Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky winner... Cheesecake Factory carrot cake!!Read more...

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Is Meat Unhealthy? Part V

In this post, I'll examine the possible relationship between meat intake and type 2 diabetes.  Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, and it is strongly linked to lifestyle factors.Non-industrial culturesNon-industrial cultures have an extremely low prevalence of diabetes, whether they are near-vegan or near-carnivorous.  This is supported by blood glucose measurements in a variety of cultures, from the sweet potato farmers of the New Guinea highlands to the arctic Inuit hunters.  Here is what Otto Schaefer, director of the Northern Medical Research Unit at Charles Camsell hospital in Edmonton, Canada, had to say about the Inuit in the excellent book Western Diseases (Trowell and Burkitt, 1981):Read more...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... Pumpkin pie!!Read more...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... Pizza Hut Doritos Crunchy Crust Pizza!Read more...

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Is Meat Unhealthy? Part IV

In this post, I'll address the question: does eating meat contribute to weight gain?Non-industrial culturesI'll get right to the point: humans living in a non-industrialized setting tend to be lean, regardless of how much meat they eat.  This applies equally to hunter-gatherers, herders, and farmers.One of the leanest populations I've encountered in my reading is the 1960s Papua New Guinea highland farmers of Tukisenta.  They ate a nearly vegan diet composed almost exclusively of sweet...

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Recent Interviews

For those who don't follow my Twitter account (@whsource), here are links to my two most recent interviews.Smash the Fat with Sam Feltham.  We discuss the eternally controversial question, "is a calorie a calorie"?  Like many other advocates of the low-carbohydrate diet, Feltham believes that the metabolic effects of food (particularly on insulin), rather than calorie intake per se, are the primary determinants of body fatness.  I explain the perspective that my field of research has provided on this question.  We also discussed why some lean people become diabetic.  Feltham was a gracious host.Nourish, Balance, Thrive with Christopher Kelly.  Kelly is also an advocate of the low-carbohydrate diet for fat...

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Is Meat Unhealthy? Part II

Over time, animals adapt to the foods they regularly consume.  This is how archaeologists can, for example, determine that Triceratops was an herbivore and Tyrannosaurus was a carnivore just by looking at the structure of the skeleton.  Adaptations to diet extend beyond skeletal structure, into digestion, metabolism, the brain, musculature, and other aspects of physical function.  What is our evolutionary history with meat?Human Evolutionary History with Meat: 200 to 2.6 Million Years AgoMammals evolved from ancestral "mammal-like reptiles" (therapsids, then cynodonts) approximately 220 million years ago (Richard Klein. The Human Career. 2009).  Roughly 100 million years ago, placental mammals emerged.  The...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... the pumpkin spice latte!!Read more...

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Is Meat Unhealthy? Part I

IntroductionAt Dr. McDougall's Advanced Study Weekend, I had the opportunity to hear a number of researchers and advocates make the case for a "plant-based diet", which is a diet containing little or no animal foods.  Many of them voiced the opinion that animal foods contribute substantially to the primary killers in the US, such as heart disease and cancer.  Some of the evidence they presented was provocative and compelling, so it stimulated me to take a deeper look and come to my own conclusions. No matter what the health implications of meat eating turn out to be, I respect vegetarians and vegans.  Most of them are conscientious, responsible people who make daily personal sacrifices to try to make the world a better place...

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Obesity → Diabetes

A new study adds to the evidence that the prevalence of type 2 diabetes is rapidly increasing in the US, and our national weight problem is largely to blame.The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) currently estimates that a jaw-dropping 33 percent of US men, and 39 percent of US women, will develop diabetes at some point in their lives (1).  Roughly one out of three people in this country will develop diabetes, and those who don't manage it effectively will suffer debilitating health consequences.  Has the risk of developing diabetes always been so high, and if not, why is it increasing?In the same issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine as the low-carb vs. low-fat study, appears another study that aims to partially address this question...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... profiteroles!!Read more...

