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  #1   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 07:09
*bookish*'s Avatar
*bookish* *bookish* is offline
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Default Ugh - why all the lowcarb haters?

http://www.weightymatters.ca/2012/0...-profit-to.html

My friend's a registered dietician who works with a bariatric program here in the city, and this was posted to their facebook page today.

It just makes me sad that there's such a huge anti-lowcarb fervor. I get that it might not be for everyone (for whatever reason), but if it works for some why can't the 'experts' just let it exist out there as another option to try?

You have the option of hundreds of different cars to get you from point A to B, so why the hell not different ways of eating? GAH! I'm not about to preach to my vegan friends, my celiac friends, or my chronic cardio + margarine friends to change what they put in their mouths, so why is it alright for them to preach at me because I don't want a damn banana?

I wish everyone would just back the eff off.

Eat and let eat.
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  #2   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 07:32
keith v's Avatar
keith v keith v is offline
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It's hard to fight with idiots, they are so good at it
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  #3   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 07:56
MandalayVA's Avatar
MandalayVA MandalayVA is offline
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Plan: whole foods
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From the blog post in question, bolding mine:

Quote:
Whether it's low-carb diets, low-fat diets, GI diets, middle-ground diets, vegan diets, and even bat-shit crazy diets, there are long term success stories and recurrent failures with each and every one, where the common ground to success is a person actually liking their life enough to sustain their new patterns of reduced dietary intake, and where the common ground to failure is suffering or restriction beyond an individual's capacity to enjoy their life.


I completely agree with this. This guy isn't anti-low-carb, he's pointing out that it's just not the only way to lose weight. And like it or not there's some for whom low-carb either just doesn't work or isn't sustainable.
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  #4   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 10:38
Turtle2003's Avatar
Turtle2003 Turtle2003 is offline
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Plan: Atkins, Newcastle
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MandalayVA
From the blog post in question, bolding mine:


I completely agree with this. This guy isn't anti-low-carb, he's pointing out that it's just not the only way to lose weight. And like it or not there's some for whom low-carb either just doesn't work or isn't sustainable.


I agree. This is actually a pretty good website. I just read one of his posts where he complains about the Canadian diabetes organization advising diabetes patients to fill 1/4 of their plates with starches, and points out the effect of such advice on blood sugars, and the need for a lower carb diet.

Seems to me he's taking a very balanced approach to diet and obesity. I'm going to be reading more at this site.
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  #5   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 13:05
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Hellistile Hellistile is offline
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Quoting Carbsane (the pillar of objectivity) sent a red flag up for me.
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  #6   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 13:29
costello22's Avatar
costello22 costello22 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellistile
Quoting Carbsane (the pillar of objectivity) sent a red flag up for me.


Yeah, I noticed that too.

I'm with bookish. To say that diets are the problem is all fine and dandy, but before I started on low carb I was rapidly gaining weight. It's like something broke, and the weight started piling on. I had to do something to stop it, and diets are the only tool available to me. Maybe 100 years from now, they'll be able to say, "Oh, here's the problem. Your whozziwhatsit is out of wack. We can fix that." But 100 years from now, I'm going to be dead - no matter what happens. So I gotta pick the diet that seems the most helpful and sustainable for me and try to stick with it the best way I know how.

The thing is, Gary Taubes' hypothesis may be wrong and it may be right, but I know the simplistic CICO solution doesn't work - at least not for me. I've said this once before on this forum and was told what an idiot I am, but I believe the rigid adherence to the CICO model has delayed making progress on really understanding obesity, its causes, and treatments/cures. When everything has to come back to how to get people to consume less or burn more, without acknowledging the complex biochemistry involved in weight maintenance, we don't make real scientific progress.

If Gary Taubes has had a hand in getting people to stop reflexively calling low-carb a dangerous fad diet and to begin to grudgingly admit it helps some people, then I salute him and I thank him. Anyone who talks about him in the tone taken by this blogger can kiss my Aunt Fanny.
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  #7   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 14:13
Turtle2003's Avatar
Turtle2003 Turtle2003 is offline
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Plan: Atkins, Newcastle
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellistile
Quoting Carbsane (the pillar of objectivity) sent a red flag up for me.


Well there is that.
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  #8   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 14:45
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is offline
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Default

Carbsane, isn't.

The ones who really annoy me are the "oh you have to have carbs" people, the "you gotta have grains" people, the ones who don't listen when I point out there is no such thing as an Essential Carb.
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  #9   ^
Old Wed, Sep-12-12, 17:04
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Default

The "studies" cited in that article are all observational, therefore yes, I can ignore all of it and still sleep like a baby tonight and every night. To wit, the Ewe super-high-carb diet was not tested in an experimental study to determine if in fact such an intake of carbs exclusively in the form of cassava does not cause obesity. Which is to say the hypothesis derived from this observation was not tested through experiment. The same is true of the other two observational studies. NuSI's argument is precisely that those studies are insufficient to determine the truth. The explicit purpose of NuSI is precisely to finance and design experimental studies that will test those hypotheses.

