As I was thumbing through the weekend edition of the Financial Times (my favorite newspaper) on a lazy Sunday morning, my eye fell on a little boxed off squib titled Dr Mehmet Oz on the January Detox (scroll to bottom to see the piece).  If I ran across something like this in a local daily newspaper, I wouldn’t think much about it, but in the venerable Financial Times?  Since we all know how much good the wonderful Dr. Oz has done Oprah (as evidenced by the photo to the left – were I she, I certainly wouldn’t be toasting him), I decided to read it to see what he had to recommend on detoxing.  I wasn’t disappointed.  He lives up to his billing.

How does Dr. Oz recommend we detoxify our livers?  Let’s read and see.

I like a simple cleansing fast as an easy, inexpensive means of flushing out toxins and rebooting the system (a juice detox, say, which involves a short-term diet of raw vegetables, fruit juices and water). But it is important to remember that detoxifying the liver, the organ responsible for detoxing our bodies, would take a month of healthy living.

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MD and I wish all of you a most prosperous and healthful New Year!

We’ve had a great time with family and friends over the holidays, but now it’s time to get back into the swing of things.  We ended the year last night with a great dinner for friends.  MD went all out on one of her mega dinners, which, of course, included foie gras, her all-time favorite food.  (That’s my serving of foie gras pictured on the left.  The little jelly-like stuff is a pomegranate pepper jelly that was out of this world and well worth the four or five carbs.)  We had a terrific time ringing out the old year and ringing in the new. I, myself, could have done with a few fewer glasses of wine and the champagne we drank to toast in the new year.

MD’s menu for our New Year’s Eve feast:

• Roasted red pepper soup
• Foie gras (cooked sous vide)
• Duck breast (cooked sous vide) with cabernet cherry reduction
• Golden beets
• Fresh herb salad with vinaigrette
• Epoisses (a soft French cheese)
• Poached pears (cooked sous vide) with pomegranate reduction and heavy cream

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The video below shows Chris Gardner, Ph.D., researcher from Stanford University, giving a presentation about the data he generated when he compared the Atkins diet to the Ornish diet, the Zone diet and the LEARN diet.  You all probably remember this study, which he published in JAMA in 2007, showing the low-carb diet brought about greater weight loss and better lab value improvement than the other three diets.

As you watch this long video (and you should watch it; it’s extremely entertaining and filled with a ton of good info), there are a few things you should note.

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The day after Labor Day (six days from today) our new book comes out, and our publisher finally gave us permission to excerpt it.  I’m going to post the entire introduction so you’ll know why we came to write this particular book.

The story you will read will be true and the names won’t be changed to protect the ‘innocent.’  Until the events transpired that you will soon be reading about, I was not especially a proponent of fast weight loss.  I mean a low-carb diet will make people lose weight quickly, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the people who used to come into my office saying, “I’ve got my high school reunion in a month.  How much weight can I lose by then?’  I always considered these as fairly ludicrous requests because the requesters clearly weren’t concerned about health issues, but simply about how they would look in the short run, without an eye to maintaining their lifestyle.

As a consequence of dealing with so many of these patients, I really developed an aversion to the notion of quick weight loss to meet some sort of deadline where appearance counted.  But, as with so many things in life, it’s easy to pontificate until you find yourself in the same position as the people to whom you’re pontificating.

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A paper appeared recently in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that seems to have a whole lot of people on edge.  If you read the press accounts of this study, you might think anyone stupid enough to follow a low-carb diet would be doomed to certain death from heart attack.  But is that the case?  Or is it simply another instance of the media either failing to understand how science works or, worse, misreporting to get a better story?

I suspect the latter, but before we get into it, I need to go over a few blog housekeeping issues.

As I’m sure everyone has noticed, the look of this blog has changed – as has the look of the entire website.  Our designer and tech guys have been struggling to get everything working right, but, finally, my incessant whining got to them, and they went ahead and put the thing up in its not-completed state.  Please bear with us – it will ultimately work as it’s supposed to.  If you are having a problem, send me a description in the comments section.  Make sure you tell me what kind of computer you’re using (Mac (Intel or pre-Intel)  or PC) and which browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.) so that the gurus will know what to do to fix it.

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