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

Synchronicity is an interesting thing.  The International Journal of Obesity has an article in the Ahead of Publication section of its online journal showing that replacing bagels with eggs for breakfast increases weight loss, which article I wrote about in my last post.  Now comes the British Journal of Nutrition, and in its Ahead of Publication section of this month’s online journal there is an article titled: Increased dietary protein consumed at breakfast leads to an initial and sustained feeling of fullness during energy restriction compared to other meal times.

The authors of this paper present data that adds to the idea that consuming protein for breakfast as part of a calorically-restricted diet leads to decreased hunger and food intake during the remainder of the day.  And this particular paper even adds to the data showing that even minimal decreases of carbohydrate intake along with a little extra protein bring about good things.

Here is how the study was done (and I’m sorry because it is difficult to follow - I had to diagram it to figure out what was going on.  If you don’t want to drive yourself crazy going through all the individual diets, just skip down to the last couple of paragraphs and read the conclusions).

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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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I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the paper a colleague from Europe emailed me this morning. It was from the journal Obesity Reviews, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity (IASO). The IASO is the international academic obesity research society, and as such, it is mired in all the mainstream misconceptions of the causes and proper treatment of obesity. Obesity Reviews is edited by Arne Astrup, the Danish obesity researcher who is a staunch believer in and supporter of the low-fat diet as the best therapeutic tool in the battle against obesity. And Obesity Reviews is the very journal in which George Bray launched his misguided jihad against Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

The paper, which isn’t published yet, is titled:

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John Tierney, science blogger for the New York Times, was as taken aback by the abject stupidity hostility of the comments to his recent post on fat in the diet that included a response from Gary Taubes about the Israeli low-carb study as I was in my recent post about his post. He decided to post on the subject again, specifically addressing the comments quibbling with the findings on saturated fat. And he included more feedback from Gary.

What we have to keep in mind here is that nutrition is a science (or at least should be) and science is about generating hypotheses, making predictions from our hypotheses, and then seeing if they hold true. The relevant hypothesis here — i.e., what we’ve believed for the past 30-odd years — is that saturated fat causes heart disease by elevating either total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol, specifically. So our prediction is that the diet with the higher saturated fat content will have a relatively deleterious effect on cholesterol. We do the test; we repeat it a half dozen times in different populations. Each time it fails to confirm our prediction. So maybe the hypothesis is wrong. That seems like a reasonable conclusion. No one is proving anything here — as some of your respondents like to decry — we’re just looking at the evidence and trying to decide which hypotheses it supports and which it tends to refute.

The knee-jerk response — as exemplified by quite a few respondents — is to assume that sometime in the not-too-distant past, maybe the 1960s or 1970s, before this low-fat dogma set in, such trials, or far better trials, were done and found the opposite — that the higher the saturated fat in the diet, the lower the cholesterol and the better the cholesterol profile. Or the higher the saturated fat, the greater the mortality. But that’s simply not the case, as I point out in my book. In fact, I’ve been criticized (by Gina Kolata, among others) for going on and on in the book about all the different studies. But I did so precisely because I didn’t want to be accused of cherry picking the data. (I was anyway, but that’s just the nature of this business.) When Ancel Keys, for instance, reported in the 1950s reported that saturated fats raised total cholesterol, which they did in his studies, he based it on comparisons of butter fat to polyunsaturated oils in studies that lasted only two to nine weeks. (He also reported, curiously enough, that the saturated fats had no significant effect on LDL.)

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