The minor differences in weight loss of experimental low-carb studies go as high as +100% that of other diets. 100% is not minor by any measure.
Quote:
My bed-side says no.

A bed-side opinion is sooo valid these days. Well, my bed-side says your bed-side sits on three wholly unreliable pieces of evidence. I'd consider sleeping on the couch for a while if I were you.
Quote:
That's certainly not to say that low-carb dieting doesn't help some manage their weights and health, it just means that no amount of bench-made "proof" will change the fact that low-carb dieting, for many, is far more of a restrictive diet than it is a livable, long-term lifestyle.

So it's not about weight loss anymore? If we go with the paleo idea, it seems we've been eating low-carb for hundreds of thousands of years. How's that for long-term, huh? If we continue with the paleo idea, the abundance of carbs in any form was only made possible by agriculture and processing recently, which makes the argument of low-carb being too restrictive kind of childish. I want my candy!!!!!!
Quote:
Meaning that even if low-carb were the holy grail of diets on paper, that fact would be worthless in practice unless you happened to enjoy low-carb enough to stick with it, and judging from the folks I see regularly in my office, that's far from a given. In fact it's a very rare person that I meet who hasn't tried a low-carb diet at least once. And all of those folks? No doubt when they undertook their low-carb diets they were true believers. As far as they were concerned low-carb was to be their salvation, and many report to me having had real success losing but that they just as rapidly regained everything when they couldn't stomach living low-carb anymore. It's that last bit that makes me think that regardless of the outcomes of Mr. Taubes' new non-profit's future studies, low-carb diets aren't going to be a panacea, just as they weren't in Banting's 1860s or Atkins' 1990s.

OK, Mr obesity medicine doc, I know where you're coming from. First, you are not a low-carb advocate, which suggests that you do not encourage your patients to start nor maintain a low-carb diet. Do you also expressly advise your patients against a low-carb diet? Maybe that would answer part of your complaint about how your patients can't stick to that, hm? Second, you are an obesity doctor, which suggests that your success rate to treat obesity is pretty much zero. At least if I look at the recent BioMed conference on Metabolism, Diet and Disease. The last question asked was "what do we do with obesity, when it's the biggest problem?" And since you are most likely not a low-carb advocate, your standard therapy is to tell your patients they should eat less and exercise more. That's another argument by NuSI which asks what if that's the wrong advice? Well, maybe you should look at your numbers for a hint, doc.
Quote:
And so while I don't share Mr. Taubes' view that there is one simple or predominant cause and treatment for obesity, and would in fact argue that anyone who thinks there's a singular cause for the society's weight struggles almost certainly doesn't work with actual living, breathing, human beings on their weights, I do agree that the research on what works and what doesn't work is inherently flawed. But it's a flaw that Mr. Taubes' is likely setting out to sustain and fund in that the flaw I see from my bedside is the arrogant belief that there's one right way to go and only one path to weight gain (or loss).

Doc, stop right there and go back a few steps. Nobody ever said carbs was the only cause of obesity. In fact, Taubes himself always says and emphasizes that carbs may be the primary cause. This implies that there may be more than one. After all, carbs are not the only thing that can affect the hormones that regulate fat tissue. Drugs do that, certain pathogens and medical conditions do that. You're a doc, you should know that stuff.
Quote:
And would you look at that. As weight rose, so too did caloric intake. Pretty much perfectly.

Sigh.

And obviously, the implication is that the increase in caloric intake is the cause, and the increase in obesity rate is the effect.

Sigh.

Have you not listened to a single thing that's been said by anybody ever, doc? The main argument of NuSI is that public policies are driven by observational studies, from which we infer cause and effect, the very thing we can't actually infer from those kinds of studies. Here's what my bed-side says about that graph. As people grow bigger, they must eat more to compensate. It's just like a small car and a big truck. The small car consumes less fuel than the big truck. Well, the big guy spends more calories than the small guy. Whatchathinkthebigguy'sgonnadoatdinnertime? Has your bed-side ever said that, huh?
Quote:
Why we're eating more is the question that needs to be answered, and while the increased consumption of highly refined carbohydrates may indeed be a player, there's zero doubt in this bed-side's mind, the game that's being played isn't one-on-one. There's no doubt it's not as simple as, "eat less, move more", and there's equally no doubt it's not as simple as just cut carbs. If either were true, everyone who wanted to be would already be skinny.

