Literally, after just posting this comment on another fitness blogger’s post on Food Logging–

Food diaries are the absolute best tool for facilitating weight loss. Statistical fact.
When I first woke up from my junk-food induced coma and realized I was (again) way too fat, I bought a book on diet and weight loss, written by a business man.

Key point was to treat calories like money. Create a daily deficit, and you will lose weight and go broke.

Easy. I lost 40 pounds in three months.

But I am totally OVER food logging. As long as I don’t eat over-stimulating food, my body, which has thankfully repaired its hunger/satiety gauges through clean whole foods eating, tells me when to quit.

I eat a lot. 3,000-4,000 calories a day, on average, and no—I’m not working out.  Just living. I try to eat as much variety as possible, and tracking ALL THAT FOOD is a pain.

–I began to read an article I’d left open yesterday in my browser, on the food reward hypothesis.

From the article,

The food reward hypothesis of obesity states that the reward and palatability value of food influence body fatness, and excess reward/palatability can promote body fat accumulation.

In other words, when food is yummy, we eat more of it.  Too much eating eventually leads to overweight/fat accumulation, and/or possibly brain damage (i.e. damage in the hypothalamus, where appetite is regulated) and obesity.

Now, this might sound like a no-brainer, right?

Wrong, if you’re a low-carber.  If you’re like Gary Taubes (the “journalist” to which the fabulous article was written as a response piece), or a no-cash-crop-Paleo promoter, you probably want us to think that it is the type of calorie, not how tasty it is.  In other words, carbs, by virtue of their caloric type, cause fatness, and fats and proteins do not.

The author of the paper, Stephan Guyenet, explains the backwardation of this “no brainer” as follows,

I thought it would be more productive to discuss one of the core elements of [Taubes'] position, which has arguably been one of his greatest influences on the public.  This is the “paradigm shift” he promotes, away from thinking about obesity as a problem of energy imbalance (energy in vs. out), and toward thinking about it as a “disorder of excess fat accumulation” where energy imbalance is the result rather than the cause of fat tissue expansion (36)…He uses this argument to brush aside much of the last 60 years of obesity research, and the opinions of many seasoned researchers, arguing that they are largely irrelevant because they operate under the wrong paradigm (logical framework).

And the pages of Good Calories, Bad Calories came screaming back to me!  As well as the feelings I’d had after reading it, which led me to compose my longest article to date, which is little more than my amateur attempt to piece together the words of other experts and my own knowledge–a blunder, out of focus, but there, nonetheless, and I hope not far off the mark.

All I have to say is Taubes is reaching with his new paradigm.

Back to my little blog comment, though: “As long as I don’t eat over-stimulating food.”  Over-stimulating, aka, highly palatable food.

It did not take my subsequent years of voracious consumption (pun intended) of nutritional information to learn this.  It just seemed sensible.  I knew that if I bit into a cookie, I’d Tasmanian Devil the whole box.  Most women know this.

Me, especially after a workout.

I knew that if I wanted a slice a bread, I certainly wasn’t going to eat it as-is.  It would have been a vessel for delivering fat and/or sugar into my mouth!

Fat! Sugar! Married in a sandwich! NOM NOM.

I knew that some foods (like corn chips) are “like crack,” and other foods (like carrots) have a very rapid diminishing return on pleasure–and yet, both are high carb foods.

You’d never ask your waiter to bring over another basket of carrots.

So if you don’t blow your brains out with fat, salt, and sugar, or any combination thereof, you’ll probably be on your way to weight loss until you’ve “kicked the habit.”

Yeah… the habit.  We can be addicted to food.  We can also be overly-habituated to certain food presentations (i.e., “I can’t eat Thanksgiving turkey without cranberry sauce!”).

I hate to strip food of its beauty–of its aroma, flavor, and interplay with our olfactory and visual senses.  I hate to strip away its relationship to culture: food as a gift, food as a gesture, food as religion, food as identity–but if we take a moment and identify food solely as fuel, and treat it as such, we begin to lose our psychological dependence on it, and allow it to guide our health in more appropriate directions.

Guyenet states is beautifully in this other article,

Diet trials have shown that a ‘simple’ diet, low in palatability and reward value, reduces hunger and causes fat loss in obese humans and animals, apparently by lowering the ‘defended’ level of fat mass (30, 31, 32, 33). This may be a reason why virtually any diet in which food choices are restricted (e.g., Paleo, vegan, fruitarian), including diametrically opposed approaches like low-fat and low-carbohydrate diets, can reduce food intake and body fatness in clinical trials.

I said it on my Nutrition Page, “Whether you follow a meat-centered, vegetarian, vegan, macrobiotic, or raw food diet, there is one common denominator for success: that the foods are of high quality and unadulterated.“

So here’s the rule of thumb, if you’re trying to eat less.  Eat whole foods, or process them in your own kitchen.

In case anyone falls into the pit of hyper focus on the plant vs. animal debate, and foolishly thinks that humans actually evolved as herbivores or carnivores, I’ll state it here: humans evolved, most likely, as specialized omnivores.

Humans are highly adaptable creatures, and given these high levels of adaptability, it doesn’t make sense from the point of view of natural selection to be able to persist on any single foodstuff.  In other words, we are not Koalas that eat eucalyptus; we are not horses, subsisting on grass; we are not lions, eating the flesh of other animals.  We fail to synthesize many vitamins the way other animal species can; hence, we must find them through diet.  We must have a variety-rich diet.

Our nutritional requirements can be met fairly well through animal-source dominance, as well as through plant-source dominance.  The debate, however, often hinges on the question: which source causes more collateral damage?  The ridiculous long-winded arguments in favor of predominantly plant-eating diets over predominately animal-eating diets, and vice verse, are the sad result of a narrow attention span spawned by the pressures of media and marketing.  Sell an idea to the exclusion of all others!

To market an idea (from a food company, or a diet book, or a supplement center) one must first create a perceived need in the would-be consumer.  Once the consumer feels he has a need, or a problem, or even the long-term possibility of a problem (heart disease, for example) he is psychologically more prepared to accept your idea or product.  If this idea or product sells well enough, the contents of it are eventually assumed to be conventional wisdom.

Dr. Loren Cordain, for example, is one of the most widely-cited Paleo nutrition experts, and yet a casual look at his book tells us everything we need to know.  It reads like a diet book, not like a comprehensive work of nutritional science.  His words are loaded and emotional, selected in order to make his readers enthusiastic about biased ideas.  Science is not supposed to do that.

The very same can be said about T. Colin Campbell, whose China Study should not be taken as a rigorous meta-analysis of nutritional studies.  If it were, you wouldn’t see it for sale at Barnes and Noble.  It is a public health warning.  T. Colin Campbell has received an avalanch of criticism from the hugely unscientific community of Paleo pushers whose arguments generally rest on the shoulders of amateur bloggers, lobby groups, and cherry-picked studies from journalists.  Their arguments also typically stem from the nature fallacy; “natural,” a most vapid term, is clearly better than modern, in their eyes; by that logic, death at childbirth, death by infectious disease, and death by a hazardous environment are preferable to deaths from heart disease, kidney failure, and breast cancer.  But death is still death, and based on humanity’s utterly ridiculous psychology of risk assessment, and our inconsistent prioritization of some types of life over others, we glibly go with the flow of conventional wisdom as defined by good PR and marketing.

Here’s a cheerful comment recently left on my blog:

No disrespect but youre an idiot!!…And if you actually read anything and did you reaearch PALEO makes total sense. Its not supose to be an all meat diet or even a high protien diet, its supposed to be a non processed natural diet. You think nomadic herding tribes were planting farms and rows of grains??? HUNTER GATHERER is how most rolled. That didnt mean fruits and veggies, they didnt have fridges or coolers back then, veggies and fruit both rot quickly making it inpossible to maintain. But you can dry meat and fat and fish and keep it all winter. You want to find out how humans are supoosed to eat, go live in the woods for a few months, and see if you can survive on a “Vegan” or “Vegitarian” diet.

The nature fallacy reminds me of out-dated religious dogma which reminds us daily that it isn’t acceptable to be a homosexual, and yet conveniently forgets that it is also still acceptable to stone your wife if she commits adultery.  Clearly, the dogma hasn’t “evolved” with culture, and the changing priorities.

Furthermore, dropping some guy in the woods is not the same as equating him with hunter-gatherers as a group (an extremely broad one).

“Modern hunter gatherers vary enormously in their diet… There is a clear trend, long known in anthropology, from almost entirely animal foods in high latitudes down to overwhelming dependence on plant foods in low latitudes, especially in dry areas where animals are few,” (Anderson, E.N., 2005)

But the debate continues in search of the optimal diet, nonetheless.

Optimal for what?  For which circumstances?  Longevity?  Athletic performance?  Disease management?  Gene expression?  Re-production?  Environmental stewardship?

Once we define the goal, the diet becomes much hazier.

Social and environmental circumstances change.  Given the high levels of human metabolic and digestive adaptability, we should seek out dietary regimes which are not only physiologically viable, but viable in other ways.  This is T. Colin Campbell’s core message; meat-centric/low-carb/Paleo cult critics label it as vegan propaganda.

Citing the Inuit Eskimos as healthy viable examples of Paleo nutrition is just as extreme as promoting a 100% vegan diet as the future of human health.  The difference, though, is that the 100% vegan diet is possible on a global scale, now.

But no.  After all the re-packaged low-carb diet books from the paleo movement (really, just a new, healthier spin on Atkins), in steps my new favorite questionable journalist, Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, who is nothing short of another author making a living exploiting conventional wisdom and confusing his lay-readers first into insecurity, and later into believing the low-carb gospel.

His claims are outrageous, his list of references formidably long, and his stamina for hypothesis-debunking is impressive!  By the end, the reader is dizzy and breathless from reading such an astounding body of evidence to demonstrate without a doubt that gravity has no pull on us anymore–that is to say, that everything we’ve been told is a lie propagated by a few self-serving scientists.  Oh yeah, and that processed food is bad for you, and that carbs are carbs are carbs and they’re all bad, too.

Thanks, Mr. Taubes.

