Yearly Archives: 2011 - Page 4

As we approach the 10^th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it may be worth remembering that of the 2,998 killed in New York City, 403 were first responders, including 343 firefighters and 60 police. One was a priest. It is in the nature of life that those who risk themselves for others, who give and love the most, often suffer the most. Let us honor their generosity and their spirit.

[1] Interesting posts this week: Mark Sisson has an interesting discussion of GERD / acid reflux. We’ll have a few posts coming up on acid reflux as well – at least one by me, and several by a guest blogger who some of you know as “Valtsu.”

Alcohol was part of the Paleolithic diet: Drunk Swedish elk found in apple tree near Gothenburg.

Apropos recent discussions of the influence of food reward on addictive eating, Paul Whiteley points to research suggesting that drugs of abuse exploit the same pathways as our natural hunger for salt.

Newell Wright explains why Gary Taubes has much to be proud of.

Beth Mazur explains why she eats moderate carbs for weight loss; and proclaims herself 95% compliant with the Perfect Health Diet.

Beth’s not the only one: Chowstalker is evolving toward the PHD. Patty writes, “since loosening up a bit with the “safe starches”, my energy level has been higher and my weight is inching down a bit.”

I liked Cate Shanahan’s Deep Nutrition a lot, but its argument that pre-natal maternal nutrition has a big impact on children’s looks is controversial. For some, Deep Nutrition is a horror book:

ok, so deep nut is now giving me nightmares. i woke up from one this morning in which my second born was super ugly and i was ashamed to take him in public. every time i did, all these ugly grown ups with patchy hair and skin infections and missing limbs would coo over him in grguly voices and tell me that he reminded them of themselves when they were babies.

Melissa McEwen observes that Paleolithic moms were often well nourished, and yet “Paleolithic people have traits … many of us no longer consider beautiful … such as brow ridges.” Hey – are you calling my Neanderthal ancestors ugly?

Elsewhere, Melissa reports that postpartum depression was “quite rare” in traditional societies. Alas, depression is quite common in New York City, and Melissa is leaving. She has our best wishes; may this move be a step forward, in all respects.

Bix at Fanatic Cook explains why ibuprofen can cause osteoporosis.

John Durant says that bears can teach us which foods are healthy: they eat the fat and abandon the nitrogen rich testicles. Bad news for Aaron Blaisdell?

I didn’t listen to all of Richard Nikoley’s b____t videos, but according to the transcript, he predicted that dogs fed a vegan diet would eat their owner. Life mimics art.

When I saw Emily Deans writing about “the MTHFR enzyme,” I wondered if she had freed her animal. But no, it turns out she’s only explaining how homocysteine promotes anger. Earlier, Emily averred – rightly – that “all that is psychologic is biologic,” and explored links between depression and serum cholesterol.

Lucas Tafur notes that a fruitarian was able to develop extreme nutrient deficiencies after only a 1 week fast.

Barry Sears calls meditation “push-ups for the brain.”

A possible key to fat loss: Be in a socially engaging environment. If you can’t manage that, include running wheels in your cage.

Cracked.com has a cartoon showing “How Stress is Killing You.”

Finally, be sure to correct your chocolate deficiency: “The highest levels of chocolate consumption were associated with a 37% reduction in cardiovascular disease and a 29% reduction in stroke.”

[2] Music to read by: The Copenhagen Philharmonic flash mobs Copenhagen Central Station to play Ravel’s Bolero.

[3] Cute animal photo:

[4] The vagaries of academic research: Most people think medical research should focus on understanding disease causes and finding cures. However, this is slow and difficult – an inefficient way to obtain money or advance a scientific career. Actual research often proceeds along different lines.

It is easier to induce pathologies than to cure them, so an effective strategy for developing a “therapy” that provides symptomatic relief is to induce a new pathology whose symptoms are the opposite of the symptoms of the old pathology. The new-pathology symptoms are dubbed “side effects,” which are an accepted feature of modern medicine. Xkcd mocks this kind of approach:

Other times, research proceeds busily in a hopeless direction. For instance, genes are densely networked, and so no one gene has a big effect; observed effects may be mostly noise. Seth Roberts argues that reported gene-environment interactions may all be invalid.

Even when research is potentially productive, there is a temptation to do shoddy work – to publish an interesting result, without double-checking or triple-checking it to see if it will disappear; or even to do careless work, so that interesting results will be more likely to appear by chance. Researchers who work this way often produce unreproducible data. Via Marginal Revolution, solid evidence that over half of biomedical research studies are irreproducible:

Bayer halts nearly two-thirds of its target-validation projects because in-house experimental findings fail to match up with published literature claims, finds a first-of-a-kind analysis on data irreproducibility.

