[chuck]Over at the Church of Awesome I guest on a podcast about fad diets, why they don’t work, and how to actually go about losing weight in a sustainable fashion. They had me on to be the “expert,” but take my dietary and nutritional advice with a huge grain of salt because it is outside my area of expertise — docs don’t get a whole lot of nutrition training, our education is mostly filled with physiology of disease, evidence-based treatments, histology, microbiology, pharmacology, etc etc. Not much room left over in the curriculum for carbs, proteins, and lipids. I feel much more at ease reducing dislocated shoulders, treating high blood pressure, and telling patients why they don’t need antibiotics.

So let me know how many mistakes I made. Re-listening to it yesterday, I think it was more than a few. Maybe I should have communed with the spirits of energy drinks like last time instead of tap water?

10 Responses to “Wherein we discuss fad diets”

  1. Plasticuproject says:

    Wow, two days and no comments? You’re loosing momentum Chuck, but I still love ya. Better hurry up with the new podcast 😉

  2. The mojo is gone. 🙁

  3. Naw, you just need to add some kinda massive overbearing bleating siren whenever you add a new post.

    Also, once the new podcast is up, just advertise on all these other podcasts to get us flowing back again.

  4. Discord.agent says:

    Day two of cabbage soup diet: My roommates have moved out, and my friends are avoiding me. They must be jealous of all the pounds I’m shedding.

  5. hey Chuck I just got finished reading The prophet of Death about the Mormon blood atonement killings by a self proclaimed prophet named Jeffery Lundgren. Hhave you heard of this guy?

  6. Never heard of him. What’s the story?

  7. In Australia nutritionists tend to be quacks, the field is poorly regulated and a lot of the degrees tend to include a lot of alt-med new-age style bullshit. Dieticians are the ones who actually have an evidence based professional association which oversees degrees and practice. Are nutritionists actually good in the US or have you got the same problems as us?

  8. I’m going to try to not sound defensive, like you’re stepping on a sacred cow, but there is one real problematic argument you brought up several times in regard to the paleo diet that bothers me.

    When you talk about life expectancy, you’re talking about about life ended by all causes. Back in pre-civilization, accidental death was much higher. We’re not talking about people who had heart attacks at age 30, but people who fell off cliffs or got eaten by lions or drowned. In fact, life expectancy decreased slightly in the move from pre-agricultural to agricultural societies due to the introduction of rapidly spreading disease in large populations. It isn’t a fair attack to dismiss the concepts by saying “cavemen only lived to be 30.”

    These days, people who study the paleo diet concept tend to compare modern hunter-gatherers and their health (which tend to have a much lower incidence of a lot of common deadly afflictions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer), rather than life expectancy. The goal being not to prevent death as long as possible (since medicine will bring most of us to our 70s no matter what), but prolonged health.

  9. @ Tort: I think you’re right. Registered Dietician is the regulated one here in the US.

    @ Matthew: That comment was leveled at the general sentiment that in the “old days” things were a lot better than they are now. But even that aside, in ancient times infection was the leading cause of death — it’s hard to imagine a time when a simple scratch on your skin could lead to death, but that was the fact for most of human history. The only way to defend yourself was having a strong immune system, for which diet plays a limited role and genetics a much greater one.

    “Prolonged health” is such a nebulous term that it would be hard to quantify how a “paleo diet” would contribute. Remember the twinkie diet, where the guy’s cholesterol actually went down after eating a diet consisting of 99% twinkies for a month. More research needs to be done, but it may be that the health of modern hunter-gatherers may be due to a necessarily constrained caloric intake and a good dose of daily exercise rather than any intrinsic “healthiness” of their diet.

  10. Chuck its about this guy who got this following of people who believed in him because he told them he was getting revelations from god. This guy swindled these people out of their cars and trucks their paychecks he was making them clean his house and dishes just totally unimaginable shit a couple sold their house and just gave him the money and if any one wanted money they had to ask him for it …he stole money from the church that he worked at. Chuck this guy even had affairs with the wives of the men that supported him because as he told them that god told him in a vision that it was to be in order for them to be purified so that he would lead them to actually meet god!!!!!Well the worse thing was he killed 5 people that followed himthe Avery family a man his wife and their three children I think the youngest was 6. he told his followers that they had to die because they were not faithful enough and god wanted a blood sacrifice. he led them out to a barn one by one and shot them in a hole that his followers had dug for him. Chuck I have listened to you and Leighton from the very beginning and was very sad when the podcast ended but love it when you make appearances on other shows I wanted to share this story with you cuz I had never heard of the meadow mountain massacre and did not know if you had heard of this one .