The most slimming tortillas in the world

It's no secret that I'm an avid food gardener.  In the last two years, I've moved from exclusively growing vegetables to growing large quantities of staple calorie crops, such as potatoes, flour corn, and long-storing winter squash. Why do I put so much effort into growing my own food, when I could buy it easily and cheaply at the grocery store?  There are a few reasons.  First and foremost, I enjoy it.  Second, it allows me to grow the healthiest and best-tasting ingredients...

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The Hungry Brain: Book Update

In January of this year, I handed in a complete manuscript draft of my first book, The Hungry Brain, to my editor at Flatiron Books.  This book represents more than two full-time years of my life, and I can't wait for it to hit shelves.  It's markedly different from any other book in its category, and believe it has the potential to substantially change the public conversation on eating behavior and obesity. In the process of writing The Hungry Brain, I read countless papers and interviewed 36 leading researchers in the fields of neuroscience, obesity research, and anthropology.  I had my brain scanned in an fMRI machine while looking at junk food.  I commissioned and compiled 47 illustrations, schematics, and graphs,...

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NuSI-funded Study Serves Up Disappointment for the Carbohydrate-insulin Hypothesis of Obesity

A new metabolic ward study tests the idea that lowering insulin via severe carbohydrate restriction increases metabolic rate and accelerates fat loss, independently of calorie intake.  Although carbohydrate restriction did modestly increase metabolic rate, it actually slowed fat loss.  One of the details that sets this study apart from previous studies is that it was funded by the Nutrition Science Initiative, an organization that was founded specifically to test the insulin hypothesis of obesity and related concepts.Read more...

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Two huge new studies further undermine the "obesity paradox"

The "obesity paradox" is the observation that people with higher fat mass sometimes have better health outcomes than lean people, including a lower overall risk of death.  Evidence has been steadily mounting that this finding may be a misleading artifact of the methods used to observe it.  Two massive new studies add to this evidence.Read more...

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A Serious Challenge to the 2012 Low-carbohydrate "Metabolic Advantage" Study

Warning: this post will be a bit more wonkish than usual, because I need to get detailed to make my points.  To read a summary, skip to the end.In 2012, David Ludwig's group published an interesting RCT that suggested a substantial "metabolic advantage" resulting from a high-protein, very-low-carbohydrate diet (VLC) (1).  In other words, this diet led to a higher energy expenditure relative to a normal-protein, low-fat diet (LF) over a one month period (a low-glycemic-load, normal-protein diet was in the middle and not significantly different from the other two).  Resting energy expenditure (REE) was slightly but significantly higher on the VLC diet, and total energy expenditure (TEE) was elevated by a whopping 300+ kcal/day!...

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Why some dogs (and humans) are born hungry

The brain is the central regulator of appetite and body fatness, and genetic variation that affects body fatness tends to act in the brain.  One important site of variation is the POMC gene, which codes for a signaling molecule that suppresses food intake.  A new study shows that Labrador retrievers often carry an inactive version of the POMC gene, causing them to be highly food motivated, obesity-prone-- and perhaps more easily trainable. Read more...

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My Recent Paper on Linoleic Acid in Adipose Tissue

Linoleic acid (LA) is the predominant polyunsaturated fat in the human diet, and it's most concentrated in seed oils such as corn oil.  LA accumulates in fat tissue, and as with many of the nutrients we eat, it is biologically active.  In a new paper, we systematically review the studies that have measured the LA concentration of fat tissue in US adults over time.  We show that the LA concentration of fat tissue has increased by approximately 136 percent over the last half century.Susan...

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Invincible Coffee: The Next Evolution of Joe

Warning -- Satire -- old April Fools post!You've heard of Bulletproof Coffee, that mixture of coffee and butter that keeps you lean and supercharges your mental focus.The problem with Bulletproof Coffee is that the butter forms a greasy oil slick on top of your coffee.  Yuck!  Is there any way to rescue Bulletproof Coffee? Enter Invincible Coffee, the next evolution of Joe.Read more...

