I’m going to tell you about the best low-carb book I’ve ever read. In fact, it’s exactly the book I wish I had written myself.  And I’ll tell you why I didn’t in a bit, but first I want to clear up a few misconceptions I may have spread in my last post.

I get feedback on the posts I write from three sources.  First, MD looks at them and tones them down if I’ve gone off on some sort of political tangent or if I’ve scattered in a bit of too colorful language.  After she gives me the go, I put the posts up and wait to see what the commenters have to say.  The third source for feedback is my friends, some MDs and/or PhDs and some not, who pick up the phone and call me.

MD okayed what I wrote. The readers who commented seemed to realize what I was trying to say.  But the phone calls were a different story.

Read more »

A little over two years ago I wrote a couple of posts arguing that we cut our ancestral teeth on meat, and that contrary to all the vegetarian blather about colon length, tooth structure, etc., the archeological and anthropological convincingly demonstrates we were descended from meat eaters, not vegetarians.  (Click here and here for those posts.) A couple of recent developments have now inspired me to write a third.

First, I noticed in both talking with people at the Ancestral Health Symposium last August and attending a number of the talks that many followers of their own version of the ancestral diet are dismayingly including more and more carbohydrates.  And recommending more to their followers.

When MD and I wrote Protein Power in the mid 1990s, we used the Paleolithic diet as an argument for the efficacy of the low-carb diet.  If pre-agricultural man evolved in a milieu devoid of carbohydrate-dense foods, we posited, then natural selection should have culled those who didn’t thrive on such fare, leaving us, the descendants, powered by metabolic processes that performed better on protein and fat substrates.  If the rampant obesity and diabetes (we just thought it was rampant then) was a consequence of a diet we weren’t designed for, then switching to one that better suited us metabolically should produce substantial changes to the good.  Which it undeniably does.

Read more »

Over a half decade ago Professor Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, famously wrote

“The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

Dr Diamond was referring, of course, to the devolution of human health that took place as mankind suffered the corporal transformation driven by the mismatch between hunter-gatherer genes and an agricultural diet and lifestyle. Smaller stature, decreased cortical bone thickness, obesity, increased incidence of infectious diseases, dental caries, periodontal disease, vitamin deficiencies, and even famine – all common in agriculturists – were not, for the most part, the lot of pre-agricultural man.

Read more »

In an example of more brain damage from the mainstream medical press, a recent online article from heartwire savaged the low-carb diet as a treatment for diabetes along with one of its main academic proponents.  This piece, when read critically, provides a blueprint for how to subtly (and not so subtly) disparage an idea that doesn’t meet mainstream approval.  And it shows why the low-carb diet – despite the mountains of evidence demonstrating its superiority – continues to have difficulty gaining traction.

Here’s the story.  Dr. Eric Westman, from Duke University, gave a talk at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) conference last month in Stockholm.  Dr. Westman made the point in his talk that since 98 percent of the research presented at diabetes meetings involved a pharmaceutical approach to treatment perhaps it was time to take a look at the benefit of lifestyle changes, specifically diet, to treat the disease.  He went on to provide data showing the benefits of low-carbohydrate diets in the care of diabetic patients.

As might be expected, the mainstream – and let me assure you, the EASD meeting was the most mainstream of mainstream meetings – didn’t like what they heard.  Neither, apparently, did the writers at heartwire, another mainstream organization.

Read more »

The first Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS) were released in 1977 to not a lot of fanfare.  At that time, the great unwashed masses hadn’t really heard much about the word cholesterol, a substance the DGUS recommended that we should limit to 300 mg per day.  Doctors didn’t routinely screen for it, and if they did, they didn’t pay much attention to it.  In fact, at that time – as I recall, anyway – the upper limit of normal for total cholesterol was 240 mg/dl.  I was in medical school back then, and I don’t really remember any emphasis on cholesterol or blood lipids.  I think we had one lecture on it in biochemistry, given by a nebbish little professor we called Mighty Manford (his first name was Manford), who labored away in the obscurity of the biochemistry department. It’s hard to believe in today’s world of lipophobia that as little as 30 years ago, no one much cared about cholesterol.

One of the major players in bringing cholesterol to the public’s awareness was Time magazine. Its piece on cholesterol in the March 26, 1984 issue was a devastating hit piece on both dietary cholesterol and dietary fat.  Both – the article explained – were a main driving force behind the development of heart disease.

Reading this article today, it’s amazing how it drips with misinformation.  At the time, however, most people – physicians included – accepted it as gospel.  Sadly, even today, many physicians who should know better believe in and act in accordance to the bountiful misinformation contained in this piece.

Read more »