Some months ago, I discovered that Stanford University has quite a few class lectures available for free on iTunes.  I enjoy listening to books and lectures during my long walks, while driving, while sitting on airplanes, and sometimes even while working on programming projects if I’m not in the middle of a real head-scratcher.  (Don’t tell my clients.) 

I’ve downloaded and listened to several lectures on subjects that interest me:  history, politics, science, economics and, of course, health and nutrition.  I had planned to transcribe portions of a couple of nutrition lectures so I could comment on them, but since I don’t like typing all that much, I kind of put that project aside.

Turns out one of the lectures I wanted to write about is also on YouTube, as I found out when I visited Mike Eades’ blog this morning.  I enjoyed it on iTunes, but it’s even better when you can see the visuals.  So in case you haven’t already seen it, here it is.  The speaker is Dr. Chris Gardner, a director of Nutrition Studies and an associate professor of medicine at Stanford:

A few things struck me as I listened to the lecture the first time, and again as I watched it today.  One is that all diets are difficult to follow to some extent — just look at the dropout rates for the other studies Gardner mentioned.  There’s no getting around that.  If your weight is going up and your health is going down, you’re on a bad diet.  To turn things around, you have to give up some foods you love.

I miss fettuccine alfredo and sourdough toast, but I’ve found it much easier to stick to a low-carb diet than any of the others I tried.  Low-fat diets, by contrast, made me feel lethargic and depressed.  I’d start cheating, then eventually give up.  (Good thing, in retrospect.)

Along those lines, notice what happened in Gardner’s study with the group assigned to the Ornish diet: on average, they began eating double the amount of fat Ornish recommends almost immediately and eventually moved up to triple what he recommends.  Ornish has complained that this wasn’t a fair test of his diet since most subjects didn’t stay within the 10% fat limit.  I think it’s more likely they couldn’t stay within the 10% limit … their bodies rebelled.

(Here’s how someone once described the Ornish diet:  put food in your mouth. If it tastes good, spit it out.)

To be fair, the Atkins group drifted back towards a higher carbohydrate intake as well.  If you do the math, it appears that by the end of a year, most of the women in the Atkins group were consuming something in the neighborhood of 150 carbohydrates per day.  They ended up on a restricted carbohydrate diet, but not exactly a low- carbohydrate diet.

But that actually makes their weight loss more impressive.  Remember, they weren’t told to count calories, as two other groups were.  And yet the Atkins group lost the most weight, even though they ate more carbohydrates than Atkins recommended.  And as their carbohydrate intake went up over time, so did their weight — again, they weren’t counting calories.  This would seem to confirm what Atkins said all along:  carbohydrates make you hungry.  You have to find the level of carbohydrate intake that keeps your insulin in check and your appetite stable, then stay there.

I also noticed that the Atkins group had the lowest dropout rate.  Once again, I’m not surprised.  Yes, you may miss your sugars and starches on a low-carb diet, but at least fat is satiating.  I never felt satiated on a low-fat diet, unless I ate huge meals.

What really perked up my ears the first time I heard the lecture was the comparison of the health parameters.  The Atkins group showed the most improvement in weight, blood pressure, triglycerides and cholesterol levels.  No other diet out-performed Atkins on any health parameter.  So much for the notion that a low-carb, high-fat diet will kill you.

Gardner even explains, in response to a question, that low-fat, high-carb diets tend to make triglycerides go up, HDL go down, and produce a higher proportion of small, dense LDL.  And remember, we’re hearing this from a guy who’s been a vegetarian for 25 years — not exactly a shill for the meat industry.

I also found it interesting the relative success of one diet versus another seems to depend on the dieter’s level of insulin resistance.  Now and then, I hear from people who swear they lost a lot of weight on a low-fat diet and felt fine doing it.  I believe them.  But I’m guessing those are people who aren’t insulin-resistant.  They can eat plenty of carbohydrates and lose weight by restricting fat and calories because they don’t end up with high insulin levels that command their bodies to continue storing fat.  Good for them. 

The problem is, the rest of us are told that if it works for them, it should work for us, too — assuming we just had the proper discipline. But it doesn’t work for us.  We produce too much insulin in response to sugar and starch.   We have to give up the carbs, or we’re setting ourselves up to fail.  And given the steep rise in metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes, I think most overweight Americans are probably insulin-resistant. 

