I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the paper a colleague from Europe emailed me this morning. It was from the journal Obesity Reviews, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity (IASO). The IASO is the international academic obesity research society, and as such, it is mired in all the mainstream misconceptions of the causes and proper treatment of obesity. Obesity Reviews is edited by Arne Astrup, the Danish obesity researcher who is a staunch believer in and supporter of the low-fat diet as the best therapeutic tool in the battle against obesity. And Obesity Reviews is the very journal in which George Bray launched his misguided jihad against Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

The paper, which isn’t published yet, is titled:

Read more »

Dr. Dean Ornish never misses an opportunity to worm his way into print. You’ve got to give him credit: he is a self promoter par excellence. When John Tierney posted twice on his New York Times blog about the Israeli study that I posted on previously, Ornish couldn’t resist. He asked if he could post another take on the study. Full post here.

Here is a point he made that readers of this blog (mine) should find amusing. And unbelievable.

What I’d like to focus on here is an encouraging phenomenon that I’ve been predicting for some time: the convergence of dietary recommendations. While people who promote different diets like to accentuate the differences between them, there is actually an evolving consensus of what constitutes a healthy way of eating for most people. While some significant differences remain, a greater agreement is emerging among nutrition experts than most people realize.

Read more »

During my Monday morning troll of the medical literature I came across a paper in Nutrition Research showing that a semi-sort-of low-carb diet improves lipid profiles significantly better than does a low-fat diet.

The researchers who performed this study are a tad more enlightened that the normal run-of-the-mill lot we typically find doing this sort of work in that these folks looked at the lipid parameters most likely to be valid, if the lipid hypothesis is ever proven: triglycerides, HDL-cholesterol (HDL), and the number of small, dense LDL-cholesterol (LDL) particles.

Before we get into the study results, I want to take a bit to go over the problems that bedevil anyone trying to study diet. Macronutrients – fat, protein and carbohydrate – exert numerous effects on metabolism. And so do calories. The problem is in determining which of these variables causes the effect in question. If we place two groups of subjects on differing diets, one on a low-carb, high-fat diet and the other on a low-fat, high-carb diet, and we keep the calories the same in both groups, and we find that those subjects on the low-carb diet reduce their triglycerides, what does that tell us. Most of us will conclude that the reduction in carbs brought about the effect. But did it? It could just as easily have been the increase in fat.

Read more »

.

A recent article on the popular online news site AlterNet delves into the bogus science underlying the lipid hypothesis. It’s nice to see the word starting to spread.

The entire piece is a great read, and I encourage you to read it through. I’ll give a few excerpts just to give you the flavor.

Quoting a famous Canadian report concerning the Framingham Study: Read more »

Harvard strikes again.

The February 2008 issue of the Harvard Heart Letter (subscription only) contains an article titled Triglycerides: A Big Fat Problem. The article discusses the correlation of elevated triglyceride levels with the development of coronary artery disease, then lists eight methods for reducing elevated triglyceride levels. It’s this list I want to discuss, but first let’s consider what triglycerides are and what they do.

Triglycerides are storage fats composed of three fatty acid chains hooked onto a glycerol (a 3-carbon carbohydrate) molecule. Fats travel in the blood as triglycerides and are stored in the cells as triglycerides. Each time a triglyceride moves into or out of a cell, the three fatty acids must first be removed from the glycerol backbone. After the fatty acids move across the cell membrane into or out of the cell, the fatty acids are then reattached in a process called esterification. (The particular bond between the fatty acids and the glycerol molecule is called an ester bond.)

Read more »