metabolic health. diversity. Washington, DC.
The only reason I picked up on the change was because the figure in the original publication (reference below) had such a striking problem when it was published. The analytic method used caused sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) and other highly processed foods to be presented as “healthful” relative to unprocessed foods. When The Economist remixed …
This is an opinion piece connected to a very interesting study (Trends in Dietary Carbohydrate, Protein, and Fat Intake and Diet Quality Among US Adults, 1999-2016 – see this post) that’s very timely, given that the revision of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is currently underway. I created a few charts from the data (above …
Continue reading “Just Read: US Dietary Guidance—Is It Working?”
This data isn’t new, and it’s not enjoyed by anyone I’ve seen write about it, including plant-based or plant-free eating advocates. It paints an unseemly picture of the Standard American Diet (SAD) or a diet gone wrong. According to ERS’s loss-adjusted food availability data, total daily calories per person decreased by 2 percent between 2000 …
This paper is a review of the dietary habits of Americans from 1999 – 2016, a follow-up from a previous analysis, using the NHANES database. As the chart above shows: As of 2015, the majority of energy in a typical American’s diet comes from carbohydrates (50.5%), 83.2% of them considered low quality. This has gone …
The most important part of this week’s published nutritional guideline recommendations – personal preferences and values are respected. …other guidelines have paid little or no attention to the reasons people eat meat, and the extent to which they would choose to reduce meat consumption given small and uncertain health benefits. Indeed, no prior dietary guideline …
I was highly interested in reading this paper because I have informally worked to understand the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the pharmaceutical industry through their own web sites, and usually leave confused and uninformed. Apparently, it’s not just me. This analysis includes the use of datasets that are not publicly available for the major …
Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Why? It covers a topic I know very little about, how our food is produced. I’d argue the overwhelming majority of my physician colleagues don’t know much about this either. Some pretend to know …
Continue reading “Just Read: Defending Beef – Unlearning and Relearning the Sustainable Diet”
On Eating Meat: The truth about its production and the ethics of eating it My generation of physicians trained in an era when our profession lacked curiosity about the world around it, with devastating results (see photos at the bottom of this post). It caused us to have insatiable curiosity. We’re now in the era …
Continue reading “Just Read: On Eating Meat, by Matthew Evans”
This is a very well written piece in the journal Religions (Religions_MDPI) covering the title of the piece. Even if you live in the future and know where you want to go, it’s important to know where you came from. I’m posting this here for reference – I encourage people interested in the history of …
Continue reading “Just Read: The Global Influence of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church on Diet “
This paper, by Cucuzzella et. al (of all the authors Adele Hite, PhD RD is on Twitter – @ahhite) is a nice review of what’s known about standards of care for initiating low carbohydrate nutrition, especially in the inpatient setting. The appendices also include provider/physician handouts, patient handouts, and a deprescribing guide (since medications usually …
Last evening was the annual Washington, DC Capital TransPride (@DCTransPride365) rewind, held a few months out from the TransPride celebration as a review and planning for next year. 2019 marks my 7th Capital TransPride attendance. It marks my first participation as a Capital Pride (@CapitalPrideDC) photographer – the best photographs are ones of humans in …
For as long as I’ve been following Dr. Sarah Hallberg’s (@DrSarahHallberg) work, she’s been following the progression of American Diabetes Association (@AmDiabetesAssociation) guidelines for nutrition therapy and eating guidelines in diabetes. I give her credit for turning my attention toward metabolic health instead of obesity, and toward an interest in the ADA’s work. FUN FACT …
Thank you Meg Miller and @AIGAeyeondesign for publishing this wonderful piece on the work to add a transgender pride flag emoji to the character set defined by the @Unicode consortium. As the piece indicates, this may be the most documented emoji proposal process in human history. See my blog posts for more info 🙂 . …
There’s a saying/complaint that doctors do not get enough nutrition education in medical school. Actually this is wrong. We do get a lot of nutrition education, we just get it from the wrong places. Witness this advertisement from the New York State Medical Journal of Medicine in 1957 (!). Does anyone believe our profession wasn’t …
When I went to medical school, I was taught that diabetes is an incurable, chronic disease, a part of human existence that we could only prevent from getting worse. The percentage of people with diabetes when I was taught with was also a fraction of what it is today: Now, in this century, we realize …
I had noted previously that non-adherence to the latest evidence around nutrition has resulted in strange behavior on the part of nationally respected organizations, who do things like endorse sugar sweetened cereals and pure fruit juice, or advise the consumption of high amounts of dietary carbohydrate in the setting of dietary carbohydrate intolerance. Some of this may be related to visible conflicts of interest.
