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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pretty brutal, eh?  But let’s shine the piercing light of good sense on what is going on here.  As you might expect, the reality is vastly different from that portrayed by ABC.

First off, let’s look at the actual nutritional content of the food eaten.  As reported in the piece, the total energy content of the meal was 6,190 calories, which included 187 grams of saturated fat.  These were the only parameters reported.  I took the time to go through the links in the article accompanying the video to find exactly where these foods came from.  Here’s what I found.

The burger is an Applebee’s Quesadilla Burger (served with fries, of course); the snack is The Cheesecake Factory Fried Macaroni And Cheese; and the dessert is Uno Chicago Grill Mega-sized Deep Dish Sundae (listed as cookie below).  How do I know these are the exact ones?  These were the ones referenced in the CSPI’s List of Most Unhealthy High-Calorie, Fat and Salty Restaurant Foods That May Clog Your Arteries.  After seeing the photos and comparing to what I saw on the video, these selections are the ones the reporters ate.

I then tracked down the Nutritional Facts for the foods involved (here, here, here and here) and put them into an Excel spreadsheet.  Take a look.

The first thing you might notice is that the total calorie count is 5,708, which is considerable, but is actually 482 calories fewer than the 6,190 reported.  Second, and this is a biggie, the saturated fat content of this meal is only 88 grams, not the 187 grams reported.

The reporters stretched the truth a little in that they reported as if the Mega-sized Deep Dish Sundae were a single treat to be consumed by one person at a sitting.  I’m sure it could be so eaten, but it’s actually designed for four people to share.  The Nutritional Facts list the calories per serving as 690 and the saturated fat as 17 grams.  I’ve used the amounts in all four servings, i.e., one entire four-person dessert, in my spreadsheet.

As you may have noticed, the total carb content of the meal is 745 grams, which converts during digestion to a little over three cups (3.1 cups to be exact) of sugar.  The ABC report, of course, failed to mention the carb content of the meal and ignored any immediate effect this huge intake of carb might cause.  One of the reporters, Jon, claimed that he was ’sluggish’ and ‘tired’; the implication being that this sluggishness resulted from his huge saturated fat intake.  No mention, naturally, of the enormous amount of carbohydrate and the large increase in insulin release it might cause.  From what I can see from the video, Jon looks to be sporting a little abdominal obesity, which would imply a degree of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia.  People with this disorder tend to over secrete insulin in response to carb intake causing an overshoot and reactive hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), which will indeed result in sluggishness.

It’s pretty impressive when the lab tech holds up the tube of blood taken after the meal and compares it to the one taken before the meal.  There is a lot of fat swimming in the serum, that’s for sure.  What the producers of this piece (and, sadly, the doctors commenting although they should know better) want you to take away from all this by the way they set it up is that all that saturated fat went directly into the blood.  And how can you argue with them?  It’s there for all to see.

Problem is, that’s what blood samples look like after almost any meal, especially one that contains carbohydrates.  The fat you see isn’t the fat the two reporters ate; it is the fat the liver has made from the carbohydrate.  It’s the same picture a tube of blood would show after either of the two doctors had eaten a high-carb, low-fat lunch.

The blood samples were taken two hours after the meal.  Dietary carbohydrate is absorbed directly into the blood and makes a pass through the liver where it stimulates the production of triglycerides, the fat you see in the blood.  Fat, especially long-chain saturated fat digests very slowly, and doesn’t reach the blood until much later than the two hour mark.  While carbs go directly into the blood, fats take a different route.  The process that breaks down dietary fat into its component fatty acids is a lengthy process as compared to the breakdown of carbs.  Once the fat has broken down, it has to combine with bile salts to make it into a form that is water soluble and can be taken up by the intestinal cells.  Once taken up, unlike carbs, which are sent directly to the bloodstream, fats go into the lymphatic system, a much smaller and more static transport system than the vasculature.  Once in the lymphatics, fats make their way to the thoracic duct, which empties into a large vein in the upper chest.  The lymphatics are small vessels and take a long time to move their contents along since there is no heartbeat pushing them as there is with blood.  As I say, the fat in the blood you see on the video didn’t come from the saturated fat in the diet, although that was definitely the implication.

But what about the ultrasound showing the blood vessels had changed?  Wasn’t that because of the fat?

I’m afraid not.  The fat from the diet wasn’t in the blood vessels yet, so it couldn’t be the dietary fat causing the change.  So what was it?

How about a little normal physiology.  Let me explain.  The body gets blood where it needs to get it by opening certain blood vessels while closing others.  Let me give you an example.  Have you ever jumped into cold water to go swimming and noticed that not long after jumping in you have to urinate?  What happened?

Your arms and legs have a radiator effect.  Since these appendages have little padding the blood circulating there is exposed to the cold water, and if nothing is done, the cold water cools the blood creating a big problem.  Your body compensates by shutting down the circulation to the skin and areas close to the surface in your arms and legs and shunts that blood to your core.  Your core already has plenty of blood when this happens, so it has to get rid of some.  It does so by sending it through the kidneys where the liquid portion is filtered out and becomes urine.  Suddenly your bladder is full and you have to go.

The body has the ability to direct blood wherever it needs by its manipulation of blood vessel size.  Where do you think blood is needed after an almost 6,000 calorie meal?  That’s right.  The digestive tract.  It takes a lot of work to deal with 6,000 calories, and a lot of work requires a lot of oxygen, which comes from the blood.  So after a heavy meal, the body shunts extra blood to the guts where the works is being done.  It does this by opening or dilating the arteries carrying blood to the intestines and by narrowing the blood vessels in other parts of the body.

Now, think back to the video of the woman whose blood vessel (in her arm) is being examined by ultrasound.  When it’s compared to the previous ultrasound, the one before she ate, notice how much faster the heart is beating.  (The little swishing sounds you hear, each of which represents a heart beat, are spaced much closer together.)  The heart is beating faster because the body is working to digest an enormous amount of food, and this work stresses the heart in the same way that running down the street would stress the heart.  Work is work.

The digestive tract needs extra oxygen to do its work, this extra oxygen can get there only via the blood, so the intestines require more blood than normal.  This extra blood gets shunted there by opening the arteries that feed the gut and narrowing those that go other places where a lot of blood isn’t needed at the moment.  Such places as, say, a relaxed arm.

Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of normal physiology (and apparently an open mind) could predict that the artery in a relaxed arm would narrow after a heavy meal and that that artery would be back to normal six hours later (which it was so reported in this video).

What you’re seeing in this video is normal physiology at work interpreted as being abnormal by a couple of lipophobic doctors who should (and probably do) know better.  It makes for dramatic theater, but their interpretation is nothing but prevarication or ignorance or both.

But had they reported the truth, there would have been no story.  Kind of sad, isn’t it.

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.

Red meat is the major culprin [sic] in colon cancer. I actually know people who have colon cancer gene that only eat a no red meat diet and have no issues with their colon. Of course they also do not smoke or drink too much alcohol.

