Greetings. It’s Tom, back from the cruise. I’ll post a full report later in the week, but for now I want to thank The Older Brother for taking over the Fat Head chair while I was gone.

I also want us all to wish him a happy birthday. He turns 55 today, which means he qualifies for senior-citizen discounts at Denny’s and many other fine restaurants.

Happy Birthday, Bro. Now that you’ve got the diet thing figured out, I expect you to enjoy about 40-45 more of them.

I promise to start writing real posts again soon.  Right now my focus is on getting ready for the cruise … finishing a slide show for the roast, rehearsing, making sure we have our travel arrangements all set, etc.   These things were a lot easier when I wasn’t also working full-time outside the home.

Chareva’s parents are arriving Thursday to stay at the house and take care of the girls, dogs, chickens, garden, etc. while we’re gone, so this will be my last post until after the cruise.  We’ll fill orders for DVDs and t-shirts until Friday, but any orders that come in while we’re gone will have to wait until we get back.

The Older Brother has agreed take over the Fat Head chair starting on Thursday and write some posts while we’re gone.   In the meantime, here are two more episodes from the UCTV series “The Skinny on Obesity,” featuring Dr. Robert Lustig.

I’ll be spending the evening attempting to finish up my bits for the roast I’m doing on the low-carb cruise.  Can’t believe it’s coming up so soon.

Odds and Ends from the news and reader emails:

The tube diet

Here’s a novel idea for losing weight rapidly:  drip some protein and fat into your stomach through a tube in your nose.  Apparently this is now popular among brides-to-be who want to walk down the aisle wearing a dress they’ll never fit into again.

The K-E diet, which boasts promises of shedding 20 pounds in 10 days, is an increasingly popular alternative to ordinary calorie-counting programs. The program has dieters inserting a feeding tube into their nose that runs to the stomach. They’re fed a constant slow drip of protein and fat, mixed with water, which contains zero carbohydrates and totals 800 calories a day. Body fat is burned off through a process called ketosis, which leaves muscle intact, Dr. Oliver Di Pietro of Bay Harbor Islands, Fla., said.

“It is a hunger-free, effective way of dieting,” Di Pietro said. “Within a few hours your hunger and appetite go away completely, so patients are actually not hungry at all for the whole 10 days. That’s what is so amazing about this diet.”

I have to admit, I’m curious as to why they’re not hungry on 800 calories per day.  Sure, a ketogenic diet can suppress appetite to an extent, but those are semi-starvation rations.  Is it because they don’t smell or taste the food?  Would they be hungrier if they consumed 800 calories of fried eggs instead?

Di Pietro says patients are under a doctor’s supervision, although they’re not hospitalized during the dieting process. Instead, they carry the food solution with them, in a bag, like a purse, keeping the tube in their nose for 10 days straight. Di Pietro says there are few side effects.

Maybe having a tube up your nose for 10 days is an appetite suppressant.  I’d try some self-experimentation with that, but people at work already think I’m odd because I eat sandwiches with no bread.

“The main side effects are bad breath; there is some constipation because there is no fiber in the food,” he said.

“William, do you take this malodorous, constipated woman to be your bride, to have and to hold her, to love and respect her, forsaking all others, until death do you part?”

“Uhhh …”

“William?  WILLIAM!”

Scientists are freakin’ liars

I occasionally receive emails from people who were offended by the “scientists are freakin’ liars” line in my Science For Smart People speech.  Those emails usually include some variation on Who are you to say scientists are liars?  Huh?  Huh?

I’m a guy who can read, that’s who.  Check out this article from the New York Times:

In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers. It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.”

The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.

Oh, well.  Probably just one bad apple.

Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.

In other words …

No one claims that science was ever free of misconduct or bad research … But critics like Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall argue that science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades — especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.

In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes.

Do we have more  bad scientists now than before?  I don’t think so.  The article gives a possible explanation for the 10-fold rise in retractions that I believe has rather a lot to do with it:

Several factors are at play here, scientists say. One may be that because journals are now online, bad papers are simply reaching a wider audience, making it more likely that errors will be spotted.

Indeed, it’s not just other scientists busting bad science anymore.  The so-called “pajamas media” has gotten involved as well.

But other forces are more pernicious. To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get there.

To measure this claim, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.

So it’s the journals most cited by other scientists that are most likely to publish bad science.  Or it could be that those journals, because they are more prestigious, feel the most pressure to issue a retraction.

