On Good Calories, Bad Calories: Your questions answered Part I

In your exhaustive reading, did you come across much that would address this issue?

I came across much that addressed it, but nothing that clarified it. First I have doubts about the value of either postprandial or fasting lipids as predictors of heart disease. As my book makes clear, these can be easily misinterpreted. Different nutrients have different effects on a whole range of "risk factors" and so the key is what they do in total -- hence, the idea of metabolic syndrome and the cluster of abnormalities that it constitutes -- and not how they effect one particular aspect. Another problem with what you're doing is you're not giving yourself time to adjust to the different diets. Thus, the measurements after six month on a diet might be different than the measurements after one day or six days. What we're interested in is what the diet does in the long term, not the short term. If you're overweight, then one effect of the low-carb diet could be caused by the mobilization of fatty acids from the fat tissue. In this case, you want to know what the diet does after your weight has stabilized on it. So there are a lot of issues. The only way to really make sense of this stuff is to long-term randomized control trials and see what happens. Anything short of that, and particularly anything observational or anecdotal, leaves itself open to misinterpretation.

 

I understand that the tome you published was actually pared down from an original manuscript of more than 700 pages. Will there be any way that those of us who are interested in this topic will be able to access the information that you left out of this book?

Well, at one point I had an unfinished draft that was 400,000 words long -- twice as long as the book itself. I'd like to think that nothing substantive was lost in the paring down that followed, but I could be wrong. If I have the time and resources someday, I will do a website and then some of this material may be available. At the moment, though, I'm dedicated my free time (i.e., not that time required to earn a living) trying to convince the medical research and public health communities to take the hypotheses I describe in the book seriously, so that they could be tested.