Q1 2008 #1 best seller

While working on the next post about low-carb and calories it dawned on me that I hadn’t posted the best seller list for the first quarter of 2008. I decided to take a break from the serious stuff for a bit, go through the Amazon.com records, and whip it out.

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George L. Blackburn, M.D.

This is going to be a two-part post. Today’s post will be the history. Tomorrow’s post will be the outrage.

Last year I initiated the Reckless Award named for Dr. John Reckless, the British physician who suggested that statins should be put in the drinking water. The award goes to the person who makes the most outrageous recommendations for statin drug use. Now comes the second such award, the Blackburn Award given to the person who makes the most feckless, stupid, dogmatic nutritional statement imaginable. The award is named after Harvard associate professor George L. Blackburn, M.D. Dr. Blackburn is the Chief of the Nutritional/Metabolism Laboratory, and Director of the Center for the Study of Nutrition Medicine, which are affiliated with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts.

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I’ve come to you with a tale of a doctor who cried wolf. I’m drowning in comments, and I can no longer keep up with personal responses. I know, I know, I’ve said that before. That’s where the crying wolf part comes in. When I wrote those words before, I tried, but I couldn’t let go. I felt compelled to answer at least 95 percent of the comments.

Right now I’ve got over 100 comments stacked up – the preponderance of which aren’t really comments, but are questions from readers expecting answers. Unlike my good friend Anthony Colpo, I don’t know everything, so I often have to spend effort reading or pulling papers to give an intelligent, accurate answer, all of which takes time. A lot of time. Often it boils down to do I take the time to write a new post or do I take the time to answer the comments (read: questions)? Because I can’t do both. And I can tell you, I would prefer to post.

I get about 60 comments (questions) per day that I have to deal with. And since this blog contains so much content written over the past two plus years, I get a lot of readers through the various search engines. When these readers enter the blog, they often hit on older posts and submit comments (questions) on those older posts. So if you see that a new post has only 20-30 comments, that doesn’t mean that’s all the comments I had to deal with that day.

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Q4 2007 #1 best seller

Once again it’s time to see what books readers of this blog are reading. Or at least what they are purchasing from Amazon.com by going through this site. The rules are that I don’t include any books that have my or MD’s name as writer or co-writer.

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I had a question from a friend today about migraine headaches. I remembered reading about them in Dr. Larry McCleary’s new book The Brain Trust Program, so I thumbed through the book to see what he had to say. (I had read the book in manuscript form, but couldn’t remember the specific recommendation for migraine headaches.) I became engrossed in the material all over again, and after a couple of hours of reading it dawned on me that I hadn’t reviewed the book for this blog.

First, a bit of disclosure. Dr. McCleary is a good friend of mine as well as a business partner for a number of years. And MD and I wrote the Introduction to his book. But we didn’t write it because he was a friend and partner, but because the book is so good.

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