Red meat lobby is very powerful in America – Let them pay for this!

Ah, yes, an enlightened cogitator indeed.

The study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (free full text here) is a typical epidemiological or observational study.  The reports have it tarted up with a lot of fancy clothes, but it is really nothing but an observational study.  And, as we’ve gone over ad nauseum in these pages, observational studies can’t be used to prove causation.

Even if they could, this study would be questionable at best because the relative risk (RR) is slightly over 1.0.  Because of the nature of the difficulty in doing these kinds of studies with any kind of accuracy it takes a RR of over at least 2.0 to get the serious attention of anyone who doesn’t have a built-in bias.

What I found more interesting than this study (which isn’t interesting or important at all) was the press coverage of it.  And I found especially interesting that which the press didn’t report.

Scientific journals have a couple of ways of getting their articles out there ahead of publication, so that the press can do stories on them.  If it works out right, the reports all hit the media on the same day that the article itself is published.  Doctors who read the journal often find out in their morning newspaper about a new paper before they even get their journal in the mail later that same day.  Many of the larger journals, Archives of Internal Medicine, for example, will issue press releases the week before on those papers coming out that the editors feel are important.  These press releases go to anyone with press credentials (I even get them), and are embargoed until the date of publication of the journal.  Reporters get advanced copies of the papers and get the editor’s (and maybe even the author’s) take on the paper.  Journalists can then write their stories to be timed with publication of the paper.

Another way followed by a number of journals is to publish papers online in advance of their actual publication date.  Reporters troll these advanced online articles looking for material for stories and often write them up for publication before the paper in question makes it into actual publication in the journal.

At the same time that this paper appeared, showing increased red meat consumption to be tied to a slight increased risk of death (and showing that those subjects eating white meat had less risk), a couple of other papers came out in the online pre-publication section of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN), arguably the world’s most prestigious nutritional scientific journal.  These two AJCN papers saw the light of day at around the same time as this highly-publicized study on meat and mortality, but demonstrated the opposite results.  They got no press coverage whatsoever.  Which proves what I’ve been saying all along: the press is biased against meat in general, and especially against red meat.  Knowing this, careful readers should take anything negative thing the media reports about red meat with an enormous grain of salt.

Let’s look at the other two studies published in AJCN.

The first is titled Meta-analysis of animal fat or animal protein intake and colorectal cancer.  One of the constant themes anti meat people like to hammer out is that meat intake, especially red meat intake, causes colon or colorectal cancer.  This is heard so often that most people take it for granted, assuming that there must be a ton of research backing it up.  As this paper points out, there isn’t.

The association between total dietary fat, including fat constituents such as saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, and cholesterol, and risk of colorectal cancer has been evaluated in numerous epidemiologic [observational] studies.  Results from these analytic investigations have generally been mixed.  Whereas some studies have reported positive associations, several studies have observed null and inverse associations.  In a pooled analysis of data from 13 case-controlled studies, risk of colorectal cancer was found to increase significantly with increasing categories of total daily energy intake.  In the same analysis, and after adjustment for total energy intake, the authors observed no evidence of an energy-independent effect of total dietary fat or specific fat components other than cholesterol.  In fact, many of the associations among men and women were in the inverse direction [i.e., more animal fat equals greater longevity].

Animal foods and meat products contain both saturated and unsaturated fats; however, similar to analyses of total fat intake, several studies have not observed any consistent epidemiologic evidence of an association between saturated fat or polyunsaturated fat intake and risk of colorectal cancer.  Although some studies reported positive associations for consumption of saturated fat, nonsignificant associations at or near the null value [no association] or inverse associations have been observed in numerous cohort studies and case-control studies.

This paper goes on to discuss how the hypothesis that fat and meat intake are a bad thing healthwise got kicked off way back in the 1960s from a presentation at a symposium. In shades of Ancel Keys and his discredited Seven Countries Study, a researcher named Ernst Wynder used the international food and cancer mortality data to demonstrate an increase in colorectal cancer as a correlate of increasing oil and fat consumption.  The hypothesis, although never proven, has been with us since.  The authors of this paper set out to study it once again.

Here is what they did:

To clarify the potential association between animal fat intake and colorectal cancer, we conducted a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies in which data for animal fat were available.  In addition, we identified case-control studies that reported results for animal fat intake and combined data from these studies with the prospective cohort data in separate analyses.  Because the primary macronutrients in the consumption of animals include protein and fat, we also conducted a separate meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies in which data categorized as animal protein or meat were available.

After sifting through all this data, what did the authors find?  Absolutely nothing.  No correlation between meat and/or fat intake and colorectal cancer.

In this meta-analysis, no consistent evidence of a positive association between  consumption of animal fat and colorectal cancer was observed.  Specifically, we found no association  between the highest animal fat intake category and colorectal cancer.  Furthermore, none of the subgroup analysis (i.e., sex, anatomic tumor site, and study design) indicated positive patterns of associations.

And their conclusion:

On the basis of the results of this quantitative assessment, the available epidemiologic evidence does not appear to support an independent association between animal fat intake or animal protein intake and colorectal cancer.

Like the study above showing the slight correlation between red meat intake and decreased longevity, this study is an observational study, and, as such, doesn’t demonstrate any kind of definitive proof.  But what I find galling is that the meat and mortality study hit all the airwaves and this study – made available to the media at the same time – received zero press.

Yet another study in the advanced online section of AJCN titled Mortality in British vegetarians: results from the European Prospective Investigation in Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC-Oxford) shows that things ain’t always as they seem.  Yet the press refuses to pick up and report this man-bites-dog story.

If you ask the man on the street (who has been fed a load of bunkum over the years by the press) if vegetarians or non-vegetarians are healthier and live longer, you will almost assuredly be told that vegetarians are the healthiest.  Most people believe this, but they just don’t want to make the sacrifice to follow the vegetarian lifestyle.  They are willing to give up a couple of years of life to not have to live on a steady diet of beans, tofu, vegetables, fruits and dry bread.  You would think that if a study came out from a prestigious institution (Oxford) published in a top-line scientific journal showing that vegetarians don’t live any longer than non-vegetarians and actually have a higher incidence of some particularly nasty cancers (but slightly lower rates of death from heart disease) it would be newsworthy.  But the press has totally ignored this study just like they did the last one.

This vegetarian study was interesting on a couple of levels.  Not only did it not show a difference in longevity between vegetarians and nonvegetarians, it showed major increases in longevity just from being in the study.  Not long ago I wrote a post about a statin study in which I discussed the adherer verses the non-adherer effect.  A number of studies have shown that subjects who take all their medicines as directed – even the placebos – live longer and/or do better than those who takes their medications irregularly.  There is something about people who go the extra mile that makes them live longer than those who don’t.

