Author of Rethinking Diabetes, The Case for Keto, The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat, Good Calories, Bad Calories, Bad Science, and Nobel Dreams
Oakland, California
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1960: < 2 million Americans with diagnosed diabetes
Today: 30 million*
Is this a problem that can be solved by drug therapy?
There must be a better way
My new book, Rethinking Diabetes, is out Jan 2
tinyurl.com/5ft2btcy
#diabetes #wefightdiabetes
* cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statis…
@diabetesdaily
@ADA_DiabetesPro
@IntDiabetesFed
@JoslinDiabetes
@diaTribeNews
@Diabetescouk
@BeyondType1
@DiabetesCanada
@ADCESdiabetes
@Diabetes_DRI
@martymakary
@samiinkinen
@bretschermd
@davidludwig
@lowcarbgp
@robbwolf
@drjasonfung
@KenDBerryMD
@SBakerMD
@drmarkhyman
@shellenberger
@DrJBhattacharya
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Today is the 20th anniversary of my (in?)famous "What if Fat Doesn't Make You Fat" cover article in the @nytimes .
Working from the research of @davidludwigmd, @drericwestman, and others, it helped catalyze a revolution.
nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magaz…
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More signs of paradigms shifting. This would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
Seriously, Juice Is Not Healthy nyti.ms/2J2QsPs
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I wish I could take credit for this. I can't. And I don't know who deserves the credit.
But thank you, whoever you are.
The caption:
"Correlation vs. Causality."
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My new book -- "Rethinking Diabetes" -- is available for preorder.
garytaubes.com/my-new-book-r…
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If this were a drug, it would be all over the front pages.
Please RT: KETO 2y results on 350 ppl w/ T2 diabetes: 53.5% reversed diabetes. Repeat: diabetics NO LONGER have diabetes Attn! @AmDiabetesAssn, Chair David Herrick @EthicOneLLC & CEO Tracey Brown @Type2CEO, When will yr guidelines be updated? Link: bit.ly/VirtaYr2
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Some good news: Johns Hopkins School of Med researchers report diabetes reversal with an LCHF/keto diet in a community setting. Nice.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3219…
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We’ve known since the 19th Century how to reverse type 2 diabetes with diet alone.
How and why was this knowledge lost?
Why did MDs insist on drug therapy instead? Why do they still?
I explain the history & science in my new book, Rethinking Diabetes.
amazon.com/Rethinking-Diabet…
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Interested in weight control -- slimming down -- for the new year. My new book, The Case for Keto, can help. Read the first chapter for free here:
gary-taubes.ck.page/30b0a6a3…
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This is Curt Richter talking about his diabetic rat experiments published in 1941. It raises an obvious question: Could Richter's rats have been smarter than the expert committees of the American Diabetes Association? I'm just saying....
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Cornell is fund-raising for a study on ketogenic diets and cancer. Please share. Please give. bit.ly/2OkOe1W
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Nina Teicholz, @bigfatsurprise, is one of the few journalists, if not the only one, investigating nutrition researchers and the web of conflicts of interest entangling their work.
This is required reading.
New report: Harvard leader Willett recently had a paper linking red meat + diabetes. Yet this idea has been refuted in clinical trials. Why does Willett persist?
This investigation finds the answer in a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, financial interests and personal bias.
shorturl.at/yCRU3
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I was at a Whole Foods last week in suburban NYC. Seems @KerrygoldUSA thinks people want to eat reduced-fat butter. Maybe not their best idea.
The space on the left is where regular Kerrygold was sold out. Reduced-fat is on the right.
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Jane Brody seems to think that those of us who ended up on LCHF/ketogenic diets never thought to try portion control first. What were we thinking? If I could find the head-slap emoji, I'd use it here. Instead...☹️
Personal Health: Jane Brody’s Personal Secrets to Lasting Weight Loss nyti.ms/2FcPOSe
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Let's just say, after all these years I'm officially a Rinaldo fan. Now maybe some of our other mega-rich athletes will follow along and stop peddling sugary beverages. espn.com/video/clip?id=31632…
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Also worth sharing.
