Prague Stepchild

Pig Foot Soup

2012-02-10T19:17:00.000+01:00

Commentor Scott asked me to post some pics of cooking the pig foot I bought a few days ago, so here they are, dude.

I cut the meat off the beef ribs and threw the bones in with the pig foot.

Gave it about an hour and a half in the pressure cooker

This is what it looked like after, a prop for an Alien film:

Threw in lots of celery, half a head of cauliflower, garlic, and a couple of onions diced up with my trusty V-slicer.

Gave it another 10 minutes or so in the pressure cooker, the mashed it.

Then hit is with the immersion blender.

Et voila!

And while I've been writing this I've been rendering some lard. Here's what it looked like when I started.

Which is one of the few uses I have for this expensive ass stainless steel wok.

Dr Doug McGuff Shut Out of AHS 2012 For Being An Anarchist or Something

2012-02-08T19:25:00.002+01:00

AHS is dead to me.

Sure, some of the best and brightest in the paleo/whatever world, people I have tons of respect for and have often corresponded with are going to attend and lecture, but shutting out Doug McGuff for being iconoclastic is pure unadulterated bullshit.

To quote from Dr Doug:

This week I was disappointed to learn that the presentation that Eric Daniels and I had planned for the 2012 Ancestral Health Symposium was not selected for inclusion. The title of the proposed lecture is: From Spontaneous Organization to Central Planning in Just One Year: How Policy Produced the Health Crisis and Will Cause Ancestral Health to Fail.

With a title like this it is little wonder that it was not accepted at an event run by the Harvard Food Law Society. Like Leonard Peikoff once said…”if you are openly putting your head in a buzz saw, you should expect to get bloody”. I proposed this talk after AHS11 because I saw a mounting tide of progressive sentiment that felt that things would be better if only public policy could be dictated by the “really smart people” at the meeting. I wanted to show how when great ideas emerge from spontaneous organization and market forces, that there is a tendency to want to capture those great ideas that percolated from the bottom up and make them into societal policies that are enforced from the top down. However, the enforcement of even good ideas from the top down by necessity stifles further creativity, prevents incorporation of new knowledge, and results in the good knowledge being applied improperly or out-of-context by a populace who receives its knowledge by an argument from authority.

I knew Doug McGuff was a sharp guy but the title of his proposed talk is simply awesome. From Spontaneous Organization to Central Planning in Just One Year: How Policy Produced the Health Crisis and Will Cause Ancestral Health to Fail.

And policy is still producing the health crisis. AHS wants a piece of that action.

Spontaneous organization is a fascinating subject, it's basically the driving force behind the internet and things like the paleo movement (or Linux or Wikipedia). Organizations that won't brook any criticism from major figures in their field are treading the road to serfdom.

The lesson: if you want to cogently criticize AHS for moving towards left wing/statist bootlickers they will take the typical left wing/statist bootlicker approach and censor you.

Real science has to be open to criticism. That's the core point of the scientific method--don't fool yourself. AHS prefers to move into the realm of monetized mysticism, which, to be fair, will probably make a lot of people rich and famous.

The CDC Goes After Bread--For Being Salty

2012-02-08T18:04:00.000+01:00

April Fools has come early this year at the Center for Disease Control.

Yeah, I wish.

I bitch about the hidebound idiocy of conventional medicine a lot, but this really has to take the cake.

The CDC have discovered something unhealthy in bread. Not all the glutinous white flour, no, it's all that damn NaCL.

I've written about salt quite a bit. I don't think it's a health problem for most people (it seems to be a risk factor for some). If you are pounding down the bread, the salt is the very least of your problems.

This is so far into the stupid zone that it's way beyond my pedestrian ability to mock or satirize.

This is for you CDC, a classic that never grows old:

Paleo Ain't Expensive

2012-02-08T14:35:00.001+01:00

As we've seen from the 7-day challenge I did a while back, price is simply not an excuse for avoiding paleo or real food for anyone who can afford to eat a standard crap diet.

I just got back from the local run to the local butcher, here's my haul:

All this stuff cost me 300 kč, about 15 USD:

1/2 kilo ground beef
1/2 kilo ground pork
1 kilo fatback for rendering lard
Some beef ribs
A bunch of Viennese sausages (for the kid)
A bunch of bacon (well, the Czech version)
1 pig foot

No fancy steaks or grassfed stuff, just lots of cheap meat (except for the bacon). When I'm feeling ambitious I buy whole cuts of meat and grind it myself, with the Fleischwolf, but I wasn't feeling it. I don't mind the grinding, I just hate cleaning up the damn thing.

This probably isn't all the meat we'll eat this week, but six kilos or so of protein, fat (and some bone) means a lot of calories for a family of three. I might throw in a vegetable or two.

Like some oven-dried tomatoes:

WAPF In Czech Republic

2012-02-05T13:23:00.001+01:00

The Czech chapter of the Weston A Price foundation is now active, with expats and Czechs participating. As Batman famously said when asked to join the Justice League, "I work alone." But I'm happy to use my bat-blogging powers to give them a heads-up.

Man, I need to spend less time watching cartoons with my kid.

Actually, Weston Price was kind of a real life superhero who solved crimes (against humanity) with his brain rather than innate superpowers, rather like Batman. If you aren't familiar with Weston Price, the original text is available here. And one certainly could do worse than read Chris Masterjohn on the subject.

(Thanks Daniel Visser)

Gambling and Other Addictions (Revisiting Food Reward)

2012-02-05T12:31:00.001+01:00

It's easy to be dismissive of other people's addictions. Gambling isn't heavily regulated here and there are a lot of herna bars in my neighborhood (smoke-filled bars with one-armed bandits and often other forms of gambling). There are four or five within a few blocks of our flat.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the "hyper-palatability" of modern processed food. This is often used as an excuse to regulate it. The line of reasoning goes something like this, "The evul corporashuns create hyper-palatable foods in their secret underground laboratories that we simply aren't capable of avoiding. Okay, WE can avoid those hyper-palatable Cheesy Poofs, but the poor dumb masses can't, so the government needs to step in." Stephan Guyenet, Robert Lustig and (apparently) most expert luminaries in the field of nutritional research generally take this as a given.

To quote Stephan from a few months back:

Dr. Robert Lustig gave a keynote address on Thursday evening, which I unfortunately wasn't able to attend due to my flight schedule. From what I heard, he focused on practical solutions for reducing national sugar consumption, such as instituting a sugar tax. Dr. Lustig was a major presence at the conference, and perhaps partially due to his efforts, sugar was a central focus throughout the day. Nearly everyone agrees that added sugar is harmful to the nation's health at current intakes, so the question kept coming up "how long is it going to take us to do something about it?" As Dr. David Ludwig said, "...the obesity epidemic can be viewed as a disease of technology with a simple, but politically difficult solution".

Taxes/regulations are vigorously opposed by the processed food industry, and also (more understandably) by people who don't want to have their food choices legislated. Children in particular should be federally protected from predatory food industry practices. Personally, I'm in favor of legislation that de-incentivizes added sugar consumption. What if we had a sugar tax that paid for some of the obesity and diabetes-related expenditures that taxpayers currently shoulder through Medicare and Medicaid? That would simply balance the "externalized" cost of health problems that are caused by sugar in the first place.

I'm not going to get into the externalities argument, that's easily shown to be a fallacy, but it oughtn't to matter even if it did exist.

Is the obesity epidemic a disease of technology? What does that even mean? Yes, we would all be healthier if we lived on farms, got plenty of exercise and ate real food--as long as we also had access to modern medicines like antibiotics, knowledge of germ theory, etc, along with knowledge of modern agricultural techniques. Otherwise we would be back in the middle ages where the average lifespan was like 12 nanoseconds or something.

I would liken the hyper-palatability of Cheesy Poofs to the hyper-gambility (yeah, I just made that up), of games like roulette or one-armed bandits with blinking lights and whatever else they come up with to stimulate the pleasure-response reaction. These could also be considered diseases of technology. If only electricity and the wheel hadn't been invented there'd be no roulette or one-armed bandits with blinking lights. And writing and the number system are responsible for the spread of card games such as poker. The solution is simple but politically difficult, more taxes, regulation and government intervention. Yeah right.

There's an addiction aspect to food. This I buy unconditionally. There's an addiction aspect to just about anything. Shopping is a big one that seems to affect a certain sex. But it can be anything, collecting stamps, finding the hippest band no one's every heard of, or memorizing baseball statistics. The main difference is that things like collecting stamps, unlike eating, aren't necessary for survival. Shopping is, at least in the world most of us live in, and I'm probably not the first one to suspect a hunter-GATHERER female predilection for this activity.

Getting back to the opening paragraph. It is easy to dismiss people engaging in an obviously destructive addiction like gambling. When I walk by a herna bar and see these people with their lined and weary faces lit by the light of a slot machine obsessively feeding in their hard earned coins I ought to think to myself, "There but for the grace of God, go I." Because I'm sure the impulse to become addicted to something like that has its germ in all of us.

What I don't condescendingly think to myself is that these people are suffering from a disease of technology and need to have the government step in and eliminate that technology for the good of the herd. I've a right, at least in some places, to shout from the rooftops that gambling is idiotic, animal fats are healthy, and ABBA really sucks. I don't have a right to use force to change people's behavior as long as they aren't hurting me. Lustig, Guyenet, et al, feel otherwise, but they've got PhDs and stuff.

How Fast Does Your Skin Wrinkle Up in Water?

2012-02-02T23:46:00.001+01:00

I've noticed my skin prunes quicker than it used to. I suspect this is tied up with overall health but I've never heard anything specific about it. Perhaps I'm just imagining things.

Pruning of fingers and toes in water seems to be related to the differential of water retention between the dermis and epidermis. But why the increased susceptibility to pruning as one ages? It takes a very long time for my five-year-old to have his skin wrinkle in the bath. I suspect there's an overall health correlation, and I suspect that this correlation could be tied in with diet.

Free Speech--Only For Qualified People

2012-01-31T17:42:00.000+01:00

Here's a quick quiz: which of the following statements are protected by the US Constitution's First Amendment?

1) Carbs, especially processed carbs and sugar are bad for a diabetic.

2) Hitler was a cool guy and the Holocaust is just Jewish propaganda.

3) The way to fix the economy is for the government to borrow colossal sums of money and spend it by giving it to politically connected companies and paying people to junk their cars. This increases aggregate demand and prevents a liquidity trap, and is really fun if you are politically connected or were planning on buying a new car.

4) Twilight is the greatest movie of all time.

Answer, all of the above...unless you live in North Carolina. While all the statements, except for the first one, are offensive to anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together, it is only the first one that can land you in hot water, unless you've been certified to say it.

This is what's facing Steve Cooksey at the health blog Diabetes Warrior. Steve was apparently providing "illegal nutritional counseling" for suggesting pizza and Mountain Dew might not be the optimal diet for a person whose pancreas is dying.

Let's just take a look at the First Amendment, shall we?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Since it is his blog they are going after, isn't that also violating freedom of the press? Or does that only apply to the "real" press, such as the NY Times or the Washington Post?

The interesting thing about a law only allowing certified people to dish out advice is that were a certified dietitian to give out the same advice as Steve, they would be in danger of losing their certification. So what the law essentially is saying is that only people who follow the party line of the ADA are allowed to tell diabetics what they should eat. Uhm, if that's not a violation of the First Amendment I don't know what is.

Only us experts are allowed to tell you what to eat--it's the law!

If someone is making false claims, that's another story. There's the famous case of Listerine having to redact its claims that its product could reduce or alleviate the common cold (although I'm not a huge fan of the FTC the ruling was upheld in court).

So perhaps the NC State Board of Dieticians would like to challenge Mr Cooksey's claims that vegetarian pizza really sucks ass for diabetics. What an awesome court case that would be! I'm pretty sure Dr Bernstein would be happy to testify for the defense. Also, I'm sure "qualified" people like Robb Wolf, Emily Deans, and Chris Kresser could be convinced to testify. Perhaps even Kurt Harris would leave his Fortress of Solitude, to make an appearance.

This is all reminiscent of Dr Annika Dahlqvist's struggle to treat diabetics in Sweden with an HFLC diet. She lost her job and went through a lot of shit for that (although she's now practicing as a full-fledged doctor again), but thanks to people like her (and especially her), Sweden is now a leader in HFLC.

I'll leave you with this video interview Jimmy Moore just did with Steve Cooksey. Which also has this awesome YouTube comment:

Guess what, Michelle Obama is going around this country trying to tell us what to eat and she is not a certified nutritionist either...!!! I rest my case..!!!

Breakfast of Champions

2012-01-22T22:11:00.001+01:00

We were just watching a BBC documentary about Apollo 11 and I was struck by the astronauts eating a steak and egg breakfast before jaunting off to the moon. Here's Michael Collins eating. There's some toast also but Collins hasn't touched it.

That's Buzz Aldrin to the left and I don't know who, one of the alternate astronauts, to the right with the map. The dude with the map is the only one who actually touched his toast (Buzz seems to have skipped the eggs and gone for steak and steak). Okay, I have to admit buzzcut redshirt guy looks to be in pretty damn good shape despite his partaking in toast and marmalade.

Speaking of Buzz Aldrin, the guy is currently 81 years old and going strong.

And he still has a damn good right hook.

The French and Autism

2012-01-21T17:25:00.002+01:00

Autism is a controversial subject--way more controversial than it should be, in my opinion. For interesting insight into autism one could do worse than start with Oliver Sacks--one of the kindest souls to inhabit this planet. In North America there is the baseless idea that autism is caused by vaccines. In France, there is the idea that autism is caused by depressed mothers and can be cured with psychoanalysis:

Sometimes, when the mother is depressed, in utero, I mean when she is pregnant or at birth, sometimes the child can be autistic,” an analyst tells the camera in one scene. Another explains that autistic children “are sick of language — autism is a way of defending themselves from language.

I'm no expert on autism, but I doubt anyone with a couple neurons to rub together thinks that autistic kids are sick of language or are the product of a depressed mother.

I enjoy making fun of the French as much as the next red-blooded American, and for the Brits, trashing the Frogs is a national sport (one of few sports in which they still excel). But the fact is, the French have been very slow to jump on the lipophobia bandwagon, and good for them. I very much doubt that these rent-seeking French psychoanalysts are suing the filmmaker because they think the average French citizen agrees with them.

Lies, Damn Lies and TV Reporters

2012-01-18T09:55:00.002+01:00

Paula Deen, a woman famous for cooking high-fat AND high-sugar food, has diabetes and is now going to get paid to promote Victoza (Liraglutide (NN2211)) a drug that "reduces meal-related hyperglycemia (for 12 hours after administration) by increasing insulin secretion, delaying gastric emptying, and suppressing prandial glucagon secretion".

Anthony Bourdain points out this is like breaking people's legs then selling them crutches. Except, I would add, crutches actually serve a useful purpose.

Now anyone reading this blog is most likely aware that adult onset diabetes is NOT caused by eating natural fats (although probably exacerbated by industrial seed oils). You know that, I know that, anyone with two brain cells to rub together that has looked into the issue knows that.

However, according Mikaela Conley, writing this ABC "news" article, Paula has Type II diabetes from eating too much butter:

Despite knowing her Type 2 diabetes diagnosis for years, Paula Deen, the all-smiles cooking host of the Food Network's "Paula's Best Dishes," continued touting her buttery, artery-clogging Southern down-home cuisine.

Deen, 64, confirmed today on NBC's Today Show that she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes three years ago and she is now launching a new campaign, "Diabetes in a New Light." The campaign is in partnership with diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk.

*sigh*

Kim Jong Il summed it up best in Team America, "Why is everyone so fucking stupid?"

As if that wasn't bad enough, the article goes on to imply that Anthony Bourdain finds her cooking unhealthy because of the fat.

Anthony Bourdain, a New York-based chef and host of the Travel Channel's "No Reservations," has long been critical of Deen's cuisine, having told TV Guide that the chef is the "worst, most dangerous person in America" because of her high-fat cooking. In the wake of her diabetes announcement, Bourdain had even more criticism to sling.

"When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got Type 2 Diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else," he told Eater.

I'm pretty sure Anthony Bourdain doesn't think animal parts cooked in animal fats is unhealthy because I've seen tons of his shows (including his most of A Cook's Tour) and never heard him whine about his arteries when eating rattlesnake fried in lard. And the guy is whip-thin despite all the "unhealthy" food he eats.

The ABC article about Paula Deen's diabetes doesn't mention sugar one single time. OK, it uses the word sugar twice in the form of blood-sugar. But never is the word sugar--as a food that is actually ingested--mentioned in an article about diabetes. Artery clogging fat is mentioned plenty of times.

Let me get this straight, SFAs are ingested by hapless pre-diabetics, where they somehow manage to jack up blood glucose AND clog arteries at the same time? And the solution to this is to inject daily a drug that INCREASES insulin secretion?!?!? Are these people fucking insane? This is seriously Orwellian "thinking"--not-thinking to be more accurate. Let's force a worn-out pancreas to work even harder, and when it breaks down completely we will just inject insulin, we will bathe in insulin, we will pave the streets with insulin and dead pancreases. Because if we have to give up the sugar and wheat and processed foods and industrial seed oils the terrorists win.

Wikipedia Takes a Stand

2012-01-17T11:48:00.000+01:00

Does anyone in the US remember this thing called the Constitution? Jimmy Wales does, and I applaud Wikipedia's planned 24 hour shutdown in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

A Motion Picture Association of America executive dubbed the blackout plan an example of the "gimmicks and distortion" that inflamed passions while failing to solve the problem of copyright infringement.

Don't you hate those inflamed passions against the loss of civil liberties?

Here's the thing about the rule of law: it has to apply to everyone all the time. Same thing with free speech. Otherwise you are living in a banana republic, which is where the US is rapidly headed.

SOPA and PIPA would continue the grave inroads into civil liberties that had its roots in the War on Drugs and was greatly accelerated by the War on Terror--especially with the Patriot Act. These acts would allow any website to be shut down by the entertainment industry, placing the burden of proof on the website. Guilty until proven innocent.

Freedom is all fine and dandy, but it really must take a backseat to more important things like people smoking pot, the threat of terrorism or the awful specter of someone posting the lyrics to a Britney Spears song.

As Ronald Bailey points out, this would grant powers eerily similar to what Putin likes to employ against those who disagree with him, or whose assets he likes to seize for one of his cronies.

Thanks Wikipedia and Reddit. And screw you Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest who complained about SOPA but weren't willing to act on principle. Thoreau is flipping you off from the grave.

Soren Bowie at Cracked has a humorous take on SOPA here.
Julian Sanchez at Cato Institute discusses SOPA here.

Addendum: the CEO of Twitter twitters "that's just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

SOPA would give the government (at the behest of alleged infringees) the right to shut down ANY website in the world, presumably because the US controls the DNS (Domain Name Service) of the major top level domains such as .com .org etc. I don't think country level domains (.cz .fr .uk etc) are controlled by ICANN but I'm not sure and am too lazy to research it. The point is, this IS a world political issue, Dick (yes that's his name).

Second Addendum: Google is adding a link to their homepage in a munificent show of solidarity--yes I'm being sarcastic.

Third Addendum: head of MPAA calls protests an abuse of power.

Is Space The Next Big Thing?

2012-01-12T14:07:00.000+01:00

[Warning: the following has nothing to do with diet or exercise or even politics (well, everything has something to do with politics)]

A friend and I were arguing about the viability of near future space travel and exploration. With him being optimistic on the future of space travel, saying it is the next big thing, especially in the private/commercial arena. I'm much more pessimistic. Why? Not because I don't think spaceships are cool and would love to see bases on the Moon and Mars and Titan and fleets of miners in the Asteroid Belt, and holiday package tours being offered for sand surfing the slopes of Olympus Mons. The problem is that the costs to lift something out of the Earth's gravity well are simply ridiculous using current technology (chemical rockets) and I don't foresee anything coming along in the near future to change that.

Actually, there already exists the technology to put a lot of mass into space at a relatively cheap cost--nuclear bombs. It's called a nuclear pulse rocket and it is essentially a giant nuclear-bomb-powered pogo stick.

Yeah, baby!!!

Personally, I've no problem with a little extra atmospheric radiation as a viable step needed to lift the tons of stuff necesary to kick off the space age. That's my idea of hope and change. Small amounts of radiation actually seem to have a hormetic effect. Unfortunately, this is another example of me being right, and most of the world being stupid & wimpy, so it's never going to happen (except possibly in deep space).

So the real questions are:
1) Why are conventional rockets so expensive?
2) Is there a technology in the pipeline to significantly reduce costs?
3) Is commercial space development viable with current technologies?

I was going to calculate the energy needed to lift a kilogram of mass into geosynchronous orbit, that thought lasted about 10 nanoseconds--then I just googled it (thus doth the internet make math wimps of us all). The answer is 6.24x10⁷ joules or 17.8 kilowatt hours(kWh). The average price per kWh in the US for 2011 according to BLS was 13 cents. Which puts the theoretical cost of putting a kg of mass in orbit using current electrical prices at $2.31 (yes, I did that calculation myself).

Gee whiz, $2.31 a kilo now all we need is a really long extension cord.

Then why does it cost so much to put so little mass into space? The current cost of putting a kg of mass into space is a lot. I'm not sure exactly, this old BBC article quotes $10,000/lb or $22,000/kg (but it's the BBC so take their facts with a truckload of salt). Also, there's a huge difference between low earth orbit (LEO), geosynchronous orbit (GSO) in terms of energy expenditure. Going into actual 'space'--leaving Earth's gravity well altogether--takes even more energy, but is not that bad once one reaches GSO.

Why does it cost so much more than $2.31/kg to put something into space? Socialism.

I kid. Actually socialism is only partly to blame in this case. The biggest problem are those pesky laws of physics. In order to lift a kilo of mass into GSO with a chemical rocket you really have to lift thousands of kilos of chemicals into LEO and hundreds of thousands of kilos of chemicals into the stratosphere. In other words, most of the fuel in a chemical rocket is consumed lifting the fuel in a chemical rocket.

How do we get around that?

In the short term (at least 20-30 years), I just don't think we can. I don't see any technology from scramjets to fusion rockets, that is going to be even close to viable in order to found a moonbase or any sort of self-supporting space colony or to even make a space station that isn't heavily subsidized by governments. I certainly think a lot of improvements can be made and I have nothing but high hopes for projects like SpaceShipTwo. But there's a huge difference between a sub-orbital and getting out there and actually doing something.

"Once you get to earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system."
-Robert A. Heinlein

PCRM And Flat Earth Society to Hold Joint Press Conference

2012-01-06T10:59:00.001+01:00

Whenever an organization has a weasel word like responsible in their title, it almost invariably indicates the opposite. This goes way back to the Holy Roman Empire, which, as the old joke goes, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, and is continued today by such luminaries as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM).

I don't know much about Jamie Oliver, except that he's got a mockney accent and has a very punchable face. But I'm willing to forgive him a few sins because his basic message is to eat real food (even if he thinks we need tons of government intervention to do that) and the PCRM, a vegetarian pressure group, hates his new cookbook.

Here's the awful truth about Jamie:

One serving of the Meatball Sandwich contains more fat than a Big Mac and more than double the calories, cholesterol, sodium, and saturated fat.

Like ohmigod!

It's easy to forget, living in the rarified paleo/lc/primal/real food/whatever world, that many physicians still think dietary cholesterol is unhealthy. Is that 50 year old rabbit study still cutting edge research in their minds? I knew about the salt and SFAs but dietary cholesterol? That's been so debunked it's pathetic. A meatball sandwich is not ideal because of the bread of course, but it is quite filling. I used to eat meatball subs at Subway for lunch (skipping breakfast) because they were cheap and then get by with a light dinner.

Honestly, all the cookbooks the PCRM hates look quite good. The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook has

More than 50 pages of recipes featuring grilled meat, which increases cancer risk.