In this Oxford University vegetarian study, vegetarian subjects were recruited by all sorts of methods.  Those in the study cast out their nets for other vegetarians and recruitment was done through all kinds of advertising venues.  Those accepted into the study -both vegetarians and non vegetarians – had to jump through a fair number of hoops to get accepted and stay in the study.  And to stay in the study for the ten plus years that it went on.  After the study period, the numbers of deaths in the two groups was tallied, and it was found that vegetarians didn’t live any longer than non-vegetarians.  As a percentage, the number of deaths in each group was the same.

What’s more interesting to me, however, is the difference between the rate of deaths in both the vegetarian and non-vegetarian subjects as compared to their neighbors who weren’t in the study.  The researchers calculated the standard mortality ratios (SMRs) for vegetarians and non-vegetarians from deaths before the age of 90 years old as compared to the mortality rate for non-study subjects living in the same area.

The SMR is the ratio of the observed number of deaths to the number of deaths expected from the national rates, standardized for sex and age, and expressed as a percentage.

In other words, if the observed number of deaths in the study group had been three quarters of that expected in a similar population from the area, the SMR would have been 75 percent.  And would have been a striking finding to boot.  It would have meant that just being in the study reduced one’s risk of death.

When all the data was tallied, the SMR for all causes of death among study subjects was only 52 percent, and was identical in vegetarians and nonvegetarians!  It didn’t matter if you were a vegetarian or a nonvegetarian, as long as you were in this study you were about half as likely to die as your neighbor who wasn’t in the study.  Now that’s an adherer effect in spades.  And I would think pretty newsworthy.  But, like the study above on meat and colorectal cancer, it was completely ignored by the press.

The point of this post is that you shouldn’t get wound up about a study that gets reported throughout the media because there are more than likely other studies that are just as well done and just as important showing exactly the opposite findings that the press chooses to ignore.  You’re not seeing the science as it is, you’re seeing the science as the press wants you to see it, which, typically, is the way that confirms the bias of members of the press.

As a journalist friend of ours once remarked:  what is news?  News is whatever the reporter decides it is.  In my opinion, they decided wrongly in this case.

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.

Tom has been dogged in his mission to actually get this film made and distributed.  And he has succeeded in a world where few do, the world of the independent filmmaker.  He has a distributor (which is the movie equivalent to a book agent) and has already had the film picked up in some foreign venues.  Today, Feb. 3, Fat Head goes on sale at Amazon.com. I urge you to click here to get a copy and watch it.  You’ll be glad you did.

One of the questions I’m asked constantly by people who have achieved success on low-carb diets is what can we all do to help spread the word?  I always tell them to buy books (and not just mine) and give them away or loan them out.  The response I almost always get is that no one will read a book.  Well, they will probably watch a movie, especially one as funny and entertaining as Fat Head.  Even if you don’t buy one to give to someone, buy one for yourself because the movie is a real treat.  Can you think of a  better way to spend a pleasant hour and a half than to watch a bunch of low-fat twits get pilloried?  Plus, Tom has witnessed firsthand the power of the low-carb diet to improve health and bring about weight loss, and has not just exulted in his own success, but has put his money where his mouth is.  He has financed every cent of this movie out of his own hip pocket.  And, as we all know, movies are not inexpensive to produce.  He has done a great service for the low-carb community, and we need to do our part to help pay him back. And to encourage others to take the risk to move the ball closer to the goal.

If you want to get a little taste of what the movie is all about and watch some video clips, check out the website.

To get an even more in depth take on the movie, here is an interview I did with the filmmaker himself.

Q:  What inspired you to make a film challenging Super Size Me?

A:  I actually didn’t set out to take on Super Size Me.  I began this project thinking it would be maybe a half-hour humor piece about how we treat fat people in American society.  I watched Super Size Me as part of my research.  And to be honest, I thought Super Size Me was very well done and very amusing, but at the same time a couple of things about it really bugged me.  One was the overall premise, that it’s McDonald’s fault people are getting fatter.  That’s ridiculous.  Ronald McDonald can’t force you to eat anything, and most people eat at McDonald’s once in awhile, not everyday.

But what really bugged me was when I realized Spurlock’s math didn’t add up.  I spent a good part of my adult life as a serial dieter, so I have a pretty good idea what the calorie counts are at McDonald’s.  When Spurlock’s nutritionist told him he was consuming 5000 calories per day, alarm bells went off in my head.  There’s no way you can consume that many calories at McDonald’s if you’re following his supposed rules.

Q:  So in your opinion, Super Size Me is essentially dishonest.

A:  Yes, it’s dishonest.  Long before I saw it, I heard people talk about how Super Size Me shows what would happen if you just ate three meals per day at McDonald’s.  But that’s not what it shows.  It shows what would happen if you decided to stuff yourself like crazy so you could gain weight and make a movie about it.  You could stuff yourself at a vegan restaurant and gain just as much weight, if that was your goal.

Q: You did exactly the opposite:  you ate nothing but fast food for a month and lost weight.  How did you manage that?

A:  I did it by intentionally ignoring the standard-issue nutrition advice.  My doctor of course warned me that if I was going to live on fast food, I should eat as many salads and grilled chicken breasts as I could so I wouldn’t consume too much fat.  But I knew better.  I ate a lot of fat, because fat is what keeps you feeling full and satisfied.  But I did limit my carbohydrates to about 100 per day, because that’s the real key to losing weight, at least for me.

Q:  You say you ignored the standard advice because you knew better.  How did you know better?

A:  Personal experience for one.  Low-fat diets never worked for me.  I’d lose a little weight and then stall, plus I’d end up feeling lethargic and depressed.  The first time I really lost weight and felt good doing it was when I tried The Zone diet, which was the first time I seriously cut down on my carbohydrates.

Q:  The Zone diet isn’t exactly a low-carbohydrate diet.

A:  No, but keep in mind, I’d been living on a more or less vegetarian diet because I thought it was good for my health, so I was eating a lot of rice and potatoes and pasta.  That seems crazy to me now, because of course I kept gaining weight in spite of working out regularly and walking several miles per week.  I just figured it was because I was getting older.

So when I finally tried The Zone diet, I was consuming maybe 170 carbohydrates per day, which isn’t exactly low, but it was a lot lower than I’d been consuming.  And the weight started to drop off.  I didn’t understand much about the effects of insulin at the time, but I did understand that cutting back on sugar and starch was making it so I could lose weight without feeling like I was starving.

Q:  On your fast-food diet, you counted calories as well as carbohydrates.  How many calories did you consume, and what did you eat to stay under the limit?

A:  I set a target of 2000 calories per day and kept it pretty close to that.  Unlike Morgan Spurlock, I’m not afraid to show people what I consumed, so my daily menus are posted on our web site, but to answer the question, I basically lived on a diet that’s about midway between The Zone and Protein Power.  Since I wanted to do an honest fast-food diet, I consumed more starch than I would on a true low-carb diet.

So a typical day might be two Egg McMuffins with only half of each muffin and an order of hash browns for breakfast, a double quarter-pounder with cheese for lunch, and another one for dinner, or maybe one of their chicken salads.  I also ate a lot of the chicken strips, which are pretty tasty, but unfortunately that meant I was taking in some trans fats.  I think they’ve finally gotten rid of the trans fats, but they were still using them for frying when I was on the diet.

