fro in the book, I made the decision not to mention these types of ambiguous studies. I would like to think that had there been a single compelling study refuting the hypothesis — or better yet, two, since you’d like to see things replicated in science — I wouldn’t have written a different book.

What you think of a Slow Burn type of exercise and low-carb dieting?  Do you still stand by your notion that exercise doesn’t help people lose weight?

I haven’t looked into the science behind slow burn exercise (although I know Mike has) but I now do it regularly (with Fred Hahn in Manhattan at Mike’s recommendation) and it seems to be helping my lower back pain immensely. I can let you know next spring whether it helps my softball game, where my ability to hit with power has been deteriorating sadly with the advancing years. What fascinates me about it is the weird confluence of the desire for self-improvement with what seems to be deep-set sadomasochistic tendencies. It’s torture when you do it, and then you look forward to going back.

As for exercise, I do not believe that it causes long-term fat loss. I think it might be helpful in a weight loss program only because it gives you a kind of positive feedback that dieting per se does not. You can feel good after a work-out, while it’s hard to feel too good after a meal that didn’t include either the calories or the carbohydrates you preferred. On the other hand, since it does make you hungry — work up an appetite — I worry whether for some or even most people the psychological benefits could be counterbalanced by the drive to consume even more calories than you might have expended during the work-out.

Are you familiar with the work of Dr. Jan Kwasniewski, and, if so, what do you think of it?

I am not.

What kind of response have you gotten from the medical/scientific community about GCBC?

In general, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been ignored. If obesity researchers have read the book, they haven’t bothered to tell me. When GCBC was published we sent out 150 copies to obesity researchers, authors of obesity task force reports, foundations that fund obesity research, everyone at NIH who funds obesity research, etc. etc. I heard back from 3 or 4 thanking me for sending them the book. Two followed up to tell me they had read it. Some later told me outright that they didn’t have the time to read a 500 page book, and particularly so when they already know what I think because of the 2002 NYT Magazine article and don’t particularly agree. That said, I may be making some progress in getting people to pay attention.

Whenever I do hear from someone who is sympathetic, I ask them to try to set up a lecture at their institution. Often I ask them to contact other researchers they might know and get me lecturers at those institutions. Through this kind of networking, I’ve been invited to lecture at some of the more influential obesity research centers and at least some of those people have taken my arguments seriously. A few months ago, I heard from some contacts at the NIH, that I might be invited down to lecture to the nutrition coordinating committee at NIH, which would be a big step forward, but the fact that I haven’t heard anything since then (August) makes me pessimistic.

When I do give these lectures a common response that I get from nutritionists and obesity researchers, and one that I find profoundly disturbing, is that they find what I say interesting but don’t see it as anything they should think about further. In other words, they have their schtick (as my wife, an almost-academic calls it); whatever research they get their funding to pursue, and even though in theory we’re all in this to cure and prevent obesity and chronic diseases, their schtick may have nothing to do with my schtick. If they’re studying, say, genetic strains of obese rats or questionnaires to improve the accuracy of diet assessment in epidemiologic studies, what does that have to do with my argument that obesity is caused by carbohydrates? So they listen politely, ask a few intelligent questions (in an ideal world) and then go back to their research, because that’s how they make a living. They don’t say to themselves, I’m going to read Taubes’s book and, if I find it compelling, switch my research over to studying the efficacy of carbohydrate restriction. And even if they did, they wouldn’t get funding to do so because they’d have no track record in that field.

So, bottom line, at the moment is that I know of a handful, maybe as many as a dozen researchers, who find the arguments in the book compelling and are doing what they can, in their limited spare time, to help get the message out and maybe get us to the place where the hypotheses are taken seriously and are rigorously tested. The rest either don’t care or don’t know GCBC even exists or just think what I say is wrong and so not worth further discussion, either because they read the book or some of it and think its crap or because they think its crap based solely on what they know about me or heard about the book and so don’t have to read it.

What’s next?  Another book?

