I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers who write sort of potpourri posts from time to time.  I think I’ve written a few in the distant past.  Hard to believe I’ve been at this – at least intermittently – for over 12 years now.  I want to bring everyone up to date on what’s going on with the Eades clan and what the plans are moving forward.  For those of you coming here solely for nutritional info, I’m going to kick this post off with a video I hope you’ll find enjoyable and enlightening.  If you have no other interest than the nutritional, as soon as you’re past the video commentary, you can quit reading.

Kevin Hall…again

A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post on NIH researcher Kevin Hall.  He was shown in an off-the-cuff video description of a study he had completed but hadn’t published yet.  In my view, his remarks were in contrast to what his own data had clearly shown.  A number of people admonished me at the time to wait till the published paper came out to see if the results there were the same as what he had shown in the poster he was presenting when he gave his video remarks.  The paper has come out, and the results are the same.  If you want to see what I was torqued about, you can read the post from then.
Today, though, I want to present what I think is a pretty decent video Dr. Hall made a few years ago.  It lays waste to the notion kicked around that a pound of fat is made up of 3,500 calories.  You see written all over the place that if you reduce your calories by 500 per day, you’ll lose a pound a week. (500 cals x 7 days = 3,500 cals or a pound of fat.)  Or if you burn an extra 500 calories per day by exercise, you’ll drop 3,500 calories in a week and lose a pound of fat.  Sounds great, but anyone who has been around the weight loss biz for very long knows it doesn’t work that way.  If you’ve heard this myth, you’ll find it really enlightening to go through the first part of the video and watch Dr. Hall lay waste to it.
But as you continue to watch, you’ll notice the thrust of the video isn’t dismantling the 3,500 cal/pound myth – the main subject is the metabolic model Dr. Hall has created.  Or, more accurately, is in the process of continuing to perfect. He’s taken data from a bunch of different weight loss studies and exercise studies and worked it into a model to be used to predict weight loss and maintenance requirements for anyone he might want to plug into the model.  He goes to great length to describe how the model was designed to replicate human metabolism and physiology.  Then he asks the all important question:

(10:44 in the video)Once you’ve built this model, how do you know it’s any good? How do you know it makes real predictions?

Years ago, the famous British statistician George Box famously wrote in a paper

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

According to George Box, we know Dr. Hall’s model is wrong, but how can we tell that it might be useful?

(10:47 in the video) The way you do that is you do this model validation exercise. And then you compare predictions of the model with data from completely independent experiments that weren’t used in any way to build the model, and you’re only allowed to change the initial conditions of the model.
In other words, if you’re going to try to simulate an experiment in a lean young man, you’re allowed to start the model off with the body weight, composition, resting metabolic rate of a lean young man, and then you feed the model with whatever was fed in that experiment, and you make comparisons with the data.
…similarly, you can, if you are now doing another validation experiment with an obese woman, you can start the model off with the right body composition and the right metabolic rate of an obese woman and feed them in that study, but you are not allowed to fiddle with any other parameters…that’s the sort of game you play.

He’s trying to create a mathematical model that, ideally, will allow accurate predictions of weight loss under all circumstances.  He says that for the model to be functional, he needs to be able to enter the starting parameters, i.e., perhaps an obese 45 year old female who is 5 ft 3 inches tall and weighing 210 pounds with a specific resting metabolic rate, and be able to predict, given her intake of macronutrients, how much weight she would lose over a given time, assuming, of course, she was consuming a reduced number of calories and participating in an increased amount of exercise compared to where she started.
If the model works perfectly, then it should calculate her weight loss over time and specify how much she would have to eat to maintain her lower weight.  And the data the model spits out would correlate with the findings of an actual study done with this same woman given the same macronutrient intake the same caloric reduction and the same exercise regimen.
If such a model worked perfectly, or close to perfectly, it would be extremely useful.  Instead of recruiting subjects for studies, an expensive proposition, and providing food for them and a place to exercise, researchers could simply feed the starting parameters into the model and with the push of a button determine the outcome.  No subject recruitment, no worries of cheating, and instantaneous results.  You can see why Dr. Hall is so interested in perfecting his model.
If you watch the video, you’ll see how much effort he’s put into it.  And how many comparisons he’s made with actual human studies to try to tweak it so it will work under all kinds of conditions – even extreme ones.
But does it work?
An interesting question.  Especially in view of Dr. Halls skepticism of low-carbohydrate diets.
Before we go on, give the video a watch.  You’ll enjoy it.
[youtube id=”hPi1LQHBWBk”]
Let’s take a look to see how the model works out with a low-carbohydrate diet.  I found this video a couple of years ago right around the same time I wrote the post on Dr. Hall.
I found his model then and tried it with a low-carb diet to see how it would work. I entered the parameters for a diet of 10 percent carbs, a fairly typical low-carb diet, along with a bit of caloric restriction, because people going on a low-carb diet tend to spontaneously restrict calories.  As I recall, the model showed the subject gaining a huge amount of weight very quickly.  So, obviously the model didn’t have all the kinks worked out of it.  And given Dr. Hall’s predilection for the notion that obesity was driven strictly by the difference between calories in and calories out, I figured he had built the model strictly on a caloric basis and not really on all the macronutrient content of the diet as he said in the video.
I intended to post all that with graphs showing how totally inaccurate his model was, at least in terms of low-carb dieting.  But, life got in the way (see below), and I never got around to it.  Someone sent me the video by email a few days ago, so I decided to redo my experiments with the model to show how aberrant it is when you reduce the carbs.  Turns out, I couldn’t make it come up with a big weight gain.
So, I figured Dr. Hall had kept working on it.  I went to the Wayback Machine to find an earlier version of the program from back when I was working with it a couple of years ago.  When I ran the older version, it still didn’t give me the bizarre outcomes it did when I fooled with it back then. I figure others found the same thing I did, notified Dr. Hall, and he changed some of the equations to make it not look so weird if someone tried to reduce the carbs.
When I didn’t see the major changes to the same degree I had seen before in the old version, I went back to the current version and looked a little more closely.
And what I found was pretty interesting.  Not to someone with a lot of experience with low-carb dieting, but interesting in view of Dr. Hall’s stated ideas about low-carb dieting vs low-calorie dieting.
Here is the link to the current version of his model so you can try it yourself.
Go to the upper right and click on Switch to Expert Mode.
That will take you to another version. When you get there, in the upper left, click on Advanced Controls, which turns it to On. Once there, you will see the screen where you can manipulate carbs:

You’ll have to play with it a bit to see how it works.  As Dr. Hall mentioned in his video, if the model works, you can enter whatever parameters you want, and the model will spit out an accurate representation of what should really happen if you actually did the experiment with a real live person.
So, I entered a 45 y/o male who was 5′ 10” tall and weighed 225 pounds with a physical activity level of 1.6.  The model gave me our subject’s current intake as being 3,063 calories, the amount to maintain is 225 pounds. You can see this under the Goal Weight tab on the right.
I tried two different interventions.  First, I tried a low-carb diet of 10 percent carbs and 2450 calories, which is reasonable.  It’s about what a male on a good-quality low-carb diet might drop to without actually counting calories.  I didn’t list a goal weight because I wanted to force the calories.  Had I put in a goal weight, the model would have set the calories to meet that given goal weight.  I wanted to see what happened if I set the calories.  I set the time for the experiment at 8 weeks, i.e., 56 days.  I set the calories under the Lifestyle Change tab to the right of the Goal Weight tab.  I did not change the activity level as I wanted to see what the model would show with diet alone.  When I activated the model, it kicked out a chart showing that over the 8 weeks our subject would lose about 12 pounds.  Which is reasonable.
Then, I switched to a higher carb diet.  One of 50 percent carbs, which really isn’t even that high.  A lot of low-calorie diets are a lot higher in carb than 50 percent.  Keeping the rest of the parameters the same as before, over 8 weeks Dr. Hall’s model shows our subject would have lost a little over 8 pounds.  See the charts from the model below:

So, the model shows an almost 12 pound weight loss on a 2,450 calorie low-carb diet and an 8 pound weight loss with a 2,45o calorie high-carb diet.  Which is pretty much what I would have expected from reality, but I doubt it’s what Dr. Hall wants his model to show, because it flies in the face of everything he believes.  It shows a greater weight loss on a low-carb diet with the same number of calories as the high-carb diet.
What gives?
Who knows?  The model works more in keeping with reality…at least based on my experience with a lot of patients on a lot of low-carb diets.
But clearly from all his writings, Dr. Hall would not believe this outcome.  He has even written a paper showing that more fat is burned on a low-fat diet than on a low-carb diet, so how can that possibly jibe with his model.  His study that I blogged on a couple of years ago says that it’s all a function of calories.  Carbs don’t have anything to do with it.
All I can figure is that he either created a model based on all his equations that simulates reality or he feels that his model needs more work.
I guess we can continue to check over time to see if the model changes.
In the next post I write, I’m going to describe my own thoughts on the whole calorie/carb debate.  I’m working on more updated ideas on this that I’m expanding for the new book MD and I are writing (see below).

Kickstarter

As many of you know, Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform.  For those of you who don’t know what crowdfunding is, it’s a means whereby people who want to raise money for new products, market testing, personal problems, books they’re writing, etc. present them to the public in an effort to attract funding from individuals instead of friends, family, banks or venture capitalists.  There are multiple platforms available for crowdfunding – Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe – to name just a few.  Most presell products that the funds are raised to develop.
As many of you know, way back in 2008, MD and I (with help from other family members) developed the first sous vide cooking unit for home use.  Until then, although sous vide had been used in most great restaurants for almost 50 years, no one really cooked that way at home because the commercial units were too large and way too expensive.  We learned about sous vide cooking, loved it, and, since there were no home units on the market, we decided to make the first one.  At the time, no one, other than professional chefs, had heard of sous vide cooking, so we had a hurdle to overcome just in increasing awareness of the process.  Who is going to buy a sous vide cooking appliance if no one even knows what sous vide cooking is?  Since we started marketing in 2008, sous vide is now well known, with tons of people posting videos of the technique. (Here are a few sous vide videos I really like showing the versatility of the process, including one of my favorite showing how you can even make cocktails sous vide.) On all the big chef competitions, sous vide is the big gun, as in, Uh oh, he’s going sous vide on this one.
MD and I have always been entrepreneurial doctors – we started one of the first chains of urgent care centers (and, actually, one of the first urgent care clinics) in the US back in the early 1980s and a definite disruptive technology as far as those in the standard office-based practice of medicine were concerned.  We’ve written 14 books on health and nutrition and developed nutritional supplements.  We’ve had our own PBS TV cooking show and developed a hugely successful weight loss product.  So, it didn’t seem like much of a leap for us to develop an appliance most people would use to cook meat.  (What we didn’t know at the time that the sous vide technique also lends itself to perfectly cooking a thousand other things than meat.)  I wanted to name it the Meat Master, but better minds prevailed, and we ended up calling our product the SousVide Supreme.
What I didn’t realize when we started this company was how much of my time and MD’s time it was going to gobble.  We quickly grew into an international business selling products in almost 30 different countries, with warehouses in Colorado, Belfast, and Rotterdam.  It consumed almost all of our time just to manage all the moving parts.  Fortunately, our eldest child, Ted, who is an attorney, a CPA, and an MBA, decided to take over the day-to-day running of the company, which has freed us up to get back to our number one love, which is nutritional medicine.
Ted decided to fund the development of a wifi connected unit using the Kickstarter platform.  You can see how we’re crowdfunding here, and see all the fam in action, including grandson, Will, who is convinced he is the real star.  If you want to jump in and grab one of the new units at a steep discount, be my guest.  We’ve got about ten more days to run.
I don’t know how many of you are interested in crowdfunding or in Kickstarter in particular.  It is much more complex than it seems and requires almost constant monitoring.  An entire thicket has sprung up of service providers wanting to help. But many of whose services do little more than help themselves to the funds you’ve raised.  I’m keeping pretty careful notes on all the ins and outs we’ve gone through and all the experience we’ve gained in this crowdfunding venture, so if you’re interested in learning more, let me know in the comments.  If there is enough interest, I’ll write a piece about it.

