Sometimes the consensus deniers are right, which is exactly why the term is so pointless and so profoundly unscientific.
The medical associations were unequivocal. Crash diets were a fad, unhealthy, and only slow sensible weight loss could work. So millions of people were fed expensive drugs for decades, monitored, and some even given risky bariatric surgery. Patients with Type II diabetes were expected to be treated for years, or possibly the rest of their lives. Nearly a tenth of the national health budget of the UK was spent managing diabetes. Fully 8% of the population have the condition in the US.
Now a new (albeit very very small) study cured diabetes in some cases in as little as a week with a diet that was thought to be bad.
In the trial the very low calorie diet was done for 8 weeks. Sticking to 600 calories a day is not easy (some reports say it was 800 cals). It’s about a quarter of what a normal guy would eat. But it shrinks fat in the pancreas and liver, and that seemingly returns insulin levels to normal. The really amazing thing is that the benefits turn out to stay around far longer than anyone thought. A word of warning, to anyone on medical treatment: the effect on blood sugar levels can be so dramatic it could be dangerous to start such a drastic diet without talking to the doc first.
The discovery, a “radical change” in understanding of the condition, holds out the possibility that sufferers could cure themselves – if they have the willpower.
Until recently received medical wisdom was that Type 2 diabetes was largely irreversible.
Prof Taylor asked 11 volunteers, all recently diagnosed, to go on what he admitted was an “extreme diet” of specially formulated drinks and non-starchy vegetables, for eight weeks.
After just a week, pre-breakfast (‘fasting’) blood sugar levels had returned to normal, suggesting a resumption of correct pancreas function.
Gordon Parmley, 67, from Stocksfield in Northumberland, one of the volunteers, said: “At the end of the trial, I was told my insulin levels were normal and after six years, I no longer needed my diabetes tablets.
“Still today, 18 months on, I don’t take them. It’s astonishing really that a diet – hard as it was – could change my health so drastically.”
While this study is tiny (11 people), there have been others suggesting something similar, and the idea came from the way people responded to bariatric surgery (it seemed to cure their insulin problems very fast). I think this study might be the first to use MRI’s to look at the fat inside the pancreas which dropped by a quarter over the 8 weeks. Note too, these people ate a lot of salad. Not all crash diets are the same, and some of the criticisms of crash diets are fair. Plus many on the crash diet may have made long term changes after the diet.
I’m not declaring that this is definitely a cure, or that it will work for everyone (it may only apply to a certain group), but I would bet people suggesting a radical low calorie diet would once have been called dangerous quacks (or deniers?). Once again, we see large organizations of well respected people saying that something is a “fact”, when it is merely the best guess they could make at the time.
American Diabetes Association
“Fact: For most people, type 2 diabetes is a progressive disease. When first diagnosed, many people with type 2 diabetes can keep their blood glucose at a healthy level with oral medications. But over time, the body gradually produces less and less of its own insulin,
“While dietary and lifestyle changes are the foundation of the management of type 2 diabetes, these changes are rarely sufficient to maintain adequate glycemic control over the long-term.
“Type 2 diabetes can often initially be managed with healthy eating and regular physical activity. However, over time most people with type 2 diabetes will also need tablets and many will also need insulin. It is important to note that this is just the natural progression of the disease, and taking tablets or insulin as soon as they are required can result in fewer complications in the long-term.
The American Heart Association wrote a whole book called the “No-Fad Diet”.
I would guess that producers of Biguanides, Sulphonylureas, Thiazolidinediones, Meglitinides, Alpha glucosidase inhibitors, DPP-4 inhibitors, Incretin mimetics and insulin will be unenthusiastic about this news. You could hardly blame them when it costs so much to test and trial new drugs. But that is exactly why we need to get the science right at the start. Everyone loses when a fact is not a fact.
*There is a gimmicky element to the promotion of this story in their use of the word “crash” diet and we can argue about the definitions, and also about whether people returned to eating their former diet (I’m guessing they didn’t). It’s possibly that this sudden weight loss may have longer term repercussions, but then we know diabetes does. Only long large trials will settle the long term view, and also find out whether people find sudden extreme diets more workable than long continuous lifestyle changes. Nonetheless, the food police need to stop claiming that all extremely low calorie diets are bad.
UPDATE: Thanks to Ian for the link to the original study, which turns out to be a 2011 work. Apparently the news media fuss now is because there is funding for a larger trial. Thanks to Christopher Dollis in comments for extra links and information.
REFERENCE:
Lim, L., K. G. Hollingsworth, B. S. Aribisala, M. J. Chen, J. C. Mathers, R. Taylor (2011) Reversal of type 2 diabetes: normalisation of beta cell function in association with decreased pancreas and liver triacylglycerol Diabetologia October 2011, Volume 54, Issue 10, pp 2506-2514, [Abstract]
I’ve always understood that a brisk walk for half an hour to get your heart rate above 130 three times a week has the same effect as the diabetes medication.
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Yes, this is true.
If you find this interesting, you’ll find Dr. Jason Fung’s work on it fascinating, on point, and possibly life-, limb-, and sight-saving for you or your loved ones. He is the founder of the Intensive Diabetes Dietary Management Clinic in Toronto.
His 6-part series beginning with The Aetiology of Obesity Part 1 of 6: A New Hope is must watch if you want an in-depth rundown.
If you’re in a hurry, the standalone video Insulin Toxicity and How to Cure Diabetes covers the fundamentals.
One correction: one particular biguanide, metformin, is still useful for diabetes treatment as it doesn’t raise insulin: it makes your body more sensitive to insulin. However, it may not be necessary with a sufficiently-intense fasting intervention.
—-
Thanks Christopher, your comments here are very well informed. I’m finding them very useful. You’ve posted some excellent links. As for biguanide and metformin, true, they still have uses, but it’s hard to believe they will sell as much if more patients get their blood sugar under control. :- ) – Jo
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Metformin is the only commonly-available biguanide that doesn’t lead to more insulin production. There was another, phenformin, but it was pulled from the market due to saftey problems. Metformin is mostly safe, but can lead to B12 and folic acid deficiencies, causing or exacerbating neuropathy, as well as rare and sometimes fatal cases of lactic acidosis. (Phenformin caused lactic acidosis much more frequently than metformin.)
Much more commonly, metformin (derived from a traditional herbal remedy for diabetes) leads to diarrhea or other gastro upset, which can be mitigated by taking it with food, building up a tolerance, or taking a time-release form. The gastro side effects tend not to track linearly. One may have the same side effects with 500 mg/day that they do with 2000 mg/day in divided doses, which appears to be the sweet spot for mortality reduction for most people.
Metformin is a good drug.
40
“lactic acidosis which may lead to coma – seek immediate medical advice if you develop symptoms such as breathing difficulties, muscle cramps, stomach pain, weakness or hypothermia”
I had the breathing problems and muscle cramps. My doctor thought it was something else. I had to diagnose it myself. I got better when I stopped taking Metformin.
20
which does not prove it was the metformin. correlation does not equal causation
33
Metformin has also ben used quite widely in the treatment of Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) which is considered, at least in part, to be related to insulin resistance
10
Yep. Overfed and undernourished. Forgo carbs (bread, pasta, ice cream) and eat fruity salads – preferably blended in a 2000W+ blender. Add a glass or two of chilled red wine every day and you will lose weight and feel much better.
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This helps, but isn’t as effective as fasting and leads to a slowed development rather than a curing of the disease. The problem is protein significantly raises insulin levels although not blood sugar by much. By eating protein frequently (it takes a while to digest) you maintain an elevated insulin level and do not cure the core problem of type-2 diabetes which is insulin tolerance.
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Fruit = carbohydrate = sugar.
Not a good diet for a diabetic
20
Well this is oversimplified. Sure it’s useful, however.
Fasting is a much-more effective treatment as it solves the problem at its core: the body’s increasing tolerance to insulin thus requiring more of it to clear sugar from the blood.
The core problem of diabetes type 2 is too much insulin, too prolonged, not too much blood sugar: doctors are treating this wrong.
Treating blood sugar primarily is the right method of treating type 1 diabetics only.
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Christoph
This is my favorite book on the subject. Read with caution. He was a dangerous extremist. I recommend getting the oldest copy you can get as consensus science forced him to remove things from later versions.
http://www.amazon.com/Fasting-Can-Save-Your-Life/dp/0914532235
After reading this book (an older version) I fasted by not eating anything at all and drinking nothing but pure water for seven full days. I was able to keep up the pace with workmates doing physically demanding work outdoors (up and down ladders on hot roofs in the summer heat). After the fast I could not stand the thought of coffee or cigarettes for three months. Did not have to quit just did not want them. Three days into the fast the desire for cigarettes just stopped.
I will do it again soon but am waiting for a low stress period to do it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2QMHCV4z4M
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This study was published what seems like some months ago. There were two caveats. 1) the onset of diabetise 2 should be recent, 2) it needed 6 weeks optimally to work. It didn’t work for every patient.
40
True.
However, here (and in the subsequent parts) you will find many other studies showing effective results to fasting interventions: remember, this protocol had the patients eating 600 Calories per day. This may not have been optimal.
Stricter fasting, more punctuated, could lead to better results as there wouldn’t be a low but signifcant amount of carbs and protein being ingested to maintain serum insulin somewhat.
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Thanks for highlighting this. And note the similarity to global warming: big corporations making a lot of money from the supposed “science” of a dogmatically pushed solution which is not actually based on any science at all and not looking at the very simple and obvious. In the case of diabetes .. that diet could be a treatment. In the case of climate … that most climate change is natural.
We also saw a very similar phenomenon with so called “bird flu” (or was it swine) when some “unknown” force suddenly pushed the story into the media and the magic “solution” was for government to buy lots of “precautionary” vaccinations and drugs.
This is why we need citizen scientists because government and commercial scientists no longer have the public interest at heart and so it is up to ordinary citizens to use their knowledge of science to counter these money grabbing people.
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I don’t think they’re similar at all. AGW has its roots in a social agenda seeking to use outside circumstance to further its cause. Diabetes, as in this example, is a disease with a diagnosed treatment based on medical science at that time from which large companies make a good profit. The real point in this is that when new treatments and theories arise, medical science is extremely resistant to change.
The whole point of Jo’s post should be this: don’t be a lazy patient. If you have a condition and believe everything the first doctor you see tells you, have fun taking whatever drugs you’re going to be taking for the rest of your life. The overwhelming majority of patients do just this.
I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 1997. I had had the symptoms for the better part of the year, which was uncomfortable to say the least. After seeing three doctors and having a colonoscopy I was presented with a very large box of steroids and told to come back and get some more when I ran out. Further enquiries of the unhelpfull staff at the extremely expensive private hospital provided me with the news that I would have to do this for the rest of my life.
The internet was a mere shadow of itself back in those days but we were still able to print out three pages of alarming side effects, both physical and psycological. After a good deal of effort I tracked down an outstanding doctor in Perth who was able to work out the cause of my condition. His treatment resulted in curing me of it in a mere 6 weeks. Ulcerative colitis is still considered incureable 15 years later. I sent letters to my other doctors informing them of my progress. None responded.
Do your homework. Don’t be lazy, and don’t believe what any establishment tells you.
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Doctors are essentially (overpaid and arrogant) tradies not scientists. [in the USSR medical doctors were considered to be semi-intelligent sh*tkickers and paid accordingly]. They are not taught the scientific method or even how to read and understand scientific journals. Don’t expect too much from them.
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Pardon? It is big corporations in the fossil fuel industry that are leading the “skeptic” cause.
AGW is based on centuries old science concerning the role of “greenhouse gases”, including CO2, in raising the temperature of the atmosphere. All this was entirely uncontroversial. Scientists later began to postulate that the increase in CO2 concentraton may be raising the earth’s temperature. Again this was initially uncontroversial.
