Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious—obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth—is what makes it so alluring. But it’s misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it’s hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.

It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world—while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat—but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Gary Taubes from Why We Get Fat

While trying to catch up on my reading before piles of Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journals consume our living space, I came across a review of Donald Rumsfeld’s book, Known and Unknown.  The title of which was taken from one of his orotund responses to a reporter about the various kinds of knowledge we have.  Said he:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Mr. Rumsfeld believes the last of the above, the things we don’t know we don’t know, is the most problematic.  I disagree.  I think the first gets most people in trouble most of the time.  And this includes Rummy himself.

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.

So opined Henry Wheeler Shaw (AKA Josh Billings), who said it a lot more memorably well over a century ago in a quote often misattributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers and others.

One of the things countless people ‘know’ that just ain’t so – or at least that ‘just ain’t so’ as they think they know it – is that people get fat because they eat too much or exercise too little.  In the minds of many, it’s all a matter of calories in versus calories out.  Which is a really meaningless statement of the problem, but which leads inexorably to the conclusion that people get fat because they are either gluttonous or lazy or both.  The so-called Gluttony and Sloth model for obesity.

Why is the calories in vs calories out notion so meaningless?  If more calories come in than go out, you gain weight, and if more calories are expended than come in, you lose weight.  Seems reasonable.  It’s a bewitching notion, because it is absolutely true but at the same time absolutely meaningless.  It tells us nothing.  Let me digress to explain using a painful example from my own past.

Almost 20 years ago I singlehandedly dragged my family into the restaurant business.  I bought a franchise for a Mexican food place. (If you’re interested, you can read more about it here.) I recruited (read: dragooned) all our children to operate it, and despite all our best efforts, the venture ended in disaster.  But during the run, I spent a lot of time in the restaurant.  And one of the constant conversational threads was why it was or wasn’t busy at any given time.  We would have a Saturday afternoon during which few people came in.  As a consequence, the next Saturday we would schedule a skeleton crew, and we would be slammed.  Then someone would realize that there was a Razorback football game in Little Rock that weekend, which would explain it.  Or so we thought. Sometimes for no apparent reason we would have people swarm in.  There would be a line out the door with more showing up by the minute.  We would all be working like dogs to get everyone served, all the while saying to ourselves and to one another: What the #$&**!!# is going on? Why are we so packed?

Now imagine if during one of these rushes, one of us had said, It’s really quite simple:  we’re so crowded because there are way more people coming into the restaurant than there are people leaving.  We all would have looked at the person uttering such nonsense as if he/she were the village idiot.  But the statement is absolutely 100 percent correct.  That’s why we were so busy.  More people coming in than going out.  But it doesn’t really answer the question at hand.  What we want to know is why so many people are coming in?  A Razorback game? A big sale at the department store next door? A good review in the paper that we weren’t aware of? A bus full of people broken down outside the front door?  Why are there so many more people coming in than going out? If we could figure out the why, then we would have an easier time scheduling staff.*

It’s the same with the calories in/calories out notion.  If you’re fat, you’ve been taking in more calories than you’ve been expending.  No one would argue that.  At least no one with good sense.  But the question is, why?  Why have you been taking in more than you’ve been expending?  That’s the question you want to have answered, because only when you discover the answer can you figure out why you’re fat and what to do about it.

Gary Taubes has done the figuring and writes about it in his new book, Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It (WWGF).  As most readers of this blog know, a few years ago Gary wrote a long, detailed book on what we can call the Carbohydrate Theory of disease, titled Good Calories, Bad Calories (GCBC).  Now he has come out with what many think is a slimmed-down version of GCBC, called by some GBGC-Lite. But it’s not really a lite version of GCBC – it’s something much different.  I call it GBGC-Fat.  I would append the term ‘fat’ because it’s about fat – adipose tissue – and why so many of us struggle so mightily to rid ourselves of superfluous wads of it.

WWGF is a great primer on fat gain, fat loss and just about everything having to do with obesity.  I read GCBC three times, starting with the first manuscript version and ending with the actual book.  I’ve done the same with WWGF, so I can assure you that it is not a rewrite of GCBC, but is mainly new material presented in a much easier to assimilate way.  As many people have discovered, trying to get their doctors or other non-believers to read GBGC is a tough sell.  Few, who aren’t already converts, can summon the will to dig in to a book that large.  The new book is much less intimidating than GCBC, but just as compelling.  Even the title is better and more seductive.  Who wouldn’t want to know why we get fat?

In his efforts to ferret out why we do get fat, Gary, an obvious follower of the Samuel Johnson admonition that we more often need reminding of old truths than instruction in new ones, looks to the pre WWII scientific literature for the ‘old truths’ that are still valid. One of which is that carbohydrates fatten both livestock and people.  If you think about it, it’s difficult for the current crop of academics to intuitively grasp this notion, because they have been inculcated from the time they entered kindergarten with the ‘dietary fat is bad’ mantra.  That kind of deep-seated learning is hard to shake.  Especially so, since when today’s academics were students, their mentors, who had built their own careers (all way post WWII) on the very same mistaken notion about fat, wouldn’t likely have provided much inspiration for their young charges to change.

So, why do people get fat?  Let’s look at it as Gary does and start from the beginning.

When we talk about obesity, we’re talking about the excess accumulation of fat.  The excess fat is stored in the fat cells (adipose cells), which, collectively make up the adipose tissue.  With that as our starting point, where do we go?

If we ask how the fat gets into the fat cells, we will discover that all the pathways of fat storage were worked out years ago and are so uncontroversial that they’re described in detail in every biochemistry and physiology textbook currently in use.  It’s well known that the metabolic hormone insulin stimulates an enzyme on the surface of the fat cell that moves the fat into the cell.

So if insulin moves fat into the fat cells, it would seem that a lot of insulin would move a lot of fat into the fat cells.  And indeed it does.  Given this, the rational person trying to figure out the previous step in our progression would ask What causes a lot of insulin?  Or the rational person, should he/she have been steeped for a lifetime in the marinade of ‘fat is bad’ might ask, What about fat?  If there is a lot of fat in the blood as a result of fat in the diet, wouldn’t that fat get into the fat cell?  If so, then doesn’t dietary fat lead to fat?

A good question, but the answer is no.  Type I diabetics can have a lot of fat in their diets and in their blood, but if they have no insulin, they can’t store that fat.  In fact, most pre-diagnosis type I diabetics lose enormous amounts of weight despite eating ravenously because without insulin they can’t store the fat.  So dietary fat itself – even large amounts of it – won’t find its way into the fat cell without the help of insulin.

When you hack through the thicket of all the biochemical pathways involved in the metabolic process, you find that insulin is the primary force involved in the storage of nutrients.  Insulin is the body’s storage hormone: it puts fat in the fat cells, protein into muscle  cells and glucose into it’s storage form, glycogen.  Insulin, along with its counter-regulatory hormone glucagon (the Yin and Yang of metabolism), are involved in nutrient partitioning – the process of stashing nutrients away in different parts of the body and/or harvesting them for the body to use as energy.

If we have a lot of insulin, the insulin dominant-pathways (the storage pathways) hold sway, and fat is partitioned away in the fat cells; if insulin is low, then the glucagon-dominant pathways (the energy-release pathways) take over and start moving fat out of the fat cells, so it can be consumed by the body as fuel.  This is how it is supposed to work.  We eat.  Insulin comes out and stores away the energy.  We go for a while without eating, insulin goes down and glucagon comes out to retrieve our stored fat so we’ll have a continuous energy supply.

Problems arise when this system goes off the rails, which most commonly happens when people develop insulin resistance, a problem of disordered insulin signaling.  Insulin talks, but the cells don’t listen.  So insulin keeps talking louder until the cells finally get the message. In other words, the pancreas keeps producing insulin and the blood levels continue to rise until the cells finally get the message.  But it’s a message that has taken a lot of insulin force to deliver.

If all the different types of cells developed resistance to insulin at the same rate, we wouldn’t have as much of a problem.  But they don’t. Different cells develop insulin resistance at different rates.  Typically the first cells to become insulin resistant are the liver cells.  The liver cells are continuously producing sugar and dumping it into the blood.  Insulin shuts this process down.  If the insulin level drops to zero, as it does in type I diabetes, the liver dumps a huge load of sugar in the blood causing all the blood sugar problems associated with this disease.  Under normal circumstances, just a little insulin stops the liver cells in their tracks.  But if these cells are resistant to insulin, much more is required to get them the message to turn off the sugar spigot.

In most people, the fat cells develop insulin resistance later, which creates the problem.  If insulin levels are high to control the liver’s sugar factory output, then these elevated insulin levels are sending a strong message to the non-insulin-resistant fat cells.  The message is take this fat and store it.  High insulin not only drives fat into the fat cells, it prevents it from getting out.  Fat is packed into the fat cells and kept there.

Between meals when insulin levels would normally fall, allowing the liberation of fat to feed all the body’s tissues, insulin remains high in an effort to keep the liver in check.  Fat can’t get out of the fat cells, and the tissues begin to starve.  Even though there is plenty of stored fat, the body can’t get to it because elevated insulin is preventing its release.

Starving tissues send a message to the brain, saying ‘we’re hungry.’  The brain responds by increasing the drive to feed.  We eat, and the carbs we eat are consumed by the cells for immediate energy, and insulin stimulated by the dietary carbohydrate drives the fat into the fat cells where it is trapped with the rest of the fat already there.  The fat cell mass gets larger and larger, and we become obese.

The above scenario explains a lot.  Why can some people eat like crazy and not get fat?  Perhaps because they develop insulin resistance in their fat cells just as they do in their liver cells.  They don’t get fat, but they typically have all the other insulin-driven problems of the obese: high blood pressure, elevated triglycerides, increased risk for heart disease, etc.  And all while staying skinny.

How about morbid obesity?  Easy.  Those people don’t develop insulin resistance in their fat cells until late in the game, if ever.  They continue to push fat into the fat cells and become more and more obese until they weight 400-500 pounds or even more.  The average person will finally develop fat cell insulin resistance before the morbid obesity stage.  When this happens, weight and level of obesity stabilize and stay the same, almost irrespective of how much is eaten.

We now know why we get fat.  Excess insulin drives fat into the fat cells increasing the fat cell mass, ultimately leading to the state we call obesity. If we keep walking this progression back, the next question has to be, Why do we make too much insulin?

We make too much insulin because we eat too many carbohydrates, especially sugar and other refined carbohydrates.  With that statement, we’re starting to edge into controversial territory, but it’s only territory populated by the ignorant.  The hard science is emphatic that carbs are a pure insulin play.  Eat them and your insulin goes up.

Some people with a little learning may be quick to point out that protein drives insulin up as well.  This is true, but with a catch.  Protein drives both insulin and glucagon up, so you don’t have the pure insulin effect.  Only carbs will give you that.  With carbs, insulin goes up while glucagon goes down.  With meat and other proteins, the effects of the elevated insulin are muted by the concomitant rise in glucagon. (Glucagon isn’t called insulin’s counter-regulatory hormone for nothing.)

As Gary lays out the progression, carbs increase insulin, excess insulin drives excess fat into the fat cells, the fat cell mass grows, and we become fat.  This chain of cause and effect leads to the ineluctable conclusion that excess carbohydrate intake leads to obesity.  And each and every link forged in this chain is scientifically unimpeachable.

So if you are fat and want this progression to reverse itself, wouldn’t it make sense to reduce your carbohydrate intake?  All the science is valid.  But don’t just take my word for it. Gary writes of a former Harvard professor responsible for much of the early work in the field of the regulation of fat accumulation who summed it up like this:

Carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat.