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Metabolic Effects of a Traditional Asian High-carbohydrate Diet

A recent study supports the notion that an 'ancestral diet' focused around high-starch agricultural foods can cultivate leanness and metabolic health.John McDougall gave Christopher Gardner a hard time at the McDougall Advanced Study Weekend.  Dr. Gardner conducts high-profile randomized controlled trials (RCTs) at Stanford to compare the effectiveness of a variety of diets for weight loss, cardiovascular and metabolic health.  The "A to Z Study", in which Atkins, Zone, Ornish, and LEARN diets were pitted against one another for one year, is one of his best-known trials (1). Dr. McDougall asked a simple question: why haven't these trials evaluated the diet that has sustained the large majority of the world's population for the last...

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Help Advance Diabetes Research

A University of Virginia researcher named Hannah Menefee contacted me recently to ask for our help.  She and her colleagues are conducting a study on how people with type 2 diabetes use Facebook to manage their health, and how that technology can be leveraged to support effective health communication. If you have type 2 diabetes, and you'd like to participate in the study, please join their Diabetes Management Study Facebook group.  There, you'll receive more information about the study, you'll receive a short survey, and you may be invited into one of the study phase...

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Food Reward Friday

Today's lucky "winner"... waffles!!!Read more...

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My AHS14 Talk on Leptin Resistance is Posted

The Ancestral Health Society just posted a video of my recent talk "What Causes Leptin Resistance?"  Follow the link below to access it.  Enjoy!What Causes Leptin Resistanc...

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Thoughts on the McDougall Advanced Study Weekend

For those of you who aren't familiar with him, Dr. John McDougall is a doctor and diet/health advocate who recommends a very low fat, high starch, whole food vegan diet to control weight and avoid chronic disease.  He's been at it for a long time, and he's a major figure in the "plant-based diet" community (i.e., a diet including little or no animal foods).Dr. McDougall invited me to participate in his 3-day Advanced Study Weekend retreat in Santa Rosa, CA.  My job was to give my talk on insulin and obesity, and participate in a panel discussion/debate with Dr. McDougall in which we sorted through issues related to low-carb, Paleo, and the health implications of eating animal foods.  I was glad to receive the invitation, because...

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What about the Other Weight Loss Diet Study??

The same day the low-fat vs low-carb study by Bazzano and colleagues was published, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a meta-analysis that compared the effectiveness of "named diet programs".  Many people have interpreted this study as demonstrating that low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets are both effective for weight loss, and that we simply need to pick a diet and stick with it, but that's not really what the study showed.  Let's take a closer look.Johnston and colleagues sifted through PubMed for studies that evaluated "named diet programs", such as Ornish, Atkins, LEARN, Weight Watchers, etc (1).  In addition, the methods state that they included any study as low-carbohydrate that recommended less...

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Low-carbohydrate vs. Low-fat diets for Weight Loss: New Evidence

A new high-profile study compared the weight loss and cardiovascular effects of a low-carbohydrate diet vs. a low-fat diet.  Although many studies have done this before, this one is novel enough to add to our current understanding of diet and health.  Unlike most other studies of this nature, diet adherence was fairly good, and carbohydrate restriction produced greater weight loss and cardiovascular risk factor improvements than fat restriction at the one-year mark.  Yet like previous studies, neither diet produced very impressive results.The StudyLydia A. Bazzano and colleagues at Tulane University randomly assigned 148 obese men and women without cardiovascular disease into two groups (1):Received instructions to eat less...

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Science of Nutrition Podcast

I recently did an interview with Seth Yoder, who has a master's degree in nutrition science and writes the blog The Science of Nutrition.  Seth caught my attention recently with his withering review of The Big Fat Surprise, the latest book to claim that ideological/incompetent scientists and public policy makers got the science of nutrition backward and we should all be eating low-carb, high-fat, high-meat diets.  I was impressed by how deeply Seth dug into the reference list, and how well he picked up on subtle but troubling misrepresentations of the evidence. Last week, Seth and I got together at a local brewpub to do an interview.  We were joined by Carrie Dennett, an MPH/RDN who has a nutrition blog and writes for the...