Sign me up. Is there any real evidence linking grilled meat with cancer? I remember hearing about that back in the 70s (yes I was a kid, damnit) but I don't believe there's ever been anything substantial. The Neelys’ Celebration Cookbook:

Bourbon Bread Pudding is saturated with butter, half-and-half, and whole milk; high-fat diets increase heart-disease risk.

All the sugar and bread is okay, but that butter will kill ya, kill ya I say!

Oh you vegan propagandist doctors. If only you actually were held responsible for all the damage you cause, that would be some sweet poetic justice.

HT: KeepFoodLegal

Ron Effing Swanson

2012-01-01T19:28:00.003+01:00

Dear Readers, I give you the greatest work of art ever created. I encourage everyone to buy a copy and hang it next their Pyramid of Greatness.

The Cause of High Food Prices? Speculators Of Course.

2012-01-01T19:17:00.001+01:00

The economic geniuses at Wired magazine have decided that the "discovery" that high food prices are caused by evil speculators was one of the top scientific discoveries of 2011.

Biofuel demand played a role in in nudging food prices up -- but the spikes, the sudden and socially disrupting fluctuations, seemed to be caused by commodity speculators who entered food markets after the late-1990s wave of financial industry deregulation. The same forces that fueled the 2008 mortgage meltdown and subsequent near-collapse of the global economy have been turned loose on food.

If only agriculture was more heavily regulated, damn those evil speculators.

Source

Margarine, Regulation and Conventional Wisdom

2011-12-31T16:48:00.001+01:00

Margarine has an interesting history: first it was seen as a boon to the masses, and a frightening competitor to the dairy farmers, then it turned into a heart-healthy alternative to butter and lard, and now seems to be losing its credibility in the mainstream. Even my mother, a stalwart follower of conventional wisdom, has stopped buying margarine, even if she still buys skim milk.

Offering prizes is an awesome way to solve problems. Margarine came about because Napoleon III offered a prize for a cheap butter substitute, won by a guy with an unusual first name, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès. Okay, nowadays we know it is vile, unhealthy stuff, but it was a neat solution. And let's face it, no one, from peasant to royalty actually prefers the taste of margarine to the creamy goodness of real butter.

An interesting aspect in the history of margarine is all the government interference on behalf of this unctuous substance. To quote from Wikipedia:

By the start of the 20th century, eight out of ten Americans could not buy yellow margarine, and those that could had to pay a hefty tax on it. Bootleg colored margarine became common, and manufacturers began to supply food-coloring capsules so that the consumer could knead the yellow color into margarine before serving it. Nevertheless, the regulations and taxes had a significant effect: the 1902 restrictions on margarine color, for example, cut annual U.S. consumption from 120,000,000 to 48,000,000 pounds (54,000 to 22,000 t).

Of course, with the spread of the lipid hypothesis margarine, despite its inferior flavor, came into puritan vogue. And it still seems to be riding this crest of madness.

Patented to improve cholesterol ratio? I'm pretty sure that in 50 years time, that will seem as ridiculous as this:

Both claims are technically correct. Doctors preferring to smoke Camels doesn't strictly mean they are healthy and neither does obtaining a patent to supposedly improve cholesterol ratio, although I think the latter claim is slightly more nefarious.

And let us not forget about the recent butter "shortage" in Norway which was caused by a government sponsored monopoly.

Healthy School Lunches Almost a Huge Success

2011-12-21T13:13:00.003+01:00

In a manner that no one could've possibly saw coming a million miles away, the LA Country School systems politically correct, low fat, low salt, mostly vegetarian menu is a resounding success--with the US Dept of Agriculture and the guy from CSPI--with the very minor problem that it has been rejected en masse by the actual students.

From the LA Times:

It's lunchtime at Van Nuys High School and students stream into the cafeteria to check out the day's fare: black bean burgers, tostada salad, fresh pears and other items on a new healthful menu introduced this year by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

But Iraides Renteria and Mayra Gutierrez don't even bother to line up. Iraides said the school food previously made her throw up, and Mayra calls it "nasty, rotty stuff." So what do they eat? The juniors pull three bags of Flamin' Hot Cheetos and soda from their backpacks.

"This is our daily lunch," Iraides says. "We're eating more junk food now than last year."

So chicken nuggets have been replaced by Cheetos.

Acknowledging the complaints, L.A. Unified's food services director, Dennis Barrett, announced this month that the menu would be revised. Hamburgers will be offered daily. Some of the more exotic dishes are out, including the beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads. And the Caribbean meatball sauce will be changed to the more familiar teriyaki flavor.

Actually, beef jambalaya and Caribbean meatball sauce sounds pretty good. Although if my school days are anything to go by, I wouldn't be too excited to taste a public school cafeteria's version.

This doesn't sound so great though:

The district is even bringing back pizza — albeit with a whole wheat crust, low-fat cheese and low-sodium sauce, according to food services deputy director David Binkle.

Low fat, low sodium, whole wheat pizza, blech.

But some students said they still are not eating — including those who liked the food at the taste tests.

Andre Jahchan, a 16-year-old sophomore at Esteban Torres High School, said the food was "super good" at the summer tasting at L.A. Unified's central kitchen. But on campus, he said, the chicken pozole was watery, the vegetable tamale was burned and hard, and noodles were soggy.

My guess is that the posole tastes terrible because it's made with lean chicken and not much in the way of spices so it consists of water, posole corn (hominy), and some chewy chicken chunks. Real tamales are pretty awesome, but they are a lot of work to make. I'd guess the school cafeterias are rather overwhelmed trying to cook complicated, exotic dishes, since they can't even seem to get noodles right.

Principals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away. Students are ditching lunch, and some say they're suffering from headaches, stomach pains and even anemia. At many campuses, an underground market for chips, candy, fast-food burgers and other taboo fare is thriving.

Unopened skim milk cartons (AKA lactose water), since real 3.5% milk has been banned for some time. Headaches, stomach pains, anemia??? Wait, who is a prime candidate for anemia? Who gets headaches if they go without eating for a few hours?

On the plus side, it sounds like they've done a fantastic job lowering food reward. A statist who believes food reward is the prime cause of obesity would probably just call for more enforcement. US schools are already resembling prisons more and more every day, what with zero tolerance, metal detectors, locked-down campuses, jack-booted Sturmabteilung, I mean kindly police, and their drug-sniffing dogs doing random searches, etc. So why not go full gulag and enforce 100% compliance?

After all, it's for the children.

Chicken Pox and Sunlight

2011-12-19T12:05:00.000+01:00

Source

The Beeb writes about this study that hypothesizes a negative correlation between UV exposure and chicken pox. I have to give the BBC credit, while they didn't actually link to the study, nor mention vit D, they also didn't put in the mainstream media requisite scare quotes about sunscreen and skin cancer. I going to call this a win.

Ultraviolet radiation has long been used for sterilization purposes and viruses, unlike humans cells or bacteria, have no way to repair their DNA (which is really all they are), at least not that I know of, so it makes sense that UV from sunlight could destroy something like chicken pox. Increased levels of vit D obviously could be a factor. Studies have linked vit D levels to other viral diseases such as influenza. My guess is that both things are involved, assuming the link between UV and chicken pox is real.

World's Greatest Golfer Dies

2011-12-19T11:32:00.002+01:00

North Korean television announced that Kim Jong Il's condition has been downgraded to Kim Jong Dead. The rule of threes has struck again, and this time in a good way. Golfer extraordinaire and alien supervillain Kim Jong Il has gone to that great propaganda machine in the sky.

On a serious note, it's hard to imagine things getting much worse in (The Democratic People’s Republic of) NK, at least in the longer term, so the world can be hopeful of some sort of perestroika happening with the new leadership. On the other hand, Asian stocks fell on the news, so this is making a lot of people very nervous.

On a less serious note, enjoy this clip of Mr Kim in an introspective moment:

And So Long Vaclav

2011-12-18T19:42:00.001+01:00

My wife just got back from placing a candle for Václav Havel at Václavské náměstí in the center. Here's some pics:

I don't have much to say about this great man that others haven't or will be saying much more eloquently. As with Hitchens, I didn't necesarily agree with him (Havel was always, like Orwell, firmly on the left), but he was a man of principle, someone willing to stand up and take a big hit for their beliefs.

Update: great video via Pavol Hardos, via Reason.

At the end Havel says, for what I assume was a theater PSA, ""Thank you all for turning off your mobile phones. Truth, love,must win over tanks and hatred. Turn off your telephones."

Correction: Ondřej, a native Czech speaker, writes that it is "lies and hatred".

The Twinkie Diet--Long Since Debunked

2011-12-17T09:49:00.002+01:00

I bring this up because I still see the Twinkie diet pop up as "proof" of the calories in, calories out, or that food quality isn't important or some other BS. Tom Naughton, long ago looked at the actual diet and found it was low in calories (less than 1500 kcal/day) and moderate in carbs (~175 g/day).

As Mr Naughton puts it:

Now, 173 grams of carbohydrate per day certainly isn’t low, but it’s not high either. Depending on whose figures you use, that’s about half as many carbohydrates as an average American male consumes per day. It’s also at least 1,000 fewer daily calories than an average male consumes. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Professor Haub lost weight on a “Twinkie Diet” that is actually moderate in carbohydrates and very low in calories. I’d lose weight on that diet, too. (I’d hate it, but I’d lose weight.)

Tom, of course, lost weight and improved his blood panel by eating a fast food diet that was around 2000 kcal/day (if I remember right), which he documented for his movie Fathead.

Unlike the "professional" journalists who hyped this alleged junk food diet, Tom looked at Prof. Haubs' actual menu and did some calculations. Just one more reason to hate the mainstream media.

We Must Feed the Cute Little Animals--Heart Healthy Whole Grains!

2011-12-16T13:12:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Wikipedia, it has recently came to my attention that cute little animals like hedgehogs are having health problems from high sugar, and more importantly, high fat diets. Isn't it time for the human race to step up and start feeding our animal cousins the same heart-healthy grains that we already know are the basis for a long and healthy life. Anything else is simply selfish, and specieist to boot.

That's why I'm hereby announcing my plan to start a worldwide charity whose sole function is to pressure governments around the world to funnel their citizen's taxes into this very, very worthy project, nay mission. It is (dare I say it?) our destiny as a species (oh yes, I dare!) to enrich all God's creatures, great and small (but especially small and cuddly), with the wisdom that is the USDA food pyramid.

I know times are tough, but I'm asking each and every one of you to look deep into your hearts, and especially your wallets, and give, give, give. The sooner we act, the sooner we can stop poor helpless bunny rabbit families from clogging their furry little arteries with bacon cheeseburgers.

So Long, Hitch

2011-12-16T11:24:00.000+01:00

Even though I disagreed with many of his (sometimes willfully contrarian) positions, especially on interventionist wars and Americans playing world cop, I always had a ton of respect for Christopher Hitchens as one of the great minds of the times.

The guy was way up on my bucket list of people I'd love to have lunch with. Alas, it will never happen.

Addendum: here's Hitch taking on the unctuous Bill Maher and his sycophantic audience with loads of panache:

Hedgehogs, Heart Disease and Fatty Livers

2011-12-15T15:53:00.001+01:00

Source

This stuff is just so insidious. I was looking up hedgehogs for the kid and came across this on Wikipedia:

Hedgehogs suffer many diseases common to humans.These include cancer, fatty liver disease, and cardiovascular disease.

Cancer is very common in hedgehogs. The most common is squamous cell carcinoma. Squamous cell spreads quickly from the bone to the organs in hedgehogs, unlike in humans. Surgery to remove the tumors is rare because it would result in removing too much bone structure.

Fatty liver disease is believed by many to be caused by bad diet. Hedgehogs will eagerly eat foods that are high in fat and sugar. Having a metabolism adapted for low-fat, protein-rich insects, this leads to common problems of obesity. Fatty liver disease is one sign, heart disease is another.

Fatty liver disease and heart disease caused in part by a high fat diet? Sugar I can see, but fat? My spidey sense immediately started tingling. Are insects really low in fat?

Apparently not. About three minutes of googling got me to this paper:

This study found that food insects supplied 16100Kcal/person/year and 513grams of protein/person/year. Results also showed that food insects were an expensive source of protein but not fat. The proximate composition showed that grasshoppers contained 32g/100g of protein and 54g/100g of fat whereas white ants contained 31g/100g of fat and 65g/100g of protein. Fatty acid analysis showed that grasshoppers and white ants fat was predominantly unsaturated with 60% and 57% unsaturated fats respectively. Grasshoppers and white ants had 13.4% and 6.7% linoleic acid respectively, and 44% and 48% of oleic acid respectively.

If grasshoppers and white ants are at all typical, their fat content is double that of protein and is the majority of their composition [Ed. grasshoppers are majority fat, white ants majority protein]. So insectivores such as many hedgehog species are adapted to eat a high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet. Grasshopers are 14% carb and white ants are 4% carb. If hedgehogs are developing diseases of civilization, it's not because they aren't adapted to a high-fat diet, it's because they are eating the same crap that cause humans to do develop these same diseases.

Gary Taubes on EconTalk

2011-12-14T13:18:00.000+01:00

This is a few weeks old, but Gary Taubes talked with libertarian economist Russ Roberts about GCBC and bad science.

Roberts thinks that economics and nutrition have a lot in common, in they are both heavily politicized and it is difficult to prove hypotheses, or more importantly disprove, hypotheses because of the complexity of the body or the economy. This is why we still see Keynesian models being advocated by left wing economists such a Paul Krugman. There's no null hypothesis for the Keynesian model, they simple reply, "but things would've been so much worse if we hadn't wasted all this money".

Anyway, a few interesting quotes from Taubes:

Remember, Keys comes up with this hypothesis; he believes it. I think as early as 1952 he was telling everyone that he believed that all Americans should eat very low fat diets, even though he was admitting that there wasn't evidence to support the hypothesis. So, he could say those things simultaneously. Like Einstein did: I'm sure I'm right and we should act on it, even though I admit that we have no evidence. But we will; it's just a matter of time.

The word "yet" shows up all the time in these studies. You can see it in newspaper articles: We don't have the data yet. One of the things I'm always arguing to people in these fields is you may never have the data. Never use the word "yet." It's a hypothesis. As soon as you start thinking in terms of "yet," you know that you've become biased and you are not going to be able to do good science. Slippery slope. Keys, because he's the leading proponent of the idea, even though he's done one bad study after another and he's actually been spanked by one report that came out of the AHA back in 1956, 1957 where they had a team of cardiologists, bio-statisticians look into this and say there's just no evidence to support it. But because he's the leading proponent, he's the one you give money to test the study.

And this is how bias can interject itself into research from the very get-go. So, instead of saying: That's a very interesting idea, Ancel; why don't you come up with a study on the idea and we'll have a group of very smart people design it with you and then we'll fund somebody else who is unbiased to do it. Instead you say: Here's $200,000, you do the study. And Ancel's not that interested in refuting his hypothesis. There's not a Popperian bone in his body. But he's a doctor and he cares about people. I said that with irony. But academics, doctors get the benefit of the doubt and it's presumed that they are unbiased, that they only care about the truth. And of course they care about money--one thing--but they also care about their reputation, the glory, the fame; they don't want to be embarrassed.

Taubes makes a good point about the incentives in the research field, which of course he's done before many times. As any good economist will tell you, incentives matter. I wonder what the solution is. Taubes thinks that people shouldn't be allowed to test their own hypotheses and that's a fair point. In physics there is a natural delineation between experimental physicists and theoretical physicists. In nutrition it seems that the people advocating hypotheses are actually running the experiments. Still, I wonder who these unbiased people would be to actually perform the experiment? That's a lot easier to say than actually implement. Especially in a politicized field such as economics or nutrition.

Taubes also admits to being an advocate himself for his hypothesis:

Once you bet your reputation on a hypothesis, you cease to do science. You cease to test it, and now what you do is you look for data to confirm it. You are an advocate. It's true. I now have an alternative hypothesis and I'm an advocate for that hypothesis; and I hope it's right because it's going to be very hard for any data to come along and convince me it's otherwise.

He's right that very few people are willing to part with a hypothesis after they've bet their reputation on it. Personally I think Taubes and Stephan Guyenet are both advocates. Steve Landsburg points to a pretty amazing counter-example.

Just to be clear, here: That’s Ed Nelson cheerfully acknowledging that the book-length argument he’s been painstakingly constructing for (probably) years, and which was intended to shake the mathematical world to its foundations, doesn’t work. This says so many good things about the culture of mathematics, and so many good things about the Internet, and so many good things about the way they interact (see here and here for more examples), and it says those things so eloquently, that I see no further need for comment.

Oh Ed, you sure could've taught old Ancel Keys a thing or two.

Also I enjoyed this from Taubes:

It's good here to remind the listener that Albert Einstein after the famous study that he had predicted that the gravitational field of the sun would bend starlight, and it was tested, beautiful experiment, and it was found to be true; somebody asked Einstein afterwards: What would you have done if the results hadn't confirmed your experiment? And he said: Well, I wouldn't have believed them because I know I'm right.

And if you are the smartest person in the world--actually, it's even a little more dangerous when you are the smartest person in the world. But that's a common view that most scientists have. And of course many times they are wrong. It's the nature of science to make mistakes. Hypotheses don't get borne out by the data; there are things you didn't observe or imagine that could have other effects.

And speaking of Einstein, he also apparently said this:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Duh, like no wonder you couldn't come up with a unified field theory, dude. Honestly, I think a better solution would be to able to grow meat artificially. Yeah, I know, sort of goes against the whole real food mentality, but it ought to be possible to grow a steak (ie a muscle) and feed it on the bacteria that a ruminant would normally get from digesting cellulose. In other words, cheap grassfed meat that a vegan should have not ethical qualms about. I think they'd find an excuse to halve qualms anyway, but still it would pretty groovy.

Addendum: damn I forgot to mention that Russ Roberts is the guy (along with John Papola) behind these awesome Keynes vs Hayek rap videos:

Obesity Is Not the Government's Business

2011-12-13T10:16:00.002+01:00

I didn't watch the last republican debate, but I saw the highlight clip of Ron Paul's responses. His reply to what the government should do about obesity and health was particularly spot on.

Here it is, starting around 9:20:

Diane Sawyer: "I was just at a pharmacy here in Iowa. And the pharmacists were talking about a big driver of healthcare costs, and they specifically mentioned habits, unhealthy habits that we all need to do better on at a young age, they talked about obesity, they talked about exercise, if I can ask you Congressman Paul, ANYTHING government should do on these fronts? [...] On these fronts specifically of healthy behavior at very young ages."

Ron Paul: "No, essentially not, but they have to be a referee. If people are doing things that hurt other people, yes. But if you embark on instituting a society where government protects you from yourself, you're in big trouble. And that's what they're doing.

Awesome answer.

Paul goes on to say:

"Once government uses force to mold behavior or mold the economy, they've overstepped the bounds and violated the whole concept of our Revolution and our Constitution."

Beyond the core argument that it's not the job of the government to tell, and especially coerce, people into making lifestyle choices, there's the more practical argument that the government usually gets these things terribly wrong, as we've seen with the demonization of SFAs and lionization of "heart-healthy" grains that is still the party line of the US government and many others like Denmark who recently instituted a fat tax.

Incidentally, the line about externalities that is always brought up in regard to health and other such issues as an excuse to control people's behavior is total bullshit. Obese people end up costing the system less in the long run, at least according to this Dutch study, because they die sooner, and frankly it's their own business, anyway. I think most obese people would prefer to be thin and healthy if they only knew how that was possible--here's a hint: don't take advice from the government.

Don Matesz Goes Full Retard

2011-12-11T14:12:00.001+01:00

Never go full retard, man.

It is with perverse pleasure that I still keep Don's feed. And since foreswearing a Paleo diet and becoming a vegetarian, he's not disappointed. Way back when I thought Don was a rational human I made a serious response to his equating modern physics with shamanism. Now that he's descended to the point of singing the praises of T Colon Campbell, I just have to shake my head in awe.

Never go full retard, man

But the point of this post is not to dis Don.

I'm a real 80/20 kind of guy. This is both a strength and a weakness. I've known a lot of gung-ho types, they are gung-ho into one thing and often gung-ho into the opposite thing six months later or six years later. Frankly, these people make me nervous.

Don Matesz has a degree in philosophy and I have a degree in electrical engineering. I would argue that there is an important lack of bullshit in the hard sciences and in the field of engineering. It's simply not possible to fake a mathematical proof or a microwave antenna array (yeah, my specialty was e-mag).

There are plenty of intelligent bloggers out there who only have degrees in the school of life, and I've nothing but respect for them. What I despise more than anything are the folks who use the guise of science to advance their own propoganda, and Don has definitely fallen into that rabbit hole.

And if anyone is offended by my use of the word retard, don't be, some of my best friends are liberals.

A Must Read For Serious Lifters--Or Anyone Just Looking For Inspiration

2011-11-26T10:03:00.001+01:00

If there's anyone who reads this blog, is into fitness and hasn't heard of Jamie Lewis, you are missing out. He happens to be very much NSFW, so if that's a problem you'll want to skip it--but it'll be your loss.

It's really cool to see hobbyist bloggers with something to say turn into professional authors and/or speakers, and I think that's the direction Jamie is headed. I've ripped on Tim Ferris before because he strikes me as a bullshit artist. Jamie is the real deal. Mr Lewis is, pound for pound, one of the strongest dudes on the planet. And he has just finished writing an ebook that's now available for 12 greenbacks.

Jamie's exercise style is pretty much the opposite of my own, he works out six days a week with very heavy weights, I do bodyweight stuff and mostly sit on my ass. But one can't argue with results and regardless of one's style of exercise he's a very smart guy along with being a very strong guy. Check out the blog and buy the book if you like to move around heavy things.

Note: I've corresponded with Jamie a few times but he didn't ask for an endorsement, this is strictly my own opinion and of my own cognizance. I think he's a blogger to watch and I hope his ebook does well. I'd love to see a world where people can successfully support themselves on the merit of their ideas and their integrity, especially in the arena of exercise which tends to be mostly about hype, trends and bs.

FDA To Regulate Salt

2011-11-26T08:24:00.001+01:00

Via Walter Olson at the Cato Institute. The FDA now wants to make salt a controlled substance. This wouldn't really affect people who eat real food but it is still ridiculous.

In a September 15 “Request for Comments, Data, and Information” (PDF) published in the Federal Register, the FDA solicits from the public “comments, data, and evidence relevant to the dietary intake of sodium as well as current and emerging approaches designed to promote sodium reduction.” Among the specific ideas it has in mind: setting federally prescribed “targets” for “stepwise” reductions in the amount of salt allowable in various foods, the phased nature of the reductions indicated because consumers’ “taste preference for sodium is acquired and can be modified.”

Various government programs (notably in Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City) already arm-twist producers into supposedly voluntary reductions, but the FDA notice hints broadly that voluntary measures will not suffice. Its public comment period ends next Tuesday, November 29; let’s hope the agency gets an earful from citizens about the importance of freedom and consumer choice.

Like the mythic case against saturated fat, the case against salt is very weak and heavily politicized. I'm a big fan of salt myself, but I think it's important to shell out the extra baksheesh for grey sea salt with the trace minerals.

The war on drugs is working out so well, why not extend it to one of the most common and biologically important substances on the planet? When the prisons are full, offenders could be sent to the salt mines, ha!

Mythic Archetypes and The Myth of Educational TV

2011-10-23T14:13:00.001+02:00

source

The last few days my kid has been sick, and to keep him bouncing off the walls he got to watch umpteen episodes of The Justice League. Not only do I not have a problem with this, I've come to think this is actually "educational television" at its finest.