What am I doing next? As suggested by many readers, I am going to write a short, easy-to-read version of the weight section of GCBC. It won’t be a diet book — no recipes — but it will be far more of a self-help book than GCBC. I might also do a weightier (no pun intended) serious investigation into the sugar and corn syrup industries; their history, political influence, lobbying, etc — that would be interwoven with a more intensive look at the potential health effects of sugar and HFCS and fructose particularly. The first book will definitely be done; the second depends on getting the funding to do so. I’d also like to get back to straight science writing for a while, since I do enjoy writing about good science, which is how I started my career, and it would be a pleasant change from the mainstream nutrition and health nonsense.

How about a blog?

As for a blog, I just haven’t got the time at the moment, although I always hope that that will change in the future.

Many wrote that GCBC had changed their lives.  Can you think of a book that has changed your life?

Did any books change my life? Yes, All the President’s Men, by Woodward and Bernstein. I read it in my last year of college or my first year of graduate school and it made me decide that I wanted to be an investigative reporter rather than go to business or law school, which was the direction I seemed to be headed.

What do you know about Dr. Simeon’s HCG protocol?

Mostly nothing.

What led you to the idea that saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease?

It was a progression of steps. Back in the late 90s, I was reporting a story for Science on the salt-hypertension controversy and one of the worst scientists I ever interviewed (and having written a book about cold fusion, Bad Science, I had interviewed quite a few terrible scientists) took credit not just for getting Americans to eat less salt, but getting them to eat less eggs, meat and butter, too. I literally got off the phone with this guy and called my editor at Science and said, “when I’m done writing about salt, I’m going to do a story on dietary fat. I don’t know what the story is, but if this guy was involved in any substantive way, I know there’s a story to be done.” So that’s what I did. I finished the salt story and then spent a year working on the fat story, which was published in Science.

The story made the point that there was virtually no evidence that a low-fat diet prevented heart disease, but let open a window for saturated fat having some deleterious effect. Then a couple of years later, I was reporting the New York Times Magazine story that would become “What If It’s All A Big Fat Lie?”, when I heard about these five clinical trials comparing low-fat, calorie-restricted diets to Atkins diets. Since the Atkins diet is a high-fat, high saturated fat diet and it improved cholesterol profiles in all these trials, that pretty much clinched it. I’ve been arguing since that these diet trials have to be perceived as tests of the hypothesis that saturated fat is a “bad” fat, although the medical establishment still prefers to ignore that fact.

Is there anything new or updated in the paperback version of GCBC or is it the same as the hardback?

It’s the same as the hardback, but there is a 3000 word (or thereabouts) afterward that’s worth reading.

I tried to come up with a selection of questions that represented the majority of questions asked.  I know that some went unanswered, but when Gary agreed to do this I promised him that he wouldn’t have to answer an exhaustive list that would require days of time.  So, I’m sorry if any specific question went unanswered, and I hope you understand.  Thanks to everyone for the terrific response.

Several years ago I encountered one of the most gifted communicators I’ve ever been around. To watch this guy work was truly amazing. His ability to spread oil on roiling waters and bring people with violently disparate views together was almost magical. Now I’ve found a book that shows how he did it.

MD and I were involved with some other people in a business venture that had kind of blown up and was on the ropes. Interestingly, the business was not struggling – in fact, it was making money hand over fist. Which is strange because most blowups between partners come about when there is great financial strain in the business. In this case it was just the opposite.

We had all agreed on a CEO for the business, but at some point along the way, the other people involved had a falling out with this CEO and wanted to get rid of him. MD and I, on the other hand, really liked him, thought he was doing a good job, and wanted to keep him around. Every conference call and every face-to-face meeting became a sort of angst-ridden nightmare for all concerned. Even the CEO wanted out, but was afraid that his portion of the business would be at risk if simply walked away. He had a couple of people he knew could do the job, but he (and MD and I) figured the other partners would be suspicious of anyone this CEO recommended. We were all at a stalemate, with the distrust among us all growing by the moment.

As MD and I were championing our CEO our partners were, unbeknownst to us, looking for a replacement. They found someone they thought would be acceptable. They sent us this guy’s resume, which was impressive. He had been involved in both large corporate situations and in entrepreneurial ventures that had been monumentally successful. He had recently taken a company from start up to acquisition by a major corporate entity for a healthy sum. Our partners wanted us to talk to the guy on a conference call to see if we liked him. We grudgingly agreed. Grudgingly because we weren’t thrilled to be even giving the appearance of considering someone proposed by the opposition.

