The Worm Turns

I decided to skip the dysfunctional family post for the moment. Can't work up the energy.

And in the meantime, back to the previously scheduled low-carb programming... the big news this week, of course, is the Israeli study... see here for Dr. Eades' writeup, if you haven't seen a billion articles on this already. It's pretty easy to note that (1) no one on any of the diets lost a ton of weight, and (2) the "low carb" diet wasn't really all that low carb, since the researchers picked an arbitrary and quite high 120 carb limit (which I'd call a maintenance maximum, not a "diet" level). But still... even with this, the low-carb numbers came out just the way they should... improvements in triglycerides and HDL, comparable on LDL, and a little higher weight loss.

But the striking thing, in my opinion anyway, is that it seems to me that the world is beginning to change. Maybe this is just hope, but when we started low-carbing, only about 8 months ago or less, it was pretty hard to find any current, mainstream medical references that didn't pretty much dismiss this as an unhealthy fad. There was (and is, of course) a low-carb community of the converted... but it's not something you talk about much, is it? Like politics and religious preferences, it's been something better practiced in the privacy of your own home. But just over this relatively brief period of time, there have been a number of distinctly positive changes... some in things like acceptance by the American Diabetes Association of low-carb as an acceptable diet, some in studies like this recent one. It's not the only thing going on, but there's considerably more positive stuff out there than there used to be. So, while it's still obvious from the reporting on this study that the media retains its customary low-fat bias, the sheer quantity of coverage, mostly in a positive way, is really encouraging.