OT:Good Calories, Bad Calories....

Absolutely. That's basically what Tom Naughton was saying. Even the foods labeled low-carb, or low glycemic index affect different people differently.
Jimmy Moore, once morbidly obese and now a vocal low-carb aficianado, chronicled his experience with a low-carb bread. The manufacturer was not amused . . .

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/jimm ... eads/10900

jnk wrote:

. . . For reasons of taste, upbringing, genetics, and other factors, the individual response to diets varies tremendously. Experiment. See what works for you. And by all means, get some exercise, too."-- http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updat ... 904c.shtml

That, right there, pretty much sums up my approach to nutrition. Pay attention to your own body, which is different from anybody else's body, listen to the signals it gives when you eat something and stop eating the things that don't work for you, move in whatever ways you can, and go from there.

http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/sympt ... mptoms.htm

Interesting read on Celiac disease. I was tested for this but it came back negitive. But I wonder about gluten sensitivity and the correlation to blood sugar levels if any.

http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/glute ... tivity.htm

Some people report being absolutely unable to shed excess pounds, no matter how much they diet and exercise. this statement caught my eye under the section here.

http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/sympt ... mptoms.htm.

hades161 wrote:Makes me wonder if we all shouldn't get a glucose tester and check it after we eat something to chart how each item we eat effect's our individual blood sugar levels.

That's what I did...and I gradually kept eliminating things from my diet. It was very revealing.

Weezy

hades161 wrote:http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/sympt ... mptoms.htm

Interesting read on Celiac disease. I was tested for this but it came back negitive. But I wonder about gluten sensitivity and the correlation to blood sugar levels if any.

http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/glute ... tivity.htm

Some people report being absolutely unable to shed excess pounds, no matter how much they diet and exercise. this statement caught my eye under the section here.

http://celiacdisease.about.com/od/sympt ... mptoms.htm.

Have you read WHEAT BELLY yet? by William Davis. He says that many people may test negative for celiac but still have wheat/grain sensitivities that cause problems. Best way to test is to eliminate all grains from your diet for several months (I forget the actual number--I think 6 months?) and see how you feel and if there have been any improvements.

I had eliminated wheat but was still eating 100% rye products, but when I eliminated even that, I started feeling better and have had NO more upset stomach feelings at all since I quit grains completely. It also helped with cravings...no grains at all, no cravings.

Weezy

Wheat Belly? no not as yet but I'll be looking into it.

Dr. Davis explains in his book that the real villain that causes celiac disease and a host of other complications is gluten, which is found in wheat, rye, barley, oats, etc. And he backs up his claims with references that are worth looking at. So your switch to rye not helping you is not surprising, or it wouldn't have been unless one hadn't read his book. One of the interesting factors he goes into in detail is that the genetic complexity of modern dwarf wheat is greater than that of the wheat that existed up until about the 1950s. No time now, but there's more. The book is worth reading.

-SWS wrote:

Lizistired wrote:The main reason Taubes sold me in one evening is this incredibly simple point.

We are told that insulin is produced in our bodies to regulate blood sugar.
No, Insulin is produced in our bodies to allow for the storage of excess carbohydrate energy, when it is plentiful as fat so we can survive periods of famine.

That's a pretty attractive hypothesis in my view as well. And that might very well explain why so many people on this message board have had their best results to date using a primal diet.

But I also resonate with the point jnk and Dr. Edlund make. If it were that simple, I think observational and clinical studies would have revealed low-carb/high-fat diets as a clear winner decades ago. Placing self-serving corporations or scientists aside for a minute, there are undoubtedly brilliant, well-intended scientists on both sides of this debate scratching their heads in earnest----wanting the best outcome for human kind.

One of Taubes' interesting points (and he has the refrences to show it) is that the observation were there, before WWII, in European science - German and Austrian, and after the war that science, and many of the Jewish scientists were simply ignored. You have to look at pictures to Europe during after WWII to realize that most of it's cities were bombed -- civilization at it existed till then had more or less disappeard - and that includes science. In one of his recent lectures Taubes tell of asking a coleague of Jean Mayer (a French born scientist) how come Mayer did not reference even one German study in his paper. The response was "Mayer was a member of the French Resistance, and he killed many Germans. He hated the Germans." And I can tell you that that is not a bizzare personal response by Mayer, the atrocities of the Germans in WWII were such that many people could only handle them by attemting to obliterate their memory. Add to that the fact the many of the scientist were Jewish, and were either murdered or became refugees and you can see how a whole lot of science simply disappeared. Unlike rocket scientists - as Taubes notes - researchers into metabolism were not considered crucial to the US's war against communism.

I find Edlund's statements polemical, not scientific.

Nothing is easier in a debate that stating that your own position is complex, and that your oponent's is simplistic.
The finding that environmental issuse impact our eating as shown in short term experiments in a psychology lab does not, in any way, refute the statement that insulin causes excess glucose in our blood to stored as fat in our fat cells. Not does it refute statements about the long term harm caused to the body by excess insulin.

A depressed mood can cause some peopleto eat less, other to eat more. So? How does that bear on the issue? Stress will actually change the way your metabolism works. So?