And I hate myself just a little bit for buying into his crap at first–that is, until I began to question his assertion that energy balance was irrelevant to weight gain.  As I wrote out my thoughts, studied his words, they unraveled before my eyes, and I could see his convenient little omissions and understatements of things that didn’t support his agenda.  A quick Google search does not reveal hordes of dissenters like myself, but there are a few, and they say it much better than I do.  I only wish my own articles were as cogent and cleanly presented, and not the bitter mutterings of a disgruntled endurance athlete.

Yes, I can get pretty amped up over the nutrition debate.  Just remember this: anthropology has done a great job of unveiling the habits of pre-historic humans, but a lot of it is stuff guess-work, heavily influenced by the human ego which wants very much to be higher on the food chain.  What we do know, is that a lot of diets have worked for lots of people, under lots of circumstances.  Gatorade is junk food, and yet athletes find it an extremely beneficial energy source.

Never remove your diet from its context.

From “Scientists Reject human trials of GM wheat,” the following quotes appeared:

“The modified wheat has been altered to lower its glycaemic index in an attempt to see if the grain could have health benefits such as improving blood glucose control and lowering cholesterol levels.

…eight scientists and academics from Britain, the US, India, Argentina and Australia believe not enough studies have been done on the effects of GM wheat on animals to warrant human trials…

…They believed the CSRIO’s animal feeding trials of up to 28 days were “completely inadequate” to assess such risks….

…The CSIRO’s trials were trying to determine whether the new type of GM grain had health benefits for people with conditions such as colourectal cancer and diabetes, he said….

…And you say?

What.A.Bunch.Of.Bullshit!

Inadequate testing aside, are we being serious here?

Lowering the glycemic index of wheat to improve blood glucose levels?

In who?

Diabetics?  Or the farm animals you want to feed it to?  Or both?

How many people actually eat whole wheat berries which, BY THE WAY, have a mere glycemic index of 46???  (“High” is over 70.)

So what these PR assholes are trying to tell us is that GMO wheat might, what, magically control our blood glucose levels and make us all healthier?

Don’t these guys know that it is the refining of wheat that causes its high GI value, and not the wheat berries?  It’s not the food.  It’s what you do to it.  And eating a low-GI food alone will not correct your blood glucose levels if you have no clue what other foods to avoid.

This has got to be the worst guise for a GM crop I’ve ever heard of.

Clearly this isn’t about feeding the world.  It’s just selling any stupid idea to gain control of the seed market.

I’m done!

“What did you mean by that?  Hang on just a second!  You can’t slam Crossfit!  Crossfit is the shit!  Crossfit has made me the badass I am today!  Crossfit isn’t for pu$$!eS .  Clearly you can’t handle it.”

…well, this is how I imagine the response.  I’m sure the Crossfit community is more dignified than that, so what is the story?  Why do I exaggerate such a barbaric response?

Because of the paleo-centric community.

I wish I could say that I’m sorry for being unfair, but I can’t.  I devoted several weeks to researching the plant-based vs. paleo camps, and read dozens of meticulously written articles, and then spent many hours combing through each of their avalanches of comments and the links contained within.

I was absolutely appalled by what I read.  While plant-based enthusiasts are not immune to being petty and insulting, the paleo community had it in spades.  There is something about glorifying man as a meat-eating ,savage, athletic, shirtless, smooth-chested stud that gets the paleo people up in arms whenever you suggest that man really wasn’t that impressive–and that he didn’t gorge himself on delicious meat.

By comparison, man is a skinny, hairless, weak-looking dweeb who was smart enough to use tools to scavenge leftovers, steal eggs from nests, and eat his own parasites.  He was lean, wiry, and as strong as his environment functionally permitted him to be.

Rest assured, nothing in the paleolithic environment resembled a gym.

The fact that the paleo movement and Crossfit are married makes me shudder at the thought of receiving paleo community backlash.  Seriously.

I admit this might be my way of criticizing those same hyper-defensive paleo people (not all paleo people are assholes).  This time I’m striking at the paleo cult from a different angle: Crossfit–the holy grail of paleo fitness.

For the record, I don’t hate Crossfit.  I like it a lot.  Really.  A lot.  I still do it.

THE PROS:

• Crossfit is the most efficient training protocol I have ever encountered (up there with RKC) when measuring gains spread broadly over power, speed, and medium muscular endurance.
• The dietary guidelines are perfectly sensible for its aim and scope.
• Crossfit teaches mental toughness in a way unlike most training regimes.
• It offers a wide variety of workout styles, and keeps things interesting, both on a metabolic level, and for entertainment purposes.
• Crossfit focuses predominantly on functional training exercises, dismissing isolated lifting and long bouts of cardio.
• When executed smartly, Crossfit makes fitness animals who are prepared for just about anything life can throw at them.
• The Crossfit Website is an amazing free resource and exercise library, full of tutorials for anyone seeking a better understanding of its core movements.

THE CONS, or at least THINGS TO CONSIDER:

• The Crossfit I certification is too easy to obtain – and serves as a money-making scheme, as well as a stepping stone for it’s Level II certification, required for its franchise.  Crossfit may very well be the most rapidly expanding fitness franchise out there.
• Lack of depth and understanding in its certification - a Crossfit certification demonstrates that you have sufficient understanding of Crossfit methodology, in order to pass a short test at the end of a two-day seminar.  Understanding Crossfit methodology is not the same as understanding exercise physiology. Most training certifications, for those with no B.S. in anatomy, kinesiology, of physiology, takes at least several months to study for, and the tests are proctored.  Furthermore, most reputable certifications require regular continuing education courses, to ensure that fitness professionals are staying current with the trends and findings in exercise physiology.  The fitness industry is plagued with bad certifications, and only a handful of nationally recognized certifications carry any weight in the fitness industry.  Having a Crossfit certification means little more than having a certification in TRX Suspension training, and should only be considered supplemental to any trainer’s list of qualifications.
• Inattentive and/or unqualified trainers - I could be wrong. I haven’t looked up the resume skirt.  But the proof is in the pudding.  I have witnessed it with my own eyes, and there is a plethora of video on youtube demonstrating this fact: that Crossfit’s attention to safety and form is lacking.  This leads me to believe that many Crossfit instructors have no idea how to correctly teach Olympic and Power lifts; or if they do, they certainly do not care if the trainee is performing these lifts properly.  Olympic and Power lifts are not things to play around with.  It is extremely easy to hurt yourself, and it happens all the time, which leads me to the next point…
• Insanely high rate of injury - This is a multi-faceted problem.  First, Crossfit seeks intensity and speed in favor of safety.  The lifts are so physically demanding, the metabolic pathways so punishing when mixed and matched, that the trainee fatigues rapidly, leaving room for error.  Second, Crossfit relies heavily on medium muscular endurance activities which, at a high enough and sloppy intensity, can easily cause overuse injury.  Third, quantity is favored over quality.  ”Come on, push!  You got this!  One more!” as someone struggles under the weight of their hang clean caught at their stomach, rather than in an appropriate rack position.
• Business model - Aside from being a rapidly expanding franchise, Crossfit has capitalized on the next biggest thing in fitness: group training.  Group training is both cost-effective and motivating for the trainee, and the intensity of group training usually helps provide a better workout.  Group fitness has known this for years; group training is supposed to be a compromise between group fitness and private training.  Crossfit workouts are usually drop-in, as trainees purchase entry on a month-to-month basis, or class packages.  The affordability of Crossfit (along with its cultish ambiance) makes for an easy revenue stream.  The groups, in my opinion, are usually too large and cannot be appropriately monitored.  If someone gets hurt, its easy to fill his spot.  People are always coming through the door, transfixed by the heavy metal music, grunting, and slamming of weights by sweat-soaked, shirtless animals.
• Lack of training infrasctructure – Huh? This will depend on the location, for sure, as well as the quality of training and instructor staff.  In large part, Crossfit lacks scaled training options for beginners, people with contraindications, and people with significant muscle-skeletal imbalances.  Crossfit is only appropriate for healthy, well-moving people, and lacks programming for everyone else.
• Vomiting – I have no idea why this is considered a badge of honor.  Vomiting from a workout says only one thing to me: you’re out of shape.  I’ve trained with dozens of truly elite athletes.  They don’t vomit after their races.  Ever.  Furthermore, the people most likely to experience vomiting and dizziness during or after a workout are those who are just getting started in a training program.  If anything, the high rates of vomiting speak only to the volume of amateurs embarking on the very technical aspects of Crossfit, and thus putting themselves in danger.
• Lack of logic in program design/ no program design – In other words, there is only one goal for anyone in Crossfit: to be a badass.  That’s it.  For anyone with specific fitness goals, I recommend going somewhere else.  Exercises are neither good nor bad; they are simply appropriate or inappropriate with respect to the trainee’s goals.
• “Oh my god, I’m soo sore!” - Giving someone 150 of anything will make him sore.  Any trainer, if he’s any good, can make you ungodly sore in 20 minutes.  That’s not an accomplishment.  Over-training large muscle groups isn’t a skill.  Fine-tuning smaller, more stabilizing muscle groups with patience and precision is more difficult.
• Crossfit is not “elite” athletics - Crossfit enthusiasts are typically only good at one thing: Crossfit.  Crossfit has no specialization outside of the scope of itself.  It doesn’t seem to have any progressive training protocol to prepare its athletes for upper-level competition in anything, even its own Crossfit games.
• Introductory exercises are anything but introductory – If a seasoned athlete or skilled gym rat enters a Crossfit gym, he’s got a pretty decent chance of doing well in his first week, especially if he’s coordinated.  But the complexity of compound movements, for most people, cannot be taught or understood in a day, or even a week.  It must be taught in a dedicated and progressive manner.  One under-appreciated compound movement used by Crossfit is the rowing stroke on a Concept II ergometer.  I have yet to see one Crossfit member or instructor perform a single stroke properly.

Obviously, I’m generalizing.  Rest assured, there are some great, disciplined, serious Crossfit affiliate gyms out there.  Crossfit is like personal training: there are good trainers and bad trainers.

