Interesting article. The only question I have: Atkins diet exists for some time. If so, then why hasn't it been a wild success? I know it works very well short time, but I also know no diet, including Atkins, managed to do well long term (2+ years). Except fringe cases of people who dedicate half of their life to weight maintenance, specific diets tend to hurt more then help.<p>Also I'd like some specific opinion on rice. It's carb, but I haven't yet seen a fat Japanese.<p>Anyways, one thing is worth taking from all this: don't mix carbs with rich meals. A cake should be fine by itself, but fries with steak not so much.
The article cites a hypothesis that boils down to "all of these things are bad because they make you produce more insulin." The proposed solution is to do less of all of those things. Why not, instead, <i>modulate insulin</i>? Then, if the cited hypothesis is right, we could eat however we wanted and be perfectly healthy and thin. I'm curious as to the correlations between diabetes or hypoglycemia and the diseases mentioned in the article.
Link to the primary research finding, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," from PLoS Medicine:<p><a href="http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124" rel="nofollow">http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...</a>
How does one get from a very narrow discussion of medicine to all medical science? Without questioning the merits of the post (happen to agree with a good chunk of it), that's a sliver of what one might call medical science, albeit a rather lucrative sliver.
I am especially bothered by one sentence:<p>"Prior to my introduction to the world of low-carbohydrate diet, I hadn't paid too much attention to nutritional science. I worked on biophysics, where I formed the opinion that medical science was mostly garbage."<p>It's hard for me to take someone seriously who once believed that medical science is 'mostly garbage.'
It's easy to see that most nutriton specialists aren't very scientific: they refer to meat as "proteins" and measure everything in "calories" (which are really kilocalories) instead of joules.
It seems to me that he is leaving out a discussion of slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscles. Slow-twitch muscles are used in maintaining posture and light activity and burn primarily fat. Fast-twitch muscles are used for strength and burn primarily glucose. Hard exercise like he suggests would use mostly glucose. Walking slowly while working 8 hrs a day (treadmill desk) would presumably use more fat. It would be interesting to see if that is actually the case (within a 95% confidence interval, of course ;) )
Can someone explain the entropy and thermodynamics bit?<p>He appears to be arguing against the concept of calories in minus calories burned equals calories stored, but he lost me.<p>He's got "entropy" in his blog name so you'd think this is his area, however, it sounds fishy to me.
See also (some conflicting views), the Hacker's Diet : <a href="http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html</a>
The article is quite interesting.<p>But it has two different parts to it. One part is how dubious and unreliable much of medical science is. The other part is a plausible argument for the causes of "life style diseases". Both arguments are interesting but they are somewhat at odds with each other.<p>If there is so much uncertainty in medical research and medical advice, then shouldn't we have something like a call to step and spend some time <i>just</i> evaluating our methods and figuring how to increase the objectivity of the process rather than jumping to yet another not yet full substantiated approach - not that the approach itself sound particular bad or dubious but the juxtaposition of the two arguments gives me pause.