If you put that in reverse, you should cut the carbs, reduce the insulin and lose the fat.  Seems simple, but here is where all kinds of controversy rears its head. Even the very smart Harvard professor who did the original work and uttered the above quote, when asked by Gary why there is so much obesity, responded that people didn’t exercise enough. Which also proves true what Saul Bellow wrote years ago:

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

As I’ve written numerous times in the pages of this blog, food is made of three things: fat, protein and carbohydrate.  When you decrease one, you typically increase the other.  If you cut the carbs, you’re going to increase the fat and protein in your diet.  And it’s the increased fat in particular that leads to all the controversy.

The current zeitgeist is that dietary fat, especially saturated fat, is bad.  And not just bad, but extremely bad.  So, even though they may understand that carbs drive fat storage, the ingrained fear of fat keeps many otherwise smart people from accepting the merits of the low-carbohydrate diet.  To escape the cognitive dissonance, they default to the calories in/calories out argument, which, as we’ve seen, is meaningless.  But they feel safe taking refuge in what they believe is a known known. More’s the pity since it will end up doing them about as much good as it did Rummy in the Iraq war.

Most rational people will find the above argument understandable and be able to connect the dots showing that carb intake leads to excess insulin leads to obesity.  The difficult concept for many to grasp, however, is the other problem with too much insulin: it prevents the stored fat from being accessed for energy. Normally adipose tissue acts as a reservoir of energy.  We eat, we convert the food we don’t immediately use into fat, and the body – acting via insulin – stashes it away for later.  When later comes, insulin falls, glucagon rises, and the body starts harvesting it’s stored fat to provide energy for all the cellular functions.  Then we eat, and the process starts anew.

In obese people it’s different.  They eat, they use the food for immediate energy needs and store the rest away.  In other words, they store excess energy away in their fat cells just like non-obese people do.  It’s the second part of the formula that is different.  In obese people, insulin is almost always elevated – even when they haven’t just finished a meal.  These chronically elevated insulin levels trap the fat in the fat cells, and, in fact, turn the fat pathway into the fat cell into a one-way street.  Fat can get in, but it can’t get out. If the fat does get out, the excess insulin tells the mitochondria not to burn it anyway, so it just gets sent back to the fat cells.

What does this mean for an obese person?

Let’s look back at the non-obese person to explain.  A non-obese person eats, uses the energy from the food and stores the rest.  During the time between meals and during sleep, the non-obese person draws on the stored fat to provide energy.  When the fat cell mass decreases to a certain critical point, the body signals the brain that the fat cells need a refill, so the brain initiates the hunger response.  The non-obese person eats, uses some energy for immediate needs, fills the fat cells with the rest, uses the stored energy as needed, and then the cycle repeats.

It doesn’t work that way in the obese.  Obese people eat, use the energy required for immediate needs and store the rest.  But–and this is the extremely important ‘but’– during the time between meals and during sleep, obese people can’t access their fat stores because their baseline insulin is too high.  When they can’t get to their stored fat, the lack of access to energy sets in motion all the same biochemical signals in the obese person that get sent in the non-obese, who have depleted the energy storage in their fat cells.  And these signals are converted by their brains into the drive to feed, i.e., intense hunger.  They have to eat to provide for their immediate energy needs because, thanks to chronically elevated insulin levels, they can’t get into to their own stored fat, even though it’s there waiting in massive quantities.

To use an analogy, it would be like being out of cash when you desperately needed it yet having a huge amount of money in the bank.  You hustle to an ATM machine and find your card won’t work.  It’s the same with the obese – they have plenty of energy to go without eating for months, but their fat ATM cards don’t work.  And since their fat ATM cards don’t work, the only option they have for immediate energy is to eat.

So fat people are fat not because they overeat – they overeat because they’re fat.

A real debt of gratitude is owed Gary for combing the old literature and ferreting out this notion.  As early to mid-twentieth century, researchers both in Europe and America had determined obesity is a disorder of fat accumulation, not a problem of ‘perverted appetite,’ self control, or gluttony and sloth.  Louis Newburgh, Ancel Keys, Jean Mayer and a few others were responsible for turning the herd thinking of academia in a different direction, and the ‘eat less, exercise more’ paradigm has been with us since. It’s doubtless not a coincidence that the obesity and diabetes epidemics have flourished as a consequence.  As I say, Gary deserves a lot of credit for resurrecting this old work and starting to turn opinion in the other direction.

In addition to the chapters describing and discussing the mechanisms by which we get fat, Gary has included other important material in his book.  One of my favorite chapters is the one titled “The Nature of a Healthy Diet.”  Although you wouldn’t know it from this title, the chapter fairly presents most of the arguments against low-carbohydrate diets and refutes them.  I’m sure many will find these refutations helpful in their dealings with naysayers, who seem compelled to point out non-existent problems with carb-restricted dieting.  There is one in particular that I plan to deploy at the next opportunity.  Since I have my own arguments against the rest of the anti-low-carb idiocy, it annoys me greatly that I didn’t think of this one myself.

Here is a scenario I often endure at a party or other get together after my identity as a diet book writer and low-carb expert has been revealed:

Other person, OP (typically an overweight female): I tried a low-carb diet once.

Me: (Dreading what’s sure to follow.) Oh, really.

OP: Yes, and it worked for a while, but I couldn’t stick to it.

Me: Oh, really?  Why not?

OP: Well, I felt tired and spacey headed.

Me: People sometimes experience those symptoms early on, but they usually resolve after a couple of weeks.  And there are steps you could’ve taken to prevent or minimize them.

OP: No, I don’t think so in my case.  I know my body, and I know what it’s telling me.  I’m just one of those people whose body needs carbs.  As soon as I started eating carbs again, I felt much better.

Me: (Fighting down the impulse to point out that she’s still fat…) Hmmm.  Maybe so.
Now, thanks to WWGF, I’ll know just what to say.  I’ll leave you with the relevant paragraph from the book along with my highest recommendation to grab a copy and read it.  I can promise you won’t be disappointed.

The more technical term for carbohydrate withdrawal is “keto-adaptation,” because the body is adapting to the state of ketosis that results from eating fewer than sixty or so grams of carbohydrates a day.  This reaction is why some who try carbohydrate restriction give it up quickly. (“Carbohydrate withdrawal is often interpreted as a ‘need for carbohydrate,’ ” says Westman.  “It’s like telling smokers who are trying to quit that their withdrawal symptoms are caused by a ‘need for cigarettes’ and then suggesting they go back to smoking to solve the problem.”)

* Full disclosure:  In the first draft of WWGF I read, Gary had used the crowded restaurant example to explain why the calories in/calories out explanation was so ridiculous.  It reminded me of our dismal times in the restaurant business, and I thought it was a brilliant way to demystify the problem.  In one of the later drafts I read, the restaurant example was missing.  I asked Gary about it, and he told me he and his editor had decided it wasn’t the best way to describe the situation.  I disagreed (probably because my financial wounds from the restaurant biz, though long past, were still painful) and told Gary I thought it was a terrific way to explain it and that if he didn’t use it, I would rip it off and use it as my own.  Although he has used the examples in lectures, Gary didn’t use it in the book, so, true to my word, I ripped it off as my own.

This post is going to be one of those potpourri posts that allows me to catch up on a few issues that aren’t significant enough to require a post for each one.

Lubricant

I want to start out with a funny Q & A that I can across while catching up on my The Spectator reading on one of the countless flights I’ve been on lately.  As most of you who are regular readers of this blog doubtless know, I am a huge The Spectator fan.  I love the writing, the book reviews, the movie reviews, and even the advice column.  Said column is written by a woman named Mary Killen who deals with the social conundrums of the British gentry class.  Her columns are not of the ‘Me and my uncle got in a fight after I yelled at him for crushing my cigarettes during sex. He ran off but I still love him. What can I do to get him back?’ variety that are more typical over here.  Those Mary routinely deals with are of a more genteel variety, and she typically dispenses invaluable advice as she does to the questioner below:

Q. Please can you advise on a matter that, although seemingly trivial, is causing some tension in our household. Like many families, rather than spreading butter on our toast at breakfast time, we have switched to one of the supposedly healthier alternative low-fat spreads. Our problem is by what name should we refer to this new product? My wife continues to ask if I’d please pass the butter, but as it isn’t butter, I find this irksome. If I refer to it as margarine, she is annoyed by the implication that we are using some inferior low-quality butter substitute. To request that someone passes the low-fat spread is hardly elegant. Please, Mary, can you advise on the correct terminology?

C.S., Woodbridge, Suffolk

Why not use the word ‘lubricant’? The products to which you refer are, technically, lubricants, and when you have guests they will enjoy laughing at your use of this term.

Hilarious, no?’  And a great idea.  We never, ever use margarine or its low-fat equivalent, but now I wish we did just so I could call it ‘lubricant.’  Perhaps from now on I’ll start asking: Is this butter or is it lubricant?’  The possibilities are endless. I encourage everyone to start using the term.’  Makes this schlock sound like what it really is.

New shipping policy

As many of you may know, we have a products page on our website that can be accessed from the tab at the top of this blog labeled, appropriately enough, Products.  We never intended to be in the ‘products’ business, but when our first book Protein Power came out, our clinic in Little Rock was inundated with phone calls from readers wanting to know how they could purchase the specific supplements we used with our patients.  We began providing these supplements to readers who called from all over the place.

When we moved our clinic to Boulder, Colorado in 1998, we changed our practice from a local one to a more national one since, thanks to the success of Protein Power, people began coming to us from all over.  We put up a website listing the supplements we used so that people could purchase them directly instead of having to go through our receptionist, who wasn’t always available.  We have maintained some kind of online presence since.   But we have never really sold enough product to make it worth our fooling with.   We’ve always done it kind of as a service to those people who wanted to use the very supplements we used ourselves and used with our patients.

Since we never really paid much attention to the products or how many we sold, we simply set the price at whatever the different manufacturers recommended and added whatever the shipping and handling actually was to that price.  The shipping and handling fees were pretty high, but that’s what they actually were.  We backed up and looked at the whole operation a few weeks ago and discovered we were selling more product than we thought we had been, even with the high shipping.  When we figured our costs, we decided that we could underwrite some of the shipping and still pay expenses, including paying the outfit actually doing the warehousing and shipping.

We instituted new pricing for our shipping.  It is now $5.00 on any orders from $0.01-$100.00.  $3.00 for orders between $100.01 to $200.00.  And free shipping on orders over $$200.00. As those of you who have previously purchased from our website know, this is a huge decrease in the $10-$20 it used to cost.

For those who do purchase through this site and for those who enter through Amazon.com, a heartfelt thanks.  Virtually everything we make goes back into the site in upgrades and tech work.  These two sources of income are the only ones we have for this site since I decided that all the Google ads I used to have on the site were tacky and ditched them.

Just another reason I hate the government

Again, most readers of this blog know my libertarian leanings and sentiments, so I’m against vastly more government policies than I’m for.  One that really ticks me off to the max, however, is that governments (local, state and federal) all pass laws that they themselves don’t have to obey.  If congress had to abide by the laws congress passed, there would be a whole lot fewer passed.

On October 15 I had to mail in my tax return that I had to get extended because I had’t received all the documentation I needed to complete it.  When I got my completed tax return from my accountant, I discovered that I owed an extra $48 above and beyond what I had already forked over.  I was traveling and filed my return electronically but I had to somehow pay the $48.   My accountant sent me information on how I could pay electronically, which I did.   Of course I ran afoul of one of the many rules that the government plays by that it prevents others from playing by.   I don’t know how many people know this, but when you purchase goods or services on a credit card, the merchant who accepts the credit card has to pay a fee on each transaction.  This fee is typically about 2 percent.  So, if you buy $200 of groceries on your credit card, the grocer has to pay $4.00 to the credit card company.

Some clever merchants figured out long ago that they could avoid paying this fee by simply adding it to the price for anyone who paid by credit card.  So there would be two fees for any given product: one fee for payment by cash or check and another (about 2 percent higher) for those paying with credit cards.