I liked Crossfit when I first got involved.  It put a whole new spin on fitness; but I was a young, impressionable, and inexperienced trainer at the time.

I got insanely fit from doing the workouts on their website, and by daily conferring with a hot meat-heat named Brad (of all names!).  I did well with Crossfit, possibly because I’d already had training in the technical lifts from my collegiate rowing years, but mostly because I had an insanely large aerobic base to work with, and did not fatigue easily.  Busting my butt for 15 minutes was nothing, so I started designing my own Crossfit-style workouts to last 45 minutes to an hour.

Years later, I ended up doing WODs with a group of guys who were just about to open their own Crossfit gym across the street from mine.  I liked working out with these guys; and I beat them–every time (Crossfit will never give you the stamina of years of aerobic base training, to be fair).  They then offered me a job.  I declined, preferring to travel to Europe.

As I got older, the awe of Crossfit waned.  I met too many people who got hurt; I spoke with too many Crossfit certified trainers who identified its short-comings.  My style of training shifted into the direction of smart training, not insane training.

Oh Crossfit, I don’t hate you.  I just think you have a lot of design flaws.  If the masses of under-qualified trainers and over-zealous trainees would pause to consider these design flaws, you might not have such a controversial reputation.

No wait.  I take that back.  I desperately wanted to write it, because the Paleo obsession with meat and its attack on starch drove me up the wall.  But at the end of the day, I couldn’t stay angry at the Paleo Diet.  Though the original popularization of Paleo was aggressively put forth by Dr. Loren Cordain with a meat pyramid that made my environmentalist-anti-industrial-meat-production sensibilities shudder in horror, many of the spin-offs of the Paleo movement have a much more docile message: don’t process your food.

Simple.

Oh yeah, and don’t eat refined “fast-carbs,” as I like to call them (i.e., fine flour products, sugars, syrups, extracts, alcohol).

That’s easy.  And that sounds just like every other sensible diet that works.

But what kills me is the Paleo avoidance of whole food starches like whole grains, bean, legumes, and potatoes.  What gives?

If you had given me sixty seconds to say it all, I would have sucked up a bunch of air like Ace Ventura and proceeded rapidly with something like this:

• Carbs are essential for performance, especially for endurance.
• Our anatomy far more resembles than of an herbivore than it does that of a carnivore.  In light of this, as omnivores, it makes more sense to lean toward the herbivore end of the food spectrum.
• Carbs are overwhelmingly abundant in nature compared to fats and proteins, though marginalized terrains don’t offer enough of the carbs we can actually eat, and therefore lead us to rely more heavily on animal-sourced calories.
• Carbs have a unique ability to make us fat if we eat too many of them; this would actually be an evolutionary advantage, especially with fructose consumption. Interestingly, it is nearly impossible to become fat on a high whole carb diet if fat intake is limited.
• Carbs regulate serotonin and digestive contraction.
• Carbs mostly break down into glucose, which is our preferred energy source; glucose metabolism is the oldest form of energy metabolism identified.
• The Paleo movement is egocentric, especially for men; any diet that makes us feel more manly, more aggressive, and more dominant over our environment (read: top of the food chain) would clearly gain favor, as demonstrated by the Crossfit movement.
• Crossfit, a popular and generally-looked-down-upon, dangerous and poorly-implemented fitness fad (at least from my surveys of other exercise physiologists–I’ll save this critique for another article) promotes a style and intensity of fitness appropriate to the limitations of a low-carb diet.  Metabolic conditioning workouts lasting 5-20 minutes do not draw heavily on glycogen stores.
• Re: Crossfit and its Paleo appeal to functional training – I can’t think of any circumstance in which a paleolithic human would ever need to perform a true Olympic lift, or could actually handle such weights in their natural, awkward, unbalanced forms (logs, rocks, etc.).  Olympic lifting, at least, requires considerable and impressive technique; power lifting, also a mainstay of Crossfit, is less technical and certainly another ego-driven endeavor.  It comes as no surprise to me that meat-eating and Crossfit are happily married.
• High protein, low-carb diets are not only dehydrating, they require much more intensive digestive and metabolic effort, and the net energy gained from such diets is poor.  While this is helpful to a sedentary fat person who wants to lose weight without working out, it is not beneficial to people who must move all day.
• Blood samples from plant-based meals are cleaner and less cloudy than those from animal-based meals; this, too, should have implications on cardiovascular efficiency.
• High meat consumption–especially red meat–is acidifying and overly “yang.”  This can be no better than a “yin” dominated diet of refined foods, alcohols, and stimulants.  The name of the game is balance, and Paleo is nothing more than a re-packaged Atkins diet with marginal flexibility around fruits and vegetables (as long as they don’t grow underground).
• Intermittent fasting packaged as “replicating” paleo life is a joke.  This is nothing more than promoters establishing–through their dietary protocols–a guarantee to deplete glycogen stores (the first to go during a fast) so that you must always be in a state of gluconeogenesis (a metabolic pathway that results in the generation of glucose from non-carbohydrate sources).
• Paleo Diet is nothing more than a fad diet book that makes impatient, lazy people happy with a scientifically proven (thanks to the attention drawn from the Atkins movement) failsafe way to burn fat.
• The Paleo Diet’s environmental impact (if applied on a large scale) is nothing short of a suicide mission for the environment, considering our capacity for land animals.
• The Paleo Diet completely ignores less glamorous aspects of paleolithic life: namely, consumption of insects, parasitic infection rates and their inhibition of autoimmune disorders and allergies, and the inevitable consumption of feces and dirt.
• The Paleo Diet unfairly names protein and fat consumption as being responsible for encephalation (increase brain size) in relation to a decrease in the size of the gut.  It is far more likely that encephalation resulted from the implementation of cooking food, thereby reducing its mass, “pre-digesting” it, creating greater bio-availability of its nutrients, and increasing net energy after digestive effort.
• The Paleo Diet claims that agrarian life led to shorter, weaker, sicker humans.  This is unfounded.  The evidence points in all directions; many agrarian peoples fared better than hunter-gatherer groups; the inverse is also true.  Ultimately, height and strength is a factor of nutrition, parasitic load, and physical activity more than it is a factor of meat consumption.
• Meat and animal sources of protein are high in certain amino acids which are strongly linked to cancer growth (i.e., methionine).
• The Paleo Diet denies (or at least tries to ignore) the well-established lipid hypothesis, which has established the link between cholesterol and heart disease.  Saturated fat, a mainstay in the paleo diet, is strongly associated with increased LDL (bad) cholesterol.  (Learn more about lipids in this reader-friendly article.)
• Bad breath is usually a sign of a health imbalance.  Bad breath is a common sign of ketosis, which is a desired effect of low-carb diets.  Constipation is also strongly correlated with high protein consumption.

This was just my superficial rant.

I’ll stop here.  I won’t dig any deeper, because Plant Positive does it so much better, and I’d much rather give homage to his thorough, well-reasoned, calm discussion of scientific research he uncovered.

It you are serious about your health–I mean, if you really are on a mission to avoid all the bad diseases of affluence and live a long, energetic life–then I DARE you to take the time to watch the entire PRIMITIVE NUTRITION series by Plant Positive.

Budget about 9 1/2 hours.

The premise of his book is simple: not all calories are created equal.  Also, scientific agendas led by money, politics, and ego are not trustworthy.  Science is full of bad science, much of which is referenced all the time.

Even the “Holy Bible of Veganism,” The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell, is under attack by paleo diet enthusiasts, the Weston A. Price foundation, and a feisty youngster named Denise Minger.

If T. Colin Campbell can be criticized for lumping animal sources of protein and high fat diets (by virtue of animal food consumption) together as the axis of nutritional evil, then can’t any scientist be questioned?

Taubes does an impressive job recounting the last century of nutritional science and its exploration of causes of Western diseases, lumped neatly together as metabolic syndrome.  He explains how there’s no evidence to suggest that saturated fat has anything to do with heart disease.  That the Atkins diet for weight loss makes perfect sense.  That vitamin C deficiency might have more to do with starch consumption.

For a geek like myself, it was the best read I’d had in a long time.

But something was bothering me…

After devoting a week of my time to trying to dig to the bottom of the Denise Minger vs. China Study issue, and shaking my head at her paleocentric fans, and then reading this book I started to feel very insecure about my own diet.  The one which extols the Almighty Carb.

I was a vegan for while, before I’d developed more knowledge in the field of nutrition.  It was a nice gig.  I was fit, healthy, and even astonishingly accused of using steroids by my co-workers.  I’d never been into pizza, or pasta, or carb-heavy meals because I knew they were nutrient poor, and I certainly hated eating added sugar of any kind, knowing that it offers nothing good beyond the joy of sweetness.

I was a whole grains enthusiast.  I still am, despite all the research and articles written about phytic acid, fermentation, mold, and insulin spikes.

Why?

Because I had to be.  I was an endurance athlete.  And when I wasn’t an endurance athlete, I was a laborer and a hiker, and a fitness trainer off and on and off and on again.

When I first read The Paleo Diet, I was stoked.  It was everything I loved about simple living and raw food.  But it went against everything I felt as a comfortable almost-vegan.  The meat.  My god, the meat quantities called for were absurd to me.

But it wasn’t the presence of meat that bothered me.  My line of reasoning from The China Study, as I melded information from that book into the pool of other things I’d read, was that animal foods don’t kill people; they simply displace whole plant foods that heal people.

No worries, because the Paleo Diet allowed for all kinds of plant foods… well… except for anything with concentrated carbs like grains, legumes, and even potatoes.  Bummer.

I felt like I was being sentenced to death.  I couldn’t imagine a worse world than one without more concentrated carb sources.

But I tried it.  And I crashed and burned in about… hmmm… three days.

You just can’t bike 20 miles a day and work as a fitness trainer 8 more hours a day without the carbs.  It was the same crash and burn I experienced when I dappled in raw during my competitive rowing years; raw is another diet that does allow for many concentrtaed carb sources.

I talked to one of my associates, who would later open his own Crossfit gym.  He handed me The Paleo Diet for Athletes.