Q:  And you ate nothing but McDonald’s?

A:  It was all fast food, and it was mostly McDonald’s, but it wasn’t all McDonald’s.  I also ate at Carl’s Jr., KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King and a couple of others.  I ate at least one or two meals at McDonald’s pretty much every day.

Q: Was it difficult, eating nothing but fast food for a month? I don’t think I could do it.  In fact, I’m not sure I could eat nothing but fast food for a week.

A:  It got a little tiresome by the end.  I was bored with eating the same half-dozen meals over and over.  That’s why I thought it was ridiculous when Spurlock played up the idea that McDonald’s food is addicting.  Addictions are progressive.  People consume more and more of the addicting substance, despite the bad effects it’s having on their health.  After eating nothing but fast food for a month, I didn’t touch the stuff for awhile.  Addicting?  Give me a break.

Q:  Are you worried that you’ll be seen as an apologist for the fast-food industry?  After all, they’re not exactly selling health food. As you may recall, that’s one of the reasons I was hesitant to even be interviewed for this movie.

A:  No, they’re not selling health food, and I don’t portray it as health food in this film.  In fact, when I met with some people from McDonald’s to get permission to shoot in their restaurants, I made it clear I wasn’t going to claim their food is good for you.

But it doesn’t have to be bad for you either if you’re smart about the choices you make, and that’s one of the main points I was trying to make in this film.  You can make good choices or bad choices at McDonald’s, just like you can make good choices or bad choices in the grocery store.  People are going to eat fast food in today’s society, like it or not, so they may as well learn to make reasonably smart choices.

Q:  And McDonald’s had nothing to do with this film being made?

A:  Other than giving me permission to shoot in their restaurants, no.  And even that took some doing on my part.  After what Spurlock did to them, they were understandably a bit skittish about allowing some guy with a camera to come in and film himself eating there.

Q:  So you lost weight on a fast-food diet, and you demonstrate pretty convincingly that Morgan Spurlock’s numbers don’t add up.  But there’s a whole lot more to this film than just disputing Super Size Me.

A:  Absolutely.  Once I started working on this film and doing some research into the so-called obesity epidemic and what’s really causing it, and especially once I started looking into the research on fat and cholesterol and heart disease, I was stunned at how much nonsense passes for real science these days.  Most of the dietary advice we’ve been hearing for the past 40 years is just plain wrong.  In fact, it’s worse than wrong; it’s harmful. That’s when it began to sink in with me that this film should be way more than just a reply to Super Size Me.  I changed the focus of the film significantly as I went along.

Q:  You call it the “so-called” obesity epidemic.  Do you really believe there is no obesity epidemic?

A:  You and I have already debated this one back and forth, so let me clarify my position for your readers.  There are definitely more fat people in America now than when I was a kid.  Look around any busy public place, and you’ll see these big, heavy people going by.  So I’m not disputing that we’ve gotten fatter.

But when I look around, say, a mall or an airport, most of the people I see don’t look overweight to me, so I don’t buy this notion that two-thirds of us are overweight.  And I certainly don’t think a quarter of all Americans are obese.  The figures have been wildly exaggerated, both by the Centers for Disease Control and by the weight-loss industry, each for their own reasons.

Q:  What are those reasons?  What do they gain by exaggerating the numbers?

A:  The CDC needs epidemics to justify their budget.  They were originally created to wipe out real diseases, things like polio and influenza and malaria.  Well, you’re not going to catch obesity from some virus floating around, you’re not going to get it from the person sitting next to you, so frankly, I don’t think this is even the CDC’s problem to tackle.

The weight-loss industry wants obesity declared a disease so they can get insurance reimbursements for weight-loss treatments and weight-loss drugs.  But to make that happen, they’ve got to create the impression of this looming national health crisis.  So they use stupid measurements like the Body Mass Index to juke up the statistics.  And by focusing on people’s weight or BMI, they’re going after the wrong problem.

Q:  In your film, you say the real epidemic is high blood sugar.  Why do you say that?

On your blog, you frequently write about how researchers often confuse correlation with causation.  That’s what I think has happened with the so-called obesity epidemic; they’ve confused a cause with a symptom.   We know fat people tend to have more health problems, so they decided being fat is the cause of all these health problems.  But being fat isn’t the cause; it’s a symptom.  And it’s also possible to be fat and healthy.

I’m a walking example of that.  A typical checkup for me goes something like this:  “Well let’s see … blood pressure is good, blood sugar is normal, resting heart rate is very good, triglycerides are excellent, HDL is outstanding, stress-test results are excellent, muscle tone is very good.  You’re healthy as a horse, Mr. Naughton.  But you really should go on a low-fat diet and try to lose 20 or 30 pounds.”  And I’m usually hearing this from some doctor who probably couldn’t keep up with me on one of my five-mile hikes.

So again, I don’t think carrying around some extra weight is a health hazard all by itself.  But high blood sugar is unhealthy, no doubt about it.  And we’ve got millions and millions of people these days walking around with high blood sugar.  Just look at the skyrocketing rate of type II diabetes over the past few decades.

We have people in my family who are thin and look good in their clothes, but they have type II diabetes.  So I think it’s misguided to focus so much on being fat or thin.  The focus should be on keeping your blood sugar normal.  Do that and the weight will probably take care of itself over time.

Q:  You blame the blood-sugar problems we have today on poor old George McGovern.

A:  Well, he was certainly part of it.  Going back at least as far as Ancel Keys, we’ve had this misguided attempt to reduce heart disease by telling people to cut back on dietary fat, or to avoid animal fats and switch to vegetable fats.  It didn’t seem to occur to any of them back then that heart disease rates were going up precisely at the same time that people were consuming less animal fat and more of these Frankenstein vegetable fats, like chemically processed corn oil and soybean oil and margarine.

So George McGovern didn’t start the anti-fat campaign, but unfortunately he gave it the official stamp of approval from the federal government, and that’s when a lot of people began to take it seriously.  That’s when you couldn’t walk into a bookstore or open a newspaper without seeing all these books and articles telling us to cut back on fat and eat more whole grains.  So we became a nation of starch-eaters, and the rest is history.

Q:  You make several references to Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories in your film.  How much influence did Gary’s book have on the direction of the film?

A:  I was already finished with my third edit of Fat Head when Good Calories, Bad Calories hit the bookstores, although I had read some of Gary’s articles while researching the film, and those were certainly eye-opening.

When I finally read Good Calories, Bad Calories, it blew me away.  I finally understood, at the cellular and hormonal level, how carbohydrates had made me fat over the years, and why low-fat diets always made me ravenously hungry and depressed.

