I hope this hasn't been already posted several times, but I was just so glad to see how this took the ADA diet apart that I had to share it.

http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/5/1/9

Re-reading this, I now realize what is really wrong with the ADA diet. They are afraid of litigation.


What this says is, "Hey, here is the excuse you can use, it protects you by saying that you were right, but it also allows you to move towards what is really correct."

The ADA has not been able to back away for fear that millions of diabetics will sue them for pushing the wrong drugs all this time.

Very nice! Thanks.

Oh yeah. I always figured that was a given -- that at the moment all kinds of health agencies are trying to figure out how to "slowly mosey on over to what the public is figuring out anyway" while making it look like a 'new' discovery they are just being cautious about.

If the content of Gary Taubes's GCBC book could be distilled for the public, there'd be lynch mobs. I can understand their concern.

Very good information. Now if only I could get my dad to believe it ...

Exactly. It is mindboggling how the "experts" have so badly botched nutrition and related health issues.

Well, my relationships with doctors has always left me with the impression that the problem was simple stupidity. I actually feel a little better about them now that I know it is more fear and greed.

I found the use of this term rather than 'ketosis' interesting:


I thought this was educational, for discussion on forums like this:


And I thought this was the best point of all:


I seriously have wondered about the mentality of people whose primary job and training and role is to find what works for health, in deciding that rather than tell people what works, they will tell them something else because probably most of them won't do what really works. It's like that joke about the drunk looking for keys a block from where he dropped them because the light is better there.

It is no end of appalling that I have watched my stepmother's family die off limb by vision by heart attack by cancer, because they are all obese and diabetic, and all follow the ADA's plan, as best they can (given that eating too damn many carbs makes you crave the things).

No amount of discussion or reference to my stepmother will help, since (a) she is mildly dyslexic so reading is a lot of work for her, it has to be simple and short generally, and (b) the ADA has the absolute power of divine medical authority in her eyes--despite how effectively its advice has managed to kill off nearly her entire family at this point--nothing and nobody else can compete, that's "medicine" and "science" and "government" all wrapped up in one.

I personally consider the ADA's asinine advice responsible for untold millions of deaths, blindness, amputations, heart attacks, cancer, and other misery visited upon the masses who have trusted them--it's hard to use the corporate sheild of non-responsibility when the level of result is so profound. If there was true evil in the world, it would be in seemingly well-intentioned people, in seemingly innocuous agencies, that had the power to bring untold suffering to so many people and their families.

You are looking at 2 different sets of doctors. For the practicing physician set you correctly identified the root problem in most instances in my experience. Once I found a doctor with a brain I resisted moving so as to not lose access to him.

Ketonuria is the medical term.

i agree that once you boil all of it down, it's nothing but a face-saving technique. they admit that they vilified saturated fat without good reason, but the damage is still done in the eye of the public.


anyone got erin brockovich's number?

i would think that by not incorporating the "latest" (and i use that term with a hefty dose of sarcasm) information regarding the effect of carbohydrates on the human body, they'd be leaving themselves open for someone to do just that. by slightly changing their story now, if someone did step up and say "we're going to charge the ADA with murder of thousands of innocent diabetics", they could say "we've changed our story, now we know what we did wrong" and probably get the whole thing thrown out.

what bothers me more is based on that paper, they had all the pieces to the puzzle, but tried to put it together based on the picture from another box. i can totally understand the two sets of thought tracks:

track A: carbohydrates break down into sugar -- sugar becomes glucose in the bloodstream -- the body uses insulin to break down sugar and burn it -- insulin also packs away excess fuel into fat cells -- insulin locks the energy into fat cells, causing people to gain weight and become obese (a symptom, not a cause) -- bombard the body with too much sugar for too long and insulin becomes less effective -- the body becomes resistant to its own insulin -- the pancreas gives up -- end result = type 2 diabetes -- in order to avoid diabetes, carbohydrates must be restricted.

track B: ingesting more calories than expended causes obesity -- reducing the amount of calories ingested and increasing the amount of calories expended promotes weight loss -- fat has 9 calories per gram, carbohydrate and protein have 4 calories per gram -- the most efficient way of reducing calories is to remove fat -- the most lucrative way to make fat-free food more palatable is to add carbohydrates.

the commonality between the two is obesity. their train of thought was supposed to go down track A, but got detoured by track B. it also ties in to the definition of insanity... repeating the same behaviors and expecting different results each time.

Maybe I'm just too close to the subject, but I don't see how litigation is not unavoidable. I'm not diabetic as far as I know, but I was shocked, dismayed, flabbergasted, and worse, completely and utterly disillusioned when I discovered how the health authorities have been ignoring something as obvious as the fact that diabetics cannot tolerate carbs in the same way that alcoholics cannot tolerate alcohol. yet no health authority would recommend that alcoholics have a glass of wine with every meal.

Every since the sheer monstrousness of this was made clear to me, I became interested in the subject. I suppose in the same way that Gary Taubes became interested in the science behind nutrition after discovering that some of the "scientists" in the field rated as the worst scientist he has ever met.

Pass me the coconut oil and the pork rinds please

I'm eating them for my health!


And Angeline, I was sooooooo pissed off when I realized that I was fat and miserable most of my adult life FOR NO GOOD REASON, I had visions of storming some of the institutions that promoted the way of eating that got me fat in the first place.

Fortunately for them, I would rather play my Nintendo Wii, and I am not a fan of confined spaces

I am STILL pissed off one year later and don't see getting over it any time soon...but I just bought Mario Kart, so they are safe for a while.

The ADA advice to diabetics to continue to eat carbs and sugars because it would be hard on them to not eat them is equivalent to telling alcoholics that it is OK to keep drinking as it would difficult for them to stop. They would recommend a controlled drinking plan. One beer with breakfast, another one as a snack, two glasses of wine with lunch, etc.

They did that. They still do. It's one of the treament plans for alcoholics. Similar to methadone for heroin addicts.

Of course the one I like is the vegan method of "curing" alcoholism, "Eat nothing but fresh veggies and don't drink". Or the supplement method, "Take lots of suppliments and don't drink".

What part of "Don't drink" don't they understand?

When I told my "diabetic counsellor" that I was going to cure my T2 with low carb she had a fit. Insisted that I try to live on a starvation diet while getting 120 carbs a day. Fool. My A1C tests show her objections to be baseless.

Yeah, you know...

It's not just that shifting from athletic to morbidly obese basically ruined 20 years of my life (more if it takes more than another few to lose enough of it, if it's even possible)... that alone would be immeasurable.

But when people you love lose a piece of their body at a time, until both feet then a leg then a hand then they're blind, and someone else has had the heart attack and another the horrible lingering death of cancer and you can track all of these to "had they gotten decent advice to begin with and followed it even 50%, there's a VERY high chance they wouldn't have had the results they did," I think it is more than just upsetting.

I said recently on a friend's journal:

I suppose the only bright side of it in my case is that it actually is so *overwhelmingly horrifying* that it really just stuns me into depression rather than inspiring me to act out.