In a Nutshell ...

A comment on another post by SJ pretty much nails the starch angst pervading the low carb webosphere on the head:

A couple of paleo/primal dieters mention that they're eating potatoes and it's the g*****mn carbocalypse.  Why is it so upsetting to these people that some people feel better when they eat a bit of starch?

Let's presume that is not a rhetorical question and answer it.  This behavior is explained by the fact that somehow carbohydrate restriction has become a religious cult, with all the trappings thereof.  All the lost suffering souls who found solace and redemption after reading Good Calories, Bad Calories in the Church of Taubes.   It makes me very glad that in 2007 when I decided to try one last time to shed the weight I did it on my own, telling nobody but my immediate family that I was even doing it, and just going from memory doing a pretty clean Atkins induction.  The Church of Taubes sucks you in.  For all their knocking of Weight Watchers, the Church is a virtual group where your voice is heard, you are accepted unconditionally and you find all the love and support you've been missing from your conventional-wisdom-steeped doctors, friends and family.  In 2009, after losing the weight, I found LLVLC forum.  There are a lot of very nice people there supporting one another in their weight loss efforts, extolling the virtues of low carbing, assuring one another that carbs are like rat poison, insulin is the devil hormone and Taubes is a genius.  When you leave the cult, you lose a lot of support and friendship you've come to lean on and it's hard to find that on the outside.  Cults are famous for targeting the disenfranchised.

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Eocene Diet Follow-up

Now that WHS readers around the globe have adopted the Eocene Diet and are losing weight at an alarming rate, it's time to explain the post a little more.  First, credit where credit is due: Melissa McEwen made a similar argument in her 2011 AHS talk, where she rolled out the "Cambrian Explosion Diet", which beats the Eocene Diet by about 470 million years.  It was probably in the back of my head somewhere when I came up with the idea.

April Fools day is good for a laugh, but humor often has a grain of truth in it.  In this case, the post was a jumping off point for discussing human evolution and what it has to say about the "optimal" human diet, if such a thing exists.  Here's a preview: evolution is a continuous process that has shaped our ancestors' genomes for every generation since the beginning of life.  It didn't end with the Paleolithic, in fact it accelerated, and most of us today carry meaningful adaptations to the Neolithic diet and lifestyle. 

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Soiled Sport's 2012 Fat Ass Series, Run #1

Divide by Zero: Weird Math in CMS Clinical Quality Measure (CQM) Criteria

From the CMS "Medicare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program - ATTESTATION USER GUIDE For Eligible Professionals (EPs)" (warning: large PDF), page 41/64:

... Step 25 – Core Clinical Quality Measures (CQMs 1 of 3)

EPs must report calculated CQMs directly from their certified EHR technology as a requirement of the EHR Incentive Programs. Each EP must report on three core CQMs (or alternate core) and three additional quality measures. If one or more core CQMs is outside your scope of practice, you will have to report on an equal number of alternate core CQM(s).

If the denominator value for all three of the core CQMs is zero, an EP must report a zero denominator for all such core measures, and then must also report on all three alternate core CQMs.

If the denominator value for all three of the alternate core CQMs is also zero an EP still needs to report on three additional clinical quality measures. Zero is an acceptable denominator provided that this value was produced by certified EHR technology.

Now, while I had an "800" in the math section of the SAT, where I believed that a fraction with a denominator of zero had a value of either infinity or 'undefined', that was many moons ago. Perhaps my knowledge of mathematics is now obsolete...

Wait - I tried this simple program on an old Microsoft MS-DOS GWBASIC interpreter, ported ca. 1981 to the Intel 8086/88 from Bill Gates' original 8080-based MBASIC, that I have laying around on my PC:

10 INPUT X
20 LET Y=X/0
30 PRINT Y
40 END

and got this warning/error message, right from Bill Gates:

"Division by zero"

and the answer: 1.701412E+38 (infinity in the 8/16-bit world from where GWBASIC sprang).

So ... allow me to say I find CMS math just a bit puzzling.

Wait ... now I understand.

Infinite quality! :-)

But thank heavens the zero denominator is only accepted when produced by 'certified' health IT.

Uncertified health IT is liable to produce a denominator of "i" (that is, the square root of -1).

-- SS

Addendum: since I am not a government math genius, I checked with Wikipedia:

... A common fraction (also known as a vulgar fraction or simple fraction) is a rational number written as a/b or , where the integers a and b are called the numerator and the denominator, respectively.^[1] The numerator represents a number of equal parts and the denominator, which cannot be zero, indicates how many of those parts make up a unit or a whole.

-- SS

Addendum:

This post is partly satire. I was a day late for April 1 but...

-- SS

Is Atkins the Schticky of the Diet World?

About a month or so ago, I started seeing infomercials for the Schticky.  That whack Sham Wow guy is back hawking the reusable silicone lint roller.  There's a similar product being peddled by the heir to the late Billy Mays.  It struck me as funny because I have one of those things around here somewhere.  My inherited pack rat gene does not allow me to throw the thing away though we never use it.  It's something we have courtesy of the hubs' ex, so I know it is at least twenty years old.  

Which got me thinking about the Atkins diet and low carbing in general.  And the name "Schticky" brings with it its own connotations vis a vis one Gary Taubes use of the word schtick in describing scientists.  The similarities are many:

• It works very well the first time on most things
• It has come back after a hiatus from the "As Seen on TV" world
• It doesn't work as well after you wash it, especially if you don't let it dry fully before using it the next time
• It comes with a 10 year warranty implying it will work for the long haul.  (For the record, mine still works, but it's not been used more than a handful of times for all these years)
• It works well on lint, but the promoters over sell it for all sorts of uses it would be inefficient to use it for
• Having one in the house keeps you from buying one of those good old fashioned masking tape style rollers that work every time for the original purpose so long as you have a fresh sheet on them.
• There's the Schticky and then there are knock-offs

As Fatman's sidekick boy wonder Glucagon was trying to explain why obesity hasn't been cured even though low carbing has been around for eons, I couldn't help but think of the Schticky.  Why would anyone have anything else if this thing really did deliver on all the promises -- and all for $19.95!!  Waging his war on insulin, Peter Attia MD (never practiced medicine after residency) is the new Vince Offer (that's the crazy Sham Wow dude's name) of low carb.  He was the co-sponsor of Taubes' publicity stunt wherein between the petition and many who left comments essentially bemoaned how Tara Parker-Pope was 60 lbs overweight because she just hadn't applied the right cure.  Perhaps she should try a Schticky to remove the fat ;-)  As I tweeted, Attia misses the point.  Atkins has (a) been around forever, and (b) been repackaged and resold over and over and over.  And yet not only has it not replaced the need for any other approach to weight loss, the landscape is littered with "users" left wanting.  Much like that Schticky in my drawer ...