The kid is bilingual, he speaks both Czech and English as a mother tongue, although he started by speaking mostly Czech. Czech has the advantage that everyone speaks it in this country, but (American) English has the advantage that Daddy speaks it, and more importantly, so does Batman. Now that he's on the cusp of five, he's become a real connoisseur of language--totally fascinated by expressions--and it's pretty amazing to see him pick up on these things. Czech simply can't keep up in the cool phrases department. A few minutes ago he was watching Planet 51 and made me rewind the phrase, "...not full of sea-monkeys dancing to the oldies," five time because he thought it hilarious even if he didn't fully understand it. This also entailed explaining what "oldies" and "sea-monkeys" are.

The vocabulary my kid has picked up from watching such "mindless crap" has made my wife a believer. It won't be that long before my kid will have a better English vocabulary than she does, which is pretty amazing for a four-year-old living in a country where his only exposure to English is me, TV shows and the occasional long distance conversation with grandparents or our ex-pat friends (also my wife and I speak English together at home).

This is where I get deeply skeptical of the naturalistic ideal or hippie-dippie aspects of Paleo/Primal/etc mindset, or what Kurt Harris calls Paleo reenactment. I've seen Paleo-type bloggers complain about things like running or walking with mp3 players. When I go for walks I usually listen to podcasts and frankly see nothing wrong with it even if my HG predecessors didn't own a Walkman. Hell, I had a paper route for years and spent many tedious hours folding and throwing newspapers at ungodly hours with nothing to listen to but AM radio. This is why I still have a burning hatred for Stevie Nicks. I would've loved to have an MP3 player where "every song you've ever heard, or will ever hear or will ever be written can be put on that thing," as Patton Oswalt put it, yet cost less than 100 US monopoly money dollars.

Now I could point that stories about mythic archetypes have been with us forever, told while sitting around the fire talking of Odin or Coyote the Trickster or whatever, If I wanted to put some sort of What Would Grok Do spin on this, and I actually think there is something to that. What is Batman but a flawed demi-god who drives a really, really cool car?

I've written before how I consider educational (and especially moralistic) TV to be worthless as an educational tool and worse than useless by people who think these shows have some sort of intrinsic merit. But now I'm going to go even further and say, based on my n=1 parenthood experience, that it's the kind of television made for pure entertainment that can actually have the merit of being educational.

So my advice is, if you have a bilingual kid and you want them to improve their language skills, let them watch whatever they find most interesting--this will probably not be a show created by education "experts". But why should this stop at bilingual kids? I think that homo sap children in general, with their big ol' brains, naturally gravitate to the more complex and subtle, that there's a natural urge to unfold one's mental wings. This is probably accelerated by older sibling's perceptions of what is cool, and coolness usually entails a lot of subtle signalling that is (purposefully) opaque to other groups like parents or non-hipsters--again a drive towards more subtlety and complexity.

This is not to say I'm going to be enrolling my kid in a Sudbury School or homeschooling him with Michael Bay movies. There's a time for having stuff shoved down your throat by your parents, and that time is when your parents can beat you up. Seriously, I'm not even close to believing that all learning should be "fun". We've all known people with immense talent that was immensely squandered for lack of application and discipline, it's practically a cliché. There is the rote aspect of discipline to any enjoyable skill, be it tennis, mathematics or dwarf tossing. And while guys like Richard Federer and Aragorn may make such things look easy, there were countless hours of tedious practice behind their effortlessness.

But if your kid is going to watch some television (and why shouldn't they?), I think shows like The Justice League whip Dora's little ass.

For The Man With a Macrophage, Everything is Inflammation

2011-10-08T10:51:00.004+02:00

I was trying to explain to the kid how the immune system works in terms of superheros, ie leukocytes are like the Justice League, antibodies are like, uhm, sidekicks? Yeah well, doesn't really work. The whole point was to get him to understand that eating crap screws with the immune system, so stop asking for ice cream every day when we pass the shop. As you can guess, there's still a lot of work to do there.

Anyway, I came across these cool videos on YouTube trying to illustrate things, and it prompted me to read more about macrophages.

Here's some pathogens in the bloodstream glomming onto a white blood cell (lymphocyte? doesn't say what kind) then a pathogen getting glommed by antibodies, then eaten by a macrophage:

And here's a macrophage realizing there's a full-on alien invasion and sending out a distress signal in the form of inflammatory (put out the Bat Signal) cytokines:

Best of all, here's a neutrophil chasing a bacterium with Benny Hill music:

I think it is pretty fascinating that macrophages not only eat pathogens (and debris), they repair muscle damage, including hormetic damage such as pumping iron. Macrophages repairing damage release anti-inflammatory cytokines.

To quote Robert McLeod, a much more knowledgeable person on this subject:

M1 macrophages are pro-inflammatory and fight infection. They are the classical state for macrophages that you would find described in a textbook. Primarily, they detect and fight foreign organisms (viruses, bacteria, and parasites). They are characterized by the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, chemicals which alert the other cell types of your immune system to react and destroy the invader (as well as adjacent 'self' cells).
M2 macrophages are anti-inflammatory and repair tissue damage. For example, when you exercise and your muscle tissue is damaged, it is M2 macrophages that infiltrate your muscle organs and affect the repairs [Tidball, 2010] after the initial M1 surge. The characteristic cytokine of M2 macrophages is interleukin-10 (IL-10), which encourages other macrophages to enter the tissue and differentiate into M2 phenotype but also discourage the attention of cyto-toxic 'killer' cells from the lymphocyte family of the immune system.

If one believes that diseases of civilization (DOCs) are caused by chronic inflammation which is in turn caused by neolithic agents of disease (NADs), which I definitely do, then the role of macrophages and their cytokines becomes of vital interest.

Now I'm going to add in another element, this one's more controversial, more tentative but it's been gaining a lot of traction in the last few years, that DOCs are caused by chronic infection. Robert McLeod gave a good summary of this back in 2009, and Paul Jaminet is a firm believer in this. Assuming the chronic infection theory is true, who is supposed to be gobbling up these pathogens that are hiding out in our bodies for years on end? That's right, macrophages. Now we have muscle repair, chronic inflammation, chronic disease and reality television all tied up with macrophages and cytokines.

McLeod again:

The differentiation of macrophages, from M1 to M2, is not all that distinct and is generally though to represent the two extremes of a continuum. My reading suggests macrophage populations can make the transition from one phenotype to the other, without die-offs. This is probably a bad thing for chronic modern diseases, in that many of the diseases that are as a result of macrophage dysfunction occur when apoptosis (programmed cell death) is impeded.

One of the beneficial effects of eating a diet low in inflammatory factors (e.g. fructose, wheat, smoking) is that the overall levels of pro-inflammatory hormones, such as cortisol or interferon, are low so the transition from high M1 expression to high M2 expression can occur more rapidly. I strongly suspect this is why most people who transition to the paleo-diet are much better able to put on muscle mass. As the Tidball article indicates, chronic exercise is another no-no because it doesn't give enough time for the M2 macrophages to enter and affect repairs, so the muscle is always in an inflamed state.

First of all, I've got the chronic exercise thing totally nailed. I'm a world-class not chronic exerciser.

The ability to transition and ratio of inflamatory/anti-inflamatory (M1/M2) is apparently quite important and is likely related to the amount of NADs we eat. Oh and guess where tons of M1 macrophages belching out inflammatory cytokines love to congregate? Yeah, in fat tissue. Especially belly fat of fat people. McLeod quoting a gated article by Olefsky and Glass:

The discovery that adipose tissue from obese mice and humans is infiltrated with increased numbers of macrophages provided a major mechanistic advance into understanding how obesity propagates inflammation (4, 5). Adipose tissue contains bone marrow–derived macrophages, and the content of these macrophages tracks with the degree of obesity (4, 5, 31, 32). In some reports, greater than 40% of the total adipose tissue cell content from obese rodents and humans can be composed of macrophages, compared with ~10% in lean counterparts (32).

Wow, more than 40% of fat tissue composed of macrophages screaming, "CODE RED!!!" That's a pretty stunning number. The obvious solution is to make a drug that reduces M1 macrophages to combine with the statins right? Then we'll have fixed things right and proper!

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Falsifiability and Footballs and Comics

2011-10-02T11:32:00.000+02:00

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal does a great comic about induction and playing doctor:

The girl is a Popperian.

I'm not sure if Charlie Brown is a Popperian. He certainly doesn't seem to believe in induction when it comes to fussbudgets and footballs.

Or maybe he's just stuck hoping for a black swan event.

Popper, as I understand it, argued that science is not about proving hypotheses but about falsifying hypotheses, since no hypothesis can be proved true until every single case is examined.

Here's Martin Gardner expressing skepticism of Popper:

A familiar example of falsification concerns the assertion that all crows are black. Every find of another black crow obviously confirms the theory, but there is always the possibility that a non-black crow will turn up. If this happens, the conjecture is instantly discredited. The more often a conjecture passes efforts to falsify it, Popper maintained, the greater becomes its "corroboration," although corroboration is also uncertain and can never be quantified by degree of probability. Popper's critics insist that "corroboration" is a form of induction, and Popper has simply sneaked induction in through a back door by giving it a new name. David Hume's famous question was "How can induction be justified?" It can't be, said Popper, because there is no such thing as induction!

[...]
Consider the current hypothesis that there is a quantum field called the Higgs field, with its quantized particle. If a giant atom smasher some day, perhaps soon, detects a Higgs, it will confirm the conjecture that the field exist. At the same time it will falsify the opinion of some top physicists, Oxford's Roger Penrose for one, that there is no Higgs field.

To scientists and philosophers outside the Popperian fold, science operates mainly by induction (confirmation), and also and less often by disconfirmation (falsification). Its language is almost always one of induction. If Popper bet on a certain horse to win a race, and the horse won, you would not expect him to shout, "Great! My horse failed to lose!"

Not surprisingly, I'm with Gardner and Popper's critics (and poor half-naked Bobby) on this.

Anyway, screw all this philosophy stuff, what's on TV?

Needless to say, they are watching Dr Oz telling them to eat a low-fat diet with plenty of heart-healthy grains to fatten them up for slaughter.

Announcement For My Fellow Cultists

2011-09-29T12:06:00.000+02:00

Attention all fellow cult members, this week we are having a discount on black robes and candles, please contact your closest cell member for details.

First Richard Nikoley relates how his father (who happens to have the world's coolest name), was told by his bible-thumping brothers that eating Paleo is a cult, then Dr Davis takes umbrage at being compared to David Koresh in an Amazon review of his new book. This seems to be the last gasp defense of those who think eating bread and margarine is healthy.

Here's my take on being compared to a cultist:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

(breathe)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!

And when I stop laughing like a drunken hyena I would say, "Is that all you got?"

There is the famous quote which may or may not be attributable to Ghandi:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Being accused of being a cultist because I avoid grains, sugar and frankeoils is very much beyond the mocking stage and well into the fighting stage. Yeah, it's pathetic, but them's fighting words nonetheless. OK, more like laughing words, but they're meant to be fighting words.

This is what it feels like to win my fellow cultists. The tide is turning and the idiots are grasping at straws. OK, so my dogmatic sister-in-law doctor is still advising my father-in-law to avoid SFAs whilst he indulges in tons of sugar (cancer and double bypass notwithstanding), but the tide is definitely turning. If anyone accuses you of being a cult member make sure and do whatever the hell you feel like, because who am I to tell you how to react? But I would advise you to laugh like a drunken hyena or else you totally won't get that very considerable discount on robes and candles we are offering.

Meanwhile, here's a picture of true evil, or at least one of the better portrayals Hollywood has come up with:

My Kid Is Stronger Than Your Kid

2011-09-27T15:25:00.000+02:00

Well, not so likely if you are reading this blog. But it is pretty amazing to see how much more physical my kid is than most of his peers, especially the older kids. Is this because he eats (more or less) a healthy diet rich in SFAs, protein and low in sugar and other NADs? Impossible to say for sure, of course, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

One of my kid's favorite things is to climb up the firepole at the local playground. I've seen many other older kids try and copy him and fail abysmally.

Going up

He's also the only kid at the playground typically wearing shorts, much less going shirtless. The majority of kids are actually wearing hats, so they won't get damaged by the awful Northern European September afternoon sunshine. I get plenty of hairy eyeballs from Czech mothers, but I think it mostly gets tipped to the fact that I'm a presumably lackadaisical father and an obvious foreigner.

Review: Perfect Health Diet

2011-09-26T10:33:00.000+02:00

Do not adjust your sets, yes that's a bowl of ice cream

I'm not sure when I first started hearing about PHD and reading the blog. It wasn't that long ago, maybe six months at the outside. It was one of those things where suddenly all the blogosphere hepcats were talking about it.

There exists the musician's musician, the comedian's comedian, or the actor's actor. What's cool about this book is that it is sort of the health aficionado's health book, yet at the same time extremely accessible. So accessible that my wife has pretty much been monopolizing it since it arrived more than a month ago. This is especially notable because my wife's native language is Czech, and while her English is excellent, she's not crazy about reading books in English. In fact she just plain doesn't do it. Which I can understand. Back when I was making a serious effort to learn Czech, I would buy Czech newspapers, and try to read Czech books, etc. Reading is something I do for enjoyment, and reading in a foreign tongue is just too damn much effort to be enjoyable. My wife is the same way (even though her English is light years ahead of my Czech).

I found Good Calories, Bad Calories to be a fairly easy and compelling read but it really needed more graphs and illustrations. A picture can be worth a thousand words and a simple xy graph can often encapsulate a lot of text. PHD is easy on the eye in this regard. Here's a couple of shots to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

Lots of tables, bullet points and graphs and inset text.

Which I think is awesome

PHD was ahead of the Paleo curve in its embracing, or at least non-demonization, of carbs. Almost the vanguard of post-Paleo or Paleo 2.0. The Jaminets also have some interesting ideas about obesity and malnutrition and the role of chronic infection. I confess I'm skeptical of the chronic infection hypothesis. But skeptical in the way that I'm skeptical that neutrinos can travel faster than light. No, scratch that, skeptical in the the way I am of skeptical of, I dunno, meme theory. Cautiously optimistic with a large dash of show me more.

I purchased this book from The Book Depository which ships worldwide for free. It took 7 weeks but eventually arrived to this mysterious place known as the Czech Republic. Having stuff shipped via third party gets really, really old (wake up Amazon!).

OK, so what did I hate about this book? I bought the book myself so I'm not beholden to the authors to write some kiss-ass review. No frickin' index! Come on guys, where's the index? Other than that I've got nothing. Great book, great blog, keep up the good work.

The No. 1 Reason People are Getting Fatter: Journalists are Idiots!

2011-09-23T09:55:00.001+02:00

I was all set to hate this study which led to such idiotic headlines as The No. 1 Reason Americans Are Getting Fatter: We're Not Smoking!!!. But the study itself is not the problem and it seems to be well done for what it is, a study on the socio-economics of obesity, specifically these factors: differences in employment, physical activity at work, food prices, prevalence of restaurants, cigarette smoking, cigarette pricing, food stamp receipts and the prevalence of urban sprawl. Out of those factors, smoking was the leading one, but the authors concluded that even this leading socio-economic factor only contributed to 2% of the weight difference.

Jumping from this study to the idiotic Atlantic headline is like looking at the number of telephones in Germany and North Korea, then writing, The No. 1 Reason Germans Are Getting Richer: More Telephones!!!

source

And then there's this idiotic article in the BBC, it was the most read article a few days ago, Diets Fail Because Advice is Wrong, Say Researchers. It is the typical eat less, exercise more BS but with a twist. This advice turns out not to work very well (or at all) because, wait for it . . . people have too high expectations and too little willpower:

"It stems from how much energy it takes to burn fat. A lot of diets are not proven by science."

She said some dieters might find it depressing to be told that it takes far longer to get weight down than previously thought.

"It's not very motivating to tell someone that if they cut their intake by 10 calories a day every day for the next three years they will lose a pound of weight."

"Nor is it motivating to tell them that our methods don't actually work. But as real, honest-to-goodness scientists and journalists with, like, degrees and stuff, we are going to keep dishing this horseshit out as long as it pays the bills."

source

Food Reward and Addiction Pt I

2011-09-20T12:18:00.000+02:00

Source: here and here

According to Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (AKA, the US Government's official scientist and spokesperson on drug abuse), "Addiction is all about the dopamine".

So what is addiction? According to this NY Times article on Nora Volkow:

All addictive substances send dopamine levels surging in the small central zone of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is thought to be the main reward center. Amphetamines induce cells to release it directly; cocaine blocks its reuptake; alcohol and narcotics like morphine, heroin and many prescription pain relievers suppress nerve cells that inhibit its release.

Addicts and first-time users alike get the high that correlates with the dopamine wave. Only a minority of novices, however, will develop the compulsion to keep taking the drug at great personal cost, a behavior that defines addiction.

Anything that is done at great personal cost is addiction? That would mean that ALL obese people are addicted to food. The great personal cost of being fat is well-known: reduced mobility, reduced sexual attractiveness, reduced health, etc. That is something most people can agree on. Yet fat people keep over-eating at great personal cost!

No fair using quoting a NYT "science" journalist's definition of addiction? Okay, here's the official definition of substance dependence from DSM-IV:

When an individual persists in use of alcohol or other drugs despite problems related to use of the substance, substance dependence may be diagnosed. Compulsive and repetitive use may result in tolerance to the effect of the drug and withdrawal symptoms when use is reduced or stopped.

Notice that the definition is limited to "alcohol and drugs". Isn't food a substance? What is the psychiatric definition of drug?

The term drug may refer to any non-food chemical substance or preparation administered for the purpose of correcting or attenuating a disease process (therapeutic drug) or for pleasure (recreational drug). Almost all drugs of interest in the realm of behavioral health care achieve their primary effects in the brain (central nervous system) and may also be referred to as psychoactive or psychotropic.

So if I eat food (which is made up of chemicals, shockingly enough) for pleasure it's just eating food. If I eat a non-food chemical substance for pleasure or for a disease it's a drug. This crap is making me tired and I've barely gotten started. I'd just like to point out, even if I hate these terribly vague definitions in a field that purports to be scientific, I don't think psychiatrists are "witch doctors" (although some of them certainly are, but then some GPs are also).

One obvious difference between difference between foods and drugs is that no has to take drugs, right? Well there's the therapeutic kind, of course, antibiotics and such, those are necessary. But not the recreational kind, right? Those are totally unnecessary. If only we had the power to make the bad chemicals disappear from the face of the Earth.

As Dr. Volkow said to a group of drug experts convened by the surgeon general last month to discuss the problem, “In the past, when we have addressed the issue of controlled substances, illicit or licit, we have been addressing drugs that we could remove from the earth and no one would suffer.”

But prescription drugs, she continued, have a double life: They are lifesaving yet every bit as dangerous as banned substances. “The challenges we face are much more complex,” Dr. Volkow said, “because we need to address the needs of patients in pain, while protecting those at risk for substance use disorders.”

In other words, these drugs must be somehow legal and illegal, encouraged yet discouraged, tightly regulated yet easily available.

There's so much arrogance and ignorance there it makes me shudder. Ignorance from a well-renowned scientist and researcher with a bajillion degrees? Absolutely. Being an expert on dopamine reuptake doesn't make one an expert on human nature, politics or civil liberties. Making doctors even more afraid to prescribe opiates to people in chronic pain just in case some high school kid might pop some of granny's pill or whatever is idiotic. And what makes Volkow so smugly sure she and her ilk know what chemical substances ought to be removed from the earth? If it turns out wheat has opioid properties would Dr Volkow recommend making it a controlled substance so that it could be both "legal and illegal"?

If Nora Volkow wants to be "general in the drug war" lets give her a rifle and a hardhat and send her off to northern Mexico so she can lead from the front.

OK, so I obviously despise Volkow's ideas as a drug warrior. But what about her research (and research in general) on dopamine and addiction and her assertion that "it is all about dopamine"? If obesity is an addiction, and addiction is all about dopamine, then is obesity all about dopamine?

The (Non)Science of Willpower and Self-Control

2011-09-18T18:39:00.001+02:00

Source

I saw the guys at Freakonomics talking about a new book by John Tierney (a NY Times journalist) and Roy Baumeister (a social psychologist at FSU) called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Since I've recently been interested in food reward, addiction and the mind/body problem I thought I'd check out some of Baumeister's research, thanks to PubMed every armchair research analyst's (or just gadfly in my case) favorite internet tool. Unfortunately, I've only got access to abstracts but those were enough to peg my bullshit meter.

First we have this Baumeister study entitled "High trait self-control predicts positive health behaviors and success in weight loss." Here's the abstract:

Surprisingly few studies have explored the intuitive connection between self-control and weight loss. We tracked participants' diet, exercise and weight loss during a 12-week weight loss program. Participants higher in self-control weighed less and reported exercising more than their lower self-control counterparts at baseline. Independent of baseline differences, individuals high in dispositional self-control ate fewer calories overall and fewer calories from fat, burned marginally more calories through exercise, and lost more weight during the program than did those lower in self-control. These data suggest that trait self-control is, indeed, an important predictor of health behaviors.

People with more self-control ate less (especially fat!) and exercised more, hence they lost more weight. There's so much wrong there, at this point I'm pretty much done with the guy. But the book blurb at Amazon mentions Baumeister's oft-cited work with willpower and brain glucose and that got my attention:

In what became one of the most cited papers in social science literature, Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower is fueled by glucose, and it can be bolstered simply by replenishing the brain's store of fuel. That's why eating and sleeping- and especially failing to do either of those-have such dramatic effects on self-control (and why dieters have such a hard time resisting temptation).

Wait, willpower operates like a muscle and it is fueled by glucose, sort of like a muscle? Hmmm...so do people who are frequently in ketosis have less willpower?

Baumeister has several papers on glucose and self-control. Perhaps they are referring to this one:

The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels of blood glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control task, and (c) initial acts of self-control impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, but consuming a glucose drink eliminated these impairments. Self-control requires a certain amount of glucose to operate unimpaired. A single act of self-control causes glucose to drop below optimal levels, thereby impairing subsequent attempts at self-control.

The idea that acts of self-control could burn BG at higher levels than, say, normal thinking is interesting. The idea that drinking sugar water is going to increase someone's self-control sounds like a load of crap to me. I mean how does one quantitatively measure "stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction"? By drinking a liter of Coke?

Certainly addiction is a very real phonemena and is correlated with poor-impulse control. But I don't think what people like Baumeister are doing fits into the arena of actual science. The Freakonomics blog points to Anthony Weiner who famously lost his job by tweeting his johnson as an example of someone screwing up their life with poor impulse control. But I think impulse-control is a lot more complicated than that, or I'm not sure that sexting one's member is really about impulse control. Maybe it's just about being an asshole. Weiner was described by the NY Times "as often working long hours with his staff, requiring them to be in constant contact by Blackberry, frequently yelling at them, and occasionally physically abusing office furniture in anger." So apparently an asshole, but a workaholic asshole. Can one be a workaholic and still have little self-control or poor impulse control? Well, yeah, probably. But I think there's something else going on, perhaps being in a detached position constantly surrounded by ingratiating flunkies and all the other job characteristics that seem to make this sort of thing endemic among politicians. I dunno, but I don't think it has anything to do with quaffing a sugar drink.

Odds and Ends

2011-09-16T14:26:00.000+02:00

This is my recently discovered quick and dirty lunch food. Cheap pork paté (and occaisonally the good stuff) and celery. I'm not a fan of raw celery but it makes a good foil for paté if one doesn't eat bread or crackers. Paté is too rich to eat straight, and raw celery is too boring to eat by itself, but the combination is pretty good. And it's a great way to work in some liver (nature's multivitamin).

And here's some found art:

Food Reward--Ah Screw It, I'm In.

2011-09-15T15:24:00.002+02:00

Or more specifically, I've lost a hell of a lot of my skepticism thanks to a lot of thought-provoking comments. Thanks for chiming in everyone.

