RD dogma is simply incorrect, outdated, and literally unhealthy. RDs can’t do anything about that, if they want to stay RDs.

The best we can do is ignore them and keep telling them what they have wrong-a big task.

The Vitamin Shoppe, in their last email newsletter, turns the floor over to Sharon Richter, RD, who is typical of the “licensed to lie” crowd.

The newsletter was drooling over the unpopular and discredited USDA Food Plate. The best thing to do with that food plate is make fun of it, which is what the informed blogs have done.

From The Vitamin Shoppe Newsletter-

The plate is a wonderful tool to follow as it provides an actual visual of what your plate should look like as opposed to interpreting a food pyramid. Each section will vary in portion depending upon age, sex and activity level. For example, children under the age of 3 need approximately one cup of fruit daily while an adult between the ages of 19-30 needs two cups. Did you know that males between the ages of 15-50 need more vegetables than women?

It can be tricky to always fill your plate with half fruits and vegetables, one quarter grains, one quarter protein and a serving of dairy, but once you fulfill these requirements you should remember to:

Make half of your grains whole grains

Switch to low or fat free dairy

Choose lean protein sources

(No link this time, the source was email)

Corrections:

No, the plate is not ideal. It’s not based on science, or even good logic. The Food Plate is the USDA’s gift to agribusiness, not your health.

It’s interesting that know-nothing Richter, RD picks the worst three points to make from the USDA Food Plate.

Whole Grains- Not a human food! Grains are out, and so are the dietitians still pushing this. Eat grains and wreck your gut first, then your health.

Low or Fat-Free Dairy- Wrong. Fat is the most important macronutrient. For RDs to try and ban it from the diet is literally dangerous. I don’t know why these people don’t end up in liability suits over it. It’s no different that a crooked dr prescribing junk.

Chose lean protein- Why? This is just code for low fat, the worst dietary advice of the last 50 years.

With her newsletter to Vitamin Shoppe customers, Sharon Richter moves to the bottom of the “Who to Believe” list. Shame on Vitamin Shoppe. Let’s gets someone to write that knows something useful!

No, it doesn’t. In fact if you manage it right, red meat can be and is part of the healthiest diet possible.

This week’s media scare started with a NY Times article that looks at a fake science report and just repeats it. Now the blogosphere is busy with people ripping it to bits.

Here’s what started it- NYT: Fake Science Story on Red Meat

When you see these stories in the news, they don’t show where the info comes from or what kind of info went into it. You just get the answer and have to trust someone else’s opinion on what it means. Zoe Harcombe from the UK dug a bit deeper and got to the meat of it, even the red part- Zoe Harcombe rips up bad science

One of the better takedowns of this nonsense is from Gary Taubes. Link:

Taubes Response to More Lies from Researchers

Me texting with Ma, comparing notes. She’s been changing things too.

Here’s the link and a quick summary-

Ask The Low-Carb Experts (Episode 5): ‘Ketosis: Devil Or Angel?’ | Mark Sisson

Sisson’s explanation of “keto-adapted” vs ketosis is key to understanding what you need to know about low carb.

Briefly, he is saying that low carbers are missing the true meaning of positive ketosis readings (from keto sticks). All a positive reading means is that fat that was food is now converted to ketones on the way to being passed out in urine. People think a positive reading is a good and desirable thing. Not so. What you want is to become adapted to using those ketones for fuel, and you won’t get a positive reading if you are doing it right.

Think of your digestive system as three subsystems- one burns sugar/carbs, one burns protein, one fat. The whole point of doing low carb is to squeeze the carbs down to give the sugar/carb burning system as little to do as possible to get the hormonal benefit.

The system you want to use the most is the fat burning system, according to Sisson. You keep carbs low, protein moderate, and your main fuel is fat. Once you do this long enough, your body adapts to it. You are “keto adapted.”

Keto adapted people burn fat. They burn the fat in food, and they burn the fat stored on the body if energy runs low.

If this is the case, then one can see “low carb” as a means to an end, not the end in itself. A lot of people think you count carbs, keep them low, and that equals all you need to know. Sisson is saying not at all. You do low carb until your body becomes adapted to burning fat “keto adapted,” and that’s all the benefit you are going to get out of low carb. As long as you eat well enough to keep it that way, carbs are not driving things anymore.

