Industry Figure Tom Chappell

Well, wasn’t that a fun week! I’m sure that everybody is nicely worked up into a lather over the ever-larger and ever-more-frequent collapses this year. As economist Nouriel Roubini writes:
Even the Washington policy makers finally realized that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and that their ad hoc step-by-step and [...]

From the Netherlands, a study showing that fat people (and smokers!) spend less on health care, and cost less to treat, even for systems with socialized medicine.
And can you guess why?
Oh, it’s because they die way sooner. Those pesky thin non-smokers just live and live; they’re very annoying.
The researchers found that from age 20 [...]

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One piece of advice that you wouldn’t imagine to be controversial, at least, is to minimize your intake of sugar. But even here, the mainstream voice can surprise: the American Diabetes Association still to this day says that for diabetics, “Sucrose-containing foods can [...]

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By the 1990’s, researchers started reporting that heart disease and Alzheimer’s seemed to share risk factors: hypertension, atherosclerosis, and smoking were all associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The connection with insulin and high blood sugar is concrete: “Type 2 diabetics have roughly twice [...]

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Will a low-carb diet lead to diseases of deficiency? It shouldn’t, because we don’t actually restrict the bulk of fruits and vegetables. Only refined sugar, flour, bread, potatoes, rice, beer, and those foods composed chiefly of these need be restricted.
This leaves a [...]

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Is a low-carb diet safe? A diet that is lower in carbohydrates is by necessity higher in protein and fat. And everybody knows that’s supposed to be trouble, right? After all, researchers have been focusing on dietary fat and cholesterol for a long, long time [...]

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Well, it’s pretty obvious what this has been leading up to, isn’t it?
The only thing that can cause fat loss is a low insulin level, and to do that, you have to restrict carbohydrates. You can either do that by restricting total calories, or by restricting carbohydrates [...]

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Suppose you have some lab rats. If offered rat chow, they’ll eat until they’re satisfied, and then stop. But what, exactly, triggers that satisfied feeling? What makes a rat happy? What makes a rat hungry?
Proponents of high-fiber diets claim that adding fiber to meals helps [...]

Alert Reader and Industry Figure Stephen Newell sends a note about a nice interview with Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories (Knopf, 2007), on the CBC’s Quirks and Quarks radio program.
The show’s web page about the the interview is here, and has some helpful links,
and the interview itself is available as MP3 here.
Quirks [...]

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Well, we could keep dancing around the subject, but we’re going to have to talk about insulin sooner or later. But we’ll need a good segue. We can’t just rush into it cold.
Hmm. So…ah!
“Speaking of metabolic disorders…”, there’s the metabolic disorder, Syndome X, the Metabolic Syndrome. [...]