This was a joke! You can’t claim a diet to be Paleolithic and optimal for human performance and yet have another book for special populations (athletes!).  Weren’t paleolithic men super active?  I felt like something was wrong with the low-carb aspect.

I went back to my old ways of eating and saved money that would otherwise go to meat.  I ate the same amount of vegetables and ate my calorie-dense carbs and felt great again.

So when Gary Taubes, through the first 300 persuasive pages of his book, had me on the verge of thinking I was diabetic due to my carb consumption, I worried.  I couldn’t speak with authority about the medical research he referenced.  Surely he’d read more than I had!

But when Taubes delved into what causes obesity and fat accumulation, I began to doubt.  While nutrition has been a big deal for the last 100 years, exercise physiology has only been on the table for half the time.  I was sick of hearing about discussions of diet without exercise.

In fact, most discussion of nutrition completely neglects the exercise/movement aspect of human health.  Fuel is a fine thing to study, but let’s not forget that the machine needs incentive to burn it.

Taubes, hypothesis by hypothesis, debunked the set point hypothesis, the lipostat hypothesis, the thrifty gene hypothesis, the energy balance hypothesis, and just about every other hypothesis attributed to body weight.

And yet, my own experience with myself and my clients was screaming “Bullshit!  Every fat person who voluntarily lost weight will be first in line to tell you how counting calories works! This whole industry speaks about nothing but the efficacy of calorie-logging.  I’m starving at the end of my active day, and to tell me that energy balance isn’t significant is a joke.  Damn you Taubes, stop blaming carbs!  And that goes for the rest of you Paleo-Meat-centric-Atkins-Price enthusiasts-otherwise-known-as-’low-carbers.”

Before I proceed, let me make this clear: I’ve always prescribed the whole foods diet.  Don’t adulterate your food!

A few more things you should know, to help identify my biases:

• I’m an endomorph.  Scandinavian: broad and tall with a propensity toward easy muscle and fat.
• I was a very serious endurance athlete.
• My BMI is 27, with a body fat range of 20-23%, depending on my lifestyle.
• I am loyal to the high carb, low fat, low protein camp of nutritional protocols.
• I eat a whole foods, high whole carb (aka-slow carb) diet with liberal plant fats and with limited amounts of unprocessed (or minimally processed) animal products.
• I occasionally drink alcohol and usually regret it the next day.  I also eat other forbidden foods, either frequently and in great moderation–or infrequently and immoderately.

What follows will not be my rant against the Paleo movement, because frankly, I agree with it.  It won’t be a blind defense of The China Study.

No, this will be my response to the persecution of carbs.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Much of the information I’m about to share is merely a summary of a very impressive seminar led by Dr. Robert H. Lustig called Sugar: The Bitter Truth.  Note that this seminar was released after the publication of Taube’s book, and I therefore cannot fault Taubes for the omission of this information.  I encourage everyone to check out this seminar, and watch it at least twice.  Also, it should be known that Robert H. Lustig isn’t exactly a friend of carbs.

But before I enter the scene of glucose metabolism, I’d like to breeze over a few of Taubes’ conclusions, so you’ll get a feel for my incredulity:

• Dietary fat of any type is not a cause of obesity or metabolic syndrome.  I argue it is half-responsible.
• The problem is the carbohydrates in the diet due to their effect on insulin secretion.  The more easily digested the carb, the worse this effect is.  Not all carbs are created equal.  This is an unfair blanket statement; and he leads his readers.
  
• Sugars–sucrose and HFCS–are particularly harmful because the combo of fructose and glucose raises insulin and floods the liver with carbs.  This is more to the point, but a slight mis-statement.
• Through their direct effect on insulin and blood sugar, refined “fast carbs” are the dietary cause of metabolic syndrome–and the most likely cause of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other chronic diseases of civilization.  Again, not all carbs are created equal.  Also, I doubt carbs cause cancer, but cellular fuel might reasonably help grow cancer, which is a cluster of cells.
• Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating or sedentary behavior (energy balance).  Ask any post-collegiate 20-something how much weight they gained after getting their first desk job.  But sure, there’s a tipping point for obesity somewhere, which makes it metabolically different from overweight.
• Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter.  Caloric deficits do not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.  I can prove to you that consuming excess calories causes me to grow fatter.  Am I some kind of exception?  The body is smart and can accommodation fluctuations in inputs; but bombard it long enough, and it will lose the battle.
  
• Fattening and obesity are caused by an imbalance in the hormonal regulation of adipose tissue and fat metabolism.  I agree with this idea, but it is not a comprehensive cause of fattening.
• Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage.  When insulin is high, we store fat.  When it falls, we release fat.  Agreed, mostly.  But this is contingent on energy balance and replete glycogen stores.  Fat storage is also contingent on other hormones.
  
• By stimulating insulin secretion, carbs make us fat and ultimately cause obesity.  The fewer carbs we consume, the leaner we will be.  How do you account for whole foods vegans who follow diets of 10% fat?  They eat starch all day long and don’t get fat.
  
• By driving fat accumulation, carbs also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.  There’s some back story to this.  But carbs also contribute to satiety by raising blood sugar and elevating serotonin.
  

Wow.  That’s some list.   And my comments followed in bold.  So now let’s dig a little deeper by understanding different carbs.

Here is a list of terms:

• STARCH  is a carbohydrate consisting of a chain of a large number of glucose units joined by glycosidic bonds. This polysaccharide is produced by all green plants as an energy store.  The most energy-dense starches are grains, potatoes, and legumes.  These are “high carb” foods, because they confer the most energy from carbohydrates.
• SUGAR is a short-chain (either a mono or a disaccharide) carbohydrate at its most basic level: glucose, fructose, maltose, lactose, and anything else ending in -ose.  All starches eventually break down into glucose, which is a monosaccharide sugar.  Half of virtually every disaccharide is glucose.
• CARBS can refer to either starch or sugar, but it usually more liberally substituted for the term “starch,” and also encompasses the group of foods known as “refined carbohydrates,” which includes processed starches like wheat, rice, corn, and potato flour-products, as well as white table sugar and high fructose corn syrup.  These are not only “high carb” foods, the are “fast carb” foods, meaning they raise blood sugar both rapidly, and by a lot–unless eaten in small amounts.
• BLOOD SUGAR is glucose circulating in the blood.
• TABLE SUGAR is also called “sugar,” but is really a type of sugar called sucrose.  Sucrose is a disaccharide, half of which is glucose, the other half fructose.
• HFCS – HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP  is infamously added to sodas and prepackaged goods in the United States.  It is almost identical to table sugar/sucrose, except instead of being 50% glucose and 50% fructose, it is around 45% glucose and 55% fructose.

Now that we have our list of carbs, let’s take a look at glucose, because glucose is what drives insulin, which is widely regarded now as a bad thing.

As summarized by Lustig…

When you eat glucose, your blood sugar rises, signaling to your brain that you have eaten, and then your pancreas responds by producing insulin, which is needed to push sugar into cells for energy metabolism.

According to Lustig, from a glucose load of 120 calories (2 small slices of bread): 80% will be used up by organs and muscle tissue. Why? Because every cell in the body can use glucose.  Glucose metabolism is the oldest form of energy metabolism we know of.  Every living thing can use glucose.

Here’s some boring biochemistry: About 20% of a glucose load will go toward the liver.  When it reaches the hepatocyte (liver cell) it passes into the cell with the help of insulin and a transporter called Glu2. Insulin binds to its receptor IRS1 (insulin receptor substrate) and tyrosine phosphorolates it, creating pTryIRS1 (active IRS1).  This stimulates another messenger called Akt (also known as protein kinase B), which stimulates sterol receptor binding protein 1 (SREBP1). SREBP1 takes an enzyme called glucokinase and turns it into glucose-6-phosphate (G6Pase).

Once you have glucose-6-phosphate, it stays in the liver, and can only get out with the help of hormones like glucagon (created by the pancreas to raise very low blood sugar) and epinephrine (commonly known as adrenaline, key in releasing sugar into the blood when you need it in a jiff.)

This glucose-6-phosphate ends up further processed into glycogen (storage form of sugar in the cells), which is easier for glucagon and epinephrine to source.  Glycogen in non-toxic and can be stored in excess in the liver without resulting in liver damage.  Glycogen is the body’s preferred source of fuel during exercise and rapid muscular movement.  It also gets depleted rapidly during periods of fasting.  Why?  Because glucose is the preferred energy source.

While most of the glucose-6-phosphate ends up as glycogen, a little bit will end up metabolized into a substrate known as pyruvate.  Pyruvate enters the cell’s mitochondria (think “furnace” or “energy factory”) and gets converted into Acetyl-Coa (an important co-enzyme for metabolism).  In normal circumstances, Acetyl-CoA from fatty acid metabolism feeds into the citric acid (citrate) cycle contributing to the cell’s energy supply.  Other terms for the citric acid cycle is the Krebs cycle, and the TCA cycle.

The citric acid cycle takes Acetyl-Coa and produces ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) which is the currency of energy.   Sometimes you don’t burn off all of the Acetyl-Coa, and so the result is citrate (from the citric acid cycle).

Citrate can be broken down by a three enzymes which are subservient to SREBP1 (mentioned above).  These three enzymes (ATP citrate lyase, acetyl-CoA carboxylase, and fatty acid synthase) along with SREBP1 turn sugar into fat through de novo lipogenesis (fat making).

The type of fat created is actually a lipoprotein, a form of cholesterol known as VLDL (very low density lipoprotein).  This is the worst kind of cholesterol and is what causes heart disease.

Even so, from a 120-calorie glucose load, Lustig claims less that 1 calorie ends up as VLDL.  In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal.

Repeat: according to Lustig, less than 1 calorie of a 120-calorie glucose load will be implicated in de novo lipogensis, which raises levels of fat in your blood.  This is important, because high blood triglycerides are an aspect of metabolic syndrome.

Take home points: Glucose metabolism is the oldest form of energy metabolism.  It does not seem legitimate to me that this ancient form of energy metabolism will kill us if we get a lot of it.

