I so often come across such breathtaking nutritional ignorance foisted off as legitimate information that I’m left feeling like the girl in this photo. I wrote about this woeful ignorance on the part of the medical community in my last post.  Now it’s time to take a look at the misinformation many registered dietitians dispense as a matter of course.

I have subscriptions to many magazines, most of which I save up to read while I’m on airplanes so I can trash them after I read them and lighten my load as I travel.  A couple of days ago I was on a flight from Newark to Seattle casually paging through a golf magazine when I came upon one of these well-meaning (I’m sure) but totally incorrect little bits of advice.  The only saving grace is that I’m sure the vast majority of people reading this magazine will totally ignore this advice and go on doing whatever it is they’ve been doing.  But the advice is so abominably wrong that it cries out for exposure.

I’m sure the magazine needed a little space filled up so the editor charged one of the magazine’s staff writers come up with a fluff piece to fit the space required.  The editor may have specified that the piece be nutritional in content because the add right below it is for Planter’s NUT-rition line of nut products “specifically designed to give you the taste you want and the energy you need.”

So, the staff writer contacts a registered dietitian and picks her brain.  Based on the dietitian’s responses, it was slim pickings indeed.

The shtick of the piece is that the snacks favored by a handful of professional golfers were to be analyzed by the dietitian.  The piece starts out thus:

Here’s how Tour pros satisfy those mid-round munchies – and how you can stay energized for all 18 holes.

Here is a bit of the actual piece that I scanned.  I was unable to find a link to the article.

Then it’s off to a pro by pro (there are snacks from seven pros) analysis and the idiocy begins.

Tiger Woods is first.  His favorite snack is a peanut butter sandwich.  Our registered dietitian, Sharon Richters, babbles (or raves, as the article puts it) about the good fats and protein in peanut butter then cuts to the pure idiocy:

The bread has carbohydrates.  Whole-grain bread gives you longer-lasting energy, and regular bread gives a quick jolt of energy.  It’s the perfect golf snack.

The white-bread, brown-bread double whammy.  What wonderful nutritional advice.  Somehow this woman has got it in her head that carbohydrates, and only carbohydrates, provide energy.  It gets worse.

Canadian golf pro Mike Weir snacks on a homemade energy bar made of granola, honey and a bunch of other stuff.  Says our registered dietitian:

Honey is OK as a sweetener, although agave is healthier.

I suppose agave is ‘healthier’ (a totally grammatically incorrect construction, by the way) than honey if you choose to disregard scads of medical evidence and choose instead to believe consuming more fructose makes you healthier.  Honey, like table sugar, is half fructose whereas agave nectar is about 90 percent fructose.  I don’t know about you, but I would prefer to minimize my fructose intake.

English golfer Paul Casey allegedly throws back walnuts during his rounds.  Not so good, says Ms. Richter, RD.

Walnuts alone will not provide enough energy.  You’re on the course for hours at a time, so I suggest adding carbohydrates for energy.  Fruit is always a good idea – bananas are easy to carry around and eat, and coconut water is a good source of carbs.

Jesus wept.

It takes a certain genius to cram so much misinformation into such a little space.  Let’s deconstruct.

Why is it that so many people – especially registered dietitians, it seems – believe that carbohydrates are the only source of energy available?  This notion is widespread.  You need energy, therefore you’ve got to eat carbs.

Walnuts contain over twice the energy than the do same dose of pure carbs.  And this energy – in the form of fat – provides a much longer burn time than would a similar dose of carbs.  So if one is on the course “for hours at a time” why on earth wouldn’t a ready source of fat such as walnuts be a vastly better snack than a comparable amount of carbs?

The energy in foods is represented as the caloric content. According to the USDA tables, a medium banana provides 105 calories, most of which comes from sugars.  One ounce of walnuts – which isn’t much of a snack – contains 185 calories, most in the form of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats along with a little protein and almost no carb.  Most people using walnuts as a snack would throw back a few ounces over the course of a round of golf, so you tell me which is the best energy source.

And when walnuts or other low-carb, high-fat snacks are consumed, insulin remains low, allowing the body to access stored body fat for any extra energy that might be needed.  If the snacks are high-carb – as this woman suggests – insulin levels rise, making it more difficult for the fat cells to release fat, causing the cycle of more hunger, more carb consumption, and more insulin.

To continue with this nonsense, tell me please when coconut water became a good source of carbs?  The USDA tables tell us that a full cup of coconut water provides a measly 46 calories that come primarily from the 6 or so grams of sugar contained therein.  Doesn’t sound like much of an energy source or a carb source to me.

Do these people learn this in school?  Do they just make it up because it sounds good?  Where are their brains?  It took me about 30 seconds to search the USDA database of foods to find these numbers, so why couldn’t the authors of this drivel have done the same and saved themselves the embarrassment of having this nonsense in print under their names?  It beggars belief.

I once read that golfers are the least intelligent of all professional athletes.  I don’t know if that’s true or not, but let’s say it is.  I’ve seen Paul Casey interviewed a number of times, and he seems – from my limited observation – to speak with the same degree of intelligence as most other professional golfers I’ve heard.  So let’s assume Paul Casey is in the middle of the pack intelligence-wise of all professional golfers.  Professional athletes – as a group – are not at the top of the intelligence list in general.  By this reasoning, we might say that Paul Casey operates at not the highest level of intelligence, yet he has sense enough to pick walnuts as a snack instead of bananas and coconut water.  What does this say about the level of intelligence of the people writing this article?

Before you attack me for casting aspersions on the intelligence levels of anyone, please realize that the above is tongue in cheek.

Let’s look at one more, then I’ll quit.

Golfer Luke Donald chows down on Chocolate Chip Peanut Crunch Clif Bars and dried apricots during his rounds.  Our dietitian likes the idea of apricots.

Dried fruit is a good source of carbohydrates.

Gotta get those carbs in.  I suppose that these people are blissfully unaware of our millions of years of evolutionary history.  A time during which we humans cut our teeth on protein and fat while pretty much hunting to extinction most of the large game animals on the planet.  Why do they persist in the notion that the only way we can get energy is via carbohydrates?  Do they think we noshed on carbs as we hunted the wooly mammoth and the cave bear into non-existence?