Nutritional blogging

One of the advantages of having Ted take over is that I will be freed up to blog a lot more often.  I typically use my blogging as a means to clarify my own thinking on a lot of subjects.  I’m a believer in the notion that if you can’t write something down clearly, you don’t really know it.  So I enjoy putting my thoughts on paper (so to speak) as it helps me clarify them and makes me deal with any weaknesses in my own arguments.
I’ve got plenty of ideas to post about, but I am keen on learning what people who actually read these posts want to read about.
If you’ve got a topic you would like to see explored, let me know in the comments.  I’ll make a list and work through them as I can, as I continue to work through all the subjects that I have on my own bulging list.

Podcast

I’ve been pondering doing a podcast for a while, but haven’t had the time to really get it in motion.  And I don’t want to do it till I can get a decent set up, because, to me, anyway, there’s nothing worse than trying to listen to a poorly done podcast, especially one you really want to hear.  Seems like it’s always the podcaster who comes through loud and clear while the guest, who is usually who I want to listen to, sounds distant.  If I keep the sound up high enough to hear the guest, it blows my eardrums out when the host comes on.
I’ve been around the low-carb world longer than just about anyone alive today, so I know most of the players well.  I suspect I could get most of them on a podcast.
If you have anyone in particular you would like to hear from, drop me a note in the comments, and I’ll add the name to my list if it isn’t already there.

Reading list

As those on my email list know, I’ve sporadically been doing a review of books I felt worthwhile.  I had intended it as a monthly review, but due to demands of our sous vide business,  I haven’t kept that up as I should.  My plan is to get that back on track as well.  If you’re interested in this feature, sign up on my mailing list below, and I’ll send you all the archived lists so far. And I pledge that I will be more diligent in getting them out. Granted it may be a bi-monthly review sometimes.

Protein Power 2.0

Last, but certainly not least, as time allows, MD and I have been working on what we thought was going to be a 20 year upgrade to Protein Power called Protein Power 2.0.  As we’ve been thinking about it, and looking to where we can upgrade, we’ve pretty much decided to write a new book.  We might keep a bit of the original Protein Power, but that book, as it is, has stood the test of time pretty well.
If we just tried to upgrade, we wouldn’t have much of a book.  But there is a ton of new material out there that wasn’t around during the days when Protein Power was written, so we want to include that and make it a completely new book.
We’ve come across a lot of scientific literature that more or less stands the mainstream of nutritional thought on its head.  And by this I mean the mainstream as it is today with everyone pretty much leaning to low-carb.
A lot of exciting stuff in the offing in this book.  Now that we’re freed up, we can’t wait to really get our teeth into it.
As with the blog and podcast, if you have anything in particular you want us to cover in depth, put it in the comments.
So, thanks for all your support throughout the years.  And thanks for taking a look at our Kickstarter campaign.
Let me hear from you.

135 Comments

    1. Somehow I figured I would get this comment from you since you don’t like videos either. It would be nice to have transcripts, but I’m not sure I can put all that together for the first few.

      1. I’m not a fan of podcasts or videos, either. Would much prefer to read a transcript any day! BUT, I recognize transcripts are a lot of work. So, maybe include a written summary of what’s in the podcast or video?

        1. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll have to try a few to see how easy the written summary turns out to be.

          1. There are some software options now, that (apparently?) can do a decent job of ‘transcribing’ a recording. ‘fraid that’s all I know about them though.

          2. Hello, I am a long-time reader and lurker, first time commenting. I just wanted to say that I would also dearly love transcripts as I have a lot of trouble processing spoken information (I also don’t watch videos, sorry) but I have no problems with written information. My partner used to work freelance for a company that offers transcription services for fairly cheap. There are many online places like this now where you can just upload audio and pay a certain amount to get it transcribed. Alternatively you could find your own freelance transcriber online and pay them directly so all the money goes to them. A lot of people will happily do that work because they can do it from home! Just a thought. 🙂

          3. Thanks for the feedback on this. A large number of people have responded with the same suggestion, so it must be something important to a lot of people. The only worry I have is that there is a lot of nuance and meaning embedded in the sound and modulation of the human voice that gets lost in translation to a transcript. I’m not a big listener to podcasts, but I have listened to a few, some of which I thought were great. Those that had transcripts I saved. When I went back and read the transcripts, I got a whole different idea of what was being said, because the tone and modulation weren’t there.
            Once Tom Brokaw did a short negative piece on low-carb diet books in which Protein Power was featured prominently. I was much younger and more ignorant that I am now, so, in my outrage, I sought the services of a big-time plaintiff’s lawyer who was a patient of mine. I sent him the tape of the show and said, Let’s sue. He sent me back a transcript and said, is this what you want to sue over. The message I had taken away from Brokaw was totally determined by his voice inflection and facial expressions – and that was the take away message he wanted to get across. The transcript of his actual words was totally innocuous.
            So, there is a lot to be had from the actual podcast that doesn’t show up in the transcript.

          4. Another vote for transcripts from me. (I’m deaf)
            Additionally transcripts benefit your website because words plugged into search engines are pulled directly from visible text on a web page. People will find your material, much more quickly.
            If it takes time to get the full transcript finished, I suggest putting bullet points of the talk on the page including links to material you discuss more fully; after which transcripts can be added when they become available.
            I suggest caution when using automated transcripts. I have a background in diagnostic pathology and a wide interest in many sciences — I have found it disturbing to see a video on molecular biology where the professor speaks about ‘jeans’ and other homphones in the auto-text (which gets a bit hilarious). They are not hard to understand normally for a deaf person already in the field, but I’m sure if the director read the transcripts themselves, they probably will not be amused. (some vids have auto-transcripts disabled for this reason.)
            Thanks for the potpourri update post!

  1. Hello Drs. Eades.
    I have been an avid follower of the Protein Power Plan program since the mid-1990’s. Today most everyone is on some type of low carb eating regime.
    My family are all low carbers and they use xylitol and others sugar alcohols for baking.
    Your first publication talk about sugar alcohols spiking blood sugar which promotes insulin production.
    Is there any new evidence to support sugar alcohols and there deleterious effect on the human body in the way that will inhibit weight loss? Waiting for PPP 2.0.

    1. I don’t recall having ever written that sugar alcohols “spike” blood pressure. They do usually have some effect on blood sugar, but not what I would call a spike. As a rule of thumb, we usually count them as carbs, but on a one third basis. In other words, it you’re looking at something with 10 g of a sugar alcohol, consider it as about 3 g of carb in your calculations.

    2. Maltitol is known for being a sugar alcohol with a particularly high glycemic index compared to others, maybe that’s the one you’re thinking of.

  2. As for what you could write about, I have researched some issues, and the results of that research cause me confusion.
    The first is protein/fat/calories (which fits with the above post). The following are all variants of a low carb diet. We have Jimmy Moore, who advocates a high fat diet for weight loss (where “high” and “low” are relative). On the other hand, you have Ted Naiman, who advocates a low fat diet, even a protein sparing modified fast, supposedly so that you burn your own fat. He essentially is advocating a high protein diet. The people who wrote the latest Atkins book (The New Atkins for a New You) seemed to imply (to me) something similar: you had to decrease your calories by a certain amount per day, all in fat calories, to burn your own fat. When you reached maintenance, you would increase your fat intake (and calories) to a maintenance level.
    I went to KetoFest in CT, and Dr. Fung’s assistant, Megan Ramos, gave a speech on intermittent fasting (IF) to improve type 2 diabetes. I’ve been using IF for a while now after reading Dr. Fung. She recommended a “moderate” protein level during the weight loss/blood sugar phase.
    Attempting to apply this to myself gets confusing. I started out eating a higher fat diet. I have transitioned since then to eating more protein and lower fat. Sometimes eating more protein and lower fat seems to make me hungrier. For instance, if I eat beef heart for “lunch” (don’t eat breakfast any more), which is low in fat, I’m often quite hungry by dinner. If I eat beef heart + pemmican (high in fat), I’m less hungry. Also, the least hungry I’ve been, where I literally could not eat for many hours, have been when I ate fat. If I eat lean meat, I’m hungrier earlier.
    I also seem to have a lot more difficulty maintaining ketosis lately, while eating higher protein. Many days, I eat just meat, sometimes with small amounts of vegetables (think a small salad). For instance, yesterday, I ate basically meat except for homemade chili (made without tomatoes but made with chicken stock and onions, one large onion per 1.5 quarts of stock, 4 pounds of beef and lamb, some spices). And I’m still not in ketosis, as measured by blood levels of BOHB.
    Further, Ted Naiman if you find his picture, is obviously an insulin sensitive, genetically gifted to be buff male. Even though I’ve lost over 50 pounds with LC/IF, I’m still at least 30+ pounds overweight (50 if you go by my DEXA scan, and “ideal” weight for my height and muscle mass). Should I be applying something that works for an insulin sensitive person to me, who is still not insulin sensitive (still have blood sugar readings > 100 every morning, don’t get below 100 even while fasting until later in the day)?
    What are your thoughts?
    Note: Once the kids are in school and I get some weeks of being on a regular schedule, I plan on replicating the experiment Dave (http://cholesterolcode.com/) did, which uses 3 days of high fat. I will use that to transition to test PSMF as per Ted Naiman, to see what happens with blood sugar and ketones, and I plan on getting insulin drawn, too. I need a good quantity of time when I can count calories and have many days in succession to control my diet. It’s getting two weeks of time in succession, and getting the time to go to a facility to get blood drawn, that is tough.
    The biome is also confusing. I’ve tried resistant starch and probiotics (pill and/or food forms) for 3-4 months, trying many different things, even eating heated and cooled potatoes, to see what happens with this. I mainly tried potato starch and other “concentrated” prebiotics. I could not find a benefit to this. In fact, I thought there were more detriments than benefits. I know you posted about this before, but there are former low carb advocates who now advocate higher pro/prebiotic intake. See: http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/2017/08/17/fat-cells-and-gut-bugs/ The Wheat Belly doctor is similar. Have you changed your position on this?
    By the way, I’m moving toward “zero carb” (an all meat diet), to test this out and because for me fiber seems to be bad. The lower fiber intake I have (including from prebiotics), the better I feel. I could be wrong, but only testing this on myself will settle it for me.