See, glucose has an order of operations.  When you eat glucose (from starch or table sugar), 20 percent or so will go to the liver for glycogen storage, but most of it gets used up for immediate energy as insulin delivers it for muscle and lean tissue and for the demands of the parasympathetic nervous system.  The body will burn glucose as fuel (though not exclusively) as long as blood sugar is elevated sufficiently and glycogen reserves are not depleted.  Hence, this is why sugar goes first during a fast–which is a period of negative energy balance.  As blood glucose and liver glycogen run low, fat stores release fatty acids into circulation to pick up the slack.

In opposition to glucose, we have fatty acids.  Fatty acids represent as much as 50-70% of the energy we expend over the course of a day–even a normal weight person has more calories worth of fat fuel in his body than he has of glucose and glycogen fuel.  This energy is very slow-burning and only suitable of low intensity activity, sitting, and sleeping.  In conditioned endurance athletes, movement is so practiced and efficient that sugar energy demand is not as great as it would be for the non-conditioned athlete.

Dietary fat is relatively scarce in nature, so it makes sense that the body has developed an efficient way to turn glucose derived from starch into adipose tissue when we consume too much of it, and also if the body’s “fat gauge” decides it prudent to put some aside (i.e., natural fattening during winter months). A mechanism for fat storage is critical, as fat can provide a steady stream of fatty acids as fuel for lower energy endeavors, as well as insulation.

Yes, Taubes, glucose can and will be stored as fat.  But this doesn’t cause metabolic syndrome.

If you consume glucose beyond your energy requirements, it will have no choice than to be stored as fat.  Muscle tissue can store a small amount of glucose as glycogen (the primary fuel tank is the liver, which does “top off”).  If there’s no place for the glucose, it must find its way into the fat tissue.  For this reason, if your blood sugar is too high–too high to be used in reasonable amounts by the body’s systems–then much of that sugar has to be crammed somewhere.

This is where energy balance, something Taubes dismisses, comes into play.

If I sit around and eat pasta all day long, day in and day out, in excess, and don’t go and exercise…

• My glycogen stores fill up to the max.
• I get bloated because each gram of glycogen will also support up to 3 grams of water.
• I will accumulate fat because the glucose has no where else to go, especially because it’s easy to take down more energy than you need with a plate of pasta.
• I am hungry much of the time because carbs leave the stomach rapidly and are digested in the intestines.  This leaves my stomach open and yawning and pumping more hunger hormone: ghrelin.
• Some de novo lipogenesis will occur in the liver, but really, not that much at all.

Glucose isn’t the bad guy, even if it can make us store fat.  We need it if we want to perform–or at least resemble the active, wandering, athletic paleo people we once were.  A people who did not subsist solely on meat and fat, but ate many thousands of different plant species, many of them starchy root vegetables and grasses.

Now… what is fat?  Fat is a triglyceride.  It’s three fatty acids on a glycerol backbone.  The glycerol backbone ultimately comes from glycerol phosphate, which a product of glycolysis (glycolysis is the process of metabolizing glucose.  Glycolysis yields pyruvate, which is the building block for de novo lipogenesis).

Here’s how Taubes describes the lifecycle of free fatty acids:

Three free fatty acids must bind to a glycerol if they want to stay inside a fat cell.  If glucose was metabolized inside that fat cell, a glycerol is freed for this purpose.  If free fatty acids can’t find a glycerol to bind to, then they slip past the fat cell membrane into the blood stream.  If these fatty acids are not used as fuel, many of them will head toward the liver, which will repackage them into full-fledged triglycerides loaded on lipoproteins.

In short, when there is plenty of sugar getting shoved into fat cells, there are plenty of glycerol backbones waiting to be occupied by free fatty acids and converted into stored fat.

Some of the triglycerides in our adiopse tissue come from dietary fat; the rest come from carbohydrates. Remember that de novo lipogenesis (creation of new fat) occurs in the liver, and to a lesser extent, inside fat tissue; these are Taube’s words, by the way.

Taubes says the rationale is that the more carbs you consume, the more de novo lipogenesis can occur.

Interestingly, according to Lustig (who provides some great slides in his lecture), only a little bit of de novo lipogenesis occurs in the liver from the consumption of glucose.  So how can it be argued that carbs (especially starches) themselves make us fat, regardless of energy balance and exercise?

Taubes states again and again that the scientific literature does not support the theory that energy balance and thermodynamics regulate weight.

I’ve never been completely behind the energy-balance-thermodynamics argument because I know that 2,000 calories of protein and 2,000 calories of carbs, consumed over time, will promote shockingly different body shapes.  Yet even though calories aren’t created equal (some lending themselves more to fat production than others), the bottom line is that total calories consumed matters more.  This is Exercise Physiology 101, and this principle almost always holds.  Even this crappy little study sponsored by Big Corn exploits this sweet little principle in defense of HFCS.

Not all calories are created equal.  This is the crux of Taube’s work, and his failure was to distinguish glucose from fructose.  By failing to pay proper attention to the fructose, he lumped all the carbs together and over-simplified.

In his delightful breakdown of fructose metabolism, Lustig demonstrates just how differently fructose behaves once inside the body.  To quote my previous article on Lustig’s seminar, Sugar: The Bitter Truth, after consuming 120 calories of orange juice…

-60 calories from glucose will break down similarly to the white bread (48 calories to the body, 12 calories to the liver to be stored as glycogen).

-60 calories from fructose will all go to the liver; the liver is the only place fructose can be metabolized.

-In total, 72 calories reaching the liver will need to be phosphoralated (turned into energy–ATP–adenosine tri phosphate).  That is a lot–three times the amount, when compared to white bread.

-You lose a lot of phosphate in this process, and so the body provides a rescue molecule, and the end waste product from the metabolism of these calories is uric acid (which causes gout and hypertension, among other things).

-Uric acid blocks the your body’s chemical–endothelial nitric oxide synthase–for maintaining low blood pressure.

-Citrate, again, arises from the metabolism of all these calories and de novo lipogenesis, which promotes fat retention, dyslipidemia, VLDL, and high blood triglycerides.

-In short, from any fructose load, 30% of it will end up as fat.

-An excess of body fat changes the way your body responds to leptin.  Leptin is a hormone produced by adipocytes (fat cells).  The more fat you have, the more leptin is produced to act on your brain’s hypothalamus.  But when there is too much, you develop leptin insensitivity; your brain can no longer recognize it and thinks you’re starving.  So you eat more.

Lustig says chronic fructose exposure alone causes metabolic syndrome.  Fructose consumption is far more associated with dislipidemia, hypertension, uric acid, heart disease, and other manifestations of metabolic disorder.  See more.  I think this is an overstatement, but at least much closer to the point.

Taubes himself states that glucose in the blood decreases fatty acid circulation, and the low blood sugar increases fatty acid circulation.  Glucose metabolism, the oldest form of energy metabolism, should not logically be responsible for obesity and diabetes.  Again and again, Taubes references carbohydrates as though they are all the same; I believe he does this to intentionally mislead his readers.

Insulin is associated with weight gain, for sure, because it crams energy into storage sites.  Insulin’s job is to deliver glucose to furnaces and to storage sites.  Eating too much, despite Taube’s claims to the contrary evidence, will eventually cause weight gain–especially if it’s carbs, because insulin loves to shove glucose into storage if you’re not going to burn it immediately. It isn’t quite the same story with dietary fat.

The theory that jacked up levels of blood sugar cause a disproportionate insulin responses to the point of insulin resistance makes sense on the surface, and it might be true, but then why don’t we see competitive athletes succumbing to diabetes in hordes due to years of carb-loading?

Energy balance.

The fact is that metabolic syndrome and is not caused by carbs (starches) alone.  Dislipidemia is a necessary evil in metabolic syndrome.

Taubes made an interesting claim that 30% of a carb load will end up as de novo lipogenesis, and I thought, “Show me the evidence.”

Could it be that Taubes borrowed the same data used by Lustig, who claimed the 30% of every fructose load will end up as fat. (At 1:02.00-1:05.00 in the seminar.)

It isn’t the glucose in the blood that’s the problem.  It’s the free fatty acids from de novo lipogenesis and other sources that are implicated in insulin insensitivity.

From The mechanism of free fatty acid-induced insulin resistance:

Therefore in contrast to the originally postulated mechanism in which free fatty acids were thought to inhibit insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in muscle through initial inhibition of pyruvate dehydrogenase these results demonstrate that free fatty acids induce insulin resistance in humans by initial inhibition of glucose transport/phosphorylation which is then followed by an approximately 50% reduction in both the rate of muscle glycogen synthesis and glucose oxidation.

Insulin insensitivity is a product of fat in the blood.

Interestingly, there’s another thing at play: something to which Taubes didn’t give more than an afterthought, and that’s the interplay of fat and starch.  On page 307, referencing George Bray, he described how rats fed a high fat diet can become obese.  To quote the book, “I could feed them any kind of composition of carbohydrates I want, and in the presence of low fat, they don’t get fat.  If I raised the fat content, particularly saturated fat, in susceptible [Taube's italics] strains I would get obesity regularly.”  (Maybe this is why T. Colin Campbell’s low fat, near-vegan diet makes for very lean people).

Taubes goes on to say himself, “But some strains of rats, perhaps most of them, will not grow obese on high-fat diets, and even those that do will grow fatter on a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet than a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet,” and suggests that fat content would have to be at least 30% of the diet, and thus seems to dismiss the key role of fat.

And yet, the Standard American Diet is 30% fat, or more.  Especially with the inclusion of dairy fat.  The foundations of metabolic syndrome are laid by excessive fructose consumption, for sure, which can account for every aspect of the syndrome.  But it is the supplementation of our diets high in fat and fast carbs that really helps induce obesity, which further exacerbates the feedback loop of metabolic syndrome.

“What do the Atkins diet and the Japanese diet have in common?”  It’s an odd question, as the two diets seem diametrically opposed.  The Atkins diet is all fat, no carb.  And the Japanese diet is all carb, no fat.  They both work.  So, what do they have in common?

They both eliminate the sugar fructose.