An unspoken industry rule alleges that at least 50% of published studies from academic laboratories cannot be repeated in an industrial setting, wrote venture capitalist Bruce Booth in a recent blog post. A first-of-a-kind analysis of Bayer’s internal efforts to validate ‘new drug target’ claims now not only supports this view but suggests that 50% may be an underestimate; the company’s in-house experimental data do not match literature claims in 65% of target-validation projects, leading to project discontinuation.

[5] I demand clinical trials!: Dr. Kurt Harris says there are “cases where even Paul Jaminet could customize your diet down to the molecule and you would still get fat”.  Maybe so, but I suspect a well-fed human body is very resilient.

[6] Taubes v Guyenet … Kozinski v Chin?: Two prominent federal judges have taken opposing stands on how to lose weight. Alex Kozinski, Chief Justice of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, advises: “Few carbs, less sugar.” Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Denny Chin once advised “Run more, eat less.”

Judging by their pictures, Kozinski is the better judge – of weight loss methods!

[7] Good cause of the week: Deacon Patrick of Mind Your Head Co-op is recovering from brain injury, and has been having good results on our version of the ketogenic diet:

The results are amazing. The more ketogenic my diet, the better my brain capacity, cognitive energy, energy stability, longevity, and the better I feel.

In an email to me he wrote with an expression of thanks and a request for help:

Thank you for the gift of better brain function you have given me! A few months ago I switched to ketogenic diet, and now a completely Paleo diet based in large part on your Perfect Health Diet — the differences I’ve experienced are amazing.

I am currently section running the Colorado Trail to raise awareness for brain injury (which I have) and to help spread the word of the iPad/iPhone donation program of Mind Your Head Co-op which I founded and run — which donates used iPads and iPhones to soldiers and civilians with brain injury.

Would you please help spread the word about the iPad/iPhone donation as well as my run? Here are a few links:

iPad/iPhone donation.

My most recent adventure.

All Colorado Trail Posts.

The Press Release and Pack.

With Abandon,

Patrick

Please consider donating your used iPad or iPhone to Patrick’s effort to help the brain injured. If you don’t have a used iPad or iPhone, donations of money would also be appreciated.

[8] Not the weekly video: Todd Hargrove introduces us to a film introducing the Feldenkrais method from practitioner Irene Gutteridge. Meet Baby Liv, Feldenkrais instructor:

[9] Shou-Ching’s Photo-Art:

[10] Weekly video:  Via Joshua Newman comes a great story about a brain-damaged man who hoped to be a mechanic, but settled for becoming a writer. His cherished hope is to see his stories made into movies. He succeeded in persuading one enterprising film maker to do a short film – about him. Enjoy:

Jeffery and the Dinosaurs from Yasmeen Ismail on Vimeo.

Happy Labor Day weekend to our American readers.

I’m pleased to be able to announce a few upcoming talks:

1. On September 17 in York, Maine. I’m awaiting details and will provide an update when I get them.
2. On October 2, we’ll speak to the Living Paleo in Boston group, on the topic “Common Pitfalls of Eating Paleo.” Thanks to Amit and Shilpi Mehta for hosting the event and suggesting the topic. Unfortunately this one is already full.

[1] Interesting posts this week: Chris Kresser and Stephan Guyenet are organizing a weight loss trial. It will test a low-food-reward eating plan against a control group who “will be asked not to change diet or lifestyle.” To be eligible, you

must not currently be weight reduced relative to a prior weight [and] must not currently be on a weight reducing diet (low-carbohydrate, low-fat, Paleolithic, Zone, Ornish, etc).

Since the control group will be eating diets that have given them the highest weight of their lives, I predict the low-food-reward diet will outperform. (NB: There is nothing wrong with jumping over a low hurdle before attempting tougher tests.) If you qualify, please consider participating in this trial.

In another post, Chris points out that people with low T3 in intensive care units have the worst outcomes, but supplementing T3 doesn’t help them. A helpful reminder that hormone levels, for the most part, are adaptive responses and can’t easily be improved on. You have to address underlying causes.

Gary Taubes introduces a new series on his blog, in which he will reply to his critics. Stephan Guyenet wrote a counter-post. You won’t miss much if you wait for them to get to the substantive posts.