Then some scientists began to do calculations on what this rise might be, and came to the conclusion that the range of likely temperature rise included numbers that may have adverse effects for human societies. This was an interesting result, but there was no stampede by scientists or anyone else to support a theory so far lacking in much empirical evidence. James Hansen predicted that the AGW t5emperature signal would begin to be detectable above the noise some time in the 1980’s. From the 1980’s actual emprical data in the form of temperatures, etc began to indicate that there may be something in these projections. Most scientists thought this notable but these preliminary results were treated by most of the scientific community with the usual skeptical caution. I was one of those “citizen scientists” who took this view.
Over the following decades, the evidence for AGW from physical chemical and biological data grew to include a multitude of lines of evidence from temperature, ice sheet and glacial data, sea level, animal migration and plant blooming, ocean pH etc etc, until that evidence for AGW convinced the overwhelming majority of citizen scientists like me that AGW had been established. I can’t put a date on my own acceptence of the AGW as there was no one piece of evidence that produced a road of Damascus conversion, but it was some time between the production of the third and fourth IPCC report.
Meanwhile, as hte evidence mounted the calls for the only way to reduce this increasingly apparent threat, the reduction of fossil fuel consumption which required regulation on a global scale was rightly regarded as a significant threat by fossil fuel industries and free market idealogues to their cororeate and ideological agendas. These groups are at the forefront of the current campaign to sow cofusion and denial about the reality of AGW.
In other words, the science of AGW is centuries old and was not accepted overnight by scientists who have no agenda other than understanding how the world works.
The “social agenda” of taking steps to mitigate what an increasing number of scientists saw as a real problem for humanity is only a few decades old.
It has been vehemently opposed by a corporate agenda, bent on denying the evidece of AGW
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Apologies for the spelling.
15
Thankfully , minor mis-spellings are usually ignored on forums.
Unless they are really funny ones. I’ve seen a few, I’ve made even more.
(or “your” instead of “you’re” etc.. darn Americans.. should be keelhauled !!)
——————
You really have to get away from that corporate agenda crap, though.
Its been shown many times that the funds being used to push the AGW fraud are many multiples higher than those being used to illuminate it.
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If you investigate the funding of the activist NGO’s, many of the biggest ones have received very large amounts from the big oil companies. Think BP, Shell, not to mention the charitable foundations set up by several of the American oil barons from the 1800’s. The vested interest’s in the AGW scare are all government funded, not the oil & coal companies as claimed by the holier than thou government funded scientists & activist groups who need AGW to further their careers.
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I think you lost a year somewhere.
If you were already involved in studying the subject, then your “conversion” to CAGW belief occurred on September 15, 2000 (AEST), or sometime in the following few weeks.
Unless you don’t watch television.
In that case it could have been a little later, but almost certainly prior to the release of the Third Assessment Report in 2001.
20
MV I do not undertand the significance the date you mention.
06
Presumably you are not politicising sport, MV, especially not Under Southern Skies.
Neither are you alluding to the cessation of the Fuel Tax protests in the UK, originally imposed for climate dogma reasons.
My guess is… Lonnie Thompson’s scary global warming yeti from the Himalayas and “We think this is alarming”.
Well it was either that or Microsoft’s release of Windows ME, which was a man-made global catastrophe for very different reasons.
20
.
You’d be amazed what can happen Under Southern Skies, Andrew.
Right venue, wrong girl, wrong moment, no yetis.
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If there was any global warming protest plug at the opening ceremony I don’t remember it. What really surprises me is that Google doesn’t seem to remember it either.
No idea what you’re on about. So tell us, what’s in the vault?
00
lol.. Dr Brain is channelling Michael the surrealist !!
quite humorous 🙂
It should be noted that around the late 1980’s was when the downward adjustment of prior temperatures started to take place, to match Hansen’s guesses.
Amazing that, when you think about it… must be pure coincidence.
And you are quite right, the AGW non-science is NOT accepted by many scientists who have no agenda. It is only really accepted by those with skin or money in the game.
(Mind you with the trillions of dollars being thrown at it, that can buy one heck of a lot of pseudo-scientists.)
And in fact, this round of hoax came from “attribution” programmers who saw a relationship between the coincidental trends of temperature and CO2 levels in the very short 1970’s-1990’s period.
A coincidence that has now ceased for approximately 15 years.
Its going to be real popcorn time once the temps start to drop over the next few years. 🙂
40
The “coincidence” between CO2 concentration and temperature goes back to the 1850’s, (correlation coefficient r = 0.91 out of a maximum of 1)
http://oi46.tinypic.com/29faz45.jpg
and has not ceased over the last 15 years (temperature data from John Christy and Roy Spencer’s UAH satellite data.)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/normalise/offset:0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.7/offset
07
[Snip- keep it polite] -Fly
So many thing wrong with what you have shown, I can’t even be bothered.
oh and I said 15 year.
Now go and play with your graphs and scales again, small minded one.
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Once again, Andy shows that his forte is abuse, not science. His response to unwelcome data is to throw a tantrum. Science is all about data analysis. If Andy cannot grasp that, he should confine his debating to topics where abuse, shouting and bombast rather than analysis of data win the day.
He claimed that “programmers” saw “coincidental trends of temperature and CO2 levels in the very short 1970′s-1990′s period.”
I responded with data showing the coincidental trend (correlation coefficient 0.91) goes back to 1850.
He claimed the “coincidence” stopped 15 years ago. So I supplied a more detailed graph of the last 15 years , with an additional 20 for comparison with earlier period.
This graph illustrates that as every climatologist knows, temperatures are affected by many varying factors of which CO2 is only one, which results in “noisy” temperature data on a year by year basis and that the noise problem did not start in the last 15 years. Once again, too short a time period for noisy data cannot reveal a trend.
But it is all too hard for Andy to mentally isolate the last 15 years of the data from the previous 20.
So I will do it for him:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/normalise/offset:0.05/to:1999/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/to:1999/normalise/scale:0.7/offset/to
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1999/mean:12/normalise/offset:0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1999/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.7/offset
NO wonder he can’t be bothered responding with anything other than abuse
13
Warning to Andy: This contribution involves science in the form of numerical calculations and statistical analysis of data.
To illustrate and quantify the difficulties of analysis with short term noisy data sets, I will repeat the calculation I made and posted a few days ago with Hadcrut4 temperature and Muana Loa CO2 data. I re-present that calculation:
The temperature trend for the hadcrut4 data is
0.124 ± 0.023 °C/decade (2σ) giving a temperature increase for the entire 56 year period
0.694 ± 0.124 °C (The error margin is 19%)
The change in CO2 concentration for that period is from 315 to 400 ppm (We will neglect the small error in CO2 concentration as this data is much less noisy than the temperature data)
The equation for temperature rise with increasing CO2 is therefore
0.694 = k log(400/315) where k is the proportionality constant.
0.694 = k x 0.239
k = 0.694/239 = 2.91
The temperature rise for a doubling of CO2 concentration is therefore
2.91 x log2 =
2.01 ± 0.38 °C
Given the noisy data, the remarkable agreement with the figure from 1850 (2.04 ± 0.07 °C) should be regarded as fortuitous.
These figures fit well within the IPCC range of 1.5 – 4-5 °C
The temperature trend for the UAH data from 1979 to the present is
Trend: 0.138 ±0.070 °C/decade (2σ) (With a 35 year data set the error margin has blown out to 51% from 19% for the data from 56 year data set.)
The rise in CO2 concentration for this period is 338 to 400 ppm
Repeating the calculations above for this data means that doubling of CO2 concentration gives a temperature rise of
1.80 ± 0.91 °C
Which is in experimental agreement with the earlier calculations but the error margin is very high.
Looking at the UAH data for the last 15 years:
Trend: 0.146 ±0.212 °C/decade (2σ) I could repeat the calculation but the error margins for this short data set (± 0.145%) make the result virtually meaningless.
12
Warning to Dr Brain
You are suffering from “Norwegian Blue Syndrome”
01
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1999/mean:12/normalise/offset:0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1999/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.7/offset/plot/rss/from:1999/normalise/trend
See even I can play your pointless puerile little game,
The pure coincidence of CO2 and temperature is busted.
IPCC, and many other climate scientists have ADMITTED as such..
Only the stragglers are left. 🙂
21
“Now go and play with your graphs and scales again”
And you do exactly as you are told.. 🙂
roflmao !!!
11
So CO2 concentration must be caused by temperature..right?
Otherwise how could you explain the annual rise and fall of CO2 (which is the main feature of the correlation)?
82
🙂
10
No. My initial response was to Andy’s claim that the “coincidence”, or correlation between temperature and CO2 concentration was confined to a short period between the 1970s and 1990s. Neither he nor I mentioned cause and effect.
However, the theoretical argument that CO2 rise since the industrial revolution has caused the temperature rise is supported by the fact that the upward curve in temperatures since 1850 follows the upward curve in CO2 concentration by 3 decades.
The annual rise and fall is of course due to the growing and dormant/deciduous decay seasons which take up and release CO2 on the land masses of the northern hemisphere. These seasonal fluctuations of course even out over the longer term and do not effect the correlation between temperature and CO2 over the period of several decades, which is the main feature of the correlation. The southern hemisphere growing seasons are of course reversed but the land mass is small compared to the northern hemisphere and does not contain deciduous forests.
11
Philip you are ignoring the bleedin obvious!
“The annual rise and fall is of course due to”…”seasons”
Seasons are not caused by CO2!
CO2 has continued to curve up but temperature has not. There is no hockey stick any more it is gone! Just another dead and buried myth.
How obvious does this non relationship need to be for you?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1959/integral/offset:-100000/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1959/scale:100000
So you are in possesion of accurate global CO2 records from 1820 are you?
30
Siliggy, which part of this do you not understand to be a reference to seasons:
The annual rise and fall is of course due to the growing and dormant/deciduous decay seasons which take up and release CO2 on the land masses of the northern hemisphere.
This seasonal oscillation does not account for the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration from 270 to 400 ppm since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The graph you present has an entirely arbitrary scaling of temperature relative to CO2 concentration which distorts the picture.
Here is the graph I presented above.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/normalise/offset:0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.7/offset
True I have selected a scaling here to demonstrate the correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature continues, but the calculation of the sensitivity factor, the temperature rise with a doubling of CO2 concentration does not depend on any graphical scaling.
The calculation shows that the data matches AGW theory, with temperature dependent on the log of CO2 concentration and gives the calculated value of the sensitivity factor 2.01 ± 0.38 °C.
I said 1850 not 1820 and here are the records for temperature and CO2 concentration and linked them in a post below:
For data since 1850, (an average of 10 data sets is shown) a better temperature fit is obtained with a nonlinear curve,
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/AMTI.png
which is similar to, but lags behind the curve for CO2 concentration by about three decades.
http://tinyurl.com/aj2us99
Theory says that temperatures should increase with the log of CO2 concentration. That is, such a plot is expected to be linear. As I have noted before, this theoretical prediction is confirmed empirically with a linear correlation coefficient of 0.91.
http://oi46.tinypic.com/29faz45.jpg
11
“Siliggy, which part of this do you not understand to be a reference to seasons:”
A silly question. It was me who said.
“Otherwise how could you explain the annual rise and fall of CO2 (which is the main feature of the correlation)?” It was me who started taking about seasons. Can you think logically at all? Is your attention span just three minutes?
Your explanation is incomplete however. You forgot to mention that as well as changes in annual temperature causing take up and decay on land that planckton and the sea via Henrys law are also amongst many ways that temperature drives CO2 concentration.
“The graph you present has an entirely arbitrary scaling of temperature relative to CO2 concentration which distorts the picture.”
Again your attention span lets you down. You claimed “curve in temperatures since 1850 follows the upward curve in CO2 concentration by 3 decades.”
