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Metabolism, Diet, and Disease Conference update and a job posting

August 16, 2012 by GT

I promised in my last post — yes, far too long ago — that I would give an update on the Metabolism, Diet and Disease Conference, which was held at the end of May in Washington, DC. As the months passed, I was waiting to hear from the organizers that they had posted a video of the panel discussion that ended the conference, and now, as of a few days ago, they have.

The conference itself was rather remarkable. The idea was to bring together from all disciplines researchers working on the various pathologies associated with insulin resistance. It was organized by the editors of BioMed Central, who had come upon the idea after reading The Diet Delusion, which is the British edition of Good Calories, Bad Calories. I was enlisted to help organize and suggest and recruit speakers and executive committee members. The conference also provided the opportunity to get researchers who had worked on carb-restricted diets — Eric Westman and Jeff Volek, in particular — presenting in a non-nutrition venue to researchers who might otherwise never take their work seriously or at least never imagine that it had relevance to their research in insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia and the related pathologies. Eugene Fine was also there with a poster on his just published pilot study on ketogenic diets and cancer — “Targeting insulin inhibition as a metabolic therapy in advanced cancer: A pilot safety and feasibility dietary trial in 10 patients.”

What I found most fascinating about the conference was how beliefs shifted over the course of the three day event, from unconditional faith in the conventional wisdom to openness and scientific curiosity about the kinds of alternative hypotheses put forward by myself and others. On the first day of the conference I was having arguments/discussions with researchers about the laws of thermodynamics and how they apply to obesity (or don’t, as I believe) only to find myself sitting with them on a panel on day three as they agreed that the role of refined grains and sugars in cancer and cancer therapy had to be taken seriously.

With that, I highly recommend reading the BioMed Central blog post on the last day’s panel discussion and then watching the video of the discussion itself to see how it played out. You can see for yourself how beliefs and opinions had shifted so that the outcome of the panel discussion was probably something that few of the researchers going in would have ever imagined. I’m not optimistic enough to think that this is a long term change in thinking, or at least not without other factors, experiments and influential researchers keeping the momentum up — and, of course, the science has to turn out to be right or at least mostly right. But it certainly gave me hope that the kinds of issues we’ve been raising again and again outside the research community will soon be addressed critically (i.e., not in a knee-jerk, dismissive manner) by researchers within the community.

This brings up item number two in this post, and here I’m going to be cribbing considerably from what Peter Attia recently posted on his blog — eatingacadmy.com . This is our update on NuSI, the Nutrition Science Initiative, and a job we’re hoping to fill in the near future.

As we’ve both alluded to in previous posts, Peter and I founded NuSI earlier this year. Peter is the president and I’m, well, the co-founder. (We rejected “provocateur-in-residence” on the basis that it only captured part of what I do and didn’t quite work officially for an organization that we, and the foundation supporting us, and the scientists with whom we’re working, all take very, very seriously.) NuSi is a non-profit organization with the mission of reducing the economic and social cost of obesity and its related chronic diseases. We hope to achieve this by facilitating and funding the kind of rigorous, meticulously well-controlled and targeted experimental research that has been conspicuously lacking in nutrition research for the half past century.

We’ll say much more about this when we formally and publicly launch NuSI in early September. The ultimate goal is to create what would ideally become a kind of Manhattan Project of Nutrition: a concerted, directed, well-funded research effort composed of the best scientists in the field — all independent and suitably skeptical — working together to generate the evidence necessary to put to rest, one way or the other, all the major and many of the minor controversies in nutrition research. Peter and I have already enlisted some of the researchers we’d like to get involved, and we’ve spoken to others about possible experiments that might be done in the future. Our hope is that regardless of any initial biases, the evidence generated in these experiments (and replicated in further experiments) will be suitably unambiguous that in, say, 15 years we’ll have little left to argue about. And if the evidence still leaves room for argument and controversy, then we’ll do more experiments until it doesn’t.

The best part, as Peter has pointed out, is that all this should be doable for less than the cost of developing just one drug in the United States.

Peter and I have been working obsessively to build a world-class team at NuSI, including our Board of Directors, Scientific Advisory Board, Board of Advisors, scientific consortium, and full-time staff. We can’t wait until we can formally introduce you to our team and collaborators.

We have already hired several positions within NuSI through standard recruiting channels and referrals, but there is one position, in particular, Peter and I thought would be worth bringing directly to the attention of our readers – our Research Associate. We’ve already received a few dozen tremendous applications from individuals with great credentials, but we’re wondering if one critical attribute may be missing or under-represented in our applicants so far. Beyond the tangible skills necessary for this particular role – outlined in the downloadable job posting (below) – this role requires an almost maniacal obsession with nutrition science and a passion for answering the kinds of questions we’ve all been debating in print and in our blogs. We think there’s a reasonable chance that our future Research Associate is one of you out there reading this right now.

