A reader asked to submit a brief article on what’s required to become a registered dietician.  I had mixed feelings about it, considering how much bad advice is dispensed by dieticians who’ve been brainwashed into following the Food Pyramid.  But what the heck, we need more people in the field who don’t swallow the “artery-clogging saturated fat” line.  So here it is:

Quick Facts about Being a Registered Dietitian

If your profession has something to do with food and nutrition, it is a
must for you to learn as much as you can about the field that you are in.
This is where your understanding about the basic facts of your specific
field proves to be useful.

For example, if you want to become an RD or a Registered Dietitian, your
primary role would be to promote good health through proper eating.  If
your service as a dietitian is required by a senior citizen, for example,
you will be responsible for preparing food and developing a modified diet
to suit the health requirements of the individual.

Dietitians are also involved in research, while those in the medical
community help patients get the nutrition that they need from artificial
sources if they are unable to consume food normally.

Frequently Asked Questions about Registered Dietitians

Now that you already have an idea about the basic role of an RD, take a
look at the following list of frequently asked questions regarding their
profession:

1. What are the requirements for being a Registered Dietitian?

If you want to become a Registered Dietitian, you need to complete an
internship of at least 900 hours.  However, a nutritionist who wants to
acquire state certification may or may not be required to complete the
same number of hours of internship.

Those who would like to become certified nutritionists with a licence to
practice in their respective states would be required to complete an
internship. This usually requires anywhere from six to twelve months of
internship. If you cannot commit yourself to doing a full-time internship,
there are part-time internship programs which would take about two years
to be completed.

2. Are there state-specific requirements when it comes to the credentials
that you need to have in order to become an RD?

The agency which provides the list of the 46 states which have regulating
laws for dietitians and nutritionists is the Commission on Dietetic
Registration.  This is the credentialing agency for the American Dietetic
Association or ADA – and they are the institution which sets up
requirements such as the 900 hours needed for an RD internship.

In states such as Washington, New Mexico, North Dakota and Maryland,
dietitian is actually different from a nutritionist – while other states
do not clearly define the difference between the two professions.

3. Which agency can you consult if you have further questions regarding
the RD profession?

Check with your state’s Board of Dietetics if you have any questions
regarding the internship requirements for your state.

All in all, whether you’re a nutritionist or an RD, what’s important is to
learn about the state-specific requirements of your profession beforehand
so that there is no confusion between the terms nutritionist and dietitian
as defined by your state’s laws.

About the Author

Amanda Clary writes a non commercial blog focused on her experience on
helping her family and friends to eat healthy. She is a “Nutritionist for
Hobby” and writes on the online nutrition certification blog to help people learn how to get certified and learn all the aspects related to this job (Skills, requisites, everyday problems, upgrading, etc.).

Some of you may already be familiar with Matt Stone, either from his own blog or from his always-interesting comments on this blog. Matt and I agree on many issues, but he’s taken me to task a few times for scaring people away from starches. I asked Matt to write a guest post to explain his views more fully. He graciously agreed. Here it is:

Just Say No to In-Breeding

by Matt Stone of 180DegreeHealth.com

In-breeding is just wrong. I mean, if two things are related to one another, they just shouldn’t be comingling. Things get nasty. People talk. Banjos run wild.

But it’s totally okay for insulin resistance and glucose to hook up. They can shag all night. Get married. Have kids with the normal 10 fingers and 10 toes. All kinds of good stuff. Nothing the least bit immoral or chromosomally risky about. Why? ‘Cuz glucose and insulin resistance are unrelated.

Recently, I was asked to do a guest blog post by Fat Head Master and Commander Tom Naughton, a man who I hold in the utmost regard for translating the work of Gary Taubes into something smart, clever, understandable, and friggin’ hilarious. It’s a tough task indeed — making Taubes palatable to a broad audience is like making a low-fat product taste good. You need lots of high-fructose corn syrup. Crap, bad example, Gary Taubes is a mad HFCS hater! And Naughton too! Don’t worry, I am too. I can usually count the grams of fructose I eat per week on one hand.

Round of applause for Tom. Tom contacted me to do this guest post PRECISELY because he knows that some of my research, theories, and therefore beliefs are not congruent with his and the rest of the low-carb crowd. That is the mark of a real researcher. It still amazes me how much the disease called “like-minded camaraderie” stifles the great health debate. Some low-carb gurus are more stubborn and set in their beliefs than frickin’ vegans. I won’t name any names.

So let’s take another look into insulin resistance, because one thing I can promise you is that it is more complicated than Glucose = Insulin = Obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and Cancer. If you get absolutely nothing out of this article, if I lose you along the way, don’t forget that. Everyone who demonizes ANY macronutrient group, especially one that can be found in the milk of every mammal on earth, is a hopeless intellectual cripple.

To begin with, let’s look at just how fragile the Carbs = Disease hypothesis is. You thought the Fat = Disease hypothesis was comical in its simplicity and oversimplification, wait ’til you get a load of this! (Note: I’m not a fan of a low-fat diet, don’t think saturated fat is harmful, and am not a vegetarian, a food-combiner, calorie-counter, or any other kind of diet-dogma nutcase. I’m a researcher with an open mind who’s tried it all).

One of my favorite examples is that continent that eats a primarily low-fat, starch-based diet, but has health that is irrefutably better than the status quo in the United States and many European countries. It’s called Asia. In reference to the British article about Big Fat Lies in which starch was demonized, I created a fun game. It’s called “Count all the obese people on a low-fat, starch-based diet.” Feel free to participate.