    1. You’re right. It is a wilderness out there with all the different (and often conflicting) opinions. We do plan to sort all this out in PP 2.0. I’m going to try to sort a little of it out in the next blog post I write.

      1. I agree with you Bob too. I have lost 64 pounds, but the last 27 came off lowering my protein and fat, but my blood sugar didn’t change a bit and my serum albumin levels dropped to 3.5. and my sodium was low. Now I was going to try fasting and I’m glad I didn’t because then my protein levels would have tanked completely. I am confused and back to eating more protein and I eat fat, weight has stayed 129, almost no carbs. I did try jicama as a prebiotic which does not, though a carb, digest at all but feeds the colon. I tried unrefined potato starch and thought my guts were going to fall out. It’s strange what helps one may not help another and things may need to be tweaked. I can’t eat gobs of fat or I get the scoots.

    2. A higher intake of protein provides a lot of additional benefits as far as weight loss is concerned: it is highly satiating, it spares or even increases muscle mass, it has the highest thermogenic effect of all macro’s. Don’t forget that the initial high fat ketogenic diet was not a weight loss diet but a diet to treat epilepsy. I seem to remember that those kind of very high fat diets (88 – 92% of calories) had some nasty side-effects.
      For a good source of information see The Ketegenic Bible by Jacob Wilson and Ryan Lowery.

  3. I read your Protein power book in 2006 and it changed my life completely. I’m 53 and was diagnosed at age 11 with juvenile or type 1 diabetes. I was a sugarholic and was eating candy and sweets all day long. I was not overweight though. I was always active and ate nutritious good food( thanks to my mom). I was always afraid to eat too much protein because they always said it was bad for my kidneys because of being diabetic. Well, after reading your book, I switched to Low carb, FINALLY stopped eating anything with processed sugar, and my life changed for the better. I still struggle with always wanting and craving carbs, but severest supplements, especially glucosamine & chondrioton, help minimize those cravings.
    The reason I’m posting this is because I am living proof that it is NOT calories in and calories out. I have experimented for OVER 20 years on this subject. As long as I eat a low glycemic diet, ( consume things that don’t spike my blood sugar), I don’t watch my calories very much at all, but I don’t gain weight. The minute I start consuming high glycemic foods, within days I start gaining weight. It’s ALL about the insulin. If you eat carbs that make your blood sugar rise within a few minutes, your body is going to release insulin to move those carbs from your blood stream to the cells, where they get stored as fat. With low glycemic foods( ones that only make your bloodsugar rise little by little, your body stores some, bust mostly it is burned off as fuel to keep you going. As long as you are not lying in bed for days at a time, you can eat your fat and not worry about calories , as long as you are moving and activating your metabolism. Insulin receptors are found in the large muscles in the body and when excersised, it keeps the insulin receptors sensitive to insulin and therefore you only need a little bit of insulin to process carbs and keep blood sugars down. The minute I stop moving, for example: laying around the house all day in the couch watching tv all day, I suddenly need a LOT more insulin to keep blood sugars normal. But I can still eat good fats and not gain a weight. I don’t know if I’m making this clear, but basically, the point is this: if you kept moving, exercise twice a week using the large muscles on the legs and arms( like strength training weight lifting, even just using a one pound weight) to keep the insulin receptors working properly, you can eat low carb , with fat, and not watch calories( as long as you don’t pig out everyday!) and not gain weight. This is just my own observation with my body. Being diabetic I can see how things affect my blood sugar. Oh, and when I do extreme low carb, like an Atkins style diet, I can eat all the fat and protein I want without gaining weight. So isn’t it ALL about the insulin and how well our insulin receptors are working Dr. Eades?

    1. Thanks for sharing your story. I’m glad to learn you are doing so well. You’re right in that insulin is a major factor involved in the storage of both fat and carbs (and amino acids, too), but it’s a more complex story than just that. The whole insulin resistance/insulin sensitivity issue will be a major part of the new book.

  4. I was advised some years ago to get my DNA analyzed to see if I have a genetic deficit that keeps me from processing folate. I did, in fact, and started taking high doses of Folate and another B vitamin.
    Then Jason Fung MD published the following critique, showing that supplementing with vitamin B not only had a negative effect on the prevention of heart disease but that it also fostered cancer. I ‘d like to know your educated thoughts on this, as i am still being advised to supplement with Bs.
    The next great hope was vitamin B. In the early 2000s, there was a great flurry of interest in a blood test called homocysteine. High homocysteine levels were correlated with increased risk of heart disease. Vitamin B could lower homocysteine levels, but whether this would translate into better health outcomes was unknown. Several large scale trials were launched with this hope. One of these was the NORVIT trial, published in 2006 in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
    The news was stunning. Stunningly bad, that is. Compared to taking placebo (sugar pills), supplementation with folate, vitamin B6 and B12 was giving people more heart attacks and strokes. Yes. The vitamin group was not doing better, it was doing worse. But worse news was still to come, if you can believe it. In 2009, researchers studied the two randomized controlled trials of vitamin B supplementation and found that in addition to raising the risk of cardiovascular disease, the risk of cancer was increased by 21%! Aw snap! The risk of dying from cancer increased by 38%. Taking useless vitamins is one thing, taking vitamins that are actively harmful is something else.
    The use of vitamin B supplements for kidney disease was similarly dismal. The DIVINe studyrandomized two groups of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) to either placebo or vitamin B supplements with the hope of slowing down the progression of kidney disease. Homocysteine levels are high in CKD and the vitamins were able to lower these levels. But did they make any real difference? Sure did. The use of vitamin B made things worse. Much, much worse. It doubled the incidence of poor outcomes. Another nail in the coffin of the homocysteine story and vitamin B supplements. Another 10 years of research money wasted.
    The ironic part of this flawed knowledge is that we are still paying the price. Enriched wheat flour, for example is wheat with all the goodness extracted and then certain vitamins replaced. So almost all the vitamins were removed, and replaced with huge doses of iron and vitamin B. So what we got was a huge surplus of vitamin B. Not that I believe this was malicious. People were mostly concerned about nutrient deficiencies like beri beri, iron deficiency anemia and not so much with anything else. The problem, of course, is that we now have data that show that giving large doses of vitamin B may increase rates of cancer and hear attacks.

    1. A number of studies have shown that taking large doses of various vitamins can indeed cause problems. On the other hand, not getting enough of them can cause problems as well. Which is why we always recommend good quality, whole (non-processed) food as the best source of vitamins.

  5. I lost more weight on high carb (50%) than on low carb (10%) , but body fat % was lower on low carb than high carb, results completely at odds with Hall’s NUSI-study. Results: 21,2 lbs weight loss versus 31,2 lbs but 21,7 % body fat versus 24,4%. I’m 5.11 and my weight is 220 lbs. Age: 47. Calories: 2500. It would be interesting to know how the other two macro’s change with a change in carbs.

    1. Usually people following low-carb diets get more protein than those on low-fat diets. The increased protein typically helps maintain the lean body mass of those on low-carb diets. Consequently, people on low-fat diets generally see a greater drop in lean body mass as compared to those on low-carb diets.

  6. 1) Lucky break on the Meat Master thing. I can hear junior high kids blowing milk out of their noses all over the country.
    2) It is indeed interesting that a model that was supposed to measure cal-in/cal-out wound up not doing that. Do not pay any attention to man behind the curtain.
    3) Podcasts can be great, but for many of us they are not. Diet Doctor solved with this transcripts, which I find very helpful (podcasts for me are physically painful, and obviously deaf people can’t hear them at all).
    4) Would love to hear interviews with Ron Rosedale, Amber O’Hearn (especially) and Georgia Ede.

    1. I hope to be able to provide transcripts of the podcasts, but probably won’t for the early ones. Unless, of course, someone who is a great transcriptionist comes to my rescue.
      I’m good friends with Amber, so I’m sure she’ll ultimately be on the podcast. Ron Rosedale is my former partner, so I’m sure I’ll wrangle him in. I know Georgia Ede, who is a very nice person, but not as well as the other two. But I’m sure she will be willing.

  7. Mike – great to see you posting again – loved all aspects of it and look forward to more of same.
    3 tiny fixes in the text:
    when I fooled with hit back then. – “when I fooled with it back then” (3rd para below the video)
    She the charts from the model below – “See the charts . . .” (para right before your graphs)
    present them to the public for in an effort to attract funding – “present them to the public in an effort . . .” (1st para under Kickstarter)
    Happy days with you posting!

    1. All fixed. Thanks very much. My in-house proof reader (MD) missed these – perhaps some sort of disciplinary process is in order.

  8. Dr. M, I have followed you both for years..love your books and your blogs – you are No 1 in my book. I love the interviews you do especially one with Ivor.
    Everything came into perspective when I discovered http://www.zerocarbzen.com and the interview with Dr. Paul Mabry. Paul, a retired Army/Navy colonel made an amazing transformation. He has his own site http://www.borntoeatmeat.com and a face book page zerocarbdoc.
    He was recently at the low carb conference in San Diego. I believe you have met.
    I would love to have you interview Paul (who has since become a good friend).

  9. Interesting model. I wonder if the initial few pounds of water weight when starting a low carb diet are factored into the difference between the 12 pound loss and 8 pound loss when you fiddled with the numbers.
    Following a mostly low carb diet (I sometimes love pie and ice cream) I’ve gone from 205 to 173 since January. It works for me.
    I’ve plugged in some numbers on the model and will track what happens over the next 90 days.

    1. I looked at that myself. Typically, those going on low-carb diets have a quick early weight loss, which some attribute to burning through all their glycogen and releasing the fluid trapped there. But that kind of evens out over a few weeks, and the glycogen stores replenish due to gluconeogenesis. So, by the end of 8 weeks, which was what I arbitrarily set the program for, I don’t think it makes a lot of difference.