For the full list of job responsibilities and requirements, please download the job posting, which also explains exactly how to apply. Please do not send any of the application materials to me or Peter directly. You can consider this the first test of the ability to follow simple instructions.

This position should prove to be both extremely challenging and highly rewarding. We think that we have the opportunity with this organization to change the world, and that the odds are pretty good that we can pull it off. Such opportunities don’t come along frequently in life. And as I said, we’ve already enlisted some of the best scientists in nutrition and obesity research to design and conduct the studies we’ll be funding; you’ll get the opportunity to support them day in and day out.

One very important disclosure: This role will make the proverbial “drinking from a fire hose” seem manageable. We consider this role (as we do our own) more of a calling than a job. If you’re interested, if you feel you meet the necessary requirements, and if we haven’t scared you off yet, please consider applying for this position.

Thank you, and we’re looking forward to sharing the progress of NuSI with all of you.

Metabolism, Diet, and Disease Conference

May 29, 2012 by GT

Well, it’s Back to the Better-Late-Than-Never…

There’s an interesting conference starting Tuesday the 29^th in Washington – today –and I should have written about it months ago. It’s the Metabolism, Diet and Disease conference being held at the Georgetown University Conference Center. The editors of BioMed Central, a British open-access science publishing company, are the organizers. They contacted me in October 2010 to tell me they had read the British version of Good Calories, Bad Calories – The Diet Delusion – and found it compelling. They were particularly struck by the notion that there are many disciplines involved in the science of obesity, diabetes and their associated chronic diseases, but they don’t read the same journals and they don’t tend to interact in conferences. So their idea was to put together a conference that would solve this problem. Between us, we recruited a first-rate executive board – including the two Nobel Laureates, Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein – and put together a conference that, as I see it, includes most of the major issues revolving around and feeding into insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

The original idea – if you’ll pardon the cliché – is that insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome are the elephant, and we would get all these people in one room, who were studying the legs, the trunks, the tail, the ears, etc., and may not have realized quite what the whole elephant itself looked like. As the recruiting of speakers started, the conference evolved and took on a life of its own. Much of the original idea still exists, but there’s a fair share of the latest esoteric research ideas, for good or for bad (sirtuins, irisin, etc.), which may or may not have anything to do with the elephant itself. But we still have some of the leading researchers in the world talking about everything from the epidemiology of insulin resistance to the pathologies that associate with it – diabetes, heart disease, cancer, aging, etc. – and the pathways and mechanisms that link them all together.

One session, which I’m chairing on Thursday morning, is called “Dietary factors in metabolic diseases,” and the speakers are all addressing the carbohydrate issue. We have Luc Tappy, the leading fructose biochemist in the world, talking about the role of fructose in metabolic disorders, and then Jeff Volek and Eric Westman talking about the effects of carb-restricted diets, suggesting that the carbohydrates (refined grains, of course, and sugars in particular) might be the fundamental problem. It will be interesting to see how the mainstream researchers take this, as they’re used to thinking about carb-restriction as quackery and now it will be presented as potentially mainstream itself.

On Saturday, I’m in Scottsdale Arizona talking at the National Lipid Associations annual convention. This, too, should be interesting, as I’ll be presenting my Why We Get Fat lecture an hour after Robert Eckel speaks. Eckel is a former president of the American Heart Association who is on record saying that he doesn’t even think low-carb-high-fat diets should ever be tested, that it’s unethical, because they’re so dangerous. After I speak, I’ll get to hear Rob Lustig and Peter Havel talk about sugar and fructose. As I said, it should be an interesting day and an interesting week.

Updates for 2012

January 21, 2012 by GT

Checking in after a long absence (working too hard, and blogging too little), I have news and updates for 2012.

The first order of business is a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Tara Parker-Pope’s “The Fat Trap” article that ran on the cover of the January 1st NYT Magazine. I wrote the letter with my colleague Peter Attia, more on whom shortly, and we posted it online at ipetitions.com. We tried to get it signed by as many MDs and PhDs as possible, to make the case to the editors at the Times and to Tara herself that a significant number of medical professionals and researchers take the alternative hypothesis of obesity seriously and so should they. As it is, we were able to get over 250 such degreed cosigners, which was more than we expected and more than we hoped. The Times is running a 150-word summary of the letter as a letter to the editor in this week’s magazine with a link to the full letter on line, which you should all feel free to sign. I also recommend you click on the signatures link to see who’s signed it and read the comments.

