Industry Figure Tom Chappell

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 [...]

(Back to Parts One or Two)
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. [...]

(Back to Part One)
Well, this business of genetically-obese mice, that’s not so convincing, is it? I mean, they’re mice, not humans, and specially-fat mice, not normal humans, and they get fat on most any diet, not just on certain diets. Doesn’t seem too compelling.
No, that was irony, just now. I’ve got all kinds [...]

Back when I posted the rule-of-thumb about the relationship between a 10-calorie-a-day change and overweight (+10 calories a day from eating or sloth equals +1 pound a year, -10 calories a day from diet or exercise equals -1 pound a year), my old friend Jeff Lorenzini e-mailed me to say that this was complete nonsense. [...]

The Sunday New York Times had an article which at first I thought I wasn’t going to like at all, but which turned out to be fascinating.
It described several factors that can confound prospective epidemiologic studies, especially those that report risks or benefits in mere tens of a percent (+10%, -20%), arguing for [...]

My favorite of the half-dozen or so books on health, nutrition, and exercise that I’ve read recently is Younger Next Year.
Its chapters mostly alternate between its two authors: on the one hand, Henry Lodge M.D., a board-certified internist, and on on the other, Chris Crowley, one of his star 70-year-old patients. Harry gives you [...]

Alert Reader and Industry Figure Stephen Newell pointed out the wonderfulness of “Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating”, by researcher Walter C. Willett, M.D.
It’s notable for being backed up by peer-reviewed studies, which is too rare in these kinds of books.
(”Whoa, Science? I’m suspicious!”)
As an example, the [...]

There are (relatively) affordable kits available nowadays to test your blood glucose levels at home, and anyone who has fat around their waist or who has been told that they are insulin-resistant or pre-diabetic should buy one, and use it. But what do the levels mean? What’s good? What’s bad?
Somewhere around blood glucose [...]

I came across these simple rules the other day in one of the nutrition books that I’ve been reading lately, which are a great synopsis of what we’ve been talking about:
1. If you try to lose weight by dieting, with no exercise, your body will lose fat and muscle.
2. If you go off your diet, [...]

Here’s a really simple rule, that is incredibly easy to follow if you make meals for yourself, rather harder to follow if you eat out quite a bit, and almost impossible to follow if you primarily eat fast foods:
No more than 50% of your plate should be taken up by high-density calories, such as meat [...]