This lecture — recounting a study conducted by a committed vegetarian — confirms what I already knew:  the usual dietary advice given to overweight people who are developing metabolic syndrome is a load of bologna.  Hats off to Dr. Gardner for reporting his results with no apparent attempt to manipulate them.  We could use a few more researchers like him.

Over the weekend, I came across this video, courtesy of the British government. Take a look:

Well, that’s it, then. Despite the fact that I love saturated fat, after viewing this disturbing video, I’ve come to a painful and reluctant conclusion: I must stop injecting saturated fat directly into my arteries.

I briefly considered continuing the practice, reasoning that I could minimize the accumulation of grease with proper medical treatment … in this case, a twice-weekly injection of Liquid Drano. But during a brief scan of the medical literature, I discovered that while Drano is effective against grease, it also dissolves hair. I’m bald enough as it is. I don’t want to go through life resembling my baby pictures.

(Rumor has it that when my father stood staring at me through the maternity-ward window, the obstetrician patted him on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Naughton. You’ll learn to love him.”)

My wife, who loathes wasting food, is bound to be annoyed with my new restrictions. Just this morning, she concluded the after-breakfast cleanup by funneling leftover bacon grease into two dozen syringes - my own personal party tray for Monday Night Football. I usually wait until halftime to begin pumping lard into my arteries, although if I crank up my appetite with a first-quarter beer or two, all bets are off. I’ve been known to empty every syringe before the second-half kickoff, then call Dominos and order a pint of pepperoni grease. Never again.

Desperate to know exactly which foods won’t clog my arteries, I decided to subject a number of them to the experiment featured in the video, employing the same rigorously scientific methods. My wife was out running errands, so my daughters assisted - partly out of intellectual curiosity, and partly because they were concerned I’d introduce a plunger as an uncontrolled variable and skew the results.

We began simply enough, taking turns stuffing slices of bread down the drain. Since the British government’s experiment specified a month’s worth of saturated fat, we didn’t stop until the drainpipe held a total of 120 slices of bread - half of them toasted.

After the plumber packed up his wrenches and left, we incorporated his expert opinion into our conclusion: bread definitely clogs your arteries, especially when consumed with milk. Or, to use the expert’s jargon, “What the @#$%?! You guys clogged the $#@& out of this pipe!”

With bread eliminated from the heart-healthy list, we moved on to other dietary staples. It turns out that rice and beans don’t totally clog your arteries, but can dramatically impede the flow. So do most vegetables, although the effects are somewhat mitigated by thorough boiling. (This may, in fact, explain the extremely low rate of heart disease in Scotland.) Clearly the theories espoused by the raw-foods advocates don’t hold up to actual scientific research.

On his return, the plumber agreed, noting, “If you’re gonna stick a coupla pounds of brussel sprouts down the drain, you gotta cook the @#$%ing things first!” I promised to include his opinion in the discussion section of our academic paper. Then, so my daughters would stop attempting to steer our research down a blind alley, I answered the question they’d been posing since the plumber’s initial visit: Yes, some men have hair on their buttocks. However, the association with heart disease is statistically insignificant.

As the experiment progressed, we were stunned to realize that a month’s worth of nearly all foods will clog your arteries: hamburgers, chicken wings, pork chops, lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, cheese, cashews, pickles, bananas and apples, to name just a few.  Chunky-style peanut butter appears to be the most artery-clogging of all.

When I called the plumber again, a pre-recorded voice that sounded very much like the plumber’s informed me that the number was no longer in service. I asked for the new number, but the pre-recorded voice replied that it was unlisted. Business must be good when you can rely exclusively on referrals.

When my wife returned home, we began to appreciate the true cost of high-quality scientific research. She spelled out, loudly and specifically, the size of the grant that would be required to re-stock the laboratory. Until we receive such a grant, I’m afraid we won’t be able to determine if the results are repeatable.

But as good scientists like to say, the drain doesn’t lie. We are confident in our preliminary conclusion: nearly all foods clog your arteries. The only exception seems to be ice cream, which apparently can be cleared from your arteries with a steady stream of warm water. If you want to avoid heart disease, we’d suggest injecting ice cream (and nothing but ice cream) into your arteries, followed by periodic injections of warm water.

Or you could try chewing and swallowing your food, thus allowing your digestive system to process it. The effects on your arteries could, at least in theory, be somewhat different.