Another fine example that shows the greater complexity of the issue of insulin resistance and the disease that stems from it — and its relationship to dietary carbohydrate — is that of the Pima Indians.

Now, wait a second. Didn’t Gary Taubes show that the Pima Indians of Arizona are now the most obese, diabetic, insulin-resistant people on earth? Yes, he did! That I won’t deny. What I’m talking about is the Mountain Pima of Northern Mexico. They don’t live on the American reservation and they continue to follow their traditional farming practices. Their diet does not consist of mostly meat, white flour fried in vegetable oil (fry bread), Pepsi products, alcohol, and packaged “food” products — like the diet of the American Pima. They are the genetic twins of the American Pima, but they, as Andrew Weil describes, “remain lean, active, and free of the diseases of Western civilization, while their relatives from the same gene pool have ballooned into the fat, hypertensive, diabetic Indians who are now so numerous in southern Arizona and northern Mexico.”

What their diet does consist of, in contrast to the American Pima, is EVEN MORE high-glycemic carbohydrates. Their staples are corn (gasp), potatoes (shriek), beans (Holy Lectins, Paleo Man!), and other grains and tubers, along with primarily game meats. Oh, and by the way, I’m not a big fan of Andrew Weil either. Dr. Santa has some kind of boner for soy products and eats enough fructose and polyunsaturated fat to, well, be fat.

What about fructose? Taubes talks about its unique metabolic property. He calls it “the most lipogenic carbohydrate.” Is this significant? I thought high-glycemic carbohydrates that raised our blood sugar and insulin levels the fastest caused insulin resistance and the constellation of metabolic syndrome. I wonder what Richard J. Johnson, author of The Sugar Fix (2008) has to say about that?

“…we have powerful direct evidence to show that consuming too much fructose-rich sugar and HFCS causes the toxic brew of conditions known as metabolic syndrome. Moreover, this same body of research suggests that starchy foods do not induce metabolic syndrome.”

“It’s worth noting here that the glucose in starchy foods may cause blood glucose levels to rise, which stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin. But this is normal and healthy. Dietary glucose does not cause insulin resistance; fructose does.”

“And so begins a vicious cycle caused by eating high-GI foods, which overstimulate the pancreas. It’s an interesting theory, but it is not well supported by the metabolic facts. Stimulating the pancreas to produce insulin is not the problem. Your body is supposed to produce insulin when blood glucose levels rise, so that’s normal and healthy. It is insulin resistance that is closely linked to metabolic syndrome and weight gain. Glucose does not cause insulin resistance. Fructose does. Glucose does not trick your body into persistent hunger. Fructose does.”

Jesus, Dick, settle down. Take it easy, bro. We get the point. Ever think to enroll yourself in fructose-anger management class?

Of course, fructose is a low-glycemic carbohydrate. It causes the lowest blood sugar spike of any carbohydrate. It makes Pepsi (caffeine also can intensify insulin resistance), look like a better choice than a baked potato, when the metabolic effects of the two are as different as Anthony Colpo and Ghandi (they are both bald, but that’s about it). Hence the name of one of the chapters in my most recent book , “The Glycemic Index Catastrophe.”  This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to analyzing the glucose vs. fructose issue.  And that is one hell of a big iceberg involving leptin, the hormone with the greatest influence over metabolic rate, appetite, and levels of lipolysis (fat burning) and lipogenesis (fat storage) of any other biochemical. 

In fact, if you had to narrow down insulin resistance to one primary biochemical reason, it would be the state of “leptin resistance,” also thought to be caused primarily by fructose — whereas other dietary carbohydrates have the opposite effect. That’s why starch-based cultures in Asia and elsewhere don’t overeat, have healthy metabolisms, and are generally better off than people in places that put “sugar on top.”

So let me throw this out at you. Even if your blood sugar and insulin surge after ingesting potatoes or rice due to having insulin resistance, let it be known that those potatoes and rice didn’t cause your insulin resistance. Low-glycemic fructose played the heaviest hand in creating that fabulous metabolic state you find yourself in. Cortisol-triggering inflammation from omega 6 overload is a prime suspect as well. If you don’t believe that cortisol can trigger metabolic syndrome, then shoot yourself up with cortisone every day for a year and tell me how it goes for ya. Fructose, cortisol, and other factors, such as lack of key nutrients lost in the carbohydrate-refining process, all play a role.

Which brings up another key point. Refined and unrefined carbohydrates cannot be equated. Even Gary Taubes makes this general assertion in GCBC. T.L. “Peter” Cleave, author of Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis, and the Saccharine Disease, on which Taubes built a large part of his hypothesis, hit the nail on the head when he stated on page 15 of that book:

“…carbohydrates should not be taken as a single group but as two very different groups; one being natural, unconcentrated carbohydrates, such as unrefined grains, potatoes, and fruits, and the other being unnatural, concentrated carbohydrates, notably refined flour and sugar.”

This was the conclusion he came to after seeing plainly that rural Zulus, eating an extremely high-carbohydrate diet, had none of the health problems of the urban Zulu, who ate a high refined-carbohydrate diet and had every facet of what Cleave called “The Saccharine Disease.” Sounds like metabolic syndrome to me:

“The saccharine disease includes dental decay and pyorrhea; gastric and duodenal ulcer and other forms of indigestion; obesity, diabetes, and coronary disease; constipation, with its complications of varicose veins and hemorrhoids; and primary Escherichia coli infections, like appendicitis, cholecystitis (with or without gall-stones), and primary infections of the urinary tract. The same applies to certain skin condition. Not one of these diseases is for practical purposes ever seen in races who do not consume refined carbohydrates.”