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Can Hypothalamic Inflammation and Leptin Resistance be Reversed?

A new study by yours truly begins to address the key question: can hypothalamic inflammation and leptin resistance be reversed?Leptin is the primary hormonal regulator of body fatness in the human body (1).  Secreted by fat tissue, it acts in many places in the body, but its most important effects on body weight occur via the brain, and particularly a brain region called the hypothalamus.  The hypothalamus is responsible for keeping certain physiological variables within the optimal range, including blood pressure, body temperature, and body fatness. In obesity, the brain loses its sensitivity to leptin, and this causes the body to begin 'defending' a higher level of body fatness, analogous to how a person with a fever 'defends'...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"...  Cheesecake Factory Bruleed French Toast!Read more...

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Help Fund High-Quality Research on Diet and Health

University of California, San Francisco researcher Dr. Ashley Mason has asked me to spread the word about a diet-health study she's preparing to conduct in collaboration with Dr. Lynda Frassetto.  Dr. Frassetto is a widely recognized expert on mineral metabolism and bone health, and also one of the few researchers who has managed to wrangle funding to study the health impacts of a Paleolithic-style diet.  Her findings have been quite provocative.  Together with their collaborators, Drs. Mason and Frassetto are preparing another diet-health trial to study the impact of two different diets on polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS.  PCOS is a common hormonal disorder among reproductive-age women, and its signs and symptoms include...

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Fat and Carbohydrate: Clarifications and Details

The last two posts on fat and carbohydrate were written to answer a few important, but relatively narrow, questions that I feel are particularly pertinent at the moment:Was the US obesity epidemic caused by an increase in calorie intake?Could it have been caused by an increase in carbohydrate intake, independent of the increase in calorie intake?Does an unrestricted high-carbohydrate diet lead to a higher calorie intake and body fatness than an unrestricted high-fat diet, or vice versa?Could the US government's advice to eat a low-fat diet have caused the obesity epidemic by causing a dietary shift toward carbohydrate?However, those posts left a few loose ends that I'd like to tie up in this post.  Here, I'll lay out my opinions on the...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... kettle corn!Read more...

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Has Obesity Research Failed?

I frequently encounter the argument that obesity research has failed because it hasn't stopped the global increase in obesity rates.  According to this argument, we need to re-think our approach to obesity research because the current approach just isn't working. Grant funding for obesity research keeps increasing in the US, and the prevalence of obesity also keeps increasing*.  What gives?  Maybe if we just scrapped the whole endeavor we'd be better off. Let's take a closer look at this argument and see how it holds up.Why Do Research?There are two fundamental reasons why we do research:To gather accurate information about the natural world.  This information is intrinsically valuable because we like knowing how the world...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... Lay's milk chocolate-dipped potato chips!!Read more...

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A New Understanding of an Old "Obesity Gene"

As you know if you've been following this blog for a while, obesity risk has a strong genetic component.  Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) attempt to identify the specific locations of genetic differences (single-nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs) that are associated with a particular trait.  In the case of obesity, GWAS studies have had limited success in identifying obesity-associated genes.  However, one cluster of SNPs consistently show up at the top of the list in these...

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Fat vs. Carbohydrate Overeating: Which Causes More Fat Gain?

Two human studies, published in 1995 and 2000, tested the effect of carbohydrate vs. fat overfeeding on body fat gain in humans.  What did they find, and why is it important?We know that daily calorie intake has increased the US, in parallel with the dramatic increase in body fatness.  These excess calories appear to have come from fat, carbohydrate, and protein all at the same time (although carbohydrate increased the most).  Since the increase in calories, carbohydrate, fat, and protein all happened at the same time, how do we know that the obesity epidemic was due to increased calorie intake and not just increased carbohydrate or fat intake?  If our calorie intake had increased solely by the addition of carbohydrate...