If you’ve read or heard some of my press interviews, you know that Fat Head didn’t actually begin as a response to Super Size Me. My intention was a shoot a demo for a TV show I wanted to produce: funny but thoughtful guy examines issues of the day.  The topic I planned to explore for the pilot episode was the ridiculous prejudice we have against fat people in modern society.  I watched Super Size Me as part of my initial research, became very annoyed, and decided to produce Fat Head instead.

Last week, Newsweek’s online edition ran a two-part article that’s related to my original idea. The Fat Wars: America’s Weight Rage is a good read, with one exception:  the author believes too much fatty food has made us fat.  The second part is titled Fat and Healthy: Why It’s Possible - another theme I touched on in Fat Head.  Here are some quotes, with my comments.

Cintra Wilson, style columnist for The New York Times, recently wrote a column so disdainful of JCPenney’s plus-size mannequins that the Times’ ombsbudman later wrote that he could read “a virtual sneer” coming through her prose.

I haven’t seen the plus-size mannequins, but I’m glad to know JCPenny’s has them. When I walk through a mall and see stick-figure mannequins in every store window, it annoys me. Most women will never look like that, even if they’re not fat, for the simple reason that most women don’t have bones the size of toothpicks. Sending the message to teenage girls and young women that they should all be this skinny is a prescription for bulimia.

Fatness has always been seen as a slight on the American character. Ours is a nation that values hard work and discipline, and it’s hard for us to accept that weight could be not just a struggle of will, even when the bulk of the research-and often our own personal experience-shows that the factors leading to weight gain are much more than just simple gluttony.

If being lean were simply a matter of being disciplined - usually defined as eating less - there would be very few obese people in America. People don’t eat because they’re gluttonous or compensating for a lousy childhood. They eat because their cells run out of fuel and they become hungry. Starving yourself may work temporarily, but it goes against your deepest, most primal instincts.  It can also depress your metabolism and make it more likely you’ll gain weight when you finally give in to the hunger and eat more.

The real problem, of course, is that we’ve been told to eat lots of high-carbohydrate foods that tell our bodies to store fuel as fat … which in turn makes us hungrier than we should be.

“There’s this general perception that weight can be controlled if you have enough willpower, that it’s just about calories in and calories out,” says Dr. Glen Gaesser, professor of exercise and wellness at Arizona State University and author of BigFat Lies: The Truth About Your Weight and Your Health, and that perception leads the nonfat to believe that the overweight are not just unhealthy, but weak and lazy.

The funny thing is, most of the lean people I know don’t count calories at all - because they don’t have to. At mealtimes, my naturally-thin wife does the same thing I do: she eats until she’s not hungry anymore. So does my son, who eats like a horse (that is, if horses liked potato chips and Coca-Cola) but literally can’t gain weight - he’s tried, both while playing high-school basketball and during boot camp.

“A lot of people struggle themselves with their weight, and the same people that tend to get very angry at themselves for not being able to manage their weight are more likely to be biased against the obese,” says Marlene Schwartz, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. “I think that some of this is that anger is confusion between the anger that we have at ourselves and projecting that out onto other people.”

Been there, done that. Before I understood that carbohydrates were making me fat, I’d try eating less, lose a few pounds, then stall, then give up. Then I’d look at myself in the mirror after my morning shower and think, “You fat @#$%!  Why don’t you just stick to a diet and get rid of this blubber?” This is what 40 years of bad dietary advice has done to millions of people.

What is it about fat people that makes us so mad? As it turns out, we kind of like it. “People actually enjoy feeling angry,” says Ryan Martin, associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, who cites studies done on people’s emotions. “It makes them feel powerful, it makes them feel greater control, and they appreciate it for that reason.”

I’ve said it more times than I count: some people aren’t happy unless they’re angry about something. You can usually spot those people by counting the number of bumper-stickers on their cars. If you count more than two, for Pete’s sake, don’t do anything the driver could construe as cutting him off in traffic - especially if you’re fat.

Think of health care: when president Obama made reforming health care a priority, it led to an increased focus on obesity as a contributor to health-care costs. A recent article in Health Affairs, a public-policy journal, reported that obesity costs $147 billion a year, mainly in insurance premiums and taxes … So the overweight, some people argue, are costing all of us money while refusing to alter the behavior that has put them in their predicament in the first place.