Taubes was right on track to echo this conclusion early on in GCBC (which is one hell of a badass book overall)…

“If cavities are caused primarily by eating sugar and white flour, and cavities appear first in a population no longer eating its traditional diet, followed by obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, then the assumption, until proved otherwise, should be that the other diseases were also caused by these carbohydrates.”

… but veered into Keto Land when he stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, which is a massive, unfounded, unwarranted, unnecessary, and unfortunate leap.

Yep, it wasn’t until the Epilogue that he sings the praises of a ketogenic diet, which is, don’t say I didn’t warn ya, metabolic suicide if continued long-term. Trust me. My blog has become a sanctuary for low-carbers in metabolic rehab. And I low-carbed for 3 years and felt all the initial benefits too — weight loss, energy, clear skin, fewer allergies — then watched them all fade away, along with my emotional state, and come back with a vengeance. Low-carb is seldom a happily-ever-after, and don’t be stubborn if you start having problems with it. End rant.

The final question is simply, “Where do we go from here?”

If we, as a race of people, are becoming increasingly insulin-resistant — then does that mean that the right “diet for our metabolic type” is a low-carbohydrate diet? Well, it’s a huge step in the right direction that we have good folks like Michael Eades and Uncle Tom Naughton that can at least step outside of the “repeat after me: artery-clogging saturated fat” wacky world of the American Dietetic Association. Finally, we’re getting somewhere at least, and see that our woes are all about hormones, not willpower.

But I think the grandest solution is not to cater to the metabolic disorder known as insulin resistance by running from carbohydrates in fear. Rather, my ambition as a researcher and writer is to truly find the pathways that allow us to topple insulin resistance completely — freeing us to eat whatever macronutrient combo we feel like without compromising our health. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re making progress. Dropping my fasting and postprandial glucose levels by 25% recently is a testament to the fact that it can be done. Eating two baked potatoes with my blood sugar peaking at 75 mg/dl one hour later is a metabolic feat few can claim.

Most importantly, people are overcoming hypothyroid symptoms and a low body temperature very quickly, and without medication, by following some of my ideas. I think this is key, as the most successful doctor in history at preventing type 2 diabetes and heart disease (Broda Barnes) did so by keeping the metabolism high, but had to use medication to do it.

And therein lies the true danger of uber-low-carbohydrate diets. All my experience tells me that, the first few years aside, a low-carbohydrate diet and certainly a full-blown ketogenic diet exacerbates a low metabolism. It is not a matter of having a genetically-doomed dysfunctional thyroid gland; it is fixable, and it lies at the core of the health problems we’ve seen explode over the last century. This is why all prolonged restricted diets, low-carb included, in the words of Robert Atkins himself (from page 303 of Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution):

“…tend to shut down thyroid function. This is usually not a problem with the thyroid gland but with the liver, which fails to convert T4 into the more active thyroid principle, T3. The diagnosis is made on clinical grounds with the presence of fatigue, sluggishness, dry skin, coarse or falling hair, an elevation in cholesterol, or a low body temperature.”

To that I will add constipation, bad moods, heartburn, cold hands and feet, and a whole host of other minor but significant health problems. To get an idea of how “shutting down the thyroid” can manifest, Mark Starr’s chapter on Hypothyroidism symptoms is 83 pages long.

This is why the acronym FAD is thrown around 180DegreeHealth quite frequently. The AD stands for All Diets. I’ll leave it up to your imagination as to what the F stands for.

Anyway, if you like compelling health conversation, stop by my blog at www.180degreehealth.blogspot.com. It is a cesspool of agenda-free health information and discussion. It is also free to become a member of my website and access long-winded but very fascinating monthly eZines and podcasts. Go to www.180degreehealth.com to get a piece a that.

Thanks everyone, and best of luck with your health pursuits. I hope that you too can someday achieve that blessed metabolic state that allows you to do what Tom’s son and way-out-of-his-league wife do: sit down and eat whatever they want, until they are full, without becoming obese or diabetic.

Thanks once again to Tom for keeping the conversation going. Clearly mankind hasn’t solved all the riddles of health yet. But thank the Lord Almighty that the low-carb movement got us all eating fatty meat and butter again. What a stupid phase that low-fat thing was!

Thank you, Matt, for sharing your research and your ideas. My wife is indeed out of my league, but fortunately for me, she doesn’t believe it. — Tom

A couple of interesting articles appeared in the British press this week. One was headlined The Big Fat Lies about Britain’s obesity epidemic, written by the author of a just-published book titled Big Fat Lies: Is Your Government Making You Fat?  (The title is a question.  The answer is yes.)  I haven’t seen the book and I’m not even sure if it’s available in the U.S., but the article is a great read … like a quick synopsis of Fat Head or Good Calories, Bad Calories.  Here are some edited quotes, with my comments:

For the past 30 years we’ve been told to eat less and exercise more, to cut back on calories and on saturated fat and, on the whole, we’re doing it. Our calorific intake between the years 1974 and 2004 decreased by 20 per cent. We are eating about 20 per cent more fruit and vegetables than in the Seventies. We are doing approximately 25 per cent more exercise than we were in 1997. But are our waist lines shrinking? No.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Jogging and joining a gym became popular here in the ’70s as well … along with pet rocks, Jimmy Carter, disaster movies, disco, and calling someone you just met to say, “Uh … I think you might need to go see your doctor for a test.”  I don’t remember anyone jogging or working out when I was a kid in the ’60s.  I also don’t remember seeing many fat people in our small town.