Peter Dobromylskyj of Hyperlipid has replied to an earlier post by Stephan. I think Peter does a fair job of getting at the weakness in the food reward theory of obesity: there is no obvious mechanism by which eating rewarding foods produces the metabolic damage that is found in the obese; whereas it is quite easy to see how metabolic damage can disrupt the brain’s food reward system. However, this same line of argument works against Taubesian insulin-carbohydrate theory: one needs metabolic damage before insulin can cause problems. Key line in Peter’s post: “Once you are insulin resistant carbohydrates become spontaneously fattening.” This is a sort of admission, also made by Taubes, that metabolic damage comes first, then carbohydrates and insulin become a problem. But what causes metabolic damage? Peter hints that (possibly inherited) epigenetic damage from past fructose consumption is the culprit. I think this is not quite adequate, but it is great that Peter is putting forth a hypothesis. I wonder if Gary Taubes in his series will offer any opinions on the “first cause” of obesity.

Melissa McEwen (“Good Books, Bad Taubes”) sums up Gary’s legacy: His defense of fats improved a lot of people’s health, but some of his ideas are unsupported by the evidence. Since truths are precious as jade, errors easily discarded, that’s a resumé to be proud of.

Seth Roberts, who pioneered the treadmill desk, is on to the next big thing: the lounge-office.

Emily Deans says homocysteine can degrade arteries and bones, and maybe cause psychosis. Best to stay well-nourished.

Jenny Ruhl wonders if plastics may be responsible for the diabetes and obesity epidemics. Bix at Fanatic Cook says NSAIDs damage joints. It’s hard to keep up with all the villains.

Jamie Scott reports the Tokelauan eating schedule: nothing but coconut milk in the morning, followed by a “substantial meal at midday, and another main meal in the late afternoon.” This closely resembles our recommended plan for ketogenic intermittent fasting.

Bryan Caplan says Pinocchio’s doctors were canny diagnosticians.

Jenny at Nourished Kitchen has lists of micronutritious foods. Liver is #1.

Danny Roddy is offering his “Hair Like a Fox” pdf book free to anyone who “likes” his Facebook page.

I was disappointed to read that the Japanese government is confiscating iodine tablets, so that supplements are impossible to obtain. This is hard to fathom because the reactors may still be generating radioactive iodine, and iodine supplements are an effective defense (see Iodine, the Thyroid, and Radiation Protection, Mar 17, 2011).

Probiotics can reduce anxiety and improve mental health. Exercise also helps.

Hey, Europeans! Cover your mouth when you sneeze! Microbes can cross oceans. Also, bacteria developed antibiotic resistance 30,000 years ago.

I bet John Durant has this too: A part of the human brain is dedicated to reacting to animals.

Anthony Bourdain attacks Paula Deen – for using butter!?!

[2] Music to read by: Ah yes, the golden age of rock and roll, when musical giants chicken-danced the earth:

(This was a Dutch comedian. The real Trashmen may be seen here.)

[3] Picky eater:

[4] Notable comments this week:

• Kate points to a paper confirming that protein deficient diets cause low T3 and high rT3. It’s not just glucose deficiency.
• Scott points to a paper showing that lower cholesterol was associated with longer lifespan. Do lipid-deficient diets, like protein-restricted and carb-restricted diets, extend lifespan?
• Ludy Feyen on Facebook points to a report that potatoes reduce blood pressure. The very first comment on the article? “Slightly lower blood pressure at the expense of strong blood-sugar spike and it subsequent insulin spike? NO THANK YOU POTATO STUDY!” Where did potato-phobia come from? Even Walter Willett has it.
• Michelle has a great story of how a stool test helped her uncover chronic infections and start on the road to healing.
• Pascal pointed out that Vitamin C helps normalize cortisol (paper, paper).

[5] Don’t tell my nieces: This shark might be chasing them on Christmas Day:

[6] Happy Beaks: The best penguin movie yet?

[7] Shou-Ching’s Photo-Art:

[8] Inspiration: Ami Sano is a Japanese girl born with no arms and only one partially formed leg. At age 21, she is already a published writer (two books) and singer. This music video features her childhood:

Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the eastern United States, and in Boston heavy rain began about 3 pm today. Root for an absence of power outages, so that we can get some much-needed work done.

[1] Interesting posts this week: The Ancestral Health Society announced that the 2012 Ancestral Health Symposium will be hosted by the Harvard Food Law Society and held a few blocks from our home in Cambridge. Fantastic!

Emily Deans has been busy writing about things dear to our hearts – micronutrients. Here are two posts on thiamin – the second invokes the fascinating story of the Erebus and of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition in which all the men but none of the dogs survived – and one on folic acid. She also questioned whether it is natural for human brains to shrink with age.