The Clif Bar is a bit high in sugar, but it doesn’t have a lot of junk in it.

Hmm.  Interesting.  “A bit high in sugar, but doesn’t have a lot of junk in it”?  What, pray tell, is sugar, if not junk.  Sugar is nothing but empty calories, half of which are fructose.

I’ve got to quit before I do permanent damage to my forehead from beating it against the desk.

It should go without saying that nutritional ignorance and misinformation abounds.  You can get it from all sources, including, sadly, your own doctor.  I doubt that many readers of this blog would be swayed from their nutritional course by the kind of drek written in this golf magazine, but others probably are.  We’ve all got to be vigilant and work to stamp out nutritional idiocy wherever we find it.  It’s a real jungle out there filled with clueless people with titles of one sort or another ready to snare the unwary with this dopey stuff.  Don’t fall victim.

MD and I just spent a couple of days with the grandkids at Disneyland.  They’re here visiting for a couple of weeks, so we decided to bite the bullet and take them on the front end and get it over with instead of waiting until the end, as we usually do, and dreading it the entire time.  It was brutal but it is now over.

I loathe Disneyland and refer to it as the biggest people trap ever built by a mouse.  Which isn’t an original, but I’ve been saying it for so long that I’ve forgotten where I heard it years ago.

This year I at least was able to avoid the Small World ride.  Our 7-year-old grandson informed us that it was ‘lame.’  I couldn’t have agreed more.  I wasn’t so lucky a couple of years ago, however.  We took the kids then and did end up going on the Small World ride, which experience the grandkid remembered when he referred to the ride as being lame.

For those of you lucky enough to have escaped the Disneyland experience, the Small World ride is easily the most inane amusement park ride ever conceived by the mind of man.  You get in these little fiberglass flat-bottomed boats and cruise through this serpentine canal that wends its way around  tableaus of little dolls of various nationalities (as in photo above) doing their mechanical dances to what is easily the most nauseating piece of music ever written. Unlike most Disneyland rides that you wait an hour to get on and are then over in about 45 seconds, the Small World ride is interminable.  It goes on and on and on.  Which is, I suppose, its only virtue because at least it is dark and air conditioned, a welcome change from the heat radiating up from the vast concrete underpinnings of the park. (The downside is that you’ve been exposed to the nauseating song for so long that it has wedged itself into your brain and you can’t get it out for the rest of the day.)

When I last rode the ride,  it had just reopened after having been closed for almost a year for renovations.  I asked one of the attendants what had changed, hoping for an de-inane-ation of the ride.  The guy told me it hadn’t changed at all; they had just made the boats a little bigger and deepened the channel.  Then he told me it was because the guests of the park had become so much larger than when the ride went in in the 60s and were causing the boats to bottom out.

The park was so crowded and hot when we went two years ago that I kind of went brain dead.  All I wanted to do was slog through and get it behind me.  This time the weather was better and, thanks to the recession, the park wasn’t as crowded.  And I wasn’t so miserable, so I had a chance to look around a little more.

If Disneyland is any indication, there is no question we’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic.  I tried to make some kind of semi-accurate estimate by doing little statistical analyses when  was waiting around for rides.  It looked to me that about 40 percent of adults were out and out obese, some morbidly so.  And I would estimate that of the folks who weren’t actually obese, at least 85 percent of them were overweight. A normal weight adult at Disneyland was a rarity.

What really surprised me was the state of obesity of the Disneyland staff.  When I was in college I got a job at Disneyland (which in part accounts for my loathing of the place).  I was a conductor on the train that circumnavigates the park.  It was one of the worst jobs I ever had.  But it did have its perks.  At that time, all the employees were college students or college dropouts who were the full time workers.  In keeping with the Disney image at the time, just about all the young employees selected were clean cut and nice looking.  As a consequence, the place was kind of a meat market.  Employee parties were legendary.  That part I enjoyed, but my enjoyment was somewhat tempered by the fact that I had a steady girlfriend at the time who also worked at Disneyland.

Now, the young employees are a reflection of the population in general.  At least half of them are obese, some almost morbidly so.  I don’t know if this represents the student body of the local college or what, but it certainly has changed over the past few decades.

Despite my kind of flippant tone in this post, I don’t find the large numbers of obese guests (as the Disneyland staff refers to the people paying to go there) and staff amusing in the slightest.  I think it is tragic.  As I’ve said many times before, we have all been the unwitting subjects of a long experiment, the hypothesis of which is that since fat is bad and carbs are good, we should all eat low-fat, high-carb diets.  If so, says this hypothesis, obesity will go away.  Well, it hasn’t.  It has gotten much, much worse.  And the sad, sad thing is that this hypothesis was never validated scientifically before we were all enrolled in the experiment.  When I see dozens and dozens of young people looking like the one pictured above, it makes my blood boil.  Most of the people who inflicted this nonsense on us are still around and still pushing the carbs and still blaming the fat in the diet. Tar and feathers spring to mind.

When I thought I was going to have to subject myself to the Small World again before my grandson got me out of it by not wanting to go himself, I remembered what the attendant had told me previously about the ride being renovated because of the increase in obesity.  I wondered if it were an urban legend or if it were really true.  When I got back to a computer, I checked it out.

There are a number of investigative reports on the idea, and the consensus seems to be that the renovation was due to the boats bottoming out due to the increased weight of the passengers.  Based on what I saw, I suspect that’s the case because just taking the average weight gain over the last 40 years means the boats are carrying 200 extra pounds more than they were designed for..  Disney officials are staying mum, however.

During my own investigation on the issue, I ran across an interesting article on Snopes.com.  A new twist has been added to many of the rides at Disneyland, especially the ones that hurtle you along in the dark.  Cameras are placed in strategic locations and take photos as the ride comes through.  After you get off, you can go see a photo of yourself and your entire boat or log or train car or whatever conveyance dropping over a precipice projected on a screen near the exit.  Most people are pictured screaming and holding on for dear life.