Dave did something no one had ever done, observed a phenomena that couldn't be explained by conventional thinking on lipids, and then continued thinking about it critically and doing what was necessary (so far) to test his thinking.
Doing good science doesn't come with a PhD. (H/t the Wizard of Oz for his speech to the Scarecrow.) It comes with critical thinking and the persistence to do what's necessary to establish reliable knowledge.
Regardless of the study results, one thing that deserves notice is how Dave, a “non-scientist”, made this whole thing happen - came up with the idea, recruited the team, helped design the study, crowdfunded it, and helped bring it to publication. Beyond impressive!
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This is a public health tragedy: 42.5% of U.S. adults suffer from obesity: one in eleven with severe obesity.
How high do these #s have to be before the "experts" even consider the possibility that the failure is with them and not us? cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obe…
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File this away under the medical wisdom forgotten with the discovery of insulin. Here's Elliot Joslin in 1910 writing about the diabetic diet and the importance of fat. Give or take that "teaspoonful of brandy," he sounds a lot like @Virta and @DrSarahHallberg today.
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Maybe the best article I've ever read on diet (LCHF) and type 2 diabetes:
strib.mn/2GJOVRu
And the comments, as ever, are worth the price of admission. Yeesh.
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Signs that the paradigm may now have shifted.
The ADA offers guidance on low carb and very low carb diets... for the 1 in 7 adults who have type 2 diabetes
shopdiabetes.org/collections…
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Reasonably coherent interview with me in Reason: bit.ly/2H0wMPY Subhead misses the point, though. Big sugar and big government sure didn't help, but bad science and inept researchers are ultimately responsible.
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More evidence that people are paying attention to the idea that the century-old energy balance hypothesis of obesity -- calories in, calories out -- may be just... wrong.
Our most read article in 2018 was this study which found that energy expenditure was significantly greater in participants assigned to a low carbohydrate diet compared with high carbohydrate diet of similar protein content bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k458… @davidludwigmd
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Reading The Hobbit last night to my boys. Thorin nailed this one:
"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. "
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Low carb, diabetes and the NYT. If I wasn't such a pessimist by nature, I'd say this might be the tipping point: nyti.ms/2cfsB0A
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On December 29th, I'll be releasing what I think is the most important book I've ever written on low-carb high-fat/keto diets, the culmination of 13 years of study. Read the first chapter here for free: gary-taubes.ck.page/8023ae0a…
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Two facts we must confront:
1. This is a national scandal (international, as well).
2. Diabetes is reversible by diet: "One way to think about it is that my diabetes manifested itself if I ate carbs. If I didn’t, I was essentially fine."
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Finally saw #MagicPill on Netflix. Very thought-provoking and a necessary antidote to some of the pseudoscience on meat and health.
You can now watch the #MagicPill on @Netflix! It’s a great documentary that highlights the role proper nutrition plays in improving & reversing diseases like obesity, diabetes, cancer & Alzheimer’s.
dietdoctor.com/watch-the-mag…
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NuSI's 3rd trial is now published. It's the most rigorous (and expensive) trial ever done using diet to manipulate fat accumulation and so energy expenditure to test competing hypotheses of obesity: energy balance vs. a hormonal/regulatory model. The H/R model was not refuted.
Are all calories alike to the body? Our new feeding study – among the largest ever done – suggests not. A low-carbohydrate diet sped up metabolism by ≈ 250 calories a day. This effect could help weight loss maintenance. Free access to study linked here: medium.com/@davidludwigmd/ma…
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Reading a 1984 Discover article on the diabetes epidemic. 600k new diagnoses a year already back then. But, omg, that diet! And the logic: this is a way to control blood sugar levels!😐
If I didn't know better, I'd think this was a joke.
Insert head-slap emoji, please.