Here’s a crazy idea: maybe the people who make that argument are attacking the wrong end of the equation. If we didn’t make everyone pay for every else’s health care, it wouldn’t be an issue.  And of course, it’s not obesity that drives up health-care costs - it’s high blood sugar. Obesity is a symptom, not the cause. Both of the type II diabetics in my family are lean as rails. They use a lot more medical resources than I do, and I’m considered overweight.

A study published last month in the Annals of Surgery supported this “obesity paradox.” The report, which looked at more than 100,000 patients who had undergone nonbariatric general surgery, found that overweight and moderately obese patients had mortality rates 15 and 27 percent lower, respectively, than normal-weight patients.

That’s it, then … the next time I run into a skinny person on the street, I’m going to grab him by the arm and scream, “Stop wasting my health-care tax dollars, you scrawny @#$%! Go grab a donut and a soda, then sit your skinny @## down and gain some weight! Discipline, Man! Discipline!”

The point is that not all fat people are unhealthy or out of shape, and not all thin people are healthy and in good shape. But it’s amazing how many people make those assumptions.

Years ago, I had a good friend in Chicago who’s one those naturally-lean types. One day he got a guest pass for the health club where I was a member and joined me for a workout. As we huffed and puffed our way around the Nautilus circuit, I could tell by his expression that he was frustrated to realize he couldn’t lift nearly as much weight as I could. (He more or less admitted as much later.) Until that day, he’d assumed my belly and love handles were a sign that I was in lousy shape.

But I wasn’t in lousy shape. I worked out regularly and walked 15 to 20 miles per week. I was actually in pretty good shape. I was also fat.

To close, I put together a sequence of clips from my interview with Dr. Eric Oliver, author of “Fat Politics,” who spoke about some of the same issues brought up in the Newsweek article. If you bought the Fat Head DVD (and bless you if you did), you’ll recognize some of this footage from the bonus tracks.

Tonight I served my five-year-old a big bowl of rat chow for dinner, then asked her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which she (supposedly) learned in school yesterday.  She couldn’t do it.  This was annoying, because she recited the whole thing last night.

So I fed her some fish food.  That didn’t work either.  I tried dried cat food.  No better.  Rabbit chow.  Nada.

I was experimenting because I’d seen several articles on … what’s that called? … the spider web … no… the tennis net … volleyball net … ah, the internet!  There were all these articles about how a high-fat diet can adversely affect your mammary.  No wait, that’s not it … your mummery.  Hang on, it’ll come to me … nope, I’ll have to look it up again.

Got it.  There were these articles about how a high-fat can adversely affect your memory.  I found this disturbing because as a performer, I have to memorize a lot of material.  When I act in plays, I memorize every line in my scenes - mine and everyone else’s.  That way I know if another actor forgot a line and I can cover. 

(Once, in a bad production of “A Shot in the Dark,” I spent more time covering than I did saying actual lines from the script.  Strange, because the actor who forgot half his dialog was a vegetarian.)

When I perform on cruise ships, I do two different half-hour standup shows … alone, with no teleprompter and no one to cover for me.  So I take memory seriously.  I also eat a lot of fat, and my memory is just fine.  I still remember the phone number my parents had when I was a kid in Iowa.  My dad used to call me “Total Recall.”  So when I saw the headlines, I smelled a rat.

Yup, it was a rat, all right.  For this study, researchers fed some rats a low-fat diet (7.5%) then tested their physical endurance and memory by having them run on a treadmill and find their way through a maze.  Later, they fed the rats a high-fat diet (55%) and repeated the tests.  Wouldn’t you know it, the rats didn’t do so well on a high-fat diet.

Let’s set aside the possibility that after eating all that fat, the rats became much more intelligent and thought to themselves, “Running a maze is stupid.  I’m going to just sit here until that dumb @#$%ing researcher gets tired of writing on his pad and gets me out of here.  I haven’t finished reading the sports section on that newspaper lining the bottom of my cage.”

The point is, a high-fat diet isn’t natural for rats.  I looked it up, and rats are listed as omnivores who will eat pretty much whatever is available, but prefer cereal grains.  (They probably like looking at that American Heart Association seal of approval on the box.)  When you feed an animal - or a human - an unnatural diet, you’re going to get negative results.

