Original Cin

Kind of weird: my diet log for yesterday shows that, without intending to, I ate foods in order of descending calorie count. There are 3.6 million different ways I could have eaten the exact same stuff!

Mummies Had Heart Disease, Too on WebMD.

This story has been making the rounds, but incredibly, it’s not news at all. The fact that ancient Egyptians had heart disease has a whole chapter dedicated to it in Protein Power (I believe I read the 1996 edition, so this has been known for at least thirteen years).

Went to buy avocados at the grocery store. Next to the normal avocados, they had, I kid you not, low-fat avocados. What is the world coming to that someone would make such a thing?

Found CRON-O-Meter, a diet tracking program the other day, and so far I like it. It gives me the instant feedback on my diet that I like so much, without most of the annoyances of NutritionData.

The program uses the same USDA database that everyone else under the sun seems to use, but allows adding new foods. Even more importantly, you can take a food in the database, change its values, and make a new entry out of it, something that I desperately wanted on several occasions when using NutritionData. So, if you have a piece of salmon that just has a mystery coating on it that adds some calories, getting that into CRON-O-Meter is a matter of starting with the entry for the right type of salmon and adjusting it; while not every food can be dealt with like this, it’s still helpful for lots and lots of things.

The visualizations of CRON-O-Meter are less razzle-dazzle than NutritionData, but they’re “good enough” and don’t require selectively loading a buttload of flash; I can live with plain old bar charts and pie charts, and you could ever argue that these are superior, time-tested charts that are easier to read than NutritionData’s triangle. NutritionData, unlike CRON-O-Meter, has always been a bit of a nutritional nag, complaining indiscriminately about relatively high levels of fat and sodium on a food-by-food basis. I know I shouldn’t anthropomorphize computer programs, but NutritionData seems shrill and nagging about EVERYTHING. As I once joked — “Sugar has sugar in it? I had no idea.”

I’m not yet certain if CRON-O-Meter is smart enough to have any sense of “Net Carbs.”

CRON-O-Meter also has a sense of time, and will happily act as a food diary for a while. NutritionData requires daily “clearing” to use its tracking on a day-by-day basis.

It looks like it’s possible to share nutritional information from CRON-O-Meter with others. I have no idea how this works.

As the name indicates, CRON-O-Meter was designed with Calorie Restriction in mind, but I don’t see any reason you couldn’t use it for basically any reasonable diet.

Installation on my Ubuntu system was a bit awkward. The “Linux” download link is a shell file that has comments to download the MacOSX version and unzip it in the same directory. The zip utility that comes with Kubuntu, Ark, insisted that this archive wasn’t valid, although I managed to open it up just fine with the command-line unzip. All said and done, I managed to get an entry in Kickoff that I click on to launch CRON-O-Meter just like any other program, even though it took me a few minutes (Hint: Working directory matters). I’m guessing Windows installation is easier, actually having an executable setup.

Meanwhile, the federal government made it cheaper for us to eat sugar and starch through massive grain subsidies. As the old farmer told the stars of King Corn, “You couldn’t make any money growing corn if not for the government payments.” Those government payments are the reason we feed cattle corn instead of letting them eat grass as nature intended. Subsidies are the reason high-fructose corn syrup is in half the products you’ll find in the grocery store, including bread. Dirt-cheap subsidized corn is the reason for Big Gulps and endless refills at the soda dispenser.

via Tom Naughton, Fat Head » Cheaper Health Care.

Yay, I’ve lost some weight:

I think it’d be useful to step back for a minute, and talk about the logic of what Taubes says in Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s nothing shocking or amazing, but there are a few small insights. (more…)

I finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes a few days ago. I think I’ve made a lot of progress on my goal to lose weight just by doing so (it’s the light blue square in my goal grid), although only time will tell. It’s a marvelous book with political, scientific, and health freedom issues that go far beyond those that Taubes immediately brings up, and I am stunned.

Calories convincingly makes the case that a misunderstanding of statistics regarding heart disease at the turn of century, as well as a flawed understanding of what humans ate tens of thousands of years ago, essentially caused an ill-founded crusade against dietary fat. Combined with the fact that fat is roughly twice as calorie-dense as protein and carbohydrates, this led to many health officials recommending low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. This puts a recent NutritionData blog entry into perspective (the entire post is worth reading, slowly, and carefully,  although it makes a lot more sense with details from Taubes):

The prevailing wisdom that meat and saturated fat are unhealthy is based on the same sort of inconclusive, circumstantial evidence as the studies I’ve noted here.  But if we really want to get to the truth, we’re going to need to consider ALL the (flawed) evidence, not just that which supports our point of view. – Monica Reinagel, More evidence that saturated fat has been falsely accused?

The bulk of the evidence on diet is inconclusive and circumstantial because, Taubes points out, the research is just not conducted in a competent manner:

…institutionalized vigilance… is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.” – Calories, 451

Indeed; calories is full of examples of questionable assumptions, poor choices of animal models (rabbits!?), and a general lack of clear thought. This book is just as much a book about the history of science (?) as it is about nutrition, and it puts contemporary events such as the rise of evidence-based medicine in perspective. (When I ran across it in the text, I found the Cochrane Collaboration website already in my bookmarks).

Fast forwarding past the history lesson that justifiably takes hundreds of pages in Good Calories, Bad Calories, the best information we have on metabolism at this point suggests that insulin promotes the storage of energy as fat, and that the intake of carbohydrates causes a big increase in blood insulin levels. Neither point should be terribly surprising to anyone that’s ever been around diabetic family members on insulin. Taubes describes this as fat cells pulling in calories, making fewer available for everything else, and increasing appetite — this model “assumes that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables” (358).

Calories is simply too much to talk about all at once, and I’ll continue writing about this for a few days at least.