It does not! The S curve seen in the graph I presented shows the opposite and the scaling matches the offset.
“This seasonal oscillation does not account for the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration from 270 to 400 ppm since the beginning of the industrial revolution.”
So what! The important point was that the correlation which you hid by using a 12 sample shows that temperature drives CO2. It is not the only driver.
“the temperature rise with a doubling of CO2 concentration does not depend on any graphical scaling.” How about: the CO2 rise with a TSI induced increase in temperature does not amount to a doubling.
“The calculation shows that the data matches AGW theory,”
True and correct both ignore many other inputs.
“I said 1850 not 1820”
You said “temperatures since 1850 follows the upward curve in CO2 concentration by 3 decades.” Did you know that 1850 minus three decades is 1820?
So where is your CO2 data for those three decades?
“Theory says that temperatures should increase with the log of CO2 concentration.”
That means that the only way to get a stable climate is to drive CO2 concentrations right up! Good plan. Lets do it.
10
Silligy, No, you were not the first to mention seasons. You asked the following question::
So CO2 concentration must be caused by temperature..right?
Otherwise how could you explain the annual rise and fall of CO2?
You mention an annual rise and fall. I give the explanation in terms of plant growing and dormant seasons.
There is nothing in this data alone to distinguish between cause and effect. You do not support your statement that CO2 concentration must be caused by a rise in temperature with any evidence.
You claimed “curve in temperatures since 1850 follows the upward curve in CO2 concentration by 3 decades.”
It does not! The S curve seen in the graph I presented shows the opposite and the scaling matches the offset.
The “S curve” in your graph shows nothing of the sort. I apologise though as I did not realise that your graph presented the integral of the Muano Loa data. What that has to do with anything I don’t know. And your scaling is arbitrary.
So what! The important point was that the correlation which you hid by using a 12 sample shows that temperature drives CO2. It is not the only driver.
I have no idea what you are on about. A 12 sample what? Unless you are talking about my graph which shows the correlation of temperature with CO2, which shows that the temperature data points are subjected to a 12 kmonth smoothing, which does not mean there are only 12 data points. And again this correlation does not itself distinguish between caus and effect.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:12/normalise/offset:0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.7/offset
Here is the graph without the smoothing:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/mean:1/normalise/offset:0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.7/offset
“I said 1850 not 1820″
You said “temperatures since 1850 follows the upward curve in CO2 concentration by 3 decades.” Did you know that 1850 minus three decades is 1820?
Did you consider that 1850 plus 30 is 1880? If you looked at the graphs I supplied you would have seen that the CO2 concentrations are rising from about 1850, whereas the temperature is flat until about 1880, then begins to rise. Therefore the statement “temperatures since 1850 follows the upward curve in CO2 concentration by 3 decades” is correct.
That means that the only way to get a stable climate is to drive CO2 concentrations right up! Good plan. Lets do it.
Well, no. Driving CO2 concentrations right up will drive the temperature right up. Holding CO2 concentrations steady will not drive demperatures up.
01
You are becoming a parrot, a regurgitator of meaningless garbage.
Fanaticism can do that to people.
31
So can fascism.
20
Andy (and Rereke) Further demonstration that when faced with science in the form af actual data and calculations, you have nothing to offer but abuse is not necessary.
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Philip,
Can you explain why you accuse me of abuse?
30
Rereke, Excuse me if I mistakenly took your comment as an endorsement and addition to Andy’s abuse.
00
Phil,
I’ve tried to ignore you and stay out of this debate, largely because you’re a boring git who just goes on repeating the same discredited quasi-religious mantras as the Master Baiter, only not quite as stupidly. So, unlike the Master Baiter, you have no entertainment value. You simply aren’t worth the effort.
However, I’m getting more than a little tired of your faux “outrage” at a few casual, mild character swipes by Andy and others.
Let’s be blunt, mate. The only reason you are here is because you CAN have a debate. This couldn’t happen over at the John
Crook’sCook’s S.S. site, or RealClimate, or Desmoblog, or any of the other fanatically religious sites that push your faith-based dogma.YOU are upset because Andy calls you a few names in debate. Well, guess what mate, WE, who are prepared to tolerate your presence, are the ones your side bans from all debate. WE are the ones your side wants to round up, put on death trains, relocate to “re-education camps”, tattoo and/or brand, and, in many cases, eliminate altogether by firing aquad.
WE are the ones that elected a PM your side regularly refers to as a c**t. WE are the ones your side labels “d*niers”, simply because we question and try to learn. WE, the ones who tolerate you, and allow you to have a voice here, are the same people your side wants to even ban from the comments section of newspapers.
So suck it up boyo. If you try to pull the mummy’s girl “ooh he insulted me” line one more time, I’ll buy into this, and I guarantee you, it won’t be pleasant.
.
Besides all that, you’re off-topic.
91
And besides which.. I’ve hardly said anything I wanted to say. 😉
I actually have complete contempt for your stupid propaganda efforts, We have seen it all before, and shown it to be RUBBISH.
But you bring it back again, and again, and again…… and again.
As I said before…
Norwegian Blue Syndrome.
41
Memory Vault, Thank you for reinforcing my point. Your entire post does not contain a single word of scientific analysis, just name calling. That is a mark of so many “skeptics” failure to debate the science. They fall back on personal abuse and name calling – an admission of failure. My feelings are not hurt by this. Every time “skeptics” engage in this conduct, I am happy to point to it as a sign of their abject surrender and failure to address the science.
Andy’s 8:43pm post is a magnificent example. I have presented data that contradicts his prejudices. Unable to refute the data he calls it propaganda , throws a tantrum and hurls abuse. Is that the best you can do? (Apparently yes.)
So pleased that you “tolerate” me. Did you give your permission to Jo? Unlike Anthony Watts, who spat the dummy when I pointed out with references to graphs he had posted and provided links to apparently without examining them, (a common failure of Watts) that his claim that data presented in thesis was inconsistent with data published in Science was incorrect. Having run more than one entire section on this point, he buts in on the discussion to declare it to be “minutae” and tells me to pull my head out of my rear end, and stop my “fawning defence” of the author (By pointing out the facts on the graphs were contrary to Watts’ assertions.) More abuse by Watts and his accolytes led me to sign off permanently from his blog in a big way, giving Watts as good as he dished out in terms of pointing out his failings as a blog operator. This colossal pompous hypocrite then starts pontificating how when someone indulges in abuse the have lost the argument (he is correct but is utterly blind to his own behaviour in this respect) and declares me banned permanently from his blog. Crushed I am.
And I am not off topic. I responded to repeated claims by your pals concerning alleged lack of warming for x years and the alleged failure of the correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature. Why don’t you tell them they are off topic for raising these issues and persisting in arguing them?
So suck it up boyo. If you try to pull the mummy’s girl “ooh he insulted me” line one more time, I’ll buy into this, and I guarantee you, it won’t be pleasant.
Petrified I am. Just petrified. Go ahead and demonstrate how not to argue science.
13
Another very salient point I neglected to mention about people who cannot aregue science so resort to abuse.
They do not even have the courage to sign their real names to their work, preferring to snipe from cover.
12
You are getting more and more PATHETIC with each post.
Laughably so.
When you produce something other than base level crap, I might bother wasting more than a few seconds of time on you.
30
And as for your pathetic junior high level linear calculations……
FFS give it a break, and learn something at least a bit more advanced !!!
Its trite and meaningless, and you don’t even know it, because you don’t have the mathematical understanding to know it.
Stupid people like you, generally don’t know they are stupid.
21
Phil, when you get around to some actual “science” maybe, just maybe, we’ll have something to debate. Until then you’re just a noisy, nosy old git peddling a rapidly failing doomsday religion.
I’ve already pointed to you – what, three days ago, that you were using outdated IPCC figures for climate sensitivity. However, it doesn’t suit your prosetylising to have to scrap a whole page of carefully manicured “calculations” because your derived answer no longer matches the IPCC “official” one, so you just pretend nothing’s happened, and go on using the IPCC’s old, outdated estimates.
That’s not good science, Phil. Heck, it’s not even good religious dogma.
As even you have managed to ascertain, there was nothing pertaining to “science” in my post. It was a well-deserved personal attack on YOU for having the arrogance to think you were entitled to come here where you are not wanted, start acting like the know-it-all prick that you are, insist that you are right and everyone else is an idiot, and then turn into a dribbling cry-baby because somebody threw a handful of mud at you.
You can’t help yourself, can you? Even in attempting to put me down, you demean our host even as she gives you free rein to spout your nastiness. What a perfect example of your arrogance. Go back and read what I wrote, you arrogant little prick. I wrote WE tolerate you. Jo tolerates you, for whatever unknown reason, and WE (the rest of us) tolerate you, because Jo tolerates you, and it is HER blog, and HER rules, something which we, unlike you, respect.
Trust me you rude slimeball, if it was my blog any of you trolls doing a repeat post of already posted and discredited material, like you and the Master Baiter do as a matter of course, would get ONE warning, and then you would be gone permanently.
That aside, if it were my blog, your rude demeaning of Jo in the above highlighted sentence would have been enough on its own to have seen you permanently black-balled.
What follows then is about 200 words which, in essence, says, “Anthony Watts decided I was an arrogant, ignorant, loud-mouthed prick, and banned me from his site”. Well, hallelujah! Like, as if any of us care, Phil? What do you expect us to do about it? Start a petition? Tell somebody who cares. Talk to the hand.
And finally, having exhausted every arrogant, pig-ignorant and cry-baby avenue available, you resort to this:
I have news for you, dirtbag. You would have to be part of a very tiny handful of irregular trolls who do not know who I am, for I have been open enough about it many times. I post under the non de plume of “MemoryVault” for future business purposes, which are none of yours, or anybody else’s business. Once again you arrogantly parade your ignorance as something to be proud of.
[OK – That is ENOUGH. I am not going to put up with a flame war on my shift. One of the basic rules of this site is that people must be polite. Either respect that or be sin-binned] -Fly
21
.
So be it.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
10
Pardon me Fly, but I was discussing the science.
Specifically I was responding to Andy’s ridiculous characterisation of the mathematical procedures mentioned in these tirades of abuse:
You are getting more and more PATHETIC with each post.
Laughably so.
When you produce something other than base level crap, I might bother wasting more than a few seconds of time on you.
And as for your pathetic junior high level linear calculations……
FFS give it a break, and learn something at least a bit more advanced !!!
Its trite and meaningless, and you don’t even know it, because you don’t have the mathematical understanding to know it.
Stupid people like you, generally don’t know they are stupid.
I responded with an explanation of why the mathematics used in these analyses was entirely appropriate and again pointed out what the results meant in terms of the claims made.
Given the outright abuse proferred by Andy I did include a few mild asides of a slightly humerous nature (So much for E=mc2) lest he and Memory Vault think their odious tactics could win arguments by upsetting me, or others who they use such tactics against.
As far as MV is concerned, my response did not contain any science, because as I pointed out, his longish post contained not a word about science in his personal attack on me. I beleive i am entitled to a right of reply on this, and also my response made the very valid point that such tactics are a sign of abject surrender on the science in the (faint) hope that they would pause and reflect.
Now I note that my mild response to Andy’s abuse is flagged as awaiting moderation, while MV’s utterly toxic rant has no such appelation.
13
PS. Fly, these notes to you are not intended for general display so feel free to remove them. But I do think your comments to me warrented a reply. I wish to add however that my last post about MV’s comment is in no way a request that it be removed. Before your edict I was going to simply reply to him that it was a stunning example of what I had been talking about. I therefore wish it to remain for all to see.
12
If you will allow me to make another point which I think is worthwhile concerning etiquette and in the (probably forlorn) hopes of raising the quality of debate on this blog.
Certain people, including Fly are under the impression that I point out the over the top abuse because it is upsetting me. This is not the case.