The sea change for me is that food reward is not really about palatability but about addiction. Dr Kurt Harris gave a terrific example with what I'm going to hereby dub the Pringle Principle™. Dr Emily Deans pointed out that addiction is a scientifically documented phenomena, and palatability is something of a red herring. All these damn ninja doctors reading my blog is really ~~harshing my buzz~~ keeping me on my toes

I've sort of lost interest in writing about the whole mind/body problem. Maybe I'll keep going with that, perhaps as to how addiction relates to the mind/body problem. But I really have to digest all this, and I'm frankly a slow thinker so we'll see, although addiction is a pretty fascinating subject.

And now for something completely different. This classic film had (IMDB rating 6.7 WTF?) my 4 1/2 year old rolling on the floor laughing. I was forced (forced I tell you!) to replay the talking ass scene eleventy-hundred billion times. Talk about frickin' addiction. Talking asses and four-year-olds, it's a marriage made in heaven.

"Excuse me. I'd like to ass you a question."

Food Reward and the Mind/Body Problem Pt I

2011-09-09T07:32:00.000+02:00

Source

Dr Kurt Harris made some insightful comments about the food reward hypothesis (FRH) that made me reconsider my skepticism (though not necessarily abandon it, just yet). I thought the most interesting thing was concerning the mind/body problem:

One thing I like about FR is what Sean hates - the fact that it brings in the messy mind/body thing. This helps me explain many of the failures of LC that I see, as well as to tie in emotional eating - cases where even Paul Jaminet could customize your diet down to the molecule and you would still get fat because you are using food literally as a drug- you are not really hungry in the food sense so much as the "I want to stimulate myself with something" sense. These people definitely exist. I've seen many of them. You probably know some too if you think about it...

Apparently GT [Gary Taubes] hates it partly for that reason too. He insists that if you say fat is regulated by the brain, that means you are part of the energy balance paradigm, and not the "proper" fat cells and hormones one...and even more egregiously, I would guess he thinks that saying the brain is the locus instead of the more passive adipocyte is uncomfortably close to "gluttony and sloth".

I don't blame all obesity on gluttony and sloth, but the words do have meaning -

Is the mind/body problem really FRH's strength instead of a weakness? It's certainly an interesting question.

The mind/body problem has also been seen as the body/soul dichotomy (by non-secular philosophers) or the mind/brain dichotomy. It is tied up with artificial intelligence (AI) and goes to the root of some very basic questions like the existence and/or nature of free will and self-awareness. I am going to start to approach this problem from the strong AI vs what Martin Gardner calls the Mysterian's perspective, mostly citing Douglas Hofstadter's views as the strong AI advocate and Roger Penrose for the counter argument. I'm not crazy about the term Mysterian, but here's Martin Gardner talking about the opposing viewpoints in an 1991 interview:

You know the problem of consciousness is a hot topic right now. There have been half a dozen books published just in the last year or two. All of them are trying to figure out what it is in the brain that makes you self-aware. Of course, materialists like Moravec, and Churchland and his wife, are of the opinion that is it only going to be a short time until we figure out how the brain makes itself aware. But there is another school of philosophy that is coming into prominence now, with which I am sympathetic. They’re called the Mysterians. The Mysterians, and this includes a number of very top notch philosophers like Donald Chalmers, Colin Magin, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and a bunch of others, are of the opinion, and I share this view, that consciousness is something so mysterious that no one has the slightest idea how the brain makes itself aware, and we may never find out. That’s the extreme Mysterian position, that we don’t have the intellectual capacity ever to solve the problem of consciousness. It may be something beyond our power to understand; the way calculus is beyond the mind of a chimpanzee. It’s an interesting point of view because it may be that there are some questions beyond the reach of science because of the limitations of our present brain. Perhaps in a million years from now, if we evolve with bigger brains, we’ll solve it. Roger Penrose is a Mysterian. This was one of the themes of his famous book The Emperor’s New Mind,
for which I wrote the introduction.

We Mysterians think consciousness won’t be understood for at least a long, long time. Also, the Mysterians believe that self-awareness and free will are two names for the same thing. If you try to imagine yourself without self-awareness, then you can’t imagine yourself having free will to make decisions. You’d be like an automaton.

The reason I don't like the Mysterian label is that it can give the impression that there's something unknowable about the human brain and hence free will and self-awareness. This is not Penrose's position at all.

Roger Penrose hypothesizes that the brain exploits aspects of quantum physics that are not yet understood. That, in order to understand how the brain functions, one must also understand bizarre aspects of quantum mechanics such as a photon seemingly being in two places at once in a double-slit experiment. Penrose's views are, needless to say, controversial. I happen to agree with Penrose, but this makes me an outlier.

A core concept in the mind/body or mind/brain duality argument is that the mind could be exactly reproduced in some other medium like a computer or in a book or even in an ant colony. This is one of the running ideas in Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid:

Mind vs. Brain
In coming Chapters, where we discuss the brain, we shall examine whether the brain's top level-the mind-can be understood without understanding the lower levels on which it both depends and does not depend. Are there laws of thinking which are "sealed off" from the lower laws that govern the microscopic activity in the cells of the brain? Can mind be "skimmed" off of brain and transplanted into other systems? Or is it impossible to unravel thinking processes into neat and modular subsystems? Is the brain more like an atom, a renormalized electron, a nucleus, a neutron, or a quark? Is consciousness an epiphenomenon? To understand the mind, must one go all the way down to the level of nerve cells? [GEB, pp 315]

AI futurists (and sci-fi writers) who believe that humanity will one day (probably within a century) be able to upload itself into some sort of computer obviously think that the mind can be "skimmed" off the brain. A more gradualist approach is to consider that human brain could be emulated to a reasonable enough degree so as to create human-like intelligences once the signal processing properties of neurons are sorted out. This is Robin Hanson's approach. Robin writes here:

My claim is that, in order to create economically-sufficient substitutes for human workers, we don’t need to understand how the brain works beyond having decent models of each cell type as a signal processor. Like the weather, protein folding is not designed to process signals and so does not have the decoupling feature I describe above. Brain cells are designed to process signals in the brain, and so should have a much simplified description in signal processing terms. We already have pretty good signal-processing models of some cell types; we just need to do the same for all the other cell types.

Hanson's ideas are not mutually exclusive with Penrose's. They could even be considered complimentary. Penrose thinks that a proper neuron/brain model requires a deeper understanding of physics than we currently have, Hanson thinks that the signal processing characteristics of neurons needs to to be correctly modeled.

But if neurons exploit quantum mechanics is it possible to build a model of a neuron without a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics, what Penrose calls, correct quantum gravity (CGQ)?It doesn't seem possible.

For example, let's look at the famous "paradox" of Schrödinger's Cat.

A cat is in a steel box, there is a vial of poison gas that is released via some sort of quantum process like a Geiger counter detecting the radioactive decay of some radioactive element such that there is a 50/50 chance of the poison being triggered within the course of an hour (note: no actual cats were harmed in this thought experiment).

Without looking in the box, there is no way to know the actual state of the cat according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics. There is a 50% chance that the cat is either alive or dead. This is the kind of thing Einstein was lamenting when he talked about God not playing dice with the Universe. Depending on one's interpretation, the Universe may split into one with a live kitty and one with a dead kitty, or the cat may exist in a state of superposition that is collapsed upon observation, or something else altogether. Or the state of the cat might simply be determined at any time by some as-yet-unkown CQG theory as Penrose conjectures.

The point being that in order to understand how a neuron employs quantum mechanics (assuming it actually does so) one would need to understand the paradox of Schrödinger's Cat, which would mean it would no longer be a paradox.

This is not to say that thinking machines can't be built without CQG. Steam engines were invented (apparently by the Greeks) without a deep understanding of thermodynamics, Edison invented the phonograph without understanding acoustical wave mechanics and Fourier transforms, etc. So it is very possible that someone will invent a thinking, self-aware quantum computer intelligence before we come up with a theory of everything that will explain how it works.

Wow, this has already gotten pretty long and I feel like I've just gotten started. I do plan to bring this around to food reward and addiction eventually, if only from a more philosophical perspective, I do think the question of how the brain works, and our lack of understanding thereof, is inextricably tied up with all of this.

Cool Food Labels

2011-09-06T09:00:00.002+02:00

OK, so as I'm a libertarian or classical liberal, I'm not a big fan of government regulations in general. If people want to live off of Cheetos and Twinkies I doubt they are going to spend much time perusing the nutritional labels. I do think that the market would provide labeling anyway, at least to cater to the segment of the population that actually cares about what it eats, had the government not took it upon itself to force companies to label their products. I also think it is the government's job, one of its only jobs, to enforce contracts and the rule of law so that labels should not be providing willfully false data.

Anyway, if there are going to be mandatory labels, I think it would be helpful if they looked something like this:

That's the winning entry from a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism contest. Obviously I have some quibbles, the low-fat high fiber agenda, etc, but that's already built into the government regulatory system's "settled science". Still, the block chart format is pretty damn cool.

Via Reason

Is Obesity Really Just About Processed Foods?

2011-09-05T14:29:00.000+02:00

Matt Metzgar thinks that the cause of obesity is frickin' obvious:

I read a curious blog post the other day about nutrition. The person stated he didn't know how people get fat, even though he had successfully lost weight via a Paleo diet. This shows how "nutritionism" has taken over as far as clouding the mechanisms behind weight gain.

In a nutshell, obesity/overweight is caused by consumption of processed foods. Historically, whenever processed food enters a culture, obesity follows. I was just reading the other day about the Tohono O'odham Indians, who as recently as 1960 had almost no diabetes. Now they have one of the highest rates in the world. The cause: adoption of processed/Western food.

Now what's not so clear is what elements of processed foods are driving the changes. This is where science can hopefully answer the questions: is it the fructose, the glycemic index, the added oils, etc. Things can get interesting in this regard. For example, Americans actually consumed more flour and cereal products in 1909 than they do today, yet obesity was minimal back then (yes, I know people were more physically active then).

So the mechanism of weight gain is modern processed foods, full stop. Matt then points to a "study" which says that Americans ate "more flour and cereal products in 1909 than they do today". Why do I put study in quotes? Because the "study" has a single author, none other than Neal Bernard, PCRM founder, vegan activist and all-around bullshit artist (and here and here and here). Not surprisingly, Bernard's paper concludes that meat and cheese are major contributors to obesity. In other breaking news, the Pope still believes in God.

Now if one didn't know that Bernard had a religious agenda (yes, veganism is a religion), one might look at this "paper", published in the American Journal of Clinical Medicine and mistake it for something resembling science. As for me, the header of my blog sums up my feelings on this and any other "research" Bernard puts his name to.

I'd like to point out that long before the golden age of 1909, a formerly obese guy named William Banting published an extremely popular weight loss pamphlet. It advised people to avoid "sugar, saccharine matter, starch, beer, milk and butter," was published in 1863, and was successful for obvious reasons. Banting and the people who had success following his diet didn't get obese from eating processed foods, such things didn't exist in those days. And they didn't get fat from eating frankenoils. They got fat from eating lots of white flour, sugar and beer. Processed foods have made the situation much worse, of course, but I don't think that the science is even close to "settled" to the point where obesity can simply be laid at their doorstep.

Dinoaurs and Asteroids and Taubes and Guyenet

2011-09-03T12:24:00.009+02:00

In his latest attack on Gary Taubes, and let's face it, this has gotten very personal for Stephan Gueyenet, he writes:

Could it be possible that, rather than thousands of career obesity researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical industry being stuck in the wrong paradigm for the last 60 years, a journalist with a physics and engineering background, who lost weight on a low-carbohydrate diet, made a wrong turn and can't admit it? I don't expect Taubes to ever change his mind, but I hope at least that people with clear minds will see the weakness of his position and the arrogance that sustains it.

At least people with clear minds? The arrogance that sustains it? Tell me this sort of shrill ad hominem is not personal. Guyenet concludes with this:

I challenge Gary Taubes to address the scientific criticisms of his hypothesis with science, not philosophical ramblings, self aggrandizement, alternative hypotheses and other diversionary tactics. Show us that the scientific literature supports the view that obesity is the result of carbohydrate increasing insulin, then acting directly on fat cells to promote fat storage. Use high-quality modern references and cite them accurately and completely, as I did in my critique (5). Directly address the points raised in my critique (and others, 6, 7). Explain why so many cultures eating high-carbohydrate diets are not obese, including Americans 100 years ago (8).

I guess Stephan missed the opening sentence of Gary Taubes' post:

I’m going to start this long-overdue series of posts with a bit of a shaggy dog story, a lengthy preamble (“amble” perhaps being the operative word) before I get to the meatier issues.

Can anyone who's read Good Calories, Bad Calories honestly accuse Gary Taubes of lack of rigor, avoiding science or dissembling? Stephan really ought to let Taubes get to the meatier issues before he accuses Taubes of using diversionary tactics.

I get allergic to playing logical fallacy ping-pong, but since Stephan accuses Taubes of false dichotomies and such, whilst engaging in ad hominems and such, I'm going to point out some fallacies I see him using.

First there's the argument from authority. The fact of the matter is that "thousands of career obesity researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical industry" actually HAVE been "stuck in the wrong paradigm for the last 60 years." It's the paradigm that takes the diet-heart hypothesis and the lipid hypothesis as axioms and it is still very much alive and healthy (unlike its believers). Remember the lipid hypthesis? Heard about the statin epidemic? Hello *tap* *tap* is this thing on?

This sort of appeal to authority argument makes me wonder if Stephan has a firm grasp of what real science is. Here are a couple things science is not about.

Science is NOT about consensus (argumentum ad populum).

Science is NOT about credentials.

As a kid who was into dinosaurs, I'm old enough to remember when the hypothesis that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid was greeted with almost universal scorn and derision by geology and paleontology communities. It has now become the mainstream, of course. The biggest problem with the Alvarez hypothesis from the standpoint of the community was that Luis Alvarez wasn't in the community. He was merely a (Nobel Prize winning) physicist. Alvarez is a classic case of an outsider shaking up the paradigm (although his son and co-theorist is a geologist).

This same sort of scorn is evident when Stephan writes that Taubes is a "journalist with a physics and engineering background." He doesn't write the word "mere" but it is heavily implied.

Secondly, if carb induced insulin is not the primary cause of metabolic syndrome that doesn't mean that the carbohydrate hypothesis is false. This is known as the argument from fallacy.

If P, then Q.

P is a fallacious argument.

Therefore, Q is false.

Perhaps leptin is more important than insulin as Stephan believes. Perhaps neither one are the primary causes behind CH. That alone doesn't falsify CH.

When Stephan challenges Gary Taubes to "Explain why so many cultures eating high-carbohydrate diets are not obese, including Americans 100 years ago," he is firmly declaring his belief that obesity is the result of modern processed foods and that a traditional neolithic diet high in carbs is healthy to optimal. I happen to disagree with this.

The philosophical underpinnings of science do matter. What is a paradigm, what are axioms, ceteris paribus, falsifiable hypotheses, etc, these things are important. Most of all intellectual rigor is important. Intellectual rigor is not about who can cite the most studies or who has the most university degrees.

Addendum: Stephan Guyenet has removed the post, saying, "Although what I wrote was accurate, in retrospect it was not presented in the most constructive way. I'll wait for Taubes to complete his series, and I may or may not respond to it at that point."

Adapted to Neolithic Foods?

2011-08-25T08:37:00.008+02:00

A while back, Stephan Guyenet pointed to this excellent paper by lead author Pedro Carrera-Bastos (which included Loren Cordain and Staffan Lindberg), that I just got around to reading. It's pretty straightforward paleo stuff, neolithic foods are bad, modern industrial foods are really bad, modern lifestyles, inadequate sleep, smoking, stress, lack of vitamin D, really, really bad, etc.

But what's really interesting is Stephan's take on it. He writes:

One of the things I like most about the paper is that it acknowledges the significant genetic adaptation to agriculture and pastoralism that has occurred in populations that have been practicing it for thousands of years. It hypothesizes that the main detrimental change was not the adoption of agriculture, but the more recent industrialization of the food system. I agree.

Uhm, what? I just read the paper and I didn't see anything in it about acknowledging significant genetic adaptation to agriculture and pastoralism. I did see this:

This is why it is being increasingly recognized in the scientific literature, especially after Eaton and Konner’s seminal publication in 1985, that the profound changes in diet and lifestyle that occurred after the Neolithic Revolution (and more so after the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age) are too recent on an evolutionary time scale for the human genome to have fully adapted.

In fact, despite various alleles being targets of selection since the Agricultural Revolution, most of the human genome comprises genes selected during the Paleolithic Era in Africa, a period that lasted from about 2.5 million years ago to 11,000 years ago.

What part of that indicates significant adaption to agriculture? The paper goes on to say:

Finally, the fossil record suggests that when hunter–gatherer populations made the transition to an agricultural pattern of subsistence, their health status and lifespan decreased.

As I've written before, Stephan has long been a proponent of traditional diets: neolithic foods are great, perhaps (probably?) optimal, as long as they are prepared in a traditional manner that minimizes anti-nutrients and such. The underlying assumption being that we are significantly adapted to these foods. The fact that Stephan is reading into this paper something that simply isn't written there is a classic case of confirmation bias, in my opinion. Stephan corresponded with Pedro on this paper and is consequentially cited by Pedro, so maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a single sentence that indicates anything about significant adaption to neolithic foods.

I do see things like this:

The Agricultural Revolution began about 11,000 years ago in the Middle East, later spread to other regions of the globe, and drastically altered the diet and lifestyle that had shaped the human genome for the preceding 2 million plus years. Some of the more significant dietary changes were the use of cereal grains as staple foods, the introduction of nonhuman milk, domesticated meats, legumes and other cultivated plant foods, and later widespread use of sucrose and alcoholic beverages.

Nevertheless it was the Industrial Revolution (with the widespread use of refined vegetable oils, refined cereal grains, and refined sugars) and the Modern Age (with the advent of the “junk food” industry, generalized physical inactivity, introduction of various pollutants, avoidance of sun exposure, and reduction in sleep time and quality coupled with increased chronic psychological stress) that brought about the most disruptive and maladaptive changes, which may have serious pathophysiological consequences. For instance, chronic psychological stress, environmental pollution, and smoking are associated with low-grade chronic inflammation,
which is one of the main causes of insulin resistance.

I think every paleo/primal author/blogger would agree with this. Neolithic foods suck, additional modern/industrial foods (frankenoils, processed foods, etc) really, really suck. And a modern lifestyle, especially constant low-level stress, takes its toll. One can speculate all day long about what a pre-neolithic diet consisted of, that's not my point. As the paper points out:

Importantly, 11,000 years represent approximately 366 human generations, which comprise only 0.5% of the history of the genus Homo (Table 1).

Is 366 generations long enough to adapt significantly to neolithic foods? Mutation rates are a hot topic right now in biology and anthropology. They now appear to happen at a slower rate than previously thought. John Hawks wrote last year:

The study was by Jared Roach and colleagues, and as you might guess from my post title, the result was surprising. Previous work had suggested a human mutation rate around 2.5 x 10^-8 per site per generation. The new study found less than half the expected number of mutations between these parents and offspring, an estimated rate of only 1.1 x 10^-8 per site.

Yesterday Hawks blogged about another paper that seems to back up a slower than previously thought genetic mutation rate:

A new paper in Nature by Zhe-Xi Luo and colleagues reports the discovery of a 160-million-year-old early mammal, Juramaia, which they attribute to the placental mammal lineage. The news aspect is that this extends the chronology of fossil placental and marsupial mammals (the sister clade of placentals) by some 40 million years. That's a big chunk of time, but it's a really nice fossil which seems pretty clear in its morphology.

I'm reading this closely because of the effect on the interpretation of mutation rates and the molecular clock. Obviously, if the earliest evidence for placental mammals used to be 120 million years ago, and now it's 160, that should affect the way we approach the genetic divergence of mammal lineages. In particular, when it comes to primates, some modern lineages are represented by fossils relatively early in the Cenozoic, suggesting that the common ancestor of all the primates may have been much earlier, deep in the Cretaceous period.

On the other hand, maybe it just takes a few simple mutations to adapt to neolithic foods (prepared in a traditional manner, of course). It only took one mutation to turn off lactose intolerance, and that mutation has occurred in several populations engaging in animal husbandry independently. But that mutation is to simply continue the production of lactase. Humans, like all mammals, are already ridiculously well-adapted to milk--at least their own species' milk, not processed, when in infancy--beyond that, things can get dicey. How many mutations and selection are necesary to adjust to a diet heavy in grains, legumes and other neolithic cultivars?

How well adapted we are to neolithic foods, which the paper cites as:

[...]cereal grains as staple foods, the introduction of nonhuman milk, domesticated meats, legumes and other cultivated plant foods, and later widespread use of sucrose and alcoholic beverages. [ed. I see sucrose as more of a modern/industrial era food]

Who knows, but one is probably better off avoiding them all as much as possible. I'm going to stick with this paradigm for now, I don't see the food reward/palatability hypothesis (FRH), especially as evoked by people with a strong bias towards "traditional" foods, as even coming close to supplanting it, or even supplementing it, at this point. Am I specifically going after Stephan Guyenet? Yes, I am. His blog is hugely influential and his recent "takedown" of the carbohydrate hypothesis and endorsement of FRH has been embraced by many influential bloggers. Maybe I'm just being reactionary, and I'm sure I'm guilty of my own confirmation bias, but I'm just not buying it.

Deeply Skeptical of Food Reward Hypothesis Pt. III: Psychology & Obesity

2011-08-17T13:11:00.013+02:00

Deeply Skeptical of FRH Pt I
Deeply Skeptical of FRH Pt II

The thing I dislike most about the food reward/palatability hypothesis is that it sends us into the intangible. Obviously, things like addiction, pleasure, over-stimulation, etc, exist and they are ultimately tied up with things like free will. Unfortunately, this leads us to butting up against the mind-body problem, which I find aesthetically displeasing. FRH posits that obese people are hyperstimulated by food that tastes too damn good, and is too readily available. This seems too pat, too simplistic. And not in an Occam's razor sort of way. More like a "God does not play dice with the Universe" sort of way (yes, I agree with Einstein or more specifically Roger Penrose).

The problem with introducing psychological elements into obesity is that it creates a sort of chicken and egg ambiguity. The carbohydrate hypothesis (CH) goes something like this: people eat too many simple and complex carbs (sugar and starch), this leads to chronic insulin production and high blood glucose (BG) levels, this leads to insulin resistance and cuts off access to fat stores, glucose gets converted to fat but not vice-versa, high levels of BG cause glycation (glucose modification of proteins), the pancreas gets worn out, chronic inflammation follows, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc ensues. There are different variations of this but that's how I'd sum up CH off the top of my head.

The nice thing about CH is that there's no talk about willpower, beyond breaking one's initial sugar addiction and getting over an LC flu. But the addiction is simply and clearly defined. This makes CH aesthetically pleasing for me in an Occam's razor sort of way.

Stephan Guyenet argues that CH is complete garbage, of course. Andreas Eenfeldt argues that it more likely needs to be tweaked. Most of the cool kids seem to be on Stephan's "side". Yes there are sides and battle lines being drawn and epithets being hurled, feelings being hurt. Anyone who's ever read anything about the history of science knows this is pretty normal behavior. Controversy and disagreement are the lifeblood of healthy science. Institutionally biased funding and a deeply flawed peer-review system are not. To this day, Anglo-Saxon countries credit Newton with inventing calculus and continental European countries Leibniz.

Stephan believes that if one doesn't prepare most of one's food at home, using traditional cultural methods, one is inevitably at an increased risk of obesity and disease (that being the cold hard truth). There's a puritanism lurking there that I find too pat, too simplistic, not in an Occam's razor sort of way, but in a teenager's opinion of politics sort of way. It also smacks of noble farmer re-enactment (yeah paleos aren't the only ones who can get caught up in re-enactment). But most of all, there's a subjectivity that I think leads to non-testable hypotheses.

