A calorie is a calorie is a calorie... NOT!

The great Richard Feynman lends his formidable talent and name to debunking certain misconceptions in the nutrition establishment. In particular, that the possibility of metabolic advantage resulting from low carb diets is in fact consistent with thermodynamics.

A Low-Carb "Aha" Moment

One of the blogs I follow is that of Dr. Michael Eades, one of the authors of "Protein Power". That was the low-carb diet I used back in 1999 to drop 25 lbs to get close to my ideal weight. His post yesterday talks a bit about Gary Taubes' new book, "Why We Get Fat". He talks about insulin resistance in the article, and that would appear to be a lot of what WWGF is about as well.
I used to wonder how it was that I could eat a very full low-carb meal, and still be hungry within an hour. Now I have my answer. To get the longer version, read Dr. Mike's post, or better yet, Gary's book, but I guess we could describe the problem as differential insulin resistance. My liver is more insulin resistant than my fat cells. So when my blood sugar starts to drop, there is still too much insulin in my bloodstream to allow fat to be released from my fat cells to feed me. So, even with a winter's storehouse of extra fat, I am hungry.

The logic of paleo diets

I am sympathetic to the idea that we return to hunter-gatherer diets, but I find myself thinking about what that actually means. How did we happen to start farming? How did we decide as gatherers what was edible? Was it starvation that drove us to try new foods? I like the idea of climate change driving early agriculture. "Gee, these grass seeds are hard to eat, but I'm hungry. Gee, look at that, I survived the winter eating grass seeds and roots." I'm afraid the logic that some paleo-philes present as to the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer feels very weak to me. I think that without that transition, perhaps humans would have come close to extinction, if we didn't disappear altogether.