Last Updated on December 3, 2015 by Patricia Carter
Summary: NUSI is now testing if calories trigger hormones that regulate fat cell behavior. This will help answer the question of which camp we should we be in, namely: the sugar is bad/saturated fat is the good camp versus the whole grain/low fat is the good camp.
Enter NUSI → Seems bad science got us into the mess and state of confusion and ignorance. So Gary Tuabes has aligned with Dr. Peter Attia, MD to do “good science“ and answer the age old question: Do we get fat because we eat too much and especially too much fat OR is it the food we eat, especially the increased consumption of table sugar and other refined carbohydrates the likely explanation for our current chronic disease epidemic including obesity? There’s a real difference there, honest!
Taubes radical alternative hypothesis theory in simpleton: Condensed from this article: We get fat NOT because we eat too many calories but because specific kinds of calories trigger hormones that regulate how our fat cells behave. In particular, eating refined carbohydrates, and especially sugar, on a sustained basis leads to chronically elevated insulin levels. Among its many other crucial functions in the body, insulin tells fat cells to take up glucose, which is converted into fat, and then keeps fat from all sources locked inside. Consume a bunch of sugar every day, as most Americans do, and you’ll get fat.
Of course, Taubes could only present the hypothesis. He couldn’t prove any of it. The right experiments had never been done.
So who are the players?
Gary Taubes is the best selling author Good Calories, Bad Calories, and Dr. Peter Attia, well…. He’s my Home Page header’s lead off podcast/resource “go-to” post for good reason. After fighting his way through his own Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis (realize this was an elite endurance swimmer – at age 34 in 2008 he was the first person to swim from Maui to Lanai and back), his incredible personal confession and requested act of forgiveness, as a doctor, upon realizing conventional medicine totally needed paradigm shifts relative to body metabolism and type 2 diabetes, leaves me speechless and hopeful that soon the paradigm shift he is advocating, will in fact occur. Just watch his TedTalk, “Peter Attia: What if we’re wrong about diabetes?“, June 2013 to see why I think he’s genuinely the real deal and amazing:
So by 2009, weighing more than 45 pounds more than in high school and having lipid profiles putting him at serious cardiac risk, he embarked on the lower carbohydrate diet. By April 2011, an email from Attia to Taubes asked questions about fructose and glucose and led to a meeting where Attia appeared with 20 pages of highly technical medical questions. Out of this, the Feynman Foundation was born having mission: recruit world-class scientists from different fields to review existing nutrition literature and create consensus statements.
Enter… the glitch: “the more they discussed the idea, the more unlikely it seemed that mere reviews of the existing literature would be enough to change the consensus about diet. “We decided the only way to do this was to create this Manhattan Project-like entity where you bring in all these scientists and remove that one obstacle”—funding—“that is preventing them from doing what they really need to do,” Attia says. “We wanted to just say, ‘Go out and solve it.’”
Where’s the Money Coming From?!?
Enter John Arnold. Arnold got his start at Enron, funded his own hedge fund Centaurus Energy Master Fund and then, in May 2012, he closed that to focus on philanthropy having become the youngster billionaire in the country in 2007 at age 33. So the Laura and John Arnold Foundation gifted NuSI a $4.7 million seed grant after Arnold heard Taubes speak on a podcast about the type of study needed to uncover the triggers of the obesity epidemic. Arnold wrote Taubes a five-line email and said, “From the little I know about the science of nutrition,your study makes a lot of sense.”
An additional $35.5 million grant was announced last year. “The reason the research hasn’t been done right, according to the scientists we’ve talked to,” says Denis Calabrese, president of the foundation, “is that it’s too expensive. And John and Laura said, ‘Well, fine. Tell us how much it is, and let’s do it right.’”
So three tests now underway through NuSI adressing the alternative theory are (see this article for more explanation of the tests)
The most recent experiment began January, 2014:
“The first subject checked into the metabolic ward at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to participate in one of the most rigorous dietary studies ever devised. For eight weeks, he was forbidden to leave. He spent two days of each week inside tiny airtight rooms known as metabolic chambers, where scientists determined precisely how many calories he was burning by measuring changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air. He received meals through vacuum-sealed portholes so that the researchers’ breath wouldn’t interfere with their measurements. The food itself had been chemically analyzed to ensure an exact number of carbohydrate, protein, and fat calories.
The two-day stays in the chambers were only a small part of the testing, which was also being carried out on subjects at three other institutions around the US. Twice a month, the subjects were required to lie down for dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry scans, an accurate way to measure body fat. They offered up their veins again and again so that scientists could measure their lipids and hormone levels. They provided samples of their stools so the researchers could record the different colonies of bacteria residing in their guts.” There’s those beastly microbiomes again!!!
And this launched July 2013: 150 overweight and obese college students, faculty, and staff are testing the theory. They are fed most of their meals under direct observation in the school’s cafeteria.
And here’s another test launched March 2013: NuSI’s first free-living study—where subjects aren’t directly observed as they eat. This is one of the largest such human experiments ever to test a low-fat diet against a low-carbohydrate diet, randomizing 600 overweight-to-obese subjects into two groups. Both will receive regular counseling meant to help them stick to their diets, a standard practice in other free-living studies. But to overcome the major problem with such work—inaccurate accounts of consumption based on volunteers’ food diaries—NuSI is funding the creation of an app that allows subjects to record their eating activity by selecting photos from an extensive database. (Because of confidentiality agreements with the developers, Attia wouldn’t provide much detail on the app’s features.)
Check out NuSI site for more interesting things happening! And of course Dr. Attia’s blog, The Eating Academy, is always an interesting read. 
Obviously I have much confidence in the passion, brains, and abilities of Taubes and Attia, and I look forward to hearing the results of their “good science”.
In health and awareness,