As a professional scientist I am used to robust but good natured and civil disagreement with colleagues and conferences and in print. These discussions are beneficial to all and to scince and are actually part of the fun of science. It is what scince is about.
Yes this is a forum for non-professionals which is a very good thing and the norms of professional discussion are unfamiliar to many participants and one makes allowences, but encountering the examples of totally over the top substitution of abuse for argument here leaves often leaves me often leaves me shaking my head with gobsmacked bemusement.
I point out to these people, (and I cite non-other than Anthony Watts on this point), when you have to resort to abuse you have lost the argument.
I point out to people who engage in this conduct that it is obvious to anyone with the most cursory understanding of psychology, that the utterly disproportionate rage infested responses of people to simple scientific arguments demonstrates that they are unable to cope with viewpoints that reflect their immovable opinions and they simply reveal themselves in a very unflattering light to any impartial observer, and that they have indeed abjectly surrendered. Far from being upset, it gives me a certain amount of guilty pleasure to see this kind of response from these people. They just can’t hack it and they show themselves up in the process.
Having had this pointed out they simply escalate the conduct rather than consider arguing in a more seemly manner.
As far as this type off thing upseting me, I have been involved in some really ugly character assassination, which I discovered is the usual fate of the whistleblower, having exposed corrupt conduct in a department at the University of Sydney, refused a bribe and a good reference offered if I would go away and seen final vidication of my position in the subsequent collapse and dissapearence of the department I warned the university about.
To imagine that the spittle flecked ravings of nonentities could upset me is absurd.
[Philip, moderators are volunteers. Behavior is expected to be civil and you have some valid points. On the other hand, the blog has it’s regular visitors and they are known entities. Whilst you have been here often enough you have to imagine that you are still the visiting antagonist and the regular writer the protagonist. We do our best to squelch verbal brawls and frankly there are moments where I’m not happy about what the regulars say but we moderators try permit free speech as much as possible. You must also understand that to some degree blogs need and bloggers have a desire for entertainment. For that reason we may allow more flamboyant exchanges especially if we know the track record of the regular writer. A significant difference between Joann’s blog and many warmist haunts is that very few people are banned and even those were given several opportunities to follow rules. We rarely remove posts, and we limit snipping. If it came to that then really you were both out of line. FLY did what was necessary in his judgement and that is that. Again you have points with regard to the fray and are not necessarily wrong but this isn’t a democracy and until you are a real regular poster fully vetted you’ll have to put up with it. There are several regular contributors here that we’d call warmists. They get space to post but they also take some verbal abuse. Put up with it don’t make it worse, don’t cry foul. We mods don’t have time to straighten out every problem and that means everybody else does. ] ED
01
Dear Ed, thank you for your thoughtful and detailed reply.
Please let me repeat, that I am not requesting that people’s opinions be banned. Published and be damned (or praised) , I say. In fact I specifically requested that one particular diatribe be left as an illustration of what I am talking about. I emailed it to a friend who shared the joke.
I acknowledged above that on blogss such as this people the general publis is and should be free to indulge in “robust” comment that would be considered poor form in professional circles and that it does have a certain entertainment value. I am all for public discussion of science by the general public. These matters must be discussed outside the stuffy halls of academia and different rules do indeed apply. I am not above (gently I hope) taking the piss myself.
If such a site is to have any entertainment or serious value, opinions by “warmists” must not only be “tolerated” but welcomed. Otherwise this blog and others would be utterly boring and pointless with skeptics, genuine and those who are not in the least skeptical in their beliefs, indulging in group hugs and congratulating each other on their insights (while complaining about groupthink). The result would be as dull as dishwater and as intellectually nourishing. I noted above that knowledgable debate is an essential part of the fun of science. I come here and elsewhere to challenge and be challenged by people who can do so because it is stimulating and entertaining.
I do not routinely take any particular notice, offence, or make any complaint about personal remarks, especially if they are accompanied by serious discussion of the issues. I simply ignore without any comment those that simply do so without anything much else worthwhile to say.
My remarks were directed at some people who repeatedly go totally over the top. I am not sooking or motivated by any hurt feelings but am simply pointing out to reperat offenders that when they engage in this with little else to say they are simply demonstrating what Anthony Watts has remarked (even if Mr Watts does not always follow his own advice)- that they are demonstrating that they have lost the argument.
I actually read some of the more ludicrous diatribes with a mild smile on my face at these people’s lack of insight into their own behavior which any impartial observer would conclude reflects far more badly on themselves than on me. They damage their own side in doing so and I wrote assuring genuine skeptics who have good arguments, even those who put then more robustly than I am used to in other contexts that I do not take the fruitcakes as a representative example of those who can and do argue the AGW from a skeptical point of view.
Let me conclude that I sincerely appreciate and understand the efforts of the moderators who give their time to contribute to the success of this and other blogs. It must sometimes be a difficult task.
10
Pardon some sloppy editing above and elsewhre. Ironically I am currently proof reading and editing a PhD candidate’s thesis but in informal contexts such as this I am frequently embarrassingly sloppy.
00
Hi Philip,
According to the UN IPCC there is a pause in global temperatures since 1998.
As reported in 2013, by Warmist friendly outfits the BBC, and Nature.
Ref the BBC report here.
Ref the Nature report here.
Ref current CO2 emissions here from CO2Now.org which is a warmist friednly site.
Temperature trend is flat, CO2 is rising – hence – correlation is broken – just like your logic.
110
The alleged hiatus is a statistical artefact, entirely dependent on short data sets with large errors and cherry picking the extreme el nino year of 1998 to begin the data set:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/trend/from/plot/uah/from:1998/trend/plot/uah/to:1998/trend
Start the set one year later (1999) and hey presto, the hiatus disappears:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/trend/from/plot/uah/from:1999/trend/plot/uah/to:1999/trend
By what logic has there been a pause since 1998 but no pause since 1999?
18
So did the UN IPPC not make that statement, implying that the press release that I have in my files, and bearing their logo, is a falsification?
Were the reports, based on that IPCC statement, and broadcast by the BBC, and published in Nature, therefore incorrect?
Did I miss the consequent retractions? If so, I would like to know. I have made several policy recommendations based on my understanding that the statement was accurate and authoritative, and had not been withdrawn or superseded by a statement to the contrary.
61
Again, your lack of understanding is astounding .. especially since it has been explained to you so, so, so many times.
Seems that you have lost any ability you might have once had to learn.
There is a cure for NBS though.
Its called REALITY !!!
31
If the statements made by by the IPCC, the BBC Nature or anyone else are that there is a statistically significant “pause” hiatus” or any other trend that you care to name for the last 15 years then they are wrong.
No one here has explained how it is that you can claim that data including 1998 represents a pause from that date to the present, while data beginning a year later to the present shows warming as usual.
The fact is that the all the data shows is that 1998 was an exceptionally hot year. Its exclusion or inclusion in short term data sets will therefore give significantly different results.
15
The only significance of statistical significance is well statistical, though it may well be indicative of an underlying trend or it may not.
10
lol, so now the IPCC et al are all wrong…… well, I guess we have all known that for quite a while, hey. 🙂
And it was explained to you at least 3 or 4 time a few weeks ago. You should take notes next time. 🙂
——————-
“The fact is that the all the data shows is that 1998 was an exceptionally hot year”
Hey, You want to pick cool years to start, so what your problem with us using 1998 ?
The fact is that all the data shows that the recent past had a thing called a LIA……..
THANK GOODNESS FOR WARMING !!!
11
Alleged is correct. It is a stoppage. Should warming pick up again (not a given), it can be called a hiatus. However until that time occurs, it is a stoppage.
And the starting point was not picked by skeptics, but by the “Team”.
As far as your “3 decades”, I can only remind you that correlation does not mean causation. We have several thousands of years that show a CO2 lag. we do know that man has increased their CO2 output over the past century, so we are to now believe that a demonstrable historical fact is now being rewritten because Piracy causes global warming?
22
Hi Philip,
The point that you are not (or are refusing to get) getting is that the “Pause” whatever it’s content is now part of mainstream, official climate science.
It is not a “Denier” meme.
It is a Warmist meme.
You are out of step with the progress of the content of your side of the debate.
And from the UK Met Office.
Given that you are not even aware that the pause is mainstream climate science – what else are you not aware of?
What else do you not know about climate, while trying to pretend that you do know?
40
What’s that? Graphs of UAH global versus CO2 levels?
Your career in alarmism has really plateaued, Philip.
40
Andrew, please refer to my comments above on the inability of short noisy data sets to reliably represent the underlying trend.
The trend for your UAH data from 2002 to the present is
Trend: 0.029 ±0.293 °C/decade (2σ)
That is, the statistically significant range for the trend is from cooling of 0.264 to warming of 0.322 °C/decade.
05
And the three other main data sets trend downwards..
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/plot/gistemp/from:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/trend
gees Dr Brain.. let’s all go cherry-picking together, shall we.
A merry old time shall be had by all !!
11
Andy, At last you seem to have grasped the point. Short term sets of noisy data are unreliable indicators of an underlying trend.
14
I agree, lets use 10,000 year trends.. ie the whole of the Holocene.
We are only just climbing out of the lowest temps in the hole Holocene, well less than the temps of the MWP and RWP.
You want to use that very short term rise out of the LIA to justify some sort of fictitious anthropogenic warming correlation.
But the world is DEFINITELY on a cooling trend !!
Unfortunately its looking more and more like we have reached the peak of the naturally occurring Current Slightly Warm Period (CSWP) and are starting a gradual decline back into another cooler period, hopefully not as deep as the LIA.
The sooner we get back to creating a solid cheap plentiful energy supply system, and stop wasting stupid amounts of money on crappy irregular expensive so-called renewable systems, the better!
If we don’t our children and grandchildren will suffer greatly from the economic downturn and the massive cost of intermittent power supply. We are doing them a great dis-service with this current, wasteful alternative energy farce.
41
ps.. Its the greatest moral challenge of out time that we provide a decent regular energy system for our descendants and theirs, and not leave the country in a bankrupt mess because of idiotic green agendas.
41
“Andy, At last you seem to have grasped the point”
roflmao……
You still don’t get it do you..
I’ve been mocking your puerile efforts at every post !
You are just too DUMB to realise it !!
Its so funny watching you parade !!
11
And with China, India, Brazil, Germany and several other countries building more and more COAL fired power stations, there sure isn’t going to be any totalitarian global decrease in CO2 global output.
Its good that the reality of the hoax is gradually coming into the light, it will hopefully save the economies of many countries as they also turn back to the most efficient of power supplies.. good old COAL, hopefully Australia will be among them!!!
CO2 level will climb to a sensible level of 700ppm plus and the world’s biosphere will flourish.
Its nearly over, Dr Brain.. so… SUCK IT UP !!! 🙂
101
Philip.
It has also been known for centuries that a magnifying glass will create heat enough for a fire if used in a certain way.
For an examination of whether magnifying glasses can cause global warming, you need to go beyond the physics of the magnifier, to the dynamics of energy flux.
So it is with greenhouse gas theory. (BTW, the early experimenters did not measure the heat effect of IR in sunlight, they used a simple bolometer to measure its approximate spectrum then used classical laws from Planck and Stefan & Boltzmann. The whole of GHG theory relies on Planck being right way back then.)
So back to the GHG experiment, it is one part of the job to measure how much heat is generated when you add extra CO2 or whatever to a simulated earthly atmosphere, though this has not yet been done successfully. The other part is to determine the fate of any anomalous energy. If it is simply sent back to space before it interacts with anything much, you won’t get significant extra heating. If it loses all its energy to materials that are part of the globe it will cause heating, though the experts can’t decide how much. They can’t agree on a position between these extremes.
