The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

In my ongoing quest to become a little more technically adept, I started using Google Alerts for a number of things I’m interested in, including my own name.  (Believe me, there are a lot of people out there in the world with the last name Eades, including the Fire Chief of London.)  For those of you who don’t know, you can go to the Google main page and navigate around until you come to ‘Alerts.’  You can then sign up for these ‘Alerts’ to be delivered to you via email.  It’s a free service provided by Google, and it uses the Google system to crawl through cyberspace and find anything (blogs, articles, news reports, etc.) that has whatever word, words or phrases you submitted included and emails the link back to you.  I put a bunch of stuff in and get emails from Google throughout the day.  Most of it is stuff that is totally unrelated to anything I give a flip about, but every now and then it turns up something of interest.  Having my name listed has cost me money because one of the first things I that came back to me was an article about Eades Whisky, which I had no idea existed and which I had to try.  It is expensive, about $75 per bottle, but I ordered some.  It’s very good.  But it hasn’t replaced Jameson, however, by a long shot.

Yesterday I got back a hit about something that I had totally forgotten about:  our rebuttal to the idiotic ’study’ presented by the PCRM (Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine - a name straight out of Orwell if there ever was one) a few years ago.  This group, composed mainly of militant vegetarians, came up with an insipid ’study’ during the height of the low-carb frenzy back in 2003.  Neal Barnard, the head of the outfit, appeared on most of the morning talk shows telling how dangerous his study had found low-carb diets to be.  A couple of the national networks called MD and me asking us if we would provide a rebuttal.  We happened to be in Santa Barbara at the time, and we said sure.  Two different networks sent camera crews to interview us late in the afternoon.

As I’ve probably mentioned numerous times, we have an absolute knack for getting pre-empted whenever we get TV time.  This day was no exception.  The news teams were on their way to the little condo we had at the time to set up and shoot our rebuttal when the news came through that Michael Jackson was going to be flying in to the Santa Barbara airport to turn himself in on the child molestation charge that he later beat in court.  Of course, all the news vans and camera crews that were heading for our place were diverted to the Santa Barbara airport, and MD and I never got to rebut the PCRM idiocy on air.

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A couple of weeks ago I posted that Gary Taubes had agree to answer questions from readers of this blog.  Over a hundred readers sent in questions through the comment section.  Many of these questions were actually multiple questions, so Gary ended up with probably 200+ questions to deal with.

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

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

The point of the cartoon above by Eric Allie holds true for the recently released Jupiter study: the reporting of the data by the media often overshadows the actual data.

Let’s first take a look at the reporting.

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The sugar hypothesis of heart disease triumphs yet again over the lipid hypothesis. A study presented recently in Rome and published in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrates that efforts to lower blood sugar pay off better in lower rates of heart disease and longer life than do efforts to lower cholesterol.  In fact, to be ruthlessly honest about it, efforts to lower blood sugar do seem pay off whereas efforts to lower cholesterol don’t much at all.

Researchers presented data from a long-term study (almost 30 years long) showing that subjects who lowered their blood sugar levels with drugs for a period of 10 years reaped large rewards in terms of reduced incidence of heart attack and reduced incidence of all-cause mortality long after the end of the study.

Here is how the study was done:

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