Category: nutrition

The Ketogenic Diet and Evidence Snobs

Seth Roberts5 Comments

If we can believe a movie based on a true story, the doctors consulted by the family with an epileptic son in …First Do No Harm knew about the ketogenic diet but (a) didn’t tell the parents about it, (b) didn’t take it seriously, and (c) thought that irreversible brain surgery should be done before trying the diet, which was of course much safer. Moreover, these doctors had an authoritative book to back up these remarkably harmful and unfortunate attitudes. The doctors in …First, as far as I can tell, reflected (and still reflect) mainstream medical practice.

Certainly the doctors were evidence snobs — treating evidence not from a double-blind study as worthless. Why were they evidence snobs? I suppose the universal tendency toward snobbery (we love feeling superior) is one reason but that may be only part of the explanation. In the 1990s, Phillip Price, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, and one of his colleagues were awarded a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study home radon levels nationwide. They planned to look at the distribution of radon levels and make recommendations for better guidelines. After their proposal was approved, some higher-ups at EPA took a look at it and realized that the proposed research would almost surely imply that the current EPA radon guidelines could be improved. To prevent such criticism, the grant was canceled. Price was told by an EPA administrator that this was the reason for the cancellation.

This has nothing to do with evidence snobbery. But I’m afraid it may have a lot to do with how the doctors in … First Do No Harm viewed the ketogenic diet. If the ketogenic diet worked, it called into question their past, present, and future practices — namely, (a) prescribing powerful drugs with terrible side effects and (b) performing damaging and irreversible brain surgery of uncertain benefit. If something as benign as the ketogenic diet worked some of the time, you’d want to try it before doing anything else. This hadn’t happened: The diet hadn’t been tried first, it had been ignored. Rather than allow evidence of the diet’s value to be gathered, which would open them up to considerable criticism, the doctors did their best to keep the parents from trying it. Much like canceling the radon grant.

The ketogenic diet.

Compound in Red Wine Has Effects Like Calorie Restriction

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here’s part of the abstract from a recent paper titled “A Low Dose of Dietary Resveratrol Partially Mimics Caloric Restriction and Retards Aging Parameters in Mice”:

We fed mice from middle age (14-months) to old age (30-months) either a control diet, a low dose of resveratrol . . . or a calorie restricted (CR) diet and examined genome-wide transcriptional profiles. We report a striking transcriptional overlap of [the effects of] CR and resveratrol in heart, skeletal muscle and brain. Both dietary interventions inhibit gene expression profiles associated with cardiac and skeletal muscle aging, and prevent age-related cardiac dysfunction. Dietary resveratrol also mimics the effects of CR in insulin mediated glucose uptake in muscle.

This is from the introduction:

Resveratrol, a natural compound found in grapes and red wine has previously been shown to extend lifespan in S. cerevisiae, C. elegans and Drosophila through a SIRT1 dependent mechanism. However, recent studies have failed to reproduce these life extension results and other studies have demonstrated that the ability of resveratrol to activate yeast Sir2 or human SIRT1 is substrate-specific in vitro and resveratrol has no effect on Sir2 activity in vivo . . . . Recently, mice fed a high fat diet supplemented with high levels of resveratrol . . . were shown to have extended lifespan as compared to controls, and several metabolic alterations similar to what is observed with CR.

I first heard of the wonders of resveratrol from James Johnston and Donald Laub, authors of The Alternate Day Diet. Here is a review article about it. The interest of the new study is that a low (i.e., practical) dose is effective.

Thanks to Bob Levinson.

Lutein

Seth Roberts1 Comment

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Ever heard of lutein? If you have consider yourself well-informed. There is no Recommended Daily Allowance. But a study of monkeys fed a laboratory diet, presumably containing all necessary nutrients, found that they got macular degeneration eight years earlier than monkeys fed ordinary foods. The missing nutrient appears to be lutein, which is found in green leafy vegetables such as spinach. More info here.

One more indication that our knowledge of nutrition is incomplete even at the simplest (single nutrient) level.

Thanks to Martha Neuringer, who was one of the first researchers to study the brain effects of omega-3s.