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Garden Update: A Banner Year

Things are warming up here in Seattle and the flowers are blooming.  I just planted my first crops of the year-- potatoes and strawberries. 2013 was a banner year for my 500-square-foot urban vegetable garden, including my first experience growing and processing a grain.  I never got around to posting about it last year-- so here it is.Interbay mulch techniqueThe bed on the right has been mulched with leaves, spent coffee grounds, and burlap sacks ($1/sack at the local hardware store)....

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More Graphs of Calorie Intake vs. BMI

In the last post, a reader commented that the correlation would be more convincing if I graphed calories vs. average BMI rather than the prevalence of obesity.  It was a valid point, so I went searching for average BMI values from NHANES surveys.  I dug up a CDC document that contains data from surveys between 1960 and 2002 (1).  Because these data only cover five survey periods, we only get five data points to analyze, as opposed to the eight used in the last post.  The document...

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Calorie Intake and the US Obesity Epidemic

Between 1960 and 2008, the prevalence of obesity in US adults increased from 13 to 34 percent, and the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from 0.9 to 6 percent (NHANES surveys).  This major shift in population fatness is called the "obesity epidemic". What caused the obesity epidemic?  As I've noted in my writing and talks, the obesity epidemic was paralleled by an increase in daily calorie intake that was sufficiently large to fully account for it.  There are two main sources...

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Uncovering the True Health Costs of Excess Weight

Is excess weight hazardous to health, or can it actually be protective?  This question has provoked intense debate in the academic community, in some cases even leading researchers to angrily denounce the work of others (1).  There is good evidence to suggest that excess body fat increases the risk of specific diseases, including many of our major killers: diabetes, heart attack, stroke, heart failure, cancer, and kidney failure (2).  Yet strangely, the studies relating excess weight to the total risk of dying-- an overall measure of health that's hard to argue with-- are inconsistent.  Why?Read more...

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New Position with Nestlé

Warning -- Satire -- April Fool's PostI'm happy to announce that I've accepted a Product Research and Development position with Nestlé Foods.  Nestlé is known for its skillful application of 'neuromarketing'-- using neuroscience to enhance product development and sales-- and the company recruited me for my background in neuroscience and food reward.As Whole Health Source readers know well, food reward has a major impact on food selection and consumption, and therefore it has huge potential as a product development strategy.  Although product development by the food industry has always relied to some extent on a basic understanding of food reward, corporations still lag far behind the cutting edge of food reward research, and they...

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Corrections to the New Review Paper on Dietary Fat and Cardiovascular Risk

The meta-analysis by Chowdhury et al. raised quite a furor from certain segments of researchers and the popular media.  I find this reaction interesting.  I usually write about obesity, which is a topic of great interest to people, but my post about the review paper received more than twice my usual traffic.  People whose findings or opinions are questioned by the paper are aggressively denouncing it in the media, even calling for retraction (1).  This resembles what happens every time a high-profile review paper is published that doesn't support the conventional stance on fatty acids and health (e.g., Siri-Tarino et al. [2], which despite much gnashing of teeth is still standing*).  I'm not sure why this issue in...

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Book Review: Your Personal Paleo Code

Chris Kresser has been a major figure in the ancestral health community for some time now.  It's funny to recall that I was actually one of his first readers, back in the early days of his blog when it was called The Healthy Skeptic and the audience was small.  Chris's readership rapidly eclipsed mine, and now he's in high demand for his ability to convey ideas clearly and offer practical solutions to important health concerns. He recently published a book titled Your Personal Paleo Code, which also happens to be a New York Times bestseller.  The primary goal of the book is to help you develop a diet and lifestyle that support health and well-being by starting from a generally healthy template and personalizing it to your needs....

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"...  the Taco Bell waffle taco!!Read more...

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The Ultimate Detox: Your Kidneys

The specter of unseen, unspecified toxins eroding our health is worth many millions of dollars in the United States and abroad.  Companies offer "detox" supplements, beverages, and creams that supposedly rid us of supposed toxins, despite a complete lack of evidence that these products do anything at all*.  This comes from an industry that excels at creating boogeymen and offering costly solutions for them.If your wallet needs to lose weight, then these products are...