Can’t have that, says the government.  Laws are passed so that no one can charge more to those who purchase via credit card.  (One wonders how much lobbying the big banks, MasterCard, Visa, Discover and American Express did to get these laws passed?)  So now, if you pay by credit card, you get the same price as someone paying by cash or check.  And the merchant eats the 2 percent.

But not the government, the same government that mandates that those in the private sector can’t charge more for credit card purchases.

As you can see below from the screen shot of my payment to the IRS, they charged me a ‘convenience fee’ of $3.89 on my $48.00 tax payment, which calculates to a little over 8 percent.  Just let a merchant try to squeeze a paltry (in comparison) convenience fee of 2 percent out of a buyer, and the same government is all over them.

What’s probably worse, is that I’ll bet the government beats the credit card companies into a much lower rate than the 2 percent most merchants pay.

Blog Comments

Once again, it’s time for me to whine about the comments.  Only this time it’s not a whine, I’ve solved the problem.  I think.  I’ve started just posting the comments pretty much as they come in.  I don’t know if I’ve developed a greater readership lately or what, but each post seems to generate about 200 comments, all of which I read.  But if I had to comment on each one, it would take me vastly longer than it took to write the post.  And I’m assuming that most people would rather read new posts than plow through the comments looking for my answers to specific questions.  I’ll continue to answer a comment here or there, but don’t feel ill used if your comment isn’t one of the ones answered because I simply don’t have the time to answer them all.

I had coffee a week or so ago with Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal.  He suggested I set up the comments to auto-post as they come in, which is how he does it on his blog.  He says it makes for a better dialogue among readers because they get instant feedback.  I’m tempted to do this, but I’m afraid if I do, I won’t read all the comments myself.  They’ll just hit the blog, and I wont know what’s going on.  Plus, nasty comments and spam (of which I get plenty despite a great spam filter) could make their way in.  If my new method doesn’t work, I may give Richard’s suggestion a try.  Any folks out there have a preference?

Finally, and once again, for the zillionth time for those who haven’t read it yet, I can’t make diagnoses and recommend treatment over the internet, so please don’t ask.  Thanks.

My nightstand, real and electronic

I realized in looking through the last few posts that I’ve fallen down on listing the books I’ve been reading. I’ve been traveling a huge amount lately (in fact, I’m writing this post at 37,000 ft between Dallas and Phoenix), so I’ve cut back a bit on my reading.  I usually stack up all my magazine reading and read it on a plane so I can jettison it along the way and lighten my load.  Since I’ve been traveling as much as I have lately, I still bring the magazines, but my book reading has suffered.

I’ve been reading most of my books on the Kindle app on my iPad simply because I don’t have the room to bring books on my carry-on along with all the magazines.  I’m somewhat limited in the books I get on Kindle because I absolutely refuse to pay more than $9.99 for an electronic book.  MD thinks I’m unreasonable, but I don’t care.  That’s my cutoff.  So, if any of the books discussed below can be had on the Kindle for less than ten bucks, that’s probably how I read them.  If they’re more than that, I got a real copy of the book.  We’re talking fiction here.  When I get non-fiction books, I almost always get the real thing so I can mark them up and go to the index and page back to what I’ve already read or check footnotes – all of which are difficult to do with a Kindle.

I’ve been working my way through The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf, who graciously sent me a copy.  Since I have the hard copy and since I’ve been on the road so much, I haven’t finished it because I haven’t had it with me.  I very much like what I’ve read so far and plan to review it here when I’m finished.

I’m also reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From in fits and starts because I have it in the hardcover version as well.  Steven (who is an avid golfer) and I have been trying to figure out when we can get together and play on one another’s home course.  He’s on a brutal (scheduling-wise) book tour and I’m all over the place myself.  The book, like all his books, is excellent, and I highly recommend it.  If you haven’t read his The Ghost Map, you should.

I just finished Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22, which I loved.  It starts out with his ruminating on his own death, which is kind of creepy since he found out he has terminal esophageal cancer in the early days of  his book tour.  And I’m sure it was growing away as he wrote the very words contemplating his own demise.  (If you haven’t read of his discovery of his disease, you can read about it in his own words here.) I especially enjoyed the last chapter of the book because it describes Hitchens’ changing his mind politically as he gained more experience and wisdom with aging. His description of the creeching that burst forth from his former political cronies and allies who felt he was a traitor to their liberal causes is something to behold.  I didn’t enjoy it because of Hitchens turn from liberalism because his politics and mine certainly aren’t the same, but because his description of what he went through is pretty much the same thing long time vegans go through when they publicly renounce their religion and begin eating meat. Most of you know the tough road that Lierre Keith has been tredding.

Reading Hitchens’ book inspired me to pick up copies of Martin Amis’s Money and his father, Kingsley Amis’s book Girl, 20.  I’ve just started both and they’re both hardcover so are sitting on my nightstand while I’m all over the place.

I’m slowing picking my way through a difficult but worthwhile and enlightening book called Bureaucracy in Representative Government.  It’s an older book published in 1971 (and recently republished, I noticed when checking Amazon) when economists, in a fury of jealousy at physicists, all thought they could prove economic laws with equations.  The book is equation and math heavy, but despite that is a thought-provoking read.  The author’s thesis is that bureaucrats running big government departments (including those at the very top, i.e., secretary of agriculture, treasury and all the rest) have the same goals and aspirations as all of us.  They want to increase their income, authority and prestige.  In business, one does this by being a better business person, negotiating deals with suppliers (which I’m learning all about now that I’m in the appliance business), pricing product correctly and running a profitable operation with good growth.  If you are the head of a bureaucratic agency, you achieve these goals – more income, authority and prestige – by increasing the number of people in your agency and increasing your agency’s budget.  As a consequence, no one in a position of bureaucratic authority wants to see his/her agency diminish in size, scope or budget.  Therefore, due to human nature as applied to bureaucracies, the size will always grow, making governments at all levels larger and larger.  It’s the natural state of things.  An interesting but sobering book that, due to its complexity, probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

I read Peter Robinson’s latest book, Bad Boy, which I enjoyed much more than his last.  If you enjoy Brit detective fiction, any of Peter Robinson’s books are worth a read.  If you’ve been put off of Brit detective fiction because you have trouble understanding the British police hierarchy, try Robinson.  He grew up in England, but has spent the last 30 years in North America, so his books are much more accommodating to American readers than those of many other UK mystery authors.

Speaking of Brit authors, I just finished Quintin Jardin’s Death’s Door, a convoluted novel with a plethora of police characters that are all either married or are ex-spouses of one another.  It was okay, but it will be a while before I pick up another of his.

I recently read Long for this World, a semi-jaundiced view of the anti-aging movement and Aubrey de Grey, one of its leading proponents.  Some halfway decent science and a lot of really great insight into de Grey, who apparently consumes almost nothing but beer and constantly floats around in an alcohol-induced, semi-conscious state.  If you’re interested in the anti-aging movement, I recommend this book.  If you really want to read the best book on anti-aging I’ve ever read (and I’ve read them all), pick up a copy of Stephen Austad’s Why We Age.  It’s one of the best written and most interesting books I’ve ever read.  Pick it up and you’ll find out how Paleo man lived as long as we do.  You will then be prepared when you present the health benefits of the Paleo diet to someone and he/she responds inanely with, yes, but they all died in their 20s.

Last night I had one of those wonderful experiences that can be experienced only by book freaks such as I (plus it tells you a lot about the dullness of my everyday life that I can get worked up by something like this).  I was laying in bed at about 1 AM, wide awake reading between three different electronic books on my iPad, none of which could really hold my attention.  I was reading on The Dark Vineyard, an acclaimed mystery set in the French countryside, Billy Boyle, a mystery series that has promise, set in WWII (Billy Boyle is a Boston cop who ends up in the army and acting as a sleuth in various WWII settings), and All the Dead Voices, a mystery set in Dublin.  (BTW, Billy Boyle is free on the Kindle.) None of these were really grabbing me, and I was wanting to read the latest Michael Connolly book The Reversal, but at $14.99 it violated my never-over-ten-bucks-for-an-electronic-book rule.  I was sorely tempted, but I held off.  I was searching for all manner of mysteries and everything violated the ten-dollar rule.  As I was looking at one (can’t remember which one now), I noticed a John Lawton book down in the section in Amazon that shows what other people liked who had read the book in question.  I about broke my finger navigating to the page and found that a new John Lawton Inspector Troy novel, The Lily of the Field, was available on Kindle, and that the price was only $9.99.  My lucky night.  I downloaded that sucker and read until 3 AM when I finally forced myself to put it down and try to sleep.

(Despite my wallowing in euphoria at having found the latest Lawton book, I couldn’t help but reflect on the technology advances that had made it possible.  Here I was, propped up in bed in the middle of the night in pitch darkness (except for the glow of my iPad), my beloved wife sacked out next to me, and I was able to search the entirety of books available, select the one I wanted, and had it sent to me wirelessly, and in just a few seconds I was reading away. Couldn’t have happened just a few years ago.  Ain’t technology grand?)

If you want a great mystery series set circa WWII, you can’t do any better than John Lawton’s books.  Start with his first in the Inspector Troy series, Black Out.  You won’t be disappointed.

I can’t end this book discussion without giving you a couple more recommendations of books I’ve finished that I’ve found to be excellent.  Michael Lewis’s The Big Short provides a look at some of the people who were smart enough to make fortunes during the recent financial crash by betting against the supposed ‘smart’ guys.   They were able to see through the government obfuscation and the PR of those who ran the big investment banks and come out the other end many millions of dollars richer.   I love real life David verses Goliath stories where the small, smart people conquer the big, bluff idiots.  As always, Michael Lewis knows how to tell a tale and keep it funny and engaging.  His description at the end of the book of his lunch with John Gutfreud, Lewis’s former boss at Salomon Brothers, whom Lewis wrote about in his first giant bestseller Liar’s Poker, is alone worth the price of the book.  A brief sample:

Hard as it was for him to enjoy my company, it was harder for me not to enjoy his:  He was still tough, straight, and blunt as a butcher.  He’d helped to create a monster but he still had in him a lot of the old Wall Street, where people said things like “a man’s word is his bond.” On that Wall Street people didn’t walk out of their firms and cause trouble for their former bosses by writing a book about them.  “No,” he said, “I think we can agree about this: Your fucking book destroyed my career and made yours.”  With that, the former king of a former Wall Street lifted the plate that held his appetizer and asked, sweetly, “Would you like a deviled egg?”

The most profound book I’ve read in a long while is Washington Rules by Andrew Bacevich.  This book has answered a question I’ve been wrestling with for ages, which is why other countries that don’t have the same economic engine we do are doing so much better.  If you wonder why the vastly more socialistic Brits, Germans and French have stronger currencies than do we Americans despite their having inferior economic systems and massive government intervention, taxation and regulation, the author of this book provides the answer.  This is an unusual book in that all the people I’ve recommended it to love it.  That includes liberals, Tea Party members, true libertarians and fiscal conservatives.  I haven’t given it to any hardcore, social conservatives yet simply because I don’t really know any. (Or if I do know them, they’re keeping their views secret.) The message of the author – who is a West Point graduate and retired army colonel with 23 years service – appeals across ideological lines because it is so obviously on point.  Here is the introduction to Washington Rules, a chapter titled “The Unmaking of a Company Man,” which has been online in a number of places, gives the real flavor of the book and tells why the author wrote it.  Read it and become hooked as I was, then get the book.  You won’t regret it.

So, there you have it: lubricants, shipping, comments, our government, and books all in one post.  I’ll be back to more traditional nutritional posting next time out.

“If I had to give you a single secret ingredient that could apply to the prevention — and treatment, in many cases — of heart disease, common cancers, stroke, infectious diseases from influenza to tuberculosis, type 1 and 2 diabetes, dementia, depression, insomnia, muscle weakness, joint pain, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, and hypertension, it would be this: vitamin D.”

