The Cult of the Diet: Or How the Waning of Religion in the West has been Replaced by the Food Inquisition

I haven't written a blog post on here in how long?! I got busy, and I decided that I was bored with critiquing all these studies, because really they're all the same crap. There's something wrong with all of them. They're either underpowered, or funded by special interest, or the researchers are unethical sacks of shit. You get the idea.

But I got with the 21st century and got a smart phone late last year. I made the mistake (only in that it takes up too much of my time) of following some very genius people on twitter like Woo, and it came to my attention that the ridiculous cult of personality that is people like Richard Nikoley and Carbsane and others have come into a veritable classical age. Why are these idiots even still around? Why have they not scurried off into the nether regions of the Interwebs? What's more, why do they care what I eat? Why do they care what you eat? No, I'm serious. You have to ask yourself why these people care so damn much whether you ate bacon for breakfast or potatoes. You can't tell me it's because they're altruistic or something. They're all really rude people with no manners and I find it hard to believe they are doing what they do out of the goodness of their hearts. So, why don't you do what makes you feel good, keeps your blood-work healthy, and keeps the weight off? If eating potatoes and bananas does that for ya, well, more power to you.

This is tangential though to what spurned this blog post. You see, in the West, formal religion has been on the decline for decades. A lot of people may identify as one religion or another, but many don't go to church or even socialize with others who share their beliefs. And that is why we have the rise of the 'gurus', people like Nikoley, and Carbsane, and the thirty-bananas-a-day guy (is he even still alive?). You're all looking for something that has meaning. Something to be a part of. You don't want to do the old school thing where you join a church. So you jump on, and sometimes fall off, bandwagons of cult personalities. This doesn't help you at all. All it helps are the ad revenues of people who really don't give a fig about your health, but were very happy that you brought traffic to their site and maybe even bought whatever they were hawking.

The 'gurus' have spawned something worse though than wasted time, wasted money, and perhaps inflicting ill health on people. They have spawned what I call the Food Inquisition. Excuse me, but when did it become okay to comment about what I eat? When did it become okay to comment on what is in my grocery basket? You see, when you think that the diet you are following is the One True Diet and all others are anathema, then the next logical step is we must squash the unbelievers! Burn the heretics! We can't allow them to eat bacon, don't they know it's going to kill them? We must get the government to intervene, make them tax everything that is bad for people, to protect them from themselves. Just like in the Medieval period, the Inquisition only functioned with the cooperation of the civil power.

Yes, it's that absurd. You see, evolutionarily speaking, we are really no different physiologically than our medieval ancestors, and I do think that some of you have taken a leaf out of their books. You need to stop it. Just stop it. Next time you feel compelled to comment about what someone is eating. Don't. If they want your opinion, they'll ask you. And chances are, they don't want your opinion.

Eggs will kill ya dead!

Today I happened to catch on the local news a story about how eggs are going to kill ya! They're going to kill ya dead, just like cigarette smoking! I just had to go find this study. Luckily the school I teach at subscribes to the journal it was in.

I have some huge problems with this study. The first is, it's not a random clinical trial. They only surveyed (yeah, nice waste of money) people coming to a vascular prevention clinic. Uh, is it just me, or do you think that people who are unhealthy, sick, and/or have a family history of illness are the most likely to go to a clinic like that?

Looking at Table 1 in the study, mean Triglycerides are high and so is BMI. So a lot of the participants are overweight. I wonder if there are any normal, healthy people in this survey? There's also a few diabetics thrown in for good measure. I didn't see where they controlled for that. But wait, because it gets better.

Table 1, click for larger version

Looking at Table 2, I almost fell out of my chair. From laughing. The people who ate the least eggs, <50 in "egg years", were the youngest. Their ages were 55.70 +/- 17.03 at first visit, so some of them were as young as 38.67 years. Now as the egg consumption goes up, so do the ages.  The people who ate the most eggs were much older. Their ages were 69.77 +/-11.38 at first visit. The youngest in the high consumption group was 58.39. That seems like some underhanded chicanery if you ask me!

Table 2, click for larger version

Of course the older people are going to have more instances of heart disease and thicker arteries too because of their age. They even state that in the article, that the older people have more plaque. Oh, but wait! The study says they "adjusted" for age. Why instead of poking around with numbers, actually study the same age groups? Or would that be because there wouldn't be any correlation? (Never mind causation.)

One could easily draw the conclusion that eggs have nothing to do with the thickness of the plaque, but with age. I could just as easily draw the conclusion that as you get older you eat more eggs. That's valid right? Or maybe the more eggs you eat, the older you get. Maybe if you never eat eggs you'll never get old? I'm screwed in that case!

It's interesting that they say that there were 2831 patients with data on egg yolk consumption, but only 1231 were used for various reasons. I'm sure those reasons were all good right, like not anything to do with throwing out data we didn't like, right? Right?