One of the rides – Splash Mountain – has achieved some notoriety because it has become common for female riders to pull up (or down) their tops as they approach the cameras.  This flashing has become so common that the ride has become known as Flash Mountain.  All of the photos are looked at by park officials before being put up on the screens for all to see.  Here is the Snopes link to the article – a little (very little, actually) navigating will get those with a prurient bent to a page of these photos.  I, of course, had to look as part of my investigation for this blog post.

The Disney officials are good at weeding out these bawdy photos and they are very good at feeding the hordes of overweight people exactly what they want.  Disneyland is carb heaven.  That’s just about all you can find.  There are sweetened cold drinks, a variety of ice cream products, cotton candy, gummy sweets, funnel cakes and other high-carb junk of every stripe.  It is almost impossible to avoid carbs there.  It can be done, but it is difficult and requires a lot of effort.  The vast majority of the people I saw weren’t making the effort.

If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to avoid the Magic Kingdom for at least another couple of years. When I do get dragged there again, I’ll stumble along as I normally do, putting one tired foot in front of the other counting the hours until it’s over. But, admittedly, I will approach Splash Mountain with a little more exuberance than I have in the past.

Just a bunch of odds and ends, none of which is worth an entire post.

Low-carb gains a foothold.

First, I’ll start off with the good news, then I’ll finish with the bad.

I took the photo above yesterday at Raley’s, a giant supermarket (and I mean giant) in Incline Village, NV.  There were no signs promoting low-fat foods anywhere in the store.  I took this to be a sign that enough customers were looking for low-carb foods and had asked for help that management decided to make the low-carb section (there really is one) easier to find.  I take this as a positive sign.

Tahoe skiing

We’ve been skiing with the kids and grandkids, all of whom have come to town for spring break.  We’ve had a blast, but family commitments have kept me from attending to this blog as much as I usually do.  Family commitments along with a few snafus, more about which later.  The picture below is from the top of a foggy ski run overlooking Lake Tahoe.  It was taken Monday when the weather was less than optimal.  Fortunately, it has improved since.

Airline/Expedia cautionary tale

One set of kids and grandkids flew in from Dallas and had a disastrous experience, which I want to relate in the hope of perhaps preventing it for some of you readers.  The tickets for this trip were purchased long ago through Expedia and were on US Air from Dallas through Phoenix to Reno.  When purchased, the confirmation had seat assignments for all four of the passengers.  Our son and fam arrived at the airport about an hour and a half early and went through the automated boarding pass machines.  The boarding passes that were issued them had no seats listed.  When my son went to the counter to speak with an actual human, he was told there were no seat assignments because his entire family had been bumped from the flight.  When he showed her the Expedia confirmation complete with seat assignments, she told him that Expedia travelers got bumped first.  She also told him that it was the airlines policy to overbook by about 20 percent, which almost never caused a problem because of cancellations and no shows.  She said that the only two times this didn’t hold was over Christmas and Spring break weeks, the only time, she said, that she really hated her job.  It would seem to me that the airlines would realize this and maybe not oversell the flights during these periods, but that’s just me.  I’m not an airline decision maker, but it seems pretty obvious.  Especially since they had to fork over four free flights on US Air and a bunch of meal vouchers.

The fam was booked on a later flight, and, of course, had no seats together.  So they had to fight that fight in order for a parent to be able to sit with each kid.  Same thing on the flight to Reno.  The kids got to the airport early in the day, waited around, and finally got to Reno at about 10:30 PM (midnight thirty for them and a long, long day for two little boys).  The other part of the fam came into the Reno airport as well, and we had it timed so that everyone got in at about the same time.  This airline fiasco caused a huge logistics problem for the family Eades, but we made it through it.

Two tired little boys late at night at the Reno airport

The moral of the story is to not book through Expedia and expect all to go smoothly, especially during busy times.  The son involved called the airline and made sure they had confirmed seats on the way home.  If you book with Expedia, I would recommend you do the same.

I use Expedia or Travelocity to find the least expensive flights and best routes between destinations, then I go directly to the airline site to reserve.  It’s usually a little less expensive than Expedia or Travelocity, and I am confirmed with the airline directly.

Blog info and snafus

There are a few blog issues I need to deal with.  First, I performed the much-loathed task of going through the stacked up spam caught by the spam filter and found about a dozen comments lodged therein.  I don’t know why they got caught – they didn’t have a bunch of links embedded, which is usually what trips them up.  I don’t know why the spam filter got them, but it did.  If you have had a comment over the past week or so that has remained unposted, you’re probably one of the victims.  I’ll get to them all soon.

Another thing I discovered, to my great chagrin, is that I have about 500 emails in my Gmail account from readers of this blog.  A couple of years ago I hired a blog consultant to help make my blog better.  The installed Feedburner to allow readers to sign up for the blog in their Google or other readers.  It also allowed people to sign up to receive the blog via email.  What I didn’t realize is that the blog came to those who signed up under my Gmail address.  Many people simply hit reply and sent me a comment or a question about the blog – much as others do in the comment section.  Problem is I never read my Gmail mail.  I have it as a repository for all my emails, which I have forwarded from my regular email address.  I keep all the emails in the Gmail account so that I will have them all in one place since I use so many computers.  I want to have them in case I ever need them.  But I never read them in Gmail.  When I heard from someone that he had been trying to contact me numerous times and hadn’t gotten a response, I asked how he had been trying.  He said through Gmail.  When I went to the account and searched, I found hundreds of people who had done the same.  I fixed the situation so that readers can’t simply hit reply.  I can’t possibly deal with all those emails that are already there, so if you have been waiting for an answer, you had better resubmit through the comments section.  Sorry for all the hassle.