During the whirlwind that has been my life of late, I managed to make my way through Dr. Michael Holick’s terrific book The Vitamin D Solution from which the above quote comes.  Before I get started on my review, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve got to tell you that of all the books I’ve reviewed on this blog since its inception, this is the first and only one that I’ve been sent gratis by the publisher.  It was strange how it came about.  I learned of this book long before it was published and had pre-ordered it through Amazon.  A few weeks or so after my pre-order, I received an email from the publisher’s PR agent for this book asking if I would like a pre-publication copy for possible review.  I sure would, said I, and promptly canceled my Amazon order.

I’ve been a fan of Dr. Holick’s for years now, reading every paper he publishes, which is a considerable job given his prolific output.  I’ve corresponded with him a time or two on a few issues and he has always been very generous with his advice.  I consider him THE authority on vitamin D.  So, I was eager to dig into his book.

I wasn’t disappointed.

I figured that somewhere along the way, Dr. Holick had gotten intrigued with vitamin D, had pursued his interest and had become sort of a guru.  But in reading his book, I learned that he is much more than that.  He began studying vitamin D as a graduate student and ended up being the person who actually discovered 1,25 (OH)D, the major circulating form of vitamin D in humans.  This was back in the early 1970s, and he’s been studying vitamin D without letup since.  His book is the most up-to-date source of all the science available about this amazing nutrient.

Dr. Holick sums up the importance of vitamin D to human well being in this single sentence from early in the book:

The sun is as vital to your health and well-being as food, shelter, water and oxygen.

Which seems reasonable since every morsel of energy we consume originates with the sun.  No sun, no plants.  No plants, no animals.  No plants and animals, no us.  As Sir Karl Popper noted, we eat the sun. We evolved in the sunlight, so it makes sense that the sun offers other benefits as well food.

Dr. Holick begins his book with a fascinating comparison of a ten-year-old girl growing up somewhere along the equator to a ten-year-old girl growing up in the United States or Europe.  The former will probably never learn how to use a computer, never go to a mall, never learn to drive a car and will probably end up spending most of her life outside tilling the soil as did her parents and grandparents.  She will probably experience periods in her life of poverty and poor nutrition.  By contrast, her US or European counterpart will always have plenty to eat, will learn to shop, order pizza, operate a computer, Game Boy, Wii, and God only knows what other kinds of electronics.  She will have her doting parents slather sunscreen on her to protect her skin from birth until she’s old enough to do it herself.  She will come of age in a different world, filled with the latest in medical technology.

And she will pay for it with her health.

Her equatorial counterpart will be only half as likely to get cancer in her lifetime.  She will have an 80 percent reduction in risk of developing type I diabetes before the age of 30.  And she will live longer.  If she can avoid trauma or an untreated severe medical condition, the girl growing up in the more primitive but sunny circumstances will have an overall 7 percent greater longevity than her US/European counterpart.  She will have stronger bones, lower blood pressure, fewer cavities in her teeth, a greatly reduced risk for heart disease, type II diabetes, obesity, arthritis and most of the other diseases that will plague her more Westernized sisters.

Why the difference?  According to Dr. Holick, the equatorial girl has vastly more exposure to natural sunlight over her lifetime than does the other.

But, you might ask, why don’t the children in the US and Europe play outside more in the sunshine and reap its many benefits?  A couple of reasons.  Most of the US and Europe are too far north to get enough sun exposure to generate the production of adequate vitamin D during a large part of the year.  And, second, most parents are so fearful of sunburn that they slather their kids with sunscreen if and when they let these children play outside during the part of the year they can make adequate vitamin D.  Since a sunscreen with an SPF of only 8 reduces the synthesis of vitamin D by 95 percent, think of how little vitamin D children with sunscreens of SPF 30 or 45 are making.  Zero.

Why?

Heliophobes.

Readers of this blog know that I refer to people who have an unreasoning fear of fat as lipophobes, fat fearers.  Well, since Helios was the Greek god of the sun, I’ll call those who have an unreasoning fear of the sun heliophobes.

Why do people become heliophobes?  Same reason they become lipophobes: they refuse to think.

Just as lipophobes see a heart attack in every morsel of fat, heliophobes see skin cancer in every ray of sunshine.

To give them their due, the heliophobes have at least a smidgen of data to bolster their point of view.  Unlike the lipophobes, who have no reliable data demonstrating that saturated fat causes heart disease, the heliophobes can point convincingly at the data showing sun exposure causes problems for the skin.

Unquestionably, excess sun exposure causes premature aging of the skin and a couple of types of skin cancer.  Of this there is no doubt.  But, lack of adequate vitamin D appears to be related to an entire host of serious problems including melanoma, the most dangerous and deadly form of skin cancer.  The most common type of skin cancer from overexposure is basal cell carcinoma, which is just about the least malignant of all cancers, and if treated (by removal) results in virtually no mortality.  The same can’t be said for prostate, breast and colon cancers, all cancers thought to be sun (or, more correctly, lack of sun) related.  These cancers are much more prevalent the farther north one goes and almost non-existent at the equator.

The trade off, in my opinion, is well worth it.  Especially when it’s possible to have the best of both worlds and avoid both the premature aging, minor skin cancers AND the breast, prostate and colon cancers (not to mention multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, and the host of other disorders laid at the doorstep of too little vitamin D) by sensible sun exposure.

Dr. Holick tells you how.  He provides charts and tables telling you how much sun exposure you require for adequate vitamin D synthesis depending upon where you live in the world.  And he describes how you can make up any difference by taking vitamin D supplements.

Why not just take the supplements and forget about the sun?

Vitamin D made in the skin lasts at least twice as long in the blood as vitamin D ingested from the diet.  When you are exposed to sunlight, you make not only vitamin D but also at least five and up to ten additional photoproducts that you would never get from dietary sources or from a supplement.

Old Mother Nature is pretty parsimonious with her creations, and I suspect she wouldn’t have five to ten photoproducts circulating around if they didn’t do something good for us.  Just because we aren’t advanced enough yet to figure out what it is they do, doesn’t mean they don’t do something.  Thus Dr. Holick’s recommendation to hit the sun if at all possible instead of the supplement bottle.

Plus, there are some downsides to indiscriminately throwing back the supplements without monitoring your 25 (OH)D levels.  See here and here, for example.

One of the few criticisms I have of this exceptional book is that Dr. Holick goes way overboard in his obvious worry about the opinion of the heliophobes.  Throughout, he repeatedly warns against overexposure as if getting a little too much sun from a day at the beach could lead to one’s body becoming wrinkled and having skin cancers the size of buboes popping out all over within a week.  But we can’t be too hard on the poor Doc because the water in which he swims professionally has a high SPF indeed.  His colleagues are primarily dermatologists and Dr. Holick works hard not to gain their total opprobrium.  As cardiologist wage their misguided war against fat, dermatologist wage theirs against the sun.  And just as many cardiologists haven’t figured out that fat can be a good thing, dermatologists apparently haven’t learned of the good sunshine can do.  Or if they have learned it, they’ve chosen to ignore it to their patients’ detriment.

The dermatologists are a pretty vocal group and are constantly issuing press releases about the dangers of sun exposure.  So sun phobic are dermatologists that in their minds, the perfect place to vacation would be inside a cave.  I’m not really exaggerating – they are heliophobes of the deepest dye.  And they don’t tolerate dissent.  Ask Dr. Holick.

In 2004 I was forced to give up my position as a professor of dermatology at Boston University Medical Center, a position I had held for nearly ten years.  My stalwart support of sensible sun exposure just didn’t jibe with the views of the chair of the department.

Since this time the scientific literature has exploded with articles about the benefits of vitamin D and the widespread epidemic of vitamin D deficiency.  (I just ran a PubMed search for vitamin D and found 48,552 citations.) I wonder if this silly woman who fired him and was so pompous and cocksure now feels any sense of remorse?  Especially since she still labors in obscurity while Dr. Holick is an academic rock star.

Another point I would take issue with is Dr. Holick’s statement in the book that there is no difference between vitamin D2 and vitamin D3.  He says he’s performed studies looking at these two versions of vitamin D and found both of them to maintain vitamin D levels in the appropriate range.   Since he’s done the studies and seen the data, I don’t have any reason to disagree with him on his findings.  But, there have been a number of anecdotal reports showing that people with problems due to vitamin D deficiency seem to have better symptomatic improvement if they take vitamin D3 (the real vitamin D) than if they take equivalent doses of vitamin D2.

Since these are anecdotal reports, we can’t put absolute faith in them, but I would still recommend vitamin D3 over vitamin D2.  In these situations where one supplement is supposed to perform better than another, usually the one that allegedly performs better, costs more.  So you end up in a risk reward situation: Do I want to pay more to get a better effect or do I want to pay less and hope for adequate results?  In the vit D3 versus vit D2, we don’t have this circumstance.  Both are dirt cheap, and, if anything, vitamin D3 is less expensive.  So if they both create the same blood levels, but one engenders more anecdotally positive reports, why not go with it.  My advice is to buy vitamin D3 and avoid the D2.

One more criticism I have of the book (might as well get ‘em out early) is Dr. Holick’s aligning with the mainstream in criticizing saturated fat.  I’m sure he hasn’t looked at the literature on saturated fat, because if he had, he wouldn’t have written what he did.  But I can’t really hold that totally against him since he is, after all, a mainstream guy (in all but his defense of sunshine), and, as such, would be expected to be marinated in the mainstream biases.

Unfortunately, for a century now, the American diet has been getting higher in fat–especially in the extra-unhealthy saturated fats.  This may partly explain why skin cancer rates have gone up, as well as diabetes and heart disease.  The average American diet is about 16 percent saturated fat, whereas most qualified dieticians [sic] will tell you it should be no more than one third of that.  To make matters worse, there has been a trend toward fad weight-loss programs advocating high fat content (the Atkins diet is probably the best known of these).

Leaving aside whether these diets actually work in the long term to help people keep weight off, diets high in saturated fat may cause a variety of life-threatening health problems and probably contribute to skin cancer, not to mention all other types of cancer.  But you don’t necessarily have to go on a traditional ‘diet’ to achieve the results you’re looking for.  You just need to start moving toward foods lower in saturated fat and try to limit or evict those foods that contain excessive amounts of fat–which is typically found in processed products (which also usually contain lots of salt and sugar) and marbled meats.  There are several excellent eating plans out there that advocate eating this way.

It’s beyond the scope of this book to offer specifics on the perfect diet, but I’ll say that a healthy eating regimen calls for plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, high-quality proteins (“high-quality” meaning they are low in saturated fat but can be high in healthy monounsaturated fats, as is the case with wild salmon), and whole grains.

Jesus wept.

Fortunately, aside from a few small mentions here and there, this is about the extent of his saturated fat bashing.

For a while now, I have been worried about the long-term effects that will come about from the heliophobes and their constant sunshine bashing. (In fact, MD and I wrote a whole chapter about it in The Protein Power LifePlan back in 2000.)  But after reading The Vitamin D Solution, I’m greatly concerned.  Conscientious parents have no idea of the future damage they may be causing by never letting their children play outside without slathering them with sunscreen.  Today’s children have weaker bones are are much more prone to fracture than children of a few decades ago.  As Dr. Holick reports

Even more alarming is a new epidemic in which bone formation in children appears normal but is actually much softer than is should be.  Girls today break their arms 56 percent more often than did their peers forty years ago.  Boys break their arms 32 percent more often.

I’m sure the girls and boys of forty years ago were much more rough and tumble than the ones of today, yet the kids of today suffer more fractures.

While writing this post I got an email notifying me of a recent study showing that melanoma, a virulently malignant form of skin cancer is occurring with frighteningly high frequency in today’s teens.  These are the adolescents at the leading edge of the great heoliophobe movement, the very ones whose parents, in an effort to protect them, coated these kids liberally with sunscreen every time they walked out of doors.  Did their well-meaning parents set them up for this terrible disease?  Are the chickens coming home to roost?  It’s difficult to say for sure, but, in my opinion, it’s more than likely.  Here’s what happened.

