Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

As you can probably surmise from the above photo of me looking full of myself with printed manuscript in one hand (sans the recipe section) and a tasty libation in the other, we are finished with the book. At least the first phase. Next will come all the editorial discussions and consequent minor (we hope) changes. Then the copy editing (a real drag) followed by galleys (requiring yet another read), and then the actual printed hardback. All that aside, we are through for now, and our lives can get back to some semblance of normalcy (or at least as normal as our lives ever get).

We got the manuscript finished on time only to learn that our editor is backed up on another book project and won’t be able to get to ours for another week. So, says she, take another week. But we’re already finished. So, we’ll spend this week reading the manuscript from the beginning, a luxury we’ve never had before.

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Just a quick post to let everyone know that I’m still alive and kicking. MD and I are closing in on the deadline for our book so I have been consumed in a frenzy of writing. Writing the last parts of a book are like losing the last five pounds - the most difficult part of the whole process. All the stuff you don’t want to dig in and write you keep putting off until you’re at the end of the project, and then there it is, still there and staring you in the face.

MD is much more industrious on a daily basis than I. She plugs along writing a little every day whereas I jump in and write in large chunks. Since she has plugged along for a long time and gotten her sections written, she is living large right now. I, on the other hand, am binge writing for all I’m worth.

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MD and I just got back from the Nutrition & Metabolism meeting in Phoenix. I’ve been dilatory in posting and in putting up comments because the meeting and the pre- and post-meeting socializing (most of which was discussion of one another’s work and the status of the low-carb diet in academia) took up all of my non-sleeping time. And all the pre- and post-meeting socializing included both film and podcast interviews.

The Nutrition & Metabolism meeting is held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Society for Bariatric Physicians (ASBP). We skipped the ASBP meeting because we couldn’t take the time away from the book project we’re working on. As a result we missed a terrific presentation by Robert Wolfe, formerly of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, now at my alma mater, the University of Arkansas. Dr. Wolfe has done much of the work on protein metabolism and has shown in a number of papers that good things happen when protein is substituted for carbohydrate in the diet. When MD and I got there, Dr. Wolfe was in the hall trying to escape from a barrage of questioners. I listened in and learned, among other things, that his work with glucogenogenesis has shown that the newly minted glucose (made from protein) goes first into glycogen and from there into the circulation. I always thought it went directly into the blood stream from the liver, but work with carbon 13 tracing shows that it goes into glycogen first.

Before I had to get suited up for the first interview, Richard Feinman and I were able to slip off and have a cup of coffee.

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Another example of the difficulty experienced in resolving cognitive dissonance from today’s Wall Street Journal:

What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can’t trace the line from “this moment’s difficulties” to “my triumphant end.” But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don’t lose. She can’t figure out how to win, and she can’t accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn’t know how he did it!)

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