John Durant thinks that if Manhattanites have to live 3 days without electricity, “all hell will break loose,” and advises, “Buy ammo.” I’m glad I live in Boston, where ammo would be unnecessary until day 5, and cannibalism still unfashionable at day 7.

Stephan Guyenet sets forth his “roadmap to obesity”. Some of the factors I think are crucial are listed in his “Other Factors” section.

Watch out, Stephan! Sean at Prague Stepchild is going after you.

The most recent post at Hyperlipid was notable for its comment section: A lot of great observations about the possibility that micronutrient deficiencies contribute to obesity.

Bix at FanaticCook wonders if there are too many antibiotics in our food.

Tom Naughton reports that salt deficiency can cause insulin resistance. I knew there was a reason for salt’s high food reward.

At PaleoHacks, some folks recount their experiences adding rice to Paleo. A few people had bad reactions that disappeared when they rinsed the rice before cooking.

Newell Wright, who has diabetes, tested rice syrup and found it wasn’t so bad for his blood glucose.

Although Don Matesz has said “Farewell to Paleo”,  some of his recent meals look Perfect Health Diet-ish.

Finally, some offbeat diet advice from Gonzalo Lira:

A cousin of mine who’s a veterinarian told me never to buy chicken breast. “That’s where they inject the hormones,” she explained. “So unless you’re sure the chicken was slaughtered at least six months after getting a hormone shot, you’ll get a big dose of hormones when you bite into that chicken sandwich.”

[2] Music to read by: One idea for getting away from a hurricane:

[3] The Jurassic Diet: Evidence that dinosaurs ate grains:

[4] “Leaky gut” and dysbiosis cause belly fat: In various places, eg Gary Taubes and Stephan Guyenet: Three Views on Obesity (Aug 11, 2011), I’ve argued that infections, inflammatory signaling, and pathogen die-off toxins are factors in obesity, and that if it is hard to lose weight following a healthy diet such as ours, one should look next to treating infections and gut dysbiosis.

A new study offers support for that view:

Mesenteric fat hypertrophy in patients with Crohn’s disease and in experimental rodent models of gut inflammation suggest that impaired gut barrier function with increased leakage of gut-derived antigens may drive visceral lipid deposition. The aim of this study was to determine whether increased intestinal permeability is associated with visceral adiposity in healthy humans…. Intestinal permeability was assessed using the ratio of urinary excretion of orally ingested sucralose to mannitol (S/M)…. [W]e found a positive correlation between waist circumference and S/M excretion within a time frame of urine collection consistent with permeability of the lower gastrointestinal tract (6-9 hours post-ingestion; P = 0.022)…. The S/M ratio from the 6-12 h urine sample correlated with visceral fat area (P = 0.0003) and liver fat content (P = 0.004), but not with subcutaneous or total body fat. This novel finding of an association between intestinal permeability and visceral adiposity and liver fat content in healthy humans suggests that impaired gut barrier function should be further explored as a possible mediator of excess visceral fat accumulation and metabolic dysfunction.

Intestinal Permeability Is Associated With Visceral Adiposity in Healthy Women. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2011 Aug 18. http://pmid.us/21852815.

(Hat tip Mario Iwakura)

[5] Marriage is good for you: Single men die 8-17 years earlier and single women 7-15 years earlier than married men and women.

[6] Endurance exercise reverses anorexia in rats: Hypothalamic inflammation is reversed by endurance training in anorectic-cachectic rats.

[7] Not the weekly video: Just to prove mobility exercises can be fun at any age, here’s Gary & Charlotte Chaney with Debbie Wheelis:

[8] Shou-Ching’s photo art:

[9] Video of the week: An essay on truth and deception, told through iPods:

[10] Postscript: Goodnight, Irene:

Chris Kresser, Danny Roddy, and I recorded a podcast yesterday, and it should be up at TheHealthySkeptic.org or ChrisKresser.com on Tuesday. Chris and Danny are great hosts and we had some fascinating questions to play with, so it was a lot of fun.

Here’s what interested me this week:

[1] Interesting posts: JS Stanton of gnolls.org has been doing a great series on satiety, hunger, and obesity. Part IV went up this week. JS points out that the obese have damaged mitochondria and reduced ability to oxidize fat. These defects often persist after weight has been lost:

Normal subjects are burning 7% carbs and 78% fat at rest, whereas formerly obese subjects are burning 49% carbs and 34% fat at rest!

Don’t miss JS’s ongoing exploration of the implications.