The Lipid Hypothesis became accepted partly because when researchers fed rabbits lard and cholesterol, the rabbits rapidly developed heart disease.  Well, go figure … rabbits rarely attack pigs and eat them.  When other researchers tried the same experiment on dogs, they couldn’t induce heart disease, no matter how much lard they fed them.  So they concluded that dogs don’t get heart disease.  But they do - if you feed them grains.

If rats eat a lot of fat and then become lethargic and stupid, that says nothing about how a high-fat diet affects humans.  We’ve been eating fatty diets for hundreds of thousands of years.  We didn’t become fat until we started eating grains.  (And we didn’t become stupid until we started feeding fat to rats and thinking the results mean anything.)

In another rat study that hit the news this week, researchers suggested that high-fat, high-protein diet leads to insulin resistance.  Once again, we’re looking at animals that aren’t eating anything close to their natural diet.  If a high-fat, high-protein diet had the same effect on humans, the Inuits and the buffalo-hunting tribes should’ve been plagued by diabetes.  They weren’t.  But after Native Americans were herded onto reservations and forced to live on flour and sugar, they became one of the most diabetic populations on the planet - more than 50% in some tribes.

Studies on actual humans don’t show these results.  In fact, they show exactly the opposite.  In one recent study, Alzheimer’s patients showed improvements in memory when they were given ketones.  The natural way to produce ketones, of course, is to eat a high-fat diet and skip the carbs.

In another recent study, subjects who ate a Paleolithic diet - which means low-carb, consisting mostly of meats, nuts, vegetables and some fruits - showed a significant drop in insulin levels.  That hardly sounds like the path to insulin resistance.  Other studies have also shown dramatic improvements in diabetes symptoms when subjects went on a low-carb, high-fat, high-protein diet.

If you’ve seen these headlines, please, don’t worry.  You’re not a rat.  You won’t develop diabetes and forget where you parked your car unless you eat rat chow.

By the way, my daughter loves eggs, cream, meat, nuts, butter and cheese.  When we had lamb steaks last night, she begged - as usual - for some extra fat from my steak.  (She got it.)  Since she would just now be in kindergarten if she’d started school in Tennessee, her first-grade teacher had her come in for a reading test before the semester began.  Afterwards, the teacher told my wife, “Your daughter blew me away.  I can’t believe how many words she recognizes already.”

I’d say her memory is just fine, too.  And she actually knows the Pledge of Allegiance word-for-word.

A few weeks ago, the media were all abuzz about a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study’s conclusion: weight loss is all about the calories, period. High carb, low carb, high fat, low fat – it doesn’t matter.

Lead researcher Dr. Frank Sacks and his team put four groups of people on four different diets for two years. There was a high-fat/low-carbohydrate diet, a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet, and two diets sort of in-between. At the end of the two years, the weight loss was about the same among all four groups.

Well, that settles it. Case closed. You can get off that silly, faddish, low-carb diet now. Drop the cheeseburger, pick up the whole-grain bun, and start counting your calories.

I was intrigued, because this study’s results don’t match my own. When I was on the Zone diet, I consumed about 1700 calories per day, which included about 175 carbs. I lost six pounds per month. On my fast-food diet, I consumed about 2000 calories per day, but limited myself to around 100 carbs. I lost 12 pounds in 28 days. That’s double the weight loss, despite an extra 300 calories per day. Exercise can’t explain the difference, because I walked the same number of miles each week on both diets.

At least that’s how I remember it. But according to Dr. Sacks, those numbers can’t be right. Either he’s wrong, or I’m a functional schizophrenic, walking around with memories of experiences that didn’t actually happen. I must have a beautiful mind. (My contact at the CIA, who has me decoding secret Al Qaeda messages in New England Journal of Medicine articles, does like the way I think.)

Or maybe, just maybe, there’s something else going on here. Ah, yes, that does seem to be the case.

I’ll spare you the details on the diets because Jimmy Moore and Mike Eades already did a full slice-and-dice on the numbers. But here’s the bottom line: Dr. Sacks and his fellow researchers got the result they wanted by coming up with a definition of “low-carb” that is, to put it charitably, rather creative: 35 percent of total calories.

If you consume 2000 calories per day, that’s 175 grams of carbohydrates. The Atkins diet recommends starting at 20 grams per day – barely one-tenth of the carbohydrate load Sacks calls a “low-carb diet.” Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades also advise dieters to start very low and gradually raise the carb count to perhaps 50 grams – less than a third of what Sacks calls a “low-carb diet,” and just 10 percent of the calories in a 2000-calorie diet.