We’re following Government advice on how and what to eat, but that advice is so wrong it is actually making us fatter. The endless message of ‘eat less, do more’ has never been proven using proper clinical trials. And we’ve only started to get really fat since governments started promoting the current low-fat health messages, back in the early Nineties.

Ah, so we probably are fatter than the British.  Our government started pushing low-fat diets in the early ’80s, so we have a ten-year head start.

The Government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA), among others, is pumping out a template of a balanced diet that is based on flawed science that I believe is responsible for thousands of people developing health problems. The co-defendant in the dock with the Government is starch.

Thousands of people developing health problems?  What’s the population of the U.K.?  I’d say it’s probably more like millions, but I guess she’s being cautious.

Another big fat lie we are fed is that we should eat less fat. The simple message is: saturated fats are high in calories and are making us fat. Saturated fats cause heart disease. And most people believe that the fear of saturated fat is based on robust science - why else would the Government be putting out this advice?

In our country, it’s to sell all those subsidized grains.  In Britain, perhaps it’s to provide job security for the National Health Service.

Let’s look at the scientific evidence. When studies have been done with high saturated fat levels combined with low levels of starch and sugar, the subjects not only lost weight faster than the low-calorie, low-fat option but - perhaps more interestingly - the cholesterol profile of the subjects on the high-fat diet was better.

That’s what happened to me when Dr. Mike Eades challenged me to try a high-fat, low-starch diet and check my cholesterol before and after.  My cholesterol dropped and my HDL went up.  But I have to admit, I was kind of nervous waiting for those results to come back.

And the other lie we are fed: exercise more. There is no doubt that exercise is an excellent tool for weight maintenance and is fantastic for our general health. But what is really misleading is the idea that exercise will significantly help you to lose weight.

I attended the European Obesity Conference in 2006, at which Sir Neville Rigby, the former director of policy on the International Obesity Taskforce, referred to several major European studies showing categorically that exercise had no significant impact on the weight of the participants.

Since the conference, one of the studies that has added fuel to the doubters’ fire is the Early Bird Study in Plymouth. This lost its Government financial backing because it showed that exercise made no difference to the weight or weight loss of children.

Anyone who believes governments fund research because they’re interested in the truth should read that last sentence ten times — out loud.  And anyone who believes researchers funded by government grants don’t occasionally fudge their results to keep the money-spigot open should read it twenty times.  (I don’t actually believe reading the sentence twenty times will enlighten the “government is our savior” crowd, but given their slow comprehension, it should keep them occupied and out of trouble for a day or two.)

I’ve heard so many media pundits lamenting about all the lazy, fat Americans waddling around these days, I guess it’s oddly comforting to know our friends across the pond are dealing the same issues.  And I must admit, I felt the same way when I read about the those Swedish Weight Watchers members who collapsed the floor during their weekly weigh-in.  My media-induced impression was that everyone in Sweden is named Helga or Lars and looks like a model.

So the British government, like ours, is handing out advice that makes people fat.  That made it especially interesting to learn how a former leader of the British government trimmed down.  See if this diet, as explained in the online article, sounds familiar:

She fought hard to get the nation’s finances back in trim. But only now can the secret of Margaret Thatcher’s own diet be revealed - 28 eggs a week. The eggs, along with cucumber, spinach, tomatoes, steak and the odd swig of whisky, went towards a strict meal regime that promised to help her shed 20lb in two weeks.

The diet included a daily breakfast of grapefruit, one or two eggs, black coffee or clear tea. Two eggs were served in each weekday lunch, while steak, lamb chops and fish were the staple of most dinners.

Her political opponents probably wish the four eggs per day had given her a heart attack, but she’s 84 and still alive.  The Daily Mail published a graphic of the diet, which I’ve reproduced below.

Looks as if her only significant carbohydrates were grapefruit and a piece of dry toast here and there.  A half-grapefruit contains about 12 net carbs.  A piece of toast is around 20.  That means Ms. Thatcher was on something much like the induction phase of the Atkins diet. Naturally, one of the experts from the British Dietetic Association had to sound a warning:

These kinds of diets are very effective in losing weight quickly but you feel terrible because your blood sugar levels go right down.  You feel cold, shivery, lethargic, fuzzy-minded and weak and can get bad breath.

Ah yes, in populations where type 2 diabetes is at epidemic levels, we certainly wouldn’t want our blood sugars to go down.  We’ve got to keep that glucose spiking all day long to avoid feeling weak.  That’s why cavemen were such wimpy specimens — not enough bread in their diets.

I don’t doubt that some people feel shivery and lethargic after giving up refined carbohydrates.  It’s called withdrawal.  People who give up heroin don’t feel so hot either, but nobody looks at them and says, “Geez, you look terrible!  Shoot up, for Pete’s sake!”

According to the news stories, Ms. Thatcher wanted to lose weight more for the cameras than for her health.  Well, it’s sad but true: image matters in politics.  (If not, Richard Nixon would’ve been elected president in 1960 … although losing the cemetery vote in Chicago didn’t help his chances either.)  It’s tough to live up to the nickname “The Iron Lady” if the iron appears to be jiggling.

