CBC news: Shut the fuck up about fat

This, from our esteemed (cough) friends the CBC health reporters:

• Parents fatten up

Er, yeah. So the basic premise of this article is that fat is the enemy — the Great Satan of the great dietary jihad. For instance:

Adults with children in the home ate more prepackaged foods and convenient foods that are often loaded with fat, such as ice cream and salty snacks.

Yeah. The only thing that’s bad about, say, ice cream and potato chips is their fat content. This is the bit that pisses me off — there’s more to good health than not eating fat. Remember the wildly popular low-fat diets of the ’80s, ’90s, and — okay, you know the popular low-fat diets? Notice the proliferation of “low-fat” foods these days? Notice the number of obese people clogging up escalators around the continent? Yeah. Low-fat doesn’t work too well, does it?

Look, this goes back to my earlier comment on armchair nutrition. The complicating factor — the one that CBC haven’t figured out yet — is that people have these things called metabolisms, which take stuff (say, food) and turn it into other stuff (say, fat — or muscle, or turpentine, or whatever).
It’s awfully appealing to suggest that fat in your food turns into fat in your ass, but it just ain’t so. Fat in your ass comes from excess glucose in your bloodstream, via a process known as lipogenesis. Now, part of the problem comes from the fact that this blood glucose can be created from more things than just (say) dietary glucose, or saturated fat, or whatever the boogeyman-of-the-week is.

Smile, it gets worse. See, the body being what it is, lipogenesis is affected by far more than just blood sugar. (Would it were that simple!) There’s quite a bit of hormonal involvement in lipogenesis, some of which we understand, most of which I certainly do not understand. So now, instead of just reducing dietary fat (stupidly simplistic) or reducing dietary glucose (mildly simplistic), you have to worry about hormonal effects too. (And don’t worry, diet affects hormones as well.)

But wait, there’s more! See, the problem with unadulterated simple carbs is that they all dump glucose into the bloodstream at once. Your cells pick off the blood sugar they need, and the rest gets sucked up in lipogenesis (and starts convincing your pancreas that producing insulin is really a stupid idea, putting you at risk for diabetes). But suppose you eat something with those simple carbs — fibre, say — that delays their absorption into the bloodstream. Suddenly, you don’t have nearly as great a blood-sugar spike! So not only do you have to consider how many grams of simple carbs, or saturated fat, or whatever, are in your food — you have to consider what else is in your food along with it, and how they interact!

Oh, and you’ve got to do all this without forgetting that calories still count, no matter where they come from, so the fact that fish oil has EPA and DHA and all sorts of delightful essential fatty acids doesn’t quite negate the fact that it’s still fat, still has 9 calories per gram, and still turns into adipose tissue if you don’t burn it up somehow.

This shit ain’t simple.

On the other hand, if you convince yourself that saturated fat is the root of all evil, you start giving advice like this (from the CBC article):

• Choose popcorn or low-salt pretzels over high-fat potato chips.
• Avoid cooking in butter, lard or solid stick margarine to decrease your intake of saturated fats; try baking or cooking in olive oil.

Low-salt pretzels. Yeah, that’s basically nothing but white flour — read blood sugar. Shit, at least if you’re eating chips there’s the slim chance that some of the oil will slow the absorption of the carbs and spare your poor long-suffering kidneys.

Oh, and butter vs. olive oil? Well, now, leaving aside the question of how your choice of cooking lipid interacts with the rest of the food you’re cooking — it may of course be entirely irrelevant — butter does have some things in it that olive oil doesn’t, with which you may wish to supplement your diet — CLA, for instance. Olive oil, on the other hand — particularly the extra virgin variety — decomposes rather quickly at (relatively) low temperatures, producing some rather unpleasant compounds. (Extra-virgin olive oil is, on the other hand, an outstanding choice if you’re cooking at lower temperatures, or making a dressing.)

Finally, we have this sanctimonious turd:

The researchers did not look at Canadians’ eating habits. According to a Canadian report on snacking trends released in the fall, fruit and yogurt are among the top snack choices in this country.

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of fat-assed Canadians snacking on fat-free yoghurt. That seems to make all the difference.

Look.  Quit searching for single-easy-answers like “fat makes you fat” or “carbs make you fat” or “trans fats kill you at 17″.  Do a little bit of research into your diet — after all, it’s pretty fucking important, it’s worth twenty minutes a week on T-Nation.  Display some skepticism and investigative initiative.  Keep a log of what you’ve tried and whether it worked.  It’s not simple, but it doesn’t have to be terrifyingly difficult, either.

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 9

Yep, I found another beer. This one’s Sand Creek Brewing Company’s Badger Porter. It’s delightfully bittersweet, and very smooth.  (Note that Sand Creek Brewing Company is based in Black River, WI — not Colorado.)

Er, I’m afraid that I’m running out of original compliments for American minibrew porters. Badger Porter is excellent beer. It’s a shame that this country’s (in)famous for fizzy yellow stuff like Bud Light (or is it “Lite” yet?) when it could export such tasty dark beers.

An administrative matter: comments

A handful of people (and a handful of spammers) have submitted abysmally written comments, which I have deleted out of hand.  I will continue to do this, of course, but I thought it sporting to announce it.  If you can’t string together even a glancingly correct English sentence, don’t bother commenting.

I will make an exception: poor writing (particularly leetsp34k) for ironic effect is acceptable.

So long, Saddam

Not that this comes as a surprise:

• Saddam Hussein executed in Iraq from the Beeb

Whether you believe that Hussein’s execution was an example of justice, or a piece of American propaganda, or something else entirely: Saddam Hussein was — going by what he did, regardless of why he did it or who encouraged or paid him to do so — a piece of shit, and I’m pleased that he’s no longer breathing my air.