I finally understood why there are so many frustrated dieters in the world, trying to lose fat on diets that are basically telling their bodies to store fat.  And I understood why people like my wife and son can’t seem to gain weight no matter what they eat.  They’re not skinny because they’re more disciplined than the rest of us; they just have bodies that reach homeostasis at a very low level of fat accumulation.  If my wife is hungry, she eats.  She doesn’t starve herself into being thin.

So I did some fairly substantial cutting to make room for what I learned from Gary’s book.  And after you put me in touch with him, he generously agreed to proof the script for technical accuracy.  I knew I’d have to simplify the science quite a bit in order to translate it into a film for the general public, but I wanted to avoid simplifying to the point of being incorrect.  Gary helped me keep it simple, but accurate.

Q:  Gary’s work is highlighted in the film, but he doesn’t appear in any interviews.  Were you unable to work out the logistics for an interview?

A:  I would’ve happily flown to New York or wherever to get Gary on film, and he was open to the idea, but his publisher wasn’t crazy about the idea of him appearing in a film that’s billed as a comedy-documentary.  There are a lot of silly moments in this film, all those animated cartoon bits and such, and his publisher was afraid it would detract from Gary’s credibility among the white-coat crowd.

And I think his publisher probably made the right call.  Much as I would’ve loved to have Gary talk about his own work in my film, I understand that his mission right now is to convince the medical and academic types that the prevailing dietary theories are wrong, and I wouldn’t want to be responsible for giving those people any reason to ignore him.  So he can attack their misguided theories with serious science, and I’ll attack them with humor.  Two fronts, same battle.

Q:  Speaking of humor, there’s quite a lot of it in your film.  How much of that was planned, and how much of it just happened?

A:  I’d always planned for this to be a comedy, even back when it was going to be a short piece about how we treat fat people.  I spent a lot of years as a traveling standup comedian, and I like producing funny material.  It comes naturally to me.

But the humor also serves an important, calculated purpose:  it makes people want to watch the film.  Funny documentaries get far more attention on average than serious documentaries.  They get more press coverage, and they sell more copies.

So a lot of the humor was planned, definitely.  The animations, the songs, the scenes where I parody Spurlock, those were all by design.  But some of the funniest moments were a matter of good, old-fashioned luck.  I conducted several hours of person-on-the-street interviews, and some people just happened to be funny.  That’s luck.  On the other hand, some people were funny when I had the lens cap on, or didn’t notice the battery had gone dead.  That’s bad luck.  I had more good luck than bad, so I’ll take it.

Q:  As you explain to the viewers near the end of the film, I encouraged you to try a high-fat, very low-carb diet to see what would happen with your lipids.  You went on what you called a “saturated-fat pigout” for a month, and your total cholesterol went down and your HDL went up, as I predicted.  But you didn’t mention what happened with your weight during that month.  Did you gain or lose?

A:  Yes, after our first interview, you told me off-camera that I could prove to myself that the Lipid Hypothesis was wrong, and I did, to my great relief.  To tell you the truth, I was kind of sweating it out, waiting for the lab results to come back.  I believed what you were telling me, but after a month of eating burgers and steaks and bacon and eggs, there was part of me wondering if I was going to get back a lipid panel that would just say “You’re going to die” across the top.  If my cholesterol numbers had gone all out of whack, it wouldn’t have done very much for the premise of my film.  But as you predicted, the numbers all improved.

To answer your question, I lost two pounds during that month.  That doesn’t sound like much, but I was eating a lot of high-fat, high-calorie food, and I wasn’t exercising much because I was swamped with work, so the fact that I lost any weight at all impressed me.

Q:  So it wasn’t just a matter of counting calories.

A:  It couldn’t be just about the calories.  If you go by the simple calories-in, calories-out equation the so-called experts are always harping on about, I should’ve gained weight during that month.

I kind of repeated that experiment again later.  I was booked on a cruise ship for five weeks as a comedian, and of course cruises are notorious for being diet-busters.  So during those five weeks, I ate burgers, steaks, bacon, sausage, eggs, seafood and salads with bleu cheese dressing.  I didn’t touch bread or potatoes or rice.   I limited my alcohol consumption to a little red wine here and there.  Since the performers work at night, on a lot of days I had a fourth meal after midnight.  There’s no way this was a low-calorie diet in disguise, as some of the low-carb critics like to claim.  At the end of the five weeks, I weighed exactly the same.  Calories in versus calories out can’t explain that result.

Q:  How did working on this film change your own dietary habits?

A:  I used to more or less limit my carbs, but I also granted myself a lot of “special occasion” days where I had the bagel, or the lasagna, or the chicken-fried steak.  After all the books and articles I read for this film, and especially after reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, I’m a lot stricter, and frankly, it’s easier to pass up those foods.  If I look at a baked potato, I see a big glob of sugar sitting there.

I also don’t worry about saturated fats and cholesterol at all.  In fact, I believe they’re good for me.   I’ve noticed that when the flu goes around, or when practically everybody I know has a cold, I pretty much never come down with anything.  Maybe it’s just a placebo effect, but I truly believe the butter and the coconut oil and the egg yolks and the beef fat I consume keep my immune system strong.

Q:  What kind of reactions are you getting from people who’ve seen the film?

A:  That’s what is really gratifying, seeing how this film affects other people.  My composer swore off sugar and starch after working on the film, and he lost 15 pounds.  Same thing happened with my sound engineer.  He realized his morning bowl of whole-grain cereal wasn’t actually good for him, and he switched back to eating meat and eggs for the first time in decades.  He lost 15 pounds, which is great, but even more importantly, he was able to stop taking Prilosec.  He’d been taking that stuff every day for years.  All of his digestive disorders are gone, and he feels healthy.  At our premiere party, he told me this film had literally changed his life.

Q:  So what’s happening with the film now?  What’s next?

A:  Now it’s up to the distributors.  The U.S. distributor is getting the film into the big video stores and department stores, and it’s already selling on Amazon.  The international distributor is selling to the DVD and TV markets in a couple dozen countries.  It turned out the world-wide premiere was on a satellite network in Israel back in December.  I started getting all these emails from people in Israel, asking me questions about the film, or just wanting to know when they could buy it on DVD.

Q:  Any plans for a follow-up film, or a film on a different topic?

A:  I have some ideas for future projects, but no concrete plans yet.  I bankrolled Fat Head myself, so first I have to wait and see if it generates a healthy profit.  If it does, I’ll definitely make another film.  This project took an incredible amount of work, way more work than I thought it would be when I started it, but at the same time, it was a blast.  Other than being on stage doing standup comedy, this is about as much fun as I’ve ever had while working.

Thanks very much, Tom.

Tom has generously agreed to answer any questions any of you might have about his film, so fire away in the comments section, and I’ll get them to Tom.

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.

He sobered up in Daly City, about 15 miles south. It was nearly four in the morning. The air was cool, slightly damp from the fog, and Karnazes was in a residential neighborhood, burping tequila, with no pants on. He felt ridiculous, but it brought a smile to his face. He hadn’t had this much fun in a long time. So he decided to keep running.