But apparently there’s plenty of jiggling going on in Britain these days, just as there is here.  Too bad our governments decided they should tell us how to eat.  Now they’re piling up huge debts to pay for the consequences (meaning we’re all piling up huge debts, since we pay the taxes.)  Pundits in both countries say our health-care systems are broken.  That may be true — but our health got broken first.

I probably shouldn’t be laughing about this, but I can’t help myself.  When a group of Weight Watchers members in Sweden got together recently for their regular weigh-in, the floor collapsed.  As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.  Here are some quotes from the online news story:

“We suddenly heard a huge thud; we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air,” one of about 20 group members said to the Smalandsposten newspaper. “The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls.”

After the initial collapse on Wednesday evening, the floor started to cave in other parts of the room, and the stench of sewage crept into the clinic, which is in Vaxjo, a city in south central Sweden. The group is looking for an alternate location for future meetings, Weight Watchers consultant Therese Levin told the Swedish paper.

 Since they were able to break the floor badly enough to stir up some sewage, I’m guessing these people were 1) brand-new members of Weight Watchers or 2) long-time members of Weight Watchers.

I’ve known a handful of people who joined Weight Watchers at least once — all women, by the way.  They all lost some weight.  And they all gained it back, usually with a few extra pounds as a going-away present. 

Given what Weight Watchers believes constitutes a good diet, I’m not surprised.  Their entire program is based on the belief that the federal government’s nutrition guidelines are actually based on something resembling science.  So Weight Watchers preaches the same guidelines:  fat is bad, a bit of protein is okay, and carbohydrates are wonderful.

I never joined Weight Watchers, but before I knew better, I did try living on their low-fat Smart Ones meals (along with Lean Cuisines and other diet meals I could nuke.)  By the end of the day, I’d be famished.  Eventually I’d give up and then, like most dieters, blame myself for not having any discipline.  Now I understand the problem wasn’t a lack of discipline; it was a lack of good nutrition.

To illustrate the problem, I went to the Weight Watchers site and put together a sample diet for one day.  Since I’m a male, I allowed myself about 1700 calories.  Figuring three meals and couple of side dishes, I chose a breakfast sandwich, angel hair pasta with marinara, chicken enchiladas, chicken on grilled flatbread, mac and cheese, and rice and beans.  That’s a pretty fair sample of the kind of meals I chose back in the day.  Here’s how they add up:

Total Calories: 1673
Fat: 37 grams
Protein: 77 grams
Carbs: 258 grams

As a percent of total calories, it works out to 20% fat, 18% protein, and 62% carbohydrates — just what the FDA prescribes.  It’s also a prescription for hunger.

If you’re a regular reader or have seen Fat Head, you already know that fat is the most satiating macronutrient …  in addition to being cricual for mood, hormone formation, vitamin absorption, etc.  I won’t go into the many wonders of fat here, except to say that this diet contains far too little of it.  That’s one reason I was so hungry.

The diet is also too low in protein.  The FDA would approve, but not the people who actually know what they’re talking about, like Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades.  According to their calculations, I need more like 120 grams of protein per day.  Eating too little protein produces exactly the kind of physical effects dieters don’t want.

For one, it’ll make you hungry — never mind the calories.  Research shows that primates eat until they satisfy their protein requirements.  If the food is low in protein, they’ll eat more of it.  Here are some quotes from an article on the subject:

Nutritional ecologist Professor David Raubenheimer’s just-published collaborative study with international colleagues found the Bolivian rainforest spider monkey regulates protein intake by eating greater quantities of low protein/high carbohydrate foods when protein-rich foods are not available.

“This is interesting because our experiments show that humans do the same,” says Professor Raubenheimer from the University’s Institute of Natural Sciences at Albany. The consequence is the current obesity epidemic.

Professor Raubenheimer has been involved in a range of similar studies on other primates, as well as human subjects in Australia, the Philippines and Jamaica, to observe how the protein content of their diets influences energy intake.

The findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Behavioural Ecology, reinforce the theory that humans and other primates are physiologically predisposed to maintain a constant level of protein in their diets. But when the range of foods available to them is low in protein (yet high in fats and carbohydrates) they are compelled to eat greater quantities in order to maintain correct protein levels.

Trust me, I definitely felt compelled to eat greater quantities.  I just didn’t allow myself to, at least until I couldn’t stand it anymore. 

The other problem with eating too little protein is muscle loss.  I’ve heard some researchers claim people lose the same amount of weight on almost any diet if the calories are controlled — that hasn’t been my experience, but let’s suppose it’s true.  So what?  The point of dieting isn’t really to lose weight, it’s to lose fat.  Digesting your own muscles is a lousy idea.  In Protein Power, Drs. Eades & Eades wrote:

On typical low-calorie, high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets, protein intake is often marginal, and as a result as much as 50 percent of weight loss can be muscle weight.  Each pound of active muscle mass lost reduces your rate of metabolism.

Now, a pound of muscle loss isn’t going to dramatically affect your metabolism, but I don’t think most people – especially men — go on a diet hoping to shed a few pounds off their biceps and pecs.  Muscle makes a body look good, whether the body is male or female.

The biggest problem with the diet is, of course, the 62% carbohydrates.  If you’re insulin resistant — and most fat people these days are — all those carbs are going to drive up your insulin and tell your body to store a disproportionate share of the 1673 calories as fat.  Then you’ll starve at the cellular level and really feel hungry.  Keep it up, and you’ll probably make your insulin resistance worse.