When I was a kid, I played outside all the time.  So did all my friends.  We were outside, especially during the summer, from the time we got up until it was dark.  Since we played outside most all the time, as summer approached and the suns rays became more direct, we had already developed the base of tan from being outside all during the spring when it was difficult to get sunburned.  Our tans protected us from the effects of the sun, blocking both UVA and UVB light.

UVB rays are those that burn the skin and the ones that drive the synthesis of vitamin D.  UVA rays are those that mobilize the melanin (the pigment in the skin) and bring it to the surface.  When enough melanin comes to the surface, our skin gets darker, i.e., we develop a tan.  The tan then protects us from the harmful effects of the sun, allowing us to stay out all day without getting a sunburn and without getting too much UVA, which is important since excess UVA exposure is thought to be the cause of melanoma.

Although many sunscreens available today claim to block both UVB and UVA, when today’s teens were young children, virtually all of the sunscreens on the market then blocked UVB only.  Which is probably the root cause of the increase in melanoma in adolescents today.  Here’s what happens.

People who don’t use sunscreens and who have good sense get out of the sun when they begin to burn.  Avoiding the sun limits the exposure to both UVB, the burning rays, and UVA, the melanoma-stimulating rays.  When people slather on sunscreen that blocks UVB only, they can then stay out in the sun for a long time without burning.  The price they pay for this is that they end up with an extremely large dose of UVA, which doesn’t cause pain but sows the seeds for later melanoma development, a fate that has in the past befallen many a vacationer to the sunny areas of the world.

Many people labor away in offices for 50 weeks of the year then escape for a couple of weeks of fun in the sun.  Since they have limited time, they don’t want to spend it with graduated sun exposure while they develop a tan.  They pile on the sunscreen in copious amounts, hit the beach and stay out all day, stopping only long enough to put on more sunscreen.  During this process, they accumulate the effects of huge exposure to UVA and often pay the price years later by developing melanoma.  Those hardy folk who work outdoors all year long and have constant sun exposure almost never develop melanoma.  Why?  Because they develop a tan that blocks the UVA.  Plus, thanks to their constant sun exposure, they receive the benefit of plenty of vitamin D synthesis, which has been shown to be protective against melanoma.  The poor schmucks on vacation who broil in the sun while basting themselves with sunscreen get way too much UVA and don’t get any vitamin D because sunscreen blocks virtually all of the vitamin D synthesizing rays.  They are the victims of a true double whammy.

And that is what I suspect is driving the increase in melanoma in teens today: their poor misguided parents attempting to do the right thing.  Very sad, indeed.

Along with the increase in melanoma, the huge epidemic of fibromyalgia we are seeing today is in great measure a consequence of vitamin D deficiency.  Without enough vitamin D, bone doesn’t harden as it should.  It grows, but is softer and mushier and less supportive than it should be.  The body continues to make more bone to try to remedy the problem and the bones actually enlarge.  This enlargement presses against the periosteum, the fibrous sheath that surrounds the bone and through which the nerves run.  As the pulpy bony growth presses against the periosteum, it stimulates the nerves in the periosteum and causes the deep bone pain common to sufferers of fibromyalgia.  Doctors who are up to date on their vitamin D knowledge will press the breastbone to try to elicit pain.  And if they do, their patient is probably suffering from a vitamin D deficiency.  If that’s what the blood test shows, then the fibromyalgia can be treated with a course of sunshine and/or vitamin D supplementation.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading The Vitamin D Solution on a plane, and the guy sitting across the aisle from me was reading Predictably Irrational, which I had read and enjoyed a while back.  I kept looking to see where he was in his book, and he kept glancing at mine.  After we had landed and were taxiing in, he asked me if I had ever known anyone who had responded medically to vitamin D.  He then told me that he had been experiencing severe, debilitating pains in the bones in his chest, back and legs.  He went to his doctor, who checked his vitamin D levels, found them way low, and started my new friend on a course of vitamin D supplements, which, in due course, had gotten rid of his problem.  He was a pretty tan guy, so I asked him about his sun exposure and wondered why he would be vitamin D deficient.  He then told me he was a kidney transplant patient, which explained everything.  As you will learn when you read Dr. Holick’s book, the kidney converts the inactive form of vitamin D circulating in the blood to the active form.  This gentleman’s transplanted kidney obviously wasn’t doing it for him.  Vitamin D supplements did the trick, however, and his pains had vanished.

The subject matter I’ve covered in this post barely scratches the surface of what’s there in Dr. Holick’s new book.  I heartily recommend it to all.

Before I sign off here, though, I want to relate a funny story.  Funny to me at least.  It involves a character who was a running dog of mine back when I was in medical school.  Any of you who read The Protein Power LifePlan already met this guy in another humorous adventure of his I related in the section on iron overload.  He’s the guy who dated the pig lady.

This guy was, in Billy Bob Thornton’s memorable words to Woody Harrelson in the movie Indecent Proposal, a “real poon hound.”  This guy would relentlessly go after anything with a skirt.  And, as often happens with those types, he came down with a bad case of herpes.  As soon as he got his diagnosis he went into a depression for about a week and then began reading everything he could read on herpes.  He discovered that herpes was typically a local infection but that in some patients (mainly immunocompromised ones) herpes could go systemic, which means it could spread through the bloodstream and and create a hellish infection everywhere, often with fatal consequences.  His affliction was never far from his mind, which led to the tale that follows.

In those days Zovirax hadn’t been developed, so the only remedies for this loathsome disorder were OTC products that didn’t really work.  At that time the main OTC med was Stoxil, which my friend purchased by the car-load lot and coated himself (or at least his infected parts) with at the least sign of an outbreak.

One day he came down with some kind of upper respiratory infection and called me to get something for it.  He was prone to these infections, which responded well to minocycline, a tetracycline-derivative drug.  I called him in a course of the drug and forgot about it.

Unbeknownst to me, my friend was planning a day at the lake with his latest inamorata.   Complexion-wise, he was lily white and usually avoided the sun.  A day at the lake was not his typical recreation, so I can be excused from not telling him not to go out in the sun; it would have never occurred to me that he might do so. The sun can be a problem because tetracycline drugs have a propensity to give people who take them a photosensitivity reaction when they get too much exposure.  These photosensitivity reactions cause the skin to swell and become discolored and blistered.

My friend took his meds as prescribed, had a great day at the lake, came home with the girl and hit the sack.  After he had been asleep for a few hours, he woke up needing to relieve himself.  On his walk to the toilet, he passed the bathroom mirror and glanced at the mirror wherein he saw the Elephant Man staring back at him.  His face red, blistered and swollen, eyes just slits.  He had obviously had a bad photosensitivity reaction (obviously that is to those who knew about such things) after his day in the sun while on minocycline.  But he didn’t know this.  He flew into a blind panic because the first thing that sprang to his mind was that his herpes was swarming on him: that he had developed systemic herpes.  He immediately grabbed the Stoxil and practically bathed in it.  Then he put in an emergency call to his dermatologist, whom, I’m sure, found it strange since dermatologists rarely — if ever — get emergency calls.

When he told me about it later in the day, I burst out laughing and have laughed about it any time I thought of it up to this moment.  In fact, I’m having trouble typing these words because I’m still laughing so hard remembering.  Who says doctors are humorless?  My friend even laughed about it later, though admittedly not to the same degree I did.  What I found so funny was not his condition but the fact that he was so obsessed with his herpes that the first thought that jumped to his mind was that his disfigurement was his herpes going wild.  Maybe you just had to be there.

Don’t let my semi-off-topic detour make you forget about picking up a copy of Dr. Holick’s book.  Despite my few minor criticisms, it is an excellent book that provides a wealth of useful information.  Just the Q&A is worth the price of the book because in that section Dr. Holick answers all the questions anyone might think of about vitamin D, including the one I’ve been asked numerous times: If you shower after sunbathing, does it wash away the vitamin D.  The answer is No.  Then he explains why.

There is something for everyone in this book, from studies showing sun bathing works as well (if not better) than medications for lowering blood pressure to discussions of vitamin D and its effects on obesity and leptin secretion.  It doesn’t matter if you’re depressed, have multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, osteoporosis or even PMS, you can learn how vitamin D will help you out. Grab a copy and start reading.

Since the last time I posted (which, admittedly, was a while ago), I’ve flown about 8 billion miles, so I’ve had plenty of time to read while in the air.  Here is a list of the books  on my nightstand right now.

Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells.  I’m about a forth of the way through this book describing the problems we hunting/gathering humans have had in adapting to agriculture.  So far, so good.  A couple of medical missteps already, but nothing major.  But I haven’t gotten to the real meat of the part on disease, so I’ll reserve my judgment until then.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely.  This is the follow up book to Predictably Irrational, which I posted about earlier.  While the first book explained how predictably irrational we humans really are, this second one teaches us how to benefit from it.

Manthropology by Peter McAllister.  A fun book written by an Australian anthropologist discussing what wimps modern men (and women) are compared to their Paleo ancestors.  According to McAllister, today’s elite athletes would have trouble competing with our ancient predecessors in any events requiring speed or strength.  Unfortunately this book won’t be available in a US edition until Oct 2010.  If you want it before then, you can get it on Amazon, but you’ll have to pay through the nose for it like I did. I couldn’t resist the title.

The First Cut, Cut to the Quick, and The Deepest Cut all by Dianne Emley.  The careful reader can probably detect a theme in these books, which are are police procedural mystery novels set in Pasadena, CA.  The protagonist, Nan Vining, is a single mom and has recovered from a near death experience after having been stabbed in the throat while on duty.  These have been my escapist books over the past couple of weeks.  I’m running out of mysteries to read because it seems that I have read everything written by US and UK (and even Australian) authors.  Help!  Any and all suggestions will be appreciated.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Goldstein.  A literary novel if there ever were one.  Probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed it immensely.  It has so many moving parts that it’s hard to describe.  Read the Amazon review if you’re interested.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridly .  I was curious to see how Matt Ridly, an excellent science writer, would approach a more soft science than usual.  His thesis is that collective human intelligence will save us from the fates all the Erhlich’s and Malthusians fear await us.

Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information by Vlatko Vedral. Another book that is no doubt not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m a physics/quantum mechanics geek so I enjoy this kind of book.  It explores the idea that information is the basic element making up the universe.

Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan.  Dr. Fagan is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a fellow member of the Santa Barbara Yacht Club. This book, his latest, explores the time that Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals co-existed in Europe and how the superior intellect of the former allowed them to survive the Ice Age.  Until I read this book, it hadn’t occurred to me that the Cro-Magnons, who were identical to us genetically, roamed Europe for about 30,000 years, a length of time vastly longer than all of recorded history.  And yet it seems we know less about them than we do most of the other primitive beings.

It’s time for the 2009 bestseller list.  These are books purchased last year through this website from readers either going through the Amazon portals on the page (more about which later) or clicking on Amazon links appearing in many of the posts when books are mentioned. As always, these are all the books purchased that are not books MD and I wrote or co-wrote.

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.

A quick post just to let everyone know that I’m still among the living and that I haven’t given up posting for good.

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.

I have to confess.  I lied to you.  I said the next post would be part II of the Meat Eater or Vegetarian series and here I am sticking another one in in between.  But I at least have a good reason for this interloper post: it is time sensitive.

Due to other commitments tomorrow and Monday (see below for the Monday commitment) I more than likely won’t be able to get the promised post up before Tuesday.  I was working away on it this afternoon (actually alternating between writing the post and dealing with comments) when my bride came in and whined for me to go to a movie I didn’t really want to see.  But, being the dutiful and obliging spouse that I am, I went.  And I was glad I did.