We got the guy on the phone and within about 20 minutes we were ready to hire him. We hooked him up with our CEO, who felt the same way. We met the guy and found him to be even more impressive in person. We all – MD and I, the CEO and the other partners – agreed to take him on after checking all his references, which were sterling. People couldn’t say enough good things about him.

He came aboard and, thanks to his communication skills, was able to dissolve a lot of the animosity and mistrust that had become a routine part of all company interactions. It was mesmerizing to watch a pro in action.

Unfortunately, the outcome didn’t have a happy ending. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. He was stuck in big company mode (even his startup was well capitalized) and couldn’t ever get his brain around our specific business model. He ended up pulling a lot of money out of the business for himself and his team (which is the one thing I feared from the get go), and when the funds ran low, he and his team moved on to greener pastures. Sadly, his big corporate outlook and strategies didn’t really work for our bootstrap business.

I did get to witness up close and personal (and at great expense) how a great communicator works, though.

Now I’ve discovered a book titled Crucial Conversations that teaches anyone to become a great communicator.

We all have conversations all the time about all kinds of things with family, friends and co-workers. But most of these conversations are the hum drum, everyday variety of communication that makes up most of our conversations. It’s the not hum drum, everyday conversations that we need to be able to deal with to be effective communicators, however; it is those conversations when the stakes are high and emotions are running strong that separates the real communicators from the rest of us. Those conversations that have large consequences that we constantly replay in our minds, telling ourselves over and over that if only we had said this or that things would have turned out differently. Crucial Conversations teaches us how to handle these conversations on the fly.

Sometimes we initiate these crucial conversations, other times we are sucked into them unawares. And when one is imminent, we have only three choices as to how to deal with them:

• We can avoid them, i.e., run away.
• We can face them and handle them poorly.
• We can face then and handle them well.

As the authors point out, these choices seem simple enough. We can avoid these conversations and suffer the consequences or handle them poorly and suffer the consequences. Or we can handle them well. Seems like an easy choice. Let’s handle them well. But it’s not that easy. Why? Because, typically, during these conversations we’re on our worst behavior. Why? Because of the same reason that makes us do so well on low-carb diets: our Paleolithic physiology. The authors explain:

When talking turns tough, do we pause, take a deep breath, announce to our innerselves, “Uh-oh, this discussion is crucial. I’d better pay close attention” and then trot out our best behavior? Or when we’re anticipating a potentially dangerous discussion, do we step up to it rather than scamper away? Sometimes. Sometimes we boldly step up to hot topics, monitor our behavior, and offer up our best work. We mind our Ps and Qs. Sometimes we’re just flat-out good.

And then we have the rest of our lives. These are the moments when, for whatever reason, we either anticipate a crucial conversation or are in the middle of one and we’re at our absolute worst – we yell: we withdraw; we say things we later regret. When conversations matter the most – that is, when conversations move from casual to crucial – we’re generally on our worst behavior.

Why is that?

We’re designed wrong. When conversations turn from routine to crucial we’re often in trouble. That’s because emotions don’t exactly prepare us to converse effectively. Countless generations of genetic shaping drive humans to handle crucial conversations with flying fists and fleet feet, not intelligent persuasion and gentle attentiveness.

For instance, consider a typical crucial conversation. Someone says something you disagree with about a topic that matters a great deal to you and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The hairs you can handle. Unfortunately, your body does more. Two tiny organs seated neatly atop your kidneys pump adrenaline into your bloodstream. You don’t choose to do this. Your adrenal glands do it, and then you have to live with it.

And that’s not all. Your brain then diverts blood from activities it deems nonessential to high-priority tasks such as hitting and running. Unfortunately, as the large muscles of the arms and legs get more blood, the higher-level reasoning sections of your brain get less. As a result, you end up facing challenging conversations with the same equipment available to a rhesus monkey.

We’re under pressure. Let’s add another factor. Crucial conversations are frequently spontaneous. More often than not, they come out of nowhere. And since you’re caught by surprise, you’re forced to conduct an extraordinarily complex human interaction in real time – no books, no coaches, and certainly no short breaks while a team of therapists runs to your aid and pumps you full of nifty ideas.