Jamie Scott looks at the question: do high-fat diets cause intestinal inflammation?

Barry Groves finds a paper showing via functional MRI that fatty meals improve mood.

Melissa McEwen shows that a diet that includes some carbs, fiber or butyrate, and omega-3 fats is very good for the gut, whereas a high-protein low-carb low-fiber diet is harmful. She has a cool picture:

In another post, Melissa informs us that Lierre Keith has become an advocate of terrorism. Eeek! I regret that we mentioned The Vegetarian Myth in our appendix for vegetarians.

Seth Roberts also linked to a paper showing that high-protein diets are bad for the colon, due to toxic protein metabolites.

Emily Deans informs us that a substantial fraction of people develop hypoglycemia when they eat a small amount of carbs following a fast; and that hypoglycemia is associated with violent behavior.

Mike the Mad Biologist advises: “WASH YOUR DAMN HANDS!”

The Scientist notes that vinegar can do us a lot of good: it helps resolve inflammation and tightens the intestinal barrier. These are among the reasons we include beneficial acids, like lemon juice and vinegar, in our Food Plate.

Chris Masterjohn notes that history affects how you’ll respond to a diet:

[I]f I eat a diet very low in muscle meats and rich in organ meats for a few months, I can go two months on a practically vegan diet, with maybe some oysters and clams here and there, and feel terrific.  How we feel right now is not just influenced by what we ate today, but how we ate the last week, three months ago, six months ago, three years ago, and so on.

Nutritional deficiencies can take months or years to show an effect.

Stephan Guyenet added a section on genetic defects that produce obesity to his contra Taubes post. These experiments show that leptin pathways, not insulin pathways, are crucial; Stephan also quotes two papers arguing that since the genes in question are highly expressed in the brain, the brain is likely a crucial organ in obesity.

In another post, Stephan summarizes two early papers indicating the existence of a fat mass setpoint that regulates appetite. One of the papers says:

In the present experiment, the subjects reduced their intake voluntarily and were always in good spirits, while in the previous experiment, the subjects had to continually fight off their hunger and would spend the night dreaming of food.

And Stephan comments:

That, ladies and gents, is the difference between someone who is at his setpoint and someone who is not.

This may be the most informative sentence Stephan has written so far. If hunger is the manifestation of a setpoint above current body weight, and lack of hunger the manifestation of a setpoint below current body weight, then the Perfect Health Diet seems to immediately reduce the setpoint to something close to normal weight for many people, because so many have reported hunger-free weight loss on our diet. As a result of this experience, Stephan’s post actually convinces me more than ever that the body’s nutritional status is a central influence upon appetite, and that being well nourished may be the key to weight loss. It also gives us easier experiments with which to test these theories: what reduces hunger better, a highly nourishing diet that is high in food reward, or a less nourishing diet that is bland and low in reward?

[2] Everything’s just ducky:

[3] Hospital epidemics: Hospitals are great places for microbes – lots of sick people eating bad food – and I expect we’ll see more stories like this one:

A strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria is sweeping a Dutch hospital, killing 28 people so far. The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) yesterday announced a set of genes for specific diagnosis of the strain, developed by scientists who mined the bacterium’s genome.

Dutch media reports that Maasstad hospital in Rotterdam has been reporting K. pneumoniae infections since late 2010. Since then, at least 80 patients have been infected and the hospital estimates that more than 2,000 may have been exposed to the bacteria.

The strain is resistant to many antibiotics, and also contains the gene for Oxa-48, an enzyme that allows it to resist the carpabenem antibiotics typically used to treat broad-spectrum antibiotic resistant Klebsiella.

We urgently need to relax the regulatory burdens on antibiotic development: see The FDA Is On The Side of the Microbes, Aug 11, 2010.

[4] Some beautiful photos: Taken by a Wisconsin law professor while hiking the Gaspé peninsula in Canada. Photos here. We’ve never hiked there, perhaps it’s time for a trip.

[5] Shou-Ching’s photo art:

[6] Not the weekly video: This lady, the dancer Lunga, must be one of Todd Hargrove’s better pupils:

[7] Video of the week: Stories of human-animal friendship can circulate for years on the Internet. A few years ago there was a story, published on April Fool’s Day in the French magazine Le magazine des voyages de pêche, claiming that a great white shark who had been freed from a net by a fisherman had then followed him for years making displays of affection.

The magazine photos may be seen in this video and the story of the hoax here.

But occasionally, there is a true story of human-animal cooperation and goodwill. Here’s one: