Looks like it just started. The episode with Peter Ballerstedt (the “sodfather”, who advocates for ruminants like cows) is a whopping 4 hours long. And he’s got another almost 5 hours over 2 podcasts with Gary Taubes. Yikes. That might take me a while to get through.
I’ll report back.
I corrected the title (misspelled “Dave”, which one would think is near impossible to make, but I did it).
I’m almost half way through the “Sodfather” discussion. They discussed completely replacing ruminants with plants, and Peter brings up so many issues I never thought about. Case in point: a lot of fertilizer used, particularly in poorer countries, is manure. If you have no ruminants, what replaces that?
He brings up so many complexities, like the various types of soils, and which ones are suitable to grow plants. He also discussed new systems where they use animals on the fields. So, you grow soybeans, but then you grow forage plants and let animals graze there, then grow soybeans again. This was apparently a success, as the forage grew better, as did the soybeans, and you also got forage for ruminants. How does that factor into a calculation about replacing animals?
These are only the things my feeble brain can remember.
I listened to about 3/4 of the Sodfather’s podcast, then listed to both of the Gary Taubes ones. I’ve always thought that Taubes had a great view of how science should be done. For instance, he says (and this is based on many others) that once you decide a certain path is the correct one, you’re done. You see everything through the lens of that path.
He gave the example of a paper he liked about genetics and obesity. He read the paper and thought that it had evidence of his ideas (fuel partitioning causes obesity), and he gave it to someone to read. That person believed that CICO (calories in, calories out) caused obesity, read the same article, and got nothing out of it about fuel partitioning. Gary said he was stunned, but then said he realizes that once you choose a belief system, it affects everything you do and read.
They did get sidetracked a few times to lipids, familial hypercholesterolemia (FH, a genetic disorder causes high LDL, etc. (My own belief: LDL is not causal for atherosclerosis; something else is causal, but LDL is associated with the damage caused by whatever the causal thing is, which could be oxidized or damaged LDL, and a whole host of other items. But LDL and FH are complex.)
I think Gary brought up quite a few ideas of how to test his theory of fuel partitioning (basically, some people put calories into fat, some don’t, and the amount of calories could be immaterial – a person could become obese eating a lot fewer calories than a person who never becomes obese). They sounded good to me, but once you believe everything is calories, they don’t make sense to those folks.
I’m assuming Taubes was saying that this approach of “being done” is a dangerous conclusion?
It makes sense to “be done” as long as the decision as to which path is correct is actually a correct decision.
I assume we all agree that “good science” is never done.
Prior conclusions remain subject to replication testing, improved variable controls, enhanced statistical models, exploring the chance of a type 1 or 2 error, etc.
I occasionally find myself in the same trap. When I was reporting on Taubes’ The Case Against Sugar, I wanted to say that he claimed it might be possible to reverse the trend of childhood diabetes by mothers maintaining a sugar-free / keto diet shortly before and during pregnancy, to limit insulin exposure to the fetus. That, like thalidomide, excess insulin only affects a fetus/infant for life, by interfering with normal fetal development, if it is directly exposed. Went back and reread it and I have to laugh, that is clearly MY hypothesis, not his, but I was ready to report for God and country about “his” idea.
If you apply that to biomedicine and the fields we talk about the most here (CICO, LDL and atherosclerosis, and a few others) I have a stronger agreement than with other sciences. There are more issues with confusing correlation and causation in these than in physics or harder sciences.
More accurately, I should have said that good science is never finished. Always more to learn. 
@SomeGuy That’s basically it. Once you select something, you only look for that thing. His current “obsession” seems to be that everyone believes CICO – you get heavy because you "overeat’. But he can cite to multiple sources where they thought that fuel partitioning was a more likely cause – people can eat fewer calories yet gain more weight than others.
@CFLBob Gary made the remarks that he does not call the people “scientists” in the nutrition/food area, because they basically are trying to prove (instead of DISprove) what they believe in. He said he might get back to “real scientists”, and he gave physics as an example.