We can lock some obese people in a room and let them feed ad libitum on some bland high-carb substance that tastes like powdered milk, and they could lose weight. Which has apparently already been done (although I've not read the study) and is seen as a sort of smoking gun for FRH and against CH.

We could also lock a bunch of heroin addicts in a room and let them feed ad libitum on some bland high-carb substance that tastes like powdered milk. I would bet they'd all gain weight. What would we prove by this?

Patricia writes in the comments of the last post:

Palatable food does not make people overeat or get fat. Hyperpalatable food does. Many East Asian cuisines are palatable, yet the people who eat them are mostly of normal weight.

OK, but I think the distinction between palatable and hyper-palatable is subjective and scientifically useless. One can just as easily argue that these hyper-palatable foods contain NADs or are addicting because of CH. Or, as the Jaminets believe, that modern, and especially processed foods, are malnourishing hence leading people to overfeed in a craving for vitamins and minerals.

Ultimately, I find FRH to be scientifically ambiguous and unappealing. Something that sounds good, like eat less, exercise more, but doesn't offer up anything beyond intangible platitudes about food tasting too yummy mixed in with pre-modern (pre-industrial) neolithic idealism and re-enactment.

Deeply Skeptical of Food Reward Hypothesis Pt. II: Cry Havoc and Release the Paradigm!

2011-08-16T13:25:00.005+02:00

Deeply Skeptical of FRH Pt I

[Note: Stephan Guyenet didn't invent the food reward hypothesis, but his advocacy and approach are my only experience of FRH so this is what I will focus on]

A paradigm starts with assumptions (axioms) then builds upon those assumptions. If the basic axioms are flawed then the paradigm is inevitably flawed. This does not mean it is complete junk, though. Great paradigms will continue to work with limitations. Euclidean geometry assumes that parallel lines never cross (amongst other apparent flaws), but that doesn't apply in a Universe where space is warped by gravity. Euclidean geometry is still a damn good approximation of static geometry at the human level which is why it is taught in schools today, not to mention that it is an excellent way to teach reasoning through proof.

The basic assumption behind an evolutionary (paleo-type) diet is that we humans probably aren't very well adapted to more than small amounts of very recently (evolutionarily speaking) introduced agricultural products like grains. We are better off eating a diet that closely resembles our hunter-gatherer ancestors. What an ideal HG diet consisted of (and how much it varied between different groups) is a huge source of contention and supposition--whether or not it was low-carb (LC) or how much fruit it entailed, etc--but I think the basic axiom is solid. Is a diet we've been eating for many millennia a better nutritional fit than an agricultural diet introduced a few thousand years ago.

Stephan Guyenet's nutritional paradigm is a bit different. He has long been a fan of traditionally prepared foods. Very seldom does he mention evolution, he's more likely to mention indigenous peoples like the Kitavans.

I find Stephan's traditional foods paradigm to be on shakier ground than an evolutionary approach. Sure, traditionally prepared foods help to remove anti-nutrients, usually through fermentation (sourdough bread, kimchi/sauerkraut, miso, etc), but does that mean that these foods are optimal?

Reviewing a paper by Pedro Carrera-Bastos and colleages Stephan writes:

[...] One of the things I like most about the paper is that it acknowledges the significant genetic adaptation to agriculture and pastoralism that has occurred in populations that have been practicing it for thousands of years. It hypothesizes that the main detrimental change was not the adoption of agriculture, but the more recent industrialization of the food system. I agree.

Here's a key idea to a traditionalist approach to nutrition. That we are already significantly adapted to a neolithic diet (assuming your ancestors have been farming for a few thousand years).

Despite his credentials and the fact that he is an active researcher in the field, my impression is that Stephan wants to embrace a theory that fits his idea that traditional diets are ideal. That the modernisation of the food industry by creating increasingly palatable and available food is what has led to the obesity/disease epidemic. Stephan is not saying food reward/palatability is the only contributing factor just an important one. The most important one as far as I can tell.

This is a valid chain of logic:

--> Humans are adapted to traditional neolithic diets
--> Traditional diets are boring
--> Humans aren't adapted to the modern commercialisation and industrialization of food
--> Modern food is too palatable
--> To be healthy and thin eat traditional and boring food.

This cuts out the middleman of the carbohydrate hypothesis. Macronutrients don't matter, as long as one eats a traditional diet (with lowered palatability) everything will be fine.

It's a valid chain of logic, but I'm just not buying it. There are a lot of assumptions there I simply don't accept. I don't think humans are well adapted to neolithic foods, traditional preparation helps but doesn't help enough. I don't believe that modern food is too tasty and available I just think it contains a lot of crap. I think we all can agree we shouldn't be eating processed crap.

Stephan writes:

However, losing fat and getting healthy will require some effort. What I've offered is a plan that puts the effort in food selection, rather than fighting the urge to eat more calories, which is typically a losing battle anyway. It also does not restrict micronutrients, macronutrients or any other health-giving element of the diet. If you think you will be able to find a way to lose fat and remain in long-term health while eating mostly commercially processed food (including restaurant food), you are fooling yourself. Processed food is the main problem, and if there is a solution, it is to avoid it. If you aren't willing or able to eat mostly home cooked food made from basic ingredients, as every healthy culture does, you will have to accept a higher likelihood of fat gain and disease. That is the cold, hard truth.

Nope, I just don't buy into that.

We actually do prepare most food at home. But when we go out we pretty much eat the same thing we would eat at home, meat, fish, vegetables. Here's some pics of what we were eating at restaurants on our recent vacation to Croatia. I just don't believe eating extremely palatable food like that at a restaurant every day is unhealthy or is somehow less healthy than a boring traditional diet based on taro or rice. This large lunch was typically supplemented by some vegetables or maybe fruit in the evening, or in my case lots of traditionally prepared fermented grain juice. I did put on some weight but I'm pretty sure it was the beer.

Is this unhealthy because it came from a restaurant and is too palatable?

In part III I will discuss why I'm uncomfortable with the notions of addiction and psychology being brought into the equation.

Deeply Skeptical of Food Reward Hypothesis Pt. I: Playing Gotcha

2011-08-15T15:28:00.006+02:00

There's been an enormous amount digital ink spilled in the last week or so regarding the Taubes/Guyenet dust up at the Ancestral Health Symposium. It mostly boils down to the carbohydrate hypothesis (CH) vs the food reward hypothesis (FRH).

I'm happy to see the waters stirred up like this and the fact that it has drawn people like Dr Kurt Harris and Dave Dixon at Spark of Reason down from Valhalla.

First of all, I'd like to talk about all the tools used to justify people's nutritional paradigms when arguing.

These tools are extremely blunt. To put it bluntly. They mostly boil down to these three things:

The evolutionary extrapolation approach (What would Grok do? What kind of animal has a digestive system similar to ours, etc).
Nutritional studies from Pubmed et al.
Indigenous studies like the Kitavans.

These are all extremely blunt tools.

Perhaps the most tedious is the tossing around of nutritional studies to try and "prove" that LC is unhealthy or that fat is bad or whatever. It is pretty easy to go to these studies individually and find how flawed they are, and Peter at Hyperlipid is the king of this sort of thing. I've done it myself when I've had the time and inclination.

This game of gotcha is idiotic because these nutritional studies are, for the most part, deeply flawed. If they are funded by private industry they are considered ipso facto biased. So they are funded by governments that actively believe in the diet-heart hypothesis, and published in peer-reviewed journals where the peers actively believe in the prevailing conventional wisdom of the field. This all taking place in a field that is extremely murky due to the essential complexity of human biochemistry. In other words, a very blunt instrument indeed.

The problem, of course, is that we are stuck with these blunt tools, so we need to make do as best as possible until something better comes along. Nutritional biochemistry is in a very primitive state compared to something like physics. This isn't helped by the fact that entrenched institutional bias and a flawed peer-review system have hampered innovation and iconoclasm.

When optimal nutritional biochemistry is conclusively nailed down by deriving it directly from DNA (or something like that) at some point in the distant future--the equivalent of a physics theory of everything or correct quantum gravity as Penrose likes to call it--these blunt tools will be seen as laughably primitive but right now they are all we have, and one's food choices are literally a life-and-death decision.

My deep skepticism of FRH is from more of philosophical perspective so I won't be citing Pubmed studies or talking about the Kitavans. There are plenty of smart people skeptical of FRH way more qualified to do that than myself.

Odds and Ends

2011-08-13T21:51:00.001+02:00

The Environmental Working Group has just issued their "Meat Eaters Guide: Report" with a simple graphic for us idiotic omnivores with a penchant for animal flesh. Turns out the best thing for meat eaters to eat (who have a carbon conscience) are lentils, skim milk and tomatoes. No references necessary since they are trying to SAVE THE FUCKING PLANET.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty fired up about the big Guyenet/Taubes dust-up and the reaction it has provoked. I have some strong opinions on this subject and I'm looking forward to airing them when time permits.

Screw The Cool Kids!

2011-08-12T09:25:00.001+02:00

While all the hepcats were off at the Ancestral Health Symposium in some town called Los Angeles, we were having our floors redone here in Prague, which meant staying at a friend's gingerbread house.

My friend B has a tiny little house not far away, less than 10 minutes by car, but the quiet neighborhood is so different from our busy area that it is like traveling out to the countryside.

This should have been a pleasant interlude, but between being stuck inside due to the shitty weather, the unpleasant bed (a tired old futon of miniscule thickness), and Liam bringing home yet another cold from school it was kind of a living hell.You ever go camping but then you get sick, it rains the whole time and someone forgot the kerosene? That's what it was like.

OK, enough bitching.

I should've taken more pictures, because it is a pretty amazing little house and area. It's a cliché of what an American like me grew up thinking Europe was like. But between the raging cold and the sleep deprivation I was lucky to snap these. Was I bitching again, sorry.

Here's the street B lives on. As one might guess, there ain't a whole lot of motorized traffic going on here.

This is the front door. There is some ducking and weaving involved in trying to enter the house.

These stairs are at a 75 degree angle, really more of a ladder than stairs. No handrail of course, because that's not minimalistic enough for B. After falling and cracking a rib (twice!) B decided to put some sort of felt stuff on the steps. Every time I go up these stairs I feel like I'm climbing up to the bridge of a submarine.

B's balcony. I managed to take this picture during a rare interlude when the sun was actually shining. It took lightening quick reflexes.

Obviously, the best thing to do when one has a tiny little house is to fill a third of the living room with a pool for fishes and turtles. There's a nice place for a reptile to sun itself there in the background. To get to the bathroom, one actually has to walk across a bridge (unfortunately NOT made of glass) over the turtle pool. I forgot to take a picture of that, damnit. The pool isn't big enough to put in sharks with frickin' lasers, but it has a sort of miniaturized James Bond feel about it.

Opposite the stairs/ladder is this corner chair with hat and boot collection next to it. These low-slung chairs look cool as hell but aren't very practical for a tall guy like myself. Me and B are pretty much polar opposites when it comes to style vs practicality.

Lastly, I thought this was amusing. This long, long walkway leads up to the front door of a large villa nestled against a hill. I don't envy anyone delivering furniture to these people. Although, come to think of it, this place is way more accessible than our flat on the fifth floor with no elevator.

Predators and Projection

2011-08-03T14:50:00.007+02:00

I grew up with plenty of dogs, especially one in college who accompanied me on many hikes and camping trips. Nowadays, we have four cats in our rather small flat. Both species are quite amazing in their own ways, but I think cats are more fascinating because they are much less like us humans than dogs.

Cats are pretty much at the apex of physical perfection.

As I see it, there are 3 kinds of mammalian predators:

Wolves--which specialize in endurance and intelligent cooperation
Bears--which specialize in omnivorous flexibility and hibernation
Cats--which specialize in being incredibly bad-ass

Humans fall between the wolf and bear category of predator. We can hunt us down some ruminant using intelligence and cooperation, but we can also survive on berries, fish and root vegetables. Mostly, we get by with our brains which allow us to read and write blogs about other predators.

But cats are so well evolved that they don't need any of this other crap. They can't survive on any sort of plant based diet because they lack the ability to synthesize the essential amino acid taurine. And they don't care or need to work together (lions being something of an exception). Cats are the true mammalian predators.

While humans exist in a society based on cooperation and compromise, what people secretly yearn for is to be more cat-like. I offer as proof the extremely successful Hollywood obsession with superhero movies. What are all these superheros but the human incarnation of the felidae family?

Speaking of human incarnations of felids, Michelle Pfeiffer in a catsuit sends my testosterone levels rocketing to eleven:

The similarity of cats and imaginary superheros is left as an exercise to the reader.

Social Engineering Sucks

2011-07-31T13:53:00.001+02:00

What people looked like before the government tried to fix things.

Mark Bittman, food writer at the NY Times wants to tax the hell out of unhealthy foods, and subsidize the healthy ones, because education just hasn't worked.

The need is dire: efforts to shift the national diet have failed, because education alone is no match for marketing dollars that push the very foods that are the worst for us. (The fast-food industry alone spent more than $4 billion on marketing in 2009; the Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion is asking for about a third of a percent of that in 2012: $13 million.) As a result, the percentage of obese adults has more than doubled over the last 30 years; the percentage of obese children has tripled. We eat nearly 10 percent more animal products than we did a generation or two ago, and though there may be value in eating at least some animal products, we could perhaps live with reduced consumption of triple bacon cheeseburgers.

Here's a clue, dickhead, people aren't getting diabetes from eating animals. Bittman mostly talks about sodas and processed food, something we in the paleo/real food community can all agree on, but he is also happy to see a tax on saturated fat.

Other countries are considering or have already started programs to tax foods with negative effects on health. Denmark’s saturated-fat tax is going into effect Oct. 1, and Romania passed (and then un-passed) something similar; earlier this month, a French minister raised the idea of tripling the value added tax on soda. Meanwhile, Hungary is proposing a new tax on foods with “too much” sugar, salt or fat, while increasing taxes on liquor and soft drinks, all to pay for state-financed health care; and Brazil’s Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program features subsidized produce markets and state-sponsored low-cost restaurants.

The reality is, of course, that the propaganda (or what Bittman calls education) has been way too successful. Sure, we can all agree that sodas are bad. What we don't agree on at all is that eating animals or salt is bad. We got into this situation in the first place thanks to wrongheaded social engineering policies (see the Food Pyramid). The solution is NOT MORE SOCIAL ENGINEERING. It's the same tired refrain from statists everywhere, state intervention hasn't worked because it wasn't enough, you know, because the evul corporashuns and and all their evul muney, hurr durr hurr durr. Communism didn't work in China, Soviet Union, et al, because it wasn't REAL communism, etc.

I believe that people ought to be allowed to engage in activities that are bad for them as long as they don't harm others in the process. If I want to chug a glass of soybean frankenoil for breakfast, whiled chain-smoking a pack of filterless cigarettes, that's my own damn business, not the government's. I also believe that if the governments of the world hadn't intervened in the what people ate, through subsidies, taxes, regulations, false propaganda, etc, there wouldn't be any obesity epidemic.

Education hasn't failed, Bittman, you fascist prick, the science has failed. At least the majority of what has passed for science in the arena of nutrition for the last fifty years. This is slowly changing thanks to people like Gary Taubes, Mark Sisson, the Drs Eades, etc. It is not going to be fixed by statist intervention.

Saltacalypse!

2011-07-31T12:26:00.002+02:00

Campbell's is adding salt back into their soups because, as the LA Times puts it, good health doesn't sell.

Eating too much salt has been widely associated with increased cases of high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes, though recently some researchers have raised questions about sodium's negative health effects (see related stories, to left). The FDA recommends no more than 2,300 mg of salt per day. A 2010 report from the Institute of Medicine noted that most Americans get about 3,400 mg each day. The biggest culprits? Restaurant food and packaged foods, such as canned soups.

I'm so happy that the old media giants are dying like dinosaurs chocking on asteroid fumes.

Good health doesn't sell? More like the CSPI's paradigm of good health, "heart healthy" grains, skim milk and zero fat doesn't sell. Although it's sold enough to cause the current obesity epidemic.

Gary Taubes wrote an excellent article on the terrible science behind salt back in the nineties (unfortunately no longer available on the web, as far as I know). So the question of whether or not salt is unhealthy isn't exactly "recent".

Personally, I prefer to buy foods with low sodium content, so that I can add my own grey salt that's loaded with minerals. As I wrote before, if you look at all the ingredients on a can of Campell's soup, the last thing you ought to be worried about is salt. Actually, I don't buy much in the way of processed food, although I do cheat and use bullion cubes sometimes, but not everyone has the time nor inclination to eat food they prepare themselves.

On the other hand, it pisses off everyone's favorite supernanny, so I am going to applaud the move, *claps*.

Health advocates expressed dismay at Campbell's move. In a statement released Wednesday, Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, asked, "Why resort to salt? Why not improve tomato soup [flavor] with more and better-quality tomatoes, or chicken noodle soup with more chicken?"

If only the tomatoes could be more tomato-ey and the chicken more chicken-ey, we could do without all this salt that's killing people by the millions. Its a frickin' Saltacalypse!!!!

They Grow Up So Quick

2011-07-27T14:37:00.006+02:00

The falcon family that live outside our kitchen window have been carrying on with their lives and now there looks to be one quite curious juvenile(?) who seems pretty close to trying out his or her flight feathers.

I love that stare of a stone-cold predator

It was easy to take this picture because the young'un doesn't spook at all when I stick my head out the window, just looks at me with frank curiosity. The parents spook very easily and I don't like to stress them unnecessarily so I try to be careful about observing them.

The nest is only about 15 feet away but I'm no nature photographer. Here's the uncropped photo to give you an idea of how their nest is located.

It's not all fun and games. They are loud as hell when they are getting fed in the morning, around 4-5 AM (not sure if there are one or two of them at this point). I assume the parents hunt at night and return in the early morning. I've had to get up and close the windows just to get back to sleep. Also they leave plenty of crap, mice bones and fur on the sidewalk below. But it is easily worth it to observe these magnificent creatures at somewhat close-hand.

Is Being Top Dog Bad For Your Health?

2011-07-26T11:54:00.007+02:00

Matthew Phillips writes over at Freakonomics that it is better to be beta than alpha.

He cites this study which shows that in a stable baboon hierarchy the alpha male experiences much higher stress than the beta males.

He also talks about this interesting study using data from the Swedish Twin Registry which seems to show that social mobility is good for your health (specifically hypertension).

These findings suggest that the risk of hypertension associated with low parental social status can be modified by social status later in life. Possibly, this could be targeted by public health or political interventions. As parental social status has an impact on later health, such interventions should be introduced early.

Phillips concludes thus: "The lesson: social climbing is good for your health, as long as you stop before you reach the top."

Wait a second there, pardner.

What is the context of being "alpha" in our current society? Being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? Or just being the head of your division? Should one aspire to be Vice President/Chancellor of the Exchequer/etc and stop there?

When it comes to stress, I always think of the rat study where two rats are connected to the same electric shocker, but Rat 1 can stop the shock by pressing a bar, whilst Rat 2 has the same amount of shock applied but has no control over it. Not surprisingly, Rat 2 experience much greater levels of stress than Rat 1. It's not the external stresses that kill us so much as our feeling of control over them.

This is why working in a office cubicle can lead to things like this:

Nerd rage ain't pretty

Anyone who's ever been an entrepreneur knows it's extremely stressful. You don't just worry about your job, you worry about every aspect of the company, since you are the company. Isn't it easier to just be an employee? In a way, but I think it's better to be the rat in control of the shock bar.

This is why I always think it's idiotic to compare the lifestyle of a modern lower class individual to, say, a medieval king. Sure, the former may have luxuries unthinkable to the medieval king, hot and cold running water, flush toilets, electricity, central heating, etc.

But it is always better to be king.

"Hail to the king, baby"

The question comes down to this: what is "alpha" in modern society? The days of existing in small groups of hunter-gatherers have (for anyone reading this, at least) long since passed. And it seems, from observing HG groups that survived into the 20th century, that there was much less of an alpha/beta hierarchy than exists in baboon and other primate societies. Certainly nothing close to the strict hierarchy of wolves.

Canis lupus, meet Vulpes vulpes

It seems that the modern struggle for hierarchy and status among humans really got started or was heavily exacerbated by the neolithic revolution. It was only the accumulation of wealth allowed by trade and fixed agricultural societies that an aristocracy was able to develop. Hunter-gatherers have no need to dig up and collect gold.

I'm of the Desmond Morris mindset that The Naked Ape is a collection of mixed impulses: alpha/beta primate hierarchy mixed with a couple million years of more egalitarian HG hunting (and child-rearing), with a brief period of neolithicism tacked on at the end.

The neolithic era seems to have re-awakened, or perhaps selected for, these buried dominance/hierarchical genes. Not that there's anything wrong with that. People work hard and excel because they want to win, or at least to increase their social status. Einstein didn't "solve" Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and discover special relativity in one year, while working at a patent office, simply because he was a bored.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, is it better to be a beta?

No. Fucking. Way.

Being alpha means trying to excel at what you do, and not taking shit from anyone. It also means not starting shit with anyone who's not going out of their way to mess with you (bullies are not alpha). At least that's my definition. I don't see why anyone would want to accept betahood.

Roasted Leg of Lamb and Bell Peppers

2011-07-25T17:11:00.005+02:00

Some quick and dirty food pron.

Leg of lamb, browned in the skillet and coated with rub of salt, dijon mustard, onion (out of garlic--yeah I know), and lots of fresh rosemary which we brought home from our gracious landlord's garden (more like her jungle of a front yard) from our vacation. Then roasted in the oven at 200C. A bit overcooked (my specialty) but still quite tender.

I'm not the world's biggest rosemary fan, but it sure goes well with lamb.

I made a ton of this dijon rosemary sauce, so I added plenty of olive oil, and tossed with bell peppers:

And roasted as well.

Dobrou chut'!

The Hayekian Argument Against Socialism

2011-07-21T13:53:00.008+02:00

We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based — a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed. - FA Hayek-Nobel Prize Lecture

A couple of somewhat political posts (Richard Nikoley and Jamie Lewis) got me thinking about the nature of socialism. I used to think socialism (and communism which is just a more extreme case socialism) was bad because it went against human nature. When I came across Hayek's argument of the division of kowledge, which was fairly recently, I was completely astounded.

I'm just an economics dilletante, the concept of the division of knowledge is probably common knowledge to any student of economics, although I never came across it in the economics classes I took in college (five of them).

The profound idea is this: socialism--any sort of top-down structure or system--destroys information. Hayek made a lot of good arguments against socialism but, for me, this one really goes to heart of the problem. Socialism destroys knowledge. This is why it is so goddamned inefficient.

The dilemma of a socialized system is that the information flow overwhelms a centralized system if it is open to new ideas and data, that closing the system and forcing the plan to work forecloses alternatives and risks unhedged mistakes, and that decentralizing without real markets poses the problems discussed by Hayek. These information problems permeate virtually all economic processes. [Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter, in An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982), p. 365]

Information theory is a fascinating subject. And by fascinating I mean ridiculously nuanced and incomprehensible. But the basic idea of Hayek's argument is that there is a hell of a lot of knowledge available in a free market.

People, no matter their education level, are very, very good at adjusting their levels of consumption. Price, in a free market, simply conveys information. If the price of gasoline increases, this signals that gasoline has become scarcer. Some people will decide to drive less. Others will decide it doesn't matter because they have more money or because most of their driving is necessary to their existence, like employment.

Millions of decisions will be made and the price of gasoline will fluctuate accordingly.

For a socialist these millions of independent decisions are some sort of necessary evil. For a communist, these millions of decisions simply don't exist, the government will decide the price of gasoline so shut the fuck up.

