The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

In my ongoing quest to become a little more technically adept, I started using Google Alerts for a number of things I’m interested in, including my own name.  (Believe me, there are a lot of people out there in the world with the last name Eades, including the Fire Chief of London.)  For those of you who don’t know, you can go to the Google main page and navigate around until you come to ‘Alerts.’  You can then sign up for these ‘Alerts’ to be delivered to you via email.  It’s a free service provided by Google, and it uses the Google system to crawl through cyberspace and find anything (blogs, articles, news reports, etc.) that has whatever word, words or phrases you submitted included and emails the link back to you.  I put a bunch of stuff in and get emails from Google throughout the day.  Most of it is stuff that is totally unrelated to anything I give a flip about, but every now and then it turns up something of interest.  Having my name listed has cost me money because one of the first things I that came back to me was an article about Eades Whisky, which I had no idea existed and which I had to try.  It is expensive, about $75 per bottle, but I ordered some.  It’s very good.  But it hasn’t replaced Jameson, however, by a long shot.

Yesterday I got back a hit about something that I had totally forgotten about:  our rebuttal to the idiotic ’study’ presented by the PCRM (Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine - a name straight out of Orwell if there ever was one) a few years ago.  This group, composed mainly of militant vegetarians, came up with an insipid ’study’ during the height of the low-carb frenzy back in 2003.  Neal Barnard, the head of the outfit, appeared on most of the morning talk shows telling how dangerous his study had found low-carb diets to be.  A couple of the national networks called MD and me asking us if we would provide a rebuttal.  We happened to be in Santa Barbara at the time, and we said sure.  Two different networks sent camera crews to interview us late in the afternoon.

As I’ve probably mentioned numerous times, we have an absolute knack for getting pre-empted whenever we get TV time.  This day was no exception.  The news teams were on their way to the little condo we had at the time to set up and shoot our rebuttal when the news came through that Michael Jackson was going to be flying in to the Santa Barbara airport to turn himself in on the child molestation charge that he later beat in court.  Of course, all the news vans and camera crews that were heading for our place were diverted to the Santa Barbara airport, and MD and I never got to rebut the PCRM idiocy on air.

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Photo by Nathan Myhrvold

Warning: This post is not for the squeamish or faint of heart.  If you qualify, stop reading and go rummage through the archives.

Since the incident I’ll describe below happened, I’ve had this post rattling around in my brain.  All it took to make me backburner the other one I’ve been working on was a vegan I overheard today prattling on about the cruelty of slaughtering animals for food.  These people are clueless.  They somehow believe the natural world is a kind, safe place where animals lie about enjoying nature and drift off to sleep when it’s time for them to die.

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As I was going through all the comments that had stacked up while I was away, I came across one about the Ornish program that I thought might be of interest to the group. Here is the gist of it:

after my 3rd heart attack dec 04 I quit the veggie/ornish just plant food eating and now with type 2 this yr am still doing great with no carbs. also off BP drugs and since May have stopped all lipitor and crestor (7 days of crestor was enough) still getting stronger and no more brain fog feeling, wish I knew then what I know now

This comment reminded me of one I read in the long list of comments after Ornish’s response to John Tierney’s blog post about Taubes’ comments on the Israeli low-carb study. Said a commenter who states that he works in a clinic that uses the Ornish regimen:

I too, happen to work in a clinic that espouses the Ornish program. In practice, however, as long as patients do the stress relief, engage in exercise, and quit smoking, they seem to do fine. The diet doesn’t seem to do very much one way or the other, especially since most people give it up quickly. They seem to dislike it.
The diet does wreak havoc with our diabetic patients, however. They are put on the diet because diabetics are prone to heart disease, but the huge quantities of starch required by the Ornish program (whole grain or not) makes make blood sugar control almost impossible. There’s a lot of internal argument about this now.

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Looks like Dean Ornish has taken time out from pimping for McDonald’s (and KFC and Pepsi Co.) to write a new book out titled The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight and Gain Health.

I haven’t read the book, but I assume it’s a recycling of all the Dean Ornish stuff we’ve seen before. Although, he does have a photo of a piece of salmon on the cover, so maybe he’s graduated from vegan to beady-eyed vegitarianism.

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