Out of control taxation and regulation

The above sign affixed to the restroom door of the Squeeze In, my favorite breakfast restaurant in Truckee, CA is a symptom of the disease of a government run by Democrats allowed to go wild.  If you are interested in seeing what the country would look like after many years of an unopposed Democratic government, you have to go no further than California.  Due to a bipartisan gerrymandering over the past few years making basically all state legislative offices non-competitive, the Democrats have controlled the state government.  And they’ve never come across a regulation or tax they didn’t like.  (I’m sure that in Republican-dominated states there would be problems, too, but as far as I know, there isn’t a Republican-dominated state.)  Not only does California tax and regulate the bejesus out of anything it can, it aggressively enforces all these taxes and regulations.  Which brings me to the sign on the door at the Squeeze In.  If a California regulator were to walk in to the restroom at this restaurant and find writing on the wall, there would be a fine.  Which isn’t really a fine, but is a shakedown.  When the state needs money, the regulators are on the prowl.  Let me explain what I mean.

I have a friend who works as a consultant for many different industries.  He recently had a gig working for a financial institution with offices all over California.  One of the California regulations is that the lettering on the signs in these facilities giving the interest rates must be two inches high.  Regulators recently did a savage burn on all these facilities throughout the state, descending upon them with rulers in hand.  They measured the height of the letters and found in multiple instances that the letters were from 1/16 to 1/32 of an inch short.  They then levied fines of almost two million dollars.  These institutions then had to hire a legal team to do battle with the state, which ultimately reduced the fines to about $150,000.  This was a shakedown for money pure and simple.  It may as well have been Tony Soprano.

Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States and has no (none, zero) Fortune 50 companies headquartered there.  Why?  Because of the outrageous tax situation.  Why do business there and deal with all the tax and regulatory nonsense California slings out when you could headquarter your offices in Texas, where the population is growing by about 1,000 people per day?  And those people ain’t going there for the weather, let me tell you.  I’ve spent a lot of time in one other high-tax state, that being Massachusetts.  But there, people have learned to deal with it by creating and underground cash-based economy.  I can’t tell you how many businesses we ran into in Cambridge that took cash only.  No checks, no credit cards, cash only.  Anyone who came to work at your house demanded to be paid in cash.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on there.

In California people are inured to it, I guess, because they simply pony up and keep on electing the same people again and again.  Now the residents of the state have been saddled with a huge tax increase that all share in.  Increased gas taxes, sales taxes, car fees, and income taxes – all went up.  It should be no surprise that a state as burdened by taxes and regulations as California should be the one in the most trouble due to the recent downturn.  People are out of work, houses are being foreclosed on right and left, the economy is in the tank, and, as a consequence, the state government is short of funds.  So instead of working to help business, which is the machine that drives the economy, the state did the only thing it knew how to do: raise taxes on those workers and businesses still standing.  Makes a lot of sense. At least to California legislators.

Underhanded internet sales technique

Some of the comments on the recent post about Pentabosol reminded me about how some sleazy operators do business online.  If you’ve never been involved in a direct response (selling directly to customers) business, you probably don’t have any idea what kinds of shenanigans people pull to try to sell products.  Let’s look at how it works with weight loss supplements.  You want to make some money selling a weight loss supplement, but you don’t have the funds to mount a normal direct response campaign, so you decide to let others do the work for you.  You start your company to sell your supplement.  Let’s call it Weight Be Gone.  You create a website extolling the virtues of Weight Be Gone and set up a shopping cart so that people can buy it.  Then you create another website called something like Webscamsreview.com or weightlossscamreporter.com or something similar.  Then you write reviews of all the other legitimate supplements out there – Pentabosol, for example – and you find them all wanting.  You then say that the only supplement that you have tested that passes the stringent requirements for your Webscamsreview company is Weight Be Gone.  And, of course, you provide a link to your own website.  Then you go out and buy Google placement for other supplements, such as Pentabosol, and when people look up Pentabosol on Google, they find the Pentabosol site listed first but right below is a site supposedly providing an unbiased review of Pentabosol.  Who can resist taking a look?  Often the people who do take a look end up purchasing Weight Be Gone because they believe the fake reviews (both positive for Weight Be Gone and negative for all the other supplements) on the allegedly ‘independent review’ site, which is actually an ad and portal for their own supplement.

Sugar, the new health food

Finally, some bad news.  It looks like sugar is making a comeback.  And not just a comeback, but a comeback as a health food.  Expect to start seeing more sugar and less high-fructose corn syrup HFCS).  It’s easy to see why.  HFCS has a real image problem.  After all, would you feel better about eating something containing organic pure cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup?

Both are about the same.  HFCS contains a little more fructose, but not a lot.  And the little difference that it contains probably doesn’t make much of a difference unless intakes are huge, in which case it doesn’t much matter anyway.

The problem I see with HFCS is that it works much better than sugar as a food additive.  It has properties that sugar doesn’t have, making it perfect for many processed foods that otherwise wouldn’t contain sugar.  As a consequence we now have a lot of foods with sweetener in them that we didn’t have when sugar was the only sweetener available.   Problem is that the battle between sugar and HFCS isn’t fought on the field of these small amounts of additives, but on the field of products such as soft drinks that contain a ton of one or the other.  People will still get the additional sugar from HFCS in all the small portions added to processed foods and will get sugar instead in drinks and other highly sweetened foods.  And they’ll think they’re eating a health food because it is pure cane sugar and not that nasty HFCS.  I suspect that all this will do nothing but bring about an increase in sugar intake.  Why?

Because HFCS is sweeter than sugar.  And since people have become accustomed to this level of sweetness, when HFCS is replaced by sugar, more sugar will be required to give the same degree of sweetness.  And so sugar intake will increase.  All in the name of health.  A sorry situation indeed.

I’ve got about a hundred (93 to be exact) tabs up on my Firefox browser, many of which are filled with articles about which I would like to post.  But these articles either keep getting displaced by something more timely or more blogworthy or even more substantive.  Many are interesting, but not worth an entire long post.  So, I decided to do one of those sort of potpourri linkfest things like so many bloggers do and be able to close a bunch of these tabs.  Plus it gives me a chance to indulge in my interest in the political situation without having to devote an entire post to it.