In other words, Sacks didn’t bother to include a diet that would’ve actually restricted carbohydrates to the point where insulin levels would plummet and send the dieters into fat-burning mode.

After thinking long and hard about this little bit of scientific chicanery, I can only come to one conclusion: Dr. Sacks is brilliant! He’s given all the married men on earth what we need most – a clear demonstration of how to “prove” you are right even when you’re not. Speaking for married guys everywhere, I want to thank you, Dr. Sacks, from the bottom of our hearts.

Okay, gentlemen, wise up and follow this brilliant doctor’s example. From now on, when you need to prove a point, just change the definition of the terms so you can’t lose. Then conduct a quick study using the terms you created.

Suppose your wife accuses you of drinking too much beer. “What’s wrong with beer?” you ask. She then offers up some cockamamie theory about how beer makes you fat, stupid, and a dangerous driver. In the pre-Sacks era, you would’ve been roped into an argument that could last for days.

But thanks to the Sacks methodology, now you can disappear into the den for a couple of days, do some intense research, and re-emerge with a study like this:

Comparison of Weight, Cognitive Ability and Motor Skills In Moderate vs. Heavy Beer Drinkers.

Abstract?
No, the results were pretty straightforward.

Methods
We assigned one random husband to two groups of beer drinkers on random afternoons when the NCAA playoffs were on television. The first group, defined as the moderate-drinking group, consumed 1.0 bottles of Bud Light during the afternoon games. The second group, defined as the heavy-drinking group, consumed 2.0 bottles of Bud Light during the afternoon games. Both groups consumed the allotted bottles of beer well before half-time.

Both groups also consumed exactly 10 pepperoni Slim Jims during the games, and both groups participated in equal amounts of exercise, defined for the purposes of the study as 1) running to the bathroom during commercials and 2) occasionally jumping up from the couch and yelling, “What’s the matter, ref, are you BLIND?!!”

Measurements
Weight was measured by bathroom scale. Additionally, abdominal fat was recorded by employing a carpenter’s tape measure, which was extended and bent carefully around the waist.

Cognitive ability was determined by the participant’s ability to read the final scores displayed on the television screen and calculate which team’s score was higher. (In layman’s terms: who “won” the game.) Each participant’s conclusion as to the highest score was later compared to ESPN news reports to assess accuracy.

Motor skills were determined by recording each participant’s average highest score in three rounds of “Grand Theft Auto,” played on an Xbox 360 immediately following the game.

Results
Weight gain was remarkably consistent among both the moderate-drinking and heavy-drinking groups (0.5 pounds vs. 0.7 pounds respectively, P=0.05). Abdominal circumference was identical in both groups, although the participant in the heavy-drinking group suffered a minor laceration due to a belching incident that occurred as the tape measure was being cinched around his waist.

Cognitive ability was also remarkably similar. Both groups correctly identified which team scored the most points in every instance (1.0 vs. 1.0, P=0.01). The participant in the heavy-drinking group was noticeably unsatisfied with the scores, despite correctly calculating which was higher, and indicated verbally that the referee was afflicted with near-sightedness.

Motor skills were similar, but not identical. The average Grand Theft Auto score was slightly higher among the moderate-drinking group than the heavy-drinking group (523 vs. 489, P=0.11) but was not a desired outcome and therefore classified as statistically insignificant. The Grand Theft Auto score was also impacted by the heavy-drinking subject’s need to urinate more often (Pee=2.5/hour vs. Pee=3.5/hour, P=0.22) which could be considered a distraction.

Conclusions
The commonly-held belief among many researchers and most wives that heavy beer-drinking will lead to obesity, stupidity, and an increased risk of traffic accidents and DUI arrests is not supported, but may require further research in other research environments, preferably during baseball season.

That’s it. Hand your wife a copy of the study and explain that according to carefully controlled research, it doesn’t matter how much beer you drink – the only risk is a slightly higher P score, which is no big deal because you always remember to put the seat back down. Then turn triumphantly towards the fridge to grab a cold one.

Of course, if your wife happens to be a real scientist – or is blessed with a functioning brain – she may stop you with one of those looks and say, “Frankly, my dear, this study Sacks.”