The Potato Diet

In 2010, I wrote a series of blog posts on the health properties of potatoes ( 1 , 2 , 3 ).  The evidence showed that potatoes are non-toxic...

Food Reward Friday

This week's "winner"... The Pizza Hut hot dog stuffed crust pizza! Read more »

Is it Time to Re-write the Textbooks on Insulin and Obesity? Part II

A new paper published on December 6th in the journal Science once again tackles the question of whether elevated insulin drives the develop...

Food Reward Friday

This week's "winner"... Kellogg's Krave cereal! Read more »

Is it Time to Re-write the Textbooks on Insulin and Obesity?

A recent study in Cell Metabolism by Dr. Arya Mehran and colleagues found a result that, according to a press release, "could overturn...

Food Reward Friday

This week's winner... the Starbuck's Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino ! Read more »

Food Reward Friday

This week's winner: poutine ! While not as appetizing looking as the Monster Thickburger, poutine is probably more popular.  For those w...

Food Reward Friday

This week's winner: the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco! Read more »

An Encouraging Trend

I was in the Seattle/Tacoma airport today, and I noticed quite a few people taking the stairs even though they're flanked by escalators....

Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky winner... the Hardee's MONSTER THICKBURGER! Two 1/3 lb beef patties, four strips of bacon, three slices of America...

Food Reward Fridays

Each Friday, I'm going to post a picture of a modern food so ridiculous it makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.  I'm do...

Candy at the Cash Register

Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published an interesting editorial titled " Candy at the Cash Register-- a Risk Factor f...

Photos and More Gardening

I've needed new professional and blog photos for a long time.  My friend Adam Roe was in town recently, and he happens to be professiona...

More Thoughts on Macronutrient Trends

I had a brief positive exchange with Gary Taubes about the NuSI post.  He reminded me that there's an artifact (measurement error) in th...

Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI)

Some of you may have heard of an ambitious new nutrition research foundation called the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI).  In this post,...

Calories and Carbohydrate: a Natural Experiment

In the lab, we work hard to design experiments that help us understand the natural world.  But sometimes, nature sets up experiments for us,...

A Late Summer Harvest

It's been a good year for gardening in Seattle, at least in my garden.  Thanks to great new tools* and Steve Solomon's recipe for ho...

Does Calorie Restriction Extend Lifespan in Mammals?

Until about two years ago, the story went something like this: calorie restriction extends lifespan in yeast, worms, flies, and rodents.  Li...

AHS11 Talk Posted

After a one-year delay, my talk from the 2011 Ancestral Health Symposium is online with slides synched.  The talk is titled " Obesity: ...

Ancestral Health Symposium 2012

I recently returned from AHS12 and a little side trip to visit family.  The conference was hosted at Harvard University through the Harvard ...

Lorcaserin: the Latest FDA-approved Obesity Drug

The FDA recently approved a new drug called lorcaserin (brand name Belviq) for the treatment of obesity.  Lorcaserin causes an average of 13...

Two Great Quotes About Obesity (technical)

By Dr. Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, from a recent paper, "The Neurobiology of Food Intake in an Obesogenic Environment" ( 1 ).  I came ac...

How Should Science be Done?

Lately I keep running into the idea that the proper way to do science is to continually strive to disprove a hypothesis, rather than suppor...

New Review Paper by Yours Truly: High-Fat Dairy, Obesity, Metabolic Health and Cardiovascular Disease

My colleagues Drs. Mario Kratz, Ton Baars, and I just published a paper in the European Journal of Nutrition titled " The Relationship ...

What Causes Type 2 Diabetes, and How Can it be Prevented?

In the comments of the last post, we've been discussing the relationship between body fatness and diabetes risk.  I think this is really...

Interview with Aitor Calero of Directo al Paladar

Aitor Calero writes for the popular Spanish cooking and nutrition blog, Directo al Paladar ("straight to the palate").  We did a ...

Why Did Energy Expenditure Differ Between Diets in the Recent Study by Dr. Ludwig's Group?

As discussed in the previous post, a recent study by Dr. David Ludwig's group suggested that during weight maintenance following fat los...

New Study: Is a Calorie a Calorie?

A new study in JAMA led by Dr. Cara B. Ebbeling and colleagues purports to challenge the idea that all calories are equally fattening ( 1 )....

What Puts Fat Into Fat Cells, and What Takes it Out?

Body fatness at its most basic level is determined by the rate of fat going into vs. out of fat cells. This in/out cycle occurs regardless o...

A Pressure Cooker for the 21st Century

Pressure cookers are an extremely useful kitchen tool.  They greatly speed cooking and reduce energy usage by up to 70 percent.  This is bec...

New Study Demonstrates that Sugar has to be Palatable to be Fattening in Mice

Dr. Anthony Sclafani's research group just published a study definitively demonstrating that high palatability, or pleasantness of taste...

Sugar Intake and Body Fatness in Non-industrial Cultures

Around the world, non-industrial cultures following an ancestral diet and lifestyle tend to be lean. When they transition a modern diet and ...

Calories Still Matter

The Centers for Disease Control's NHANES surveys documented a massive increase in obesity in the United States between the 1960-62 and 2...

How Bad is Fructose? David Despain Interviews Dr. John Sievenpiper

In my article " Is Sugar Fattening? ", I discussed a recent review paper on fructose, by Dr. John Sievenpiper and colleagues ( 1 )...

Lower Blood Pressure Naturally

Recently, Chris Kresser published a series on dietary salt (sodium chloride) and health ( 1 ).  One of the issues he covered is the effect ...

Beyond Ötzi: European Evolutionary History and its Relevance to Diet. Part III

In previous posts, I reviewed some of the evidence suggesting that human evolution has accelerated rapidly since the development of agricult...