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1965. Jean Mayer tells NYT that prescribing low-carb/keto diets is equivalent to committing mass murder. @virtahealth just published 1 yr data on nutritional ketosis for type 2 diabetes. Data suggests precisely the opposite of Mayer's speculation. bit.ly/2jnWn79
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Is this what the beginning of a paradigm shift looks like? bit.ly/2u1nDhA
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Catching up from my vacation: Re the latest on carbohydrates and longevity, from Harvard and Lancet Public Health (not to be mistaken for the Lancet itself): bit.ly/2MUStjp I covered this in 2012 (& 2007 & 1995). Same bad science. Same perps. bit.ly/2N7Aarj Sad.
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And once again the folks at Harvard's school of public health think this evidence should not be reported because it disagrees with their conclusions. Science, anyone?
New, most rigorous-ever reviews of red/processed meat conclude that there's only low/very low-quality evidence to show any negative health outcome. “The guidelines [on meat] are based on papers that...say there's evidence...and there isn’t” says one expert
nytimes.com/2019/09/30/healt…
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Thinking of #obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem.
aeon.co/essays/sugar-is-a-to…
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From 1797 to 1914, doctors treated diabetes with a simple, powerful approach: fatty meats and boiled vegetables. Turns out, history might have had it right all along.
#DiabetesAwareness #NutritionFacts #MetabolicHealth #LowCarbLifestyle #HealthHistory #WellnessTips
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The cost to society of diabetes:
$1.1 billion/day
$413 billion/year*
Are new drugs the answer?
Or will we bankrupt the healthcare system?
There must be a better way.
My new book, Rethinking Diabetes, is out on Jan 2nd
tinyurl.com/5ft2btcy
*diabetesjournals.org/care/ar…
@diabetesdaily @ADA_DiabetesPro @IntDiabetesFed @JoslinDiabetes @diaTribeNews @Diabetescouk
@BeyondType1 @DiabetesCanada @ADCESdiabetes
@Diabetes_DRI
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I'm wondering if the ketogenic diet for ob/db would have been accepted more readily if the MDs who reinvented it post WW2 had mentioned that this was the conventional treatment for diabetes pre-insulin.
Here's Thomas King Chambers, 1875, "A manual of Diet in Health and Disease"
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More signs of a paradigm slowly shifting. LCHF/ketogenic diet for T2D in a hospital setting.
bit.ly/2ENUrAz
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The debate used to be whether low-carb diets were deadly. Now it's whether low-fat diets are as good as low carb (at least, when both are restricted in sugar and high GI grains). That's progress.
Indeed. The only thing not said is that calories restricted in both groups are the most fattening carbs. Both groups are carb-restricted, but one also restricts fat.
Counting Calories Is Not the Key to Weight Loss, New Study Finds nyti.ms/2CazqzS
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Congratulations to Dr. Unwin and his patients.
If this were a competition, my guesstimate at the current score:
Unwin 150
American Diabetes Association 0.
AT LAST 🥳 tonight 6 minutes of low carb magic on prime-time National TV to celebrate 150 yes ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY cases of drug-free remission of T2 Diabetes in a single UK NHS clinic (mine!) Just choose foods that don’t put your blood sugar up! itv.com/news/2025-01-03/doct… @DiabetesUK @Oliviaguthrietv @bigfatsurprise @drjasonfung @SBakerMD
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Made my day. If this be confirmation bias, I'll take it.
As I walked my son to his 1st day of school, I couldnt help but look back to just 3yrs prior
Had I continued to listen to the prevailing voices in nutrition & lifestyle medicine, I would‘ve been on my way to diabetes, hypertension & coronary disease
Very
Low
Carb
Ketogenic
Diet
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It's been almost six years since "Sweet and Vicious" in the NYTM. Today's launch day for The Case Against Sugar. bit.ly/2hKnAyy
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Trying to put LCHF vs. the medical/nutritional authorities in perspective. tgam.ca/2BDawJ9 Thanks to @M_Andreae for the anecdote vs. hypothesis take on the problem.