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Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"...  Kirkland Signature Cashew Clusters!!  WHS reader Brad Dieter mentioned these on Facebook the other day:Nutrition tip of the day. Do not buy Cashew Clusters from Costco. You will eat an entire bag in one fell swoop. Sweet, salty, crunchy, and calorie dense, the perfect storm in Stephan Guyenet's model of overeating. I have n=1 data as proof.n=1 quickly turned into n=6 as other people chimed in, including myself.  I can attest to the fact that Cashew...

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Snacktime in My Kitchen

Here is a photo of all visible food in my kitchen:  Along the back wall, we have glass containers of raw nuts, unsalted roasted nuts, grains, and legumes.  It's easy and attractive to organize your dry foods using inexpensive 2 quart Ball jars.  They also have the advantage of being moth-proof.  On the left, we have fresh fruit and a few onions.  On the far left in the background is our hand-cranked conical burr grinder, for occasional coffee (Skerton). If...

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Mindless Eating

You think you're in control of your eating behavior-- but you aren'tIn 2005, Brian Wansink's research group published a remarkable study that demonstrates the powerful unconscious influence of the food environment on our consumption (1).  Volunteers were invited to a test kitchen to eat bowls of tomato soup for lunch.  Each person was given a bowl containing 18 ounces of soup-- but there was a catch.  Half the volunteers were given custom-made soup bowls that partially refilled as they ate, such that the soup level dropped more slowly.Read more...

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5 Easy and Effective Ways to Eat Less

Why do we overeat?  Why is it hard to lose fat once we've gained it?  Is there a way to comfortably and sustainably eat less and lose fat?  I recently did an interview with Armi Legge of Evidence Magazine that gives an overview of my thinking on these topics-- based on a large and compelling body of research that rarely reaches popular media sources in useful form.   At the end of the interview, Armi asks me to list my top five tips for reducing calorie intake.  Enjoy! 5 Easy and Effective Ways to Eat Less &nbs...

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Mysteries of Energy Balance and Weight Loss

How to Lose Weight EffortlesslyYou've probably seen this claim many times: a pound of fat contains 3,500 kilocalories (kcal).  A slice of toast is 80 kcal.  All you have to do is forego one slice of toast per day-- just a few percent of your total calorie intake-- and you will lose 8.3 lbs of fat per year.  Fat loss is so easy!This reasoning is extremely common both in the popular media and among researchers.  Here's an example from the book Mindless Eating, by researcher Brian Wansink:...the difference between 1,900 and 2,000 calories is one we cannot detect, nor can we detect the difference between 2,000 and 2,100 calories.  But over the course of a year, this mindless margin would either cause us to lose ten...

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NutriScience Seminar in Lisbon with Lindeberg, Fontes, and Bastos

My friend Pedro Bastos has asked me to spread the word about a seminar he's organizing in Lisbon titled "Evidence and Evolution-based Nutrition".  It will include Staffan Lindeberg, Maelan Fontes, and Pedro Bastos-- three quality researchers in the area of evolutionary health-- I'm sure it will be interesting.  Here's the flier: &nbs...

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Public Talk at the University of Virginia on Friday, January 17

This Friday, I'll be giving an invited lecture at the University of Virginia, my undergraduate alma mater.  I was kindly invited by a medical student named Robert Abbott, and it worked out well because I was already traveling to Charlottesville. The talk will be titled "Why Do We Overeat?  A Neurobiological Perspective".  Here's the teaser:Obesity is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in industrialized nations, yet this is a relatively recent phenomenon.  In the...

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Free e-Book and Ideal Weight Program 2.0 Announcement

I'm happy to announce that we're releasing a free e-book titled Why do We Gain Fat, and How do We Lose it? An Introduction to the Science of Body Fat, by Dan Pardi and myself. This is a slimmed-down version of the longer, fully referenced e-book we offer as part of the Ideal Weight Program. In it, we provide a succinct overview of the science of body fat gain and loss, and the evidence base for our program.  It also contains a schematic that ties together the various concepts in visual form....

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