If Dr. Edlund had really wanted to compare the impact of enviroment vs. metabolism, he should have run the following study:

Group 1: Eat all low carb high fat meals in a red room, for 3 moths
Group 2: Eat all low carb high fat meals in a blue room, for 3 moths
Group 3: Eat all high carb low fat meals in a red room, for 3 moths
Group 4: Eat all high carb low fat meals in a blue room, for 3 moths
Groups 5-8: same as above, but eaten in a normal environment.

Measure them all on a daily basis.

That' is the only way of finding out which is the more potent effect, the enviroment or metabolism or for that matter, the only way of learning more about their interaction.

Here is a hypothesis that hasn't been tested: a month after eating all meals in a red or blue room, both groups will have adapted to the environmental conditions. and will be eating just as much per meal as the control group. On the other hand, the effect of the different diets, a month after the study starts, will be maintained.

A complex issue means you have to do complex thinking about it - and some complex, expensive studies. And what happens when you're doing a complex study? You don't publish its results for a long time. Ever heard of "publish or perish"?

I notice that we still have had no links to long term randomized controled studies showing the beneficial effects of low fat high carb eating, nor to those showing the long term success of behavioral therapy in either weight control, or diabetes control.

Edlund's point, as I read it, is not one of taking a position in the debate about fat vs. carbs vs. protein vs. whatever, since he, like many medical scientists, appears to see the very nature of that debate as being overly simplistic. After all, it is easy for anyone to state a simple fact about the mechanics of metabolism and then to overextend its application to form an unproved HYPOTHESIS about how to apply that in suggesting what MIGHT be a healthy food choice for long term benefits. That was the mistake made in the fat demonization, and it is likely that the same mistake is now being made in carb demonization.

That said, if a certain way of eating makes sense to someone, that is truly wonderful and I wish him or her all the best with that. But that is not the same thing as there being long term proof of the benefits of simply restricting an entire kind of calories for the world's population, as if the other kinds of calories were somehow more nutritional or more beneficial to everyone. It is more complicated than that. And anyone telling people that it is "obvious" and that "science has proven" something when demonizing fats, proteins, or carbs, or whatever, is obvoiusly , according to proven science , overstating the present state of the research, which is all mostly obsevational and all mostly short-term on all sides of the class-of-calories debate.

Meantime, though, if any individual or group find success in being healthier by adjusting their own intake of calories according to some fat/protein/carb/whatever ratio, for whatever reason--more power to them. I wish them all the success in the world--as long as they don't claim that the proof is in for the population as a whole and that any scientist not on their particular ratio-based bandwagon is somehow dishonest, blinded, or stupid. A lot of good scientists consider healthy eating to be much more complicated than prescribing a theoretical fat/carb/protein/whatever energy ratio to the planet as a whole--especially now, after getting burned with earlier fat and cholesterol assumptions.

That's how I read Edlund, anyway. I believe his partial list of confounding factors was meant only to show the complications, not to propose a solution. Although I could be wrong. I often am.

ozij wrote:I find Edlund's statements polemical, not scientific.

I also find rampant polemical thinking on both sides of this issue. I didn't view Dr. Edlund's premise as polemical. I viewed his execution to be as extemporaneous as blogs and articles on either side of this issue. It occurs to me that all of scientific discourse is not purely ranomized, controlled studies. Heuristic and abstract discourse are indispensible prerequisites. Replicated, randomized, controlled studies are the culmination and crown jewel of research in medical science.

ozij wrote: I notice that we still have had no links to long term randomized controled studies showing the beneficial effects of low fat high carb eating, nor to those showing the long term success of behavioral therapy in either weight control, or diabetes control.

Yes, I have noticed that as well.

-SWS wrote: <snip>Enter the USDA recommended food pyramid. It clearly doesn't work for many people. Scientists advocating primal dieting suspect the food pyramid, high on carbohydrates and low on fat, fails the very design/evolution of human metabolism. These objecting scientists in particular think the USDA recommended food pyramid is flat-out wrong. And they might be right.

If the USDA food pyramid is wrong, that alone doesn't make it bad science.<snip>

This may be one reason that the USDA replaced the food pyramid last year with something called My Plate:http://www.choosemyplate.gov/index.html. Although the same criticisms may be valid, going after the food pyramid at this point seems like a straw man argument.

It is an interesting exercise to survey how different governments/cultures use graphic design to portray their dietary recommendations. I'm quite fond of the Japanese variations of the spinning top. I'm not sure the French even have one (it's been a while since I looked).

Since carbohydrate consumption and resultant insulin secretion levels are central to lipid metabolism, I wonder whether it might be useful to have diet recommendations indexed against something like one's response to a glucose tolerance test. High responders should eschew carbs to a greater extent than lower responders. I think the one size fits all diet recommendation misses the people who reside along both tails of the bell curve.

I believe this is the latest pyramid:



Benefits from that pyramid may vary according to genetics, though:

http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/ea ... 4.abstract

Slarty:
It appears he didn't WEIGH the bread.
Those look like HUGE slices.
Filling up on grain-even high fiber grain
Sounds like it would cause a whole lot of pain. (rhyme unintentional)
I'd have the crust off a quarter of one of Subway's nine grain sub rolls -toasted. Yum--I'm full.