The brain makes us hungry but it's not only carbs that make us fat

Published 3.27.2017
On Mondays, I like to begin the week with a list of interesting articles, blog posts or other items that I've recently come across and want to highlight or comment about.

Chris Kresser interviews Stephan Guyenet about his new book The Hungry Brain.Kresser used to be Paleo, but at some point realized it was bunk— particularly when it came to legumes.

I don’t know why they shy away from saying it’s the calories— actually, they do say it’s the calories, but the brain is still involved. Low carb (LC) diets work because people spontaneously eat less— at least people who lose weight eating LC. Not everyone loses weight on a LC diet. Talking Taubes:

I guess I don’t even really understand where this idea comes from because there’s not really any research that suggests that carbohydrate is disproportionately to blame for obesity. If you put people on high-carbohydrate diets, they don’t gain weight. They don’t become diabetic. It doesn’t happen in animal models. It doesn’t happen in people. There’s no association in observational studies between total carbohydrate intake and obesity or diabetes or any of that. What you do see, you see that refined carbohydrates and sugar are associated with poor health outcomes, and that’s, I think, just consistent with the general idea that if you eat a refined, calorie-dense diet, you’re going to tend to have poorer health outcomes. But that’s true in general. It’s not just, it’s not just refined carbohydrates, it’s refined anything.

For Taubes it has to be about the carbohydrates, or his entire alternative hypothesis implodes.

Mike Eades opines on the Salim Yusuf presentation, cheering even as he admits it means nothing and it’s a breach to present unpublished data. He also tries (desperately?) to downplay and dismiss the legume evidence— which the only definitively heart protective data Yusuf presented. But ya know: “carbz.” Legumes are also high in protein. I guess Dr Mike would discount the fact that the only food that all the Blue Zones share in common is legume consumption. Eat yo beans, doctor," even if you can’t sous vide them.

For good or ill, legumes are not considered vegetables apparently. There is some evidence that vegetable prices have soared while grain prices have not. But grain is a subsidized commodity (as is meat) while vegetables are not. This is why legumes (whole legumes, not oils) should be added to processed foods, at least in my opinion. I realize I haven't completely spelled out my reasoning for this opinion, but intend to do so in future.

There’s no reason to torture yourself with ice baths after exercise, they don’t work. In fact, ice baths delay recovery. So what does work? Sleep. Don’t go out an party after a tough match, go home and sleep.

Lower carb diets vs low fat diets makes no difference.

Researchers assigned 245 nondiabetic women to one of three diets: a low fat, high carbohydrate diet; a lower carbohydrate and higher fat diet; or a different low-carb, high-fat diet that was rich in walnuts. The trial was designed to run for 1 year, with preliminary results to be analyzed halfway through.

Six-month weight loss averaged 6-8 kg in the three groups, from baselines of 90 kg; each group also lost an average of 2-3 body mass index points, reported Cheryl Rock, PhD, RD, at the University of California San Diego, and colleagues in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

The low carb arm of the study still had 45% carb in the diet, which many low carbers won't define as low carb. This points again to why Kevin Hall's Nutritional Science Initiative (NuSi) study designed with Taubes approval is so devastating for LC gurus. The LC diet in that study was genuinely low carb, by anyone's standard, just as no one would argue the low fat diet used wasn't truly low fat. But today is not the day to beat that dead horse.

Stephan Guyenet reviews a recent Kevin Hall study, which was a meta-study, but mostly a review.

A high fiber diet is (by definition) a high plant diet. Is the benefit due to fiber or the phytonutrients?

The hazard ratio for highest quintile of fiber consumption as adolescents and in early adulthood, versus the lowest, was 0.75 (95% CI 0.62-0.91, P=0.04 for trend), reported Maryam S. Farvid, PhD, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues.

Eating healthy when you’re young helps you as you age.

Is all nutrition science useless? Or is pop coverage of nutrition science useless? Here’s the paper he’s dissing. It’s based on mining the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) data, which is self-reported and therefore useless. People lie about or misstate (misremember) what they eat and how much. That’s just a fact.

How to get people to eat more vegetables? Make it more convenient for them to do so. The story of how lettuce came to American tables is one example.

In 1963, Lugg signed on to lead the research division of Bruce Church Inc., which teamed up with a subsidiary of refrigerator-maker Whirlpool—a partnership based largely on the hope that they might be able to figure out how to get lettuce from Salinas to the East Coast before it turned brown. After a lot of experimentation, they figured out how to manipulate the atmosphere inside the vehicles in which they shipped the lettuce so that it was more hospitable, providing the right balance of CO2 and oxygen in refrigerated rail cars and containers—a hack that took the shelf life of the lettuce from three or four days to 14, as long as the lettuce was kept cold.

People of the Paleolithic period ate everything and anything that could be eaten in the nearby environment in which they lived. The Paleo™ diet is just a new version of lower carb diet, not based on a complete reading of the anthropologic evidence.

Is it the gluten or the fiber? I vote fiber. There are plenty of gluten free whole grains. The issue is refined grains. Additionally, there are many new gluten free products that aren’t based on rice flour. A meta-study of gluten sensitivity studies concludes that most likely it’s not the gluten causing the problem— though at least they admit that the gut distress people report is real. Freedhoff doesn’t think gluten should be avoided, but concludes that if you feel better avoiding some food, then continue to avoid it.

Does drinking 8 cups of water help teens lose weight? No, because few of the subjects in the study actually drank the water.

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• Diets are not religions and other tidbits
• Weight affects health and other tidbits

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