I'm not sure. But maybe that's where we should be on some of this stuff. It seems like there's some disagreement about just what constitutes hypothyroidism. But again... if we're dealing with damaged metabolisms, I don't think it's probably very predictable exactly how a metabolism will break down, so that regardless of what we might think the "natural" human diet is, sometimes assuming that a person will produce adequate glucose+ketones to function properly might not work out. But is this a special case that pops up again occasionally, or is it the norm? I just don't know--and I don't think the self-selected online low carb/paleo community constitutes a random enough sample to even guess.

I listened to the Jimmy Moore interview with Perlmutter first--that one was very basic, seemed like a "stock" interview--didn't seem to go much deeper than "carbs bad." His interview with Robb Wolf seemed a little less basic--after that I listed to an interview he did with Dr. Mercola. After the Jimmy Moore interview, I wasn't sure I wanted to buy the book after all--but after the Wolf and Mercola interviews, I think I do. It's hard to cover everything in a one-hour interview.

Perlmutter always seems to apologize when he's about to get at all technical... I think his publishers have pounded into his head the importance of not sounding too geeky to lay audiences, in fear that that will decrease the general appeal of his book.

When Robb made the point out that it might be a more secure position to hold that a ketogenic diet is therapeutic once a person's glucose/insulin metabolism is compromised, I was a little disappointed by Perlmutter's response. Robb did have a good point. I don't personally think our ancestor's diets were as carb-poor as many people argue. Our ancestors were really smart, sometimes brilliant--they would have found starch in places we wouldn't even think to look. At the same time--I think a good counter-argument is that while a ketogenic diet might or might not be everybody's ancestral diet--a diet that's therapeutic against alzheimer's, cancer etc., is unlikely to cause these--so that it seems reasonable to suppose that it might be preventative, for those it appeals to.