  10. Dr. Eades, I’m curious about how males and females react to the same approaches. When I read blogs and comments on intermittent fasting and high-fat keto, it seems males (especially younger males) do extremely well with these approaches. Sure, I see a few women reporting good things when they start IF and/or keto, but not nearly as many as with men, and the results tend to fade over time. In fact, it seems that when women comment, they report poor results with these approaches.
    Is it simply because the men are being more vocal about it? Or is there a reason women (especially women over 50) tend to have less success with IF and keto? Do hormones (estrogen, progesterone, etc.) come into play? Does it make a difference if there have been pregnancies? Do men simply have more muscle mass that revs up with IF and keto? Since women have a higher percentage of fat and a lower percentage of muscle than men (not judging; speaking generally), does this play into the picture? Is it that men can be more single-minded than women (again, not judging)?
    Or maybe it’s the “red car” syndrome. You never notice how many red cars are on the road until you buy one yourself. I’m a woman over 50 (ok, over 60) and what I’m seeing is men tend to do better with IF and keto, and women tend to struggle. Is that just my perception?
    Maybe it’s my imagination, but when talking about groups of people, it seems it’s always the women over 50 who struggle, especially those who have years of low-carb eating behind them.

    1. We intend to address all this in the book. Part has to do with the difference in hormones and the fact that menopause exists. Another part has to do with the smaller lean body mass most women have as compared to men of the same weight. And, strangely enough, alcohol consumption tends to have a much larger effect on both weight loss and weight gain in females than it does in males. I know, I know, it’s not fair.
      MD once overheard a conversation between two late middle-aged women in the locker room of a golf club. One said to the other, “The only way I can ever reliably lose weight is to stop drinking wine.” The other answered, “Well, that’s just too extreme.”

      1. Not fair at all. Men can pee standing up and “write” their names with it. Men lose weight and gain muscle more easily than women. Men get to dance facing forward and in flats. Now you’re telling me that they experience less weight gain from alcohol consumption than do women?
        If it weren’t for shoe shopping, I’d rather be male.
        I can’t wait to read your new book!!! When do you expect it will be available?

          1. One more comment on the alcohol consumption. In Protein Power (page 165 of the hardcover edition), you wrote of “an old study done by a New York physician back in the early sixties in which he divided his dieting patients into three groups–wine drinkers, hard-liquor drinkers, and nondrinkers. He kept all groups on the same reducing diet and found that the wine drinkers lost the most weight. He had no idea why; he just reported his results. They make sense now because we understand that wine improves insulin sensitivity. Many researchers believe the disparity between the levels of heart disease found in France and Britain–the so-called French paradox–can be laid at the doorstop of increased wine consumption. And so, like the French, Italians, and others living around the Mediterranean, we can increase our insulin sensitivity, decrease our insulin levels, and enjoy life more by adding a moderate amount of wine to our program.”
            You go on to say that “moderate” means a glass or two with one meal.
            Also, you wrote that “Distilled spirits, while they contain scant to no carbohydrates–it’s all been turned to alcohol–tend to raise insulin and to impair insulin sensitivity if consumed in more than modest quantities.” You say to avoid distilled alcohol at the beginning, other than an occasional drink of no more than 1 oz.
            Did your thinking change on this topic? If so, what was the deciding factor? Were new (reputable, not observational) studies published?

          2. Yes, I well remember the old NY State Medical Society study, which I have in a box somewhere. It, too, was an observational study in that it wasn’t randomized. People self selected the group they were in, and perhaps there were other characteristics about wine drinkers that played a role in it. At that time, wine drinkers were not as common as they are now. Nor was wine in the US, for that matter. Had I written about that study today, I would have said it was pretty much worthless. So, yes, my thinking has changed on the subject.
            I don’t believe people should never drink, but it is an impediment to weight loss, especially in women. We’ll write all about it PP 2.0.

      2. I definitely find (much to my chagrin) that wine stops my weight loss in its tracks. I’m 42, only have maybe (maybe) 5-10 more pounds to go, but they need to be pounds of fat and not what little muscle I have left after having two kids and working desk jobs for 20 years 😉 I joke around with friends that what I LOVE about LC is I don’t have to give up the two things I would most miss in the world – wine and dark chocolate. But I have definitely noticed that if I go “face down” in either one, weight loss halts. As you have said many times, I still don’t often *gain* when I do that, but I do stop losing. It’s annoying but now that we are heading back into fall (we tend to drink by the pool during the summer) it’ll be a little easier to put the wine down 😉 At least on weekdays!
        Oh, one other thought that I didn’t include in my original comment, above. I absolutely loved watching Kevin Hall explain that our hypothetical person dropping 500 k/cal/day would simply “vanish” after a couple years. If only it was that easy, right?
        To another commenter’s point, I find it’s definitely about the insulin. I was never diagnosed as such (and that fact’s probably directly to your credit!) because I caught mine early enough and turned it around w LC. But I suspect I was well on my way to Type II or pancreatic burnout had I not made the change. I can’t thank you enough for all that you do/write. Your comment about “usually overweight female” commenters at cocktail parties saying that they “have tried it and just NEED carbs” is what finally got through to me. Once I read that, I couldn’t “unhear” it. I tried it, and voila. The rest is history. And dinner tonight is ribeye. 😉

    2. I hear you. I’m 56 and struggle with low-carb too. I had a total hysterectomy at 48, and started eating low-carb the following year. I started Crossfit about the same time, whereas I had been doing just weights on my own before my surgery. Either Crossfit or low-carb (or both combined) wrecked my metabolism and I got pretty depressed too. I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue a couple years later. While I still try to keep my carbs under 50 g/day for the sake of my triglycerides and Ldl, I actually feel better when they are a little higher. I hope Drs. Eades’ book sheds some light on all that, too. Full disclosure, my hormones have been stable and optimal with pellet implants for the past couple of years, so I don’t think that’s part of the problem, but who knows.

  11. Yes, I would be very interested in your notes on Kickstarter, A podcast from you, A new book from you, and, most especially, more frequent blog posts and book reviews. I enjoy your insights very much. Thank you.

  12. Hello Mr. Eades.
    I´m a big fan of “protein power” book…. and i was catched by the subject: eicosapentaenoic acid (20:5; EPA) and arachidonic acid.
    I’d like to read more about it…. maybe here or in the 2.0
    Best regards
    Nelson

  13. Would very much like to listen to podcasts by the Eades’. Favorite guests: anyone doing nutritional research.

  14. Hey Dr. Mike, you were right, the video was interesting—but I feel that is just about all it was! Hall very often seems to contradict the points he makes. But the point about whether his equations work doesn’t concern me as much as what possible purpose all this could serve. It would seem to me to be an “iron-clad, guaranteed, proof positive” method of blaming the dieter when the diet doesn’t work. When the wonderful SAD (and I do mean SAAAAAAD) diet doesn’t produce the desired results for someone, just wave this report in front of them and scream, “SEE—IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!!!! I HAVE PROOF POSITIVE RIGHT HERE!!!!” I have had this reaction from doctors all my life—-making me feel worse than useless and less than human. The fact that a few years of eating low carb and keto has made such a difference in my life and health is what they call a “fluke”. Hall also seems to ignore the concept of homeostasis. He claims that once you reach your goal, all you need do is cut your calories back another 100 or so and you won’t regain the weight—guess he never had a REAL weight problem. As with all things, the body seeks balance, whether it is hormone secretion (insulin, leptin, grehlin, etc.) or drugs or food, the body has ways of dealing with too much –too little–or a constantly measured supply! Even eating low carb or keto requires occasional raising or lowering of macros to keep things moving. It seems the body isn’t happy unless it has to compensate for change—keep mixing things up—it needs to maintain a certain level of metabolic flexibility in order to protect itself during all of life’s varying circumstances. I therefore see no purpose for predicting what anyone’s weight loss should be while living in a metabolic lab—with all the possible genetic permutations, epigenetic programming and infinite variables of life, the whole project would seem to be a lesson in futility!! In any case, thanks for another great post Dr. Mike!

    1. Your comment about Dr. Hall’s notion that just reducing calories by a hundred per day will prevent weight regain is interesting. In his reply to Dr. Ludwig about the latter’s comment on Hall’s published NuSI study, Hall says that 150 calories per day is an insignificant amount and doesn’t really matter. Which is interesting in that his study showed an increase in energy expenditure in those on the low-carb diet arm of the study of between 100 and 150 calories. Hall blew that off as insignificant and of no consequence in terms of weight loss. He sings a different tune in the video.

      1. Just listened to Dr. Ben Bikman discussing white adipose tissue and brown adipose tissue. The BAT being helpful to dieters with its way of burning calories to provide heat to our core when needed (essentially wasting extra calories —though not really wasting) was very interesting. More interesting was that the amount of brown fat we carry is very limited, with white fat being far more prevalent. While white fat doesn’t usually behave as brown fat does, Bikman states that when white fat is exposed to ketones in the body, it begins to exhibit the same behavior as brown fat. Perhaps this could explain the extra 100-150 calories the dieters experienced on the low carb arm of the study? This would seem to create a metabolic advantage for anyone using a low carb or keto type of diet. Logically, the amount of extra calories burned would vary according to the amount of WAT the person has and the depth of ketosis achieved through diet or fasting. What do you think?

        1. I know Dr. Bikman, and I’m familiar with his talk. I think he may be right. But there may be more to it than just the action of ketones on WAT. I’ve got to write a post on my views on all this soon.

  15. I am an email subscriber and am looking forward to more posts, including book posts, as well as your new book. I’ve read your blog for a long time, but had fallen “off the wagon” in recent years due to some major lifestyle, career, and family stresses, but am now back on track and have lost a significant amount of the weight I had gained during that stressful period, but still need to lose some more.
    I thought I’d play with the body weight planner you referenced. Perhaps it is simply because I am older than your test sample, and female, but I got radically different results than you posted, much more in line with what Dr. Hall preaches, but not at all in line with my own experience.
    Here is what I put in, using myself as a model: Female, 5’8″, 59 years, current weight 176 pounds. The model gave a maintenance calorie intake of 2281 calories at 50% carbs. I set a 90 day time frame and started experimenting; that is when things started to get interesting. I ran the model at 2281 calories , at 2200, and again at 2000. Pretty consistently, if the carbs went down, weight went up initially, and then started to taper. The lower the carbs, the greater the initial gain, and the slower the taper. Out of curiosity I increased the time frame to 1 year. As I reduced calories, the greatest weight loss still occurred at 50% carbs, well with even greater loss if increased carbs. In fact, according to this model, the fastest way to lose weight is to increase carbs to 100% and reduce calories. The model shows that if I maintained calories and increased carbs I would still lose weight, even without increasing activity. This does not align with experience.
    In all scenarios, the initial increase in weight at 10% carbs was not offset by the tapering weight loss, even after 1 year. I’m beginning to think your results were the aberration and that the model is consistent with Dr. Hall’s statements, although more data would be necessary to confirm that assumption.
    I can see why so many people struggle with weight loss just based on the anticipated results if one follows this model. The status quo is changing far too slowly

  16. I don’t understand why food vacuumed in plastic and then cooked in that plastic, though probably delicious, could be considered good for you. Assuming it is BPA free, why not a concern for ANY plastic. I have followed all your books, however, I cannot comprehend your take on Sous Vide cooking as being a good nutritional approach. I am so confused as to your motive for this endeavor.