When the sun came up, Karnazes was trotting south along Route 1, heading toward Santa Cruz. He had covered 30 miles. In the process, he’d had a blinding realization: There were untapped reservoirs within him. It was like a religious conversion. He had been born again as a long-distance runner. More than anything else now, he wanted to find out how far he could go. But at that exact moment, what he really needed to do was stop. He called his wife from a pay phone, and an hour later she found him in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. He passed out in the car on the way home.

Now (or even when I was 30 years old) I couldn’t simply throw on an old pair of sneakers, head out the door, and run 30 miles.  Drunk or sober.  I would have to be worse than slobbering drunk to even consider it.  I’m not sure I could throw on a pair of sneakers any time in my life and even walk 30 miles, much less run them.  Not without training for it, and the article implies that he was not previously a runner. This is obviously a guy who is just put together right for the sport of running.  I don’t know what the ultimate effect will be on his knees and hips, but for now, he seems to be doing okay.  As I say, he’s put together right for it.

This same article lists the 12 secrets to his success.  I was keen to see if he had any dietary advice, and sure enough he did.  Number 4 on the list.

4. EAT JUNK – LOTS OF IT
You wouldn’t believe the stuff Karnazes consumes on a run. He carries a cell phone and regularly orders an extra-large Hawaiian pizza. The delivery car waits for him at an intersection, and when he gets there he grabs the pie and rams the whole thing down his gullet on the go. The trick: Roll it up for easy scarfing. He’ll chase the pizza with cheesecake, cinnamon buns, chocolate éclairs, and all-natural cookies. The high-fat pig-out fuels Karnazes’ long jaunts, which can burn more than 9,000 calories a day. What he needs is massive amounts of energy, and fat contains roughly twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates. Hence, pizza and éclairs…

I’ve received numerous emails and comments about the high-calorie, high-carb diet that Michael Phelps consumed on his way to eight Olympic gold medals.   What I tried to tell all those who communicated with me about it is that it is possible to eat this way if a) you’re young, and b) if you’re burning a zillion calories in intense physical activity.  As Mr. Phelps ages, he won’t be able to keep up the same intensity of activity.  If he continues to eat the way he does now, he will not be the better for it.  I would predict that he would become obese.  And it’s not just Mr. Phelps to whom this happens.  It’s called the ex-jock syndrome.  Many professional athletes struggle with obesity when their playing days are over.  There activity level falls but their food intake doesn’t.  And they pay the price.

But what about Dean Karnazes?  He is 44 years old, way beyond the age of most professional athletes who have retired and gotten fat.  Why has he escaped while eating the enormous amounts of high-carb foods he does.  A couple of reasons.  First, he is still active as evidenced by the 50 marathons in 50 days.  And, second, he doesn’t eat all the high-carb foods all the time. (I suspect that Michael Phelps doesn’t either.)  I intentionally left off the last part of his recommendation to eat lots of junk.  Here it is:

When he’s not in the midst of some record-breaking exploit, Karnazes maintains a monkish diet, eating grilled salmon five nights a week. He strictly avoids processed sugars and fried foods – no cookies or doughnuts. He even tries to steer clear of too much fruit because it contains a lot of sugar. He believes this approach – which nutritionists call a slow-carb diet – has reshaped him, lowering his body fat and building lean muscle. It also makes him look forward to running a race, because he can eat whatever he wants.

Apparently Mr. Karnazes is as smart as he is fit.  He eats everything that’s not red hot or nailed down while he’s running, but he eats what sounds a lot like a low-carb diet when he isn’t.  Which makes a lot of sense.  When you are burning the calories that he does on his long runs, the body will use up most anything you put into it.  And it doesn’t matter what it is.  I’m sure that due to his conditioning Mr. Karnazes is highly insulin sensitive and has low circulating insulin levels.  If you want to eat like he does, it’s a simple matter: run like he does.  Otherwise, you’re better off eating like he does when he’s laying around the house.

Olmsted County, MN

A recent paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine should give pause to those dispensing statins like candy. According to some fairly persuasive autopsy data, it appears that the rate of heart disease may be back on the rise after being in a slow decline over the past 40 years.

In Olmsted County, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, autopsies are much more common than in other parts of the country. So much so that the autopsy records of this county are often used in scientific inquiry as a surrogate for the country as a whole. Autopsies used to be more common nationwide but had fallen in 2003 to only 8.3 percent of deaths. Autopsies are conducted in Olmsted County at rates an order of magnitude greater than they are throughout the rest of the country.

Autopsy studies are terrific for gathering data because you don’t have to guess what disease someone had, you can actually see it. But, great as autopsy studies are for gathering data on a given person, they can be less than stellar when looking at the larger picture. Since autopsies are done on people who have died and were presumably not in very good health right before they died, it’s often difficult to extrapolate the findings to the living, breathing, more healthy population. The researchers at Omsted County got around this problem.

From 1981 through 2004 3,237 people in Olmsted County aged 16-64 years died of all causes. Of these, 515 died of ‘unnatural’ causes, defined as suicide, accidental, homicide or a manner that could not be determined. Of these 515, 493 (96%) were autopsied. The fact that these subjects died of unnatural causes is what gives the data its validity. Were these patients who died in the hospital after lengthy illnesses, it would be hard to apply the findings to citizens at large. The subjects of this study, however, died not of illness but of some other more violent cause. Assuming they were representative of the rest of the ‘healthy’ people walking around, what their coronary arteries showed would be of interest. Of these 493 subjects who died of unnatural causes, 82 had their coronary arteries graded during autopsy. (Coronary anatomy grading is an analysis based on degree of coronary artery plaque adjusted for age and sex that basically describes the severity of atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries.)

From the start of the study in 1981 until 1997 the autopsy data showed a slow decline in the number of people with evidence of coronary artery disease and in the number of people with high-grade (bad) coronary artery disease. The autopsy data pretty much mirrored the national data showing a slow, steady decline. Then right after 1997 things changed.

From 1997 through 2004 there was a steady increase in the number of people with signs of coronary disease. Beginning in 2001 the number of people with high-grade disease began increasing. You can see this graphically in the chart below.

The authors of the study conclude that

Declines in the prevalence of CAD at autopsy over the 1981-2004 period taken as a whole reinforce the argument that 4 decades of declines in heart disease mortality largely reflect reductions in disease incidence (ie, reductions in CAD incidence more than offset any rise in prevalence from improved survival among persons with CAD). Our finding that temporal declines in the grade of CAD at autopsy have ended, together with suggestive evidence that declines have recently reversed, provides some of the first data to support increasing concerns that declines in heart disease mortality may not continue.

What do they think is causing this increase?

The extent to which recent trends are attributable to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes mellitus awaits further investigation.

If you look at the graph below you can see that deaths from heart disease peaked in about 1950 and leveled off for a few years until around 1968 when they started a much steeper decline. In 1966 the surgeon general issued the famous warning that is still on all cigarette packages. Even before that drastic step was taken there was much in the news about the dangers of smoking and people began to quit. Most experts consider the decline in incidence of heart disease (which mirrors the graph below but lags behind it) as a consequence of the fall off in the number of people who smoke.