First and foremost, I want to link to the latest post in MD’s blog.  When I posted earlier about our meals in Mexico, I mentioned this great Andalusian gazpacho recipe she had.  A bunch of people asked for it, so she put it up.

Richard Feinman sent me a link to an annoying Mayo Clinic nutrition blog by a couple of ignorant dietitians.  Reading stuff like this that is written with such certainty always makes me think of a couple of lines from Shakespeare’s’ Measure for Measure:

Man, proud man!
Dress’d in a little brief authority:
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d.

These women are oblivious to the fact that the studies upon which they base their idiotic ramblings are worthless as proof of the nonsense they spout.  The first considers a diet with 45 percent of calories as a low-carb diet.  Oh, really?  The second is an observational study, and, as such, totally useless for proving causality.  Yet, in their words, these studies

caused a couple of “aha” moments

for them.  I suppose they could have meant, “aha, we’re really clueless.”

I read a nice little summary in the journal Hepatology of a study published in Nature Medicine.  The study looked at chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) and aging.  As we age, we tend to accumulate protein debris in our cells.  Over time this accumulation interfers with the proper functioning of the cell and is thought to be one of the components of aging and cellular sensescence.  Organelles within the cell called lysosomes are charged with the responsibility of basically chewing up (auto-phagy: self eating) these junk proteins to keep the cell free of garbage, allowing it to do its job.  Chaperones are proteins that bind to junk proteins and move them into the lysosomes for degradation.  Researchers developed transgenic mice that had the ability to make more of the chaperone proteins than normal mice, giving them the ability to increase the degradation of junk protein.  Their study showed that increasing the CMA in these mice resulted in lower accumulation of junk protein, better ability to deal with protein damage, and improved organ function.  The reason I like this paper so much is that it confirms what I wrote in one of my favorite posts from the past about ketosis doing the same thing.  Maybe you don’t have to be a transgenic mouse to get the benefits of cleaner cells; maybe just staying in ketosis more of the time will do the job, too.

Politics alert! POLITICS ALERT! POLITICS ALERT! For those of you who chastise me for daring to bring politics into what is at heart a nutritional blog, beware: politics to follow.  If you want to avoid reading about anything to do with politics and get back to the nutrition stuff, skip on down until the politics alert has been removed.

Here is one from the Karma-is-wonderful department.  By now everyone knows that Tom Daschle got the rug pulled out from beneath him in his attempt to become the secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration because of his failure to pay over $100,000 in taxes.  And everyone knows that former Senator Daschle didn’t pay taxes on the car and driver he was provided as part of one of his lobbying efforts. (One wonders what kind of car would run up enough imputed income to result in over $100,000 in taxes.) But what many people might not know is that Mr. Daschle, in his days as a Senator from South Dakota, ran ads showing that he drove an old car while working in Washington for the folks back home.  The irony is so sweet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While we’re at it, you might enjoy this cartoonist’s ideas on how we can afford the stimulus package being argued in Congress. Now we can add one more with Solis.  We really can begin to refill the coffers if this keeps up.

An insightful article in the Economist from a few weeks ago got me thinking.  This piece was talking about the government in the UK, but it could be applied to any government anywhere when faced with a crisis.  Governments all follow these two rules:

First, eschew all blame.
Second, do something.

I’ve never seen our own government here in the US not follow these rules.  For example, let’s look at the subprime mortgage situation that has gotten us into our current bad way.  When the house of cards began to fall, what did the government do?  Pointed fingers at everyone but itself.  It eschewed all blame.  It was the fault of all the independent mortgage lenders making shaky loans; it was greed on Wall Street; it was Bernard Madoff.  And on and on and on.

And what did our government then do, after all the finger pointing?  It did something.  It passed an emergency stimulus bill to the tune of $700 billion to keep all of these people from losing their homes and to keep the economy from cratering as a result.  As near as I can tell, I have about 5,000 people who read this blog every day.  And those 5,000 people know a lot of other people.  In fact, I would imagine that, on average, each of these 5,000 people probably knows or knows of at least 50 people, which means that all of us together know around 250,000 people.  Of all these people, some are bound to be in financial trouble and are behind on their mortgages.  So I ask you this, has anyone reading this blog learned of anyone he/she personally knows getting mortgage help from this $700 billion?  I didn’t think so.

So the government pointed fingers and did something.  We know that whatever it did, didn’t really help the individual people who were hurting during this mess.  It helped Wall Street guys get their bonuses, and it helped management of troubled banks get their health insurance premiums covered, and it redecorated a few offices, so maybe the do-something part of the equation actually helped some individuals (though not the ones it was sold to us to help).  But what about the blame?  Wasn’t it Wall Street greed and independent mortgage brokers?  As Will Rogers used to say, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers.”  I’m kind of the same way, but I like to think I’m a little bit of a critical reader.  The single best and most comprehensive piece I’ve read yet on the current financial debacle was written several months ago in The Spectator, published in London, and my favorite weekly magazine.  The author of this article musters the data to show that it is the government itself that is at fault.  And if you don’t believe the author, here is a piece written in the New York Times on September 30, 1999 when the seeds for this subprime meltdown were sown, discussing the potential problems that could come to pass.  Sadly, they did.

On the global warming front, here is part of an email I received today from an outraged friend of mine in the UK.  This friend is a famous author who hobnobs with everyone who is anyone in the UK.  Name withheld mainly because it’s too late at night there for me to be asking for permission.

Tonight I sat watching television which I don`t do a huge amount of. We have been snowed in for 4 days and tonight it is minus 8. I watched a hapless man from a council lamenting that they had run out of salt and grit so the county`s roads would be death traps. Asked why their stocks were so low, he said because they had all been led to believe we would never have winters like this again because of GW. so they spent the money on recycling and ‘Climate Change initiatives’ instead. ‘And I have to say,’ this brave man ended ‘I think we`ve all been badly conned.’   Ten minutes later the US Vice President Biden appeared on my screen – what a pleased-with-himself guy he is. In Munich, and he said to me that the USA was now wanting dialogue with Iran and Pakistan and Russian and…. and that this will be an initiative that will work … well I am glad he is so cocky about it. He then said ‘we have far more to fear from global warming than we have from international terrorism.’    What the hell planet is this guy ON?   It`ll take a 9/ll and the entire mad middle east to explode in their faces for the truth to dawn….. meanwhile, does it not occur to them that most of Western Europe has been trying to engage these countries in dialogue for the last 10 years – and that meanwhile, weekly, a terrorist plot is detected and defused by our counter-intelligence and  anti-terrorist police … He looked so smug I wanted to throw something at him.

