Results for: low carb
The Rosedale Diet: Here We Go Again
Ron Rosedale, MD has devised a “powerful program based on the new science of leptin.” “Finally — the ultimate diet for fast, safe weight loss, lifelong health, and longer life…” He suggests it will prevent or improve high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, and a host of other ills. He repeats the CAM canard that “doctors only treat symptoms” and...
Dr. Oz and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Dr. Mehmet Oz is one of the most well-known, and possibly the most influential medical doctor in America. The Dr. Oz Show is broadcast in 118 countries and reaches over 3 million viewers in the USA alone. When Oz profiles a product or supplement on his show, sales explode – it’s called “The Dr. Oz Effect”. Regrettably, Oz routinely and consistently gives...
Gary Taubes and the Cause of Obesity
Gary Taubes has written two books explaining why people get fat and why a low-carb diet is the solution to preventing and treating obesity. He didn’t like what I had to say about his books on this blog back in 2011. I was not the only one to criticize. Another reviewer accused him of “abandon[ing] journalistic and scientific integrity in place of...
Gluten-free skin and beauty products: Extracting cash from the gullible
Gluten-free doesn't make sense for a lot of diets. Except for lip balm and toothpaste, it makes an order of magnitude less sense for beauty products.
The Diet Fix
Diets fail. Not just often, but almost always—90% of the time. If diets worked we wouldn’t have a worldwide obesity problem. And obesity is a problem that needs to be solved. The prevalence of obesity has doubled since 1980. As a public health issue, there are few determinants of illness that are more destructive, as obesity contributes to the growing rates of...
Steven Fowkes (Part 2 of 2): Nutrients for Better Mental Performance
Last week, in part 1, I covered Steven Fowkes’ “cures” for Alzheimer’s and herpes. In part 2, I will cover a video where he goes further afield. It is titled “Nutrients for Better Mental Performance,” but he also discusses sleep, depression, hangovers, and a lot of other topics. Some of what he says are simple truisms: mental performance is affected by everything...
TIME Magazine, Dr. Oz, What to Eat, and Supplements
Here on SBM we have frequently had cause to criticize the media for poor science reporting and for spreading misinformation. Among many other individual offenders, we have criticized Dr. Oz for promoting alternative medicine on his TV show and gullibly promoting guests who pretend to talk to the dead and pretend to heal people with carnival sideshow tricks. We tend to be...
Why We Get Fat
Journalist Gary Taubes created a stir in 2007 with his impressive but daunting 640-page tome Good Calories, Bad Calories. Now he has written a shorter, more accessible book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It to take his message to a wider audience. His basic thesis is that: The calories-in/calories-out model is wrong. Carbohydrates are the cause of obesity...
Evolutionary Medicine
I have been asked to review a pre-publication proof of a book that will be published in May 2009: Evolution Rx: A Physician’s Guide to Harnessing Our Innate Capacity for Health and Healing by William Meller, MD. It offers “a primal yet radical new view of why we act and feel the way we do, why we get sick and how we...
Calories In – Calories Out
There is general agreement that the US, and the West in general, is in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Even if you think this is alarmist or overstating the situation, the data clearly shows a steady expansion of the American waistline. Weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry and is an active area of research, and yet all the self-help books,...