Really enjoy your site, and this 7-day-crash-course info. I know the players well, except for Todd Becker, and applaud your choices.

I’d like to add to your crash course William Davis, M.D. and his just-published Wheat Belly. Tom Naughton recently reviews the book and then interviewed Dr. Davis over at his, TN’s, blog. I found in the interview that Dr. Davis is very well spoken (not some nutty obsessed non-mainstream doctor, as I’d feared).

Besides wheat, an issue that is interesting is stomach cancer and low carb – AND stomach cancer and HIGH carb (but low sugar). At http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?p=1077 Paul Jaminet has a post called “Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, II: Mucus Deficiency and Gastrointestinal Cancers” and he writes:

“Optimal Dieters have been dying of gastrointestinal cancers at a disturbing rate. Recently Adam Jany, president of the OSBO (the Polish Optimal Dieters’ association), died of stomach cancer at 64 after 17 years on the Optimal Diet. Earlier Karol Braniek, another leader of the OSBO, died at 68 from duodenal cancer.

“A Polish former Optimal Dieter who has now switched to something closer to the Perfect Health Diet [Jaminet's diet] noted that gastrointestinal cancers seem to be common among Optimal Dieters…”

Jaminet’s post shows a picture of what H. Pylori does to stomach mucosa (diminishes it), and seems to be saying that too-low-of-starch may do the same thing.

I asked Gary Taubes about this and he wrote that Jaminet may be right [re Jaminet's solution of adding more starch to the diet] “but then you have to explain why the Japanese have such high rates of stomach cancer.”

As we know, the Japanese are high starch but low sugar.

We all know (the story is told well in Le Fanu’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’) about Barry Marshall, M.D.’s discovery in the mid-1980s that H.Pylori is THE cause of stomach ulcers (not stress, etc.), and it is estimated by some researcher or other that Le Fanu quotes, that H. Pylori is also responsible for two-thirds of stomach cancers…

Whatever you can make of the above…

IMHO THE FEINMAN/LUSTIG QUARREL IS MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TAUBES/GUYENET QUARREL: I think Prof. Richard Feinman is, at his blog (where I discovered YOU via the comments under Prof. Feinman’s anti-Dr. Lustig or shall I say “corrective-of Dr. Lustig” posts!!!) posing the most interesting questions lately — about Dr. Lustig’s poor biochemistry etc. (I’m not wholly down on Dr. Lustig by any means, but Dr. Feinman is MOST illuminating, AND he’s posting a series of YouTube videos explaining where he differs with Dr. Lustig — he only has 2 done, but they’re up!)

Dr. Feinman writes, “Sugar, HFCS are carbohydrates. We need to be informed as to what the problems with high carbohydrates are and when and if, sugar has a unique effect compared to starch. Lustig’s YouTube is pure propaganda and thoughtless. No biochemist would present anything like that to a class. Because it contains a mixture of truths, half-truths, falsehoods and howlers, it is hard for us to quickly pick it apart. There are thousands of papers on fructose. The sad thing is that, from my conversations with him, Lustig actually knows a lot but what he is doing is not responsible science.”

He also writes, “What we know works well for obesity and the metabolic syndrome is carbohydrate reduction. It could be that that is because of the de facto removal of the fructose in the carbohydrates but the burden of proof is on those who say that. Lustig has not even begun to meet that burden of proof.”

I think S. Guyenet is a complete sideshow. No two people can really agree on what the heck he’s saying. Not a good sign.

I KNOW from personal experience that Taubes/Atkins have the most important things right.

Here I am, a woman in my mid-50s, and look what happened to me after reading GCBC (same with my husband, read it too, lost 25 lbs in 4 mos without exercise; lost his GERD he’d had for decades in 2 days and it never came back, etc…)

Me BEFORE reading GCBC in 2010:
Weight 168, TGs 105, HDL 52

Me AFTER implementing GCBC’s wisdom:
Weight 150 (no exercise done, not that I’m proud of that), TGs 48, HDL 67

Dr. Feinman pointed out to me that my TG/HDL ratio is under 1, when all it has to be is under 3.5.

ANOTHER INTERESTING ISSUE — non-meat eaters doing as well as meat-eaters, as long as you keep in the eggs, fat and low carb: After GT posted his own lipids on his blog, Frank J. Spence, Jr., M.D. posted and GT answered:

frankjspencejr

Gary, this is spooky. As you know I have also been on the 3 eggs a day, high fat, very low carb diet about 2 years. Just yesterday I had my lipids checked, with almost identical results as yours:
T Chol 192, TG 65, LDL-C 114, HDL-C 65.3, VLDL 13, Chol/HDL 2.9
Weight staying mid 180s. Thanks again for your good work.

garytaubes

Hi Frank,
Spooky it is, since you don’t eat any meat at all and I live on it. Nice numbers and nice to hear from you, as ever.
gt

Funny thing, I just read that article a few minutes AFTER tweeting about this course and was like “oh shit, here I am recommending folks to watch Gary’s lecture” and Stephan is making a convincing case that in some parts Gary was wrong, too.

However, what is Stephan really saying? My takeaway from reading the article was that dietary carbohydrate does not cause obesity. Yet there is no explanation about what does, and no matter the cause of obesity, restricting carbohydrate and sugar tends to be an effective way to help people lose weight and reverse metabolic syndrome – even when there might be some controversy about the actual mechanisms involved.

It will be interesting to see which hypothesis proves to be true, and nevertheless I think Gary’s lecture is a good starting point for this course because it really explains the sorry state of nutrition research for the past decades, and how the dietary recommendations are based on rather poor evidence.

I also hope that by going through the other parts of this course people will learn that there’s more to health and well-being than just avoiding a specific macronutrient.

//sami

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-hypothesis-of-obesity.html