Either way, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

They’re not fat because they don’t have access to vegetables

One of recommendations listed in the 2010 USDA’s Dietary Goals report was to make fresh fruits and vegetables more available in poor neighborhoods – in other words, they want politicians to take your money and use it to subsidize fresh produce and the people who sell it.  Because ya know, if only we could get more broccoli and carrots into poor neighborhoods, poor people wouldn’t have such high rates of obesity.

Recent studies disagree:

It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables.

But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

Even if we’re talking about neighborhoods where there truly aren’t as many vegetables being sold, people get the causality backwards.  The local residents aren’t fat because they don’t have access to vegetables.  The vegetables aren’t available because people don’t buy them.

Some experts say these new findings raise questions about the effectiveness of efforts to combat the obesity epidemic simply by improving access to healthy foods. Despite campaigns to get Americans to exercise more and eat healthier foods, obesity rates have not budged over the past decade, according to recently released federal data.

Duh.  That’s largely because the government’s definition of “healthy foods” is all screwed up.  Nothing wrong with fruits and vegetables, of course, but as long as they keep pushing low-fat diets based on breads, cereals and pasta, they can open a subsidized vegetable stand next to every poor person’s residence in the country and it won’t make any difference.

Advocates have long called for more supermarkets in poor neighborhoods and questioned the quality of the food that is available. And Mrs. Obama has made elimination of food deserts an element of her broader campaign against childhood obesity, Let’s Move, winning praise from Democrats and even some Republicans, and denunciations from conservative commentators and bloggers who have cited it as yet another example of the nanny state.

Speaking in October on the South Side of Chicago, she said that in too many neighborhoods “if people want to buy a head of lettuce or salad or some fruit for their kid’s lunch, they have to take two or three buses, maybe pay for a taxicab, in order to do it.”

Here’s what people like Mrs. Obama can’t seem to grasp:  if enough people in those neighborhoods wanted lettuce and fruit in their kids’ lunches, plenty of greedy capitalists would happily move in to sell them.  In a previous post, I wrote about a chain of stores that tried selling 15-cent bags of apple slices in a poor neighborhood.  The apple slices had to be thrown away because they didn’t sell.

Mrs. Obama has also advocated getting schools to serve healthier lunches and communities to build more playgrounds.

Her office referred questions about the food deserts issue to the Department of Agriculture. A spokesman there, Justin DeJong, said by e-mail that fighting obesity requires “a comprehensive response.”

No problem then.  The government’s on the job and planning a comprehensive response.  That of course means a really expensive and ultimately futile response.

Farm News:  Guineas Gone

Well, we knew we’d make a few mistakes when we took up farming.  The result of our first mistake is that our guinea fowl are all gone.

Once they’d grown considerably and seemed determined to fly around the basement, we decided to move them out to chicken coop.  The theory was they’d bond with the chickens for awhile and get to considering the area their home, then we’d let them free-range.

They free-ranged, all right.  On Sunday we took the girls to see a Sondheim musical at a theater in downtown Franklin.  When we returned home, seven of the guineas were already out and about.  The girls tried to chase them down, which of course merely inspired them to flee.  For a couple of days, they hung around our property, usually waddling around in a pack.  They seemed fond of the creek, so we hoped they’d stick around.

Nope.  We haven’t seen them in two days now.  The other three wandered off as well.  The coop has a fence around it and a big net covering the fence so hawks don’t swoop down and fly away with our chickens, but there are gaps large enough for a determined bird to get out.

We’ll try again after making the area more escape-proof.

The Ace

This has nothing to do with diets, health, fitness or farming, but I feel the need to report it anyway:  I finally got a hole-in-one on my frisbee golf course.  The disc sailed towards the basket about 200 feet away, looked as if it would miss high and to the right, then faded left, hit the chains, and dropped into the basket.  I let out a self-congratulatory war whoop.

Unfortunately, I was out there playing by myself.  You get a hole-in-one, you want a witness.  Since I didn’t have one, I’m telling all of you.

The Dr. O Show

I was recently interviewed on the Dr. O show.  No, not that Dr. O.  This Dr. O actually knows what he’s talking about when it comes to diet and health.

Some of you may recognize Dr. S. Andrei Ostric as a frequent contributor in the Fat Head Facebook group.  He’s a passionate and intelligent guy who recently decided to start producing his own Dr. O podcast show.  I hope he keeps at it and ends up on some national radio network.  We need people like him to offset the damage done by media doctors who push the same old anti-fat nonsense.

You can listen to our interview here.