One reason why the global experiment is so hard arises from a common need to quarantine part of an air column into which CO2 can be added or subtracted. As soon as you devise a partition to separate the test area from the control area, you interfere with conduction & convection at least, which together with radiation are the principal means of transferring energy of the type under study.
Another problem is that instruments are not performing well enough to detect slight differences, like minute changes in watts per square meter at the top of the atmosphere or surface sea temperatures that lead to Ocean Heat Content figures. The figures float around too much – even an accountant would reject them.
120
You must be new here. Jo has already done an article on where the “Big Oil” money goes, and it is not skepticism. They are solidly in the AGW camp. Why? They make money regardless! What you are so ignorant about is they do not care about a carbon tax! Because they will not pay it, consumers will – they will just pass it on. And they LOVE Solar and wind. Why? Again, they get PAID to do nothing! Subsidies. So they are not losing regardless of who is in power, nor will they. They are heavily invested in Solar and Wind. And are laughing all the way to the bank.
if your lack of grasping well known facts is as bad as your understanding of science, I can see why you are clueless and have no idea what you are talking about.
110
We have energy companies.
00
Dr Brian Philip Shehan the semi retired nuclear resonance expert and amateur CAGW advocate is not new here. He generally sticks to Bolt’s blog where he posts as ‘Dr Brian’. If Bolta links to this site for whatever reason, Brian usually pops in for a while. Given that Bolt is on holidays he has decided to come over here anyway and bless us with his wisdom.
30
Here is a nice little graph using pre-hansenised data which shows the monumental stupidity of the correlation mind-snap
http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/7457/fvhx.jpg
The ONLY reason there is any coincidence (except in the very short period from 1970-1990) is because Hansen et al put the period from 1920-1970 in the deep freeze !! Flattened it like a pancake !!
01
Andy, I thought we were discussing atmospheric, not ocean temperatures.
02
The land temperatures would be similar if Hansen hadn’t got at them to make them fit his theory.
In fact his pre-adjustment graphs show that same peak in the 1940s’.
That is why your little SkS graph is such a nonsense, its based on data deliberately altered to show that effect.
Massive cooling of past records to create a trend that has no relation to reality.
20
“semi retired nuclear resonance expert”
I wonder how that explains his manic fixation with linear trends in a non-linear chaotic system.
And I doubt a nuclear resonance expert would ever work with data he knew had been massively manipulated.
Or would he?
00
I can see it now.
Some test results have a big peak where there shouldn’t be one, so he says..
“better get rid of that peak….. can’t have that now, can we !!”
No wonder he fell for the climate science ‘fixes’ !
00
Just in case you really are as obtuse as you seem and not simply blowing smoke to confuse the point because you have no answers otherwise, I did not say that the 1998 el nino peak should not be there, nor did I say that it should be excluded from any data set.
I did point out that because it is very large, including or excluding this single year from a short term data set makes a large difference in the the resulting linear fit, demonstrating my point that short term noisy data sets are unreliable indicators of underlying trends.
02
Actually I do not assume that the rise in atmospheric temperature since the burning of fossil fuels began increasing atmospheric CO2 to be linear.
Again, because of the high noise level in the data, for periods of a few decades hide any underlying non linear curve, a linear fit of the data is a reasonable.
For data since 1850, (nn average of 10 data sets is shown) a better temperature fit is obtained with a nonlinear curve,
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/AMTI.png
which is similar to, but lags behind the curve for CO2 concentration by about three dedades.
http://tinyurl.com/aj2us99
Theory says that temperatures should increase with the log of CO2 concentration. That is, such a plot is expected to be linear. As I have noted before, this theoretical prediction is confirmed empirically with a linear correlation coefficient of 0.91.
http://oi46.tinypic.com/29faz45.jpg
03
Hi Philip,
You seem to have missed the 1970s Global Cooling Alarmfest.
…in your little history…
I especially like the Dr. Steven Schneider video on the link expounding on the Cooling Alarm.
40
No. I didn’t.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
04
Ah….. William Connelly et al trying to revise history yet again.
and you link to it, and expect to be taken seriously ….. roflmao !!!
Seems your NBS may be even worse than even I thought.
10
Once again Andy thinks that name calling is an adequate response to data.
01
It is a bit of a slow day for me. So I thought I would take some light relief, and do an analysis of part of the document that Philip references. Enjoy:
Abstract
Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why. An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.
End Abstract.
Analysis:
Climate science as we know it today did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. The integrated enterprise embodied in the Nobel Prizewinning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change existed then as separate threads of research pursued by isolated groups of scientists. Atmospheric chemists and modelers grappled with the measurement of changes in carbon dioxide and atmospheric gases, and the changes in climate that might result. Meanwhile, geologists and paleoclimate researchers tried to understand when Earth slipped into and out of ice ages, and why.
Comment: This is essentially correct, even if the reality at that time, would not have been expressed in exactly those terms. We note that this opening follows Bernays, in starting with a defensible truth.
An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming.
Comment: This paragraph provides a mechanism that compacts intermediate learning in order to place the “then” conceptual thinking into todays belief system. It introduces the notion that a myth exists, as a given, around the historical observations, with the result that the then current research looses its scientific veracity, when viewed in todays terms.
A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales.
Comment: This sentence, while not a direct lie, is misleading in that it is dependent on a definition of “the literature” and upon knowing the search terms then currently in use. A search on Greenhouse Warming will produce a significant number of unique hits. But a search on a wide range of synonymns for “climate”, “atmosphere”, “weather”, et al, in conjunction with “extreme events” or “cooling”, et cetera, will produce a significantly higher number of unique hits, with papers written by several luminaries, past and present.
More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review describes how scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.
Comment: Having built a superficial framework to isolate the previous and inconvenient research, this sentence reinforces the notion of a myth, and then builds a time-bridge that sets the stage for the rest of the paper to start from todays position, and then, by implication, fabricate an artificial history that provides a sense of continuity with the past, and therefore implies a natural and unimpeaded progression of research and thought with minimal doubt and controvosy.
Conclusion:
The sample consists of propaganda with little or no substantive fact. It is presumed, although not verified, that the remainder of the document will continue in the same style, and for the same purpose.
70
Excellent reply Rereke.
Looks like Philip has been imbibing materials designed to insert unquestionable assumptions into his mind.
10
So Dr. Steven Schneider didn’t do an about face from Global Cooling to Global Warming?
So the great list of articles on global cooling in the 1970s never happened?
So the CIA didn’t do an official report on global cooling in 1974?, note: reading the summary should be sufficient to get the idea that global cooling was mainstream in the 1970s US Government circles.
Here is a short (6 minutes) video referencing the global cooling scare with more work by Dr. Steven Schneider at 4:22 into the video.
Philip your starting to sound like someone who is saying “… we have always been at war with East Asia…”
20
Hi Philip,
Given – from your reference above, and as explicated by Rereke Whakaaro (also above) it would seem that you believe that …
… in essence – the global cooling alarm is a myth, with no basis in the 1970s science, and climate science from at least 1970 forward has been dominated by the concept of (man made) global warming.
[1] How do you deal with contradictory information such as the Dr. Steven Schneider video, and the CIA pdf that I provide above?
[2] Does the presence of contradictory information not make you uncomfortable?
[3] Does it not make you ask the question that you may have got it wrong, or been misled?
[4] If someone wanted to make an inquiry about anything – what would be more useful, Certainty or Doubt?
[5] Are you literally allowed and able to question the idea that the 1970s global cooling alarm is a myth – could you conduct a vigorous inquiry into it’s mythic status with the view to rigorously and exhaustively test the idea to see if it might be real – or would that make you so uncomfortable – that you must shy away from such a path of action?
[6] Are you aware of Cognitive Dissonance?
Good Luck with that.
Cheers ExWarmist
20
Proof mean nothing to this fool ! Because he doesn’t understand it.
All his CRAP has been dealt with in the past, many times, yet he keeps parroting the same nonsense and propaganda. NBS!!
I wonder if he has the same CD as Michael has. ?
Did he also do a 10 week climate propaganda course. ?
20
And his response – {chirp][chirp}….
20
Well said.
00
Just a question from one you call a coward.
Given the documentation of the claims of global cooling from the 70s, and given that even some of the alarmists of today have been quoted from that period as proclaiming the second coming of the ice age (their view of the age of the planet is just a bit longer than a literal biblicist), what is the fear among modern day alarmist about recognizing and acknowledging that indeed it was the scare du jour of the 70s?
is the fear in acknowledging the scare based on the mistaken belief that those now proclaiming the second Armageddon (the first being ice of course) cannot be shown to be wrong ever – in other words infallible?
What science is behind this belief of infallibility? Does the belief in infallibility support the new religion of Climate Alarmism? Or is it simply a matter of stubborn pride and the inability of those who ‘know it all’ to never admit they were wrong?
30
Phil Jourdan. Apologies for the late reply. (I do not believe I have at any time called you a coward.) And to those above who complain that I have not answered their comments. My apologies if I cannot get back to everyone on every post and topic, nor do the necessary reading viewing on all the links people post, such as Schneider’s.
I felt disinclined to do a detailed re-read of the paper or links people have suggested, but I should point out that Rereke ends his longish analysis by indicating he did not read very far into it. I suggest that people do so.
So here is my recollection of the contents.
First note that the title of the paper is:
THE MYTH OF THE 1970S GLOBAL COOLING SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS
At no time have I denied that there was some scientific opinion in the early seventies about global cooling, and clearly neither does the paper. The cooling concerns were in the context of long term changes in climate due to natural processes which have timescales of millenia, if not tens of millenia, which prduced the ice ages. At that time the possibility of global warming occuring in the near future(decades and centuries) was only beginning to be understood.
I did not therefore consider the fact that there were official documents dealing with contingencies for possible cooling by the CIA anything remarkable, (that is their job and how they justify their budgets) any more than the fact that since the establishment of the fact that the AGW is a real possibility the CIA has formulated documents on that.
Similarly the fact that some scientists such as Schneider subsequently ‘changed their minds’ and began to form the opinion that AGW posed a greater imminent threat is entirely unremarkable. That is what scientists are supposed to do, change their opinions in the light of newer knowledge. As I have remarked before, I was not persuaded by the evidence until relatively recently.
What the authors have done is examined the scientific literature for articles predicting both global cooling and global warming and found that there was no “consensus” either way a few decades ago, but in fact papers predicting warming outnumbered those predicting cooling.
01
First, I will point out to all that your proclamation of cowardice was on a different thread.
Second, I will point out that an excuse of lack of time or inclination is not a valid excuse when attempting to debunk something. You may not like Rereke’s links. You may not agree with them. You may have alternatives that are more conducive to your beliefs. But you cannot refute them if you are ignorant of the contents.
And third, I will also point out that I asked a generic question. I did not say “YOU”. So your personal story is not relevant to the answer of the question. Whether you acknowledge the scare of the 70s or not, my question was about those trying to deny its existence. I specifically point you to this documentation http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/warmists-rewriting-history-again/
And invite you to respond to my question(s) as written.
00
The lack of inclination is not on my part. I said I could not be bothered rereading the entire paper, which I had done in the past.
It is Rereke who has not bothered to read the paper past the abstract, and who has based his comments on ignorance of the paper’s contents. He then places highly contentious interpretations on the abstract and draws conclusions on the method which if he had bothered to read the whole paper he would have realized are unwarranted. Rereke supplied no links whatsoever.
The reason I intitially did not bother to reply was because such comments are not worth bothering with. If Rereke wants to read the whole paper and get back to me, that would be another matter. I will then take the time to reread it myself. Until then I see no reson for anyone, especially those who have not bothered to read it, to complain that I was relying on my memory of what the whole paper actually said.
Ex warmists questions asks questions about Schnieder and CIA reports which I did answer. His comments on my own attitudes appear based on false premises but I answered them anyway in my reply about how I and other scientists work which you declare my irrlevant personal story. Tell it to Ex warmist.