    1. If you knew how much testing we do on bags, you would know the answer to this question. The temps in sous vide cooking a very low. In most cases, somewhere in the 120F-140F range. We test the bags using very high temps and find nothing is absorbed into the food from the bags. We test using alcohol, water and olive oil in the bag cooked at much higher temps than are ever used in sous vide cooking and find nothing leaches from the bags into the food. Our bags are made of food-grade plastic. I can’t make the same claims for bags purchased in supermarkets, which are usually designed for freezer or refrigerator use. If you’re going to cook sous vide, use food grade bags.
      If you cook a steak on a grill, you get the build up of compounds believed to be carcinogenic. If you cook it sous vide, you don’t get that build up. With sous vide, you get no oxidation of delicate fats. Because the food is contained, you get no loss of water soluble nutrients. In the food technology literature, sous vide cooking (using food grade bags) is considered one of the safest means of cooking in terms of what happens to the food. So there is a trade off.
      Here is a video by a doctor discussing plastics and sous vide cooking. This doc has no affiliation whatsoever with our company. I’ve never met him or spoken with him, and as far as I know, he has no economic interest in the process.

  17. I would love to see more pointers for those of us who have difficulties starting low carb – headache, strong cravings, etc. I have all of your books & look forward to your new book. I really love it when there is a new blog in my inbox.

  18. Supposedly “The flip side of every challenge is an opportunity”. Hmmm … let’s see.
    A site like dietdoctor.com has presentations blasting yogurt. Does Fage plain full fat or 2% yogurt deserve this scorn? What about Chobani plain nofat with some added cream? If yogurt can be made sous vide I wonder if this gets past the alleged flaws in the others?
    Searching YouTube for “lchf” turns up many fine presentations .. yours included. Aha .. there’s Phinney mentioning lack of salt can cause constipation which is why he consumes broth while he travels. Following up … I discovered the broth packets in our local grocery store show lots of nasty ingredients on the label. Sigh. Fortunately I’m not travelling at the moment, however I want to underscore “lc” can stand for lots of constipation – another vital fact that needs more emphasis in the beginning imo.
    If it is true that excess meat protein does not get converted into glucose by gluconeogenesis that will be a key fact but it also leads to other questions? Which meats does this work for is my first question.
    Is it really feasible to reverse insulin dependent Type II diabetes remotely? Is this a reasonable goal for someone who has been insulin dependent for decades but at the same time sort of low carb, sort of between slacker and diligent?
    Further presentations hint at lchf smoothing out moods. OK. Playing with dynamite here. Lets take Type I Bipolar Disorder / Mania being treated with divalproex. I recall you have stated divalproex is quite nasty wrt fatty liver. So of course you want to remove divalproex – but the downside risk is substantial. Where’s the path out of the weeds on something like this?
    I live in a house with a small kitchen. So do all my neighbors for many blocks in all directions. If the “Property Brothers” pitched their “open concept” remodel here they would kind of end up standing in the back yard. In fact a back yard addition would cost far less than a kitchen remodel and could accomodate meat cooking entertainment such as the freezer that would not fit in the garage, a sous vide cooker that would not fit in the kitchen, fire pit, and housing for your preferred meat eating entertainment rituals. (e.g. Mangalista “go hogs” edition).
    Finally, I see many lchf video presentations with better measurement tools HOMA-IR (now you can correct my spelling) … I’m sure you know the presenters and already know about these tools but this kind of thing would be very valuable imo to know what’s going on as we attempt to follow lchf and maybe dabble in keto.
    Thanks!

    1. LCHF works wonders for bipolar 1 in my experience. Talk to your p-doc about lamotigine. Much friendlier to your body.

  19. My understanding is that metabolic ward studies support CICO; or is that incorrect?
    Podcasts would be great and it would be very interesting to hear about Low Carb eating as it has to do with benefits for other than weight loss: CVD,Cancer, etc. And yes, sorting out all the low carb views would be welcomed.
    I think that lo carb is like many things in life: one size does not fit all and maybe there is a continuum that manipulates the macros based on individual biochemistry. Just a guess on my part.
    Sometimes i think it not the carbs per say, but the junk carbs; and all who seem to lose weight on any diet plan are cutting these out to some extent or another i think.

  20. The news of a podcast is very welcome. I’d assume you’d have people like Eric Westman and Ivor Cummins and Zoe Harcombe. There’s a couple of people I can’t recall being interviewed around and perhaps they’re less easily available – Malcolm Kendrick and also Peter at Hyperlipid.
    I also wonder if you’ll be having interviews covering areas that other LCHF and Paleo podcasts generally don’t but that you do comment on yourself — paleopathology, static isotope analysis, anthropology, for example.
    The pathology of mummies seems very telling. Have you seen the information on the Chinese mummy Lady Dai? Gallstones, diabetes, liver disease and “a severely damaged heart”. Not surprising when you see all the sugary confections she was buried with to carry on eating in the afterlife (a massive amount of booze, too):
    https://asianart.com/articles/ladydai/index.html

  21. As a long-time reader and fan, I’m delighted to see more pixels here from you, Dr. Mike. I devour your work, knowing how satisfying and non-caloric it is — npo, all by eyeball.
    I’ve worked with another author who loves podcasting and admit I’m not a fan. It’s much easier for me to grok the concepts you present when I can read them at my own pace and backtrack when I need to. It’s also easier for me to find the time to read — which I can do during available moments in a lively environment like office or family — than to commit to listening to a podcast. And I know I enjoy your written voice; will the live voice of Dr. Mike be as mellifluous? Not everyone online (or in broadcast) is pleasant to listen to.
    I’d like to see more from you & MD on the sleeplessness I and others seem to experience in ketosis. I feel both livelier and more relaxed, but sleep escapes me. Even my regimen of magnesium, valerian, HTP, valerian, and passionflower doesn’t help much. I’ve never noticed any sleep benefit from taking melatonin.
    And apropos of that, I don’t remember reading about favorite magnesium compounds from you. I myself see more laxative effect from magnesium oxide, which isn’t always desirable, and there’s such a range of compounds in the supplement aisle nowadays.
    Thank you so much for your smarts and experience and for sharing them so generously with us readers!

    1. My voice is as mellifluous as… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I don’t think my podcasting is going to replace my writing, since, as I mentioned in the post, writing is a way for me to think things through on paper (so to speak), which can’t really be done on a podcast, a more reactive medium.
      We will definitely address sleep in the book. Till then, try a chelated magnesium supplement, which has better absorption and doesn’t cause the laxative effect. A chelate is anything with an ate on the end of it, such as magnesium citrimate, gluconate, etc.

  22. Hi, Dr. Mike!
    Yes, I’d love to hear about your Kickstarter experience. As the founder of SUGARbriety, where we’re ‘saving the world from sugar addiction’, we’re always looking for new fundraising opportunities.
    As far as the podcast, yes, I’d LOVE for you to have a podcast. The key with podcasting is to not only get your audio situation ironed out as well as possible, but to also help your non-audio savvy guests to sound their best.
    As an audio engineer of 33 years experience, here are:
    Ben Fury’s Top Five Tips For A Great Sounding Podcast.
    1. Mix It!
    Simply ganging together your microphone plus their microphone is a guaranteed disaster. Someone needs to be mixing the audio. If it’s you, use headphones so you can clearly hear your own audio plus the guests audio and adjust the levels to roughly match each other. Then keep listening and adjusting as necessary. If they get louder or quieter, be on top of it and ride the gain up or down on their microphone to always keep their levels roughly even with yours.
    2. Post Produce It!
    Live sound is best left to live sound engineers. If you record it, then post produce the audio and/or video in professional A/V software, it’s MUCH more likely you will come out with a professional looking/sounding podcast. I prefer Adobe Premiere Pro, but most any computer A/V software today is better than the gear we were using professionally 20 years ago.
    3. Test Drive It!
    Do a sound check. Don’t wait till you go live for a full interview with someone and discover they sound like they’re coming from Outer Mongolia through a PVC pipe filled with cotton candy. If their sound is horrible, run through the basic microphone checklist and see if you can fix it. If it’s not fixable, consider advising that they do an audio microphone/recording system upgrade to bring them into the 21st century and do the interview at a later date.
    4. Fix It Before It’s Broke!
    If the sound check sounds horrible, run through the microphone checklist and get their audio fixed before the interview. Be sure and check how your own system sounds and fix it too if necessary.
    [Microphone Checklist]
    A) Record In A Good Sounding Room. A good sounding room is one with minimal background noise. Also, one that is not too “live” with lots of reflected sound echoing and hurting the intelligibility of what’s being said. Curtains and carpets are good. Larger rooms are often good. A large or small room with only hard surfaces is horrible.
    To test a room; stand where you’ll be speaking and clap your hands. If the sound echoes and goes on and on, you need a different room or need to add some room treatment to get it under control. If the clap dissipates almost immediately without echoes, you’re in a good room for audio recording.
    B) Use A Good Microphone. Just good. Doesn’t have to be great. In fact, for interviews, sometimes your super expensive large diaphragm condenser is NOT the best mic for the job. It will pick up every bit of background noise that otherwise might not be noticeable.
    For interviews, I prefer cheap omni lavaliers. Polsen OLM-10 and Audio-Technica ATR-3350 are both under $30 and sound fine. You just clip them to your talent’s shirt and you’ve got decent clean level with low noise. Best of all, with the microphone six inches below the talent’s lips, the chances of overloads from plosive “P’s” and “K’s” goes way down.
    Best of all, these mics are cheap enough you can mail one to an interviewee to use and if they forget to mail it back, it’s not the end of the world. To interface either of these mics to a computer, they’ll also need a Sabrent USB External Stereo Sound Adapter. $8 from Amazon. Works on Windows and Mac. Plug and play. No drivers needed. Since it’s also got a headphone jack, your talent will be able to hear themselves and you clearly with whatever ear buds they have handy.
    C) Check For Extraneous Noises And Distortion. If the talent is wearing a lavalier, make sure it’s not rubbing on anything. If they use a headset or stand mounted mic, make sure they’re not hammering it with plosives or excess level. Get them talking. Get them excited and see how loud they get. A person dully saying, “Check one, two, three,” and an excited interviewee are two totally different animals. Get your levels set so you can hear them clearly without distorting at their loudest. If they are hammering their plosives, get them to move the mic slightly off axis so it’s below or beside their mouth instead of right in front of it. You can fix a lot of things in post, but mic handling noise and distortion are not among them. Get this right when you’re live or your audio from that interview is bad forever.
    D) Get The Talent Close To The Microphone. Ideally, you want your talent within 6 inches of the microphone to maximize their sound and minimize room sounds. Less ideal is having them within 18 inches of the mic. Completely unacceptable is having them 2 feet or more from the microphone. You get a ton of room tone and almost no signal. It sounds terrible, especially in a live echoey room.
    5. STAND UP AND HAVE FUN!
    Watch the behind the scenes of the stars recording their voiceovers for an animated movie. Notice how they’re almost all always standing up? That’s for a reason. Standing people are more energetic people. Standing people are dynamic. Standing people sound ALIVE!
    Seated people sound dull by comparison. Professional radio people are trained to sound ALIVE even when seated. Most people don’t. Most people relax when they sit down and their rib cage gets cramped. They get quieter. They get less interesting. Especially when you’re interviewing people who aren’t very media savvy, get them up! Get them moving!
    This is when you’ll LOVE an omnidirectional lavalier microphone. It will stay 6 inches from their mouth and capture that enthusiasm no matter how they move around. Since it’s an omni, it won’t matter if they turn left or right, their level will stay even no matter how they move.
    That’s it. Follow those 5 Tips and your podcasts will sound as great as the information is awesome.
    If you need more help with your audio/video setup, ping me. I’m gonna listen to ALL your podcasts, so I’m VERY interested in making sure they look AND sound fantastic!