Dr. Lustig featured in new seven-part series

Dr. Robert Lustig seems to be everywhere these days, including a recent appearance on 60 Minutes.  That appearance inspired at least one diabetic I know to seriously reconsider his diet.  (Fat Head apparently didn’t do the trick … oh well.)

The UCTV video channel is now featuring Dr. Lustig in a seven-part series on obesity.  Here’s the first episode:

Saturated Fat Praised on TV

In my recent speech, I explained why people are turning to the internet for alternative dietary advice that actually works.  It’s nice to see that stories about the benefits of a high-fat diet are also finding their way into more mainstream media, like this one from an Australian news channel featuring nutrition author Christine Cronau.

I couldn’t embed the video, but you can watch it here.

Naturally, we had to also see a dietitian warning the audience that tens of thousands of studies have linked saturated fat to heart disease and other diseases.

Tens of thousands?  Really?  I don’t know exactly how many observational studies anyone could find on that topic, but I doubt there are thousands.  If we did go through all the studies, we’d find that the supposed correlation is all over the place.  What matters are the clinical studies where researchers attempted to lower rates of heart disease with low-fat diets.  Those studies have been done, and they were all major flops.

I hope the people watching that news story see the kind of shape Christine Cronau is in and conclude that the dietitian is clueless … which she is.

I receive a fair number of emails and comments from people urging me to add a section to the blog that lists studies supporting a low-carb diet.  Yes, that would be a worthy project, but it’s not one I’ll have time to tackle anytime soon.

However, I’ve frequently referred people to David Evans’ Healthy Diets and Science website, which is basically a compilation of health and nutrition study abstracts, conveniently indexed by topic in the right sidebar.  I don’t know where he manages to dig up all these abstracts, but there are nearly a thousand of them, spanning decades of research.

I’m pleased to announce that Evans has recently published a book with the provocative title Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Prevent Heart Disease – Evidence from 101 Scientific Papers.  The content is exactly what the title promises:  a list of 101 studies that dispute the hypothesis that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, with quite a few of them suggesting that saturated fat and cholesterol are, in fact, good for us.  For each study, there’s a title, a citation and a brief summary (with occasional commentary) by Evans.

Here are just a few example titles:

Diets high in carbohydrates which have a high glycemic load increase heart disease risk by 98%.

Vegetable oils implicated in increased death rates.

A high saturated fat diet gives protection from heart disease.

These are the studies you don’t often read about in the media, and of course they’re also the studies most doctors have never heard of, much less actually read.  Many of them are observational studies, and I’ve pounded home the point over and over that observational studies don’t prove anything.  So does that make these studies worthless as evidence?

Not at all.

As I explained in my Science For Smart People speech, if someone spots a correlation between A and B in an observational study and proposes that A causes B, one of the questions we should ask ourselves is whether or not we see a link between A and B consistently.  If we don’t, it’s highly unlikely that A is causing B.

The example I gave in the speech was the observation that people who live near power lines have higher rates of cancer.  Naturally, plenty of journalists and ambulance-chasing lawyers immediately concluded that power lines cause cancer.  More cautious types pointed out that poor people are more likely to live near power lines, and poor people have higher rates of cancer for all kinds of reasons.

What finally put the power-line scare to rest was another observational study that found a completely opposite correlation:  people who work on power lines for a living – and are therefore consistently exposed to more electrical current than people who merely live near power lines – have lower rates of cancer than the population as a whole.  If proximity to power lines caused cancer, the people who work on them would have high rates of cancer.  But they don’t.  No consistency, no scientific validity, no cause and effect.

The same principle applies to observational studies about dietary fat and heart disease.  If several observational studies show that people who eat a lot of saturated fat have higher rates of heart disease, but several other observational studies show that people who eat a lot of saturated fat have lower rates of heart disease, then it’s extremely unlikely that saturated fat causes heart disease.  That’s the value of observational studies as evidence:  they’re better at disproving a hypothesis than they are at proving one.

There are plenty of clinical studies cited in the book as well, and you can already guess what the evidence Evans has compiled shows:  it’s not the fat in our diets that causes heart disease; it’s the sugars, refined carbohydrates, processed vegetables oils and other garbage.

For those of you who’ve written to me asking for evidence you can cite in a lecture or class paper, this is a book you need in your library.  For those of you who’ve written asking for evidence that will convince your loved ones your high-fat diet isn’t going to kill you, ditto.  For those of you who’ve written to tell me Fat Head is an irresponsible and dangerous film that will inspire people to eat high-fat diets and die of heart disease … well, never mind.  Nothing’s going to convince you anyway.

But for those of you who are interested in the actual science, this is a great little reference.