To me, fuel partitioning seems more likely, though I can’t wrap my head around exactly what that means. Insulin play a role, but once you start looking at how complex the body is, you get into all these hormones, especially the satiety ones like GLP-1, but there are so many of them…
Take what happens to me often: I won’t be hungry at dinner, but everyone will be eating, so I will too. I’ll start with something small, eat it, then get something else, eat it, etc., until sometimes I’ve eaten more than I normally would, while starting from not being hungry at all. Why is this? And how does this relate to “fuel partitioning”?
Whether it’s a learned behavior or biology-driven, we tend to use highly palatable food as pleasurable entertainment. I’m not getting up to grab another piece of Halloween candy because I’m energy deficient. I’m not hungry, I’m looking for what might be a dopamine hit. It is a joyous and positive feeling in my mouth. Honestly I’d probably be just as happy to swish and chew and manipulate a bite of something delicious and then spit it out, if that were the convention. I sometimes imagine a sort of tracheotomy that would allow for all that plus swallowing, with no digestive consequence.
[Might make a useful experiment - equip 50% of rats with an esophageal diverter, and then give all unlimited access to highly palatable foods. Is there any notable difference in how much the two groups nosh?]
As far as fuel partitioning … for me it’s almost like luck of the draw. I will choose my dopamine hit from what’s available, so having things available that are ostensibly better for me and partition more beneficially, that which is not going to lay a layer of fat on my liver, or that which is not going to skyrocket my blood glucose, is a helpful way to guide my choice.
@ctviggen - Bob, have you subscribed to the paid version of Taubes’ Uncertainty Principles Substack? I keep thinking I should and then getting stubborn about my determination not to be paying for information. So I get the teasers in my inbox and then reconsider it every few weeks. If you do, is it worth it … or do you think he’s discussing 95%+ of his thoughts through podcasts and other free venues?
@kib1 I do not (pay to) subscribe to his substack, although he did say that paying subscribers is how he has the money to write his latest book. I’m overwhelmed with costs right now. Just learned we need to replace our septic tank, 5-9k; we need a new roof, 40k; I’d like to replace the last 7 windows in our house, about 1.5k/window; we have one door we haven’t replaced, 3k; we have multiple other things that need done. So, I can’t really pay for his (or any) substack.
The problem, which Gary also points out, is that what a lot of what we eat on keto isn’t what I’d call highly palatable. I’m really mainly eating meat, sometimes with some cheese. I do like some chocolate mouse cups I’ve been making (coconut, chocolate, allulose, some sugar in regular chocolate), but I only eat one of those per night.
The other night, I was not hungry for dinner. I was considering not eating. My wife made beef – I forget what it’s called, but thinner strips of beef, since we can no longer afford steak – and I said, maybe I’ll have one. I ended up eating 5 of them I think. While starting out not hungry.
It’s not chocolate cake, ice cream, cookies, etc., it’s beef. (When we have ice cream for someone’s birthday, the same thing happens – I’ll have two slice of ice cream pie and want another. But those are so many more calories than beef.)
Anyway, I have to do some work, then go get some lug nuts to put my rims on my car, then start making dinners and preparing for the week.
I get it about the money pit disguised as a house, believe me! I was just wondering, as Taubes provides one of the few substacks I find truly thought out and potentially useful, but I still haven’t pulled the trigger on paying for it.
My theory is that I sometimes eat out of a need / sense of reward for something that is not calories. That some foods are providing something else to me - as I say, possibly dopamine. So I may not be hungry, but once I start stimulating that (?) dopamine response, I keep going. It’s definitely not hunger, whether I’m chowing down on my third hot dog or 10th little packet of Smarties, it’s some other kind of feedback loop.
I don’t know that the trigger has to be sweet, or based on a nutritional deficiency, or maybe even highly palatable, as long as it’s got some enjoyment factor. I can find myself going back for another bite of cold chicken, or egg salad, or pretty much anything else I don’t actively dislike. I wouldn’t call it addiction, perhaps, but it is clearly apparent to me with alcohol. If one glass of wine was nice, surely another glass would be equally as enjoyable. Ditto all the other things I like, albeit maybe to a lesser degree.
