Tipping the scale at 230 (5'10) in May, 2007, at 30%+ body fat, I decided to do something about it. This blog is about that continuing journey. Having lost 60 pounds of fat and gained 20 pounds of muscle -- on the way to 10% BF -- I'm ready to reveal my "secrets." I'm enthusiastic about helping others achieve real results. The mainstream advice is mostly wrong. One need only take a look around.
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The data is in:
Now quick, quick, and go see the shocking rest.
(Note: Ancel Keys was an utter fraud.)
And later: I hope everyone gets the tongue-in-cheek about this post...
Here represents a core fundamental of scientific method.
Suppose you lived in Europe any time during the last few hundred years and were fortunate enough to observe the lovely swan in action. Suppose further that you noticed that every single one was white. How about you observed a million of them over time? Could you say, definitively, that "all swans are white?"
No. You. Can't.
You could hypothesize, which, if you're a scientific researcher, would naturally involve attempting to find swans that aren't white. Grasp that: you look for swans that are not white, because, it doesn't matter if you find 10 billion white swans, you still can't say definitively that all are white universally, or even globally, unless every nook and cranny of the Earth has been checked for non-white swans. OK, but so what? Could we work with and find use in hypotheses that may not be substantiated universally, but are true in a limited context? Sure. It's done all the time, and it's fine, so long as it's done right.
But this isn't how politicized, government, and big-industry "science" is done, now -- especially in areas like diet, medicine, environment (yea, all you "health-nut" greens: the bad science is exactly the same, and I've looked into it just as extensively as health going back far more years than I've been into health / fitness). What is done now is that everyone is going about looking for white swans, finding them, and proclaiming that, (!!!) yep, all swans are white.
But it gets worse. Way, way worse. Why? Simple: all swans aren't white. It only took a single exception to disprove the "rule." Here, let me have the always delightfully candid Robb Wolf elaborate:
In the case of vegetarianism from the China Study perspective, we should see a simple dose response curve with meat intake and cancer. We do not. In fact, we only need ONE (1) example of a conflicting finding to completely discredit the hypothesis. The Inuit Paradox is just such an example. Now the vegetarians will start back-pedaling and yamering a bunch of bull-shit, but the fact is we have a well documented example of a society that consumes greater than 90% of it’s calories from MEAT yet suffers NO: cancer, diabetes, or heart disease until the introduction of neolithic foods. This fact is forgotten, ignored, dismissed…but it’s still a fact. The inuit, are BTW but one of hundreds of hunter gatherer cultures who represent this interesting “Paradox”.
So this is what you're up against, folks. It is the literal equivalent of having government and big industry marching about and conducting research, today -- often spending your tax dollars -- to tell you that they have -- yay! -- located even more white swans. And you're trusting your health and that of your kids to that kind of...FRAUD?
Via reader Chris S. comes this absolutely astounding news: "Eating an egg a day can raise the risk of developing diabetes." And, of course, such "startling" news is being uncritically reported all over the place. You can access the abstract here.
In a word: absurd. I don't know what's worse, actually doing this sort of meaningless and useless "research" in the first place, or mindlessly shilling for it via sensational "news" reporting. In my opinion, the whole lot of 'em ought to be pelted with rotten fruits, vegetables, and of course, eggs.
Now, here's why. This is an observational study, not a controlled intervention study. And not randomized, either. In essence, what they did was to take data from two other studies, data that was gathered by means of an annual questionnaire. As it turned out when they analyzed the data, those who developed type 2 diabetes were largely the same people who tended to eat a fair amount of eggs. Correlation or association, however, in no way implies causation. It could also turn out that the people who got diabetes take hotter showers, on average.
The only thing you can really say is that type 2 is surely linked to diet, diet composition is an individual thing, and it happens that the people who generally have a taste for the foods that tend to lead to the development of diabetes also happen to have a greater than average liking for eggs as well.
Apparently, they only looked for an association with eggs. They didn't look at what, for instance, those who developed type 2 ate with their eggs, i.e., bacon & sausage, or, lots of hash browns, toast, pancakes, waffles, syrup, jams, jellies, fruit cocktails and so on. They didn't look to see, in general, if those who developed Type 2 tended to have higher or lower carbohydrate intake, and, what kind of carbs, i.e., from fruits & vegetables, or from products containing white flour, white sugar, processed vegetable oils, and/or high fructose corn syrup.