I will repeat it. The suggestion that scientists, be they Schnieder or anyone else, cannot change their minds in the light of new evidence without censure is idiotic. My comment on my own changes of mind on AGW (as well as other scientific matters) is entirely relevant.
It is what scientists do as part of their job. They would not qualify as scientists if they were not prepared to do so. Non scientists who are unwilling to do so do not qualify in the least as “skeptics”.
I forget who said:
“When the facts change, I change my opinion. And you sir?”
It was your accusation that I had accused you of cowardice that prompted me to respond to these questionable comments at all (so many critics, so little time), as earlier on this thread I had said that those who indulge in over the top abuse while hiding behind screen names have not only thrown in the towel but lack courage. I went back and could not find that I had mentioned you. If I did so earlier it must have been in a similar context.
01
Perhaps you have to remember what you write. And the comment was directed to those who dared to question your infallibility.
Nevertheless, you have still failed to answer the question. You wasted a lot of words excusing your boorish behavior, and still failed to answer WHY are so many alarmists scared to admit there was a Global Cooling scare in the 70s. I do not care if they changed their mind. That is not the question.
So until you can learn to read, learn to write, and remember what you have written, your response, as wordy as it is, is still nothing more than a non sequitur.
please answer the question. In as few words as possible.
00
I never called anyone a coward for disagreeing with me. I have called people cowards for sniping from cover. Produce the quote and the contxt.
I have responded to your comments and those of Rereke and Ex warmist.
When questioned if I had missed the “70’s global cooling alarmfest” I responded that I had not and linked a paper I had read on the subject.
None of you bothered to read the paper (then you accuse me of not bothering) and responded with loaded and contentious commments based on a number of false premises, which is why I did not bother responding initially.
If you read the paper and my response, you cannot possibly accuse me or the authors of ignoring the the claimed alarmfest. Your claim that “warmists” deny that such papers were written this is your own spin.
What the authors, I and others point to is that the alarmism was on the part of the mass media, the legitimate scientific papers on future possible cooling were outnumbered by papers predicting warming and papers with a neutral outlook.
Take the time to actually read the paper before you bother getting back to me.
01
#1 – Show me where I said you called anyone a coward for disagreeing with you?
#2 – You have NOT answered the question. Let me repeat it just for you:
You have told us how people can change their minds. You have told us how you never denied it. You have told us many things that were all non-sequiturs. But you have NOT answered the question I posed. You just lied for the second time (I allowed your first time was merely a misunderstanding. That appears not to be the case since you doubled down on your lie).
#3 – I do not care about your paper. I asked you a question. I was hoping for an honest discussion. I have yet to see any from you. Should you return and decide to engage in an honest discussion on my question, I will be more than happy to entertain your ideations.
#4 – I was VERY specific to NOT accuse you of alarmfest – claimed or otherwise. For the goldfish among us, let me repeat:
The ball is in your court. But you are not allowed to introduce non sequiturs, straw men, or play the victim. I really do not care about your persecution complex as I have stated twice now, the question is not about YOU.
00
You are blowing smoke. Twisting and turning to cover up for the many errors you have made in comments in this thread.
Your nitpicking objection to my rendering your entirely FALSE statement that I called you and others cowards because you “dared to question [my] infallibility” as “people who disagree with me” is an attempt to cover up for the fact that such comments were only directed at people who abuse others while hiding behind screen names and you have failed to produce a quote to support your accusation.
My initial response answered comments by Rereke, Ex warmist ad yourself. You wrote:
I will point out that an excuse of lack of time or inclination is not a valid excuse when attempting to debunk something.
Indeed. I actually wrote that I could not be bothered rereading the entire linked paper that Rereke had failed to read past the abstract. I said I would rely on my memory of the contents, (but I have since reread the paper and my recollections were correct).
It was Rereke who could not be bothered reading the paper he proceeded to pontificate on so your advice should have been directed to him.
I also noted that I could not be bothered looking at the video of Schnieder as recommended by Ex warmist as the fact that he may have changed his mind was entirely irrelevent to the subject as changing one’s mind in the light of newer evidence is precisely what a scientist is supposed to do.
You then objected to me explaining what my attitude was, when Ex warmists longish list of comments asked precisely what my opinions were.
You also wrote:
You may not like Rereke’s links. You may not agree with them. You may have alternatives that are more conducive to your beliefs. But you cannot refute them if you are ignorant of the contents.
Rereke posted no links.
Perhaps your comments about a lack of inclination to read a passage before attempting to debunk it should be directed at yourself.
As for your complaint that I have failed to answer your generic question to your satisfaction:
what is the fear among modern day alarmist about recognizing and acknowledging that indeed it was the scare du jour of the 70s?…
That statement and those following contain a series of premises that I do not accept and for which you present no evidence, (Ask me when I stopped beating my wife for good measure). ie, that “warmists “ “fear” acknowledging the fact that this opinion existed. “Generically”, they don’t but they acknowledge that it existed with other future climate scenarios and it did not approach anything resembling a scientific consensus, and that the scare was a media beat up.
Therefore I can only give my own opinion and those of the authors of the paper I linked in support.
02
Lie #1 –
let me restate it for the ESL fellow who does not and cannot read:
You have been challenged. Answer. And learn how to respond.
Lie #2:
You are free to point out any twisting and turning. yet you have not. Why? I have a dozen comments on this thread, a third with you. Of those dozen, none were of alleging facts. 4 were collegial, 2 were inquisitive, 2 were explanatory (directing others to other threads for answers). Which leaves the 4 with you. And it all started with a simple question that you took as an accusation after (now it is 3 times) I SPECIFICALLY said it was not you.
#3 – Your fight with Rereke (which you got soundly whomped on – note that is not a statement of fact, as we had no judges keeping score) is not answering the question. A question put to you a week ago. A simple question. And the question remains unanswered. And has generated another question that will be coming soon.
#4 – My statement stands (and Rereke has posted many links – perhaps you missed them). If you do not know what is in a link, you cannot refute, rebut, debunk or deny it! YOU claimed you were too lazy to follow up with your discussion with Rereke. I really do not care. You have been using your fight with them as a diversion to get out of answering the question posed.
#5 – The question contains no premise. it contains facts which all have admitted to – there was a scare in the 70s about global cooling. That is not in question especially in light of the link I GAVE – http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/warmists-rewriting-history-again/
And another one for you:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F70B1FF83D5F137B93C2AA178AD95F428785F9
read it again (or don’t be bothered, i do not care).
So you have doubled your lies, stated nothing with many words, and still not answered the question. SO I will again repeat it, and add one.
New Question: Why are you trying to divert the thread. What do you fear? Why is discussing something (note not admitting anything) have you cowering in abject fear?
Old Question: What is the fear among modern day alarmist about recognizing and acknowledging that indeed it was the scare du jour of the 70s?
Please try to answer with as few twists, turns, lies innuendos and diversions as possible.
10
Oh, and learn how to spell your name. Phillip has 2 Els.
10
The paper giving details of this study was published in Diabetologia in 2011 and can be accessed at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00125-011-2204-7
21
Western medicine is really only interested in trying drugs and surgery to treat diseases.
No serious attempt will be made to introduce fasting as a routine diabetes therapy even if it spectacularly successful. Instead researchers will try and discover the biological mechanisms involved to develop and patent expensive new drugs.
164
I wouldn’t go running down Western medicine too much bananabender, it is very effective and has extended human lifespans and quality of life way beyond what has ever been experienced in human history.
However, “Western” methods rely on a good ongoing scientific rigor and a dedicated skillbase to advance and investigate the state of knowledge and understanding…..
At the moment our problem is that “Western” science has been co-opted by bureaucratic and political classes. Science and medicine have all become repositories for the consequent generations of these elites to corrupt as merely positions of social status and political power, rather than being institutions of diligence, learning and advanced skills.
CAGW being the epitome of this entropy and corruption of science and the scientific method.
…. Anyway, this study is very interesting. Visceral fat content within the pancreas and a relationship with type II diabetes. A worthy hypothesis.
170
This is simply untrue. Most of the increase in life expectancy and quality of life since 1850 has been due to clean water and improved hygiene. Engineers and rubbish collectors have saved far more lives than doctors.
Modern Westerners are plagued with diseases such as acne, asthma, dementia, diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease and gastric reflux that are very rare in traditional societies.
Dr Staffen Lindeberg MD PhD studied the people of Kitiva in the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea in the 1980s. He found NO acne, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes, dementia, asthma, tooth decay or any other common Western disease amongst almost 1000 people aged up to 100.
http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/TheKitavaStudy.html
53
I don’t think this is true.
Sit down with a dozen people one day, and ask them when they would have died or become disabled without modern medicine. You’ll find that most of them would not have made it without antibiotics and surgery. Not to mention vaccination, synthetic thyroid hormone, antidepressants etc etc.
134
If it weren’t for spears and cannibalism, they’d obviously live forever. Puhlease.
Western society and lifestyle has its own disease profiles peculiar to it. Essentially however, life expectancy is far longer, sometimes in spite of, but more often than not because of modern medicine. A simple traumatic leg wound or reaction to an insect bite would kill you in a few days in the New Guinea highlands.
It is of course survival of the fittest in such conditions, but of course those buried in the jungle are unlikely to have given you their health profile, now are they.
100
191
bb makes a good point that sanitation has saved a huge amount of people and workers in those fields deserve credit. Of course, so has modern medicine. It sounds like you were doing crucial humanitarian work. That must have been very challenging realising you couldn’t save them all but trying to do what you could, particularly when this happened so often and starkly.
80
The noble and self-sacrificing medical profession to the rescue of blighted humanity again!
The health problems you described in South Africa are primarily caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation and extremely poor nutrition. [Ironically the poorest hunter-gathers have far better diets and hygiene than the poor in developing countries. They are also largely free of infectious diseases].
Virtually all of these disease you mentioned (including malaria) were common in Western countries 150 years ago. Malaria and dengue fever were eliminated by draining wetlands and poisoning mosquitoes. TB and measles were reduced by demolishing slums and quarantining the sick. Typhoid was almost entirely eliminated by providing clean water and effective sanitation. Infant mortality was reduced by providing basic health advice and greatly improved maternal and infant nutrition.
The fact is that many of the most serious public health problems in Western countries had been greatly reduced decades before mass vaccination and and effective drugs arrived.
74
You missed discussing measles, tetanus, TB and childbirth, banana bender.
You do make some valid points, but you are being a pedantic, unreasonable pr*ck about it.
50
Plumbers are the unsung heroes of the earth. Would it be more diplomatic to suggest a cure for iatrogenesis.
http://biblehub.com/mark/2-17.htm
10
I’d suggest you watch a movie called “Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet”, where Edward.G.Robinson plays the erstwhile doctor, wandering through wards of children asphyxiating from diphtheria in affluent, industrialised Germany where sanitation and nutrition was excellent. A polio epidemic here in around 1958 had absolutely nothing to do with poor nutrition or over-crowding etc. These are all important, but your argument, such that it is, has no merit whatsoever. Infectious diseases spread depending upon the immunity of the herd it infects, not necessarily correlated to the conditions under which someone is living exclusively. TB strikes affluent and hobo alike, as does measles, rheumatic fever, diphtheria, pertussis, etc. Sanitation is important but medicine, including vaccination has been quite important in preventing epidemics of these once common diseases. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the facts to suit your agenda, something to which I see you are no stranger.
40
Given the probable failure rate of individuals trying to fast, a drug that manages the biological mechanisms involved would save many lives.
A patent now lasts for only 17 years. Patent holders have had four years of their Intellectual Property rights arbitrarily stripped from them without recompense.
A very big part of the reason patented pharmaceuticals are so expensive is the horrific cost that government regulation imposes on an organisation seeking a patent for a novel pharmaceutical.
