'A prudent diet may be associated with enhanced insulin sensitivity and a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.'

I consider myself to be 'pre-diabetic' (for various reasons: genetics, results of my fasting blood glucose over the years, sedentary life style, results from testing my own blood sugar at home) so I'm always interested in lowering my risk.

The above looks like an innocuous, perfectly fine thing to say. What my doctor may do is prescribe (he has suggested this in the past) a drug. A prudent diet may work, yes. A pill may also work. I can read. I can see what side effects are possible (also possible with a diet I may choose, by the way!)

After years of being careful with carbs, with the support of this board, I'm still here, still fat, still pre-diabetic, still doing variations of low-carbing (with Intermittent Fasting being the most comfortable for me - with no weight loss from that) and I can understand why my doctor would prescribe a pill.

(Add to this that I have a history of colon cancer in my family (both sides). I am extremely hesitant to load up on red meat and cut fiber out of my diet. Surely the 'read meat' was not published in the study...)

'Well, I disagree with this profoundly.'

The world is made up of square pegs being pounded, without success, into round holes. The square peg is in the eye of the beholder, I guess!

Read Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. There's enough bad science in there to prove the point. If that's not enough, how about Climategate?

The vast majority of scientists are motivated by their next grant. Bad science makes it to publication because it fits the prevailing wisdom and lot of good science doesn't get published because it exposes the prevailing wisdom. That has almost always been the case.

http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html

There are over 40 names on that list, including Dr. Joseph Lister.

'There are over 40 names on that list, including Dr. Joseph Lister.'

Yeah, so?

All that means to me is that good science has prevailed, picked up the pieces and continued.

One of my favorite scientific theories that turned out to be bogus was that of phlogiston.

From Wikipedia:
'The theory holds that all flammable materials contain phlogiston, a substance without color, odor, taste, or mass that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx.

"Phlogisticated" substances are those that contain phlogiston and are "dephlogisticated" when burned; "in general, substances that burned in air were said to be rich in phlogiston; the fact that combustion soon ceased in an enclosed space was taken as clear-cut evidence that air had the capacity to absorb only a definite amount of phlogiston. When air had become completely phlogisticated it would no longer serve to support combustion of any material, nor would a metal heated in it yield a calx; nor could phlogisticated air support life, for the role of air in respiration was to remove the phlogiston from the body."[5] Thus, phlogiston as first conceived was a sort of anti-oxygen in today's terms.'


Were it not for scientists and their questioning, measuring, and testing, I'm wondering if phlogiston could still be a square peg being pounded into a round hole today.

Climategate? Is that political or is that scientific?

If it is a contest between politicians and scientists going after the truth, I think I'll put my money on the latter, thank you.

Gary Taubes is a good science writer. He is not a scientist. But he is a good science writer. In fact, he is an award-winning, very successful science writer.

I cannot compare my data since I'm not a scientist, but I do compare my knowledge with people who do not agree with me. Namely on Lyle McDonald's mean forum.


It sure is. At least, it is for me on the subject of computer programming.


No but my point is that nutritional scientists do not act as if they were competing with each other. It's not like in other sciences.


Individual studies can be well done and proper by themselves, but of course they rely on other studies (references) too, which is normal. But what happens when all contradictory findings are tossed aside in a particular type of reference that most scientists use in their own research?


Indeed and of course when this gets to the medias it becomes "does" instead of "may".


Normally it works like that, but in nutrition it is just not true currently. That was the whole point of Gary Taubes' GCBC. Those interested in researching alternate obesity hypothesis do not get the funding!


Agreed.

Patrick

I hear your frustration. After over two years of low-carbing I'm still fat - but 40 pounds lighter than I was. I'm no longer pre-diabetic, however. That was fixed very quickly by the diet. My blood work is remarkably good.

I also added IF recently. I haven't lost weight on it either.

I believe that if the scientists working in this area had moved past their incorrect hypotheses a long time ago, they might have been able to advance the level of knowledge to a point where I would have the answer I need to help me lose weight.

Politically (and financially, and career- etc.,) motivated scientific fraud.

He says himself that he is not a scientist (by profession), but being a scientist IMHO does not imply you earn your life as one.

By the way, did you read GCBC? It truly is an eye opener and well worth your time.

Patrick

'Namely on Lyle McDonald's mean forum.'

I may have checked that out once but only once. Where is it, again?

'Politically (and financially, and career- etc.,) motivated scientific fraud.'

Well, we'll see, won't we? I'm not even familiar with Climategate (unless it refers to that subject of global warming, whether such a thing exists, etc.) but ultimately, we will see, won't we?

'That was fixed very quickly by the diet. My blood work is remarkably good.'

