Does anybody listen to Sam Felton's Smash the Fat podcasts? I sometimes do and about fell out of my chair (no doubt from a lack of carbs) when he introduced the rather infamously caustic an vitriol filled 'carbsane'. He's letting her talk, and I think in her mind that's a good thing. The saying "better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" comes to mind.

He's quite the gentleman, I'll give him that. Not sure I can stomach this all the way to the end.

Oh the nausea...
I'm not sure I could listen to that either.

Did she try to explain to Sam why his experiment isn't valid?

She chided him for mot expressing enough about how filling some foods were over others. And is positive that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, because apparently there was only ever one study result anybody should pay attention to. Mostly some blithering nonsense, I couldn't take it through the whole thing.

I always read her handle as CarbInsane, since she obviously is suffering from carb-induced brain fog.

My favorite quote was "people saying they are addicted to carbs is ridiculous! That's like people saying they couldn't do a low-fat diet because they are addicted to fat!" Um, yeah. Duh. I am addicted to fat. And I can eat as much as I want without gaining weight and becoming diseased. Because my body requires it for nourishment, inconsequential stuff like that. All things that cannot be said about carbs.

Okay, dish. Who/what is this carbsane, of whom you speak?

What does whether or not people can become addicted to carbs have to do with whether or not they can become addicted to fat? Alcohol is a food, you'd have to be kind of silly to say that it's impossible to become addicted to it.


I actually do think that carbohydrate addiction could could make it hard to do a low fat diet, though, whether fat addiction as such is a thing or not. Not many people find themselves nibbling compulsively at butter or pure lard. Oreos are another story.

We don't become addicted to "tobacco" usually. We become addicted to tobacco delivered through cigarettes, or through a pipe, or as chewing tobacco. Okay, it's all tobacco--but there's an element of conditioning that involves the actual form the drug is delivered in. If your sugar delivery system was fat-free candy, or coca-cola--then maybe it wouldn't interfere with a low fat diet. But if sugar/carb addiction took the form of doughnuts, oreo cookies etc.--that whole package, including the fat, gets associated with that hit of sugar.

http://carbsanity.blogspot.co.uk/

But you have been warned

Just some nutcase who claims she tried low-carb a while back, it didn't work for her, only calorie restriction did, ergo, only calorie restriction matters to all people, ever. No exceptions. "Well, yeah, there are all these studies, but people ignore this ONE, ONCE that backs up my belief on how the world works, therefore they are all ignorant rabble!" I swear, she was completely and blissfully unaware of how contradictory and anti-logic her statements were.

Coming across somebody more egomaniacal and less open-minded would be possible. In theory, I suppose.

She has lots of followers though who post many comments on her blog - most of them about all the science that proves low carb, saturated fat, animal fat, etc, is deadly for health, yet all the delusional low carbers and paleo folks refuse to believe the evidence!

She has a special hate for Jimmy Moore, but has nasty things to say about anyone who is friends with Jimmy or associates with him, such as Seam Croxton or Tim Naughton. She seems to live for ripping low carb/paleo to shreds. Yet I'm still not exactly sure what she *does* recommend people eat. Here is a typical quote from one of her followers: Lately Carbsane has moved away from Jimmy a little to spend some time ripping Nina Teicholz to shreds.

Yes. I read some of her vitriol on Amazon where she sweeps in to heap criticism and hatred on any book that recommends low carb or criticizes the war on fat. I think Amazon is wrong to let her use their site as her soapbox.

I am impressed that she spelled the word disdain correctly.

Best wishes
From the untreated mentally ill
Barb L

Akk. She gets into this low fat diet that supposedly reversed diabetes--because the people could eat as much as 500 carbohydrates a day and still be off insulin. Denise Minger reported a similar thing in a recent Ancestral Health talk--people on the rice diet supposedly reversing their diabetes, and even being able to loosen up their diet with time--although during the question period, she admits that this basically amounts to adding a bit of lean protein to the diet. The rice diet was extremely low fat, allowing plain rice, fruit, and unlimited amounts of sugar.

This is a problem of definition of diet. Assuming going in that what's claimed is true. If a person can't eat carbohydrate without dysregulated fat and glucose metabolism--because dysregulation of glucose metabolism pretty much inevitably means dysregulation of fat metabolism--we call this carbohydrate intolerance. Obviously not eating carbs doesn't reverse this, it just avoids the carbohydrate. But it does address the fat intolerance very well, doesn't it? A high fat meal no longer results in an inappropriately sustained level of blood triglycerides, if a person goes on a low carb diet, in most cases.

Switch to the low fat, for people it works for. Maybe glucose tolerance goes way up. But these people had better never return to the SAD, high fat and high carb diet. Adding glucose to a low carb diet exposes the fact that low carb doesn't permanently cure a carbohydrate intolerance, I'll accept that.

It seems equally obvious that a diet almost devoid of fat doesn't cure a fat tolerance--because adding fat to a low fat diet also exposes the fact that low fat doesn't permanently cure a fat intolerance, it just sidesteps the issue, just as a low carb diet sidesteps the issue of glucose intolerance.

Looked at this way, it's a problem of metabolic flexibility, and it becomes reasonable that two radically differing dieting strategies could both be therapeutic. Calling one strategy a cure, the other not, involves ignoring a good part of the disease. This seems ludicrously obvious.

If we have a choice of glucose tolerance, or fat tolerance, which should we choose?

Hint; Denise's video includes a newspaper clip where the founder of the Rice Diet admits that he sometimes whipped his patients to encourage compliance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFfK27B_qZY

I am quite literally "untreated mentally ill," having had psychotic breaks that I would categorize as both schizophrenic and manic. Against a back-drop of life-long social anxiety. I deeply resent implications that ideas put forth by people like me should be disregarded. Or that my choices, such as being on a ketogenic diet, are categorically wrong. Mentally ill doesn't equal stupid.

If it's true that people like me are over-represented in the low-carb community--I have no idea either way--maybe it's for the same reason that overweight or diabetic people are over-represented--because we get something positive out of the diet. Correlation might imply causation sometimes, but even when it does, which is cause, and which the effect?

Something mania can do--cause a person to leave way more weird comments on low carb blogs than he normally might. Manic individuals might be over-represented in all sorts of blogs, of various interests.