MD just finished the book Julie & Julia and was hot to see the movie.  I hadn’t read the book, and don’t plan on it, so I was lukewarm at best on the idea.  But I’m glad I relented because the movie is one of the best I’ve seen in a long while.  MD and I related to it on a number of levels.  We written books and have been through all the publisher snafus that Julia experienced.  We know what it’s like to have a cooking show.  And we’ve been through the blogging experience.  But, unlike the heroine of the blog and book, we’ve actually met Julia.

In the summer of 2000, a couple of friends of ours who own Al Forno, a famous restaurant in Providence, RI, arranged for MD and me to be a part of a huge fundraiser for the Providence Public Library.  It got worked out in such a way that MD and I attended as – get this – celebrity chefs.  Chefs? I still don’t know how it happened because our cooking show hadn’t even been conceived of at that time and we had just published The Protein Power LifePlan a few months earlier.  But there we were as celebrity chefs with – get this, too – Emeril Lagasse, Jacques Pepin, and Julia Child.  And, as they say, that’s not all.  We were there with Billy Joel as well.  Yep, Billie, Emeril, Jacques, Julia, MD and me – the celebs brought out to raise money for the Providence Public Library.  It was kind of surreal.

When I was introduced to Julia, I told her I was delighted to meet her and that my wife and I lived in her home town.  I knew she lived in Santa Barbara, and MD and I had been living there for about a year at the time – if you could call it living there.  We actually lived primarily in Incline Village, Nevada and Santa Fe, New Mexico, but we did spent a fair amount of time in Santa Barbara, where we lived aboard a sailboat in the marina when we were in town.  So, I was more or less honest when I said we lived in Santa Barbara.

Julia Child was a big woman.  And I don’t mean fat, I mean big.  She’s well over six feet tall and is imposing even stooped a bit as she was then at age almost 90.  As we shook hands she replied to my remark about living in her home town in her wonderful, warble-y, quivery voice, “Which home town? Santa Barbara or Cambridge, Massachusetts?”  And she moved when she spoke just as Meryl Streep portrays her in the movie.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realize she lived anywhere but Santa Barbara, but it just so happened that MD and I had just purchased a condo in Cambridge a few months before.  Our eldest son, wife and first grandchild were moving to the Boston area for a year while our son clerked with a federal judge.  We bought the condo and they rented it from us.  So, I answered her that we lived both places.  Which, of course, was a stretch since we lived part time on a boat in one and owned a rental condo in the other, but, hey, I was among real celebrities so I had to act the part.

In the years between that first meeting and her death, we saw her a dozen or so times around Santa Barbara.  She frequented a lot of the same restaurants we did and was a regular at the farmer’s market.  But other than the time we chatted a bit at the Providence Library shindig, neither MD nor I ever spoke with her again.  We would say hello if we passed one another, but that’s it.  I’m sure she didn’t have a clue we had met before.  Having had the interaction with her that we did, made the movie a little more poignant for us.  I now wish we had made the effort to get to know her while we had the chance.

Julia had to deal with her publisher and with promoting her various books.  And we do too.  One of the things authors agree to when they sign a publishing contract is to make themselves available for various publicity events.  MD and I have done the book tour routine (which is miserable), appeared on countless TV shows and radio shows, and shown up for innumerable book signings.   None of these PR events are particularly fun, but the most loathsome PR event of all takes place this coming Monday.  It is the dreaded radio satellite tour.

There is a certain type of PR agent that books these kinds of things, which involve scheduling numerous radio shows one right after the other with military precision.  The shows start on drive time radio on the East Coast and move west with the sun.

We will start at 6:50 AM Eastern, which is 3:50 AM our time, and be on the radio pretty much non-stop throughout the day.  A number of you have asked in the comments if we are going to be appearing anywhere.  Right now, this is all that is scheduled.  I’ve posted the schedule below so that if we’re on a station in your neck of the woods, you’ll be able to listen should you chose to.

It will be a grueling day for us, but somehow we’ll manage to keep our good cheer through it all.  A thousand cups of coffee will help.  Hope you get to listen in to part of it.

Is the body in the photo at left the new look for today’s man?  If so, it appears that MD and I may have missed the boat yet again.

It seems as though we possess a positive genius for having our timing screwed up.  Our past is littered with missed opportunities to promote our various books, all occasioned by situations beyond our control.  Let me give you a few examples.

We were scheduled to be the guests for the biggest part of one of Soledad O’Brien’s shows when word came down that Hillary Clinton was going to declare her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.  We were in NY (brought by our publisher, thank God) prepared to go on the show the next day when we got bumped to another time.  Another time that never materialized.

I was scheduled to be on O’Reilly live and, in fact, was in the limo sent by Fox to take me to the studio when I got a call on my cell telling me that the Texas fugitives had been captured in Colorado.  Since I was on the way, O’Reilly went ahead and did the interview, but it was taped and played a couple of months later when John Kasich (who is now apparently running for governor of Ohio) was the guest host and viewership was probably lower than had it been O’Reilly live.

MD and I were on our way to Miami (sent by our publisher once again) to appear on a couple of big live TV shows there when we got word that Elian Gonzales had been snatched by the Feds and was being sent back to Cuba.  Bumped again never to return.

We were to appear one afternoon on national TV rebutting the PCRM’s Neal Barnard, who had been all over the airwaves that morning with his ridiculous ‘study’ about low-carb diets.  We were in Santa Barbara at the time, and the network (I can’t remember which on now) had arranged for us to go to a local studio to be interviewed via satellite.  Just as we were about to leave for the studio, we got a call telling us our gig had been canceled because Michael Jackson’s plane was en route to the Santa Barbara airport where he was to turn himself in conjunction with the sexual molestation charges.  After that the news was all Michael Jackson.

I could go on, but you get the picture.  MD and I seem to be snake bit when it comes to book- and/or self-promotional timing.

Now we’ve finished a book, about to be released tomorrow, that is filled with all the latest science, much of it never before published other than in scientific papers, and we may be scooped again.  But in a different way.

Our new book includes info on saturated fat, fatty accumulation in the liver, diacylglycerol, D-ribose, L-leucine, visceral and subcutaneous fat, sagittal abdominal diameter, evolutionary psychology, and on and on, showing how all these things relate to the accumulation and loss of middle-aged fat.  But did we come out with it too late?

Maybe so according to a recent New York Times article titled “It’s Hip to Be Round” with the distressing picture below of various potbellies emblazoned across the top of it.

If this piece is to be believed, men at least have given up the flat-belly look in favor of the more portly Ralph Kramden body habitus.  If you’re of an age, you’ll remember Ralph Kramdem.  He was the character Jackie Gleason played on the television show The Honeymooners.  Taking a look at the photo at left.  That’s Jackie playing Ralph.  Remember Jackie Gleason’s nickname?  The Fat Man.  He was remarkable for his obesity because there was so little of it back then.  Notice, too, how Jackie, aka Ralph, wouldn’t have merited a second look today.  Half the people you see on TV today are more overweight.  And you think we don’t have an obesity epidemic?

According to the Times:

This summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.

In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.

Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately…

The article goes on to lay out what I believe is an idiotic rationale (but obviously tongue in cheek) for all this (they blame it on Obama),  then adds

“I sort of think the six-pack abs obsession got so prissy it stopped being masculine,” is how Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out, explains the emergence of the Ralph Kramden. What once seemed young and hot, for gay and straight men alike, now seems passé. Like manscaping, spray-on tans and other metrosexual affectations, having a belly one can bounce quarters off suggests that you may have too much time on your hands.

“It’s not cool to be seen spending so much time fussing around about your body,” Mr. Hicklin said.

And so guys can happily and guiltlessly go to seed.

So, there goes half our audience.  Always a day late and a dollar short.  I suppose we should have written a book describing how to develop the middle-aged middle before middle age.

On another note, if you still don’t think there is an obesity epidemic right now, take a look at this old video of Manhattan, NY filmed in the early 1920s.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check at 1:50 and 9:16 to see the crowd scenes.  The people look like stick people.  They wouldn’t look that way if the film were made today.

And, if you want to read a little more about our new book, Tim Ferriss has excerpted part of one of the chapters here.

Last but not least, we’ve gotten some photos back of the first testimonials for our news book.  The photo on the right is the before, the one on the left, after six weeks on the plan.

Just kidding, of course.

Photo credits:

Troisdorf man

Large belly

Thin waist

Before I get into a discussion of the absolutely phenomenal book you see pictured at the right, I’ve got a few disclosures to make.  First, I’m not much of a believer in the notion of man-made global warming or climate change (as they now call it since temperatures have been constantly falling instead of rising).  I’m a denier, in the pejorative term used by those who are believers.

Second, I’m not particularly pro-feminist.  And I certainly don’t hang around with any self-proclaimed radical feminists.  I have a wife who is smarter than I am, who is more talented than I am, and who, pound for pound, is probably a better athlete than I am, and I’m not bad. (In my defense, I can read much, much faster than she, but, she has better comprehension.) I long ago gave up the idea (if I ever really considered it seriously) that men are superior to women in any ways other than brute strength.  Having said that, however, I do believe that men are better suited to certain endeavors than woman and vice verse, but that doesn’t mean either men or women should be denied the opportunity to give whatever it is they want to do a whirl just because of their sex.  I guess I consider myself an egalitarian.  But from what I’ve seen of radical feminists, I’m not sure that I would count myself a big fan.

Given the above, you wouldn’t think I would enjoy and recommend a book written by a self-proclaimed radical feminist who is obviously a believer in global warming and the impending end of the earth as we know it.  I wouldn’t think so, either. Not my cup of tea even when it is sort of preaching to the choir.

But I can tell you that Lierre Keith’s book is beyond fantastic.  It is easily the best book I’ve read since Mistakes Were Made, maybe even better.  Everyone should read this book, vegetarian and non-vegetarian alike.  If you’re a radical feminist, you should read this book; if you’re a male chauvinist, you should read this book; if you have children, especially female children, you should read this book; if you are a young woman (or man) you should read this book; if you love animals, you should read this book; if you hate vegetarians, you should read this book; if you are contemplating the vegetarian way of life, you should definitely read this book; if you have a vegetarian friend or family member, you should this book and so should your friend.  As MD said after she read it, “everyone who eats should read this book.”

Anyone who has ever read a book on writing has come across the hackneyed piece of advice to cut open a vein and bleed on the page.  Lierre Keith, the author of this book, has come closer to literally doing that than almost any writer I’ve ever read.  Not only does her passion for her subject bleed through in almost every sentence, she is a superb lyrical prose stylist.  My book is dog eared, underlined and annotated from front to back – I can’t remember anything I’ve read that has contained so many terrific lines.

In fact The Vegetarian Myth is filled with so many good quotes (most by the author but some from other authors) that I was reminded of the old joke about the redneck who went to see a performance of Hamlet.  When the show let out, someone asked him what he thought of it.  Replied he:  It wasn’t nothin’ but a whole bunch of quotes all strung together.  As you’ll see when I ‘quote’ them below, The Vegetarian Myth contains quotable lines and paragraphs at about the same rate Hamlet does.

Ms. Keith was a practicing vegetarian (vegan) for twenty years, driven by her passion for kindness and justice for all creatures.  She couldn’t bear the thought of even killing a garden slug, or, for that matter, even removing a garden slug from her garden to a place where something or someone else might kill it.  Her years of compassionate avoidance of any foods of animal origin cost her her health.  Her story of coming to grips with the realization that whatever she ate came as a consequence of some living being’s having to die form the matrix onto which her narrative hangs.

You can read the first 14 manuscript pages of the book on the author’s website.  I have quoted from these 14 pages liberally below.

The introduction to The Vegetarian Myth explores Ms. Keith’s rationale for writing such a book, a book that, given her years of walking the vegetarian walk, must have been incredibly difficult to write.  She says as much with her first sentence.