I don't think 'pre-diabetes' is ever FIXED - it's hardly a diagnosis. In fact, I'm giving myself a bogus diagnosis here. My blood work is very good. Stellar results, in fact - which, I have told my doctor, I attribute to Intermittent Fasting. The few studies that have been done on that show that it does improve blood chemistry results, that's all. Which it did.

'After over two years of low-carbing I'm still fat - but 40 pounds lighter than I was. '
After a few months of simple exercise on the stairmaster, daily, I lost 12 pounds. Without dieting at all. And now I'm older, my hormones are different and I'm too damned lazy to work out on a stairmaster at the Y every single day.

'I believe that if the scientists working in this area had moved past their incorrect hypotheses a long time ago, they might have been able to advance the level of knowledge to a point where I would have the answer I need to help me lose weight.'

Now, that's just being silly. Scientists agree to the measure of a calorie. If I take you - not knowing you - and lock you in a hotel room with a bathroom and a TV and monitor the possible exits, I am quite certain that if you are only given x amount of calories (to be determined), you will lose weight. It just won't feel good and you won't be able to keep it up. Which is why dieting is so hard. Whichever diet you choose, you have to live with.

'It sure is. At least, it is for me on the subject of computer programming.'

Gotcha. I'm a retired computer programmer. My area was system programming IBM mainframes. With my PC, I'm just as lost as the next person.
I recall the first day of my last job, when I was surrounded by people talking about 'copying and pasting' and I was clueless because I didn't have a personal computer! I looked like a time traveler from the past to them.

'my point is that nutritional scientists do not act as if they were competing with each other. It's not like in other sciences.'

I think one problem is that nutritional information, supported by studies, comes from various sources - and they aren't the people working in the science community doing that research. They are sometimes dieticians, sometimes doctors with their own agenda (which you can choose to agree or disagree with), or biochemists who may have the facts but those facts have little application to what people are capable of using in everyday life. By the time some of this is in a magazine promoting health (such as 'Prevention' magazine), it's just what the publisher wants to fit their philosophy of health.
But other than that, science is science, even for people working with nutrition.

'But what happens when all contradictory findings are tossed aside in a particular type of reference that most scientists use in their own research?'

If what you mean is, what happens when a scientist takes a different path and doesn't incorporate previous findings in his own work, then he builds an argument that is then tested and evaluated in the scientific community. If his results can't be replicated, for example, they are worthless. A scientist who is studying 'high-fat' anything is going to have his results weighed against 'low-fat' anything. The conflicts will eventually be resolved or remain an open question to be resolved by some interested scientist.

'Indeed and of course when this gets to the medias it becomes "does" instead of "may".'

Sometimes, a magazine article may use the wording of the press release and KEEP the 'may' which is important. Often, the 'does' is supplied by the mind of the person reading the magazine article. When it's in the media, it's either a magazine or newspaper article, and on television or radio, the 'may' gets dropped altogether ('Scientists say...') That is the fault of the media, no one else's!

'That was the whole point of Gary Taubes' GCBC. Those interested in researching alternate obesity hypothesis do not get the funding!'

I haven't read GCBC. It's a big world. If you are interested in researching alternate obesity hypothesis and your usual sources of funding are not interested in that, move to a different job that does allow that, or get alternate funding. The whole whiny 'there's a conspiracy to keep people fat' thing is missing, I HOPE, from GCBC. Again, Taubes is a science writer. His job is actually to get his book published. And to get his next book published. And the next one.

There's nothing quite as irritating as being called "silly" by someone who hasn't taken the time to understand the issue.

If you would sit down with GCBC - or even just watch one of Taubes' lectures - you might begin to understand the science behind obesity and metabolism. It has little to do with working out for hours or suffering through caloric restrictions.



Yep. Anyone can be starved. Lean people, obese people. What I can't understand is why, if you so strongly believe in the "eat-less-move-more" model, you persist in eating low-carb - a diet you say hasn't helped you.



It amazes me how many low-carbers don't understand the science behind the diet - and have no interest in learning about it. You seem reasonably intelligent and you say you've been low-carbing for years. Why not learn the theory behind the diet?

I cannot believe you haven't read that damn book!

It's basically just a review of a century of science -- and bad science, and good science ignored, and overt scientist bias, and more. So yeah, if you haven't gotten that particular education you're probably missing a huge chunk of the reason a lot of people on the topic of nutrition feel so differently about its science.


Well, scientists and doctors are trained in universities initially. And colleges use textbooks. And textbooks are written by people educated often decades ago by equally ignorant people and it just continues on. Textbooks can be filled with utterly wrong garbage that totally ignores both past and present research in some areas while parroting assumptions (like that you can't live without carbs, and that whole grains are utterly necessary for health). I work in a huge publishing corp and seeing some of the content in the nutrition books is just painful, especially since they work so hard to make the quality of the products so good in every other way. But that's what's popular -- not what's actually scientifically proven. So let's be sure we indoctrinate all our future scientists and docs with the same BS we've been indoctrinating them with for the last 30+ years and nothing... will ever... change.