Assorted Links

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  1. Why Word has an animated paperclip. For more on this, see the excellent Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Prestige, and Success by Art Kleiner.
  2. Does sugar make it harder to fight off microbes?
  3. Practical memory training.
  4. Interview with Leonard Mlodinow, author of Feynman’s Rainbow and the soon-to-be-published The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Peter Spero.

The McCarrison Society

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The McCarrison Society is named for Robert McCarrison, a British doctor who studied nutrition in India. Its website is full of important nutritional info, including this:

When I worked in East Africa from 1960 – 1965, there was not a single case of breast, colon or prostate cancer, no cardiovascular heart disease and any diabetes seemed relatively mild. Nor was this absence of such diseases due to poor diagnostic facilities.

It’s like a British version of the Weston Price Foundation.

Interesting lecture by Michael Crawford, its president.

More. It was founded in 1966 and has about 300 members.

80% Empty or 20% Full?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

A study in the latest issue of Journal of Nutrition wondered if following dietary guidelines (“eating healthy”) is helpful. From the abstract:

Few studies have found that adherence to dietary guidelines reduces the incidence of chronic disease. In 2001, a National Nutrition and Health Program (Program National Nutrition Santé) was implemented in France and included 9 quantified priority nutritional goals involving fruit, vegetable, and nutrient intakes, nutritional status, and physical activity. We developed an index score that includes indicators of these public health objectives and examined the association between this score and the incidence of major chronic diseases in the Supplémentation en Vitamines et Minéraux AntioXydants cohort. . . . Men in the top tertile [ = most adherence] compared with those in the lowest one had a 36% lower risk of major chronic diseases . . . No association was found in women.

No association in women. Suppose the guidelines were half correct — half of the advice was useless, half was helpful. You’d still expect an association because the helpful advice would help and the useless advice would neither hurt nor help.

Did the authors of this highly-informative study face their results squarely? No. The abstract concludes: “Healthy diet and lifestyle were associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases, particularly in men, thereby underlying relevance of the French nutritional recommendations.” Particularly in men, huh? The study started with about 2000 men and 3000 women. It lasted eight years.

How Bad is Dairy?

Seth Roberts14 Comments

A most intriguing comment on Tim Ferriss’s excellent post about how to sleep better:

To require less sleep and yet still feel awake, energetic and not sleep deprived in general:

The single biggest factor for me has been the elimination of all dairy products from my diet. I have experimented with this over 4 years now and it is clear the most benefit is achieved with the most radical approach to this. In other words, removing dairy products completely from my diet has the biggest benefit. Yes this means no chocolate, no products with whey in them, no milk, yoghurt etc etc. it’s also interesting to see how difficult this is to do, but the benefits are so astounding from an energetic lifestyle point of view that I do it for long periods of time at a stretch.

Huh. Cheese makes me sleepy, so much so that I use it to fall asleep on planes. I didn’t always understand this. Several years ago, I was in New York and bought expensive tickets to a Broadway show. Before the show I ate some cheese — samples at a store, maybe. During the show I fell asleep.

The Amish and Organic Farming

Seth Roberts1 Comment

One modern invention accepted by Pennsylvania Amish farmers is pesticides: They use horses to pull pesticide dispensers. This may play a part in an increase in birth defects in their community, which are usually explained by inbreeding. (However, large increases over short periods of time are almost always due to environmental changes.) A few years ago, Sally Fallon, head of the Weston A. Price Foundation, was part of a group visiting an Amish farm that had recently become organic (i.e., stop using pesticides). Someone asked the farmer why he had decided to change. Show them, he told his son, who had been standing with his arms behind his back. One of his arms had no forearm. We took that as a sign from God, said the farmer.

Gary Taubes’ Influence on Me

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Yesterday I had my cholesterol levels measured. My HDL was better than usual — I have ten years of records — and the Total Cholesterol/HDL ratio was good, which is unusual for me. Thinking about what might have caused this, I realized that over the past few months, mainly because of Good Calories Bad Calories, I’ve shifted toward what I think of as a pre-agricultural diet: plenty of meat and greens, no grains, a little fruit. Long ago I stopped eating packaged food. That was the pre-factory diet — a hundred years ago. Now I’ve moved back in time two more log units (log unit = factor of 10).

My interview with Taubes.