More:

Here’s another explanation on Livestrong.com that discusses the difference between sugar burning and fat burning.

“Can Your Body Really Learn to Burn Fat Instead of Carbs?”

From drhyman.com-

Most medicine today is based on clear-cut, on-or-off, yes-or-no diagnoses that often miss the underlying causes and more subtle manifestations of illness. Most conventional doctors are taught that you have a disease or you don’t; you have diabetes or you don’t. There are no gray areas.
Practicing medicine this way is extremely misguided because it misses one of the most fundamental laws of physiology, biology, and disease: The continuum concept. There is a continuum from optimal health to hidden imbalance to serious dysfunction to disease. Anywhere along that continuum, we can intervene and reverse the process. The sooner we address it, the better.

Here’s the full article…

The way I see it is this is like the oil light in your car. Once the light comes on, the damage is done. It’s really a “You have a bad engine and it’s too late now” light. These conventional drs Dr Hyman is writing about practice just like that. Until you have a “disease,” you are not really a legit customer.

Some other related evidence-

I tried a couple of medical reference apps to get some extra info on meds and some basic facts. One, “Medscape,” was a complete waste of money. If you look up cortisol for example, all you find is a prescription version and a list of diseases that may cause cortisol problems. They don’t ever talk about how it works, just what they think a broken system looks like once it’s broke. There is another app that is a blood test reference but it’s the same way, all you get is what disease may cause a test result number to be off, no info on what the numbers really mean. Crazy.

OK, sure.. here’s a short version.

From Salisburypost.com-

I’s that time of the year. The time when we all decide we’re going to be healthy and eat better. The question that frequently arises is, what is the best diet for me to follow? The answer to this question has been so varied and changed so frequently over the years that it’s no wonder we all suffer from analysis paralysis when trying to decide what we should be putting into our mouths. We have been influenced by nutritional researchers, our doctors and our government and look at the sad state we’re currently in. Let’s try empiric logic and attempt to discover what we should be eating based on what our genes dictate. We couldn’t do any worse.

The new diet I am recommending is actually 60,000-100,000 years old. It is called the Paleolithic, or Caveman diet. Simply, if you can hunt it, fish it, pull it off of a tree or out of the ground, then you can eat it. Simple as that. This is how we ate thousands of years ago and how we have evolved to eat and should be eating now. Back in Paleolithic times there were no processed foods or food manufacturers. Another basic recommendation is, eat what you are. We are primarily composed of protein and fat and very little carbohydrate. We don’t need to spend millions of dollars to figure that out…”

The whole article is a good explanation of the logic behind Paleo.

My favorite defense of Paleo right now goes like this: Consider the many thousands and thousands of diet studies published each year, but we get less healthy and more confused. It’s just not working! I don’t think anyone is going to work out how to buy food at Wal Mart and look like you don’t, at least not while I can still walk.

Paleo eliminates the variables (to an extent). Until science can figure about a better way of eating than nature did, I think I’m going to switch off the whitecoats and their boring papers and hang out with the hunter gatherers. Maybe the whitecoats will figure it out someday, but they have to learn how to think first.

Share on Facebook ]]> http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/16/what-to-eat-who-to-believe-short-version/feed/ 0 http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/16/good-article-about-chemical-hormone-disruptions-and-weight-gain/ http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/16/good-article-about-chemical-hormone-disruptions-and-weight-gain/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:10:56 +0000 Steve http://dietforhumans.com/?p=435 This is way above average for a site like HuffPo…

BPA’s Obesity And Diabetes Link Strengthened By New Study

This is about the chemical BPA that is found in plastic packaging and other places disrupting your hormones and prompting higher release of insulin, even in tiny, tiny amounts.

What is interesting is that in order to explain the problem, she has to use insulin theory just like low carb authors like Gary Taubes do to explain what happens when you overdo carbs (and most people do). This is hardly ever found in nutrition writing unless someone is explaining what everyone else is missing!