Beyond Ötzi: European Evolutionary History and its Relevance to Diet. Part II

In previous posts, I described how Otzi was (at least in large part) a genetic descendant of Middle Eastern agriculturalists, rather than be...

Media Appearances

Last October, I participated in a panel discussion organized by the Harvard Food Law Society in Boston.  The panel included Drs. Walter Wil...

Lessons From Ötzi, the Tyrolean Ice Man. Part III

There are two reasons why I chose this time to write about Otzi.  The first is that I've been looking for a good excuse to revisit human...

Lessons From Ötzi, the Tyrolean Ice Man. Part II

Otzi's Diet Otzi's digestive tract contains the remains of three meals.  They were composed of cooked grains (wheat bread and whea...

Exercise and Food Intake

The New York Times just published an article reviewing some of the recent research on exercise, food intake and food reward, titled " D...

Next Primal Chef Event Sunday 5/20

Gil Butler has been working on a television show called Primal Chef , where he invites local chefs to make creative dishes from a list of Pa...

Lessons From Ötzi, the Tyrolean Ice Man. Part I

This is Otzi, or at least a reconstruction of what he might have looked like.  5,300 years ago, he laid down on a glacier near the border be...

Global Meat Production, 1961-2009

Total global meat production per person has steadily increased from 0.13 lbs per day in 1961 to 0.29 lbs per day in 2009*, a 120 percent inc...

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 ...

The Eocene Diet

65 million years ago, a massive asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, creating a giant dust cloud that contributed to the extinction ...

Onward

In upcoming posts, I plan to pursue two main themes.  The first is a more comprehensive exploration of what determines eating behavior in hu...

Recent Media Appearances

Men's Health interviewed and quoted me in an article titled " Reprogram Your Metabolism ", written by Lou Schuler.  Part of th...

Food Reward: Approaching a Scientific Consensus

Review papers provide a bird's-eye view of a field from the perspective of experts.  Recent review papers show that many obesity researc...

Speaking at AHS12

I'll be giving a 40 minute presentation at the Ancestral Health Symposium this summer titled "Digestive Health, Inflammation and t...

Qsymia (formerly Qnexa), the Latest Obesity Drug

There are very few obesity drugs currently approved for use in the US-- not because effective drugs don't exist, but because the FDA has...

Boing!

I just had a featured article published on Boing Boing, " Seduced by Food: Obesity and the Human Brain ".  Boing Boing is the mos...

Tweet

I've decided, on the sage advice of a WHS reader, to join the world of Twitter.  I'll be using it to announce new posts, as well as ...

Palatability, Satiety and Calorie Intake

WHS reader Paul Hagerty recently sent me a very interesting paper titled "A Satiety Index of Common Foods", by Dr. SHA Holt and co...

Soda-Free Sunday

Last Thursday, I received a message from a gentleman named Dorsol Plants about a public health campaign here in King County called Soda Free...

Is Sugar Fattening?

Buckle your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen-- we're going on a long ride through the scientific literature on sugar and body fatness.  ...

By 2606, the US Diet will be 100 Percent Sugar

The US diet has changed dramatically in the last 200 years.  Many of these changes stem from a single factor: the industrialization and comm...

Cigarette Smoking-- Another Factor in the Obesity Epidemic

Obesity rates in the US have more than doubled in the last 30 years, and rates of childhood obesity and extreme adult obesity have tripled. ...

My TEDx Talk, "The American Diet: a Historical Perspective"

On October 21st, I spoke at the Harvard Food Law Society 's TEDx conference, Forum on Food Policy .  The conference kicked off with thre...

An Interview with Dr. C. Vicky Beer, Paleo-friendly MD

As I was preparing my recent article on the Paleo diet ( 1 ), I interviewed a local Paleo-friendly MD named C. Vicky Beer.  I was only able ...

Paleo Diet Article in Sound Consumer

I recently wrote an article for my local natural foods grocery store, PCC, about the "Paleolithic" diet.  You can read it online h...

Insulin and Obesity: Another Nail in the Coffin

There are several versions of the insulin hypothesis of obesity, but the versions that are most visible to the public generally state that e...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part VII

In previous posts, I outlined the factors I'm aware of that can contribute to insulin resistance.  In this post, first I'll list the...

Three Announcements

Chris Highcock of the blog Conditioning Research just published a book called Hillfit , which is a conditioning book targeted at hikers/bac...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part VI

In this post, I'll explore a few miscellaneous factors that can contribute to insulin resistance: smoking, glucocorticoids/stress, cooki...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part V

Previously in this series, we've discussed the role of cellular energy excess, inflammation, brain insulin resistance, and micronutrient...

New Obesity Review Paper by Yours Truly

The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism just published a clinical review paper written by myself and my mentor Dr. Mike Schwart...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part IV

So far, we've explored three interlinked causes of insulin resistance: cellular energy excess, inflammation, and insulin resistance in t...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part III

As discussed in previous posts, cellular energy excess and inflammation are two important and interlinked causes of insulin resistance.  Con...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part II

In the last post, I described how cellular energy excess causes insulin resistance, and how this is triggered by whole-body energy imbalance...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part I

Insulin is an ancient hormone that influences many processes in the body.  Its main role is to manage circulating concentrations of nutrient...

New York Times Magazine Article on Obesity

For those of you who haven't seen it, Tara Parker-Pope write a nice article on obesity in the latest issue of NY Times Magazine ( 1 ).  ...

High-Fat Diets, Obesity and Brain Damage

Many of you have probably heard the news this week: High-fat diet may damage the brain Eating a high-fat diet may rapidly injure brain cells...

Junk Free January

Last year, Matt Lentzner organized a project called Gluten Free January, in which 546 people from around the world gave up gluten for one mo...