Now let’s look at all this data and put on our thinking caps. We know – everyone knows – that smoking is a major risk factor for heart disease. We know that smoking is on the decline and so has been heart disease, which makes sense. We also know that doctors every where have been prescribing statin drugs like crazy to anyone with even a tiny elevation of serum cholesterol levels. The paper tells us that virtually all the people in Olmsted County – including the ones who died of unnatural causes – are patients of the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic is a hotbed of statinators.

So, we can reasonably conclude that many of these people dying unnatural deaths were probably on statin drugs. (The average age of the subjects was 36 years with a standard deviation of 14 years, meaning that plenty were middle aged and ripe for statin prescriptions.) And the reversal in the many-year-long decline in heart disease occurred just about the time that the statinators really got going.

What we can tell from our calculating is that people are smoking less, taking statins and developing more heart disease. I’m not saying that the statins are necessarily causing heart disease, but I certainly don’t think they’re doing a whole lot to prevent it either. And since we know that statin drugs consume a huge portion of national medical bill, why do we continue to take them by the handful?

The authors of this study sort of backhandedly blame the increase on the increasing rates of both diabetes and obesity. But most people who are diabetic and obese are middle aged, and what statinator worth his/her salt wouldn’t have one of these patients on a statin? It would seem to me that if statins have even a fraction of the power to prevent heart disease that most statinators believe they do, these figures showing the extent of coronary disease would still be going down and not up. It certainly makes one wonder.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post showing how the press fails to mention low-carb diets in weight loss stories, focusing instead on exercise or some other facet of an individual’s quest to lose weight and improve health. Today we’ll look at how the press, in an effort to minimize the untoward effects of carbohydrates on health, sometimes simply misrepresents the true outcome of studies.

A week or so ago a Swedish study (click here for a pdf) was released looking at the short term effects on the liver of a diet high in fast food. ABC News reported the study. Let’s first look at what the study was all about and what the data showed, then we’ll see how ABC reported it. By looking carefully at what ABC did to misrepresent the study, we can arm ourselves with the knowledge to identify this kind of press bias in future reporting.

First the study.

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of fast-food hyperalimentation (overeating) on liver enzymes and fat accumulation in liver cells. The specific liver enzyme in question was alanine aminotransferase (ALT), one of the liver enzymes routinely measured on standardize lab panels. Over the past couple of decades the prevalence of elevated ALT in routine labs has about doubled. Elevations of ALT are associated with an increased incidence of metabolic syndrome and all its attendant features, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The Swedish researchers wanted to see if force feeding young, healthy subjects a diet high in fast food over a four week period would increase blood levels of ALT and increase the fatty infiltration of their livers.

Eighteen healthy subjects (12 males, 6 females) with an average age of 26 years were to try to increase their body weight by 5-15 percent in 28 days by adding two large fast-food meals daily in an effort to double their normal caloric intake. Researchers matched a similar control group for comparison.

The subjects took to their assignment with a vengeance. The average intake soared from 2273 kcal/day to 5753 kcal/day, a 153 percent increase! This caloric increase was driven primarily from an increase in fat, the consumption of which skyrocketed from 87 g/day to 261 grams per day (200% increase). Carbohydrate intake increased from about 275 g/day to 644 g/day (134% increase). And protein went up from 89 g/day to 180 g/day (102% increase). Sugar intake increased by 200%.

As a percentage of total calories fat rose from 36% to 43%. Carbs decreased from 48% to 45%. Protein also decreased from 16% to 12% of total caloric intake. So although the actual gram amounts of protein and carb went up as the subjects gorged on fast foods, their fractional percentage of the total calories went down.

What happened?

Over the four weeks subjects on the high-fast-food diet increased their weight by 9.5 percent, their serum ALT levels by 334 percent, and the content of fat in their livers by 155 percent. The control group showed no changes.

When the researchers ran the standard statistical analysis to determine which – if any – of the specific macronutrients correlated most directly with the increase in ALT, they discovered that

the average consumption of fat or proteins during the 3 days at the end of the first or third week weeks was unrelated to changes in ALT. [Blood was drawn in the non-fasting state at the end of the first and third weeks to more accurately monitor ALT levels.] However, the maximal ALT/baseline ratio correlated with carbohydrate intake during the third week.

One could, I suppose, argue with the standard statistical analysis program the researchers used to determine this correlation, but the fact remains that the researchers did report in the study as quoted above that the increase in carbohydrate intake was the driving force behind the elevation in ALT, not the increase in either protein or fat. You might imagine that those reporting the study would mention this finding.

Before we get to the biased article by ABC, let’s take a look at a more balanced piece of reporting by Yahoo! News. Marlow Hood, the Yahoo reporter, not only read the study but took the time to track down the author and interview him as to his findings. (As most of you who are long-time readers of this blog should know, I’m always leery of study authors’ interviews with the press because the conclusions these authors often report haven’t been run through the tempering of the peer-review process and in many cases don’t jibe with what the actual study shows. In this case, however, it did.)

Said Frederik Nystrom, the lead researcher

signs of liver damage were linked to carbohydrates was another key finding…

It was not the fat in the hamburgers, it was rather the sugar in the coke…

Dr. Nystrom also pointed out another surprising finding (surprising only to those, I suppose, who don’t understand lipid biology) that wasn’t included in this study but will be published in a future paper.

We found that healthy HDL cholesterol actually increased over the four-week period — this was very counter-intuitive.

The study showed that the increase in saturated fat correlated with the increase in healthy cholesterol.

Apparently Dr. Nystrom isn’t aware that HDL-cholesterol levels are fat dependent. In other words, increasing fat in the diet, particularly saturated fat, increases HDL-C levels.

Now let’s look at how ABC News reported this study to see a masterpiece of deception.

After a gratuitous opening to the article and the briefest of descriptions of the methods of the study, Radha Chitale, the reporter, pulls out one of the most commonly-used methods of slanting a story: she interviews someone other than the author. In this case she interviewed Dr. Kieth-Thomas Ayoob, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Given what Dr. Ayoob says, one really wonders if he even looked at the study or if it were merely synopsized for him by the reporter during a phone call.

Here’s how the reporter led into Dr. Ayoob’s comments.

Studies have shown that a diet high in fat and calories — the magic recipe for delicious, greasy fast food — puts people at greater risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes, both of which can lead to cardiovascular diseases and heart failure.

But the Swedish study, the goal of which was to double calorie intake and increase body weight by about 15 percent, showed that the liver is also at risk when you roll up to the drive-through window.

Here is Dr. Ayoob’s take on the study in his own words.

The extra fat is the big enchilada here, the equivalent of about three sticks of butter daily. The liver is basically using its compensatory mechanism to accommodate all this extra stuff.

Say what?!?!?!