Okay.  Politics over.  The all clear whistle has sounded.  It’s safe to go back into the water.

One of my readers sent me this great link to an article in the journal Archeology about the diet of the Roman gladiators.

It appears that far from being the cut and shredded specimens of masculinity that we see portrayed in films, the real gladiators were fat.  Why?  Because body fat protected them from injury.  It provided a kind of a built-in shield.  And how did the gladiators make themselves fat?  According to researchers on the subject, gladiators ate a lot of simple carbohydrates and not much animal protein.  I can already see Dean Ornish’s next book: The Gladiator Diet.

You’ve all read my whines and rants about the sorry press coverage of scientific studies.  Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way.  Here is a writer from the prestigious British Medical Journal bitching about the same thing.

Says he:

Every day one of our national newspapers publishes a piece reporting on “scientific research” and nearly every day the report is misleading, inaccurate, shows poor understanding of science and scientific research methods, and irritates the hell out of many a hardworking researcher. Often the original research is crap too. Millions of innocent people are misdirected and confused as new and often harmful myths are started.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Last week an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times about intermittent fasting.  I’ve gone through quite an evolution myself on this subject, going from pro to not so pro back to pro with some reservations.  I’m planning a post within the next couple of weeks on the subject, specifically about one of the papers mention in this LA Times article.

A pretty good review article on the treatment of obesity appeared in Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology & Hepatology (free full text and pdf) last December. (See, my tabs have been up for a long time)  This article provides an overview of all the different diets available for the treatment of obesity.  And, what makes it nice, is that not only does it not ridicule or give the low-carb diet short shrift as most mainstream journals do, it actually seems to imply that the low-carb diet works the best.  Slowly but surely we’re making progress.

Last but not least, lets end with a death-defying bit of daredevilry.  Watch this guy jump this motorcycle both ways.  I like to push the envelope risk-wise sometimes, but you couldn’t get me to do this for all the money in the world.  Bravo!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I received the following email from Dr. Richard Feinman today asking for help on behalf of the Metabolism Society and low-carbers everywhere.

Greetings!

Here’s a good topic for your blog.

The question bears on recommendations along the lines of the USDA meeting that is coming up.  It arises from a seminar that Eric Westman gave at Downstate. The group at Downstate is not particularly doctrinaire and the talk was well received but Dr. Sheldon Landesman of the School of Public Health raised a good question: “the major focus of diets based on carbohydrate restriction are fundamentally therapeutic. How could the benefits that you presented be utilized in making recommendations to the population at large?”  So while 20 g a day might be very beneficial for somebody with diabetes or somebody trying to make a big impact on weight loss, even the maintenance phase of people on low carbohydrate diets may be different than what would be recommended for everybody.

Also whereas the population at large has significant amount of overweight and obesity, a large part of the population is not overweight and even those who are, may not want to lose weight at the moment. The question is quite pressing in that the USDA has convened a panel to make new recommendations for 2010. Many of us are upset that there is no representation of the panel of people who have experience with carbohydrate restriction and some who are on the panel are probably actively antagonistic to such an approach.   On the other hand, Brian Wansink [who is involved with] the committee is aware of the problem and open to suggestions on carbohydrate restriction.

So, the question is:  how can the benefits of carbohydrate restriction that you have experienced personally or in your immediate environment be translated into reasonable recommendations that the USDA could put out? In other words, if you actually had your way what kind of recommendations would you like to see the USDA make? Recommendations should be short and to the point.

If you can encourage your readers to send their suggestions to your blog and also copy to Lauri Cagnassola (info@nmsociety.org) the Metabolism Society will organize them. We will publish the results in the scientific and popular literature and also communicate some of the main points to Brian.

I think they are right to call our bluff on what we would actually do if we had access to policy.
Best Regards,

Richard Feinman, PhD
Metabolism Society

I draw your attention to the question that inspired Dr. Feinman’s email:

The major focus of diets based on carbohydrate restriction are fundamentally therapeutic. How could the benefits that you presented be utilized in making recommendations to the population at large?

I think this question is breathtaking in its inanity.

As you can see from the graph at the top of this post, obesity is galloping along and shows no signs of slowing down.  According to the latest figures from the National Center for Health Statistics (from which the above graph was taken), almost 70 percent of Americans (between the ages of 20 and 74) are either overweight or obese.  Despite the growing rates of childhood obesity, there is a much lower rate of childhood obesity than there is adult obesity.  Since childhood precedes adulthood, one can only assume that most of the children who are not overweight now will ultimately become overweight or obese as they enter and progress through the ranks of adulthood.

Now we all know that the consensus of many studies published in the medical/scientific literature indicate that single best treatment for obesity is a low-carb diet.  We also know that there are no diseases of carbohydrate deficiency while there are diseases of both fat and protein deficiency.  Therefore a low-carb diet that provides plenty of good quality protein and fat should never lead to any diseases of nutritional insufficiency.

Finally, since a good quality low-carb diet reverses obesity and a host of other medical problems associated with obesity, doesn’t it make sense that this same diet would prevent these disorders?  Dr. Feinman was himself a co-author of a brilliant paper positing that the Metabolic Syndrome can be defined as a constellation of symptoms that respond positively to carbohydrate restriction.  If carb restriction improves these symptoms, then why wouldn’t carb restriction prevent them?

I find it extremely difficult to believe that if the entire population of the United States were to follow carbohydrate-restricted diets that the graph at the top of this post would look the way it does.  Which is why I think the question asked at Dr. Westman’s presentation was inane.  Especially if the questioner had just sat through a talk about the health benefits of low-carbohydrate dieting.