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To some, the word 'fat' conjures up a heart attack; to others, it may be the key to healthy living. theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…
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I'd like to think about this as a discussion rather than a debate. Either way, it should be interesting and maybe even fruitful.
Big announcement. Joe Rogan has graciously invited Gary Taubes and I to debate on his podcast. March 19. To my knowledge, this will be the first time Taubes has publicly live debated an obesity researcher who is familiar with his work. @joerogan @garytaubes
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I'm a fan. If @halleberry is writing a diet book, I'm pre-ordering mine. bit.ly/2DWYomE
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Indeed. Another sign of paradigm shifting.
Dietary fat: From foe to friend? science.sciencemag.org/conte…
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Why has the ketogenic diet remained a "fad" diet for, well, 200 years? Maybe because it does some amazing things. Here's @Jordanbpeterson on what it did for him and his daughter: bit.ly/2HaDS0C
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Not just new guidelines but the necessary RCTs to put these controversies to rest. Until then, butter is back, again.
High carbohydrate diet and the link to bad outcomes thelancet.com/journals/lance… #ESCCongress & @TheLancet a call for new guidelines
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. @DrSidMukherjee asks in the NYT whether the time has come to study whether diets (ketogenic?) can heal us. Yes, it is. nyti.ms/2Eg3Xx6 Another sign of paradigms shifting: mainstream medicine contemplates the once unthinkable.
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Words fail me.
I should believe you, why exactly? I have no reason to believe you were ever vegan, or to think you are anything more than a meat industry shill. I do however have reason to believe if you eat meat you probably only poop about once a week. Vegans can poop multiple times a day.
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Common sense returns to South African nutrition. It's about time. Congratulations to Tim Noakes.
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The @WashingtonPost sets back nutrition journalism by several decades. Apparently, we don't have to give up eggs "entirely." I guess that's something to be thankful for.
For the common sense, read the comments.
washingtonpost.com/health/eg…
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Dr. Bernstein was patient #1: the first to ever check his blood sugar multiple times a day. He proved patients w/ T1D could maintain healthy blood sugar.
He changed diabetes practice forever. But not enough.
My new book, Rethinking Diabetes, is out Jan 2.
tinyurl.com/5ft2btcy
#diabetes #WeFightDiabetes
@DikemanDave
@diabetesdaily
@ADA_DiabetesPro
@IntDiabetesFed
@JoslinDiabetes
@diaTribeNews
@Diabetescouk
@BeyondType1
@DiabetesCanada
@ADCESdiabetes
@Diabetes_DRI
@martymakary
@samiinkinen
@bretschermd
@davidludwig
@lowcarbgp
@robbwolf
@drjasonfung
@KenDBerryMD
@SBakerMD
@drmarkhyman
@shellenberger
@DrJBhattacharya
Dr Richard Bernstein is an icon in the world of diabetes management and still going strong at 89 years of age! piped.video/2UZXv8HAn70
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How Sugar Changed Everything
From zero diabetes cases in the 1800s to a global epidemic...it all began when sugar became part of everyday life.
#NutritionFacts #HealthHistory #Wellness
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I'm going to side with the folks who say "it's me and Gary Taubes" or "Gary Taubes and me." Not :Gary Taubes and I." If you need a guide, you wouldn't say "Joe Rogan has invited I to debate." You would say "Joe Rogan has invited me to debate."
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As much as any coincidence can be amusing these days, the new USDA Dietary Guidelines are released the same day as my new book, The Case for Keto.
I think the latter will be more useful, but I acknowledge my bias.
smile.amazon.com/Case-Keto-R…
wsj.com/articles/new-u-s-die…
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What do female physicians do to lose weight? What do they recommend to their patients?
👉 Intermittent fasting
👉 Ketogenic eating
👉 Low-carb, calorie-restricted
In that order.