I recently read the 2019 Standards of Medical Care in Diabetes and see there has been a change in approach, which I’m calling a little less strange, and quite welcome. I clipped the relevant pages in the slide above, and what they contain are:
As discussed in @DrAseemMalhotra’s testimony to the UK Parliament last week: In June, 2018, the Royal College of General Practitioners (@rcgp) published an e-learning course “Type 2 diabetes and the low GI diet” with lead author Dr. David Unwin (@lowcarbGP): Type 2 diabetes is an increasingly common and progressive disease, the progression of which can …
This is a cool new study, that in a rigorous way, shows that without changing macronutrient (carbohydrate, fat, protein) proportions of a diet, ie. even if keeping carbohydrate intake high, there’s still benefit from eating un-processed (“real / whole”) food.
This heavily paywalled study is a more thorough analysis of something that caught my eye and was glossed over in the original publication of DIETFITS last year, which showed that weight loss was equivalent in groups of people who either ate a healthy low carbohydrate or a healthy low-fat diet. The conclusion for some was …
This paper, written by lead author See: June Stevens, at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, is an analysis of 7 years of NHANES data (a United States’ commissioned annual survey of people’s health) and their likelihood of being in metabolic health. Early Days, We Still only Define Metabolic Disease As we learned a long …
This paper, published in 2017, provides an overview of studies and potential applications of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) done to date. The paper is of interest to me as I’ve been wearing a CGM as a non-diabetic, normoglycemic, physician for some time now (see: Part 1: Why I decided to wear a continuous glucose monitor …
It’s not just us. More and more physicians are noting an unhealthy food environment where they work to save lives. In this study, physicians used the Freedom of Information Act process to get information about food available at VHA hospitals. Process verification for a Freedom of Information Act request was used to assess government-run inpatient …
In English: following weight loss, people on lower carbohydrate diets were able to eat more food to keep their weight stable than people on high carb low-fat diets, putting another nail in the coffin of low fat diets and “calories-in/calories-out” – weight may be more dependent on hormonal interaction with food (insulin/ghrelin/leptin) than on simple …
Continue reading “Just Read: The Metabolic Advantages of a Lower Carbohydrate Diet”
This is a very helpful study which establishes via a good protocol that people on low-carbohydrate diets can experience a significant rise in their cholesterol levels. Across a population, there may not be a significant rise of LDL cholesterol on average. However, at the individual level, there may be changes that significantly concern patients and …
This paper, written by european researchers, describes a newer way to estimate insulin sensitivity (or it’s unhealthy opposite, insulin resistance) using commonly obtained lab values. Here’s the equation they came up with: The novel formula for SPISE was computed as follows: SPISE = 600 X HDL-0.185/(TG0.2 x BMI1.338, with fasting HDL-C (mg/dL), fasting TG concentrations …
This is a retrospective look back at the health of 27,392 people in Japan to see when the earliest signs of diabetes of pre-diabetes were present among those who became diabetic or pre-diabetic. And, it turns out the signs were present more than 10 years before they were diagnosed, with a better estimate being 20 …
Answer: No. This is true across multiple venues and pieces of scholarship. See this video clip from June, 2018’s #Food4Thought18 in this blog post: Photo Friday: Narrative Art and Exploding Myths in the era of Diabetes Reversal Zoe Harcombe, PhD (@ZoeHarcombe) is an international expert on the data and science and scientific techniques connected to …
Continue reading “Just Read: US dietary guidelines: is saturated fat a nutrient of concern?”
This is an excellent review paper recommended to me by Mark Cucuzzella, MD, that demystifies a lot of what we were never taught about fat in the diet. As I mentioned previously on this blog multiple times, saturated fat has been exonerated multiple times in recent months, most dramatically in this exchange at Food for …
Continue reading “Just Read: Saturated Fat: Part of a Healthy Diet”
This is a study done using data from Kaiser Permanente, performed by the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research (@KPCHR), looking at the relationship between triglyceride levels and cardiovascular disease in a group of patients who had their LDL’s controlled (values of 40 to 100 mg/dl). H/T @MacroFour for the link. I believe the paper …
Federal Commission for Nutrition. Vegan diets: review of nutritional benefits and risks. Expert report of the FCN [Internet]. Bern: Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office 2018. Available from: https://www.eek.admin.ch/eek/de/home/pub/ernaehrungsbezogene-und-gesundheitliche-vor–und-nachteile-einer.html (scroll down for English version) In the #FMRevolution, there’s no limit to ideas of interest when it comes to health… First (#Food4Thought18), now this. The Swiss …