But no; couldn't possibly be foods that have continually and steadily grown to super proportions in the American diet over the last century. Nope: it's the eggs, a food humans and their ancestors have been poaching from nests since the dawn of time millions of years ago.
Some of my other posts to shed light on this sort of menace to society:
In a mental exercise I posted yesterday, I asked readers to speculate as to the order of most likely cause of heart disease and death from myocardial infarction.
The facts are that death by MI was unheard of in 1910 (about 100 years ago), had risen to 3,000 deaths per year by 1930, and to 500,000 by 1960. Then I provided eight food group categories, A - H, and indicated how much each had changed over the last 100 years, but without telling you which group was which. So here we go:
So, if one were to simply line it up by the numbers, the order would be like this:
Of course, this is missing junk and highly processed foods.
Now, I agree with the commenter on the previous post. This does not establish causality. And yet, how many decades has it been now that the "health" establishment has been telling you, as though it was certain, that meat and saturated fat are the causes of heart disease? If they even mention junk food, pastries, and all manner of stuff loaded with flour and sugar, it's not those: It's the fat.
It's absurd.
So here's the article with associated references from whence I culled this little exercise. That's Sally Fallon and Mary Enig: It's the Beef. This is an excellent source for all manner of mythbusting with regard to meat and other animal products. Here's another good one.
There was another question posed on my original post speculating that perhaps there weren't heart attacks in 1910 because people didn't live long enough to have them. Average longevity was way lower. The firs thing to note about that is infant and child mortality is what brings the averages way down. There are still people living to 80, 90, 100 and beyond -- plenty of them -- and they weren't dying of heart attacks. Stephan had a good post last July concerning this exact issue, vis-a-vis the Inuit.
I was going to try to design a poll, but let's just get on with it. Do your own personal poll; discipline yourself to create an actual list of probable causality, in oder of most likely to least likely. If you think the causation is likely multiple factors, then place two or more categories next to each other, like 1, 2, 3. In other words: in order of priority, of likely cause.
The most certain vector for approximating the level of heart disease is a data point relatively easy to obtain: death from myocardial infarction ("heart attack"). It's well established that heart attacks are typically caused in first-order by heart disease (generally used to describe a number of related conditions). Naturally, everyone is thusly focussed on second-order causes: what causes heart disease?
Let's take in some statistical data. Myocardial infarction was almost non-existent in 1910 (heart attacks were unheard of). By 1930, deaths from MI had escalated to 3,000 per year. That would constitute a thousands of percentage increase, approaching infinite, the lower the actual number of deaths in 1910. It began to taper off in terms of percentage increase, so that by 1960, there were 500,000 deaths from MI per year. That's very important to understand, as health authorities proclaim that their low-fat diet prescriptions are lowering the rate of death from heart disease.
Now, here's the changes in consumption of various food groupings from 1910 to some point in the recent past, like a few years ago.
Now, in what order would you assign most likely cause, A - H? I'll give you the actual food groups in a post tomorrow, as well as references.
One of the things I'll discuss often is getting off the "mealtime" bandwagon. Why would you want to eat when you're not hungry? Some days, I'll eat five or eight "meals" a day. Others, one or two. Some days, none at all. Today at 11am, I suddenly realized I was hungry. So I ate. Imagine that.
A simple five strips of bacon (uncured, organic, from Whole Foods) and three Jumbo eggs. The cooking oil melting in the pan is one of my favorites: ghee. If you get tired of your butter smoking and browning (when you don't want browned butter), use ghee. It's on about par with lard, but both take a backseat to the greatest cooking oil of all: coconut oil.
But before I get into one of the long digressions for which I'm infamous, let me get to the point. It's about the ghee.
Here's the article from the BBC: "Hidden heart harm of fatty foods"
Ahmed Al Haj is only 48 and looks healthy on the outside, yet this Bangladeshi waiter has ended up on the operating table for a triple heart bypass.
As a Muslim, Ahmed does not smoke or drink, but his diet has been rich in ghee, the clarified butter in which many south Asian dishes are drenched.
Instead of a healthy pink muscle, his heart looks like a pulsating lump of lard after a lifetime of eating too much saturated fat.
The layer of fat encasing Mr Haj's heart was so thick the surgeons doing his triple bypass could not see his coronary arteries.
Surgeon Shyam Kolvekar from The Heart Hospital at University College London, who performed Mr Haj's triple bypass, said cases like this were increasingly common and highlighted the dangers of eating too much saturated fat.