We’ve got a therapeutic modality – the carbohydrate-restricted diet – that causes no health problems in non-overweight people who follow it, reverses obesity in overweight people who do follow it, and improves every single defined component of the Metabolic Syndrome in those who have the syndrome and apply the diet.  And someone wants to know the rationale for making these recommendations to the population at large?

It’s kind of like saying that since stopping smoking improves chronic bronchitis in only those people with smoking-induced chronic bronchitis, how can we make the recommendation not to smoke to the population at large, most of whom don’t have smoking-induced chronic bronchitis?

The annoying thing to me is that the people who ask these kinds of questions are probably the very ones who would vote to add statins to the drinking water if they could.

Now that my rant is over, let me encourage you to send in your answer to the question

how can the benefits of carbohydrate restriction that you have experienced personally or in your immediate environment be translated into reasonable recommendations that the USDA could put out? In other words, if you actually had your way what kind of recommendations would you like to see the USDA make? Recommendations should be short and to the point.

You can either send them as comments to this post, and I’ll pass them along.  Or you can email them directly to Lauri Cagnassola (info@nmsociety.org), who will get them to the appropriate people to submit those who have some influence over the committee to set the nutritional guidelines for 2010.  Or do both.  If you send them through the comments section of this post, maybe you will inspire others to tell their story.  A story of success in overcoming health problems from one of you will do more than a long letter from me, whom everyone will think is simply trying to sell a diet book.

And remember, where government committees are concerned, more is better.  If you’re trying to get your point across, bombarding them always helps.  As was confirmed by my interview with Bill O’Reilly most people don’t give a flip about however the nutritional guidelines turn out because they – just like Bill – figure these guidelines are just another bunch of government propaganda that doesn’t really mean squat to them.  But with the nutritional guidelines it does mean something because the law mandates that all the people the government feeds must be fed according to these guidelines.  And since many millions are fed, the food manufacturers take note.  If we can get some low-carb influence into the nutritional guidelines, it will mean that many more products will begin showing up on grocer’s shelves carrying labels saying ‘low-carb’ or carb-restricted’ just like the multitude that say ‘low-fat.’  The low-fat mania was basically launched by the nutritional guidelines.  There is no reason that low-carb can’t get its fair market share.  If it does, it will make all of our lives a little easier, not to mention healthier.

So, write, write, write.

Photo used under Creative Commons from Mr TGT

A few days ago the Washington Post published an article with what has to be one of the dumbest headlines I’ve ever read.

New Guidelines Make It Easy to Get Fit

The article goes on to discuss how new US government guidelines cutting the previously recommended amount of exercise required for some minimal level of fitness even more.  Which, of course, makes it easier to get fit.  Right?

Only the government could come up with such idiocy.  It fair takes one’s breath away.  Could anyone else in his/her right mind imagine such stupidity? Or is it just the people we give our tax money to that think this way?  Changing the guidelines helps us get fitter easier? Jesus wept.

This article (and the guideline changes behind it) reminds me of an old joke that I heard as a kid and thought pretty funny at the time.  And still do, I guess, since it points out the brainlessness of these kinds of statements.  Here goes.

Late in the afternoon, a man comes into his house panting, puffing and sweating profusely.  His wife looks at him and says ‘What happened to you?’

The man croaks out between gasps for air, ‘I ran home behind the bus and saved two dollars.’

His wife looks at him scornfully and says, ‘What an idiot.  Why didn’t you run home behind a taxi and save $20?’

That’s a joke, but it’s the same logic behind the “new guidelines mak[ing] it easy to get fit.”  One wonders why, if these new guidelines make it so easy, that the government doesn’t decrease the recommendations even more?  That would make it even easier.  In fact, why not recommend 3 minutes of exercise per day, then virtually everyone could become fit. Even the guy in the photo at the top of this post.

As the old miner said to Butch and Sundance:

Morons.  I’ve got morons on my team.

And indeed we do have morons on our team, and we pay them each April 15.

We finally made it home after the long, tedious drive from Napa. We have to make the same trip in a few days when we head up to Tahoe, and I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to it. We would have been there now except that MD has to sing in a performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony on August 16. Early on the morning of the 17th we’re out of here.

Years ago when our youngest son, Scott, was in kindergarten or the first grade, he came home from school in a huff. When we asked him what was wrong, he told us that he had had a very rude day. We thought the expression was hilarious, and it’s become part of our family lingo since. We don’t have bad days – we have rude days. And I’ve had a few rude days in a row that I feel compelled to tell everyone about.

It started last Thursday. I got a call on my cellphone from a Colorado area code. When I answered, it was a real good news/bad news call. Back in 2003 our house in Boulder was burglarized. The crooks went through every drawer, every closet, every everything. All our drawers were dumped, all the clothes in the closets were on the floor, and the house was trashed. We had all of our computers and electronic items (TVs, DVD players, stereo system, etc.) taken as well as a lot of artifacts we had collected over the years. They got a couple of guns that I had owned since I was a teenager and a bunch of casts of various hominid skulls that I had collected over the years. And they took my Gibson guitar (the best guitar I’ve ever had – it was custom made) and the 100 plus year-old, sweet-toned violin on which I had learned to play. All in all, they got about $75,000 worth of stuff, much of which was irreplaceable. The detectives from Boulder came out and fingerprinted everything and collected some cigarette butts from which they hoped to be able to extract DNA. But they told us that the testing would take forever because we were behind all the murders and rapes in the system. There was a lot of sturm and drang from the police for a bit, but in the end, no one was fingered for the crime.

The call I got last Thursday was from a detective in the Boulder County Sheriff’s office telling me that they had finally gotten a hit on the DNA from the cigarette butts. The good news was that they had found the thief (at least one of them). He had been incarcerated in the state of Washington, and upon his release had moved to Montana. The bad news was that the statute of limitations had passed, so there was apparently nothing that could be done to him. Nor could any attempts be made to find and/or collect any of our stuff that he might still have. The call just sort of rubbed salt into an old wound.