'I cannot believe you haven't read that damn book!

It's basically just a review of a century of science -- and bad science, and good science ignored, and overt scientist bias, '

Sorry, I didn't read the book. Taubes is not the first person to criticize science he doesn't like. Books about the history of science are rife with examples of 'ha, ha, can you believe this stuff was science?'

I took a college course, 'The History of Science' Does that count? There's lots of 'ha, ha, can you believe this stuff?' there.

Gary Taubes is a science writer, no more than that. Another good book is 'Dream Babies' (if you can find it) about the history of child-rearing theories. Ha, ha, can you believe people raised kids that way?

'It's basically just a review of a century of science'

Then, yeah, we covered it in the History of Science class. Interesting stuff, history.

'And textbooks are written by people educated often decades ago by equally ignorant people and it just continues on.'

There you are wrong. Textbooks are written by people who are also working in a very competitive field - more so because they must be scientists and also be able to write well, organize ideas and make connections. I have a huge problem with textbooks (atrociously expensive) being so current when, for example, I don't think you need a better calculus textbook for freshman calculus - Thompson's 'Calculus Made Easy' (updated just a bit by Martin Gardner) is just fine.

'But that's what's popular -- not what's actually scientifically proven.'
I believe that what you see in nutrition textbooks HAS been scientifically proven. You may have grounds to sue your publishing company if they are making up studies that never took place. If you disagree with conclusions, then that's another thing altogether. And nothing is to stop you from revising a textbook or writing your own if you have the passion, the education and the interest. To think that once upon a time, you couldn't just go directly to the Internet and self-publish!

'If you would sit down with GCBC - or even just watch one of Taubes' lectures - you might begin to understand the science behind obesity and metabolism. It has little to do with working out for hours or suffering through caloric restrictions.'

I read Taubes when he first started writing about this and I have seen him on video and I have him on podcasts I've downloaded from iTunes. I think I do understand where he is coming from.

He's a science writer.

'What I can't understand is why, if you so strongly believe in the "eat-less-move-more" model, you persist in eating low-carb - a diet you say hasn't helped you.'

I've said it before several times on this forum: the low-carb diet tastes better to me. It works as well, if adhered to, as WW, or low-fat, or Slim Fast, or any other diet you can name. If adhered to.

Right now, if you look in most* of the journals I subscribe to - on this forum, people are 'off plan' with their low-carb diet plans. They succeed at low-carbing when they don't eat carbs or they eat the minimum of healthy carbs. As soon as they start eating off-plan, two things happen simultaneously:

1. They treat protein and fats as if they are invisible and calorie-less.

2. They incorporate carbs that THEY want back into their diet until they are eating what they want (guiltily, perhaps, furtively, perhaps, rationalizing like hell about it) and piling on the proteins and fats because that is 'all good'.

Because they feel liberated from the whole 'calories in, calories out' thing, they stay fat as ever. Taubes (who belongs to a gym and exercises himself) told them that it was OK not to exercise if they diet because it will only make them hungrier and that was all they needed to know. They aren't expending calories.

So you have more food going in and less energy being expended. People of all ages and all different metabolisms (and states of hormonal imbalances, etc.) looking at the low-carb lifestyle as if it works when, obviously, it doesn't work for them any better than WW would. They don't like WW (I don't, even though I go to WW to be weighed), they like low-carb and they will stick with it. Why? IMO, it just tastes good.

*make that a lot, not most. The more successful recoveries from backsliding are made by younger people. Not to mention the presence of very enthusiastic exercisers who don't care what Taubes has to say and they look great while they are low-carbing.

It's clear from your posts that you don't understand metabolism and weight regulation.

You may eat low-carb because you prefer it, it tastes good to you. I don't. I prefer the foods I can't have. I want to eat tuna casserole tonight. I want spaghetti. I want ramen noodles. I want macaroni and cheese. I want a peant butter and jelly sandwich. I want ice cream and cheesecake and cookies.

I don't like meat. I find it morally and aesthetically offensive.

If it were possible for me to eat the "normal" foods I used to eat, I would do so. But I can only eat those foods if I'm willing to accept either massive weight gain and diabetes or constant hunger.

Eating low carb I can maintain my (admittedly still too high) weight without feeling hungry, weak, irritable.

And BTW I've done Weight Watchers - twice. Not only did I not lose weight, I was barely functioning due to constant hunger. So I'm going to have to say that low-carb works for me better than WW does.

Honestly, mathmaniac, I don't know if I'm being particularly prickly today, but I'm finding your tone offensive.