Where do I begin? How about with a refresher in epistemology? Anyone recall a priori from logic class? Or, if you're a practitioner of religion, you could file this under the "what, is god stupid?" category. If neither, then, is nature malevolent? Did we survive 3 millionish years of evolution with a deadly pitfall around every enticing corner? To wit: eggs whites are healthy. Egg yolks'll kill you! "God" must be crazy.
In short and simple, a priori simply means obvious, tautological. But there's a catch. Everything isn't that simple. And when you attempt to make it so when it's not, you make big mistakes. Example: primitive man looked up at the sun, moon and stars and made an a priori conclusion. Obviously, all these lights in the sky are revolving around us.
That view persisted for not only hundreds of thousands of years of primitive reason, but even for the fist 9,000 years of our 10,000 years of civilization, counting from the advent of agriculture and nation-statism.
Poor Ahmed's heart is fat (not meant sarcastically). Ahmed eats fat. So eating fat causes heart disease.
I'm not going to belabor this, because it's just absurd on its face, and besides, we'll talk a lot about this over time. Dietary fat typically does not get stored as fat. Dietary sugar does. Carbohydrate drives insulin drives fat storage. Learn it.
And notice this most particularly in this article. There is no effort whatsoever to even question or suggest the existence of any other variables in Ahmed's life. He eats fat. Case closed. How much sugar and other carbohydrate does Ahmed consume? Blank out.
I'll tell you this, though. If I was a big consumer of sugar and other processed foods and carbs, like wheat flour products, I'd watch fat too (all the while I'm getting fatter and fatter). If you're both high carb and high fat, you'll probably get atherosclerosis. The problem isn't the fat, it's the sugar, but in that macronutrient environment, the problem is probably exacerbated by the fat because of its energy density, so even more glucose is going to be sequestered in fat cells.
Later: Well, I've been on such a tear this morning (hey, as my cousin just emailed: "you're an animal") that I didn't even finish the article. Low and behold, near the end:
The footage, taken at The Heart Hospital a few weeks ago, has been released with Mr Haj's permission to highlight the hidden danger done by fried snacks, pastries and buttery foods.
Need I say more? Except: what kind of "buttery foods?"
More later: I was remiss in not thanking both Elliot and Chris for emailing that BBC article.
Since blowing my top the other day, I've waited until a few of the excellent reviewers out there had a shot at the recent diet study. I'll point you to three excellent, substantive, thorough reviews. Otherwise, you'd have only fat-faced liars like Tara Parker-Pope of the NYT.
First up: Stephan at Whole Health Source, who notes that the diet, indeed as I suspected and speculated, wasn't particularly low in carbs. Also:
And finally, it caused the biggest improvement in the triglyceride:HDL ratio. This ratio is the best blood lipid predictor of heart disease risk I’m aware of in modern Western populations. The lower, the better. They didn't calculate it in the study so I had to do it myself.
Click over to see the chart he created; and:
Other interesting findings: despite the calorie restriction, diabetic participants on the AHA group actually saw a significant increase in fasting blood glucose.
I've speculated before that wheat and sugar may cause hyperphagy, or excessive eating. We can see from these results that reducing carbohydrate (and probably wheat) reduces overall caloric intake quite significantly. This squares with the findings of the recent Chinese study that showed an increase in calorie intake and weight, correlating with the replacement of rice with wheat as the primary carbohydrate. It also squares with diet trends in the US, where wheat consumption has risen alongside calorie intake and weight.
If he's right about the hyperphagy, and I suspect he is, that's the resolution to the calories in/out vs. "good calories bad calories" debate: i.e., it's both.
Next up, Regina Wilshire at Weight of the Evidence. She also notes the absolutely devastating result that the diet diabetics are being put on actually raised fasting glucose levels. Here's how she puts it:
This is critically important to note - the low-fat group experienced a rise in fasting blood glucose over the course of the two years; this despite a greater calorie deficit than the other two diets, and a greater increase in physical activity! Yet, this type of diet is exactly how the ADA recommends people at risk for or diagnosed with diabetes eat, while expecting ever increasing doses of medication to cover their progressive decline in glycemic control.
She extracted a very nice graph comparing the lipid panels of the three diets. Click over to take a look.
Then the good Doctor, Michael Eades of Protein Power takes a stab. Of course, he notes that it's not even a low-carb diet, but one of moderate intake. Low carb is <60 grams per day. He speculates as to why they still came out on top.