What do you have to work with. The issue at hand, the other person, and a brain that’s preparing to fight or take flight. It’s little wonder that we often say and do things that make perfect sense in the moment, but later on seem, well, stupid.

“What was I thinking?” you wonder.

The truth is, you were real-time multitasking with a brain that was working another job. You’re lucky you didn’t suffer a stroke.

This book is a well-written, no nonsense guide through the jungle of various crucial conversations we venture or even stumble into. Some of the examples of these kinds of conversations are listed by the authors below:

• Ending a relationship
• Talking to a coworker who behaves offensively or makes suggestive comments
• Asking a friend to repay a loan
• Giving the boss feedback about his/her behavior
• Approaching a boss who is breaking his/her own safety or quality policies
• Critiquing a colleague’s work
• Asking a roommate to move out
• Resolving custody or visitation issues with an ex-spouse
• Dealing with a rebellious teen
• Talking to a team member who isn’t keeping commitments
• Discussing problems of sexual intimacy
• Confronting a loved one about a substance abuse problem
• Talking to a colleague who is hoarding information or resources
• Giving an unfavorable performance review
• Asking in-laws to quit interfering
• Talking to a co-worker about a personal hygiene problem

I’m sure you can think of (and have actually been involved in) many more than this short list. One I can think of that is probably applicable to readers of this blog: Talking to a loved one who needs it about a low-carb diet.

Both MD and I found this book enjoyable and enlightening. It uses a minimum of management-type jargon and is totally devoid of psychobabble. As you read through it you will intuitively feel that the advice the authors give is on the money. Best of all, in my opinion, at least, is that the techniques described require some work and discipline to acquire and become proficient in. (I always mistrust any book that presents X number of easy steps to master some complex skill.) In order to become a virtuoso communicator requires practice in the techniques described. Since you can’t always predict when a crucial conversation will be on you and don’t always know beforehand what’s it’s even about, you’ve got to internalize the methods so that you can use them while on autopilot. Which takes some effort.

The first step in any crucial conversation is the easiest: determine what you want the outcome to be. Being able to skillfully execute the techniques described in this book will get you to that outcome with your emotions and your relationships intact. I can’t recommend Crucial Communications highly enough.

Q1 2008 #1 best seller

While working on the next post about low-carb and calories it dawned on me that I hadn’t posted the best seller list for the first quarter of 2008. I decided to take a break from the serious stuff for a bit, go through the Amazon.com records, and whip it out.

These are books purchased by readers of this blog (and MD’s blog and the Protein Power website) through the Amazon.com links. The rules of the list are that no books authored or co-authored by MD and/or me are included. Only those written by others.

The numero uno best seller was Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, a phenomenal book that I reviewed last March and that I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it. You’ll never look at decision making (yours or anyone else’s) the same again.

Here are the books in descending order of sales.

#1 Mistakes Were Made by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (Review)

#2 The Brain Trust Program by Larry McCleary, M.D. (Review)

#3 Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes (Review)

#4 The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick, M.D. (Review)

#5 200 Low-Carb Slow Cooker Recipes by Dana Carpender

#6 15-minute Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

#7 500 Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpender

#8 The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

#9 How’s Your Drink by Eric Felton

#10 Carb Wars: Sugar is the New Fat by Judy Barnes Baker

As you look over the list you’ll notice that I’ve made an addition: I’ve linked to the reviews I’ve written on any books on the list.

I give my thanks once again to those of you who have purchased books, household goods, tools, clothing, DVDs, CDs, and even groceries through the Amazon portals on this site. I really appreciate it. The income goes towards maintaining the site. I’ve ditched most of the Google ads and other ads that used to roam throughout this blog because I found them annoying and I suspect readers did too. As a consequence, the funds from Amazon purchases play a much larger role now than in the past in underwriting the site. Please keep purchasing.

For those of you in comment Limbo, I’m slowly working my way through. I’m trying to keep current on the comments on the most recent posts (and I’m falling behind a little there), and I’m knocking off a handful of the comments that stacked up while I was on the mad-dash-to-finish-the-book hiatus. Ultimately, I’ll get to them all. Thanks for your patience.