    1. Wow! Thanks for the didactic. Makes me wonder if I really want to do this or not. I didn’t realize it was that complex.

      1. It’s actually quite easy once you memorize these few key audio factoids. After you do just a few recordings, you’ll run through that checklist without even thinking about it.
        Go for it, Mike! Audio is FUN!

    2. “My voice is as mellifluous as…”
      As a *very* good speaker. I have listened to every video and audio interview and speech by you that I have found on line. (Yeah, okay, I’m a bit obsessive: but it helps to have reinforcement, and I love learning!) I listen to podcasts ALL the time! Cooking, cleaning, driving, exercising, gardening, and — pretty much anything that does not require actual brainwork! (Cannot be on the computer AND listen to a lecture, unless I’m playing a mindless game…) You need have no hesitation on that that score, if/when you start podcasting Mike — you are very pleasant to listen to. (And I write that as an “expert” — I’ve listened to easily 10,000 hours — and sometimes I do have to turn someone off for vocal … insufficiency. You will not have that problem!)

      1. Thanks again. We’ll see how it all works, I guess. What’s mellifluous to one may be annoying to another.

  23. This comment is relative to the book you will write to replace Protein Power. Over the years since reading the first Protein Power book around 1995, the information that provided the strongest evidence that low carb / high protein was the way our ancient ancestors ate, was in the archaeological record. I also used that information to convince some of my family while most people tried to convince me I was ruining my health. I hope some of that information will be included with this next book.

    1. Some will be included, but it’s hard to improve upon Protein Power in that respect. What we’ll do is show how some of the more modern foods are joining forces with carbohydrates to really magnify the problem.

  24. I’m so happy you’re coming out with this new book, and I just want to add my vote for some help with healthy weight loss for seniors and for women (and of course for senior women). And if you have room, I’d be interested in understanding more about the differences between people who are “metabolically challenged” versus those who aren’t when starting a low carb or keto or IF program. And one more area that always speaks to me personally – the psychological effects of food and diet. (Sorry – it sounds like I’m asking for The Encyclopedia of Protein Power. But with all these nutrition books out there, I’m getting a little overwhelmed.)

    1. Since a senior woman will be the co-author, I’m sure there will be plenty on the problems senior women have losing weight and maintaining weight loss.

  25. Regarding the doctor’s quest, my question is, “But, why?” We are way too complicated generally, then add in individual reactions, and you have a perfect windmill to be tilted at.
    I’ve been back on the diet and exercise chain gang since January, lost 45 pounds. I ate a lot of fresh fruit, now tapering, and “clean carbs,” oatmeal, grits, beans. Most days 100-150 grams. The weight still came off.
    Then I upped my protein from 120-150g/day, to 160-200 and the weight started flying outta the love handles and belly. After a vacation where I indulged pretty much whatever I wanted and gained 7 pounds, I have lost all but one in 8 days. On my bike only twice, moderate calorie deficit.
    Richard Nokaley discovered pretty much the same thing concurrently with my experiment. I know it is “impossible,” but there are the results. I think of it as similar to the potato hack. How? No one knows, but there are the results.
    And I’m confident, not due to loss of LBM which probably happens on the low protein hack.
    Talk about Protein Power!

  26. Hey Dr. Mike! So glad to read you’ll be posting here more often! Congratulations on the kickstarter campaign; looks like it is well on its way and then some. And I can’t wait to read the new book!
    Please do add me to the list for the archives of reading recommendations. You haven’t steered me wrong yet! My husband and I both read a great deal in our line of work, so he can never understand why I still want to read something else at the end of the day. I particularly enjoyed “Poorly Made in China.” I feel like I see examples of that concept in action just about everywhere these days. Sigh.
    Oh yes – LOVE podcasts if you get one going. For those who are asking for a transcript, speech-to-text software is pretty inexpensive and available these days and you might find one that works fairly well, but THANK YOU for your time spent in putting the content out there at all. Yours is my favorite LC and nutrition blog, and I’ve shared it with many.
    As far as topics, I’d love more information on LC and gut health. Like some others below, I find that my fiber intake (pretty much regardless of source) is directly correlated with gut discomfort and disturbance; I’ve tried various forms of almost all-meat diets as I’ve been on this LC journey the last year. When my internist pulled labs, I did have a moment of panic that she would only find bacon and burger grease 🙂 (labs were sterling). I seem to do fine with a nearly all-protein-and-fat diet, except that if I take a detour for variety into something like whitefish in tomato broth/soup, I will have painless but definitely watery “output” from the gut side of things the next day. No cramps (in fact, no warning it’s coming!) so that’s been the only thing I notice if I eat truly no fiber. I’m assuming it’s a switch in the gut flora away from digesting acid/carbs, but that’s just a guess. Maybe the acid in the tomatoes (this also happens if I take the cranberry supplement I have used for years). I’ve read Wheat Belly, Fiber Menace, etc. (see avid reader, above 😉 and I know I feel better when I just stay away from fiber (and, to a great degree, all starch/sugar in any form) but I realize what a huge role gut health plays, and want to make sure I address that in my overall diet. I’m in LC mode for the long haul.
    So glad you are “back!”

    1. If you sign up below – even if you’ve signed up before – you should get all the book archives.
      Glad you’re interested in the podcast; that gives me some motivation to overcome my trepidation and actually work on it.
      The new book will possibly have info about gut health, but I’m just not all that convinced that it can’t be changed quickly for the better with the right kind of diet.

  27. Thanks for the past 10 years of a great diet. It was hard at first, but second nature now.
    I feel that a lot of bad potentials were stymied. The blood glucose, even in old age is normal, unlike that of family members.
    With the PP diet, blood pressure was great, except in case of stress, which happens.
    When I was finally alerted to hypothyroidism and all the various blood tests involved, (bloodwork was undernormal), got on the meds. for it, etc., the blood pressure remains in check, stress or no.
    Meanwhile, great energy and a svelte 110 lbs., at 75 yrs. No complaints.
    Many Thanks !

  28. Yes, please write about your kickstarter experience! I’m interested in using it for some ideas and would find your experiences super helpful.

  29. Like to hear you have conversation with Dr Kelly Brogan….very well read /educated psychiatrist who has bucked the conventional wisdom and speaks to food as medicine…has been somewhat blacklisted
    Dr McBride, Dr Wahls also address such specific healing related to dietary and
    specific chronic illness
    Also, for balance, Dean Ornish who has captured the vegetarian establishment approval (and is covered by insurance) and who claims dramatic results with his low fat regimen…(support group, meditation and exercise) want to hear a real exchange re his research…

    1. “for balance, Dean Ornish ”
      EWWW ick! Skip the “balance” — that man is UN-balanced, and a waste of air. He claims his weird diet has a specific effect — but he discounts any effects of all the OTHER interventions he added on top of his weird diet. Please, let’s NOT waste Mike’s time with that charlatan!! If you want to check Ornish out — go YouTube him; you can see what a nutcase (without any nuts — in either sense of that word!). (I know Mike it way too nice to answer like this — but that man is a FAKER and a ZEALOT and an ASS!)

  30. From our own experience of crowd funding our e-Shower on Kickstarter, we too spent a lot of money with apparent “experts” who just didn’t have a clue.
    My husband and I have crowd funded a number products on Kickstarter most of which we never received OR we were sent a poor substitution of what they claimed there campaign would provide. There are also now many crooked types buying cheap products from China and putting them on Kickstarter as their own invention.
    I have watched campaigns get huge funding and then watched the comments coming in when the crowdfunders received their faulty product. The campaigns comments get closed very quickly! I have seen those same campaigners put up a similar product in the next year and seen them being funded yet again! No one is checking what these guys are up to.
    It was such a good idea, crowdfunding, but not enough policing has been done as to the credibility of the products or the abilities of the campaigners to complete their product.
    It seems it is very important to “know” the right people to get the word out there to get the funding. It doesn’t seem to matter how good the product is though.
    If you have any words of wisdom we would love to know, as my husband is wanting to fund another product we invented and any help would be very appreciated from a successful campaigner.

    1. As I’m sure you know, Kickstarter can be a disaster if not done right. I haven’t watched it as closely as you, and I have ordered only one thing, which came through as promised. But from my reading, I know that a lot of backers have been screwed as well as a lot of people going on trying to raise funds. They raise the funds, but the funds can easily go into other pockets instead of toward product development unless you’re really careful, which we have been.

  31. Hall’s model takes water weight into account.
    The quick initial drop in weight on low carb is the give-away. It’s even more obvious if you look at the % fat the model returns above the weight charts.
    Now, if you wonder why a greater weight loss on low-carb leads to a smaller % fat loss, my guess is that while your body is busy burning through its glycogen stores, it’s not burning through its fat stores. And Hall’s model would take that into account, since that’s an observation he has reported before (in the NUSI study is I remember correctly).

