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

I found an intriguing study in the Advanced Online Publication section of the International Journal of Obestiy.  (Currently you can download the full text of the article free here.  Often these articles go unfree once they are published, so grab it in pdf while you can.)  The paper shows the value of adding a couple of eggs to not just a low-carb diet, but to any calorically restricted diet.

The authors point out that since different foods confer different degrees of satiety (i.e., meat: a lot; pasta: not much), a diet composed of foods with higher satiety values might just help people lose weight more easily.  Well, duh.  Those of us in the low-carb biz have been saying that for years since low-carb diets are so much more satiating than high-carb diets, and, consequently, those who follow low-carb diets tend to spontaneously reduce their caloric intake.  Of course the lipophobes out there all then shout that the extra fat and cholesterol are going to clog the arteries of anyone following a low-carb diet.

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Dinner tonight at Casa Eades

Last Sunday the New York Times published a color spread on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data on the changes in food consumption in this country between 1970 and 2006, which got me to musing.

To the uninformed, which, sadly, probably means most people working in the nutrition industry and even those employed in a nutritional capacity at the USDA, these changes (all save two) seem to be in a positive direction. The intake of dairy products has decreased; the intake of vegetables has increased; the intake of red meat has fallen; the intake of fish, chicken and skyrocketed; the intake of fruit is up; the intake of grains has increased markedly; and the intake of vegetable fats has almost doubled. The only two negatives are that sugar and sweeteners have increased and overall food consumption has gone up by about 11 percent, or an addition 1.8 pounds per person per week.

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The May 2008 issue of Obesity Reviews, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, contained a review written by George Bray, M.D. of Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories (GCBC). Gary Taubes has written a rebuttal that will appear in this same journal. Before we get to Gary’s response, I would like to spend a little time on Bray’s review, which I found interesting and troubling on a number of fronts.

Most reviews of books in academic journals are of academic books and are, at most, a page and a half, maybe two pages, long. The Bray review of GCBC was 13 pages long, including two plus pages of citations. And this for what is basically a popular book written for a general audience, not an academic tome. In all the reading I do of the medical literature, I’ve never seen a book review come even close to this in terms of length and comprehensiveness. Obviously Taubes’ work struck a chord.

George Bray, M.D. is probably the most renowned figure in the field of obesity research today. He is the Boyd Professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center (and former executive director) in Baton Rouge, LA; he holds numerous other professorships at various academic institutions; he has held leadership positions in virtually every academic obesity organization in existence; he has authored or co-authored more than 500 scientific papers; he has written at least a dozen books and authored chapters in many more; and he figures prominently in the recent history of how the academic ideas of the causes and cures of obesity are what they are today. It speaks volumes that someone of Dr. Bray’s academic stature would be tapped to write a review (a review, in fact, that is longer than most scientific papers) of a popular book. GCBC has gotten the attention of the academic community.

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Moonrise, Jackson Hole (click to enlarge) photo by Daniel Eades

A study published in the current edition of the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrates once again that the low-carbohydrate diet is better than the low-fat diet in bringing about both weight loss and an improvement in lipid profiles. This study, as published, is not without its flaws, which we will get to in a due course. What I find amazing - or maybe I don’t - has been the press reaction.

First came the television reports (here, here and here), all of which reported the study as the Atkins diet triumphing over the low-fat diet and the beloved Mediterranean diet. TV was made for sound bites and sensationalism, so this report fits right in. Although numerous studies have shown the same superiority of the low-carb diet, the TV media seems to treat these studies in one of two ways: it ignores them or it treats them as a man-bites-dog kind of story. The print media has had a little time to reflect on the situation and is reporting the study in a different way.

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