mike_organon

Taubes shows those simple rules don't work (so many people have difficulty loosing weight) because the causality is backwards.

Why do you think "mysteriously" is part of the definition of auto-immune? If we don't know what causes a particular auto-immune response doesn't make it not auto-immune.

CORS is more secure than JSONP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing

But "auto-immune disorder" does describe whats happening. What most doctors can't say is what causes that: so they can't say more than "dumb luck".

One explanation I've heard is leaky gut caused by grain sensitivity, followed by dairy proteins leaking out, causing the immune response, which then mistakes the pancreas which has similar looking proteins. I don't know how much evidence there is for that.

I need this. Maybe I wasn't precise about "glucose regulation", but obviously it doesn't happen if you don't have insulin.

I would agree that eating can't cure it, but it can help. Eating the standard USDA/ADA diet is loaded with carbs. Reducing carbs, and increasing (healthy, grass fed) fat and protein makes the glucose easier to manage. My average BG reduced by 30%, with fewer lows, and it's easier to do.

It's a disorder of glucose regulation, so minimizing carbs and maximizing fat (because protein also leads to glucose), can help a lot. Eat more animals and vegetables, less grains.

I agree. I went Paleo 2 years ago and it made blood sugar much easier to manage.

Did you consider BrowserId? I think this has a lot of advantages over OpenId or various proprietary accounts.

https://browserid.org/

Both of your answers ask for more government control. Consider the government is a huge concentration of power, so many will want to corrupt it. Our goal should be to reduce the power of government, thereby reducing corruption.

It's complex and there are a lot of characters to follow, but many of them are developed very well - which is rare on TV and wonderful to see.

Yes, that's better than a lynch mob with no rule of law.

The difference is using large amounts of other peoples' money.

My first thought on reading Rowe's speech was this might be a symptom of public education itself. Do-gooders using other people's money to push their agenda (higher education is the American dream) on other people. It means the people making decisions are disconnected from the outcome and reality. The result is a distortion of of the market, and also the distortion of culture that not getting higher education is disrespected (as Rowe says). Unfortunately, Rowe wants to use the government to push his agenda.

There is evidence that people have followed the advice of the "experts" in the past 4 decades: eat low fat, more carbs, industrial oils and margarine. The big problem is the experts were irrational and wrong.

Bacon already tastes as good as it's going to get! (No, this is not sarcasm.)

I think the "not too much" is also redundant. If you eat bacon and eggs, your hunger will tell you when to stop. It's the non-food (sugar and grains) that mess up our hunger signals (mainly insulin).

> The capacity to observe reality?

That is a very strong statement. My point is you haven't proven it. I certainly sympathize with your situation, but neither that nor your evidence prove that the free market is impossible according to the laws of reality. Just don't overstate your position.

> Generally, when somebody argues that the reason a given approach has failed is that it hasn't been tried hard enough, they're laughed at.

I know - I would say the same thing about socialism.

> Our healthcare market is arguably freer than that of other industrialized countries.

It's not one dimension. Maybe the way in which the US is not free causes the problems that aren't seen in countries with more powerful rulers. We have to look deeper than one dimension.

You've observed that when some people get to force others to their will, that works best? And when was the free market tried consistently and failed?

We have a mixed economy in the US. Observing its failings doesn't prove that a free economy is wrong.

The foods our ancestors ate don't exactly exist anymore. Animals are smaller and we eat fewer wild ones. Fruit is sweeter. I'm not big into supplements, but I do recognize it's hard to get the right nutrients even eating paleo.

Wait, I thought your point was that the 20 cals (10, whatever, a small number) was a straw man and it's 7 strips of bacon that causes overweight.

My point is you're misinterpreting Taubes, because he is saying 1) the mainstream believes such as small number of calories matters, and 2) that is absurd.

Do you agree with #1 now?

When I said precision, I don't mean 20 cals leads to 40 pounds. I mean the precision of someone eating an average calorie count with a margin of error so small. Consider the other side of that - for me to have maintained my own weight for the last 20 years, I would have to have been extremely precise in my eating, which I'm sure I wasn't.

No, in the graph, the green line is pulling the red line up - this is exactly what Taubes says is wrong because the delta is so small. The blue line is a red herring because that's no longer the maintenance weight.

Taubes is saying that kind of precision in calorie counting is absurd, so can't be the explanation for other people that have constant weight over decades. How could a person on the blue line have eaten with such a small margin of error?

It's incredibly difficult to eat a constant amount. People generally eat to satiety, and that changes with weight. The hypothesis Taubes puts forward in the book is that increased weight causes one to eat more, not the other way around (which is conventional wisdom). So the question is, what caused the weight gain (fat storage)? Taubes argues in the book, it's carbs and insulin, not dietary fat.

Taubes is referring to the 20 grams above maintenance of current weight (difference between red and green lines in your graph), not the grams above what ideal weight would require. The 7 strips of bacon are needed to maintain the excess weight, not to put on more (according to conventional wisdom). His point is that weight control can't be explained by counting calories so precisely for decades - there must be something else going on. He's not being deceptive.

We should be skeptical. Taubes' books show most of the conventional nutrition information is based on flawed studies that eventually became dogma. GCBC was aimed at medical professionals, and his new book tries to present it for average people, but he still has to present enough to counter 50 years of bad advice.

"What's better? 5 servings of fruits and vegetable. Unrefined, whole foods. Water. Legumes and grains. Fish."

Cut out legumes and grains - those are not whole foods, but they are modern (in evolutionary terms) and processed, and detract from nutritional advantages of of real food: fish, meat, eggs, and vegetables.

"Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your "evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with modernity."

But there is evidence (in Taubes' GCBC to begin with) that modern foods cause the "diseases of civilization".

Before agriculture, as hunter-gatherers, many people did live into what we would consider old age (if they didn't die from injuries, etc, which is not relevant to diet).

His point is that one of the major health problems in the US and elsewhere is blamed (almost universally by the media, government, medical and weight loss industries) on an idea which is simply wrong and is misleading people to even worse health. A detailed argument can't be made through tweets.

It's 7 words and you think the last 5 are not important enough to be criticized?

A high-carb meal would spike insulin which leads to fat storage. The cycle only lasts a few hours, so even if there is a limit per cycle, you wouldn't want to have 3 cycles instead of one.

Defen is correct, you're using a different referent of "excess". Taubes means excess of maintenance (which may vary), not excess from ideal. No one is disputing that if a 300 lb person ate what a 180 lb person needs, he would probably loose weight. Taubes refers to this low-cal diet as a starvation diet, but his book has more to say about its problems and limitations. His point is that staying within 20 cals of maintenance by counting is nearly impossible, so counting isn't what is responsible for weight control, otherwise everyone would be wildly far from ideal weight.

You say teachers could do it in the 80's. Montessori could do it 100 years ago. I don't think the problem is lack of technology, it's that the principles of education have changed. Software won't fix that.

"But for me, my family in the car is infinitely more important than potential damage that might be caused by an unknown person in an car that's under no control."

I'm glad someone remembered this. Saving someone else might be a good thing, but saving your own family is definitely heroic.