–Robert H. Lustig

If my blood sugar is sufficiently elevated, then I won’t release fatty acids into my blood stream.  If my blood sugar is low, then I will.  This is a neat, self-regulating negative feedback loop.

But what if I eat lots of glucose and fat!?  (i.e. ice cream, cake, doughnuts, potato chips…)

Too much fat and too much glucose in the blood, along with elevated triglycerides from excessive lifetime fructose consumption = obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Now you have a new, nasty, positive feedback loop.

Increased adiposity, after all, will increase leptin and hence leptin insensitivity, which makes you eat more, which gears you toward foods with the biggest macro-nutrient payoff (fat and sugar (namely, glucose) combos like cookies, chips, doughnuts, or a Happy Meal.

There is no food in nature high in both fat and sugar besides breast milk (or maybe durian).  And well… breast milk makes us grow bigger.  

So it makes perfect sense to me that combining fat (from dietary fat, or from fructose) and glucose is the crux of the issue.  Not starch alone.

Jennifer Livingston is a female news anchor who spoke out against a letter she received from a by-chance viewer of her show.  The letter criticized her for being overweight.  The author wrote: “Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping you’ll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.”  The statement was made with respect to the fact that her “physical condition” had not improved for quite some time.

Now, when you hear the letter, it does sound harsh.  My initial reaction was, “Man, that guy’s a D-bag.”  It’s really not about the content, so much as the delivery, right?

But when you listen to the letter and pick it apart sentence by sentence, you should see that he was stating his opinions matter-of-factly.  It just so happens that harping on a woman for her weight isn’t generally considered a nice thing to do.

Livingston retaliated with:

The truth is, I am overweight … But to the person who wrote me that letter, do you think I don’t know that? That your cruel words are pointing out something that I don’t see? You don’t know me… so you know nothing about me but what you see on the outside and I am much more than a number on a scale… I leave you with this: To all of the children out there who feel lost, who are struggling with your weight, with the color of your skin, your sexual preference, your disability, even the acne on your face, listen to me right now: do not let your self-worth be defined by bullies. Learn from my experience — that the cruel words of one are nothing compared to the shouts of many.

Nice response.  She really made a case against bullying.  Against heckling.  Against unfair prejudice.  It was awesome!

Nothing about what this guy said, however, was out of line–and he wasn’t being a bully.  That’s what I think, and I’m sticking to my guns.

Ms. Livingston, by addressing the “children,” takes the spotlight off herself–perhaps because she was accused of being a bad role model for young people.  But there is a difference between being an obese child and being an obese adult.

Children are not in control of their food.  They are beholden to their parents.  Children are usually not in control of their own rational faculties, due in large part to lack of cognitive development, and ignorance induced by a lack of life experience and an inundation of junk food marketing.

But adults don’t have these excuses.  We know why we’re fat.

Now being overweight is one thing.  It is understandable, considering our environment (which is strongly structured to promote fat), that this happens.  The majority of us are overweight.  We get it.  We know why.  This is not news.  There’s time for change.  Let’s make it!

But being inordinately fat–that is obese–is another thing.  It is up there with the most unhealthy things you can choose for yourself.  In the end, I believe obesity-related illnesses will bankrupt our health care system.

Being overweight is usually a sign of temporary negligence, but being obese is a sign of long-term negligence and often out-right denial.

I’ll say from my own experience as a trainer (with a designation in Weight Management Coaching) meeting with potential clients and performing their physical screenings and body fat analyses that overweight people are frequently at the gym trying to correct their health.  Obese people are not.  The are under-represented at the gym

There are many reasons for this: embarrassment, low levels of self-efficacy, denial, feelings of defeat, lack of access, lack of volition.  Obese people face a cascade of emotional and medical conditions that actually prevent them from taking corrective steps in their health.  And morbidly obese people have it even worse; at that point, they become so chemically and behaviorally imbalanced that normal body weight, even if achieved, can be fleeting.

(Keep that in mind!  There is a point of no-return–albeit, it is way out there on the spectrum of fat.  Having seen numerous exposes on morbidly obese individuals trying to save their own lives from food addiction, I learned that many of these individuals keep the weight off until something stressful occurs.  Once that happens, the addictive food behaviors return, and the weight comes back.)

We should do what we can to avoid obesity and reduce the number of overweight.

One of my favorite websites is The Yale Rudd Center For Food Policy & Obesity, founded by Dr. Kelly Brownell, author of Food Fight: The inside story of the food industry, America’s obesity crisis, and what we can do out it.

This book, dear readers, is the very first book I ever read about food and public health, in 2004, when I was but a sophomore in college, and this book was all over Yale bookstores.

First, a little back story:

I was a 100-lb 8-year old.  Then a 150-lb 10-year old.  By 14, I was 209 lbs.  Despite my high levels of physical activity (I played hard), I was a fat kid.  In the Presidential Physical Fitness Test inflicted upon middle-schoolers, I ran (more like staggered through) The Mile in over 12 minutes.  My gym teacher turned off the clock and asked me to come in early.

I took up sports in high school, and went from 209 lbs to 172 lbs in one year.  Then, over the course of three years due to negligent and emotional eating, plus boozing, I hit 222lbs.

I tried to enroll in R.O.T.C. to help pay for college.  The army didn’t want me because my body fat percentage was 30.5%, just half a percentage point over their cut-off.  I was pissed.  I was fat, sure, but so what?!   I was a great athlete!

What I failed to realize at that time was that I wasn’t the athlete I used to be–that I had become so fat (again) that I could barely clear the volleyball net.

As luck would have it, I found rowing, and my size was advantageous only because it was correlated with strength. But at the beginning of my sophomore year in college, when my coach told me I had Olympic potential, and that the US National Team would never take me seriously if I didn’t get my weight down, I had a revelation.

What you put in your mouth makes all the difference.

I read Brownell’s book and realized he was talking about me.  That my over-indulgence, my drinking, my absent-minded eating, more poor food choices, and my non-healthy friends and environments were making me fat.

Needless to say, I’m grateful to Brownell for his book.  He would also teach its content as a class.  Shortly thereafter, he started the Yale Rudd Center.

What struck me about Brownell, oddly, was that he is fat.

The Yale Rudd Center was once an organization for the exposure of unfair food marketing practices, food addiction, and policy changes.  But over time, it also took on fat acceptance, weight bias, and prejudice.

I must wonder… I really must.  Would the Yale Rudd Center have focused so much on weight bias if Brownell himself were a normal weight?

*Disclaiming wave of the hands*  Jennifer Livingston would tell me that I don’t know a thing about Brownell–that he’s more than just a number on the scale.  Clearly!  I love that guy!  I mean, I owe my own waist-line to him.

But I’m in slight disagreement with his attention on fat acceptance.  The site states:

Despite increased attention to the obesity epidemic, little has been done to stop the bias and discrimination that obese children and adults face every day. The social consequences of obesity include discrimination in employment, barriers in education, biased attitudes from health care professionals, stereotypes in the media, and stigma in interpersonal relationships. All these factors reduce quality of life for vast numbers of overweight and obese people and have both immediate and long-term consequences for their emotional and physical health.  The Rudd Center aims to stop the stigma through research, education, and advocacy

True, true.  Discrimination sucks.  Bullying is mean.  It is hard to be fat.  If you’re fat, you better be funny; or you better be the bully; or you better be wicked smart.  It sucks.  No one really wants to be fat.  It’s not fair, either, considering that the media alternative is anorexia.

Couldn’t the author of that letter addressing Ms. Livingston have been written to any of the emaciated female anchors or media stars serving at wretched examples to young girls?  Eating disorders are also epidemic.

The fat acceptance movement has gained some ground.  Some of its proponents state that being fat doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unhealthy.  That’s true.  But it’s also like suggesting that I leave one chamber empty into my Fat-Makes-Me-Sick-Gun and play Russian Roulette.

I’ve heard that being fat is an individual issue, and its “my business if I’m fat, not yours!”  Okay… well, in the words of my Kettle Bell Concepts II instructor, “You have a social responsibility NOT to be fat.  If there’s a fire in my office building and the elevators aren’t working, your fat body is probably what’s getting between me and the fire escape.”

Man, the comments can be harsh.  The truth hurts, especially when your condition is your responsibility.

The Yale Rudd Center submitted these guidelines in how to portray fat people in the media:

Guidelines

• I: Respect Diversity and Avoid Stereotypes 
• 1. Avoid portrayals of overweight and obese persons merely for the purpose of humor or ridicule.
• 2. Avoid weight-based stereotypes (e.g., such as obese persons are “lazy” or “lacking in willpower”).
• 3. Present overweight and obese persons in a diverse manner, including both women and men, of all ages, of different appearances and ethnic backgrounds, of different opinions and interests, and in a variety of roles.
• 4. Portray overweight and obese individuals as persons who have professions, expertise, authority, and skills in a range of activities and settings.

By following some of these guidelines, don’t we inadvertently send the message that “It’s OK to be fat!”  That it is acceptable?  Isn’t that what the fat acceptance movement is all about?

Unacceptable!  Here is a neat little write-up of the economic costs of obesity.   Obesity accounts for 21 percent of health care costs.  Obesity, as far as the military is concerned (I wasn’t allowed into R.O.T.C.) is a national security threat.  Obesity contributes significantly to rising health care costs, how insurance policies are structured, time loss at work, sick days, ridiculous infrastructure modifications like larger seats in airplanes and restaurants, emergency medical responses, fertility complications, and more.

And we should just sit back and accept it because now everyone these days is fat?

Unlike being a minority, being young, old, gay, or handicapped, being fat is controllable.

Every bite that you take and every step that you make factors into your weight.  (A small percentage of a small percentage have weight issues related to genetic deviations, medications, and underlying disorders unrelated to initial body mass, and I respect that).

No one really wants to be fat.  And when a fat person wants to lose weight, one of the best things they can do is make it public–tell everyone they know what their goals are, surround themselves with people who also have healthy habits, and remove themselves from fat-promoting situations.  They should not seek solidarity with other fat people.  It’s like an alcoholic trying to quit drinking at a bar.

Now come on, Maria.  Alcoholism is an addiction.