Share on Facebook ]]> http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/16/good-article-about-chemical-hormone-disruptions-and-weight-gain/feed/ 0 http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/07/is-it-going-to-take-engineers-to-put-this-calorie-nonsense-to-bed/ http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/07/is-it-going-to-take-engineers-to-put-this-calorie-nonsense-to-bed/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:51:37 +0000 Steve http://dietforhumans.com/?p=423 It Takes Just Two Engineers to Correct a Whole Field of Study’s Stupid Mistakes!

The next time you hear a dietitian or a TV show bigmouth say “calories in=calories out” (CICO) and 3,500 calories equals 1 lb of body fat, you can completely debunk these with a single statement. Don’t worry about digging into the finer details of insulin, leptin, exercise, or any of that. Just say:

“Since the calorie is a unit of energy and weight storage is a process, CICO is meaningless and 1lb=3,500 calories is incorrect because an input to a process does not equal the process itself, or its output.”

Done. Calories in=calories out and 1lb=3,500 calories are hereby declared dead due to incorrect mixing of process inputs, actions, and outputs. These people have literally been peddling nonsense.

What’s this about?

There is a boom of people who are trading notes online on all kinds of diet information that gets down to internal body processes, and all of them involve some actions inside the body that happen for numerous reasons. People who are doing low carb to lose weight or Paleo to lose weight and live better, or doing intermittent fasting, all that seeks to change the process going on inside. People are getting better at it all the time. Let’s say they are working on a process model.

The process model folks are always under attack, or disregarded by CICO folks that don’t get it, get in arguments, and in general just make nuisances out of themselves.

What’s wrong with CICO then, and 1 lb=3,500 calories? It only allows one input, calories, and it has one action-steady burn. It’s not much of a process model at all. It’s really just skipping actions and jumping to a guessed answer. No animal on this planet works that way. Why are so-called professionals getting away with even saying it?

What’s a process?:

A process is something that needs 3 three things-
1. Inputs
2. Actions
3. Outputs

One input to the process that determines your weight is food in. Calories is a legitimate and very important input. Dietitians tell us just take energy out (another input, not an output), and use this to find the net difference, then work in 1lb=3,500 calories. Every lb up or down has to be due to 3,500 calories in, or avoided, except for energy out. Done. But it’s dead wrong. In fact, this is impossible for this to be correct. It just skipped every action inside your body besides “steady burn,” whatever that is anyway, and jumped to an answer.

We haven’t even gotten to actions yet, but let’s look at the inputs left out of the above-
-Stress
-Sleep
-Hormonal health.

You can’t correctly analyze a process if you ignore the inputs that matter.

Moving on to actions:

The actions we are interested in are part of all the complicated processes in the body that determine how you turn food to into energy and set your weight point. We don’t even know them all but we know that they do exist.

Hormones move around in the body and carry inputs and outputs where they need to go, tissues, glands, the brain. Hormones are not necessarily inputs themselves, but if they are messed up, the process gets messed up and you might get an output (weight) you don’t want. It should be said that there is room to debate the details, but we do have some basic facts to work from like insulin’s role in storing fat, leptin’s role in signaling the brain about how much fat is there, and the thyroid’s role in managing too many important processes to mention. There are more. There are all kinds of things going on.

It’s a complex system with complex processes. It’s not like food as an input just goes “poof,” and you gain energy by heating up inside, and when you get cold, hit it again. That would simply be a steady burn process. No animal on Earth works that way, except humans, if you listen to a dietitian. True Story!

When people chose to eat low carb/Paleo for example, they are manipulating the food input to hopefully get the hormone action they want. It’s not just calories, it’s the balance of macros because they know that changing macro percentages can change actions once the process starts. In other words, the thinking is less carbs lowers insulin, and since this is an input to the real fat storage equation, it matters.

At least you have things in some kind of process model that reflects how lifeforms work on Earth. No one has a perfect process model and we are all experimenting.

What the Stupid People are Thinking:

Low fat dieters are manipulating inputs too, but they don’t know what they are doing and skipping to the answer, an amateur mistake. They are simply ignoring every input except calories to simplify the math. But, the problem comes next-

CICO declares that there is no such thing as a fat storage process that does anything other than add and subtract. Why is it then, that nature put in such a complex analog computer to sort it out? Why the built-in complex process? Just because we don’t know everything there is to know about it, it certainly can’t be said that it does not exist. If you don’t understand the model, you don’t just skip it and declare a direct relationship between input and output. This really is what they are doing. Where do they get numbers then?