Things got worse. That same Thursday night MD and I went to a concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl. MD is a big Steve Miller Band fan and a long-time Joe Cocker fan (as well as a dedicated and devoted concert goer), and when she found out that they were both going to be performing on the same night at the SB Bowl, she sat poised with her finger on the button to get tickets as soon as they were made available. At the time it seemed so distant that I (foolishly) agreed to go with her.

The Santa Barbara Bowl is a great venue for concerts and Santa Barbara is a great venue for anything out of doors. The weather is mild, even in the middle of summer (and in the middle of winter, for that matter) and there are no bugs, so you can watch a concert outside without dripping sweat and swatting mosquitoes. I’ve been to too many of those kinds of concerts during my days in the South.

We got there and found our seats, drank a little champagne and watched the crowd shuffle in as we waited for the show to start. An interesting and diverse crowd it was. There were a lot more young people there than I would have expected along with a lot of people who were on the leading edge of the baby boom. A lot of young women scantily clad (miniskirts and short shorts, it appeared, were de rigeur) and a lot of mutton dressed as lamb. And there was a guy whom I couldn’t quit staring at who could have come in first in a Fred West look alike contest.  It was eerie. I was settling in for at worst a good time simply people watching.

When Joe Cocker took the stage and the music started, however, I realized that I had made a huge mistake in agreeing to attend. First, the sound was at deafening decibel levels, and, second, Joe Cocker could barely be understood. One of his first songs was The Letter, which is my favorite Joe Cocker song, and he was at least a third of the way through the tune before I recognized it. In his best days, Joe kind of croaked and screamed out his songs, but the words were at least recognizable. Now, his voice is…I don’t want to be unkind, so let’s just say, he’s no Freddie Mercury.

And, like the rest of the population, Joe has added some weight since his youth. He’s not of Orson Welles proportions yet, but he’s well on his way. And he’s lost his hair. All changes which are kind of for the better, at least in terms of his watchability (by me, at any rate). When he was younger, all of his choreaform movements and the thing he did with his hands kind of gave me the creeps. As an older, bald, obese guy they didn’t seem nearly so bad. In fact, they somehow seemed more appropriate.

Even worse than the Cockeresque unintelligible croaking and screaming were the throngs of hemorrhoids (I call them hemorrhoids because they are a pain in the you-know-what) who all insisted on standing and swaying, totally oblivious to those behind them who didn’t particularly want to stand and sway to the croaking, yet wanted to see the stage. And, just like Joe Cocker, the hemorrhoids have aged and followed the trend of all Americans in adding avoirdupois to their frames, making them even more difficult to see around. Here is a picture of my view of the Joe Cocker portion of the concert.

Now, you may tell me that all people stand and sway to the music at concerts. Not so. Not so at all. At some concerts the ratio of hemorrhoids to others is small, at others – Gordon Lightfoot concerts, for example – the ratio is so small that it’s infinitesimal. MD and I went to the SB Bowl a few days before the Cocker/SMB concert and saw James Taylor. As you can see from the photo below (which you can click to enlarge), there was nary a hemorrhoid in sight, at least not one in front of us, which, as far as I’m concerned, is all that really matters.

James Taylor concert. August 1, 2008 SB Bowl

The hemorrhoids to others ratio is huge at some concerts. Jimmy Buffet comes to mind. I’ve seen him a couple of times, and at the first chord of each song, all the Parrotheads jump to their feet and start to jerk and twitch. Annoying to the max. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be at a Hank Williams, Jr. concert. All I know is that I couldn’t be dragged to one with a team of horses. Other concerts are a crap shoot. MD and I saw Paul McCartney in Michigan years ago, and everyone stood the whole time, making it virtually impossible to see. Had everyone remained seated, everyone could have seen. As it was the hemorrhoids in the front, prevented people in the back from seeing the concert. We saw McCartney two more times over the years – both the later times in the South – and most of the people sat. The latter two concerts were the same music but much more civilized in terms of concert goers. So, you never know. I guess you pays your money and you takes your chances.

At least we lucked out in one category at the concert. We had good seats on the end of the row, and no one, not one single person, went in and out during the performance. I can never understand why people pay good money to go to a concert or a sporting event, then spend all their time going back and forth to the concession stand. Go to the concert or the game and sit and watch it, for God’s sake. You can eat and drink at home or during intermission or halftime. That’s my opinion, at least.

The Steve Miller Band was kind of a disappointment on a couple of fronts. First, the sound was way too loud. Don’t the people that put these things on realize that sounds in excess of a certain decibel level can damage hearing permanently. And the damage is cumulative. I don’t know what the sound level was during the SMB performance, but it was earsplitting.

Second, the band has added a new member, who is a lead singer and backup singer. He sang four or five new songs that the band has recorded, none of which sound anything like the SMB is supposed to sound. The guy has a good voice, but with him singing, it’s a different band. And, worst of all, the guy is on stage for the entire concert, and when he’s not singing, which is most of the time, he gambols around the stage doing some kind of dance that makes him look like the village idiot or worse. It is annoyingly distracting. And not just to curmudgeonly me – I heard others make the same comment.

As the concert mercifully ended and we trudged out and down the hill (the SB bowl is way up on a big hill) and the drunken chavs stumbled along (many were literally falling-down drunk), I couldn’t help but wonder how people can think it’s fun to go to a concert, have their eardrums blown out, and get knee-walking drunk. It’s a mystery to me, but God knows, a lot of people must enjoy it.

I left the concert with my ears ringing and damn glad it was over. MD left wishing she had come with anyone but me. We both dreaded that we had to get up the next morning at 4 AM to leave for Napa in order to get there in time for our meeting.

I’ll post about Napa next and the heart stopping $1400 dinner bill. I’m sorry to bore you all with my trials and tribulations of the past few days, but I’ve faithfully posted on nothing but nutritional topics for the past year. No political ruminations, no weird things I’ve found in my daily slog through the web, no nothing other than pure nutrition. So, you’ve got to indulge me on these couple of soul-cleansing blogs. It’s how I regenerate and restore my good humor.