Link for complete cartoon by Erik Sansom

If you spend any time roaming around low-carb websites you will have stumbled upon posts about the now infamous Kimkins Diet. I haven’t made an in depth investigation into the situation, but from my brief readings it appears that an unscrupulous woman has been outed.

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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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Probably no laws of physics have been so over invoked and less understood than the laws of thermodynamics. Everyone it seems is using the laws of thermodynamics to justify every position imaginable in the field of weight loss. Journalists often throw out the laws of thermodynamics to prove or disprove dietary regimens they’re writing about. Authors of various blogs and other online sites rabbit on about how the laws of thermodynamics are aligned with their pet theories. And even worse, research scientists – who really should know better – more often than not misquote the laws of thermodynamics, especially when talking about the possibility of a dietary metabolic advantage. ‘It can’t be valid,’ they sniff, ‘it violates the laws of thermodynamics.’

So, I figured is was time to delve into these mysterious laws so that readers of this blog at least can know thermodynamic nonsense when they see it.

When you get a grasp of the laws of thermodynamics it becomes pretty easy to see how they can be confusing not only to the great unwashed masses but even to scientists who have never really taken the time to study them. Thermodynamics are seemingly simple at first glance, but the more you dig into them, the more complex they become. To see what I mean, take a look at the syllabus for the thermodynamics course at MIT and skim through a few of the lectures.

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Over the past few weeks I’ve taken some heat in the comments section for my writing that weight loss or weight gain involves more than a simple accounting for calories. The entirety of mainstream medicine and nutrition believe that calories are the only thing that counts and that a low-carb diet is nothing more than a clever way to get people to cut calories. Weight loss on low-carb diets, so they say, occurs only because subjects following low-carb diets reduce their caloric intake. A calorie is a calorie is a calorie they say. But is it?

I could argue that this idea isn’t necessarily true because of a number of recent studies that have shown that subjects following low-carb diets actually lose more weight than their counterparts on low-fat, high carb diets despite the fact that the low-carbers consumed considerably more calories. But instead of going through these modern day studies, let’s go back and look at a couple of earlier famous studies to see what we can learn.

ANCEL KEYS STUDY

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