Than the reporter follows up with

The liver processes fats in the blood. Excessive calories and fats overload the organ, causing fat to build up in the liver cells and leading to liver damage.

Jesus wept.

Not no where, not no how in this report does it say anywhere that carbs were the cause of the problem, which is the point the actual authors of the study were at pains to make.

If one were to read only the ABC News report, one would come away with the notion that this study shows in dramatic fashion how an increased fat intake can ruin a liver in only four weeks. But, as we saw above, that isn’t the case at all as shown by the study and confirmed by the study’s lead author. It just one more way that the media disses low-carb diets or the idea that excess carbs may actually be harmful by misrepresenting research reports.

An interesting corroborating side note to this study is found in one of the references. I’m sure these findings were a big surprise to the researchers running the analysis of the data, so they did what all researchers do in the same situation: they looked in the medical literature to try to get a handle on the situation. One of their references is to a study done at Johns Hopkins published a couple of years ago in Digestive Diseases and Sciences. In this study researchers found that the fatty infiltration and inflammation of the livers of morbidly obese patients who underwent bariatric surgery correlated with carbohydrate intake.

There were no significant associations between either total caloric intake or protein intake and either steatosis, fibrosis, or inflammation. However, higher CHO [carbohydrate] intake was associated with significantly higher odds of inflammation, while higher fat intake was associated with significantly lower odds of inflammation. In conclusion, present dietary recommendations may worsen NAFLD [non-alcoholic fatty diver disease] histopathology.

On another note, the Swedish fast-food study provides us with much more interesting material than the fact that excess carb intake runs up serum ALT levels. In fact this study gives us a glimpse into the subject of the existence of a metabolic advantage. It will be the subject of the next post.

I’ve learned from Tom Naughton that his new movie is titled Fat Head and carries the tagline You’ve been fed a load of bologna. Tom has also graciously agreed to answer all your questions about the movie so fire away. Submit any questions you might have as comments, and Tom will answer them in a blog post within a few days.

I’m putting up the rest of the clips from the movie on today’s post.

The sequence of these clips as they will appear in the movie is as follows:

1. Blaming Fast Food
2. Spurlockian Bolagna
3. The Guy from CSPI
4. Big Fat Lies
5. McGovern Report

I’m posting these in kind of reverse order. I put up the last two on yesterday’s post.

Here are clips 1 through 3:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And here is the clip that contains one of the most perceptive lines in all of moviedom. It’s so typical of do-gooders such as the jerks at CSPI, and it runs rampant in our own government. It’s the idea that anyone producing and/or selling a product is inherently evil, and that we, the consuming public, are stupid, and, consequently, are desperately in need of do-gooders and governmental regulatory bodies to protect us from our own brainlessness. Because, after all, we can’t possibly think for ourselves. Naughton captures this mindset perfectly in two lines from the Guy from CSPI. Watch for them. Beautiful.

Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A little over a year ago I wrote about how MD and I had been interviewed on camera for a documentary being made to respond to Morgan Spurlock’s popular movie Super Size Me. Tom Naughton, the producer of the anti-Super Size Me film, spent a few hours with us and even contributed to this blog with his answers to the many of the questions my readers had for him. Today I received word from Tom that the film is pretty much finished.

He sent me a few YouTubes of short segments of the movie so that readers could get a taste of what’s coming. I’ll post these over the next couple of days.

I think this will be a terrific flick (my appearance in it notwithstanding), and I urge everyone to spread the word. Let’s all send these YouTubes around to friends and family to generate as much interest as possible.

Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I would rather take a beating than eat fast food. I do know, however, that others enjoy it. I used to enjoy the taste of it myself even though I knew it was terrible for me, but now I’ve read so many bad things about it that I just about can’t bring myself to eat it.

While roaming through the web looking for other data I stumbled upon a blog that contains what I think is an incredibly useful load of info for anyone trying to stay on a diet of any kind and still indulge in fast food. The writer of this blog – a Calorie Counter – has undertaken a prodigious task, at least by my reckoning. He (I’m pretty sure it’s a he) has gone to the time and trouble to wade through all the nutritional information provided by the various purveyors of fast food and tabulated them all for comparison. The hamburgers compared to other hamburgers; the fries to other fries; the chicken sandwiches to other chicken sandwiches. (Click here for the charts)

Says the author:

I’ve compared the nutrition facts of the most popular foods from over 20 popular fast food restaurants to see how each restaurant’s version of the same food stacks up against the others. If this isn’t enough to convince you to eat less (or none) of this stuff, it will at least give you the information you need to make the better choice and avoid making the worst one. Enjoy…

Here is a sample showing the plain ol’ hamburgers from multiple fast food joints compared.

Now as if this mega load of work wasn’t enough, the author also made the comparison charts so that they could be ranked by nutrient. So, for example, if you want to see which of the hamburgers contains the most calories, you find the hamburger comparison chart and click ‘Calories’ and Voila! they will be ranked from least to most. If you want to find which of the chicken nuggets or pieces or, as the old ad says, parts (parts is parts) has the fewest carbs so you can see if it’s worth indulging, you click ‘Carbs’ and you have the chart below, arranged from fewest to most. Who would of thought Wendy’s 5 pc Chicken Nuggets contains the fewest grams of carbs? And who knew that the Arby’s 5 pc Chicken Tenders contains four times the carb of the Wendy’s? Not I.

I roamed through a couple of the fast food company nutritional information pages to do my due diligence before recommending these fast food comparison tables. I didn’t check with every one, but the ones I did check were on the money, so I’m pretty sure the author did a good job in listing the nutrients accurately.

Have fun playing with the charts and discovering just how nasty all that fast food you’ve eaten really is. There are a few other posts on this blog that are worthwhile, but, sadly, the author has bought into the idea that fat is bad, carbs are good (or at least aren’t responsible for weight gain) and that the only thing that matters is calories. Where have we heard that before?

Despite his being misguided in terms of what causes weight gain, the author has done us all a great service by making this material available. And even though I don’t eat fast foods, I appreciate his efforts. I have learned one thing, however. Whenever I take the notion to indulge in a little restaurant junk food, it seems that I always succumb to the onion rings. I always figured that they probably had a few grams of trans fats, but that the carbs weren’t all that bad. Not that bad?!?!? The lowest one of the bunch contains 45 grams of carbs, which is the equivalent of almost a quarter of a cup of sugar, not to mention 4.5 grams of trans fat. I hope this new knowledge tempers my enthusiasm the next time the onion ring demon begins to prey on my soul.

A reader wrote me about an ABC segment on a guy named Chicken Charlie who fries Twinkies, Oreos and anything else he can get his hands on it seems. And it looks like he’s eaten a few of his creations as well. He mentions that he is young and has a lot of time left to experiment. Looking at the crap he fries, I’m not so sure. Especially if he eats a lot of it.

Here is the link to the video. Enjoy if you can.

Hat tip: Joe Matasic

If you’re interested in a few other posts on deep-fried foods, click here, here and here.