Okay.  I said I was through with Anthony Colpo, but now I’m going to quote from him once again.  What gives?

What gives is that I’m stuck in the airport in Seattle – my flight to Chicago is delayed for almost four hours because of bad weather in the Windy City.  I figured I would use this time to stick up a quick post about thermodynamics and provide a long quote from Robert McLeod, who writes Entropy Production, a physics (sort of) blog.  As you can see below, he pretty much trashes Bray and other nutritional researchers who blithely use the 1st Law of Thermodynamics to prove the old a-calorie-is-a-calorie notion.  To show the way the average nutritional writer looks at this law, I needed to find a quote.  As it works out, the only thing I have with me is Anthony’s book The Fat Loss Bible, which just happens to have the perfect quote.  So, sorry AC, I’m not really trying to pick on you.  And you certainly aren’t the only nutritional writer who thinks this way – you’re just the only one who has a quote handy I can use.

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. In other words, energy just doesn’t just magically disappear; it must be converted to something else. In the case of any excess calories you ingest, they will be stored as fat, used to accommodate an increase in lean tissue mass, or dissipated as heat through thermogenesis. Manipulating the proportion of protein, fat and carbohydrate you eat each day will not excuse you from the Law of Thermodynamics.

This is the way just about all nutritional scientists and writers look at the First Law.  Let’s take a look at how a physicist sees it.  Robert McLeod wrote a long post a while back reviewing Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories.  Near the end of the post, he discusses the energy balance equation and one of our old friends, Dr. George Bray, who gave Gary’s book a bad review in an obesity journal.  (I posted on this same review a couple of times here and here.)

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On to the second and, mercifully, final part of the critical review of the metabolic advantage as presented by A Colpo in his book The Fat-Loss Bible. As discussed in the previous post, our friend, like the kid to the left, is focused so intently on his refusal to believe in even the possibility of the existence of a metabolic advantage that he can’t read the literature correctly – not even the very literature he uses to try to prove his own position.  His bias has hypnotized him to the point that he can’t see anything that doesn’t confirm his what he already believes.  And this same bias prevents him from even taking a scientific approach to the problem.

We all fall victim to the confirmation bias and have to fight it constantly.  Gary Taubes thinks I may even have succumbed a little in the earlier post on AC and the metabolic advantage.  He emailed me saying he had read the post and thought it was great up to the point right at the end where I wrote that the data on the whole showed that, if anything, there was a metabolic advantage.  Gary thought the data presented in all the studies in AC’s chart was ambiguous and that I was going out on a limb a little in making the statement that I thought, if anything, that the papers argued for a metabolic advantage.

I disagree.

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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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Synchronicity strikes again.  The seeds of this post were sown when Gary Taubes emailed me about a study published in early 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that I had seen at the time, briefly skimmed and tossed aside as worthless.  Gary agreed that the study was of little value, but notice that it contained a peculiar statement by the authors, an interesting admission about HDL, the lipophobe’s favorite lipoprotein.  And not only had the authors made this strange admission, but so had another prominent lipophobe who wrote the accompanying editorial.

I pulled the study, read it more thoroughly and still found it mediocre at best.  But I did come across the strange HDL statements that Gary had mentioned. (More about which later.)

As I was shaking my head over the amount of money spent on what was a truly abominable study, the synchronicity occurred.  I got a ding that I had a new email.  It was a notice from the American Heart Association telling me that this august body had deemed the very study I was holding in my hands as one of the ten most important papers published in 2009.  The sheer stupidity of it nearly took my breath away.

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