Also of interest, is that they found that fasting cholesterol, BMI, Triglycerides, HDL cholesterol and LDL cholesterol were not significant predictors of the thickness of plaque. Just egg yolks! 


In my humble opinion, considering that the sample was unbalanced, not random in the least and that more than half of the data they had access to was thrown out, that this amounts to someone with an agenda, with an axe to grind. Because if you really wanted to help people, and you really wanted to find out what was causing heart disease, you wouldn't have such poor research methods. However, if what you really want is to push an agenda, you won't care about data or ethics or anything else. You won't care if you kill people, so long as yours is the voice that is heard, so long as yours is the message that is received. Because diet is a religion to quite a few people out there, on all sides.

Just so you know, I'm my own experiment in this case. I eat at least three eggs almost every day. If I drop dead of heart disease, well, we won't know if it was the eggs that caused it, or my propensity for fountain diet cokes :P

There's No Fat in Sugar

We have an obesity epidemic in this country because our government, dietitians and doctors continue to give people the wrong information. Take for example an article on the Pima Indians from the NIH.

"Thirty years of research show that exercising and eating lower fat, fiber-rich foods can at least delay diabetes. "If you delay it long enough," adds Dr. Knowler, "It's almost as good as preventing it...

[NIH doctors] also discovered that high levels of insulin in the blood, or hyper-insulinemia, is another strong risk factor.

Studying this clue, researchers working with patients found that high levels of insulin were linked to insulin resistance. Normally, the pancreas releases insulin to regulate the amount of sugar or glucose in the blood. People who have non-insulin-dependent or Type II diabetes (hereafter referred to simply as "diabetes") produce insulin, but their bodies don't respond to it effectively. NIH researchers have made it clear that people with insulin resistance are those most likely to get diabetes...

The second strategy is to encourage those who are at high risk to change behaviors that can lead to diabetes, such as eating a high fat diet, being physically inactive, and being overweight.

The NIH has begun a major nation-wide program to prevent diabetes in people who increase exercise and eat lower fat foods." [emphasis mine]

Now let me explain something to you that even a five year old should be able to understand. We have three basic nutrients, fat, carbohydrates and protein. Carbohydrates break down in the blood into sugar. This causes you to secrete insulin, sometimes it makes people insulin resistant, some think quite possibly because of exposure to sugar and/or refined carbohydrates.

Once you are insulin resistant, simply cutting out the sugar and simple carbohydrates doesn't stop you from being insulin resistant. If you continue to eat carbohydrates, depending on genetics, you may become type 2 diabetic. If you don't eat carbohydrates, and restrict them severely, you will not. It's not possible (to my knowledge) to become diabetic if you are not eating carbs, because you don't have an increase in blood sugar if you're not consuming carbohydrates and therefore very little insulin is secreted. Some people can eat more carbs than others and be okay. Some have to cut out all carbohydrates, as in the case Taubes mentions in his book about the du Pont executive who couldn't even eat an apple. Some have said their insulin resistance improves after months of being on a low carb diet, and they can then have some carbs without having problems.

So you tell me why in the hell they are advocating that people who are already insulin resistant eat more carbohydrates? Because that's what they're doing. By lowering fat you raise carbohydrate consumption. Protein intake cannot increase very much, you can't tolerate too much of it (unless you're body building and breaking down muscle).

Why do they blame fat? I think it's because of the mistaken notion that since the Pima were agriculturalists that meant they didn't eat meat and that they only ate carbs. There isn't a single documented case of a native society being completely vegetarian, that I know of anyway. They usually tend to eat whatever they can get their hands on.

"A dietary change common to all these cases [of Native American cultures] has been the increased consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates ... Since the key diagnostic feature of diabetes is high blood sugar, often accompanied by sugar in the urine, diabetes is frequently spoken of as "sugar diabetes" and "I've got sugar" or "I've got high sugar"... All carbohydrates cause a rise in blood glucose, and the glycemic index, a meaure of the impact of food or a meal on the rise in blood glucose, has a significant but transitory effect on both insulin production and glucose homeostasis." --from the Encyclopedia of medical anthropology by Carol R Ember, p 342

Since the Pima didn't grow sugar or refine grain to within an inch of it's life, I'm going to go with door number 1. And that is, the Pima are overweight or obese and diabetic because they consume carbohydrates typically found in the western diet. They may have consumed carbohydrates before contact with Europeans, but they were not the same kind of carbohydrates. Also, because they live in a rather inhospitable place, they may have not gotten enough calories, and this functions in much the same way as carbohydrate restriction if Ancel Key's studies on starvation are worth anything.

It's sad that all of the Native Americans' ancestors were screwed over by the Europeans. But what's even sadder, is that they are continuing to be screwed over even today, just like every other overweight or obese person in this country who has been told that they're fat because they eat too much. They will continue to get type 2 diabetes, will continue to have legs amputated and will continue to die prematurely as long as the lie that fat is the problem is perpetuated.