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Can Salt Increase Calorie Intake?

The debate rages on over whether dietary salt (NaCl) increases the risk of cardiovascular events, with no clear answer in sight.  Yet few people are paying attention to another, more insidious effect of salt: it may increase our calorie intake, and eventually, the size of our waistlines.IntroductionHumans are born with specific hard-wired food motivations, which guide us to food properties that kept our ancestors alive and fertile in times past.  We have an instinctive attraction to sweetness because, in the world of our ancestors, it indicated ripe fruit or honey-- both important sources of calories and other nutrients.  Most of the other food properties we're instinctively drawn to, such as starch, fat, and glutamate, signify...

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A Free Issue of Examine.com Research Digest

Examine.com is a website that provides unbiased information on supplements and nutrition.  They publish the Examine.com Research Digest (ERD), which reviews the latest studies in these areas.  I like ERD because it does a nice job of curating recent science, making it understandable and engaging for a broad audience, and explaining important background information.  They have no conflicts of interest because they don't sell anything except information.  I've been a scientific reviewer for ERD since the beginning.Examine.com is celebrating its fifth anniversary today.  To celebrate, they offered to put together a custom issue of ERD using five of my favorite articles.  I chose articles I thought my audience would...

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What I Eat

People often ask me what I eat.  I've been reluctant to share, because it feels egocentric and I'm a private person by nature.  I also don't want people to view my diet as a universal prescription for others.  But in the end, as someone who shares my opinions about nutrition, it's only fair that I answer the question.  So here we go.In my food choices, I try to strike a balance between nutrition, cost, time efficiency, animal welfare, pleasure, and environmental impact.  I'm...

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Is the "Obesity Paradox" an Illusion?

Over the last two decades, multiple independent research groups have come to the surprising conclusion that people with obesity (or, more commonly, overweight) might actually be healthier than lean people in certain ways.  This finding is called the "obesity paradox".  Yet recent research using more rigorous methods is suggesting that the paradox is an illusion-- and excess body fat may be even more harmful to health than we thought.Introduction.  What is the obesity paradox, and why does it matter?Read more...

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Testing the Insulin Model: A Response to Dr. Ludwig

Dr. David Ludwig, MD, recently published a response to my critique of the carbohydrate-insulin-obesity hypothesis.  This is good because he defends the idea in more detail than I've encountered in other written works.  In fact, his piece is the most scientifically persuasive defense of the idea I can recall. Before we dig in, I want to emphasize that this is science, not tribal warfare.  The goal is to arrive at the best answer, rather than to win an argument.  I'm proceeding in good faith, based on my belief that Ludwig and I are both serious people who care about science and human health, and I hope my audience will do the same.  That said, let's get to it.Read more...

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Always Hungry? It's Probably Not Your Insulin.

David Ludwig, MD, recently published a new book titled Always Hungry? Conquer cravings, retrain your fat cells, and lose weight permanently.  The book is getting widespread media coverage.  Ludwig is a professor of pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School and a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.  He's a pediatric endocrinologist, but his primary focus is research, particularly the impact of nutrition on hunger, calorie expenditure, and body weight.  Although I sometimes disagree with how he interprets evidence, he has made significant and useful contributions to the scientific literature in these areas, and I also support his efforts to find policy solutions to curb the intake of sweetened beverages...

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How Much do You Know About Your Own Brain?

We tend to believe we're aware of what's happening in our own brains, and also in conscious control of our behavior.  But a growing body of neuroscience and psychology research demonstrates that most of what happens inside the brain-- including the processes that cause us to select and execute behaviors-- is beyond our conscious awareness.  This has important implications for our eating behavior, body weight, and health, as I explore in my upcoming book The Hungry Brain.Let me give you a straightforward example that illustrates how little of our brain's activity we're aware of.  It focuses on information processing by the visual system, which is one of the best-understood systems of the brain.  I drew the basic facts of...

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