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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Changes in diabetic nephropathy

I received a short paper from a colleague in Portugal a couple of days ago that demonstrates in just a few pages how science should really work.

The paper from the journal Diabetologia reports on a study done in Pakistan showing that high-dose thiamin (vitamin B1) may be a valuable therapeutic agent in the treatment of diabetic nephropathy.   This small study certainly isn’t the final word, but it does show how medical science should work.

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I don’t know about you guys, but I like these link-o-rama posts because they let me get rid of a bunch of tabs on Firefox and disseminate info that probably isn’t worth an entire post.

First, let me start out by linking to one of my wife’s recent posts.  We’ve had a spate of people writing us through the website asking about cookbooks, of all things.  She did a post a couple of months ago about her favorite cookbooks.  In case you missed it, here it is.

Second, I’m going to start using these link-o-ramas to link to some of my older posts that I think would be of interest to a lot of people now.  One that I thought was pretty good on how to dissect a scientific article didn’t get many readers since I wrote it back when maybe three people read this blog.  The notion that it didn’t get many readers is evidenced by the fact that there are zero comments on it.  So, without further ado, here is Baboon Business.

After all the recent posts about the savagery of the nature, I thought I would throw this item into the mix just to show that nature can be tamed, at least in the short run.  There is a guy who is a fixture in downtown Santa Barbara who has a dog, a cat and a rat as pets.  He is always down on State Street, the main street running through town, with the cat riding on the back of the dog, and the rat riding on the back of the cat.  Here is the YouTube, so you can see for yourselves.

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At Fat Head the Movie premiere

A couple of years ago I got an email from a guy named Tom Naughton asking if he could come interview me for a movie he was making that was supposed to kind of be a counterpoint to Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me! I hadn’t seen Spurlock’s film at the time, but I knew enough about it that I was wary of anyone who wanted to make a film maybe showing fast food places in a positive light.  I wrote Tom back and suggested we talk.  Once he had me on the phone, Tom was able to make me realize that his film was not pro fast food, but was pro personal responsibility.  And that it was pro low-carb, since the diet he went on and lost weight on eating at nothing but fast food restaurants was a low-carb diet.

He came to visit with all his movie making paraphernalia and we set to the interview, which I wrote about in a previous post.  We kept in contact over the intervening years, and I watched multiple versions of the film as it evolved and got better and better with each new iteration.  Finally, Tom called to tell me Fat Head was finished.  MD and I attended the premiere of the movie a few weeks ago (we are pictured above with Tom at said premiere), and I can tell you that folks were laughing their heads off.  It’s a very funny movie made by a guy who is a professional comedian.  Along with being funny, however, the film is exceedingly thought provoking.  I can’t imagine anyone who might be anti low-carb watching it and coming away feeling the same.

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