The key importance of the amount of information available and the frequent lack of relevant information have been dealt with only in the last decades. L. von Mises and F. A. von Hayek can rightly be regarded as pioneers in this connection. [Jan Tinbergen, in 1979, as quoted in Recollections of Eminent Economists (1988) by J. A. Kregel, Vol. 1, p. 90]

Under socialism information is destroyed. All these independent decisions are destroyed.

Humans are very good at looking out for their self interest. Call it what you want. Greed? When I shop for a better deal is that because I'm greedy? Or is it because I don't want to be exploited by the evil corporations who are so obviously greedy. When I'm fiercely protective of my child, is that because I'm greedily trying to foist my offspring/DNA onto the next generation?

Real Food On a Budget--Maria

2011-07-17T17:45:00.005+02:00

The contest part is officially over, but anyone who wants to still participate can, of course.

Maria writes:

I ate breakfast around 0730ish, lunch around 1430ish (unless I skipped it, then dinner would be about 1730ish).. Coffee/cream was through the day, but I put it in whichever slot was emptiest :)

This was only for me, had it been for my family of 4, it'd have been thriftier and would prob come out to about $500/550 for a month. As it is, they've pre-moved and finishing out the last two months of this on my own, so this menu is only for one (me). But I am 7 months pregnant.. so sort of for two! :))

Lastly, I drank lots of water, didn't include that.. or vitamins. (D/C/Iron/Magnesium).

[...] I put $9 for the heavy whipping cream, should be 6... changes the total to $61 for the week. Small detail, but still...

Here's Maria's shopping list:

And meals for a week:

There you have it. I'd say $61 for 1 (and a half) people is quite reasonable. Especially given the quality of the meals and ingredients.

Maria adds:

Also, this particular week was a bit monotonous when compared to the possibilities, but I suppose that's what happens when you hardly have a kitchen and don't have a family to demand variety.. :)

When it's solely me, I can tolerate a bit more monotony, but week-in, week-out of that menu would certainly get old. Also, I tried to elaborate on cost in the post, ended up with various versions and lots of re-dos, but was trying to say that, when cooking and shopping for a family of 4/5, it's easier to buy somewhat more in bulk, reducing the overall price.. Doesn't make sense I suppose on paper, but that's what I've found doing it.

For the past 6 months our monthly food budget has been $450 and we've easily been able to stay within those confines, but if we were to make higher-quality choices, we could still get away with $500/550.

Buying in bulk and cooking for a family is going to bring the cost per person down significantly. Maria's meals are a bit more monotonous than one might want week-in-week-out, but they look pretty damn good to me. The point is that a paleo-ish type diet is no more expensive than the crap-in-a-box diet typical in North America, actually less so.

Thanks, Maria, for contributing. This is my favorite format: food bought in one table, meals eaten (et) in another.

Ron Swanson Doesn't Believe in Awards Anyway

2011-07-17T08:32:00.004+02:00

Awards are stupid, which is why I fully intend to decline this nonsense and recommend it go to Leslie because she works really hard and I don't. (Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation, Season 2, Episode 17: "Woman of the Year")

Nick Offerman has been snubbed by the Emmies. Again. But some guy from some TV show called Glee was nominated.

My only response is to give you Ron Swanson's Pyramid of Greatness (click for large):

I can't decide what's my favorite. There's the four basic foods: Cow, Pig, Chicken and Deer protein (Fish, for sports only, since it is almost a vegetable).

SKIM MILK: That's right. It's on here twice. Avoid it.

PERSPIRATION: Only sweat during physical activity or love making. No emotional sweating.

FRIENDS: One to three is sufficient.

TORSO: Should be thick and impenetrable.

POISE: Sting like a bee. Do not float like a butterfly. That's ridiculous.

INTENSITY: Give 100%. 110% is impossible. Only idiots recommend that.

The only one thing I sortta disagree with is BUFFETS (choose quantity over quality). And the one about American, obviously, although it's hilarious. But no one is perfect, not even Ron Swanson.

Is Paleo/LC/Primal a Fad Diet?

2011-07-14T13:28:00.016+02:00

Over at Free the Animal, Rosemary made this comment which I strongly disagree with:

Good to see you ever-so-slowly moving away from the whole paleo thing. At least you’re doing it with far more grace than some (Girl Gone Primal, anyone?). I’ve seen this coming on for a while; the typical lifespan of any fad diet – and LC/paleo is no different – is limited by design. People discover it; get passionate about it (and start blogs); and then – eventually – crash and burn (out). Just peruse any of the LC forums out there. It was pretty clear something was happening when Kurt Harris began to equivocate – if not outright reverse himself – on a number of things – “no such thing as macronutrient”, his posts on “orthorexia” and eating Rice Krispies, etc. Hooray for intellectual honesty… The only exception to this rule seems to be people like Jimmy Moore and Dana Carpender and Charles Washington – True Believers who are so invested in their dietary worldview (financially and otherwise) that any deviation or questioning would simply be unthinkable. But I do applaud your evolution; people who complain simply don’t get it – and need to get a life, in point of fact.

I don't think paleo, low-carb (LC) or primal (which I see as a Sissonesque rebranding and rejigging of paleo) is some sort of fad diet. Subsisting on lemon juice, that's a fad diet. Cutting out frankenoils, sugar and glutens is simply a step in the right direction.

While I've tended to avoid the term paleo diet for quite a while (in favor of the term real food), this is because paleo has gotten a bit trendy and somewhat stylized, along with the annoying self-appointed paleo police puritans and maybe my innately contrarian nature. I don't think there's anything wrong with the basic principles of a paleo diet: that we are genetically optimized for hunter-gatherer type food, that neolithic foods such as grains are bad and uber-neolithic foods such as frankenoils, processed sugar (and most likely sugar substitutes) are really, really bad.

To get a perspective on the history of low-carb diets and the demonization of animal fats one really has to read Good Calories, Bad Calories. Long before the role of insulin was known and insulin itself was isolated (the first diabetic was given an insulin injection in 1922, thanks in large part to a guy named, coincidentally, Banting), the fattening effect of carbs was common knowledge among doctors and medical researchers of the 19th century, although there was certainly no consensus on the matter.

I see the revival of the LC paradigm to be somewhat like the Copernican "revolution". The heliocentric model wasn't invented by Copernicus (Philolaus might've had that honor back in 400 BC) but Copernicus was important in shattering the Ptolemaic system that had held sway in Europe, thanks to the Catholic and Orthodox Church, since the collapse of Rome.

Neither did Atkins invent the LC diet. What he did was bring it into the mainstream and in so doing he took a hell of a lot of flack and made a hell of a lot of money. The Atkins Diet is flawed, of course, but the general principles, to lose weight avoid carbs and especially simple carbs like processed sugar are sound.

It is incredible that in twentieth-century America a conscientious physician should have his hard-won professional reputation placed on the line for daring to suggest that an obesity victim might achieve some relief by cutting out sugars and starches.
-ROBERT ATKINS, author of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, testifying before Congress, April 12, 1973 (GCBC, pp. 404)

Next we come to the paleo or evolutionary diet. This I would liken to the framework of Newtonian gravity. Newton did not discover gravity, he was simply the first person to write a pretty accurate equation to describe the force of gravity (along with co-inventing calculus and other such minutiae):

Newton didn't know how gravity worked, he was famously perturbed by the notion of action-at-a-distance. We still don't know how gravity works, but we've gotten closer with General Relativity. Just as Newtonian mechanics laid out a framework for, and extended, the ideas of Copernicus and Kepler (and that towering genius Galileo), proponents of a paleo, or evolutionary diet, created a framework to explain why a LC diet was so succesful at restoring health.

Long before evolution was accepted or even well-known, doctors had observed that neolithic foods like processed sugar and bread made people fat. Long before there was a comprehensive theory about gravity people had observed there were some pretty glaring problems with the Ptolemaic model.

Are there faddish aspect to the paleo diet? Yes of course. There were faddish aspects to Relativity. Think of all those posters of Einstein adorning dorm rooms and offices.

This image was really popular, therefore Relativity is faddish bullshit

Until we have a working biochemical model for the human body it's all guesswork. I think human biochemistry is in more or less in the same position physics was when Copernicus and Galileo dared to challenge the Catholic church. Except that instead of challenging the idea that the Earth is the center of the Universe, the heretics must challenge the doctrine of the Food Pyramid.

Human biochemistry is a knowable thing just as the nature of gravity is a knowable thing. We are (seemingly) much closer to understanding the latter. The low-carb paradigm and its successor, the evolutionary diet paradigm (paleo) go a long way towards getting us started on the road to understanding human biochemistry and leaving the dark ages of lipophobia, statins and idiotic food pyramids. The China Study and other such papal decrees by the Church of Heart Healthy Whole Grains can elect all the Grand Inquisitors they want, but they are the last gasp of a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Were Gladiators Really Fat Vegetarians?

2011-07-11T10:40:00.022+02:00

Don Matesz, everyone's favorite apostate ex-paleo vegetarian shaman, points to this 2008 abstract, The Gladiator Diet, where Karl Grossschmidt (or more correctly Großschmidt) says essentially that gladiators were fat vegetarians, based on bone analysis from a gladiator graveyard found in Ephesus.

Unfortunately, the details in the article are very sketchy. I managed to dig a little deeper and found a couple more articles going way back where Dr Großschmidt says the same thing. Here's the text from a 2004 article (reproduced here) from the Telegraph, which in turn is about this 2004 documentary:

Dr Grossschmidt noticed from the bone analysis that, contrary to the normal effects of intensive training, the gladiators put on weight before a fight rather than lost it.

Bone samples were subjected to chemical analysis. While a normal meat and vegetable diet will show balanced levels of zinc and strontium, the gladiators' bones were very high in strontium and low in zinc - another indication of vegetarianism.

The density of the bone tissue was significantly higher than normal, exactly what one finds in modern athletes, he said. The bone enlargement was particularly pronounced in the feet - evidence that gladiators fought barefoot in the slippery arena sand.

And here's another 2004 article with this quote from Dr Großschmidt:

"Tests performed on bits of bone taken from the skeletons of some 70 gladiators buried at Ephesus seem to prove that they ate mainly barley, beans and dried fruit," said Dr Karl Grossschmidt, who took part in the study by the Austrian Archaeological Institute

"This diet, which has been mentioned in the oral history, is rather sad but it gave the gladiators a lot of strength even if it made them fat," said Grossschmidt who is a member of the University of Vienna's Institute of Histology and Embryology.

So Dr Großschmidt has been quoted quite a bit saying basically the same thing. As far as I can tell, the only verifiable facts are that the bones had high density, not surprising, and that they had high levels of strontium and low levels of zinc. The low zinc thing could be indicative of a vegetarian diet, vegetarians are at risk for zinc deficiency.

And speaking of zinc deficiency, guess where soils were recently identified as being particularly low in zinc?

Central Anatolia, in Turkey, was a region with zinc-deficient soils and widespread zinc deficiency in humans. In 1993, a research project found that yields could be increased by 6 to 8-fold and children nutrition dramatically increased through zinc fertilization.

Through a partnership with Cukurova University, the State and the private company TOROS Agri Industry Group, zinc was added to fertilizers. While the product was initially made available at the same cost, the results were so convincing that Turkish farmers significantly increased the use of the zinc-fortified fertilizer (1 per cent of zinc) within a few short years, despite the repricing of the products to reflect the added value of the content.

And Ephesus is located in modern day Turkey, of course. Not a smoking gun, exactly, perhaps these soils were depleted of zinc over the last 1800 years, but if the soils are low in zinc then the animal that eat these plants are going to be low in zinc also, and the people who eat the animals will also be low in zinc. Maybe everyone in Ephesus was zinc deficient in circa 200 AD.

Next Dr Großschmidt says that the "oral history" supports his supposition of a diet of they ate mainly barley, beans and dried fruit. Oral history? What does that mean? Apparently there is some reference to gladiators as "barley-eaters". Where this comes from is left extremely vague. Color me skeptical.

And then there is this:

Dr Grossschmidt noticed from the bone analysis that, contrary to the normal effects of intensive training, the gladiators put on weight before a fight rather than lost it.

Huh? How do you tell that from 1800 year old bones? Do bones have rings like trees? I'm no expert on bone analysis, but this sounds like a load of crap.

And this:

It was a boring diet, he admitted. "They got enough of this food every day to make them very fat and strong," he said. He concluded that they devised the diet primarily to protect themselves from slashing wounds and damage to nerves and blood vessels, with the layer of fat supplementing their scant armour.

I'm going to call this the sumo-gladiator hypothesis, and it's entirely supposition by Dr Großschmidt. It's also something I find very dubious.

First of all, sumo wrestling is a very specific sport which relies more than any other sport on very mass and inertia. Endurance and dexterity are minor factors. The body type required for knocking someone out of a small circle is going to be very different from that needed to fight an armed death match in a sandy arena, or for just about any other sport really.

Secondly, is a layer of fat really going to act as much protection against slashing wounds? Subcutaneous fat is also a lot easier to cut than hardened muscle, not to mention that it slows one down and impedes heat loss which would have likely been a factor on the coast of Asia Minor. I just don't buy it.

So the whole vegetarian sumo-gladiator hypothesis Dr Großschmidt puts forward seems to rest on low zinc bone content, some hearsay about gladiators being barley eaters, and his supposition that fat acts as some sort of armor. Personally, I don't think it is possible to say with any certainty what the gladiators ate. Perhaps, as slaves, they were denied access to the more expensive animal products. Maybe the low-zinc soil meant that most people in Ephesus were zinc deficient even if they ate an omnivorous diet. A comparison of gladiator bones to those of other contemporary citizens would be interesting in this regard.

I think it more likely that gladiators looked like this:

Boxer of Quirinal

Rather than this:

"I'm bigger than you and higher up the food chain. Get in my belly!!!"

Were they vegetarians? From the evidence Dr Großschmidt presents in these interviews, I think it's impossible to say. Is a vegetarian diet optimal for most humans, regardless whether or not they have to fight to the death with swords and tridents? Definitely not.

Addendum: the reference to gladiators as hordearii (the binomial name for common barley is hordeum vulgare), or barley-eater, apparently comes from Pliny although I've not found the actual quote.Wikipedia has this:

Pliny also noted barley was a special food of gladiators known as hordearii, "barley-eaters". However, by Roman times, he added that wheat had replaced barley as a staple.

But the footnoted reference is broken.

Also, the gladiator bones were compared to average contemporaries, my bad.

Grossschmidt and collaborator Fabian Kanz subjected bits of the bone to isotopic analysis, a technique that measures trace chemical elements such as calcium, strontium, and zinc, to see if they could find out why. They turned up some surprising results. Compared to the average inhabitant of Ephesus, gladiators ate more plants and very little animal protein.

It would be nice to read the actual article, rather than the abstract, but it doesn't seem to be available. Also I found this quote from Discovery Magazine (2007) on the relevance of high strontium:

Medical University of Vienna anthropologists Fabian Kanz and Karl Grossschmidt analyzed gladiator skeletons unearthed near an ancient Ephesus stadium in what is now Turkey. The researchers found high levels of the trace element strontium, associated with plant-based diets, in the athletes' bones.

So the vegetarian argument, at least for these gladiators in Ephesus in the second century AD, seems to be stronger than my initial impression.

In the same article Discovery Magazine also wrote this:

The discovery validates historical accounts of what gladiators, who were rather hefty and short by today's standards, ate.

The tallest gladiators measured around 5 feet 5 inches tall.

Wait, what? So far as I can tell, the only historical "account" of what gladiators ate is this single reference by Pliny about hordearii. And what would this have to do with gladiators being short "by today's standards"? Were they short because they were eating a vegetarian diet since birth? Not getting enough protein? Because they were eating a neolithic diet full of "heart-healthy" whole grains?

Also, I think it is pretty clear Dr Großschmidt is not some sort of crypto-vegan with an agenda. He says this diet would have been "boring", and "rather sad" and would have made them fat. I'm just skeptical of his conclusions.

Metabolic Syndrome is NOT About Free Will

2011-07-08T14:00:00.007+02:00

Ah, the old willpower and diet argument, will it never die?

Scott Adams (of Dillbert fame) is a highly intelligent guy who often has some interesting things to say. But recently he wrote a brief post on his blog titled "Chipping Away at the Superstition of Free Will" which linked to a typically idiotic Huffington Post piece about the "psychology" of losing weight: cut out the sugar (good, of course) AND FATS, cultivate self-discipline, surround yourself with like-minded people, blah blah blah.

The HuffPo piece simply parrots the shallow and idiotic party line so I won't bother dissecting it.

Adams writes:

Here's another blow to the Nature Deniers. Yes, I did just invent a new label for people who believe human nature is not an important factor in human actions.

Uhm, what?

I believe human nature is an important factor in human actions, how does that make Free Will a superstition? I enjoy sex, I'm designed by evolution to enjoy sex, I'm aware that I'm designed to enjoy sex. Does that mean I can't control my actions and try to constantly hump the legs of pretty women I see walking down the street? Yes! Wait, maybe that was a bad example.

Seriously, the majority of people (in most western countries) are overweight and fail in their quest to lose weight. This is because these people have no idea that they are screwed up and addicted to neolithic agents of disease (NADs) thanks to the party line still being spouted by the mainstream. It is most certainly not because of a lack of discipline (although there is discipline involved in curbing the initial addiction) and definitely not because free will is a superstition.

Here's Adams doing a typically funny strip on the subject back in 1993 (I suppose I'll get a takedown request for this although I'd argue it is fair use):

Source

This is an interesting topic because the root of it is whether or not the brain is an algorithmic machine, which is something I'm very interested in, and which, of course (being a huge fan of Roger Penrose), I don't believe it is. If the brain is an algorithmic machine, like this computer I'm typing on, then there is no such thing as free will and hence true culpability goes out the window along with a lot of other things. We are all just very complex wind-up toys going through the motions with the illusion of free will.

If the human brain is simply an algorithmic machine then we should be on the verge of making a much better algorithmic machine out of silicon which will very quickly make another, etc, and then we are at the singularity and we all become redundant, blah blah blah.

If the brain is not an algorithmic machine then the question of what is free will is tied up with the question of what is self-awareness which is something we don't understand AT ALL. And something which Penrose argues we won't come close to understanding until we have a unifying knowledge of the laws of the Universe that can link together and explain quantum mechanics, gravity and entropy (the unidirectional flow of time).

Booze Doesn't Kill Neurons--Apparently

2011-07-08T12:33:00.002+02:00

Well ya see Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

"In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the lowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we all know, kills brain cells, but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers.-Cliff Clavin, Cheers

Old Cliffy was wrong. A study at Washington University School of Medicine indicates that memory loss due to alcohol binging is caused by stress on the hippocampus not by killing brain cells.

So cases of Korsakoff syndrome like The Lost Mariner (If you haven't read Oliver Sacks you are missing some fascinating stuff) are probably a result of permanent damage to the hippocampus and perhaps other parts of the brain involved with memory formation rather than overall neuron damage.

via Reason

Growing Vegetables Now a Crime Against Humanity

2011-07-08T11:20:00.002+02:00

The Bass family is being prosecuted for this terrible, disgraceful eyesore of a front yard (warning for those of weak constitution, avert your eyes now!):

Apparently, a neighbor filed a complaint and some officious little prick from the city government is prosecuting to the full extent of the law. Apparently growing basil in a neat planter is akin to having a rusty old Chevy up on blocks in the eyes of this city official.

"ALL GARDENS MUST BE SANCTIONED BY ZE STATE!"

The Basses are fighting it, but if they lose could face 93 days in jail.

Via Radley Balko

Update: this story is really going viral. I hope the asshole loses his job over this, but that's probably overly optimistic.

Borromean Rings and Biochemistry

2011-07-07T16:50:00.009+02:00

While on my recent vacation I tried challenging myself by reading Martin Gardener and re-reading Roger Penrose, but I eventually broke down and indulged in some Raymond Chandler which is, for me at least, ideal beach reading. Specifically, The Long Goodbye, which I consider to be Chandler's best novel despite its numerous flaws:

She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. (Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, 1953)

Does writing get any better than that?

Anyway, something I came across in Martin Gardner before I gave up the mental challenge is the odd topological concept of the Borromean rings.

Wikipedia

These three rings are interlocked but no two rings are linked. Look carefully, if you remove any one ring, the other two will not be linked.

This is a great illustration of how systems can be interdependent without having a direct causal linkage.

It might also illustrate how the complicated feedback systems of the body can be very difficult to isolate and study independently.

Let us substitute the hormones ghrelin, insulin and leptin for these three rings since hormones are simply feedback loops. Two of these hormones were discovered quite recently, shockingly recent considering the supposedly advanced state of biochemistry and its bastard child nutrition (eat less, exercise more, eat healthy whole grains, avoid SFAs blah blah blah). Is it possible to remove one of these rings, say insulin, and study it all by itself? Or is it possible to study two of these feedback systems while leaving out the third?

Yes, perhaps it is, but I doubt it.

Roger Penrose makes a very strong argument why physics is incomplete and how this incompleteness is tied up with our inability to understand self-awareness and artificial intelligence. All physicists know physics is incomplete, of course (otherwise why bother?), but Penrose argues that the depth of this incompleteness is much greater and has more serious ramifications (such as with AI) than most physicists, and scientists in general, like to acknowledge.

Pointing out that modern physics is incomplete is a far cry from throwing it all away and embracing shamanism and Chinese medicine, of course.

I think nutrition today is something like what alchemy was to physics and chemistry in the middle ages, a bridge to a proper understanding of the chemicals and their ratios that best fuel the body. This requires a deep understanding of the biochemistry of the body, right now we are stuck using hueristics like ancestral diets, paleolithic vs neolithic diets, and various studies of varying qualities and institutional bias.

I strongly believe in minimizing or eliminating neolithic foods that we aren't well adapted for. But this is simply a heuristic. We are not even close to is a real understanding of the biochemistry of the body so these heuristics and studies are what we're stuck with.

A true biochemical understanding of what we should eat would be from first principles, from a deep understanding of DNA and how it produces this complicated machine called human. Until that happens (and I doubt it will happen in my lifetime), I'll stick with avoiding neolithic agents of disease.

I Still Hate 1984 AND The Wonder Pets--A Philisophical Manifesto

2011-07-05T13:07:00.008+02:00

Back in 2008 I wrote a blog post about why I can't stand didactic dystopian novels. And a while back I wrote a short post about why I dislike The Wonder Pets and Dora the Explorer, which pissed off a lot soccer moms (and dads) who were apparently googling for Wonder Pets pictures. These are really two sides of the same coin.

About didactic dystopian novels I wrote way back when:

Not all dystopian books are awful, of course. When a book is an extension of the author's world view such as Phillip K. Dick's paranoia and belief in the questionable nature of reality, some very interesting dystopias can emerge.

But if you need to read an "important" book like 1984 in order to understand that a totalitarian society sucks or Fahrenheit 451 in order to realize that burning books is bad, then you are also going to be stupid enough to fall for the newest form of fascism rolling down the pike, like Political Correctness or Obamamania, because you never were able to master the concept of thinking for yourself.

I would go even further and say that when a dystopian novel is based on good characters and dialogue I don't have a problem with it, even if it has an agenda I disagree with (I'm thinking Cat's Cradle). What I can't stand is to get beaten over the head by a 'novel' that is really just a barely readable piece of propaganda that is later declared a classic by the very establishment that misunderstands it.

The problem with 1984 is that it ends up being a shortcut to conceptual thinking about what fascism really is (not to mention that it is really boring).

--

"What's this fascism stuff, dude?"

"It's that 1984 thing, dude, the greatest novel of the 20th century about a society that didn't tolerate dissent. I didn't actually read it but it is my favorite novel ever."

"Cool, let's all go to a protest wearing the exact same clothes and chanting the exact same slogans."

