You Gotta Handle It When The Truth Changes

I am eating a low-carbohydrate, “ketogenic” diet. I have lost a considerable amount of weight, increased my energy, and have done a pretty good (almost-perfect) job of reversing diabetes along with the gazillion supplements I take.

There are an awfully lot of folks publishing research on an awful lot of things, with the overwhelming amount of those publishing in “traditional” medical journals (like Lancet) being professional “academics,” or university professors.

In this world of internecine warfare (of which I used to be a part) the number of articles you publish are counted, as one supervisor of mine loved to say, “like notches on a gun.”

For those few who may not be versed in western American tradition, that is supposed to be how one keeps track of the number of humans that weapon (and presumably, man at its trigger) have killed. Considering how many companies and governments and granting organizations provide money to folks who do research (and want to do more which takes more money) it is a bit of a wonder if anyone finds anything at all.

Back to the article indexed at the beginning of this from the Guardian, which indexes an article from Lancet.

It is a meta-analysis” — an analysis of what other people have researched and how they have done it. A lot of research was done over a period of years, when people had to remember something about how they “used” to eat. My guess is that you can’t remember what you ate 25 years ago and that the research subjects really couldn’t either. The author and hospital cited are affiliated with Harvard, which has an extraordinarily large PR machine and seems to have sent press releases to the hinterlands leading to several prepublication references to this article which are so horrific they are not going to be cited here.

The Guardian analysts get points, though. The thing that is really proven by this article is that nobody follows diets terribly well, even if they make sense — which they probably don’t.

There is a very basic urge in human behavior more studied in younger folks than adults, called “limit testing.” Most allegedly “normal” folks, when told what not to eat, will immediately launch into some sort of a dream of what they (allegedly) are not supposed to have.

This can be treated, but it is a bit of a job and nobody seems to have any interest in doing it. It would make people better and they would not need a doctor anymore.

Me, I would rather have a stable of healthy patients than predictable ones who just keep paying.

Stay tuned.

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