A patent is a fair reward for making the information widely available, rather than concealing it as a trade secret for generations as was done previously. And knowing the underlying mechanisms will undoubtedly reveal more useful information about human biology than just that which was first looked for.
30
Pharmaceutical patents are routinely extended for another 10-20 years by a process known as “evergreening”. The drug undergoes a minor reformulation or is prescribed for different purpose. The 17 year patent then starts again. This is extremely common.
Major pharmaceutical companies spend vastly more on marketing than they do on drug development.
The major pharmaceutical companies spend most of their research effort developing “me too” drugs. These are slightly modified but 100% legal “copies” of successful existing drugs. Common examples are SSRI antidepressants and proton pump inhibitors used to treat heartburn. In many cases these “new” drugs are no better than existing and much cheaper drugs.
20
True.
30
A fasting drug eh ! Like the one that makes you violently sick if you touch a drop of alcohol for instance.
00
I’m alive because of modern medicine so broad statements such as yours are … well far too broad.
Slightly off topic; isn’t it just great that Jo introduces a new topic and seemingly within minutes there is a civilized constructive dialogue. An exchange of ideas that simply was impossible just a few years ago.
111
Somewhere along the road of life I ran across something to the effect “in the west they study illness, in the east they study wellness.” In other words, treatment vs prevention. Far more lucrative to create treatment plans, the supporting pharma industries, the return visits, etc. than if the patient never became a patient in the first place.
Indeed we have come a long way as far as health and quality of life but, to paraphrase what J.H. so nicely stated, the treatment has in effect become the disease.
21
You’ll find by far the staunchest defenders of western medicine are Asian, particularly Chinese, doctors.
20
True, but of course , under Mao, western medicine was seen to be unaffordable for the masses, hence the stimulus for “barefoot doctors” and acupuncture. Except for Chairman Mao, who had his own private physician, because as Orwell wrote,” some pigs are more equal than others”
60
Some of the staunchest defenders of western medicine are doctors you say? Do they live in the west as well? That their heritage is eastern is one thing where do they live.
Some of the staunchest defenders of climate science are climate scientists, does that mean it is without flaws as well?
00
Really?
I’ve got a Chinese Malaysian friend who worked in Asutralia as a GP . He claims that Falun Gong cured him of all manner of ailments including an incurable genetic condition.
Asians are particularly attracted (or forced into) careers that have a high perceived status. In the English speaking world the career with the highest perceived status is medicine. So these doctors have a great motivation to preserve the status quo. A century ago their great-grandfathers were most likely equally staunch defenders of Chinese traditional medicine.
02
Apparently your single person survey with Dr. Feng Shui holds more weight than the 30 or 40 Chinese medico friends and acquaintances to which I am referring.
20
The link in my post (6) above only gives the abstract. Apologies.This URL should give the whole article:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00125-011-2204-7/fulltext.html
—–
Thanks IAn. Added to the post. – Jo
20
You don’t need to go on any crash diet to cure diabetes 2.
Strict low carb diet where you don’t need to restrict calories only carbs, gives the same result. There are soon thousands in Sweden who have cured their D2 with LCHF = Low Carb High Fat diet.
For more info please see Swedens largest health blog English version: http://www.dietdoctor.com/
51
There is a link in the post above to a comparison between low carb and low cal and that particular poster argued (fairly well) that the low calorie diet worked much faster. See “similar studies”. But some people might find the low carb diet easier to stick too…
40
It isn’t even low-calorie per se. One can assume that on a 600 Calorie diet, very little time is spent eating. I.e., most of the time one is fasted. During this time, very little insulin is released into the bloodstream which allows the body to reset its sensitivity to it.
It’s similar to how angina patients take off their nitroglycerin patch at night, otherwise they’d just build up a tolerance to it and it would stop working.
While our ancestral diet, at most latitudes, tilted to lower carb, higher fat (although not so much near the equator where our most ancient ancestors lived — they often ate more plants); the big explosion in obesity and diabetes corresponded not just with greater refined carbohydrate intake, but also (and this is too little understood) with food companies and even sports nutrition companies marketing to people the need to eat frequently including snacks or protein shakes and the like.
This means that people who eat thus have chronically elevated insulin which leads to developing more resistance to it which leads to diabetes and obesity. Thus goes the theory.
The fact that various fasting regimes as well as bariatric surgery cure diabetes for a lot of people suggests there’s important something to this.
No one would want to maintain a low Calorie diet indefinitely, if this was even possible. However when cutting out snacking between meals, stopping sipping on sugar-containing drinks, and introducing longer fasts of a day to up to five days at a time (one study Dr. Fung cites shows both fasting one day a week or five days every five weeks work well, with the latter being even better), one can still maintain a normal average Calorie consumption by eating rewarding meals, but still periodically drop insulin in order to increase the body’s sensitivity to it, reversing diabetes type 2.
It isn’t for nothing that religions around the world had periods of fasts, cultures had admonitions about snacking between meals, and no snacking between meals is a staple of Ayurvedic medicine.
Relatively low carb can help also, but is less of a cure than a mitigation strategy. The protein in low-carb diets stimulates quite a bit of insulin production. So constant low-carb, high-protein snacking is probably not that great. Periodic larger low-carb meals with fasts between them and the odd higher-carb meal to prevent adrenal fatigue and thyroid problems is probably ideal and mimics how a lot of our ancestors would have fasted and eaten.
They sure as hell did not sip pop between meals.
90
Shorter version:
It’s probably all of the above, but fasting has the strongest effect (makes sense: near total cessation of food and large reduction in serum insulin) followed by low carb (less-deep reductions in insulin), then some* drugs which increase insulin sensitivity, high-intensity exercise, moderate exercise, and portion control.
The takeaway point, I believe, is they’re not all equally effective. If one wants the best chance of a profound improvement, one would be wise to look into periodic fasting: whether short-length total absence of food or medium-length reductions.
*Insulin and most other diabetes drugs don’t actually improve type-2 diabetes. If anything, they inexorably worsen it and exacerbate a progression to insulin-dependent diabetes.
30
Intermittent Fasting is the keyword search term du jour. The 5:2 diet (5 ad lib, 2 fasting) is the zeigeist in health junkie circles. Also the daily 16 hour fast. There are many different forms. I’m interested in comparisons, and also any gender specific studies, as some claim that women respond differently to men.
50
Women of reproductive age don’t seem to tolerate prolonged or repetitive fasts as universally well due to adrenal fatigue and thyroid issues. Yet more reasons why a strict low carb diet isn’t ideal for the masses, especially combined with fasting.
I tend to think when treating diabetes you might be a bit more aggressive than you otherwise would, as it’s a balancing act. But fair point about women.
Some of these interventions are intended to be short lived and curative, then followed with a more lenient program.
I don’t think men should fast willy-nilly either, but it remains a valuable tool for diabetes management and healing. I also mentioned Ayurvedic medicine up above. Probably not everyone needs to frequently fast for 1, 3, 5 days — but getting away from the profiteering dogma that we need to be constantly stuffing our faces or we’ll faint or our muscles will melt would be a positive step.
It’s madness. We evolved with a variable food supply, not 6 small meals a day. Where were the fridges on the African Savannah for all this!?!
150
My wife has had two healthy children while on a very strict LCHF -diet. She is on it not to lose weight but because it has been the only thing that has gotten her stomach problems to disappear. She has been on the diet for 5 years straight and there has been no problems whatsoever.
My mother in law jumped on the LCHF-train after she was diagnosed with T2-diabetes. She never even started the medication because after couple of months on the diet her blood sugar levels were perfect. She has also lost something like 20kg in the past 3 years.
The trick is to eat more saturated fat instead of carbs. Mostly butter. Vedgetable oils are not good for you in such a large amounts you need to eat to get enough calories to get by. And avoid the Low Carb, High Protein -diet. It might get you thin, but all that extra protein will also do pretty hefty damage to your body and therefore is not sustainable for longer periods. There is even evidence that it increases your chance to get T2-diabetes.
Our family of four (the kids are <4 years old) eats something like 6-8kg of butter in a month with all those vedgetables and meat. Try to match that and you'll be pretty ok. 🙂
70
Would this also work for someone with type 2 diabetics that is not overweight?
10
Most likely yes, Laurie. On days where one isn’t fasting, a normal weight type-2 diabetic would just eat a bit more once their appetite adjusts to having some fasting days.
Most of our ancestors were not obese, yet had fasts imposed on them from time to time. Intermittent fasting essentially reproduces that.
That said, a person who was of normal weight and in particular a female of reproductive age who is of normal weight may want to ease into fasting rather than do the more intense regimens. Dr. Fung’s approach is 3 day-long fasts per week on non-consecutive days. While I have no doubt that would have a profound effect, it is probably not necessary for everyone (I assume he would alter the approach on a patient-by-patient basis), especially for someone who isn’t obese.
Plenty of people get good results on one to two days of fasting a week.
30
Even one day of fasting per month has been shown to be of some benefit.
For that matter, the Ayurvedic medicine practice of three meals a day with no snacking would be an improvement for many.
20
Laurie, also LCHF work for people without extra weight. The blood sugar normalises first and the weight drops much later.
In T2D, your body produces insulin but your cells are not responding to it properly. They have gone numb (I think this might not be the word I’m looking for, but I’ll stick with it. Finglish rules! 🙂 ) to it. Why so? Because of constant overly large exposure. The same thing happens with any poison: the body can get used to it and be taught to tolerate very large dosages – even ones that would kill normal unaccustomed people immediately.
Fasting and LCHF work for the same reason. You stop running from a sugar-high to a sugar-high and therefore from a insulin-high to an insulin-high. With LCHF it is because you just don’t eat that much carb to get your blood sugar high in the first place. In the fasting diet you have two days a week for your body to recover and sensitise again to insulin.
I’ll stick with LCHF. I have been on it for years and see no reason to stop.
PS: As a hint to those who might want to try LCHF, I’d like to give you a couple a quick tips.
1) Start slowly. Any large change in a diet will make you feel ill in the beginning. Move from your normal diet to LCHF in stages in a month or so. If you just immediately dumb all carb and start eating huge amounts of protein and fat, you will feel like you are going to die. You will not, but you will feel like it.
2) Eat more salt. After you stop eating bread, you get a lot less salt than you used to. You need salt to feel well, so you should learn to eat it more from elsewhere. Try tasting salt – if it tastes delicious, you have a lack of it.
3) Don’t overdo protein. It’s easy to eat too much meat and at the beginning it is difficult to eat enough butter to keep your hunger away. You’ll learn this eventually. Try not to eat any more meat that you eat currently.
4) If you are a vegan, don’t even bother trying. It is impossible to have a healthy LCHF diet if you avoid all animal products and you’d just end up with serious mineral deficiensies.
10
How come Michael Smith News has something about climate change and you are into diet? Happy New Year
41
Helen this site isn’t exclusively climate change focused .. site tagline “tackling Tribal Group Think”. Medicine has as much tribal group think as climate change.
40
JoAnne was a science broadcaster in a more general sense prior to focusing largely on the climate-change issue due to the urgency of the situation because profound and civilisation/economy (and thus human well-being and, in some cases, survival)-jeapordising political decisions were being made in the absence of a good understanding of climate processes … in some cases, despite them. I understand her feelings on this because that’s how I felt. Yet she, like Anthony Watts I, were originally believers in the AGW theory.
Jo’s “About” page — in addition to a small section on “Food Science” — shows that much of her education is in biology.
As an aside, I’m often amazed how little attention biologists such as Richard Dawkins give to the positive benefits to the biosphere of a certain amount of increased atmospheric CO2 lending itself provably to more photosynthesis. I’m not saying more CO2 is an endless benefit and that a point couldn’t be reached where additional atmospheric CO2 did greater harm than good, but there is no reason to believe the amount of atmospheric CO2 the planet had, say, in 1950 was the correct amount. There’s a range, and it’s in natural flux.
