#TFMsuccess – Fasting helped Ann reach her goals after plateauing on keto
It is a challenge to put words to my endocrine struggles, but as Lewis Carrol wrote, “Begin at the beginning…and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” I started having endocrine problems as a child. I was under caloric restriction throughout my entire childhood so my body never developed a correct metabolic...
Doctors on the take…
Leonard Cohen Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That’s how it goes Everybody knows Lyrics – Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen The current situation in medicine where everybody knows that the system has been completely...
Clinical Practice Guidelines or Legalized Bribery?
Clinical guidelines are theoretically very useful, gathering leading experts to help front-line clinicians care for patients. Experts often spend decades doing research into a single clinical problem. Clinicians, on the other hand deal with a multitude of problems. A general practitioner may deal with cancer, heart disease, and obstetrical problems all in the space of...
Pro Tip: Avoid Miracle Weight Loss Cures
The Internet is full of promises of the latest and greatest miracle ‘drug’ or food that will miraculously melt away stubborn fat. Here’s the plain truth. The entire notion of a miracle weight loss drug is completely preposterous. We only believe it because we so desperately want to believe it. Deep in our hearts, we...
Food Cravings
Food cravings are defined as frequent intense urges to eat specific types of food. There are people who deny their existence, but in truth, we've all felt them, some more than others. For example, some people have intense food cravings for sugar (probably the most common). However, salty foods, chocolate, junk food (pizza) are also...
Vitamins and Calcium
One of the more common questions is whether I recommend any supplements. I recommend very few of them. For longer fasts, I recommend a general multivitamin, although there is scant evidence that it is beneficial. In fact, almost all vitamin supplements have been proven to be useless. In some cases, like vitamin B, worse than...
Meat Kills! Maybe, possibly….
Recent headlines are filled with proclamations that 'Meat Kills!' Nothing sells newspapers like the old chestnuts - meat kills!, saturated fat is bad! Let's take a quick look at this most recent study see if we can draw some conclusions. The study was called 'Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake with All-Cause and Cause-Specfic Mortality',...
X Marks the Spot – T2D 30
Triglycerides and coronary disease Gaizano et al. Circulation. 1997;96:2520-2525 Why should we care about high triglycerides? Doctors always obsess about LDL cholesterol and barely a word is heard about triglycerides, yet high blood triglycerides strongly and independently predict cardiovascular disease, almost as powerfully as LDL. Hypertriglyceridemia increases the risk of heart disease by as much...
How much protein is excessive?
As we discussed last week, excessive protein is turned into glucose and then to fat. But how much protein is excessive? That's the real question that stirs up all kinds of controversy. The Recommended Daily Allowance for an adult is 0.8 g/kg per day. How did we get that number? Let's start at the beginning....
A behind-the-scenes look at medical education
Today, I'm going to take you on a little behind-the-scenes tour of what really happens with medical education and Big Pharma from my perspective as a community physician. Sometimes I forget that not everybody understands this, since many of my friends are physicians. Doctors get continuing medical education (CME) through events like lectures and conferences....
Here’s $5, Kevin Hall, go buy yourself a clue
Kevin Hall, the senior NIH researcher recently published a paper in AJCN that has received a lot of media attention. This study, he claims, completely refutes the insulin hypothesis so completely that it is now 'dead'. That's interesting, I thought, as I sat down to read the article. It was a little surprising, therefore to...
The Biggest Loser Diet – Explained!
This week, splashed all over the New York Times, was an article about a paper written by Kevin Hall, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Health. It was published in Obesity and titled "Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after 'The Biggest Loser competition". This generated a lot of hand-wringing about the futility of...