Now you really lost me, doc. That's exactly NuSI's argument. Science is shite, and we should do better science. By the way, have you thought of putting both graphs together such that you then see that there was an increase in the proportion of carbohydrates eaten, and there was an increase in the total calories eaten, which ultimately suggests that the biggest part of this increase in total caloric intake comes from the carbs, huh? Remember, the proportional chart is about calories, while carbs and fat have difference caloric content. Carbs have 4c/g, fat has 9c/g. So if 1% gets shifted, that's +/-1Xg fat and +/-2Xg carbs. In metabolism, what matters is the absolute number, not the proportion. There's a huge difference in the metabolic effect between 50g of fat and 100g of carbs. There's an even huger difference when you subtract 50g of fat and replace it with 100g of carbs to keep calories constant, or even with 200g of carbs as is the case here since calories went up.

I'm done. While I respect the medical profession, I can't stand some idiot with a doctorate.

Last edited by M Levac : Wed, Sep-12-12 at 17:30.
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  #10   ^
Old Thu, Sep-13-12, 04:49
WereBear's Avatar
WereBear WereBear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by M Levac
The "studies" cited in that article are all observational, therefore yes, I can ignore all of it and still sleep like a baby tonight and every night.


You made me laugh.

In the article, he admits it works. He admits that when people go back to their previous way of eating, they gain the weight back!

Duh! Duh! Duh! That's my idiot alarm going off, right there.

Restrictive my shrinking behind. I eat a lot of red meat, cheese, bacon, butter, and all kinds of "goodies" that I never ate on my previous "low fat/healthy whole grains" diet. That freakin' diet was the restrictive one!
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  #11   ^
Old Thu, Sep-13-12, 05:11
rpavich's Avatar
rpavich rpavich is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle2003
I agree. This is actually a pretty good website. I just read one of his posts where he complains about the Canadian diabetes organization advising diabetes patients to fill 1/4 of their plates with starches, and points out the effect of such advice on blood sugars, and the need for a lower carb diet.

Seems to me he's taking a very balanced approach to diet and obesity. I'm going to be reading more at this site.


You mean he's contradicting himself.

On one hand he slams Gary Taubes for his low carb approach...and also extolls the benefits of low carb on the other....


Thats' not balanced..that's contraditory.
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  #12   ^
Old Thu, Sep-13-12, 06:53
MandalayVA's Avatar
MandalayVA MandalayVA is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rpavich
You mean he's contradicting himself.

On one hand he slams Gary Taubes for his low carb approach...and also extolls the benefits of low carb on the other....


Thats' not balanced..that's contraditory.


No, he slams Taubes because he believes that Taubes thinks that low carb is the ONLY way to lose weight when it's not.
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  #13   ^
Old Thu, Sep-13-12, 07:37
costello22's Avatar
costello22 costello22 is offline
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I call BS on this comment to the blog post (my bolding):

Quote:
Wendy Hanawalt9:00 AM

I did the lowcarb thing for a long time. I gave it up. I'm now eat a vegetarian diet, for many reasons, including health. I have to say that for me, it's been easier to maintain a vegetarian way of eating than low carb. More variety, more possibilities. I have managed to lower bgs and weight on this way of life. I did also on the low carb diet, but as you point out in the article, once I could no longer stand it (I started to crave green beans!), the weight came right back on.


Any real low carber knows she could have had her green beans!
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  #14   ^
Old Thu, Sep-13-12, 07:42
rpavich's Avatar
rpavich rpavich is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by costello22
I call BS on this comment to the blog post (my bolding):



Any real low carber knows she could have had her green beans!



This illustrates a BIG PROBLEM with this anecdotal sort of reporting of low carb stuff: ANYONE who does ANYTHING faintly even RESEMBLING low carb no matter how far off it is will be put under the generic "low carb" umbrella and that will be used to condemn the approach in general.
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  #15   ^
Old Thu, Sep-13-12, 07:46
costello22's Avatar
costello22 costello22 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MandalayVA
No, he slams Taubes because he believes that Taubes thinks that low carb is the ONLY way to lose weight when it's not.


That may be what he's claiming, but I think he slams Taubes because Taubes dared to criticize nutrition "science" - and more and more research is accumulating that the low carb diet isn't the dangerous diet it was portrayed (by nutritionists!) to be. I think it just sticks in the craw that Taubes might have been right about anything, that he might have valid points - both about the causes of obesity and the quality of nutrition research.

I notice that when a commenter on his blog suggested a potential conflict of interest, the doctor responded that the conflict didn't exist. But he couldn't leave it at that. He had to make a snarky remark implying the commenter was 'mad' at the doctor.
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