Meet the bomb calorimeter. This is a gadget you put a bit of food in, hit a button, vaporize it in an instant, and watch the temperature change. Temp change=energy stored. Write that down. It’s not steady burn, it’s instant burn. =poof= This is where calorie numbers really come from.

On to the 1lb=3,500 calories thing, this isn’t even in correct units. A lb is a unit of weight (mass). A calorie is a unit of energy. This is saying that the output of a process (weight) is equivalent to the input of the process (calories). Algebra 001, use consistent units. It’s really just putting numbers to the incorrect CICO thing anyway, the one that skips process and goes right to the (guessed) answer.

Summary:

Sure, this is geeky, but if you suffered through it, hopefully the diet wars make more sense.

On one hand, there are a variety of people experimenting with process models for their diet and health, and it’s working pretty good.

Then we have dietitians and all those agencies telling you, with impossible math, that there is only one model and it’s a tin can with wires on it, and it works exactly the way your body does. It’s not even good enough to call a process model, because they are just skipping around and leaving things out. But, it works better than anything else anyone is doing, including the mob that is comparing notes online that knows better.

Let’s let the first idiot that keeps saying CICO and 1lb=3,500 calories have their thyroid, adrenals, and about half the pancreas blocked, because after all, they don’t do a thing. It’s not in their math.

It’s not.

True story.

This was a lunch hour project, don’t expect references!

-Two Engineers in Memphis

Share on Facebook ]]> http://dietforhumans.com/2012/02/07/is-it-going-to-take-engineers-to-put-this-calorie-nonsense-to-bed/feed/ 0 http://dietforhumans.com/2012/01/26/great-podcast-about-leptin-with-dr-ron-rosedale/ http://dietforhumans.com/2012/01/26/great-podcast-about-leptin-with-dr-ron-rosedale/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:45:46 +0000 Steve http://dietforhumans.com/2012/01/26/great-podcast-about-leptin-with-dr-ron-rosedale/ This is a clip from Jimmy Moore Low Carb show, which is cool to,listen to free on iTunes!

Ask The Low-Carb Experts (Episode 2): “All Things Leptin (Leptin 101)” | Dr. Ron Rosedale:
Link to Podcast

World’s leading leptin expert answers listener questions on the role this “master hormone” plays in virtually every area of your health. If you’re clueless on leptin, then you need to listen to this podcast.

Note: testing the WordPress iPad app. If the links are no good, I’m working on it!

Share on Facebook ]]> http://dietforhumans.com/2012/01/26/great-podcast-about-leptin-with-dr-ron-rosedale/feed/ 0 http://dietforhumans.com/2011/10/22/the-low-fat-diet-is-the-worst-dietary-advice-in-the-last-50-years/ http://dietforhumans.com/2011/10/22/the-low-fat-diet-is-the-worst-dietary-advice-in-the-last-50-years/#comments Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:41:22 +0000 Steve http://dietforhumans.com/?p=203 Next time an “expert” nutritionalist or dietitian tells you to do a low fat diet because fat has more calories per gram than carbs or protein, just punch them in the nose. The advice is completely discredited and has directly caused a huge and expensive health crisis.

This is from Dwight C. Lundell M.D at spacedoc.net-

Does the thought of a steak, bacon and eggs, or real milk make you cringe thinking you’re instantly clogging up your arteries?  How many times have you seen physicians and nutritionists write “artery clogging saturated fats”? For the last 40 years the dietary instructions from governments and other authoritative bodies have told us to avoid all animal fats.

Americans took the message seriously and complied. Average fat consumption decreased, average blood cholesterol levels decreased but their rate of heart disease has continued to rise; the cost of its treatment has continued to rise.  Now, in 2011 we have 24 MILLION people diagnosed with diabetes and another 65 million with pre-diabetes and an epidemic of obesity now afflicting over 65% of the population…

Full story…

Besides Wall Street bankers, and endocrinologists, I can’t think of any professionals that get away with being complete idiots as much as nutritionalists or dietitians.

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