She ponders the idea of factory farming, which she loathes, and the misbegotten idea that most people hold (not most readers of this blog, but most of the people in the world) that grains are good, not only for people, but for many animals as well.  And the common misconception that agriculture, the growing of annual grains and plants, is a wonderful, kind, sustainable activity.

This misunderstanding is born of ignorance, an ignorance that runs the length and breadth of the vegetarian myth, through the nature of agriculture and ending in the nature of life. We are urban industrialists, and we don’t know the origins of our food. This includes vegetarians, despite their claims to the truth. It included me, too, for twenty years. Anyone who ate meat was in denial; only I had faced the facts. Certainly, most people who consume factory-farmed meat have never asked what died and how it died. But frankly, neither have most vegetarians.

The truth is that agriculture is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems. The truth is also that life isn’t possible without death, that no matter what you eat, someone has to die to feed you.

I want a full accounting, an accounting that goes way beyond what’s dead on your plate. I’m asking about everything that died in the process, everything that was killed to get that food onto your plate. That’s the more radical question, and it’s the only question that will produce the truth. How many rivers were dammed and drained, how many prairies plowed and forests pulled down, how much topsoil turned to dust and blown into ghosts? I want to know about all the species—not just the individuals, but the entire species—the chinook, the bison, the grasshopper sparrows, the grey wolves. And I want more than just the number of dead and gone. I want them back.

After she had seen the error of her ways as a vegan and had been eating meat for two years, for reasons unknown to her, the author continued to surf the same vegan websites and message boards she had for years.  Until she read one post that was so bizarre that she finally realized the large intellectual gap that had widened between her rationale thinking and the cult like thinking of, well, a cult.  It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

But one post marked a turning point. A vegan flushed out his idea to keep animals from being killed—not by humans, but by other animals. Someone should build a fence down the middle of the Serengeti, and divide the predators from the prey. Killing is wrong and no animals should ever have to die, so the big cats and wild canines would go on one side, while the wildebeests and zebras would live on the other. He knew the carnivores would be okay because they didn’t need to be carnivores. That was a lie the meat industry told. He’d seen his dog eat grass: therefore, dogs could live on grass.

No one objected. In fact, others chimed in. My cat eats grass, too, one woman added, all enthusiasm. So does mine! someone else posted. Everyone agreed that fencing was the solution to animal death.

Note well that the site for this liberatory project was Africa. No one mentioned the North American prairie, where carnivores and ruminants alike have been extirpated for the  annual grains that vegetarians embrace. But I’ll return to that in Chapter 3.

I knew enough to know that this was insane. But no one else on the message board could see anything wrong with the scheme. So, on the theory that many readers lack the knowledge to judge this plan, I’m going to walk you through this.

Carnivores cannot survive on cellulose. They may on occasion eat grass, but they use it medicinally, usually as a purgative to clear their digestive tracts of parasites. Ruminants, on the other hand, have evolved to eat grass. They have a rumen (hence, ruminant), the first in a series of multiple stomachs that acts as a fermentative vat. What’s actually happening inside a cow or a zebra is that bacteria eat the grass, and the animals eat the bacteria.

Lions and hyenas and humans don’t have a ruminant’s digestive system. Literally from our teeth to our rectums we are designed for meat. We have no mechanism to digest cellulose.

So on the carnivore side of the fence, starvation will take every animal. Some will last longer than others, and those some will end their days as cannibals. The scavengers will have a Fat Tuesday party, but when the bones are picked clean, they’ll starve as well. The graveyard won’t end there. Without grazers to eat the grass, the land will eventually turn to desert.

Why? Because without grazers to literally level the playing field, the perennial plants mature, and shade out the basal growth point at the plant’s base. In a brittle environment like the Serengeti, decay is mostly physical (weathering) and chemical (oxidative), not bacterial and biological as in a moist environment. In fact, the ruminants take over most of the biological functions of soil by digesting the cellulose and returning the nutrients, once again available, in the form of urine and feces.

But without ruminants, the plant matter will pile up, reducing growth, and begin killing the plants. The bare earth is now exposed to wind, sun, and rain, the minerals leech away, and the soil structure is destroyed. In our attempt to save animals, we’ve killed everything.

On the ruminant side of the fence, the wildebeests and friends will reproduce as effectively as ever. But without the check of predators, there will quickly be more grazers than grass. The animals will outstrip their food source, eat the plants down to the ground, and then starve to death, leaving behind a seriously degraded landscape.

The lesson here is obvious, though it is profound enough to inspire a religion: we need to be eaten as much as we need to eat. The grazers need their daily cellulose, but the grass also needs the animals. It needs the manure, with its nitrogen, minerals, and bacteria; it needs the mechanical check of grazing activity; and it needs the resources stored in animal bodies and freed up by degraders when animals die.

The grass and the grazers need each other as much as predators and prey. These are not one-way relationships, not arrangements of dominance and subordination. We aren’t exploiting each other by eating. We are only taking turns.

That was my last visit to the vegan message boards. I realized then that people so deeply ignorant of the nature of life, with its mineral cycle and carbon trade, its balance points around an ancient circle of producers, consumers, and degraders, weren’t going to be able to guide me or, indeed, make any useful decisions about sustainable human culture. By turning from adult knowledge, the knowledge that death is embedded in every creature’s sustenance, from bacteria to grizzly bears, they would never be able to feed the emotional and spiritual hunger that ached in me from accepting that knowledge. Maybe in the end this book is an attempt to soothe that ache myself.

How anyone who can read these 14 pages and not purchase and read this book is beyond me.

After the introduction which deals with why the author wrote the book, The Vegetarian Myth is divided into four sections: Moral Vegetarians, Political Vegetarians, Nutritional Vegetarians, and To Save the World.

The first three of these sections are the author’s in-depth refutations of the moral, political and nutritional arguments that vegetarians are constantly putting forth.  She does a masterful job.

In the Moral Vegetarians chapter, the author addresses the moral issue of killing animals for our own food.  She beautifully makes her case by cutting to the heart of the matter:

What separates me from vegetarians isn’t ethics or commitment.  It’s information.

And while she was in her 20-year trek in the vegetarian wilderness, she shielded herself from information as most cultists do:

I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information.

She finally realized the truth about agriculture; she figured out that the amber waves of grain are as death dealing as any slaughterhouse.

And agriculture isn’t quite a war because the forests and wetlands and prairies, the rain, the soil, the air, can’t fight back.  Agriculture is really more like ethnic cleansing, wiping out the indigenous dwellers so the invaders can take the land.  It’s biotic cleansing, biocide. … It is not non-violent.  It is not sustainable.  And every bite of food is laden with death.

There is no place left for the buffalo to roam.  There’s only corn, wheat, and soy.  About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year.  Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal.  They count, and they died for your dinner…

Soil, species, rivers.  That’s the death in your food.  Agriculture is carnivorous: what it eats is ecosystems, and it swallows them whole.

In Political Vegetarians she refutes the politics (predominantly liberal) of the vegetarian movement and describes the dark side of political meddling in our ecosystem approved of in the main by PETA and other vegetarian groups.  She follows the money.

Rice, wheat, corn – the annual grains that vegetarians want the world to eat – are thirsty enough to drink whole rivers.

The result has been an unending river of corn, drowning our arteries and our insulin receptors, our rural communities, and poor subsistence economies the world over.  The corn comes at a huge environmental toll: there’s a half gallon of oil in every bushel.  And it’s essentially a massive transfer of money from the US taxpayer to the giant grain cartels, who are able to command the price of grain to be lower than the cost of production, with all of us making up the difference – five billion dollars in subsidies for corn alone, straight into the pockets of Cargill and Monsanto.

Nutritional Vegetarians is about the nutritional inadequacies of a vegetarian and especially a vegan diet.  And she does an absolute bang up job of laying out the rationale for following a no-grain, low-carb diet.

I have a disclosure to make here.  Much of the information in this chapter is based on Protein Power and The Protein Power LifePlan.  MD and I are listed in the acknowledgments, but I swear I didn’t know this until I bought the book.  We aren’t the only ones, but there are plenty of quotes from us in this chapter.  Gary Taubes, Malcolm Kendrick and (dare I say it) Anthony Colpo are quoted liberally as well.  I would have loved this book just as much if we had never been quoted.

Ms Keith has made a few minor innocuous errors in this chapter, but, all in all, she has done a tremendous job of synthesizing the scientific information into an easy to read, informative format.

The Nutritional Vegetarians section isn’t just about the science of why vegetarianism is bad and meat eating is good, it gets into the nutritional politics (as opposed to the vegetarian politics in the previous section) as well.  Ms Keith shows how we got to where we are by the nutritional strong arming by the McGovern committee back in the late 1970s.  George McGovern (a senator from a grain-producing state) and his cronies basically set the nutritional standards under which we are still oppressed.  They have been a disaster, as some scientists at the time predicted they would be.

And some scientists knew ahead of time that they would be.  Phil Handler, the president of hte National Academy of Scientists asked Congress, “What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?”  Dr. Pete Ahrens, an expert on cholesterol metabolism, told the McGovern committee that the effects of a low-fat diet weren’t a scientific matter but “a betting matter.”

It’s twenty-five years later and we aren’t winning this bet.  Each US American now eats sixty pounds more grain per annum and thirty pounds more cheap sugars, mostly from corn.  [Is it any wonder we're all fat?]

The result, Dietary Goals for Americans, set in motion a cast sea change in the public’s beliefs and behaviors. … Dietary Goals was a predictable victory in a war that started ten thousand years ago.  What really won were those annual grasses that had long since turned humans into mercenaries against the rest of the planet.  We would now enshrine them like demi-gods, those whole grains and their sweet, opiate seductions, believing in their power to bestow health and long life, even while they slowly ate us alive.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book review that was positive from beginning to end, and this one is no exception.  Based on the many comments I’ve gotten on this blog and my response to them, I’m sure many of you will find my main objection surprising.  There is too much politics in the book.  Not nutritional politics, but feminist politics.

I know, I know, I let my libertarian leanings come through in all kinds of blog posts and comment answers, but there is a difference.  My blog is just that – a weblog of things I find interesting or informative.  And it’s free.  I don’t particularly like to pay for a book (and I paid full price for this one plus shipping) on a given subject then be beaten over the head with a political viewpoint.  I guarantee you that our new book has zero politics in it.  And if people bought our book expecting to learn about getting rid of their middle-aged middles and were fed a generous dose of my politics mixed in with the information, I would expect them to be flamed.

To give the author her due in this matter, the vegetarian ideology that had her in its grasp for 20 years was intertwined with her feminist politics, so a bit of said politics are necessary to describe how she was so taken in for so long.  But I think she went a little overboard with it.

And, I think the last section of the book – To Save the World – is the weakest part of the book.  The author makes several recommendations, all of which (save one) are, in my opinion totally unrealistic.  But I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions after you’ve read the book.

I’ve read that when people are asked to recall what they remember of something they read, they tend to remember the first thing in the piece and the last thing.  Most of the middle melds into a vague memory of what the article was about.  I certainly don’t want people to remember this last negative part I wrote and let it dissuade them from reading this book.  The good parts of the book so far outweigh the not-so-good parts that there is really no contest.

At a time when PETA and other vegetarian groups are mobilizing and ramping up their activity levels, a book such as this one bringing sanity to the debate is more important than ever.  And don’t think these groups aren’t becoming more active.  In the past, PETA and PETAphiles pretty much devoted their educational efforts toward the idea that eating animals was cruel.  Now they are starting to make the case that a vegetarian diet will solve the obesity epidemic.  Take a look at this billboard in Jacksonville, Florida.

If you find this sign annoying, buy The Vegetarian Myth and do your part to fight back. And if you have or know anyone with a daughter who is contemplating going vegetarian (young females are the most common victims), please make this book available.  It could be the most important thing you ever do for the long-term mental and physical health of a young woman.

