name that "researcher"!

I'm dipping into old Hyperlipid posts again....  I have a love-hate relationship with the comments sections of my favorite blogs!  Sometimes the stoopid is overwhelming, but then again the best commenters give a bonus bolus of wonderful information.  ;-)  Check out some of these:

"I have a possibility. I've always suspected that the reason vegetables are healthy is because when you eat a salad or a saute, you're essentially replacing carbohydrate in your meal with fat. This is because most vegetables are pretty low in carb, and are doused in fat before serving (salad dressing, butter, olive oil etc.).

"The calories from a salad or a vegetable saute (excluding starchy tubers/roots) are almost exclusively from fat."

And:

"And by the way, as someone who studies the mechanisms of aging, my view is that the oxidative damage theory is far from proven. Just because the antioxidant capacity of your blood is going this way or that, it really doesn't allow us to predict anything about health outcomes at this point.

"For all the talk you see in the media about how great antioxidants are, I'm not aware of a single convincing study showing that antioxidants improve a health outcome in humans (without vitamin deficiencies)."

And:

"I think you, Gary Taubes and I would agree about diet composition and hunger. One of the things Taubes talks about in his book is that hunger, in the most common sense of the word, is the result of carbohydrate consumption elevating insulin.

"When people are on very low-carb diets or when they have been fasting (both of which have similar metabolic effects), they experience hunger differently. I've found this to be true of myself. 24-hr fasts are fairly easy for me now. I even do strenuous workouts at the end of my fasts sometimes and have plenty of energy.

"Interestingly, you can fast for days without being very hungry, but if you're eating a calorie restricted high-carb diet, you'll be ravenous. I guess it's the difference between burning fat, which your body has plenty of even if you're not eating, and burning carb, which you can't store much of. Maybe that's an oversimplification.

"So yes, I agree with you that the diet would probably have been more tolerable in that study if the subjects had been eating fewer carbs."

OOOH!  We're getting more hints!  ;-)  Continuing:

"I see what you mean about the WHEL study. I have to say, my diet would be pretty boring without vegetables. I wonder if leafy greens are any good? High nutrient density, low carb. Plus our closest relatives eat them like they're going out of style.

"I'm interested in the alpha-lipoic acid thing. My suspicion with 'antioxidants' that are associated with improvement of some measure in a biological system, is that the effect isn't due to the antioxidant activity of the molecule. For example, curcumin was first thought to help in Alzheimer's models because it's a powerful antioxidant, but now they're finding it has specific effects on inflammation and cell death pathways that seem to be independent of this activity.

"As far as the insulin/aging connection, I don't know the answer for sure, but there are some tantalizing clues. First of all, I don't want to present myself as an expert. I'm a grad student whose work intersects with aging mechanisms, and I also have a personal interest in it."

(My emphasis.)

Wow, when did "the good doctor" stop "studying aging" and start being an obesity expert?  More interesting to me, when did he lose his humility?

SO many amusing little gems in this series of comments -- his diet would be boring without fruits and vegetables....  He, Peter and Taubes agree on something (anything)....  The virtue of salads is actually the fatty dressing you put on them....

It was always a grief to me that from a reasonably intelligent commenter on Hyperlipid, he descended into a gluttony-and-sloth inquisitor.  I used to read his blog with enthusiasm, but with the coming of the PhD, he started chasing funding instead of useful information ... long before he started posting pictures of junk food and saying this is what made America fat.