What, and lifestyle isn’t defined by habits and addictions?  Changing your lifestyle–just about everything you do–is like quitting a substance.  It’s hard.

And so, back to Ms. Livingston… while I agree that her critic is kind of a D-bag and that fat kids and people shouldn’t be bullied or socially subdued, we should not accept fat, we should not falsely accuse someone of bullying just because the truth makes us feel bad.

Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. – Michael Pollan

I just spent the last several days reading the critique of T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, written by Denise Minger.

Earlier this week, I decided to revisit The China Study book for its references–in search of the “holy grail” of significant argument in science: peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals.   As I am more fond of works of journalism (due in large part to the inaccessibility of prohibitively expensive scientific journals), I have amassed many books on a variety of nutritional subjects–written by people who have aggregated available data, on all sides of the nutritional debate.  I did this in an effort to get a broad “macro” understanding of good nutrition.

But when faced with an extremely arrogant unhealthy fellow quite opposed to organic-pushing-yuppies, and refusing to read anything but peer-reviewed journals, I had no choice but to re-open The China Study and start looking through its references.

That’s when I wondered if anyone had finally criticized the book, as it had been years since I’d last wondered.

Many have suggested that I become a registered dietitian.  Every time this is suggested, I think how that might be nice, but ultimately balk at the notion of studying the effects of isolated nutrients.  Frankly, I don’t have the science background and wouldn’t want to go back to school just to go back to school.

And besides… I’m a fitness trainer–plain and simple.  And while I could devote my attention to a PhD in kinesiology or something of the sort, it wouldn’t contribute very much to the job that I love, which has only a part to do with hard science, and the rest to do with lifestyle modification, motivation, behavioral psychology, nutrition, and goal-setting.

Thus, with a complete and utter lack of any scientific qualifications, I brave the field of nutrition, which is just about the most hotly debated subject ever.  More than politics, more than religion.  Criticizing what and how people eat is bold, because it tends to put to make people very defensive.    After all, you are what you eat.  Criticize how someone eats–you criticize what they are and what works for them (or at least what they think works for them).

That being said, my safest approach is broad in scope.  First, eat.  And read.  And eat.  And read some more.  And eat.  And read and read and read and eat and eat and eat.  And after all of this, I still can’t be sure what an optimal diet will be.

Like any amateur blogger on nutrition, I’ve done it all: vegetarian, vegan, raw food, paleo, macrobiotic, Atkins, high protein, and more.  Most fitness trainers experiment with diet as obsessively as diet-zealots.  I’ll spare the back story.  Suffice it to say, I’m like the rest of them.

I’ve read a lot of books.  I’ve done a lot of research.  My leg-work pales in comparison to Denise Minger (despite my own enthusiasm for the subject, and handful of years over her) and most definitely to T. Colin Campbell.  But allow me to speak about them both.

Enter Denise Minger – A twenty-something, passionate, zealous independent researcher with no formal education in nutrition, statistics, and other relevant sciences.  But I will be the last person to disregard her on such grounds, because I do not believe that knowledge and understanding is limited to formal credentials.  She is clearly a bright and diligent person, and I know I will very much enjoy the rest of her blog’s content.

My first impressions of her were awe and curiosity, as she was making some compelling claims that I could not superficially dismiss with the knowledge I had.  As I continued to read her blog, her About page, and finally, her bashing of The China Study, I was more turned off by her tone, her arrogance, and frenetic writing style.  But that didn’t mean what she was saying was worthless.  I was compelled by her arguments, like her many readers and fans.  Like the majority of them (I can only assume), I lack the raw data of the China Study, as well as the tools to interpret it correctly.  But even so, something felt wrong with her hard-line criticism.

My favorite books in nutrition happen to be Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, and Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition, by Paul Pritchford.  It’s an eclectic mix of kind-of science, conventional science, and non-science.  I’m a huge fan of the concept of not messing up food by hyper-processing it.  All these books are in agreement there.

The discord in recent debate around nutrition comes from animal vs. plant-sourced food, and each of my favorite books has something different to say.  Price is all for animal foods so long as they are nutrient-dense and indigenous.  Campbell is highly suspect of animal foods, especially as a large percentage of diet, and prefers to abstain, but does not tell his readers to be vegan.  And Pritchford has a strong preference towards plant-foods, with quite minimal levels of animal foods.

Having done it all, and always modifying my diet due to my very erratic lifestyle of travel and re-location and volunteering, I eat what I can get, and I’m a stickler for quality.  I don’t tell my clients to be vegan.  But I make gosh-darn sure to emphasize that animal foods should be kept at a minimum.  It feels right.  The conglomerate opinion of the material I’ve covered states the same thing.  The common denominators are pretty consistent.

And this, I think, is the crux of T. Colin Campbell’s book, and was stated with great diplomacy in his response to her China Study bashing.  He has many decades in the field and has read untold studies in nutrition, conferred with untold scientists, nutritionists, doctors, and more.  Honestly, if I had to bank on anyone’s wealth of knowledge (irrespective of academic credentials), I’d bank on him.  Frankly, if 23-year old Denise spent the next couple of years working 40 hours a week on the subject of nutrition, she still would only have scratched the surface of Campbell’s experience.  Nothing teaches better than experience, with credentials or without.

The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, and you can read T. Colin Campbell’s admission that The China Study is the most comprehensive in its design, but its data alone do not provide all the answers.

I argue that causality in nutrition, as it relates to disease, will be impossible to prove except in the rarest of cases, which I cannot even imagine.  Why?

Well… from a training standpoint, we don’t merely eat.  We move, we live, we inundate ourselves in chemicals, we pollute our environments, we meditate, we do things.  We do so many things–eat so many things–and do so many things to the things that we eat…

I know that some people respond to exercise differently than others.  There are hard-gainers and easy-gainers.  Stubborn fat, and elusive muscle.  In my case, muscle that comes too readily, and fat that just stays put–vegan, raw, or not.  It is amazing.

If people don’t respond uniformly to exercise, why should I expect them to respond uniformly to a diet?  Some people take more, and some people take less.

Same with diet.

So I ask, what is the point, Ms. Minger, of your relentless efforts against T. Colin Campbell, when your diet closely resembles his “plant-based” recommendation?  Campbell is a spokesperson for veganism, but neither his foundation nor his book go beyond “whole-food plant-based,” I think in order to differentiate from out-of-proportion (often poorly implemented) vegan dogma and idealism.

Ms. Minger can reference studies that demonstrate effects contrary to what Campbell is conveying.  I can show you examples of fat people who don’t get skinny with lots of energy expenditure.  That doesn’t mean cardio should be chucked out of the approach.  It merely demonstrates the complexity of the subjects at hand.

The comments one her blog speak volumes.  She’s created a community of semi-raw/paleo/Weston A. Pricers vehemently opposed to veganism, with scores of anecdotes stating how veganism made them sick, this and that and this.

Any diet can be applied poorly.

What I’ve learned in my time as a “tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist” is that a smart enough person can draw enough arrows to make a compelling case for anything.  And Ms. Minger is a very smart chick.  It’s clear.  Campbell is also pretty smart.

If you look hard enough, you will find what you’re looking for.

Now, if you consider the sheer number of arrows pointing in favor of Campbell’s conclusions which are, namely, that even moderate consumption of animal-sourced foods and refined foods promote poor health in our time, there are a lot.  I mean, a lot of them.  He has quite a bit of science to back up his claims (although, considering the amount of data out there, much of it inevitably conflicts with itself), but more importantly, he has modern human populations and controlled clinic trials to reference as well.

Minger also has done her due diligence (again, not on the order of magnitude of Campbell and his associates–she’ll be nipping at their heels for years to come), especially with the raw data of the China Study itself.  She, too, has been able to draw some compelling arrows in favor of her own conclusion which is… umm… that’s the thing.  After spending days reading her blog and the comments and the counter arguments, and so forth, I wasn’t quite sure what she was trying to accomplish.

Was it that milk doesn’t kill people?  That refined carbohydrates are equally guilty for poor health?  That people who consume more animal-based foods also consume more refined foods, and it’s unfair to hyper-focus on animal protein?  That Campbell should have controlled for other factors in his years-long analysis of the China Study data performed by himself and his assistants?  She modifies her original post by stating that she wants to “highlight potential weaknesses” in the China Study.

She takes a list of statements made by Campbell and attempts to dissect them with the raw China Study data and supporting studies.  In doing so, she draws a bunch of new arrows that point in an opposite direction.

But did she accomplish anything beyond giving animal-food-obsessed fans some reassurance that  their foods won’t necessarily kill them?  I don’t think so.

Let’s say that Minger got it right–that Campbell’s evidence is self-contradictory.  The conclusions may not follow, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.  After all, Minger herself eats the diet recommended by Campbell in The China Study.

Show me the clinical evidence of group of people following his dietary recommendations and dying from diseases of affluence.  Show me.  Do that, and I’ll be impressed.

T. Colin Campbell is a scientist.  He is a lot of other things now, too.  He’s a vegan spokesperson.  He’s a marketer.  He’s a teacher.  He’s an author.  His behavior in each of these roles must be taken in stride.  But by no means should Ms. Minger smear his work to such an extent that she’s led many of her readers into thinking that he should be kicked out of the scientific community and that his recommendations are garbage.  Some of the comments left on her blog were startling, to say the least.

The release of The China Study book was business and marketing.  Authors are beholden to publishers. Publishers need to market books.  Films need spokespeople.  Messages get conveyed, re-conveyed, re-worded, and so on until the public can digest it in sound bytes.

The paleo movement so defensive of animal foods is currently what’s hot.  I remember when raw was the headlining diet.  I can’t help but feel like Ms. Minger’s aggressive criticism is more a product of her zealous defense of her own diet (inclusive of animal foods in limited amounts) than anything else.  We can interpret data over and over again, control for that, omit this, include too much.  But the bottom line is that a whole-foods plant-based (who said vegan?) diet, applied intelligently, works for a lot of people.  This does not mean that paleo doesn’t work.