Despite the instruction to increase carbs to 120 grams per day, I believe these subjects had a long-term benefit from the two months of rigid low-carb dieting (20 grams per day) with which they started the study. Why do I believe that? There is a terrific study in Nutrition & Metabolism showing that subjects with diabetes who underwent a strictly supervised low-carb diet for six months, and who lost weight, improved blood sugar control and lipid parameters, were still showing the positive effects of this intervention 44 months later. These impressive findings seem to indicate that there is some sort of rejuvenation that takes place in people after they have spent a period of time on an honest-to-God low-carb diet that carries over for several years. Maybe this is the phenomenon we’re seeing in the subjects in this NEJM study. The two months of rigid low-carb carries over for the rest of the study despite the subjects cranking their carbs up to non-low-carb levels.
He ridicules that lying fuckwad Dean Ornish in the comments and links to a past blog post of his that exposes just what a liar Dean Ornish is.
From my brother this morning in email, what a shocker! And, i'll bet it wasn't even a real low-carb diet (<60 grams/day). I've seen stuff well in excess of 100 or even 150 grams being called "low carb." For many, real effectiveness is under 30, or even 20 grams per day. There's more of the asinine and bias, too.
The low-carb diet set limits for carbohydrates, but none for calories or fat. It urged dieters to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein.
"So not a lot of butter and eggs and cream," said Madelyn Fernstrom, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center weight management expert who reviewed the study but was not involved in it.
Dumb-ass fucks. Jesus. And even still...
Average weight loss for those in the low-carb group was 10.3 pounds after two years. Those in the Mediterranean diet lost 10 pounds, and those on the low-fat regimen dropped 6.5.
More surprising were the measures of cholesterol. Critics have long acknowledged that an Atkins-style diet could help people lose weight but feared that over the long term, it may drive up cholesterol because it allows more fat.
But the low-carb approach seemed to trigger the most improvement in several cholesterol measures, including the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL, the "good" cholesterol. For example, someone with total cholesterol of 200 and an HDL of 50 would have a ratio of 4 to 1. The optimum ratio is 3.5 to 1, according to the American Heart Association.
Now, observe. And do follow the links to the sorts of things I eat all the time. You know what my midnight snack was, last night? Eight strips of thick bacon, dripping in the fat it was cooked in (I never drain the fat, or put my bacon on a paper towel -- right from fry pan to plate, dripping). I guarantee I have a better lipid panel than 99.999999999999% of any low-fatters, vegetarians, or vegans. Hey, Dean Ornish, you self-serving pudge face: how about compare my lipids to any of your unfortunate patients. Huh? C'mon. 3.5 to 1 Total to HDL and lower as ideal? How about 2 to 1? My HDL is higher than my LDL (.98 to 1 LDL/HDL). And I eat bacon, at least 6-10 eggs per day (jumbos), cooked in butter or ghee; ribeye steaks, cheese, and all manner of fatty animal products cooked in animal fats. This is what happens when you're not a biased whore for grant money (and, really, criminally negligent, in my opinion).
You know what? Gloves are officially off. Let the others be "objective." I'm going to be calling these people lots of names. I'm going to do that a lot. It'll be fun. You'll see.
The far more polite Regina Wilshire has links to a bunch or articles about this study.
As usual, Stephan the biologist delivers. Takes apart the biases in the study and all. Of course, the biases were incorporated in order to explain away the fact that one of the healthiest diets ever observed is one high in saturated fat and animal flesh, to the exclusion of much of everything else.
Let me sum it up: the heavy smoking Masai, who eat almost nothing but raw cow's milk, raw cow's blood, and meat, are healthier -- far healthier in every marker -- than you, Mr. and Ms. low-fat America.
Later: Just thought of something. Look at the picture on the link to Stephan's blog. Notice anything? How about that nice set of white sparklers in the one tribesman. This reminded me of a Discovery episode the other night I surfed into. It was covering some deeply indigenous population way far from any civilization in Papua New Guinea. I forget the name of the peoples, and they do live in squalor (I'd eat white flour and sugar first), but they looked remarkably healthy. They subsist on tadpoles, frogs, sweet potatoes, and tobacco they grow and dry themselves. The men were all lean, with nice pecs, shoulder decks, and defined triceps. Guess what else? White sparklers all. No missing teeth, and their gums looked quite healthy as well.
I think I touched on this earlier, but Michael Eades has a good one about how you simply cannot trust the media to accurately report the findings from diet studies. It's bad enough that so many of the studies are flawed with selection bias, but even when a study is honesty done and its finding sound, you can't get honest reporting on it.
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