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 8

As you may have guessed by my (alas, only slightly) unusual absence, I’m in Milwaukee now. Can someone explain to me why United Airlines is perfectly happy to cancel a flight when the scheduled flight attendant cannot or will not show up? Surely they must have other qualified flight attendants near their major hubs (this flight was out of Chicago-O’Hare International Airport) who’d be delighted to stand in (presumably for time-and-a-half) when the scheduled staffer can’t make it (being — let us generously suppose — stuck in Denver during one of their recent two-foot snowstorms).

In any case, we should move on to happier things.

In paticular, we should move on to Breckenridge Brewery’s “remarkable” and “partakable” Vanilla Porter. It’s a vanilla-flavoured beer in the same general vein as Granville Island’s Lions Winter Ale, but richer and more subtly flavoured. Unsurprisingly, like Flying Dog, Breckenridge beers hail from Colorado. One might be forgiven for speculating that Colorado has passed Ireland and the Czech Republic in terms of beer mastery and is nipping closely at Belgium’s heels. (Of course, one may be overwhelmingly North American, and thus subject to accusations of bias — but at the same time, one might tell such an accuser to shut the fuck up.)

So, back to the porter. It’s rich without being sweet, a fine improvement over Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. It’s very — very! — drinkable; it’s one of the best beers I’ve ever tasted. Buy some if you find it.

Jack Reape returns!

Jack Reape, the nemesis of periodization bullshit (or wait, is that Dan John?), has returned to Testosterone Nation:

• Periodization Nuts and Bolts by Jack Reape

This is the sort of thing for which I admire Jack Reape:

The key to using periodization isn’t necessarily the planning involved before you start to train, but the ability to monitor what you’ve done in the recent and not so recent past.

Those of you who also read John Farnam’s quips will recognize the presence of the insidious dictum: “Reality is always right”.  If you can bring yourself to work from reality, rather than from a convenient oversimplification of reality that makes you feel good, you’ll get better results.

More Jack Reape right here:

• Jack Reape on T-Nation

There’s no fixed origin

…well, at least not in geometric terms.  Any origin you pick ought to do the job.

(It’s been a while since I wrote about research-y stuff.)

Briefly: if you’re working with geometry in a basis given by a set of linearly independent vectors, your points will themselves be vectors — giving the coefficients of each basis vector in a linear combination.  The “origin” is whatever point in space corresponds to the zero vector.

Put that way, it should be pretty obvious that there’s no fixed choice of origin — it can be anywhere.  In fact, it’s fairly easy to move your origin around — just translate everything else in the world.

Taken even further, it’s sometimes useful to deal with multiple origins for the same set of geometry.  After all, an origin is just a point in space, right?  It’s easy to go from one origin to another when needed, so why not pick the origin that’s most convenient for any given chunk of geometry?  (How useful this is depends on your application, of course.)

Had I kept in mind that there’s nothing special about any particular origin when I wrote code a year and a quarter ago, I might’ve saved myself a few weeks of debugging just now when my implicit assumption that there’s one global origin became shockingly obsolete.

Once again, reality beats pseudoscience

This time, it’s faddish “detox” diets:

• Are we really what we eat? from the Daily Mail

Now this is what I like to see: restrained, well-researched health reporting firmly grounded in the real world.  Here’s the money shot:

So did the detox regime cleanse our testers’ bodies to a superior degree?

No. Livers and kidneys were functioning just as well in both groups, while both also had similar concentrations of antioxidant vitamins.

There is no evidence to show that starving ourselves rids us of the toxins that we like to think are clogging our bodies: our liver and kidneys are the perfect detox machines already. Most people lose weight on a detox diet simply because they have reduced calorie intake.

(Okay, calling the liver and kidneys “perfect detox machines” is stretching things just a little — ethylene glycol, anyone? — but for the most part the article is delightfully free of such lapses.)

The pseudoscience that’s getting its ass kicked by reality here is armchair nutrition: appealingly simple and eminently plausible notions about health and nutrition that fail to account for the human metabolism.  In this case, the eminently plausible notion is that ridding your diet of anything questionable will also rid your bloodstream of anything questionable.  Other famous notions of similar plausibility (and veracity) include “you get fat by eating fat” and “you get high cholesterol by eating lots of cholesterol”.

This is not to say that diet doesn’t matter, of course.  From the above article:

We wanted to see if cholesterol and blood pressure could be lowered through diet alone. Some scientists say you just have to say no to junk food, alcohol and sugary snacks, and eat the same basic diet as our ancestors did.

Archaeological research tells us that the human diet in 180,000BC consisted mostly of vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, with a little lean meat and fish. In other words, a high-fibre diet rich in plants and unsaturated fat and low in saturated fats.

We asked a group of junk food-loving volunteers to try out the “evo” (evolutionary) diet for 10 days. Blood and urine samples were taken, as well as blood pressure readings. After 10 days, our volunteers’ blood cholesterol had reduced by nearly a quarter and their blood pressure was down by about 10 per cent.

I don’t particularly buy the notion that we need to eat like desperate hunter-gatherers to lower our heart-disease risk factors.  That’s one step removed from the simplistic falsehoods the article just debunked: “Just eat the food you evolved to eat” is all well and good, but I find it difficult to believe that our ancestors were always able to eat optimal diets.   There’s a clue in here, though: “eat like your ancestors” suggests that we’ve evolved to process some foods more efficiently than others.  So, let’s seek out those foods and see what happens when we metabolize them.

And for more on that subject, I direct the interested reader to Testosterone Nation.