    1. I’ve already had this discussion with another commenter. The body contains only about 400 mg of glycogen, representing about 1600 kcal, which it goes through pretty quickly, accounting for the rapid early weight loss in low-carb diets. But most research has shown that the glycogen stores refill even on a low-carb diet, so all the glycogen lost early on comes back within a week or so. At the end of 8 weeks, the weight loss differential between low-carb and low-fat is insignificant, so it can’t really be attributed to glycogen loss.

      1. I am not familiar with the research showing a return of glycogen despite continued adherence to a low-carb diet. Do you have any reference I could look at?
        In fact, it is my understanding that the (relative) depletion of glycogen is at least in part responsible for the improvement in blood glucose for people with diabetes. If elevated fasting glucose is due to elevated glucagon, then keeping glycogen stores low is primordial to maintaining lower glycemia (which does happen in long-term low-carbing).
        Also, I quickly checked the calorie math in Hall’s model. I used the % body fat returned by the model to determine changes in fat mass. I also assumed 3500 calories per pound of fat mass, 400 calories per 100g of glycogen and 4g of lean mass per 1g of glycogen. The 10% carb and 50% carb diets are almost perfectly equivalent in their effect on total body energy content. I see no calorie paradox at all in this model.

        1. Here is a paper written years back based on naval research. At the time of publication, I corresponded with the author, who sent me a bunch of US Naval publications (which I don’t know whether are available to the public or not) replicating his data.

          1. The paper shows that, when they receive a bunch of glucose, people on a low-carb diet store more glucose as glycogen than people on a standard diet. They have an “increased potential for glycogen synthesis.”
            To me, that shows the low-carbers had lower glycogen than the high-carbers right before the test.

          2. In the body of the paper I linked, it says that GS (glycogen synthase – the enzyme that makes glycogen) activity is increased, shifting glucose toward glycogen. The authors also reference other papers showing muscle saturation with glycogen in LC diets when FFA are high. I looked up a few more recent papers that also show glycogen is repleted fairly quickly after a rapid loss upon switching from high-carb to low-carb diets. Granted, most of those studies were in athletes, and the paper I linked to used Naval recruits (which one presumes are young and in shape), but I would suspect most anyone would replete glycogen after the early loss from a switch to low-carb dieting. Most studies are done in athletes, because there is a worry that they won’t be able to meet the demands of bursts of short-term, high-intensity output without stored glycogen. Turns out that athletes adapted to low-carb actually replete their glycogen to slightly greater levels than do those adapted to high-carb diets. It doesn’t say this in the abstract, but it does in the body of the paper.

            There was a high degree of variability in muscle glycogen concentrations pre- exercise in both groups. In contrast, the depletion and resynthesis patterns showed a more uniform response, especially the amount of glycogen synthesized during the 2 hour recovery period in LC athletes (44.8 ± 7.5; 95% CI 40.2–49.4 ?mol/g w.w.), which was one- third less variable than HC athletes (34.6 ± 23.9; 95% CI 19.8– 49.4 ?mol/g w.w.)

            Clearly Dr. Hall didn’t figure that into his own model, which was the point of this post. Models don’t work very well. His model fits all the data from all studies he used to construct it, but he obviously didn’t build into to it the glycogen repletion after the initial weight loss. As it stands, his own studies refute his model and vice verse.

          3. The papers you link to talk about muscle glycogen, not whole body glycogen, let alone body weight.
            Phinney has done some studies on the question (also in athletes).
            https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-7075-1-2
            “On average, subjects lost 0.7 kg in the first week of the EKD [eucaloric ketogenic diet], after which their weight remained stable. […] These results are consistent with the observed reduction in body glycogen stores but otherwise excellent preservation of lean body mass during the EKD.”

          4. Just had an email conversation with Steve Phinney about this very subject. Just about all the work has been done in trained individuals, but some researchers are starting to look at non-trained people. Since it’s a lot easier and safer to biopsy muscle tissue to determine glycogen levels than it is to biopsy liver and/or kidney to look for same, that’s probably the way it’s going to be done. Absence of evidence doesn’t mean evidence of absence. It just hasn’t been looked at. I don’t know anyone, especially anyone with any experience with low-carb diets, who believes that the glycogen stays depleted forever. Or that it just replenishes in the muscle and not the liver. The liver is the primary storehouse for glycogen, so it makes no sense to me that the muscle would replenish and not the liver.
            If you can provide evidence that 8 weeks into a low-carb diet, obese individuals are still glycogen depleted, I would love to see it.

    2. This was my thought as well. However on a LC, you not only lose glycogen, but carry less water/fluid. In terms of fat loss, the difference between LC and LF appears to be insignificant (the best is LCLF). However, the other side of this is outside of a metabolic ward, LC seems to provide additional advantages for most people: adherence and improved lipid/health markers. Hall mentioned that the appetite suppression on LC was a factor that was not accounted for in his study.

  32. Thank you, Dr Eades, for all your informative posts. I would love to know more about how essential drugs affect weight loss on a low-carb diet. As a transplant recipient, liver and kidney, I have to take immunosuppressant drugs for life and they seem to inhibit weight loss. I’m happy that my blood test results are always fantastic. My HBA1C was recently measured at 4.6% and I have low triglycerides and high HDL. However, 8 years of low carb didn’t save me from a TIA and, 5 weeks later, a minor heart attack! I’m pretty sure these two events were the consequences of having an infected tooth extracted and not taking a strong anti-biotic. I had taken amoxicillin for the tooth infection on two previous occasions to no avail. So, has anyone looked at strategies to combat the unfortunate effects of unavoidable drugs while on a low-carb diet?

    1. I’m not sure that your problems were caused by the infection, but they could have been. Amoxicillin is not a good antibiotic for dental infections. There are a handful of antibiotics that will kill anaerobic bacteria, the ones typically causing dental infections, but amoxicillin is not one of them.
      Based on my pretty extensive experience taking care of people using low-carb diets, I can’t think of a case in which the diet would call for a different drug than for someone not on the diet. Other than diuretics of blood-sugar-lowering meds, of course.

  33. What I’d like to read about…
    Hi there and greetings from England.
    CT – CAC (coronary arterial calcification) testing is increasingly on my radar and I’ve seen you on youtube with Ivor Cummins talking about it.
    With issues of volume and density it’s getting complicated for the lay person.
    How about an idiots’ guide?
    Perhaps to include – how often to test, what to ask for in the results (beyond just the score e.g. volume and density), how to stop/reverse arterial calcification (or should we?).
    That’d be on my wish list for a blog from you.
    Cheers!

    1. Very good idea. I’ll do a post on that soon. Thanks for bringing it up, because it’s really important. Since you brought it up, I’m not sure why I haven’t done that post already.

  34. I am very much looking forward to your new book, Protein Power 2.0. I agree that rewriting the original with updates will not be as beneficial as a new book as there is so much available now along with different theories that have been tested. In the new book, I hope you and Mary can address:
    1. Timing of Meals. I have been reading about this for quite awhile and the NY Times has a good article in today’s edition: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/well/eat/the-case-for-a-breakfast-feast.html?emc=eta1
    2. Role of Supplements
    3. Your opinions and review of some of the great studies that have happened since the original Protein Power.
    Happy Writing and Researching,
    Teresa

  35. Have you covered the subject of Mtor and excess protein in relation to aging and cancer.
    Looking forward to Protein Power 2. It is going to be a Best Seller !

    1. Yep, we’ll get into the whole mTor deal. In my view, it’s not as problematic as some would have us believe. Especially in those following low-carb diets. We’ll explain in PP 2.0.

  36. Regarding your podcasting thoughts, I saw this today:
    http://kk.org/cooltools/zencastr/
    It records locally on both sides which is usually makes for a much better recording. The next issue will be the guests mic quality. Some podcasts send a mic around for the guests to use. I think a headset is a better options, because it keeps the mouth / mic distance constant.
    I’ll be watching for the first podcast to appear!
    I use Overcast on the iPhone and set it to around 1.5X speedup and listen in the car.
    John

      1. Don’t be — just (mentally) pick someone you like and “talk’ to them. (The audience is just listening in while you and that person have a chat!) (Well, a one-side chat, but still….)

  37. With regard to a podcast, I’m impressed with Dr. John Abramson of Harvard, and I think he’d be a good source for a discussion on cholesterol or statins.

    1. I’m impressed by him, too. Thanks for the suggestion. For some reason, he wasn’t on my own list. A great oversight on my part.

  38. Oh Happy HAPPY!!! Mike is back on line!! (Had to chuckle to, cause just last night, I made delicious porkchops with basil and green pepper (no, really, try it!) in my baby Sous Vide, which many years ago, you asked me to call a “teenager,” cause it was only 17% smaller than the ‘real’ Sous Vide Supreme! {wink} See you have all KINDS of weird effects on people!
    “I am keen on learning what people who actually read these posts want to read about.”
    I want to read anything at all you write! Your hobbies (yeah, I know, like you get ANY time for those!); anything on food and meds. I LOVE your disassembly of studies, presentations, and ads; very helpful to gently ‘poke’ friends and family into thinking. You and I emailed back a forth a bit, long, long ago, about the OODA loop and Wm Lind’s “4th Generation Warfare Handbook”: even THAT would make an interesting blog post: what about it appeals, what about it you find useful, and what not. MCT oil (and the ‘new’ MCT oil powder — no, really they have made a powder (that mixes well in coffee; kind-of like a creamer) to help induce ketosis.
    Maybe a post or two about the things you learned do and don’t work in business. Many of us our here are also in business; always good to hear how someone else does it — esp. from someone you already know to be a solid source of solid info! (I guess, I’d suggest your blog is NOT ‘bound’ by its main focus — food, health, and low carb. ‘Filling in’ for your vast herd of fans out here won’t go wrong!

    1. Thanks very much for the kind words. I hope I can live up to the billing. I wish the OODA loop could solve nutritional problems. Same for 4th Generation Warfare. It would make life a lot easier.

  39. I’m looking forward to anything you and MD put out about health and diet. But, I dearly love those occasional “asides” where you write about what’s on your mind. Your post on Café Americano changed the way I drink coffee. The one about manufacturing in China was a hoot. Your climate change post was a great help in my thinking about a complex issue. I hope you’ll continue to do them from time to time.
    Your reading recommendations are a must. Through you I found Boyd and Bernie. I just happened to be running out of stuff to read….

  40. Add my name to the list of those who are delighted that you’re blogging again!
    I’d like to know your thoughts on supplements — not on which ones to take or not to take, but on general matters of quality and ingredients.
    I’ve started to wonder: How do I know if what I’m taking can be trusted quality-wise? From some of the things I’ve read recently, I wonder about the possibility that, even with good companies, some of the ingredients in my supplements might have been purchased from places with different standards than I might like.
    And I’ve started to wonder how harmless all those “other” ingredients really are — the grit and the cellulose and the gels and the food coloring and binders with long names. If any of them falls under the category of “a little won’t hurt you,” to what extent do they negate the benefit of the tiny amounts of vitamins or other goodies are in the pill?
    I’ve been taking a daily multivitamin, plus vitamin C, for decades. Now I’m waffling. I’m not losing sleep over it, but I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

    1. We’ll try to cover the supplement issue – at least the important ones. The book is growing by the minute. Ultimately, we’ll have to decide what to keep and what to chop, or it will be the size of one of those home family medical guides.