I try to have food available that isn’t going to completely trash my metabolism, because I know there will be times when I simply need to nibble. While going back for another beef strip might not be particularly economical or slimming, it’s certainly better for the body than another Snickers bar.
I agree, I think it’s very tough to determine why we do things. I am good at not eating crap, and we have a lot of that in our house because we have one child with “arfid”, which basically means she eats a very restricted diet. I give her chocolate milk (made with chocolate sauce that uses fake sugar) because it’s really hard to get her to eat protein.
I think Taubes is more likely correct than the CICO (calories in, calories out) paradigm. But I think it’s unfortunate he mainly uses insulin. As you and I know, it’s more complex than that.
I again had another time when I was not hungry at dinner, yet ate a meal, then more. There is a feedback mechanism in me that I somehow broke.
I do know that meat is better than other foods. There is some feedback there – once I eat some amount meat, I’ll hit a limit where I can’t eat more. Whereas if I eat something like ice cream “cake”, I’ll eat 2 pieces and have to stop myself from eating more.
Gary Taubes brought up a good point, which is that a lot of these “highly processed foods are bad for you” require people to “overeat” because they’re so palatable. Yet he gave the example when he was a teen playing a sport (American football?) and the team would go to a restaurant that provided meat like steak. One time, he ate 7 steaks as a record. Does that mean that steak is hyper-palatable?
I think insulin is one factor, but there’s something else involved that I don’t know what it is.
I’m having a hard time with “Is ‘Ancestral Eating’ Just a Modern Myth” with Alex Leaf. He believes that red meat is causal for cancer and high LDL is causal for atherosclerosis. But then they talk about how keto might allow ketones to feed the cells that might change to become cancerous and how atherosclerosis is multi-factorial.
That makes no sense to me. It might be possible that something else causes atherosclerosis, and higher LDL is an accelerant. But the mere fact you have high LDL doesn’t mean you get atherosclerosis, and they discuss LMHRs (lean mass hyper-responders who have very high LDL yet little or no atherosclerosis) to say this could be true. A similar argument can be made for red meat: it’s not causal but maybe it’s an accelerant (though I think “red meat = cancer” is garbage).
Applying models. They had a discussion of applying models to data. So, you try to “adjust” the data using a model that takes into account things like obesity. I do not like models. I think the chances they provide better evidence are near zero. Even if you could say obesity affects data somehow (which I don’t think you can because the numbers are all from epidemiological studies), once you add in another variable, the chances you know how two variables affect each other are near zero. I think these models are near useless. The human body is so complex that until we know more, models are basically worthless.
Obesity. The interviewee thought, as many do, that losing weight ALONE helps with certain things. But they discussed a study where the people went on a very low calorie diet. What happens then? Well, even if you’re eating higher carb, if you’re eating something like 500 calories a day, you’re changing so many factors, including ketones. Could the benefits come solely or mainly from an increase in ketones?
That transition from a carb-burning body to a higher-ketone-using body causes so many things to happen that I don’t believe you can say that ONLY weight loss causes something.
Listened to a podcast with Chris Palmer (the author of “Brain Energy”) that I think was a study about a few people who went on a keto diet and they had a tremendous response for Schizoaffective disorder. He said that there are so many changes in the brain when you go to a keto diet that you cannot tell what caused the benefit.
I think that’s the same thing that happens with low calorie/keto diets and anything else, and weight is one factor, but not the only one and maybe not the main one.
I don’t think you can say for sure that obesity or weight loss causes something At All. It’s one of three possibilities. The two other possibilities are that the dietary change acts directly somehow on the other issue, and this in turn acts on obesity, in other words the obesity is caused by the issue, not the reverse, or that obesity and the other issue are simply associated, with neither one acting directly on the other.
FWIW, like you, I don’t care to pay for info either. Despite wanting to be supportive of high quality sources, it’s a mindset thing.
… excuse me if this sounds judgmental but these might be discretionary. The payback on utility bill savings difference of 7 new windows (@ $1.5k each) would likely take over 100 yrs. Food for thought.
… and that same $10,500 for windows would buy a lot of high quality steak. 
vs 
House resale value effect vs. joy and health benefits of eating all that steak?
Food for thought.