And as I learned from an excellent article by Dr. Doug McGuff, insulin resistance can also shrink your muscles.  Dr. McGuff wondered why so many fat people have weak muscles — they are, after all, hauling a lot of weight around.  That ought to make them stronger, but usually doesn’t.  Here’s an edited version of what he figured out (the full article is worth the read):

The key to the paradox of the obese-yet weak client was insulin sensitivity. The modern Western diet is very high in refined carbohydrates when compared to the diet in our evolutionary past. In the face of very high carbohydrate intake, one’s glycogen stores will become completely full. Once the glycogen stores are completely full, glucose will begin to stack up in the blood stream. The evolutionary-based response is to increase insulin to drive more glycogen storage. However, pushing more glucose into a cell whose glycogen stores are full can be very damaging.

In the chronically overfed state, the body protects itself by decreasing the sensitivity of insulin receptors on the muscle cells and preserving (actually increasing) insulin sensitivity on the fat cells. By this mechanism blood sugar can be held in check without making the interior of the cells a syrupy mess, and energy is stored for future starvation (which never comes). The problem is, insulin not only controls glucose homeostasis, it is a major hormone for nutrient storage and all of the anabolic processes of the body. In the state we describe above, a vicious form of nutrient partitioning begins to occur. Nutrients used for growth and differentiation are shunted away from the muscle and the liver and are diverted to body fat. The muscles become smaller and weaker and the liver becomes infiltrated with fat as it desperately tries to produce VLDL.

Not a pretty picture, is it?  I know, because by the time I was 14, I was a fat kid with skinny muscles.  I finally started reshaping my body a bit when my older brother bought some barbells and more or less insisted we work out together.  Our high-school health teacher also us to cut back on sugar, potatoes and bread if we wanted to lose weight, so I did.  Then the low-fat diet craze hit, and I got stupid all over again.

Now I’m at least smart enough to know that Smart Ones aren’t going to help most people lose weight and keep it off, and neither will Weight Watchers.  They claim a success rate of nearly 50%, based on a study they funded.  But it’s interesting how they came up with that figure. 

First off, the study only included people who were already lifetime members.  To become a lifetime member, you have to reach your goal weight and stay there for six weeks.  That means all the people who yelled “I’m starving!” and quit after a month or so were excluded …  as were all the people who stuck it out but didn’t reach their goal weight.

After five years, most of the lifetime members included in the study had regained at least half of what they lost —  but Weight Watchers defined “success” as weighing 5% less than when they first joined.  So if you started at 200 pounds, reached your goal weight of 170, and went back up to 190, you were counted as successful.  Wow.  Sounds like “budget-cutting” in Washington.

A blogger analyzed the study, crunched his own numbers based on Weight Watchers’ enrollment figures, and calculated something closer to 6% of all members ever reaching their goal weight and staying there for six weeks … and when he crunched them again, counting only people who stayed at their goal weight for five years, he calculated a success rate of about two in a thousand.

I’d say the best thing Weight Watchers could do is reinforce their floors.

The last time I had a checkup, my blood pressure was 111/65.  It’s pretty much always in that range, but the nurse who checked it seemed pleasantly surprised and commented, “You must watch your salt.”

Well, of course I watch my salt.  I don’t like cleaning up spills.  So I watch carefully as I shake little blizzards of salt onto my eggs, steaks, pork chops, vegetables, salads, soups and stews.  Yesterday, when we stopped at a McDonald’s during the trip home from Illinois, I salted my mushroom-Swiss burger.  Truth is, I put salt on just about everything except cheese and fruit.  I guess that explains why my blood pressure is about 20 points below average for a man my age.

And I’m not the only who reaches for the salt shaker at mealtime:  according to news reports, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg puts so much salt on his bagels, they end up tasting like pretzels.  He puts extra salt on salty popcorn.  He even salts his pizza.  Clearly, Hizzoner loves salt.

So naturally, he recently announced a plan to “encourage” (ahem, ahem) restaurants and food manufacturers to reduce the salt in their products –  to help prevent heart disease and strokes, doncha know.  Amazing, but typical for a politician.  Sure, I love my salt … but the rest of you folks out there should cut back on the stuff, and by gosh, I’m going to help you do it.

I’m not sure which annoys me more:  the bad government or the bad science.  This is certainly a bit an overreach for the mayor of New York City.  As a New York Times article explains, Hizzoner hopes his plan will reduce salt intake across the country.

Excuse me?!  I wouldn’t live in New York City if you paid me, and I certainly wouldn’t vote for Bloomberg if I did.  How did he end in my charge of my salt consumption?  We all know he has presidential ambitions, but he should probably wait to win a national election before assuming office.

Perhaps hoping to avoid looking like the nanny-state busybody he is, Bloomberg announced that the salt reductions are “voluntary.”  Suuuuuure, they are.  If any two words in the English language don’t belong in the same sentence, they are 1) government and 2) voluntary.  As George Washington wrote, the essence of government is force — that’s why he considered government a necessary evil at best.  Anyone who thinks reducing salt will be strictly voluntary should read this passage from the New York Times article:

The city’s campaign against salt resembles its push to cut trans fat from restaurant foods, which began with a call for voluntary compliance. When that did not work, the city passed a law to force restaurants to eliminate trans fat.

In other words, you better volunteer to follow our guidelines, or we’ll force you.

The science is just as bad, for all kinds of reasons.  Take a look at the rationale behind this “voluntary” reduction:

The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.  Public health experts say that would reduce the incidence of high blood pressure and should help prevent some of the strokes and heart attacks associated with that condition.

