Interview with Aitor Calero of Directo al Paladar

Aitor Calero writes for the popular Spanish cooking and nutrition blog, Directo al Paladar ("straight to the palate").  We did a written interview a while back, and he agreed to let me post the English version on my blog.  The Spanish version is here and here.

Without further ado, here it is:

Read more öbbThis post was written by Stephan Guyenet for Whole Health Source.

What Causes Type 2 Diabetes, and How Can it be Prevented?

In the comments of the last post, we've been discussing the relationship between body fatness and diabetes risk.  I think this is really worth understanding, because type 2 diabetes is one of the few lifestyle disorders where 1) the basic causes are fairly well understood, and 2) we have effective diet/lifestyle prevention strategies that have been clearly supported by multiple controlled trials.

Read more öbbThis post was written by Stephan Guyenet for Whole Health Source.

New Review Paper by Yours Truly: High-Fat Dairy, Obesity, Metabolic Health and Cardiovascular Disease

My colleagues Drs. Mario Kratz, Ton Baars, and I just published a paper in the European Journal of Nutrition titled "The Relationship Between High-Fat Dairy Consumption and Obesity, Cardiovascular, and Metabolic Disease".  Mario is a nutrition researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center here in Seattle, and friend of mine.  He's doing some very interesting research on nutrition and health (with an interest in ancestral diets), and I'm confident that we'll be getting some major insights from his research group in the near future.  Mario specializes in tightly controlled human feeding trials.  Ton is an agricultural scientist at the University of Kassel in Germany, who specializes in the effect of animal husbandry practices (e.g., grass vs. grain feeding) on the nutritional composition of dairy.  None of us have any connection to the dairy industry or any other conflicts of interest.

The paper is organized into three sections:

1. A comprehensive review of the observational studies that have examined the relationship between high-fat dairy and/or dairy fat consumption and obesity, metabolic health, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
2. A discussion of the possible mechanisms that could underlie the observational findings.
3. Differences between pasture-fed and conventional dairy, and the potential health implications of these differences.

Read more öbbThis post was written by Stephan Guyenet for Whole Health Source.

How Should Science be Done?

Lately I keep running into the idea that the proper way to do science is to continually strive to disprove a hypothesis, rather than support it*.  According to these writers, this is what scientists are supposed to aspire to, but I've never actually heard a scientist say this.  The latest example was recently published in the Wall Street Journal (1).  This evokes an image of the Super Scientist, one who is so skeptical that he never believes his own ideas and is constantly trying to tear them down.  I'm no philosopher of science, but this idea never sat well with me, and it's contrary to how science is practiced.  Descending from the writings of Karl Popper, apparently the idea has been strongly criticized by a number of other philosophers of science.

I'd go further and say that the idea is commonly abused by non-scientist contrarians who need an excuse to wholesale reject a body of scientific evidence that is inconvenient for them (along with Thomas Kuhn's writing on paradigms).  It's also abused by writers who want to make a dramatic story by creating a sense of outrage or superiority in the reader (i.e., "these people are supposed to be scientists, but they can't even get the scientific method right!").
Read more öbbThis post was written by Stephan Guyenet for Whole Health Source.

Two Great Quotes About Obesity (technical)

By Dr. Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, from a recent paper, "The Neurobiology of Food Intake in an Obesogenic Environment" (1).  I came across it because it cites my review paper (2).  My perspective on obesity is similar to his.  From the abstract:
The modern lifestyle with its drastic changes in the way we eat and move puts pressure on the homoeostatic system responsible for the regulation of body weight, which has led to an increase in overweight and obesity. The power of food cues targeting susceptible emotions and cognitive brain functions, particularly of children and adolescents, is increasingly exploited by modern neuromarketing tools. Increased intake of energy-dense foods high in fat and sugar is not only adding more energy, but may also corrupt neural functions of brain systems involved in nutrient sensing as well as in hedonic, motivational and cognitive processing.And a nice one from the conclusions:
Read more öbbThis post was written by Stephan Guyenet for Whole Health Source.

Marijuana for Attention Deficit Disorder

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