I so often come across such breathtaking nutritional ignorance foisted off as legitimate information that I’m left feeling like the girl in this photo. I wrote about this woeful ignorance on the part of the medical community in my last post.  Now it’s time to take a look at the misinformation many registered dietitians dispense as a matter of course.

I have subscriptions to many magazines, most of which I save up to read while I’m on airplanes so I can trash them after I read them and lighten my load as I travel.  A couple of days ago I was on a flight from Newark to Seattle casually paging through a golf magazine when I came upon one of these well-meaning (I’m sure) but totally incorrect little bits of advice.  The only saving grace is that I’m sure the vast majority of people reading this magazine will totally ignore this advice and go on doing whatever it is they’ve been doing.  But the advice is so abominably wrong that it cries out for exposure.

I’m sure the magazine needed a little space filled up so the editor charged one of the magazine’s staff writers come up with a fluff piece to fit the space required.  The editor may have specified that the piece be nutritional in content because the add right below it is for Planter’s NUT-rition line of nut products “specifically designed to give you the taste you want and the energy you need.”

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Applebee's Quesadilla Burger

One of my readers sent me a link to a segment on ABC News with Charlie Gibson showing just how disgustingly slanted and inaccurate mainstream media reports can be.

Gibson leads into the segment about two reporters who underwent self experimentation on the adverse effects of unhealthy eating.  The reporters, ABC’s Yuji de Nies and Jon Garcia, set out to see what would happen if they consumed a giant meal containing over 6,000 calories.  Here is the result as they reported it.

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

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

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

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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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Dean Karnazes is an ultramarathoner whose most recent exploit was to run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive states in 50 consecutive days.  Not a bad feat.  His endurance seems almost superhuman, and, based on what I’ve read about him, I suspect it is.  A recent article in the magazine Wired explained how he got started running 14 years ago.

DEAN KARNAZES WAS SLOBBERING DRUNK. IT WAS HIS 30TH BIRTHDAY, and he’d started with beer and moved on to tequila shots at a bar near his home in San Francisco. Now, after midnight, an attractive young woman – not his wife – was hitting on him. This was not the life he’d imagined for himself. He was a corporate hack desperately running the rat race. The company had just bought him a new Lexus. He wanted to vomit. Karnazes resisted the urge and, instead, slipped out the bar’s back door and walked the few blocks to his house. On the back porch, he found an old pair of sneakers. He stripped down to his T-shirt and underwear, laced up the shoes, and started running. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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