Public health experts are such wild optimists.  The only result we can reliably predict from reducing the salt in packaged foods is that there will be less salt in packaged foods.  I seriously doubt people will eat less of the stuff.  In fact, I predict the public reaction over those five years will be something like this:

Year One:  Hmmm, this is kind of bland.  Hand me the salt shaker, will you?  (shake)
Year Three:  Wow, this is tasteless.  Pass the salt, will you?  (shake-shake-shake)
Year Five:  What the @#$% is this, cardboard?  Give me the salt!  (shake-shake-shake-shake-shake)

And even if the public is fooled into consuming less salt, there’s no evidence the result will be fewer strokes and heart attacks. Back in 1998, Gary Taubes wrote an excellent article on the subject titled The (Political) Science of Salt.  It’s a long article, but here’s my synopsis:

Some scientists claimed they found a teensy bit of a correlation between salt intake and cardiovascular disease decades ago, so they announced the “salt kills!” hypothesis and have been doggedly defending it ever since … even though many other scientists have found no correlation whatsoever, as well as mathematical problems with the correlations reported in the first place. 

Sound familiar?  It’s just like the “science” behind the “saturated fat kills!” theory.  And once again, shortly after the theory was announced, the geniuses in government decided they’d better alert the public right now instead of waiting for actual scientific evidence to confirm it.  That confirmation never came in, but uh … well, you know … we already told ‘em to cut back on salt, so we’d better keep promoting the idea. 

All we know from the evidence is that cutting back on salt will result in slightly lower blood pressure for some people with hypertension.  We don’t know that it will save their lives.  For the rest of us, it’s probably worthless and might even be a bad idea.  Here are some quotes from Gary’s article:

University of Copenhagen researchers analyzed 114 randomized trials of sodium reduction, concluding that the benefit for hypertensives was significantly smaller than could be achieved by antihypertensive drugs, and that a “measurable” benefit in individuals with normal blood pressure (normotensives) of even a single millimeter of mercury could only be achieved with an “extreme” reduction in salt intake. “You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” says Drummond Rennie, a JAMA editor and a physiologist at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, “that the [NHLBI] has made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”

After decades of intensive research, the apparent benefits of avoiding salt have only diminished. This suggests either that the true benefit has now been revealed and is indeed small, or that it is nonexistent, and researchers believing they have detected such benefits have been deluded by the confounding influences of other variables.

There is a correlation between hypertension and cardiovascular disease, by the way.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean hypertension causes cardiovascular disease.  The correlation could be explained by any number of other variables, such as:

• Refined carbohydrates produce high blood sugar and high levels of insulin, which in turn are both bad news for your arteries.  Refined carbohydrates also cause water retention, which raises your blood pressure.  (So if you really want to reduce your blood pressure, give up the sugar and starch.)
• Blood pressure tends to go up as we get older.  (Mine hasn’t, but bear with me here.)  We’re also more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes as we get older.
• Stress causes your body to produce more cortisol, which can damage your arteries.  Stress also raises your blood pressure.
• Eating lots of vegetables may be good for your heart.  Vegetables are also high in potassium, which lowers blood pressure.

Even if hypertension causes cardiovascular damage all by itself, the clinical evidence says it takes an extreme reduction in salt intake to budge the blood-pressure meter.  Mayor Bloomberg’s “voluntary” 25 percent reduction isn’t exactly extreme.  It’s just a recipe for bland food.  It won’t do diddly for the city’s health.  (Excuse me, I meant the nation’s health.  The mayor also wants to help those of us unfortunate enough to live outside his jurisdiction, you know.) 

Even the usually pro-government New York Times seems a little dubious about Bloomberg’s latest attempt to regulate us into eating the way he thinks we should:

While most food companies say they agree at least with the goal of reducing salt, some medical researchers have questioned the scientific basis for the initiative, saying insufficient research had been done on possible effects. While agreeing that reducing salt is likely to lower average blood pressure, they say it can lead to other physiological changes, some of which may be associated with heart problems. An elaborate clinical trial could weigh the pluses and minuses of cutting salt in a large group of people. But that would cost millions, and it has not been done.

Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the city’s initiative, if successful in reducing salt, would amount to an uncontrolled experiment with the public’s health. “I’m always worried about unintended consequences,” he said.

Yup … like that uncontrolled experiment that told everyone to cut back on fat, and had the unintended consequence of sparking an epidemic of type 2 diabetes.  But my favorite sentence in the article is this one:

The city’s salt campaign is in some ways more ambitious and less certain of success than the ones it waged against smoking and obesity.

Less certain of success?  How exactly are we defining success here?  Were Hizzoner’s campaigns against smoking and obesity successful?  Have thousands of New Yorkers given up smoking?  Did those calorie-count menus Bloomberg demanded inspire them to eat less and lose weight? 

I must’ve missed those headlines.  I guess I was too busy looking for the salt shaker so I could add some flavor to my eggs.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that consuming saturated fat is not associated with cardiovascular disease.  Never mind the usual problem of noticing an association and then confusing it with cause and effect … these researchers say there’s not even an association:

A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD.

A meta-analysis basically means they studied other studies and evaluated the data.  Man, this news must come as a total shock to most nutrition researchers.  I mean, it’s not like anyone’s ever come up with similar results before. 

Uh, wait … actually I seem recall plenty of similar results. Not even a year ago, researchers who published a meta-analysis study in the Archives of Internal Medicine had this to say:

Strong evidence supports valid associations (4 criteria satisfied) of protective factors, including intake of vegetables, nuts, and “Mediterranean” and high-quality dietary patterns with CHD, and associations of harmful factors, including intake of trans-fatty acids and foods with a high glycemic index or load.