“The Fat Trap” made the point that obesity is effectively incurable. The letter argues that it only appears to be incurable because the wrong treatment is being used, and the wrong treatment is being used because the people studying the disorder don’t understand what causes it in the first place — like trying to treat a bacterial infection with an anti-viral medication and then throwing up your hands and saying it’s hopeless when the treatment doesn’t work. Should they ever get the cause right, then the correct treatment becomes obvious.

Second order of business is my colleague Peter Attia. Peter and I started working together last April after he came to San Francisco to meet me. He had recently read Why We Get Fat and Good Calories, Bad Calories and my sugar article in The New York Times, and he had 27-pages of questions he wanted to ask. I was impressed, if not awed, and we hit it off. I suggested to Peter that he should take over the insurgency and I’d be the figurehead, as I’ve been burnt out and overworked for a decade. The good news is he took me up on it, except that now he has me working twice as hard as ever to help.

Among the projects we have in the works is a non-profit, the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI), to raise money for the kind of research we think is necessary to clarify the relationship between dietary nutrients, obesity. diabetes and their related chronic diseases. We have a specific plan of research to pursue (or rather to fund so that established, unbiased researchers can then do the studies) and have already recruited a world class scientific advisory board and executive board. I’ll fill in the details in the next couple of weeks as we get closer to going on-line.

Peter’s blog, The War on Insulin.com, is up and running. Peter takes many of my ideas and expands on them from his own unique perspective. He also blogs about his own personal experience on a conventional healthy diet and then a ketogenic diet. What makes this particularly interesting is that Peter is a fanatic endurance athlete and an obsessive self-experimenter, and he comes at his experience and his blog with a significant amount of medical training and acumen. I highly recommend that he be read. (And if anyone can figure out how he manages to workout 23 hours a week, function in a full-time job, blog regularly on nutrition and physical activity, and be there for his family and not collapse in a puddle of exhaustion, please let me know.)

The next order of business is an exciting and promising project. My friend Larry Istrail is a medical student at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s recently created the Ancestral Weight Loss Registry, to collect and publish data on individuals who have tried to lose weight with a paleo/carbohydrate-restricted diet. He’s also spent much of the last few years compiling clinical data on many aspects of carb-restricted eating in the related science section, such as the efficacy of such diets for weight loss or the effects of saturated fats and cholesterol intake on heart disease. Tara Parker-Pope’s article in The New York Times claimed that the National Weight Control Registry (about which I could easily fill up a few blog posts with criticisms) has some 10,000 people registered in over 15 years. We’re hoping that the Ancestral Weight Loss Registry will beat that in a few months. Using this kind of self-selected data to do good science is tricky if not perhaps impossible, but it will be interesting to see what happens.

If you’re reading this and you’ve lost significant weight on a carb-restricted/paleo diet (or if you haven’t), please check out the Ancestral Weight Loss Registry and enter your details. I’m also hoping you’ll pass this on to your friends and if you have a blog or a podcast, to your readers and/or listeners.

The last order of nutrition/obesity-related interest is that I have some speaking engagements coming up in the next few months and I thought I’d mention them, which I’ve been lax in doing in the past. I’m giving a couple of readings in the Berkeley/Oakland area, a lecture at the Seattle Town Hall and the University of Texas San Antonio, an after dinner talk at a diabetes conference at Auburn University, a talk at an integrative health conference in Los Angeles and a lecture in Santa Cruz, courtesy of the local office of education. There’s also a couple of talks coming up in Europe — in Amsterdam and Brussels — and a slew of conferences and keynote addresses into the summer and fall, details of which will go up shortly. The dates and locations and links through April (Amsterdam not yet included) are up on my calendar, and I promise I’ll do a much better job in the future of keeping the calendar updated far in advance.

Along these lines (okay, this is the last order of nutrition/obesity-related interest), the email subscription to my blog now works as it should, and will NOT subscribe readers to “Two and the Zoo” like it used to. Feel free to sign up if you’re interested.

Finally, my best friend Marion Smith recently did a post on her website about our shared history with one of the more distasteful but apt terms in journalism and writing. Marion credits me for the terminology, although I’m going to give credit here to Calvin Trillin, who came up with it. It was from reading Trillin in my salad days — back when I had time to read — that I learned of the term and the technique and embraced it. Either way, Marion is a wonderful writer and nutrition and weight is not the subject. Both reasons to read her blog.

And with that, a belated Happy New Years.

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