"Yeah I heard there'll be tons of babes there."

--

Any kid who gets their morality or worldview from a TV show is in serious trouble. If they are going to learn ethics from a TV show, the last thing they need is a show like The Wonder Pets teaching the joys of conformity. The most difficult and important part of growing up is learning to avoid peer pressure and the need to conform to the popular hive mind. In other words, learning to think for oneself.

The last thing any society needs is more conformity.

Original thinking is not something that can be taught, per se, but it can be cultivated in an environment where questioning things is de rigueur. I was recently trying to get my son to question the nature of gravity. At 4 1/2 he's not quite ready for Relativity but simple questions (why does this cup fall?) lead to greater truths (because this part of space is warped), and when those simple questions can't be answered (why does warped space cause things to fall?) there is something wrong in either the understanding or the paradigm.

I do think children's TV shows (and TV in general) can teach something--creativity. I prefer my kid to watch shows like Spongebob or Phineas and Ferb for their originality, surrealism and characterization rather than a repetitive, politically correct piece of moralistic fluff like Wonder Pets or something "educational" like Dora the Explorer.

No kid is going to turn into a socialist vegetarian simply by watching Wonder Pets and no one is going to gain much insight into fascism by simply reading 1984. I dislike these things because they've either become (in the case of 1984) or represent (in the case of Wonder Pets) a pale substitution for original thought.

Will The Real Mediterranean Diet Please Stand Up?

2011-07-03T15:09:00.007+02:00

I was thinking of titling this post, "My Vacation Rental" after reading Girl Gone Primal's advice, "If you haven't got anything interesting to say, don't tell us about your vacation rental."

Our vacation rental was pretty cool, but with the incessant drone of scooters and tractors towing boats in and out of the water it wasn't exactly idyllic.

Here's a shot:

Having spent some time in Spain, Italy, France, Greece, Spain, and now Croatia, I would say that the main thing these countries have in common is a love of food. What I've seen little evidence of is this mythical beast known as the Mediterranean Diet.

And now for some food porn from Croatia.

Mussels with red sauce.

Fish and vegetables:

Mixed grill. Note the Croatian red sauce in an onion "bowl", this stuff was pretty tasty and ubiquitous. At it's best it's simply amazing.

Bread was served with every meal and it was pretty damned good. But I mostly used it to make toys like Mr BreadHead here. Bread is a great construction material, not so great as a source of calories.

Amazing how kids can get so much more playtime out of a piece of bread than an actual toy.

Going Off-Grid

2011-06-17T12:07:00.000+02:00

"Honey, would you mind unplugging me."

Off to Rab, Croatia for two weeks, and probably will have minimal internet connectivity. Instead, I will be spending my time outside, hopefully reading actual books, swimming in the Adriatic and all that kind of stuff.

Feedback Control and Metabolic Syndrome

2011-06-15T14:22:00.011+02:00

When I was studying electrical engineering, one of the most interesting specialties was feedback control. Had I not specialized in electromagnetics and physics I think that's what I would have optioned. Like many things, my initial fascination stemmed from frustration. At first I really didn't get it at all. I found it pointless and tedious. Actually, I found most of EE to be pointless and tedious, I really wanted to study physics or mathematics (and did study music) but didn't feel it was "practical" enough.

Anyway, I didn't end up learning much about feedback control beyond the core basics and that was more than 20 years ago so this will just be some cursory ramblings on the subject.

As I wrote in my oft-maligned post criticizing Art DeVany's use of the butterfly effect, the body is far from being a chaotic system because of it's numerous feedback systems: insulin, leptin, ghrelin, etc, just to scratch the surface, with ghrelin and leptin being discovered very recently!

I'd also like to point out that I've not yet had anyone criticize this post on a scientific or mathematical level.

Yeah, that's me sort of gloating. If DeVany didn't make such a big deal about being an expert I wouldn't bother to point out his mistaken and sophomoric use of basic physics.

But seriously, my knowledge of chaos theory and complexity could fit inside a nutshell with an infinite amount of space leftover, or something like what Hamlet said. Ditto for feedback theory.

Feedback mechanisms are interesting, vitally important and they are what separates chaos from order. The body is very complex but it is also very far from being a chaotic system thanks to all these feedback systems. This all ties in with the idea of entropy which is also fascinating and also something I admit I know very little about.

The only reason I bring this up is that no matter how meager my knowledge of feedback mechanisms are, I'm sure most people who espouse the calorie-is-a-calorie bullshit--especially nutritionists and journalists-- know even less (paging Jane Brody).

So let's look at some feedback 101, shall we? Here's a classic graph of damping response:

Stolen from here

The classic example uses shock absorbers on a car, but it doesn't matter if the feedback system is mechanical, electrical or chemical (ie leptin, insulin, and other hormones).

So the system receives a shock, like driving over a pothole or a speed-bump or eating a pizza with a liter of Coke. The system responds. In the case of a car the default mechanism is some sort of spring, in the case of a pizza and a liter of coke (or beer), the default mechanism is a hormone called insulin that essentially tells all the cells in the body, "INCOMING!!!!"

The underdamped instance corresponds mechanically to having no shocks, you hit a bump and the car bounces for the next five miles. The overdamped instance corresponds to a serious sports car, like my old friend, an Alfa Romeo GTV6, sadly gone but not forgotten.

The ideal feedback response is critically damped. The system responds exactly enough to handle the shock.

This all depends on what sort of shocks the system has to deal with. A monster truck needs to have a different feedback system than a Cadillac.

In the case of metabolic syndrome, the insulin (and probably leptin and other hormones) feedback mechanism is damaged from overuse. Once the response mechanism is damaged (insulin sensitivity, or a worn-out shock absorber), the absorption mechanism (springs or pancreatic signalling with insulin) is soon to follow and the system is what we engineers technically refer to as FUBAR.

Diet and Pills and Mental Illness

2011-06-14T14:47:00.009+02:00

An article in the New Yorker reviews three books that cast a skeptical eye on mental illness and especially the drugs given to fix or abate it.

I'm pretty skeptical myself that the majority of people who are taking stuff like anti-depressants really need them or that they have a net benefit. I remember watching a documentary a while back where Stephen Fry defended pharmaceuticals, saying they basically saved his life and maybe they did. One family he interviewed, however, had their teenaged sons on an insane cocktail of pills saying that they'd been absolutely out of control. This frankly turned my stomach.

Nowadays, of course, I would point to diet as the first and foremost factor to be explored, especially for children.

From the article:

First, [the three authors] agree on the disturbing extent to which the companies that sell psychoactive drugs—through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery—have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated. This is a subject to which I’ll return.

Second, none of the three authors subscribes to the popular theory that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. As Whitaker tells the story, that theory had its genesis shortly after psychoactive drugs were introduced in the 1950s.

Now I think putting kids on anti-depressants or whatever should be a very, very distant last measure. On the other hand, Tom Cruise thinks Brooke Shields was a bad mom for taking Paxil, an anti-depressant, for postpartum depression. And let's face it, Tom Cruise is a stupid asshole. Cruise is so stupid he makes other actors look intelligent by comparison. BTW, isn't it ironic that Dolph Lundgren is one of the most intelligent and well-educated actors ever to star in a Hollywood film? The dude graduated top in his class with a masters in Chemical Engineering.

I'm so dang STOOOOPID!!!

So while I'm not a big fan of popping pills for health and mental health, I just can't subscribe to the idea that mental illness is NEVER caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Somewhere in a box in storage I have a fascinating book by Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express, about his (apparently schizophrenic) mental breakdown after taking mescaline at a commune (yeah, I know). Like Stephen Fry, he believes that pharmeceuticals saved his life, and I think both these guys are smart enough that I can easily respect their opinion on this.

Incidentally both Fry and Vonnegut are now believed (or themselves believe) to have bi-polar disorder.

And you know who else had bi-polar disorder? THIS GUY!!!!

Well, supposedly. He was also a vegetarian. COINCIDENCE?!?!?!

Walter The Farting Dog

2011-06-13T14:05:00.001+02:00

I just found out about this and I'm totally ordering it. It's a NY Times bestseller and I've never even heard of it until now. That's what happens when you live under a rock, or in a foreign country. The best part is that it has been supposedly banned in some school libraries I couldn't find where it was actually banned, but it has been challenged several times, such as in Wisconson:

Walter the Farting Dog by William Kotzwinkle, and Glenn Murray. Frog, Ltd.
Challenged but retained on the library shelves of the West Salem Elementary School despite the book's use of the words "fart" and "farting" 24 times.

That made me laugh. So the word fart is allowed to be in the library, but 24 times in one book is grounds for possible censorship?

Now can someone tell my why it takes three people to write a children's book that has like 50 words in it?

PhD + PhD = Crap Diet for Toddler

2011-06-13T10:58:00.000+02:00

I was reading the Freakonomics blog and a transcript of a show which basically discusses their ideas in Superfreakonomics that WHAT you do as a parent doesn't seem to make much difference. Bryan Caplan further expands upon this in his book by saying people should have more kids and be less stressed out about raising them. It is an interesting concept and worth checking out. Good luck getting my wife to agree to any of that, though, as I write this she is having a speech therapist analyze my four-year-old son because she is worried that he doesn't pronounce his l's and r's. I already googled and found out that it's perfectly normal (yeah I got my degree in parenting from Google). Not to mention the fact that the kid is fluent in two frickin' languages.

But what really caught my eye were these helicopter parents sending their 19-month-old to all sorts of classes but not letting her eat meat and presumably much SFAs in general:

------------------

DUBNER: Rounding out the roundtable is another pair of mom-and-dad economists. Justin Wolfers is an Australian-born professor at Wharton. Betsey Stevenson, who’s also at Wharton, is currently serving as chief economist for the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. That’s where I visited them and their absolutely beguiling 19-month-old daughter, Matilda.

[...]

DUBNER: What kind of classes does she take?

STEVENSON: She goes to music class.

DUBNER: How many days a week is that?

STEVENSON: Music class is one day a week. She goes to art class.

DUBNER: How many days a week is that?

STEVENSON: That’s one day a week. And she goes to a preschool prep class.

DUBNER: Preschool prep, uh huh, preschool prep.

[...]

STEVENSON: Well, but we do do expensive things, although I think that we don’t think they’re necessary, we understand that they’re nice. So, Matilda goes to a lot of classes. She likes her classes.

WOLFERS: You know, buying her organic food. Certainly she’s going to be fine eating anything.

DUBNER: Yeah, let’s talk about the food. Tell me the foods that she does not eat.

WOLFERS: Meat, any kind of sugar.

DUBNER: Any kind of sugar.

STEVENSON: Fruit.

WOLFERS: Except juice. I mean, so she’s allowed fruit.

DUBNER: So, has she ever eaten a doughnut?

WOLFERS: No, and she’s like a total Berkeley hippie.

------------------

Two economics professors at an elite university sending their toddler to preschool prep classes (?!?!?!?) but they don't let her eat animal protein and presumably animal fat. Here's a newsflash: if really you care about your kid ditch the pre-pre-preschool and give her a juicy, well-marbled steak. Her developing brain cells will thank you for it.

More Penrose and Entropy--Why WHAT You Eat Matters

2011-06-10T13:02:00.001+02:00

The source of most of the energy on the Earth (except for nuclear and possibly fossil fuels) comes from the Sun, of course.

Here's an illustration from page 414 of Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind:

The net energy is in balance, but the type of energy is what's important. The Earth receives high energy photons, visible and ultraviolet, and radiates back into space more low energy infrared photons. Likewise, the human body intakes high energy food and oxygen and gives off low energy heat and CO2. Plants use photosynthesis to strip off that carbon, combine it with hydrogen (hence carbohydrates) from water and make plant. As Richard Feynman says, plants are made out of sunlight and air!

Here's the thing that blows my mind. The Sun is a huge ball of low-entropy. Where did the Sun come from? A gigantic cloud of extremely cold diffuse molecules of mostly hydrogen. Well a diffused cloud of cold hydrogen is extremely high in entropy. But when that hydrogen cloud is collapsed by it's own gravity under enough pressure to start fusing into helium, BOOM we have a massively low entropy fireball like the Sun. As Penrose points out, it is gravity that is responsible for low entropy hot spots like the Sun. What I don't understand is how this jibes with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? How did a high-entropy gas suddenly become a low-entropy fireball if entropy is always increasing?

Sometimes gravity DECREASES entropy as in the case of creating a star from gas. Other times gravity INCREASES entropy as in the case of black holes.

Illustration page 438

Wait, what? When gas clumps together to form stars entropy decreases, but when stars clump together entropy increases?

Entropy is a non-trivial concept.

So how does this relate to diet?

A calorie is a calorie is a calorie is simply bullshit.

Let's look at the Earth again. Let's suppose the Sun were to suddenly produce mostly infrared photons instead of visible and ultraviolet photons, but the energy flux was exactly the same. We'd be collectively screwed.

But hey, what's changed?

Well according to those who love to talk about the body-as-calorimeter and the first law of thermodynamics, nothing has changed at all. A joule is a joule and a calorie is a calorie, right? Wrong!

Joules and calories are measures of energy. They don't measure the entropy (quality) of that energy. In the case of humans this is even more complicated by eating things we haven't adapted to in quantities we haven't adapted to. Not only is it ridiculous to bring up the first law of thermodynamics in the context of diet from a perspective of basic physics, it is ridiculous in the context of metabolic response.

Musings on Entropy, Life, Penrose, Red Herrings, The Universe and Everything.

2011-06-09T16:07:00.012+02:00

OK, let's start with some quotes from GCBC on the whole calories are calories thing:

[...] As Marian Burros wrote in the New York Times in 2004: “Those who consume more calories than they expend in energy will gain weight. There is no getting around the laws of thermodynamics.” This was the “very old and immutable scientific message,” she explained. And yet the great majority of those who attempt to expend more calories than they consume don’t lose weight. Those who do, lose only a little, and for short periods of time. This suggests that obesity is a disease, “a chronic condition,” as Albert Stunkard described it over thirty years ago, “resistant to treatment, prone to relapse, for which we have no cure.” (Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories; pp 270)

and

This conviction that positive caloric balance causes weight gain is founded on the belief that this proposition is an incontrovertible implication of the first law of thermodynamics. “The fact remains that no matter what people eat, it is calories that ultimately count,” as Jane Brody explained in the New York Times. “Eat more calories than your body uses and you will gain weight. Eat fewer calories and you will lose weight. The body, which is after all nothing more than a biochemical machine, knows no other arithmetic." (Gary Taubes, GCBC; pp 293)

Jane Brody, you are such a tool. So the body is like an abacus except made out of chemicals and stuff?

Besides GCBC, this classic post by Robert McLeod explains what is wrong with the body-as-calorimeter model:

Applying the 1st Law to living organisms is Proof by Tautology. Yes, 1 + 1 = 2, but this tells us absolutely nothing about the underlying mechanics. The 1st Law does not (I repeat N-O-T) tell us whether you store excess energy in the form of fat, or bleed it off into the atmosphere by dilating blood vessels next to the skin, sweating, etc. To do so would require an accounting of entropy.

Entropy is a fascinating subject which I'm convinced is like quantum mechanics, ie, no one really understands it. OK, entropy is probably better understood than quantum physics, I've no idea really, I just know that I don't understand it, and certainly never will. But I've been re-reading The Emporer's New Mind, by Roger Penrose and he has some interesting things to say about it.

...we do need to replace the energy that we continually lose in the form of heat. Indeed, the more 'energetic' that we are, the more energy we actually lose in this form. All this energy must be replaced. Heat is the most disordered form of energy that there is, ie, it is the highest entropy form of energy. We take in energy in a low entropy form (food and oxygen) and we discard it in a high-entropy form (heat, carbon dioxide, excreta) We do not need to gain energy from our environment, since energy is conserved. But we are continually fighting against the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is not conserved; it is increasing all the time. To keep ourselves alive we need to keep lowering the entropy that is within ourselves. We do this by feeding on the low-entropy combination of food and atmospheric oxygen, combining them within our bodies and discarding the energy that we would otherwise have gained, in a high-entropy form. In this way, we can keep the entropy in our bodies from risng, and we can maintain (and even increase) our internal organization. (See Schrodinger 1967.) [Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind, 1990; pp412-413]

Food (and oxygen) are really important as sources of low-entropy, not energy. But isn't it the same thing to simply say that we need to take in energy in order to live? A charged battery has less entropy than a discharged one because it has more energy potential, so what?

The interesting distinction is that energy is always conserved. We take in energy (in a low-entropy form), we give off the same amount of energy (in a high entropy form, heat). We don't have any organs that can convert energy to matter a la e=mc², or vice-versa. Energy is conserved but entropy isn't. Entropy must always be lowered since it is constantly increasing by the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

What we are really doing when we eat and breathe is not consumimg energy but consuming anti-entropy. It is literally impossible for any form of life on earth to consume energy, in order to do that they'd need to convert that energy to matter since energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It is also impossible for any form of life to create mass. Consumed mass is either excreted, or assimilated.

Now let's go back to the first law of thermodynamics and the tedious a calorie is a calorie is a calorie bullshit.

A calorie is a measure of energy (specifically the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C). Since it is impossible to convert calories to fat (or muscle or whatever) the whole calories in equals calories out dogma is a fucking RED HERRING!

All life at all times must give off as much energy as it takes in. So the real question of obesity is: how does one stop taking in as much mass or converting that mass to fat? Now it becomes more obvious that it is the body's metabolic processes that are really the issue.

Our bodies are a complicated network of feedback mechanisms signaled by hormones (and other things) such as insulin, ghrelin, leptin, etc. These are the metabolic pathways that determine whether mass taken in will be used to build muscle, bone, generate heat, excreted, etc.

These feedback mechanisms have been finely honed over millions of years of evolution. But recently we've created or exploited foods that can screw up this finely tuned system.

Calories are a RED HERRING!

Stir-Fry--Don't Cross the Streams!

2011-06-08T21:41:00.001+02:00

Quick and dirty beef and veggie stir-fry. My wife suggested not mixing the vegetables and beef as I usually do, which allows everyone to mix and match as they see fit. Or to use the meat and veg leftovers for something else.

So that's what I did. Seems like a good idea.

Vegetables--bell pepper, zucchini, and mushrooms.

Eating Real Food at a Real Table

2011-06-03T14:17:00.003+02:00

For many years my wife and I ate dinner in front of the TV. I think I got into this habit being single (my dining room used to hold a weight set), then was a bad influence on my wife.

It's not like we watch that much TV, one or two shows, and occasionally a movie which usually gets broken up into two nights. We definitely prefer comedies like Parks and Recreation, or at the most Burn Notice (which has started to take itself rather too seriously lately). I'm sure The Wire is the greatest TV show ever in the history of the Universe, but we'd rather watch The Big Bang Theory or 2 1/2 men.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and by great power I mean having a kid, and by great responsibility I mean eating a real formal dinner at a real dining room table with real food.

Here was last night's layout.

Still working on that panorama thing

Eating dinner every night at a table was the last nail in the coffin of my squandered youth.

*sniff*

Now GET OFF MY YARD YOU KIDS!!!

Here's what my plate looked like:

Fake-grilled éntrecote or filet mignon (hovězi svičková to be exact), potatoes and mushrooms fried in Kerrygold butter, and a lots of stuff to make it un-salady like cheese, sunflower seeds, bell pepper, fresh spinach, etc. The dressing was a honey-dijon from Jan's Sushi Bar, except I only use 1 tablespoon (or a little less) honey.

Speaking of mushrooms, I really ought to write about the Slavic obsession with mushrooms and mushroom picking one of these days. Come to think of it, forest mushrooms are about the most paleolithic food around. Ancient, seasonal, unchanged by managed cultivation, and primeval.

7 Day Challenge--Everyone's a Winner!

2011-05-30T21:31:00.004+02:00

OK, I'm going to get all touchy-feely here. Unlike the race of immortals in the Highlander, I'm declaring all three people who participated in the Real Food On a Budget winners. Thanks, Brendon, Jonathan and Margaret, I'll be contacting you about your prizes. Also thanks to Richard for really getting the word out.

There can be only one...button on our shirts

Aside: why did Highlander have a Frenchman play a Scot, a Scot play a Spaniard and an American play a Russian? Also, has there ever been a bad movie with a Queen soundtrack?

So the official prize portion of the Challenge is over, but if anyone still wants to guest post their paleo-ish on a budget eating for a week, I'd be more than happy to put it up.

To summarize, Brendon spends $30-35 a week in South Korea. Jonathan spent $27.75 for a week, simply shopping at his local supermarket, and Margaret spent $85.49, around the national average, for very high quality food (grass-fed beef, etc). Hopefully these folks and others can help to dispel the myth that eating a paleo-type diet composed of real food, not crap-in-a-box, frankenoils, or "heart-healthy" whole grains, need be an expensive proposition.

Update--Here are the three books they chose:

Brendon: The Protein Power Lifeplan

Jonathan: The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet

Margaret: Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains

I've Been Slimed!!!

2011-05-28T20:12:00.005+02:00

"He slimed me"

A few days ago, Mark Sisson wrote about meat glue, and damned if I didn't manage to buy a couple of meat glued "steaks" the very next day!

Here's the video from Australian TV:

As they point out in the video, a fake "steak" should easily be pulled apart. And these (I bought two) were:

Real meat doesn't do that, of course.

That translucent stuff reminds of something from of Aliens. Here's a closeup, look away if you have a weak stomach:

"Kill me"

The ironic thing is that I bought these at the local organic "bio" store. Here's the package, the green label is some sort of EU bio/organic thing. Hooray.

Transglutaminase doesn't have to be labeled in the EU.

I'm not a huge fan of government regulation but if things are going to regulated, and food is very heavily regulated in the EU, it would be nice to know when transglutaminase is used to make a fake "steak".

Most of the bacteria in meat reside on the surface, which is why hamburger goes bad so fast, so there's an excellent case to made that this sort of thing is dangerous to one's health.

Roasted Vegetables and Breakfast of Champions

2011-05-25T19:07:00.000+02:00

I've been roasting a lot of vegetables lately, especially parsnips after being inspired by this post from Jan's Sushi Bar. Here's some cauliflower, parsnips and tomatoes, tossed with olive oil and salt and roasted on 250C for about 45 minutes:

Roasting veggies makes them tangy and crunchy, more meatlike in other words, and that's a good thing.

A typical dinner lately:

Did some expensive shopping at the local high-quality deli:

850 crowns (~$50) for Kerrygold butter, awesome (unadulterated) olive oil, stuffed grape leaves, cheddar cheese, goose paté, caviar paste, eggs, a little coach class bottle of white wine, and 300 grams of pancetta. I don't go to the high-end deli that much, cause it's easy to drop 100 bucks there, mostly to to stock up on olive oil and grey sea salt.

The fatty smoked pancetta makes a great breakfast for young kids with developing brains. My kid loves it.

My breakfast was pancetta wrapped around slices of cheddar. A little of that goes a long way.

XKCD Has Its Moments

2011-05-25T08:37:00.003+02:00

The epitome of 80s cool

As far as web comics go, I find xkcd only mildly funny and often annoying for some reason I'm not quite sure of. I appreciate that it was one of the first web comics to be successful (the first to be successful enough for its creator to quit his dayjob I believe), and helped pave the way for comics that are actually funny, as opposed to the lumbering syndicated dinosaurs, but I think as far as geek type humor goes, SMBC is an order of magnitude better and more consistent.

Still, xkcd has its moments and the alt-text from the most recent comic was something I had to try for myself. It was the following:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy."

I started with a tab that happened to have a Wikipedia page open (I almost always have a couple open) and it was suitably random, Perry the Platypus (I have to answer numerous questions about my son's favorite cartoon characters).

It took twelve clicks but I got there.

