Jeff Volek presents research indicating low-carb also best way to improve lipid profiles

Ultra-low-carb eating has appeared for about a century already to be the most effective treatment for both overweight and diabetes (both linked to the more general metabolic syndrome), beating all drugs and other interventions by wide margins (on this, see Taubes’ groundbreaking Good Calories, Bad Calories). However, the establishment has resisted or ignored (if not memory-holed) this information for general application primarily based on separate claims about lipid profile risk and heart disease. The conventional view has been that these risks outweigh the benefits, so other treatments are likely to be better on balance.

Turning this view completely on its head, in this 1 July 2014 conference presentation, cholesterol researcher Jeff Volek explains how his and related carefully controlled research over the past two decades indicates that ultra-low-carb eating appears to also be the best known intervention for improving lipid profile markers, properly interpreted. He focuses particularly on issues with the measurement, context, and interpretation of LDL-C, and by the end appears to have left the strong conventional view concerning low-carb and lipid profiles in the dustbin of failed scientific claims.

[Gets going at about 1.05.]

See my Evolutionary Health page for more perspective and selected references.

REVIEW | Primal Body, Primal Mind by Nora Gedgaudas

The first half of the book is on nutrition and is quite good, backed up by a lot of evidence and careful referencing. The second half turns more speculative. You can tell because the scientific references simply start to vanish, leaving the author speaking of her opinions. This is where we start talking about cell phones killing us and a few other much more questionable assertions about which no conclusive evidence exists one way or the other that is popular with the, what is it now? Neo-New-Age?

This is especially disappointing and perhaps even dangerous because the nutrition stuff gets you into a rational mood, the author builds some credibility, and then the whole thing seems to start sliding into technophobic imagination, which might drag some readers down with it (the one's who didn't notice the precipitous decline in scientific references). There are plenty of better established dangers, and mixing in what seems to amount to groundless technophobia undermines the credibility of the otherwise solid nutrition research.

You can get some good ideas out of this book, but if you aren't careful, you might also get some quite weak ones mixed in. Overall, I would say that more solid presentations are available that do not get as lost after halftime, and these should be prioritized. My own list after reading a lot of books in this field reads: Sisson, Taubes, Wolf, and Cordain (the newest one; he's revised a few things).