I will concede that Campbell pays a great deal of attention to the effects of animal-sourced food, and too little to the effects of refined carbohydrates and oils.  Again, it does not make his recommendations wrong.  We’re not talking about cause.  We’re talking about association.  If the ingestion of animal-sourced foods leads to the displacement of plant foods–if the chemical high we get from animal foods leads to an extra-chemical high from combining them with refined foods–his recommendations still hold.

And what do I think of Ms. Minger’s “raw food, plant-based, paleo-ish, Weston-A-Price style fusion?”  I think it’s great.  I mean, I don’t think it gets much better than that, especially if you are young and healthy and don’t have contraindications.  But you cannot remove anything from its context.  Would I eat that diet if I had cancer or kidney disease?  Probably not.

T. Colin Campbell and company are addressing a nation of sick people in a polluted environment with a plant-based strategy demonstrated in risk–not causality.  I believe their recommendations are safe and effective when applied intelligently.  I believe, furthermore, that their recommendations are excellent in the context of industrial agriculture, environmental constraints, and negative externalities–as well as in the context of changing farm policy, swiftly reversing an obesity epidemic, and empowering consumers.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees, trying too hard to be right.

A study published recently (August, 2012) in Nutrition Journal called “The effects of four hypocaloric diets containing different levels of sucrose or high fructose corn syrup on weight loss and related parameters” made some conclusions about sugar consumption and weight loss.

If you don’t know what “hypocaloric” means, it means “low-calorie.”  The study took different groups of overweight-to-obese people and placed them on diets containing levels of sugar (sucrose) or HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) in levels of 10-20% of their total caloric intake, and ensured that all groups achieved a caloric deficit of about 300 calories per day.  Every group, including the control group, was also put on an exercise program.

And what happened?

Short answer: everyone lost body fat.

Yippie!

I didn’t need to read the article to know that would happen.  Come on.  That’s just Personal Training 101: calories in vs. calories out–plus the bonus of thermogenetic exercise!  Every trainer is taught to sell training on that concept.  Burn more than you eat and you lose weight.

“What are you getting at?” you ask.

Well… this isn’t new research.  It’s old.  Super old.  We didn’t need a controlled double-blind study to prove it.  Trainers see it every day.  Anyone who had ever deliberately lost weight by counting calories know this.

But if you dig deeper and look at the underlying biochemistry of sugar metabolism, it still isn’t news.  No one explains it better than Dr. Robert H. Lustig.  Sucrose and HFCS are almost identical in composition, and in how they behave in the body.

To be completely fair, HFCS got a very bad reputation for a while.  People failed to see that it was pretty much the same as regular table sugar.

The scientists, in an effort to save the reputation of added sweeteners, state:

evidence regarding a potential positive association between sugar sweetened beverage consumption and obesity is inconsistent [43]. Because of the metabolic nature of overweight and obesity and the complexity of the western diet, it is unlikely that a single food or food group is the  primary cause. Randomized, clinical feeding trials have shown inconsistent results from testing the effects of added sugar on weight gain. Differences in study instruments and methods, population studied and study design may have contributed to these inconsistent findings.

In other words, science has a very tough time pinning down cause and effect in multi-variable situations.  It can’t really.  ”Causation” is exceedingly difficult to prove.  But correlations are easy to demonstrate.  Too easy, sometimes.  This is why social context, politics, policy, money, corruption, public opinion, advertising, and everything else should always be factored into the decision-making process.  Emotional intuitive (visceral) decisions shouldn’t be overlooked, either.  Yes, these things get us into trouble, but so does science.

My favorite quote these days is “100% of all products recalled by the FDA were deemed ‘safe and effective’ by the FDA.”  Science can be bullshit.  ”Good science” is much rarer in our industry-led scientific data pool.

I have absolutely no argument with what the study concluded:

“In conclusion, similar decreases in weight and indices of adiposity are observed when overweight or obese individuals are subjected to hypocaloric diets with different prescribed levels of sucrose or high fructose corn syrup.”  < (AND EXERCISE, you jerks!  You left that out!)

At the bottom, I looked for conflicts of interest.  Here’s what it said: “JM Rippe has received research funding from the Corn Refiners Association for the present study. The other study authors reported no competing interests.”

Ok… one guy.  Big deal.  And there were how many scientists?

Here they are:

Joshua Lowndes (jlowndes@rippelifestyle.com})
Diana Kawiecki (Dkawiecki@rippelifestyle.com})
Sabrina Pardo (Spardo@rippelifestyle.com})
Von Nguyen (Vnguyen@rippelifestyle.com})
Kathleen J Melanson (kmelanson@uri.edu})
Zhiping Yu (Zyu@rippelifestyle.com})
James M Rippe (Jrippe@rippelifestyle.com})

Wow!  They all WORK FOR Mr. James M. Rippe!  No conflict of interest, you say?  That’s sweet.

The CORN REFINERS ASSOCIATION paid Mr. Rippe and his associates (or employees) to design a study that teaches us nothing new at all, to make HFCS look less hazardous than it is.  I had such a giggle over this I thought I’d point it out to my readers.

HFCS and Sugar consumption at levels of 10-20% of a low-calorie (plus exercise) diet don’t inhibit weight loss when efforts are well-structured and executed.  The introduction of HFCS didn’t make us fat, they’d like us to think.  Well let me say this: the correlations are staggering.

Correlations are neat little things that help us make general decisions.  Correlations should be taken with other correlations and perhaps a dose of intuition.  This ads up to lifestyle change.

So keep in mind that the Corn Refiner’s Association is a lobbying group whose sole purpose is to make the public and politicians feel all warm and fuzzy about corn.

Corn. King corn.  The CORNerstone of farm policy.  The crop that receives the most subsidies (i.e. ‘welfare’).  The crop around which our backward policies have enabled the competitive wipe-out of other corn producers.  The crop around which so much GMO attention and research is hinging.  The crop that is quite impossibly being directed towards “sustainable energy.”

Good old corn, you complicated SOB.  I’m so glad these scientists devoted their valuable skills to the promotion of bastardized food production and processing.

Currently, no regulatory authority (such as the FDA) requires “chronic” studies in order to demonstrate safety.  Industry practice is to conduct 90-day studies, which is insufficient to view long-term effects on health.

The GMO crops typically under scrutiny are Monsanto’s Roundup-ready soybeans and maize, which are engineered to produce modified Bt toxin insecticide.  According to the report, “These GM crops contain new pesticide residues for which new maximal residual levels (MRL) have been established in some countries.”

This particular study focused on NK603 R-tolerant maize.

The problem with present studies is that they attempt to measure the effects of the active ingredient of a particular toxic compound, rather than the full-spectrum of adjuvants (a pharmacological or immunological agent that modifies the effect of other agents) and other ingredients.

The authors of the paper note that:

…toxicity evaluation of herbicides is generally performed on mammalian physiology through the long-term study of only their active principle, rather than the formulation used in agriculture, as was the case for glyphosate (Williams et al., 2000), the active herbicide constituent of R. It is important to note that glyphosate is only able to efficiently penetrate target plant organisms with the help of adjuvants present in the various commercially used R formulations (Cox, 2004). When R residues are found in tap water, food or feed, they arise from the total herbicide formulation, which is the most commonly used mixture in agriculture; indeed many authors in the field have strongly emphasized the necessity of studying the potential toxic effects of total chemical mixtures rather than single components (Cox and Surgan, 2006; Mesnage et al., 2010; Monosson, 2005). Even adjuvants and not only glyphosate or other active ingredients are found in ground water (Krogh et al., 2002), and thus an exposure to the diluted whole formulation is more representative of an environmental pollution than the exposure to glyphosate alone in order to study health effects.

In other words, the authors are attempting to study more realistic variables over the long term.

They reported in the discussion of their findings that:

In conclusion, it was previously known that glyphosate consumption in water above authorized limits may provoke hepatic and kidney failures (EPA). The results of the study presented here clearly demonstrate that lower levels of complete agricultural glyphosate herbicide formulations, at concentrations well below officially set safety limits, induce severe hormone-dependent mammary, hepatic and kidney disturbances. Similarly, disruption of biosynthetic pathways that may result from overexpression of the EPSPS transgene in the GM NK603 maize can give rise to comparable pathologies that may be linked to abnormal or unbalanced phenolic acids metabolites, or related compounds. Other mutagenic and metabolic effects of the edible GMO cannot be excluded. This will be the subject of future studies, including transgene and glyphosate presence in rat tissues. Reproductive and multigenerational studies will also provide novel insights into these problems.

This study represents the first detailed documentation of longterm deleterious effects arising from the consumption of a GM Rtolerant maize and of R, the most used herbicide worldwide. Altogether, the significant biochemical disturbances and physiological failures documented in this work confirm the pathological effects of these GMO and R treatments in both sexes, with different amplitudes. We propose that agricultural edible GMOs and formulated pesticides must be evaluated very carefully by long term studies to measure their potential toxic effects.

In other words, the “safety thresholds” set by regulatory agencies are not enough.  What we have seen in these rats, in an attempt to account for environmental synergistic factors, is illness: tumors, liver and kidney damage, and more.

If you trust the corporate-infiltrated FDA’s safety limits, then you have given your consent to be the lab rat.

The backlash from this study illuminated a number of problems in its design: first, that the rats tested were of a breed already prone to tumors; second, that there were not enough rats in the control group, and just one rat can seriously skew a correlation.

These are valid points.  However, I wouldn’t discard the study completely.  While the leading scientist already has a poor track record in the scientific community and has been accused of poor study design and misleading interpretations of results in the past, I will state something in his defense.

The findings of increased kidney and liver lesions from a diet containing GMO corn have been seen elsewhere.  Check it out…

http://benthamscience.com/open/tonutraj/articles/V004/3TONUTRAJ.pdf

http://www.medecine.uottawa.ca/bmi/assets/documents/dr_altosaar/dr_altosaar1.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691507005443

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/mon.php

http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11884:health-effects-and-risks-of-bt-foodsconflicts-of-interest-in-approval-signed-by-medics

Whether is this enough to cause cancer, I cannot say.  But lesions of any kind are enough to make me balk at a plant that produces more potent Bt toxin, which ultimately has a conversation with my organs.