I’m going to tell you about the best low-carb book I’ve ever read. In fact, it’s exactly the book I wish I had written myself.  And I’ll tell you why I didn’t in a bit, but first I want to clear up a few misconceptions I may have spread in my last post.

I get feedback on the posts I write from three sources.  First, MD looks at them and tones them down if I’ve gone off on some sort of political tangent or if I’ve scattered in a bit of too colorful language.  After she gives me the go, I put the posts up and wait to see what the commenters have to say.  The third source for feedback is my friends, some MDs and/or PhDs and some not, who pick up the phone and call me.

MD okayed what I wrote. The readers who commented seemed to realize what I was trying to say.  But the phone calls were a different story.

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In 1976 the classic film Network starred Peter Finch as crazed anchorman Howard Beale who launched into his now-famous rant “I’m mad as hell…” on air and galvanized movie goers everywhere.  Even though Howard Beale is fictional, I often share his sentiments.

I got a call yesterday from an acquaintance who wanted to get together and talk to me “face to face.”  I’ve played golf and had a few drinks with this guy over the last couple of years, but that’s about it.  I agreed to meet him at a local coffee shop.

When we had our coffees in front of us – I, a full-strength, scalding hot Americano; he, a non-fat, decaf, double shot latte, just in case you’re wondering – we made small talk for a few minutes then he cut to the chase.  A look of despair came over him, and he confided to me that he was a type II diabetic and was in real trouble.  His doctor had been monitoring his HgbA1c levels for a couple of years, and lately they had been inexorably on the rise to the point at which drastic action was required.  What drastic action?  His doctor told him he was going to have to start insulin injections.

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A couple of weeks ago, through the agency of a friend, I ended up spending the evening in a commercial kitchen preparing food.  The restaurant was closed for business that night, but had a full kitchen going for the dozen or so people who turned out to try their hands at being chefs.  We all cooked various portions of a four or five course meal. That’s me at the left in my chef’s attire chopping scallions for garnish for one of the dishes.

Sad to say, but this wasn’t the first time I’ve ever labored in the back end of a restaurant.  Both MD and I are very familiar with those duties.  One of the truly bad moves of my financial life was investing in a franchise restaurant years ago.  I still don’t know what came over me, but whatever did, it cost me a lot of money.  I distinctly remember how it all happened.  I was sitting in the kitchen of our house in Little Rock going through the mail and came upon a magazine buried in the pile.  I don’t remember now what magazine it was, but it had an article on hot new restaurant concepts.  One of the hottest, and one that was taking Dallas by storm, was a Mexican restaurant franchise called ZuZu.  ZuZu Handmade Mexican Food, to be exact.

I read the article and inexplicably reached around behind me, picked up the phone and dialed the number to get more info.  (A phone call, I might mention, that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was all over.)  The person on the other end – a honcho from ZuZu corporate office in the Rolex Building in Dallas – painted a wonderful picture of restaurant ownership, and before I knew it, MD, our eldest son and I were headed to Dallas to see a ZuZu restaurant in the flesh and try the food.

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A study appeared this week sure to drive members of the low-fat and vegan tribes sprinting for their Protexid.

Ron Krauss and his group published a paper in the Articles in Press section of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) stating there is no evidence that saturated fat intake increases the risk for heart disease.  The paper, titled Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease, is not a study per se, but is a meta-analysis, a compilation of numerous studies looking at the relationship between saturated fat intake and the risk for developing heart disease.

As I’ve discussed before on these pages, meta-analyses are not my favorite types of studies.  I’ve attacked them when they’ve been used to ‘prove’ the low-fat diets are better, so I can’t very well embrace meta-analyses when they present a conclusion I agree with.  And I really can’t embrace meta-analyses when they are compilations of observational studies, which are themselves next to worthless.

For those who don’t know, meta-analyses are compilation studies in which researchers comb the medical literature for papers on a particular subject and then combine all the data  from the individual studies together into one large study.  This combining is often done to bring together a collection of studies, none of which contain data that has reached statistical significance, to see if the aggregate of all the data in the studies reaches statistical significance.  I think these types of meta-analyses are highly suspect, because they can lead to conclusions not warranted by the actual data.

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Synchronicity strikes again.  The seeds of this post were sown when Gary Taubes emailed me about a study published in early 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that I had seen at the time, briefly skimmed and tossed aside as worthless.  Gary agreed that the study was of little value, but notice that it contained a peculiar statement by the authors, an interesting admission about HDL, the lipophobe’s favorite lipoprotein.  And not only had the authors made this strange admission, but so had another prominent lipophobe who wrote the accompanying editorial.

I pulled the study, read it more thoroughly and still found it mediocre at best.  But I did come across the strange HDL statements that Gary had mentioned. (More about which later.)

As I was shaking my head over the amount of money spent on what was a truly abominable study, the synchronicity occurred.  I got a ding that I had a new email.  It was a notice from the American Heart Association telling me that this august body had deemed the very study I was holding in my hands as one of the ten most important papers published in 2009.  The sheer stupidity of it nearly took my breath away.

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