I’ve got to apologize in advance for the length of this post, but in order to thoroughly do what needs to be done, it took the space.

Readers of this blog who have been around for a couple of years have been through the Anthony Colpo (AC) fiasco with me.  For those of you who weren’t around at the time, I’ll give a brief – a very brief – overview of what happened so you’ll understand what this is all about.

I wrote a post in September 2007 describing two different diets and their outcomes.  The first was designed by Ancel Keys and was a 1500+ calorie low-fat, high-carb diet; the other, designed by John Yudkin, was a 1500+ calorie low-carb, high-fat diet.  The subjects following the two diets experienced drastically different results.

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In the early 1980s MD and I were laboring away in anonymity in our clinics in Little Rock, Arkansas.  By that time I had gone through my thin-to fat-to thin again metamorphosis, and I was starting to treat patients for obesity.  My own transformation had been fairly striking, a fact not lost on many of my overweight patients, a number of whom were seeking my professional advice on treating their own weight problems.  I was still doing a fair amount of general primary care medicine, but more and more of my time was being diverted to helping people lose weight.

When I, myself, had gotten fat, I had tried a few diets that were then being extolled (including the Pritikin diet) and had experienced pretty much the same thing most people did with these diets:  I lost a few pounds, drifted from the diet, and regained the lost weight plus a little.  I then started thinking seriously about obesity as a medical problem, and in an effort to learn all I could about it, I turned to the medical textbooks on my shelves.  Unfortunately, none of them contained any information I found particularly enlightening.  The texts went into great detail about the risks associated with obesity and the many diseases that it either caused or made worse, but, other than recommending caloric restriction, none really discussed the treatment.  None really discussed (at least not to my satisfaction) what happens metabolically that makes people store excess fat.

I next turned to physiology texts, which didn’t help a lot, either.  I then grabbed my old medical school biochemistry textbook (I hadn’t been out of med school all that long at the time, so it was fairly current) and struck gold.  I started tracing out all the pathways for fat storage and noticed that in virtually every one insulin turned up somewhere.  Then I started reading about all the pathways involving insulin and realized that excess insulin had to be the agent driving the storage of excess fat.  I then went back to the physiology texts, reread them in light of my new found knowledge, and discovered that they reinforced what I had learned from the biochemistry text. I just hadn’t realized it, until I had made the insulin connection. (I drew out all the different pathways insulin worked through on piece of paper that we’ve saved, but I can’t lay my hands on it right now.  If I find it, I’ll post it.)

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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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Is the body in the photo at left the new look for today’s man?  If so, it appears that MD and I may have missed the boat yet again.

It seems as though we possess a positive genius for having our timing screwed up.  Our past is littered with missed opportunities to promote our various books, all occasioned by situations beyond our control.  Let me give you a few examples.

We were scheduled to be the guests for the biggest part of one of Soledad O’Brien’s shows when word came down that Hillary Clinton was going to declare her candidacy for the U.S. Senate.  We were in NY (brought by our publisher, thank God) prepared to go on the show the next day when we got bumped to another time.  Another time that never materialized.

I was scheduled to be on O’Reilly live and, in fact, was in the limo sent by Fox to take me to the studio when I got a call on my cell telling me that the Texas fugitives had been captured in Colorado.  Since I was on the way, O’Reilly went ahead and did the interview, but it was taped and played a couple of months later when John Kasich (who is now apparently running for governor of Ohio) was the guest host and viewership was probably lower than had it been O’Reilly live.

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