If you’ve made it this far in this long review, take a couple of minutes and watch this YouTube of Lierre Keith at a book event; she’s as fascinating to listen to as she is to read.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I haven’t posted in a week because MD and I have been hard at work in Seattle and at Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands located in northwestern Washington.

We’re working on our project that we’ve been keeping under wrap.  No, it’s not the new book, and, no, it’s not Metabosol.  It is something pretty cool and even revolutionary in its own way.  Barring further bumps in the road (there have been a few), we should be able to reveal all on September 1. The reason for the secrecy is that this project is most press worthy, but, for reasons that will be obvious when we reveal what we’ve been working on, we don’t want the press to report it prematurely.

We flew into Seattle Sunday afternoon after buzzing across the top of Mount St. Helens and looking into the crater left when the top 1300 feet of the mountain blew off on May 18, 1980.  After landing, we got picked up by our partner and taken to his boat for an afternoon on Lake Union.  A huge annual celebration was taking place, so we spent the afternoon on a lake made choppy by a thousand other boats while the Blue Angels zipped through the sky overhead.  Seattle has been experiencing brutally hot temperatures, which we got blasted by on Sunday afternoon.

When we were in Seattle in December, we got caught in the worst snow storm in 30 years.  All the while we were slogging through the snow, our hosts were telling us to come visit in the summer when the weather is always beautiful.  So, we come in the summer only to be confronted with the worst heat wave since temperatures have been recorded.  I hate to imagine what we may encounter on the next trip.

Here is the Seattle skyline on Sunday afternoon.  Notice the chop on the water.  We were one of God only knows how many boats in the lake.  After getting pounded by the chop and brutalized by the heat, we tied up to a nice restaurant and had a lovely dinner complete with (at least for me) copious amounts of Jameson to go along with the copious amounts of Jameson I had already swilled to combat the heat on the lake.

Our partner’s boat, which is his pride and joy, is a handmade Venetian water taxi.  He worked with a guy who makes such boats in Venice, Italy several years back, had it built to his specs and then transported to Seattle.  It is a gorgeous boat, and, one day, I hope to go out on it in clement weather.  Below is a photo of MD standing by the boat tied up to another restaurant the last time we went out in it.  The temperature was about 23 degrees (not counting the chill factor), and you can see by the lack of chop on the water surface that we were the only fools out there.  (In case you were wondering, it is heated inside…but not air conditioned, thought the back of the roof slides open to admit fresh air and sunshine.)  As I say, our partner loves to show off his boat.

After our Sunday respite (which it was, despite the heat and chop), we crashed and for the next two days worked from early morning until late at night.  We didn’t have time to answer emails, deal with blog comments, or do much of anything other than work.

We started each day with a quick breakfast at Louisa’s, a little restaurant close to the office where we spent our days.  One of the menu selections, fittingly enough, was called Mike’s Special, so how could I resist.  Especially when it was such a great low-carb option: two poached eggs on a bowl of sauteed spinach, red and green peppers and onions.  Good, good, good.  It came, of course, with a giant piece of toast that was at least an inch thick, which I ate a couple of bites of just to try.

As we were eating breakfast on the last morning, a man was eating alone while reading the paper at the table next to us.  He looked to be about 70 or so and was fairly thin with a pot belly.  He had on two pressure stockings on his lower legs and bruising in the crook of one of his arms from where, obviously, blood had recently been taken.

Watching him eat, I created an entire story about him that I’ll bet is not too far from the mark.  Even if it is not accurate in this man’s case, it is totally (and sadly) accurate in many thousands of others.

The man was eating a bowl of oatmeal.  He had a glass of skim milk so fat free it was almost blue that he poured little bits of into his cereal from time to time.  Along with his oatmeal, he was eating one of the giant pieces of toast the restaurant serves.  He took one pat of butter (I assume there was no margarine available) and cut it in half.  He carefully spread one half pat on one half of his toast then loaded it with an entire individual serving of jelly.  After eating the first half piece of toast, he prepared the second half the same way and ate it.  The only fat he got from his entire meal was that that came from that one pat of butter.  Based on the size of the bowl of oatmeal and the size of the toast (and the skim milk), I calculated that this guy consumed about 100 grams of carbohydrate. (Thirty grams in the oatmeal; at least 30 in the toast; 15 in each container of jelly; and about 10 in the skim milk.)

I imagine (here is where I’m speculating) that he has elevated cholesterol and has been told by his doctor to watch his fat.  And he is complying. He got a whopping 4 grams of fat in his one pat of butter (36 calories-worth) while getting 100 grams of carb in the rest of his meal (400 calories-worth). The tiny bit of fat he got contained short-chain fatty acids that are immune enhancing whereas the 100 grams of carb he got provided really no health benefit.  Since the 100 grams represents 20 times the amount of sugar circulating in his blood, his pancreas had to release a large amount of insulin to deal with it.  His pot belly indicates that he is already insulin resistant with an abdomen full of visceral fat, so he no doubt secreted a lot more insulin than a person without insulin resistance.  This excess insulin help him store fat in his liver, increase his level of visceral fat, ratchet up the inflammatory process, injure his blood vessels even more and increase his risk for heart disease, the very thing his doctor was trying to prevent by putting him on a low-fat diet.

How much better off this guy would have been had he joined me in the Mike’s Special.  But, his cardiologist, I’m sure, would have been apoplectic.  A sad state of affairs indeed.

MD and I were so busy this entire week that not only haven’t we been able to keep up with even our emails, we haven’t been able to go through the over 300 requests we got for a copy of our new book.  We will go through those and respond to everyone over the next couple of days.

Also, I have about 60 comments dating back for months that are stacked up in my awaiting-moderation queue. My plan is to deal with six of them per day and have them all cleared out within 10 days.  And this all while keeping current on new comments coming in.  So if you have had a comment languishing, it should be up within the next ten days.

Our newly designed site is supposed to be up this next week.  Keep your fingers crossed.  I’m certainly keeping mine crossed.

For those of you who still can’t get your minds around the idea that exercise doesn’t make you thin, read next week’s Time. The cover story, ‘Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,’ is a long article parroting what Gary Taubes wrote about a couple of years ago.  The notion has finally made it to the mainstream.

Finally, I’ll end with a book recommendation.  I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the flight to Seattle.  If you haven’t read it, and if you like offbeat mystery/thrillers, give it a whirl.  A disgraced investigative journalist headed for prison teams up with Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous girl with the dragon tattoo, and one of the strangest and most interesting protagonists to ever find her way into fiction, to solve, at the request of an aging industrialist, a decades-long mysterious disappearance.  The novel, set in Sweden and written in Swedish but masterfully translated, has become a world-wide phenomenon.  The book is satisfying throughout, and I highly recommend it.  As soon as I catch up on all my work, I’ll start the second book in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Tomorrow I’ll post on working, crabbing and eating on Orcas Island.

I’m almost afraid to say it, but it looks like after being delayed two times our new book is actually coming out on September 8.  As we have done with all our books, we will be expected to be available for all kinds of media appearances and interviews.  It is a giant pain, but it has to be done.  It’s part of the book-writing gig.  If you don’t sign up to do the PR, they don’t sign up to publish your book. (If you want to see a little of what a book tour is like, read this piece by Joe Queenan to see what we’re up against. Sometime I’ll write a piece on the nightmare of my first three-week-long book tour and my dealings with the escorts that are a part of the book tour experience.)

MD and I have been in discussion with our publisher and have gotten permission to excerpt part of the book, which I will do on this blog soon.  The book is about the weight gain that seems an inevitable part of moving into and through middle age and how this weight is different from that gained in the younger years.  It’s a kind of bad news, good news story because middle-age weight comes from a more dangerous kind of fat (the bad news), but a kind of fat that is fairly easy to lose (the good news).  But despite its being easier to lose, it still requires some effort…and a little different approach.  And, surprisingly, most of this fat can be lost in a 6-week window.  That doesn’t mean that we promise that all weight will be lost in a 6-week window, but most of the middle-aged weight can be ditched or at least significantly shed in this time period – thus the title.

Since we don’t have an active practice right now, most of the subjects we’ve given the diet to are former patients, friends and relatives.  We have had almost unbelievable success with those who gave the program a fair try.  We had one middle-aged friend who had struggled with lipid problems for years.  Despite our telling her not to worry and not to go on a statin because those drugs have never been shown to be beneficial for women, she was worried.  Her doctor was hectoring her, telling her that she would have to go on a statin if her lipids didn’t come into line.  She had an appointment in two weeks, so she went on the first two weeks of the program, then went to her doctor.  Not only did she lose eight pounds in her first two weeks, her lipid numbers plummeted.  Her total cholesterol fell from 240 to 174; her triglycerides dropped to below 100; and her HDL ran up to 60.  Happily, this all happened during the editing phase of the book, so we were able to include her story.  Other subjects have done as well if not better.

Another story is that of a business associate of ours who has gradually gained weight over the past 15 years who tried the plan.  She has tried diets of one kind or another for about 10 years.  She loses a little, but it’s been a tough slog for her.  She went on the new program and also lost eight pounds the first two weeks, which was a much greater loss than she had ever experienced.  A 60-year-old friend of ours easily lost 20 pounds over the course of his 6-week effort and had remarkable improvement in his lipids.  His wife had been on an HCG program that we had tried to talk her out of.  When she saw her husband lose substantially faster than she did, and without going on a 500 calorie diet, she switched to our program and her weight loss picked up and her measurements improved dramatically.

We have had multiple successes like the ones above, but, as I said, all are friends, relatives or business associates.  And they are not people who are keen on giving their testimonials to various media sources.  The first lady, mentioned above, works in the entertainment business – she was the director of a popular sitcom that most readers of this blog would probably be familiar with.  She doesn’t mind telling her story, but she doesn’t want her picture shown.  We found this out when the PR department of our publisher contacted us about some major interest in our book by a major women’s magazine.  They had read an advance copy of our book and were interested in making it a cover story.  They asked if we had any success stories they could interview and build a story around complete with photos.  We said sure and started calling all our ‘patients.’  Each one declined to be interviewed or would be interviewed but didn’t want her actual name used.  All refused to have their photo appear in the article.  So, we were left holding the bag, so to speak.

So, here is my request.  If any of you out there who are middle-aged and overweight would like to try the program, we will send you an advance copy of the book.  The deal is that you must be willing to have your real name and photo used by any media that approach you. This could be magazines, newspapers, online articles, and/or radio. You must also be willing to go on TV with us (or by yourself) – either national or local – and tell your story.  Should a TV appearance be required, generally all your expenses will be picked up by the television station, and if not, then you need not appear.  All you have to do is read the book, follow the program, keep us updated about your progress and tell anyone from the media who might contact you how you fared on the regimen.

Our publisher will let us recruit only 20 people for this project, so we can’t make it available to everyone who wants to do it.  We will select the 20 people from the applications we receive.  I have no idea how many that might be: it could be five or it could be 50.  I just don’t know.

I’ve set up a gmail account for anyone who is interested.  Please send an email giving your particulars, i.e., age, sex, weight, dietary history (what kind of diets you’ve been on, when and with what degree of success), medications, other disorders (diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, etc.), contact info and a photo if you have one.

Send to:

6weekcure at gmail dot com

Put ’6weekcure’ in the subject line of your message.

We’re also looking to recruit a few people in other categories for some more immediate media exposure.  So, if you have used the shakes for weight loss that I have given the recipe for multiple times in the comments section of this blog, send an email to the above gmail address and put ‘Shakes’ in the subject line.

If you have been on an all-meat diet and done well, drop us a note and put ‘All meat’ in the subject line.

MD and I thank you, in advance, for being willing to help.

Addendum:  We have received over 300 requests from people wishing to try the program in our book.  Since our publisher is providing us with only 20 copies, we have to terminate the offer at this point.  We will go through the 300 plus submissions and contact all those who wrote shortly.  Thanks for all your interest.