Not quite what @usnews would recommend
bit.ly/34W8zlX
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Sugar and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease? NuSI's latest study is published today in JAMA. Here's the @nytimes article by @anahadoconnor .nyti.ms/2UfuhLZ
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Hmm? Monks who eat less than the Thai population but grow obese anyway? Maybe, just maybe, it's not about the calories?
In Thailand, ‘Obesity in Our Monks Is a Ticking Time Bomb’ nyti.ms/2OwDHzK
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Indeed. The only thing not said is that calories restricted in both groups are the most fattening carbs. Both groups are carb-restricted, but one also restricts fat.
Counting Calories Is Not the Key to Weight Loss, New Study Finds nyti.ms/2CazqzS
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for diabetes should be the health story of the year. I agree with Paul Scott at @duluthnews .
duluthnewstribune.com/lifest…
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Great talk with @SamHarrisOrg on what we should eat, how much, and belief systems--why we believe what seems like common sense, but isn't. nitter.app/SamHarrisOrg/status/86…
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Rethinking Diabetes will be out in the New Year.
Kirkus gives it a starred review, calling it a "must-read book for diabetics, but doctors will also learn a lot."
kirkusreviews.com/book-revie… #kirkusreviews
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If only we had listened to John Yudkin back in the 1960s. The case against sugar is made in this recent article in the BMJ: bmj.com/content/360/bmj.j580…
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If a single clinic can do this in the UK, imagine what a nation-wide program could accomplish?
Our 151st case of drug free T2D remission 🥳Just look how high his blood sugars were and yet he avoided drugs. He is so proud and feels properly well😊 This is how we did it nutrition.bmj.com/content/ea… Remember starch is ‘soon to be sugar’👍
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Another n of one for #TheCaseforKeto. Ashley is the sister-in-law of a good friend. No before and after weights necessary.
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This prompted my loudest, spontaneous LOL in years. Hilarious!
Then I realized that, so far as the obesity and diabetes establishments are concerned, I'm essentially Tony.😐
tomgauld.com/shop/science-he…
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A sign of paradigms shifting?
When the director of the National Institute for Drug Abuse gives a lecture on the potential for keto-therapeutics in alcohol use disorder, you know we're making progress.
That's today.
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Marion seems to continously confuse association with correlation. She keeps using the word "effect", which implies cause, when what is observed is an association, which doesn't. Why can't our nutritional authorities get this right? It's 8th grade science.
Once again @marionnestle provides context and the big picture, leaving you with what you/we should do today acknowledging we may know more tomorrow, but not a lot more.
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The new Lancet report on diet and planetary healthy assumes the healthiest diet for ALL OF US is mostly plants. That's the same bad epidemiology we've been confronting for decades. The AP article is nicely balanced.wapo.st/2FDZUKU
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An interesting experiment: search Twitter for #vegandiet and look for before and after testimonies/photos. Then do the same for #ketodiet. I'd like to understand better the apparent difference.
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While I wait for Russia-Croatia to resolve, @davidludwigmd reminds me that today is the 16th anniversary of "What if..." nyti.ms/2zl8wES
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Great talk with @SamHarrisOrg today. Look forward to getting on air. nitter.app/SamHarrisOrg/status/85…
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People are catching on. Oprah maybe should have known better.
cnn.it/2TmTSFR
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Larry H. @cardiobrief asked me for a comment on the @American_Heart's latest SFA/PUFA advisory. I got carried away: bit.ly/2twYn03
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From The New York Times in 1959, Alvan Feinstein predicts the future. Give or take half a century, he nailed it.
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The world is changing. Nice to see Stanford Med fully on board.
A small clinical trial led by Stanford Medicine found that the metabolic effects of a ketogenic diet may help stabilize the brain. Read more: stan.md/49jeMZa
#bipolar #mentalillness #newtreatment
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Alert: @KenDBerryMD tells me his X account has been hacked/hijacked.
Please ignore any further tweets from his account until X can restore it and we let you know it's back in his control.