Cool … vegetables and nuts may be protective.  I like vegetables and nuts.  Trans fats are bad — no surprise there. And wouldn’t you know it:  foods with a high glycemic index or load are associated as “harmful factors.”  That would be sugar and starch.

But what’s really interesting is the association they didn’t find:

Insufficient evidence (2 criteria) of association is present for intake of supplementary vitamin E and ascorbic acid (vitamin C); saturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids; total fat; -linolenic acid; meat; eggs; and milk.

No associations for total fat, saturated fat, or consuming meat, eggs and milk.  These, of course, are the foods the anti-fat hysterics have spent 30 years hectoring us to give up.

Those studies are recent, but they’re hardly the first to exonerate saturated fat in the mysterious case of Who Gave Uncle Herman A Heart Attack.  Here’s the conclusion of a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007:

Our findings suggest that diets lower in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat are not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease in women. A higher glycemic load was strongly associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease.

So we’re back to sugar and starch.  And here are some quotes from a paper titled The low fat/low cholesterol diet is ineffective, published in the European Heart Journal in 1997:

Remarkably, no primary prevention trial of sufficient size or sensitivity to examine the effect of a low total and saturated fat diet alone has ever been conducted. All six primary prevention trials involved alteration of one or more other risk factors such as cigarette smoking, blood pressure and exercise. Curiously, the third and most recent of these small studies actually showed a significant adverse effect on coronary and total mortality.

In other words, more people died — from heart disease or otherwise — in the low-fat group.  I don’t think it’s all that curious. But, to continue:

The MRC study followed 252 men randomized to a very low fat diet or no change in diet over three years: the low fat diet was poorly tolerated but achieved a 10% reduction in cholesterol. There was no difference in the rate of reinfarction or death and the researchers concluded that the low fat has no place in the treatment of myocardial infarction.

The commonly-held belief that the best diet for the prevention of coronary heart disease is a low saturated fat, low cholesterol is not supported by the available evidence from clinical trials.

I guess the anti-fat hysterics missed that paper.  And they probably missed this analysis of the Women’s Health Initiative study as well:

Over a mean of 8.1 years, a dietary intervention that reduced total fat intake and increased intakes of vegetables, fruits, and grains did not significantly reduce the risk of CHD, stroke, or CVD in postmenopausal women and achieved only modest effects on CVD risk factors, suggesting that more focused diet and lifestyle interventions may be needed to improve risk factors and reduce CVD risk.

You gotta love the way some scientists explain away results they don’t like.  Notice the last part of the conclusion:  Uh … gee, uh … well, it’s not that the low-fat diet theory is wrong or anything, you see, it’s just, uh … we may need more focused diet and lifestyle changes.

I could quote more studies, but you get the idea.  The once high-flying theory that fatty diets cause heart attacks and low-fat diets prevent them has been shot down over and over by the evidence.  So naturally, some of today’s researchers still come to the obvious conclusion:  We need to produce fake pig meat to prevent heart disease.

Okay, technically that isn’t the reason scientists are trying to produce pork from stem cells.  The main reason given in the online article is to

turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.

Well, if it keeps third-world populations from living on starches, I guess that would be an improvement.  But please, let’s not confuse this stuff with real meat.  Check out how they’re producing pork in a lab:

To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs’ muscle cells. They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number. So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating strips of meat about 1 centimeter (a half inch) long; to make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication in the lab.

I think I’ll pass on the stem-cell bacon.  Meat isn’t nutritious just because it’s meat; it’s nutritious because of what the meat eats when it’s still alive and wandering around on hooves:  grass and bugs and other foods created by Mother Nature.  A lot of that good nutrition ends up in the fat.  But of course, some researchers are convinced we need to alter that fat:

There are tantalizing health possibilities in the technology. Fish stem cells could be used to produce healthy omega 3 fatty acids, which could be mixed with the lab-produced pork instead of the usual artery-clogging fats found in livestock meat. “You could possibly design a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them,” Matheny said.

Amazing.  After all the research disputing the theory that saturated fat causes heart attacks, we’re still hearing about artery-clogging saturated fat.  Yes, perhaps we should put technology to work on that.  We could manufacture something better … just like when corn-oil margarine replaced butter.  Fortunately, the reporter had the good sense to talk to someone who believes in real food:

Some experts warn lab-made meats might have potential dangers for human health. “With any new technology, there could be subtle impacts that need to be monitored,” said Emma Hockridge, policy manager at Soil Association, Britain’s leading organic organization… She also said organic farming relies on crop and livestock rotation, and that taking animals out of the equation could damage the ecosystem.

That’s one of the concepts explained so brilliantly in Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth:  the soil needs animals.  It doesn’t need stem cells raised in a nutritive soup, and it certainly doesn’t need the animals to go away.

And frankly, some of those possible “subtle effects” are worrisome.  A couple of times in my life, I’ve put my foot into a slipper only to find a roach had taken up residence there.  Both occasions produced a reaction known colloquially as “screaming like a girl.”

Now imagine some renegade stem cells escaping from the meat laboratory and merging with other live hosts.  Years from now, I could stick my foot into my slipper and end up with some half-roach, half-pig thing grabbing my toe and oinking at me furiously as I try to kill it with a newspaper.

Then I really would have a heart attack.

p.s. — I’ll be out of town this weekend. If I’m slow to deal with comments, that’s why.