Here's the path it took:

Perry the Platypus --> Anthropomorphic
Anthropomorphism --> Human
Human --> Taxonomically
Taxonomy --> Science
Science --> Knowledge
Knowledge --> Fact
Fact --> Information
Information --> Sequence (at this point we seem to be veering away, but fear not!)
Sequence --> Mathematics (yes, it must be getting close)
Mathematics --> Quantity
Quantity --> Property (philosophy)
Property (philosophy) --> Modern philosophy

Boom baby! Philosophy is the Kevin Bacon of knowledge.

Speaking of geeky comics, they all are derived from the genius of Gary Larson, of course.

Real Food On a Budget--Margaret in North Carolina

2011-05-24T14:53:00.007+02:00

I've recently been corresponding with Margaret who put together a detailed spreadsheet of her eating for last week. It's not super cheap, but at 85 bucks a week is a great example of how eating really high quality food doesn't have to be any more expensive than the average American spends per week.

So what is the average person's weekly food budget?

I've seen different numbers so I decided to calculate it for myself. I took the numbers from this ERS/USDA report for 2009. Americans spent 607,422 million dollars on food-at-home and 574,541 million dollars on food away from home for an annual total of 1.18 billion dollars for 300 million people or $75.77/person per week. Note: I didn't include money spent on booze (167,028 million dollars). Margaret spent $9 on wine and beer (what a lush!) so her actual amount of 76 dollars for food is only 23 cents more than the national average for 2009. But the quality of what she ate is an order of magnitude above the national average.

Margaret writes:

Here's a typical spring week for me in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I have some backyard chickens and a vegetable garden, plus I'm a member of a local meat CSA. Also, we have a great grassfed beef farm just west of town. I try to cook food with leftovers in mind. In the winter, it's chuck roast. In the summer, it's quiche. Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and the Asian market are where I shopped this week. The local food co-op (Reduced for Quick Sale good meat is always a draw) and the farmer's market are also popular stops for groceries. As you can tell, this isn't an attempt at doing bargain basement paleo, but a realistic look at how I spend my food budget.

I tried to get most of the details on what I cooked this week, estimating costs when only part of an item was used. My boyfriend and I love to cook, and don't eat out a whole lot. The grill comes in handy for making crispy chicken and smoked pork roast, along with grilled veggies. Butternut squash cut like french fries, tossed in bacon grease, S&P is a favorite, and butternut grows easily in the garden and keeps in the closet all winter. Now I just have to wait a few months for this year's crop.

Here's Margaret's spread sheet for the week:

Margaret also sent me some food pron shots. These weren't taken during the week she was logging food prices, but represent typical meals she eats.

Every month I get 14 lbs. or so of meat from my CSA. Sometimes there's a ~3.5 lb. fresh ham. On the gas grill for 4 hours with indirect heat, salt and pepper, it comes out great. Here are some slices with collards from the garden and mashed potatoes and celery root. Celery root is great to mix in with mashed potatoes for a more distinct flavor (or leave out the potatoes altogether) but it's expensive (4 bucks a lb. last I checked). I'm attempting to grow it in the garden this year, and it should keep in the closet all winter.

(Mixing celeriac with mashers is a great idea, I cook with celeriac a lot, so I will be trying this in the very near future.)

Here's a pic of local grassfed bone marrow with a side of parsley.shallot.olive oil/lemon juice salad, maybe $2 for the whole thing? Not including the 2 bucks for the marrow spoon, of course.

Chicken thighs are a cheap cut of meat, fatty too. That makes them an easy choice for the grill. Steve Raichlen writes my go-to grill cookbooks. These thighs had a rub and a mop, maybe an hour on the grill. Fun to do once a month or so.

Thanks Margaret, for this detailed account of eating high-quality food for the same price the average American spends on crap!

Real Food On a Budget --Jonathan Vaudreuil in Boston

2011-05-17T19:14:00.000+02:00

Jonathan gives a detailed account of his last week's experience of paleo on a budget. Jonathan's write-up is noteworthy in that he did all his shopping at the local supermarket and he the week's budget to the SAD diet he was eating before--which would've cost 13 cents more.

Jonathan also posted this on his blog JV Gets in Shape.

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For the past few months my diet has been more of a paleo/primal diet than Tim Ferriss’s slow-carb diet. The diets are all quite similar, and in both instances there’s a huge push towards grass-fed beef, seafood, and buying organic. If you follow all these suggestions you’ll see a skyrocketing food bill, which is a huge turnoff for a lot of people. While that might be ideal, if you’re on a budget you can easily have a reasonable food bill and still eat paleo.

I decided to see if I could put together a delicious paleo menu for a week without breaking the bank.

First off, I didn’t go to lots of local grocery stores, small markets, and the massive bulk-buying warehouses to determine how to save every penny possible. I did the easiest thing possible: I went to the local supermarket, determined a menu based on the full price of each food item, and came up with the best ways possible to lower the cost of food. If I can do it this way, then anyone can. I believe that’s the most important aspect of this challenge, making it something anyone can do, otherwise you might throw your hands up in the air and say, “I don’t have a Sam’s Club/local Greek market/supermarket discount chain near me, guess I can’t do this!”

I’m also going to point out how this compares cost-wise to the standard American diet (SAD) on a budget. The end result might surprise you.

Let’s start off with some background: I live in the greater Boston area and shop at Star Market on Mount Auburn St in Cambridge, MA. For those not familiar with the area, it’s about a mile and a half from Harvard University.

The cost of living index for food here is about 20% higher than the national average, so keep that in mind when I list food prices. I’m also going to round food prices to the nearest dime.

Now, about me? I’m 6′ tall and I weigh around 175-180 lbs. This is based on a close approximation of what I’d eat in a given week if I were going to eat 3 meals a day. I’m not going to factor in eating more from working out, 16-24 hour fasts, or eating out, things I do every single week. We’re keeping it simple.

For breakfast let’s stick with simplicity: 5 egg omelet with spinach. Eggs looked like the cheapest source of protein and I usually aim for 30g+ of protein out of breakfast, so 5 eggs/day it is. I add spinach for it’s nutritional value, it’s deliciousness, and the fact that we’re going to buy leafy spinach instead of the frozen stuff so we can make a few salads and munch on greens for other meals.

The cheapest eggs I found were $2.20/dozen, which was actually less per egg than buying a carton of 18. Sometimes buying “bulk” isn’t the better option! A 10 oz bag of store-brand loose leaf spinach was $2, and we’re going to get a lot out of that single bag. Breakfast for the week just cost us $8.60, a mere $1.23 per day, and we’ll have lots of spinach for a few salads.

For lunch and dinner we’re going to create a few different meals so we don’t end up eating the same things every single day. That’s another thing I do – I eat the same lunch almost every day. Not for this experiment! Paleo has a lot of room for variety.

First thing we’re going to do is buy a 5 lb chicken and roast it in the oven. Store-brand chicken is the cheapest at $1.60/lb, so a 5 lb bird will be $8. We’ll get leftovers out of some of what we’re going to do with the chicken, and from this point on I’m going to start breaking costs down in terms of how much each meal would be.

When we’re done roasting the chicken we’ll have about 2.5 lbs of lean meat and 1.5 lbs of bones, so we’ll say each lb of chicken cost us $2. Let’s take the bones and make some chicken stock! Cook the bones in 4 quarts of water and add an onion ($1) and a pound of frozen vegetables ($1.50-1.80: we’ll call it $1.60 for simplicity’s sake). Out of this magical concoction we should get enough stock for 18 good-sized portions when we make our soup. Cost: $0.31 per serving.

To make the hearty soup, mix 1.5 lb of the cooked chicken and 1.5 lb of mixed frozen veggies in with 1/3 of the stock. We now have a hearty and delicious soup to eat any time for only $1.21 per bowl.

We still have 1 lb of chicken and enough spinach for about 3 salads. We’ll pick up 3 plum tomatoes ($0.50 apiece, estimated) and use some oil and vinegar we’d have in the kitchen for a simple dressing. Since we’ve already factored in the cost of the spinach with breakfast, the other ingredients cost a mere $1.17, and it’s the perfect lunch to take to work a few days this week.

For the rest of our meals the most reasonably priced meats we can get are boneless chicken thighs ($3/lb), chuck steak ($4/lb), or pork ($4/lb, variety of different cuts). Most of the time we could stock up on pork or steak when they’re on sale, but for this menu we won’t. We’re not going to buy any seafood, as the cheap stuff is often $7-8/lb unless we buy cans of tuna fish when they’re on sale for $1 apiece.

We’re also not going to buy any bacon, since it’s at least $5.50/lb and yields very little protein/lb compared to other meat.

Most of our veggies will be store-brand frozen ones, which range from $1.50 – $1.80/lb. As I said before, we’ll call it $1.60/lb to make things easier.

Our dinners will be quite simple: a 1/4 lb of meat and a 1/4 lb of veggies. It’s all about cooking them in interesting ways.

Mustard-crusted chicken, for example. A cheap paleo way to do this is to crush up some pork rinds for breadcrumbs, coat the chicken in mustard, then the rindcrumbs, and bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes on each side, along with roasting vegetables in the oven with a little olive oil and seasoning on them. Cost?

$0.75/lb of chicken, $0.25 per serving of rindcrumbs, and $0.40 per serving of veggies, totaling a mere $1.40 per meal.

Another favorite of mine: the fajita bowl! We’ll cook up 1/4 lb of steak and mix in a little diced onion and pepper (cost: $0.25) and either a few scoops of sugarless salsa ($0.25 for a double serving) or if you’re feeling like a moneybags add 1/4 of an avocado ($2/avocado). It ends up costing only $1.50 – $1.75 per fajita bowl.

Most anything else you cook within these basic ingredients will cost about $1.15 – $1.50 per meal.
I’m going to add one last thing to the week’s menu: a stick of butter for cooking, $1/stick. I use it for my eggs when I don’t have any animal fat to cook them in.

How much does eating this way cost? Let’s add it all up. Breakfast is $8.60 for the week with some leftover spinach. We’ll have soup 4 times, 3 salads, and mix up other meals that’ll cost around $1.40 each. And a stick of butter. Add it all up and you get… $27.75 for the week.

That’s right. Under $30.

How much would a week eating a SAD cost? We’ll base it on something very close to what I ate before I changed my diet.

Let’s say the person eats the following for breakfast: store-brand bran cereal, needing half a box each week ($1.20/wk), with some toast ($0.10/slice of store-brand bread), a glass of OJ ($2.50/wk) and milk for the cereal ($2.80/gal, 1% of course, the rest to be consumed as part of a “healthy” dinner).

Lunch: sandwiches, of course, and we’re buying the super-cheap bologna for $4/lb ($7 total since I’d eat about 1/4 lb per sandwich). Also need a healthy snack, so an inexpensive $3 bag of pretzels will do.

Dinner: pasta ($0.15/serving) with sauce ($0.25/serving) for 3 nights with small amounts of ground beef and veggies added in ($0.80 total) for $1.20 per meal. Breaded chicken and veggies 3 more nights at $1.40 per meal. One night we’ll splurge and have a 1/3 lb steak with a baked potato, clocking in at $1.83 for the ultimate in American cuisine.

Oh, and a stick of butter to cook stuff in.

The SAD for the week would cost… $27.83.

Absolutely no cost savings at all.

Remember, this is a comparison of how I eat now and how I used to eat, and I felt it would not be fair to cut out any food items just because I could save a few dollars. If I took something out I probably would replace calories with something else, and then it’s no longer an accurate comparison.

Paleo is not just for people making big bucks. It can be a simple and inexpensive way to eat better without a lot of extra effort.

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Thanks, Jonathan, and keep 'em coming, folks!

Falcons!

2011-05-15T20:55:00.000+02:00

We've had falcons nesting outside out kitchen window for the last six or seven years now. It is extremely difficult to photograph them, or even get a good look at them, though. If I stick my head out the window they spook and will often start dive-bombing me. And if the cats stand in the window they pull a full on screeching assault. So I really try to leave them alone. But I did manage to a couple shots today just sticking the camera out the window.

Here's a couple shots of me being warned off just standing in front of the window:

Here are the parents hanging out on the chimney accross the street:

Here's Mom just hanging out at the nest:

A closeup:

And here she is, feeding the kids:

The fledglings should soon venture out to look around and I'll try to take a picture without having my eyes gouged out.

Real Food On a Budget --FAQ Update

2011-05-15T09:48:00.002+02:00

A lot of questions came up and interesting points made which I will try to address here.

First of all, the time frame. In order to give people time to participate, the challenge and prizes will stay open until Friday, May 27. Speaking of prizes, and what constitutes winning, I will probably divide it up into three categories, perhaps cheapest, most interesting, best presentation, something like that. We'll see how it pans out.

The point is to show that paleo-type meals neither have to be expensive nor dull, something that is pretty obvious to anyone who has done it. However, different circumstances mean that some people can eat more cheaply in absolute terms than others, which is why I'm going to run a PPP location cost analysis on every entry, and include carbon footprint data.

OK, I'm joking. But it is why I've decided to pick three "winners" for this, and three book prizes.

Now here's my short FAQ:

How strict need one be?

Personally, I'm no paleo puritan. I've no problem with heavy cream, eggs, potatoes and white rice. However, for purposes of demonstration it would be nice to see the starches kept pretty low. But I'm certainly not going to disqualify someone for eating a little rice or potato with their meal.

What about long term food already in stock?

Short answer: let's not sweat it too much. I didn't really think about this because all we keep in the freezer is than meat, ice cubes, coffee and soup stock. Many people, of course, stock up on items like coconut, and coconut oil, nuts, frozen vegetables, etc. I think it is pretty easy to come up with a standard price for a bag of frozen peas, or whatever, using the internet if this is a big part of one's challenge diet.

What if I supplement with food from my garden?

Then you are really cool. Like the long term food question, I think the cost of homegrown veggies can be estimated from looking at store prices.

Do you want guest post submissions, or do you want people to post on their own blog?

Either way is fine with me. I think the best would be for you to post on your blog and guest post as well.

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I will add to this if necessary and thanks to everyone for participating.

I've been trying to document my food but it requires a lot of organization and discipline so I'm failing miserably. But here's what I had for late lunch/dinner yesterday, pork cutlets chopped up and stir-fried with a red bell pepper, an egg, some green onions, ghee and a little soy sauce (yes, soy sauce, damnit!).

And sweet potato pancakes, a large sweet potato, microwaved, mashed with an egg fried in ghee.

Of all that the only thing I know the price of is the pork which was 44 Czech crowns ($2.54). The meat was store-bought prepackaged, so not as cheap as the local butcher, the sweet potato has been around for a couple weeks. And I haven't been keeping track of my vegetable purchases, but veggies aren't that cheap here. So probably 5 bucks for a big meal for one person, but basically my only meal of the day. Not super cheap but less than a 12 oz bag of Doritos from Amazon (when bought in a three-pack no less!).

My wife bought a big jar of ghee a while back and it wasn't cheap, 230 kč ($13.30) but it really lasts a long time and we use it a lot, and really like the taste so it turns out to be a pretty reasonable investment, the actually ghee cost/meal is quite small.

Real Food On a Budget --Brendan in South Korea

2011-05-15T09:38:00.000+02:00

I haven't even started writing my update and I've got my first entry. Brendan is in SOUTH Korea, but that's not going to stop me from using this as an excuse to post a pic of my favorite character from my favorite movie:

I'm so ronery . . .

It's great to see how much a budget paleo-type diet costs outside of North America and I hope to see more international entries.

Brendan photographs all his meals, so he was able to last week's and give a detailed estimate of what he spends per week.

So, without further ado, here's Brendan:

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Mind you I'm in Korea, a rice and noodle country (though with fantastic bbq restaurant options). So, I will speak in terms of Korean Won, which is roughly 1,100 KW-1 USD. It's not difficult to work out.

Well my weekly costs vary from week to week depending on the availability of certain meat products. I head to the supermarket (Home Plus, a big Korean chain store) at about 9:45 PM. This is the time I get out of work, and it's also the time that the store has rolled out the on-sale meat. This is meat that will "expire" in a couple of days and can therefore no longer be considered fresh. Luckily, this is not at all the case. I have not had any trouble keeping this meat fresh, and if I ever have any worry that I won't use it by week's end, I'll throw it in the freezer. Usually I'll spend 20,000 KW (Korean Won) on meat, as it makes up the bulk of my diet. I like to buy 500-1,000 grams of American or Australian beef, 500 grams of pork, and 500 grams of chicken breast. These are all relatively cheap when on sale. If I was at home in the states I could buy meat of comparable or better quality for about half of that.

Vegetables/fruit usually cost around 5,000-6,000 KW. I will always buy a bag of hot green peppers for around 1,000 and a bag of massive green onion stalks for 1,000. Then I will buy whatever is in season and looks good. Sometimes it's eggplant, other times its a variety of bell peppers, cabbage, or broccoli if I can get it. Fruit purchases are minimal, though sometimes I can't resist buying some apples. Either way, it usually is the equivalent of around 5$.

I will also buy about 30 eggs for 5,000 KW some weeks. Currently I have not been purchasing too many eggs, simply to take a break and try new recipes.

I don't do much dairy, but I do consume a bit of whey protein powder each day (20$ a bag which is used over the span of two months, so the price is negligible and not included), and I did recently pick up some whipping cream to put in my morning coffee (2,000 KW). Other infrequent purchases include butter (Koreans don't really have real butter though) and olive oil. I supplement with fish oil and vitamin D. I don't include these in the weekly price.

That's about it. With these ingredients (and only a frying pan; small Korean apartments do not often have ovens, and I don't have a microwave), I make dozens of meals, usually stir fries, fritattas, omelets, pancakes with coconut flour (6$, i-herb.com), sweet potato pancakes, burgers (pork, beef), among other things. I have one-two very large meals per day a-la' IF, which often consist of 1,200-1,800 calories per meal. I work out four times a week, and my caloric intake hinges on that. Every Saturday I have a cheat day/meal (something I keep from my slow carb diet days) where I go pretty overboard on beer, soju, wine, makkoli, and possibly some carbs/sugar, though I barely crave those things. I decided not to include cheat meals in the calculations, because they are unnecessary and not paleo.

The totals are...

2000 grams of meat: 20-25$
Various fresh vegetables: 5$
30 eggs: 5$

That's around 30-35$ a week for high quality eating that fuels my workout and work-day exceptionally well. I won't go into the benefits I feel/see, but it's been three months of eating this way, and I don't see any reason to stop. Here are this week's meal pics.

I've had beef stir fry with an egg in the middle because "why not"

a 6-egg omelet with bacon and sweet potato pancakes

Pork burgers with sweet potatoes and fried eggs

chicken stir fry with purple cabbage and other vegetables

Eggs and bacon with bacon-fried apples

6-egg fritatta with chicken breast and vegetables.

[Ed. Brendan didn't label this pic but I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it is seven eggs and chilli peppers]

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Thanks Brendan

Real Food On a Budget, Quick Update

2011-05-11T20:23:00.003+02:00

Thanks everyone, the response has been fantastic.

I need to be more specific in the details and address some questions, I will get around to that tomorrow.

And a quick link, Dr Annika Dahlqvist has been allowed to work again in the county of Västernorrland, where she was blacklisted three years ago for daring to not demonize saturated fats--in Swedish and run through Google Translate to English.

Salt!!! (Fist Pump)

2011-05-10T14:40:00.003+02:00

I'm a big fan of salt, which I've written about several times.

I'm also skeptical of the alleged dangers of salt, but I do think it is important to invest in some real unpurified salt that has plenty of trace minerals. Now, a new study, which contains a lot of threes, finds that the third of people who ate the lowest amount of salt died three times more often than those in the upper third of salt consumption.

Roger Federer sums up my reaction to this nicely:

Hooah!

Via Robin Hanson, a notable economist who is beginning to suspect there might be something very messed-up and politicized in the field of nutritional science.

Welcome Robin, would you like to swallow the blue pill or the red pill?

What Is The Real Cost of Eating Real Food? An Open Call to Healthy Eaters on a Budget

2011-05-06T15:16:00.004+02:00

There are two core criticisms that seem to come up a lot with paleo/LC/whatever diets.

They are boring.
They are expensive.

The boring canard is quite old, Atkins addressed it way back in the 90s. William Banting probably addressed it way back in Victorian England. Nowadays, there are plenty of amazing paleo food pron blogs around that easily lay that one to rest.

The second one is not a falsehood, exactly, more of an excuse and typically an exaggeration. I'm going to dub it the Hamburger Helper Hypothesis (HHH). It's not a hypothesis, of course, I think we can all agree that a bowl of spaghetti costs less than a bowl of meatballs but I couldn't resist the alliteration. Also, I think it is really cool that Hamburger Helper has it's own Wikipedia page.

The Hamburger Helper Hypothesis is an excuse along the lines of, "Exercise takes too much time" (and believe me, I'm the king of excuses). Anybody who poses that excuse needs to read Body-by-Science, or Skylar Tanner or any of the other myriad of people who look fantastic working out 10- 20 minutes a week.

The Hamburger Helper Hypothesis is something I've never really seen properly addressed even though it is brought up quite a lot. A while back Don Matesz did a series of posts on budget paleo with prices in response to an earlier complaint about expensive ass paleo on Richard Nikoley's blog (here, here, and here and a several others). They are great ideas (especially the fish head soup) but it would be nice to see a more comprehensive post somewhere, along the lines of: this is what I ate this week, this is how much I spent and here are some pictures.

As far as I know, no one has done this, but this being the internet and all, someone probably has and I simply haven't come across it.

OK, enough hemming and hawing.

I'm offering an open challenge/invitation to anyone who wants to document their shealthy (or Real Food or whatever you want to call it) diet on a budget experience for a week and the winner shall receive a year's supply of grass-fed beef!!!

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. I can't afford that by a long shot. What I will offer is a health book of your choice, Paleo Solution, Perfect Health Diet, and yes, even a T*m F*rr*s' book (but not Lindeberg, I ain't made of frickin' money). Also, you get to guest post on one of the least prestigious health blogs around.

This particular challenge/invitation came from recent comments on Richard's site. In particular, Leah wrote:

I guess it depends. To be honest, since I was (and still am, more for household stuff, now, though) a major couponer, my budget went up drastically since switching to a whole food diet. I do eat less now, and rarely snack, but since I was getting all my snacks nearly free previously and pasta/rice/starchy fillers for pennies, it has definitely made a difference. Actually, it has almost doubled my food budget, and even now I use coupons for frozen veggies, avoid buying pricey items like nuts, and only buy free range/grass fed about 50% of the time (and I stick with mostly whole chicken, ground meats and organ meats).
In the long run, though, I can’t complain, because I have more energy, weigh less, and will hopefully save on medical bills down the road

I should probably add that I still only spend about $50-55/week to feed myself and a ravenous toddler- so it’s probably not an average person’s definition of “expensive”

To which I responded:

I’m sure it is more expensive to eat paleo than to buy bulk grains, but how many people actually do that? And what are the actual differences in terms of cost?

The offer stands for anyone who wants to document this for a month or so to write a guest post on my blog, or perhaps even a “real” paleo blogger like Richard would be interested

Unfortunately, Leah didn't reply. So this is my formal offer to people like Leah to document their budget eating of real food for a week (a month is really redundant) with real prices.

Obviously, fresh salmon costs way more than macaroni and powdered cheese, and obviously fresh salmon is way more healthy. Much less obvious is the cost of cheap home-rendered lard vs crap like industrial rapeseed oil.

I'd love to see the Hamburger Helper Hypothesis really laid to rest, or more specifically, put into its proper perspective of overall health.

Also, I'd like to point out I'm no absolutist on the subject of diet. I really try to avoid grains, frankenoils and sugar, otherwise I'm pretty flexible.

Addendum: thanks to Richard for spreading the word. If you are interested, leave a comment or send me an email at praguestepchild@gmail.com.