  41. Grear news indeed! Excited to learn more about the new book! Protein Power is certainly standing the test of time. Many years ago, I remember writing to somebody that you were ahead of your time with a lot of the information in your book, which has now been presented in studies confirming those arguments.
    I used to joke with the phrase ‘before and after Protein Power…’. After reading it, we could do whatever we wanted regarding what and how to eat for life, but we certainly could never say “we didn’t know”.

    1. Hey Gabe, thanks for writing. Hope all is well in your end of the world. Hope you like the new book as well as you did the old one. It will be different, with, I hope, as much groundbreaking info as the original.

  42. Always enjoy your informative posts. Alex decided a couple of years ago to go into medicine and has been orienting his IB curriculum accordingly. He has a particular interest in nutrition (where did that come from?). His big chem project last year was to test various oils for sat fat content. He has a two year project underway where he is testing a ketogenic diet for the prevention of altitude sickness (we collected data on our recent trek in the Himalayas). He is doing well in chemistry, math, etc. We plan to ship him off to Ireland next year where he can go directly into a 6 year MD program (which might be reduced to 5 years if he does well on his IB diploma). It’s going to be expensive, though, and I’m hoping to get off the hamster wheel at some point. I’m wonder if crowd-funding might be a possibility. What do you think?

    1. Hey Jay, there are a number of crowdfunding websites out there that will help you raise funds for most anything. Problem is, you have to drive traffic to them. In general, people are incredibly generous, but they have to know about a cause.
      My youngest son is in the middle of one of these deals right now. He’s grown his hair out for two years, so he can donate it to a group that makes wigs for kids with cancer. The wigs cost about $1300 to get made, and he wants to be able to donate his hair and get the wigs made, so the kids who get them won’t have to pay for anything. He’s having trouble raising the funds simply because he doesn’t have the reach beyond his group of friends to get out to the world at large. I’ve shared his FB page, but that hasn’t helped a lot.
      So, if you don’t have a way to get the appeal out to a large number of people, you’re going to have trouble raising funds. If you can, it’s a slam dunk. Let me know when it get’s closer, and I’ll give you even more info now that we’re doing the debrief of our own.
      BTW, I’ve always figured the ketogenic diet (or even a good low-carb diet) would be protective against altitude sickness. People are given Diamox, which is nothing but a diuretic to prevent (or treat) brain swelling. Seems like the diuretic effect of a LCHF diet would do the same. Any results yet?

  43. Dr. Martin Blaser has written a book called “Missing Microbes”. A youtube video http://tinyurl.com/y94oc2p3 of his research shows graphs with a striking correlation between the population increase in obesity and the ever-growing decrease in microbiome diversity since the 1970s, the start of the obesity crisis, due to antibiotics, C-sections, and antiseptics. It seems the quality of the microbiome may be the missing factor in most discussions of what controls weight. I would like to see you address that issue in future blogs. Also, I would enjoy your thoughts on Naveen Jain’s new service called Viome, where they measure a client’s fecal microbiome down to the species level, rate the quality of a person’s metabolism, and recommend protocols for the diet that best suits the client.

    1. For some reason, this whole microbiome approach hasn’t really attracted a lot of my attention. I haven’t totally ignored it, but the few papers I’ve read seem to show the microbiome can be radically changed pretty quickly with marked changes in diet. So, does the decrease in microbiome diversity since the 1970s (when the obesity epidemic started) come about because people followed the wrong diet, became obese, and changed their microbiome, or do the microbiome changes drive the obesity? I would bet on the former.

  44. You write:
    “We’ve come across a lot of scientific literature that more or less stands the mainstream of nutritional thought on its head. And by this I mean the mainstream as it is today with everyone pretty much leaning to low-carb.”
    So you are saying you have new evidence that low-carb is wrong? Your new book will disprove low-carb? Just to be clear. Ty!

    1. No. In rereading that the quote, I realize that is sort of an infelicitous sentence construction. What I meant to write is that now that the mainstream is sort of coming around to low-carb and studying it, there is a lot they’ve missed. That’s what we’re going to write about. We are still firmly planted in the low-carb-diet camp.

  45. Look forward to your podcast.
    Check out Ned Kick of the healthcorrelator blog.
    He would bring the scientific/engineering perspective to health + nutrition.
    So when can we subscribe on iTunes to the podcast?

    1. Soon, I hope. Gonna get my first one rolling before long. Takes a while to get all the stuff set up.

    1. I would love to embrace this study, but I can’t in good conscience, because it’s an observational study, and as such can’t prove causality. If this study were done the way it was done and showed low-fat diets to prevent peoples’ risk of death, I would tear it to pieces on my blog.
      The only nice thing about this study is that it at least presents the other side for a change. Almost all of the studies you see touted in the press are observational studies like this one, but they show the opposite. So, it’s good to see one that has the press all over it showing that fat restriction is harmful. I believe it is, but studies like this don’t prove it. In our new book, we plan to address the mechanism showing how fat, especially saturated fat, is beneficial.

  46. I much prefer to read blog posts. I can reread a section if I wish, can easily copy and keep certain things that I want to remember or quote to someone, and can find the information again on a google search. I can read without having the sound on, so I don’t disturb my family in the room. Blog posts also don’t demand one’s time in the way that a video or audio recording does.
    As far as topics for blog posts and the new book, I would like to know about improving the metabolism. I’ve been eating low carb for years. A few years ago I was close to my goal weight and was losing weight at the rate of one pound a month. I took a prescription for about six to seven weeks, which not only stopped my weight loss but caused me to gain eighteen pounds in spite of continuing to follow my low carb diet. When I told my doctor, he informed me that this particular drug was also prescribed to people who needed to gain weight. Fabulous! After stopping the prescription, I stopped gaining weight, but I was no longer able to lose weight. It has been three years since I stopped taking the prescription and my weight loss has just begun again, very slowly. If you could address metabolism, I’m sure that many of your readers would be interested, even though they haven’t had my particular experience.
    I’m also interested in reading about what is essential in the diet. Although I know that there is no dietary requirement for carbohydrate, many people are unaware of that. I’ve heard people say that the newest Atkins book includes more vegetables because the older versions were not a healthful diet. I’d like to know your thoughts on this. I’ve read your books and other books on nutrition, including Good Calories, Bad Calories, but most people know only what is in the mainstream media.

  47. Hi Dr Eades
    And my usual greetings from England.
    Just a few further thoughts (my selfish questions) to my previous suggestions about CT – CAC scans as a possible future blog, and possible questions before it’s even been written:
    (1) I’ve seen you and Ivor Cummins discussing the CAC scan on youtube and the pros and cons between the CT angiogram (dye injections) and the CT – CAC scan. If you have had an angiogram, does it negate the need for a CAC scan?
    (2) How often should you have a CT – CAC scan? Ivor Cummins (I think) recommends regular testing to track the development or regression of calcification. Sadly, at least with my mainstream GP, he thinks there is no further point in testing because there’s is no chance of either stabilisation or reversing calcification.
    (3) Would an echocardiogram (with normal functionality) negate the need for a CAC scan?
    And changing subject completely, and for those running out of book suggestions, can I recommend “I am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes. The benchmark in unputdownable thrillers has been raised to a new height. The edition I read has an afterword by Terry Hayes alluding to it’s length – thank heavens for this. It never sags, and the back story with the villain neither detracts nor is detrimental (as they can be in other novels). And the ending…sheesh!! Thanks heavens again that I was reading this during the day time at the weekend. You all know how it goes…one more chapter and I’ll put the light out or go back to work. I’m sure you won’t be able to put it down.
    Thanks!

    1. Hi Charles,
      Good to hear from you. Let me answer your questions. I really do need to write a post on this subject.
      1) A clean angiogram, though a good thing, is not necessarily a replacement for a CAC. Why not? The angiogram shows only the lumen (or interior) of the artery. An artery that might look plaque-free on an angiogram can still have a significant amount of plaque. Not all plaque protrudes into the lumen compromising blood flow, and any plaque that doesn’t protrude, doesn’t get picked up on an angiogram. The CAC does determine the amount of plaque present, and even shows where it is, but it doesn’t show whether it protrudes into the lumen.
      2) Your GP is wrong on both points. Plaque isn’t necessarily stable and can grow (the most likely outcome) or regress over time. Or even change from soft plaque (the dangerous kind) to to harder, more stabilized, and vastly less dangerous plaque. All these changes can take place over a short increment in time, and the changes are really more important that the data one gets from a single CAC. When I find patients with significant CAC scores, I like to recheck them in a year to see what’s happening.
      A problem with too many follow ups with CACs and other radiographic procedures is in the amount of radiation given the patient. The helical scanners (the most common ones) use a hellish amount of radiation to get the data needed for a CAC, so you don’t want to use them every time you turn around. The EBT scanners – which were the first to do this kind of scan, and, in my view, still the best – use minimal amounts of radiation to give a more accurate picture of what’s going on. The story of how the other scanners replaced the EBT in most places is scandalous and deserves to be told. If you call about getting a CAC, ask how long you will be in the machine. If the answer is around 45 seconds to a minute, you can be sure you’re going to get a scan from an EBT machine. If, instead, you’re told you’ll spend 45 mins in the machine, it’s a helical scanner.
      3) An echocardiogram tells basically if your heart muscle is working okay. It doesn’t tell you anything about the amount of plaque you have. As long as you haven’t had a heart attack – and sometimes people can have minor ones and just think it’s indigestion – your heart muscle should be working okay. So, you could be at risk even with a normal echocardiogram. In my view, a better strategy is to get a CAC, then if you have significant calcium for your age, get a stress echocardiogram to make sure no damage has already taken place.
      I have read I am Pilgrim. I read it years ago when it first came out, and, in fact, I have a first edition. I liked it, but wasn’t crazy about it, mainly because it was more of a thriller than a mystery novel. I enjoy a good thriller from time to time, but I vastly prefer good mysteries. But, as thrillers go, it is a good one. Now I wish I had the later edition with the afterward. I read not long ago that I am Pilgrim is Monica Lewinsky’s favorite book of all time, for whatever that’s worth.

  48. My doctor wants to put me on statins. My triclyceride to HDL ratio is one to one. I will check your archived blogs but I would like to hear more about stations, blood cholesterol, heart disease etc.

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