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Sad that perhaps the best article ever published in a major newspaper on the tragic (tip of the iceberg) problem of benzodiazepine dependence is the obituary of Dr. heather Ashton, who defined the problem and pioneered the solution. nytimes.com/2020/01/03/scien…
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Takeaways from the year in nutrition at the NYT: if you're human, low carb seems a good idea; mice should do low fat. And time your eating. Other species are still up in the air. nyti.ms/2Tbq4YO
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A #calorie is a calorie? Is the #EnergyBalanceHypothesis of #obesity correct? Is it the right paradigm to understand the disorder? Thinking of #obesity as an energy-balance disorder is as meaningless as calling poverty a money-balance problem.
aeon.co/essays/sugar-is-a-to…
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A friend and classical scholar tells me that gladiators in ancient Rome ate vegetarian "mostly plant" diets, as we're told to do today.
Why? Apparently they wanted to be fatter than the typical Roman. .
From a 2008 article in Archeology Magazine: bit.ly/2q4zdGf
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Endorsements for my new book, The Case for Keto, demonstrate that this is no longer fringe science but has to be taken seriously.
Read the first chapter for free here:
gary-taubes.ck.page/30b0a6a3…
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More thought provoking from @jordanbpeterson . Getting the right answer requires asking the right question. Re obesity, as DuBois noted 80 years ago, it's not why some of us are fat that's the mystery, it's why anyone isn't. So many calories, so many ways to fool our appetites.
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After decades researching and writing books on #nutrition, #obesity and #ChronicDisease, I ponder... Can a diet (#Atkins) that allowed me to achieve and maintain a healthy weight so effortlessly be an unhealthy #diet, one that will shorten my life? theglobeandmail.com/opinion/…
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This is how bad science corrupts for generations. 20 yrs ago, UK-epidemiologists launch EPIC-Oxford studying cancer and lifestyle. Back then dietary fat is the only acceptable nutritional hypothesis. So no questions are asked (apparently) about sugar or quality of carbs.
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Just 'cause the MDs got salt physiology so wrong, is no reason for skepticism about, say, obesity. Is it? nyti.ms/2pX9XCT
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Excellent analysis by @bigfatsurprise on the USDA trying to sweep low-carb diet research under the rug at precisely the time we need the best possible advice on achieving and maintaining metabolic health.
One of most promising solutions to fight #COVID19 has yet to enter nat'l conversation-better nutrition. Diet-related conditions (obesity, hypertension etc) increase risk for worse outcomes. We need #DietaryGuidelines reform. By @bigfatsurprise in @WSJ: bit.ly/Teicholz-COVID
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Yep, seems like the right advice to me. Seems like the word is out.
Victor Oladipo is Back...
bit.ly/2iZZzpy
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Stephen Hawking, of all people, on obesity. I'd change my mind to agree with him, but then we'd both be wrong read.bi/2gcmydY
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The Economist: "The case against sugar is gaining traction" and "compelling" in review of my book econ.st/2hTDCWf Pre-oder at Amazon
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20 years ago when I was doing my first NYT Magazine article on obesity, George Cahill, former science director of HHMI, told me Veech was the smartest graduate student he'd ever had. Studied with Krebs. Did remarkable, unheralded work.
Richard (Bud) Veech, the Unknown Scientist Behind the Ketogenic Diet Craze Dies at 84 medium.com/p/richard-bud-vee…
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“The conventional wisdom on weight loss—eat less, move your body more—has failed tens of millions of Americans,” writes Gary Taubes. wsj.com/articles/the-keto-wa… via @WSJ
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It's 2018, and @nytimes op-ed writers (@4fishgreenberg ) still confuse correlation with causality. Is it too much to expect scientific literacy (and basic logic) from the paper of record? nyti.ms/2O6ZHld
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More signs of the paradigm shifting. From a @washingtonpost oped by on food insecurity: "Our success with carbohydrates, however, has had a serious downside: a worldwide plague of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases." wapo.st/2VqjC2i
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