10
*and I
10
Clarification: I am a believer in the AGW theory. I believe Jo and Anthony are as well.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. However, we believe the IPCC and mainstream climate scientists have greatly overestimated the warming feedbacks. Since the data is not tracking with their predictions, we dispute that AGW is likely to be Catastrophic.
It will have a mixture of benefits and harms, and would be much, much more economical and effective to adjust to what little warming man is able to cause rather than try to stop it, which is probably impossible given human nature anyway. Further, man’s contribution through CO2 at least (CFCs may have been a bit more troubling) is a bit player in a much larger orchestra, and may not produce much in the way of troubling warming.
Which is to say that the average temperature of the planet circa 1950 wasn’t necessarily perfect either. More people die from cold than heat. Our food production and economies have done better during warm periods than cold ones in the past. Etc.
10
@Christoph Dollis – When you put it that way, I think most skeptics would put themselves into your camp. It is not that AGW=0, but the C part of CAGW that is the bone of contention.
But it is not only Man that has an influence on climate. Every species does. The magnitude is one of the questions. As is the ability of man to change it.
20
ummm.. sorry to seem ignorant…
but what is a diet ????????? 🙂
60
One would have thought you knew about this,comment #3 mentions red wine.
20
Somethin’ to do with th’ Japanese Parliament I think……..;-)
00
I once read something in a history book about a “diet of worms”..
Doesn’t that sound yummy !!
10
LOL! Hilarious.
00
google “diet of worms” you get all sort of things:
from historic events to pop bands to feeding habits of aquatic monotremes.
quite educational.
ps.. why do I get the impression this is not contributing to the topic at hand ???
or maybe it could be useful.. tapeworms can help you reduce weight, I’ve heard.
00
As long as you remember the important stuff.
It’s RED with garden worms,
WHITE with sandworms,
and a light Rose with escargot.
20
I remember a documentary a few years ago that followed a group of diabetic aboriginal women back into their former bush environment.
Thay ate only bush foods for a number of weeks and were retested after a few weeks and they had all improved markedly after that few weeks duration.
30
This is very old news. Here’s a very well regarded paper from 1984. Kerin O’Dea is now a Professor of nutrition at the University of South Australia.
Diabetes. 1984 Jun;33(6):596-603.
Marked improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian aborigines after temporary reversion to traditional lifestyle.
O’Dea K.
http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/33/6/596.full.pdf [free full text]
30
Now just imagine that the the status quo, i.e expensive drugs and surgery is the only way to help patients with diabetes, was the basis of a multi trillion dollar industry started by some of the most powerful and wealthy people in the world which not only extended their wealth but was key to fulfilling their political agenda for global control of all industries, all wealth and all governments – You could cure every person in the world of diabetes with a crash diet and the subservient and compliment media, fed a narrative by the government funded scientists would still be reporting that expensive drugs and surgery is the only way to help patients with diabetes.
101
Duh obvious. Its usually the obvious that is true. Aka if Co2 had an effect on climate we would have been fried zillions of years ago
82
Its usually the obvious that is true
I cannot think of a single instance where this is true. Not from the shape of the earth to the nature of atoms, from the reasoning of women to the plans of men, from history, psychology, law, biology or drama. Not one instance.
31
Years ago my discovery of Weston A Price was a revelation in diet and the human body http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_Price this mans world travels and study of old world tribal living is a rare insight and just fascinating.
There’s even a foundation in his honor http://www.westonaprice.org/ it’s interesting if you have an open mind, I believe the biggest health problem in people today is having the mental toughness or commitment to improve their diet and live better.
I’ve had people ask me how to improve their health/diet etc..and when you give them the hard facts quite often they will get defensive or agitated, not because they don’t agree with you but because their too scared to kick bad habits.
40
Interesting discussion. Follows on from the presumption that T2 diabetes is as a result of poor diet/overweight/unfit.
I’ve never been any of these and have the disease. A high level stress event can tip over the balance and diabetes can be the outcome. My endocrinologist has 85% of his patients stress induced
What gets me is that so much medicine now days is about “management”, not addressing the fundamental cause. No money in cures. Same reason that no one researches the placebo effect.
Can see what’s being proposed for many would be a fundamental mind shift and an obvious kick start for change. The challenge for people to act, not think.
30
No.
The hypothesis is, all things equal, it follows too frequent eating and thus chronically elevated serum insulin leading to a tolerance to it, aka, type-2 diabetes.
Expressly overweight is seen as a symptom of the insulin toxicity rather than primarily causative.
130
I’m interested that you mention stress. A healthy builder/tech teacher friend in his 50s developed diabetes during a phase of great difficulty with his sons young family. A few years later the family situation has stabilised and he no longer requires medication but does maintain a self-designed diet based upon reading articles at Dr Mercola.com and others on the ‘net.
Singular cases are not useful scientifically but it might be interesting if all diabetes cases were asked to fill out carefully designed health questionaires to identify diet, life-style and psychological factors as my friend senses that his dis-stress was a causative factor.
00
Promising.
I mean the article and the subsequent discussion, not just the treatment.
Does this mean some day in the future we can have a similar unbiased, fact-based article and discussion on lung cancer, heart disease, smoking and tobacco.
Or is that still a bridge too far?
121
If climate followers here can talk about nutrition; how about a nutritionist commenting on climate?
http://www.naturalnews.com/043395_freezing_weather_global_warming_scientific_evidence.html
00
To the above commenters who point out that this is hardly news, I agree. I’m so totally sick of the “but I’m born with a different metabolism to the rest of you, so you need to pay for my gastric banding… give me respect… and I’ll sue you if you object that I overflow onto your plane seat…” people and those who make excuses for them.
It’s a simple matter of calories in, calories out. (I never quite got reconciled to kilojoules, I was brought up in school with bomb calorimeters. Anyone here remember them?)
Anyway. As a newly qualified young hospital doctor back in 1968, I had just 5 beds on my ward (out of about 40) grudgingly given over to a medical specialist in a previously unheard-of discipline – “metabolic medicine!” What on earth could that be?
Turned out this rather strange doctor admitted grossly obese patients, wired their jaws together, and I was required to drain off what seemed to be about half a pint of blood from each of them each morning for biochemical analysis. Boy, did their weight drop fast. As did their blood pressure, basal glucose and cholesterol levels. Had the technology been available at the time, I’m quite sure that insulin resistance would be shown to also have dropped. On the negative side, a fair number developed acute (but superficial and transient) stomach ulcers.
Actually – an observation that seems to have been lost now from history – the occupation of Holland during WW2 and the diversion of its food supply to the Axis armies resulted in a reduced Dutch death rate. Seems that the best way to increase a population’s health is to reduce its food supply. But not by too much.
Fat people (the majority of type 2 diabetics) have no one to blame but themselves.
Disclaimer – I am a very sensitive and caring New Age Guy.
85
LevelGaze,
I did not have the benefit of your medical training. However, I did have the extraordinary good fortune of growing up and living in an extended family where my great-grandmother, Lizzie, was still alive.
Lizzie had a simple saying to explain everything. It formed her philosophy and her life.
As far as fat people were concerned, Lizzie would say:
“It can’t end up on your hips, until it has gone past your lips”.
.
I miss Lizzie and her wisdom..
120
I was in a bar that had an “All you can eat and drink” for a set fee afternoon and I was sitting between two very big girls. The waiters bought everyone a snack platter of 3 chilli wings, calamari rings and a couple of spring rolls which the girls consumed with two Heineken cans. They then headed for the servery coming back with a serving of pork loin and apple, two pork ribs, three lamb chops, and a couple of sausages plus potato bake and some salad.
About 10 mins later a waiter came and delivered a plate with a rib eye steak on it for the girl on my right which she proceeded to consume – the other girl asked where did she get the steak? The other replied let me show you and they both headed back to the servery and returned. 10 mins later the waiter returned with two more rib eye steaks which they both consumed. Then of course the extensive dessert tray was attacked with a fury and the Heineken kept flowing.
Unbelievable, I’ve never seen such gross consumption in all my 60+ years.
30
What! Could it be Mrs. Creosote and her sister?
My wife and I went out to dinner 6 months ago at a “home style” restaurant and witnessed a very similar situation. She and I ate till filled and took home a box each (about 1/2 the meal) without appetizers or dessert. At the same time the table across from us with two very large women consumed a large platter of fried appetizers (each), the entire serving of a large portion dinner with all the fixings (each) and a very large dessert (each), washed down with several soda beverages. They did all this in the time it took wifey and me to eat our halves.
I guessed it to be over 4000 calories per each of them.
40
Do not mock these people – they are doing their bit to prevent global warming by sequestering Carbon.
30
In fact, has Trenbreth considered that the energy imbalance may be due to this sequestration via obesity?
40
This behaviour is especially obvious on a cruise ship. There are always a few folks too wide to fit through the door to the dining room, so they head for the buffet.
Dependent on a walking frame for mobility because they are so heavy, they use the walker as a mobile tray with which to abscond with a load of sweets! This is after consuming enough grub for a small family.
I remember one woman struggling to push her walker because she was so busy stuffing her gob with the cream cakes which filled the tray of her walker!
I guess they are adamant that they will get their “money’s worth” out of the cruise?
40
You can see it every day at Crown Casino. Mountains of food, all you can eat. The waste is incredible as well. Pile your plate…, don’t like it for some reason, so leave it and get another.
00
Some have interpreted the Minnesota Starvation Experiment as supporting the opposite view to yours.
How we’ve come to believe that overeating causes obesity
51
I could not agree less with your comment, Levelgaze.
Many overweight people are overweight precisely because they followed medical advice.
A few facts:
98% of diets fail, usually with eventual weight gain beyond the original starting weight.
Low fat diets appear to be the least effective diet regime because they adversely affect hunger perception/satiety/appetite and insulin resistance.
While gluttony and sloth contributes to a percentage of overweight people, genetics is more entirely relevant than has been appreciated, but above all else adulteration of our food sources through processing of food (made worse by low fat alternatives for the “diet conscious”) is THE most important factor, in my opinion.
As an aside, I know of many people who would routinely intake less than 1500 calories daily, yet are grossly overweight and cannot lose it no matter what they try. These people all seem to have one thing in common, they are passive personality types, being easily intimidated people who are often perpetually worried and stressed, they have very poor self-esteem and lack energy to do much in the way of physical activity without becoming exhausted.
In addition, I see a lot of young women who gain considerable weight in spite of regular exercise and relatively low caloric intake, usually due to PCOS-like syndromes or possibly the influence of OCPs. I also see a significant number of people who gain considerable weight after a severe viral infection or a severely stressful incident (marriage breakdown or death in the family), especially illnesses where they can’t eat much at all in the initial stages, such as glandular fever, and weight then piles on subsequent to this in spite of modest dietary instigation. This seems to relate to reverse T3 up-regulation but other factors are likely to be at play.
Obesity is complex and I would recommend you avoid broad blame statements that are unhelpful, and quite likely only relevant to a minority of patients. Truth is the body has a set point for weight which becomes disrupted for whatever reason, and the interaction between premorbid personality, genetic factors, toxic load, nutritional deficiency, sedentary lifestyle, illness and infection, thyroid modulation, cortisol, insulin and its regulation, body image and perception are far more complicated and a simple calorie in calorie out paradigm is completely off base with little evidence to support it.
71
Winston,
You can recommend until you’re blue in the face, but I won’t pay any attention until you can explain why the people you refer to magically manage to get excess calories out of thin air.
Explain that and we will have discovered how to create energy out of nothing, and the world will be saved. Nobel science prizes all round, hallelujah.
Your move.
15
Watch the link Chris Dollis gave you @#2 and you’ll notice that prisoners overfed increased their metabolic rate commensurate with their intake, while those on low intakes reduced their basal metabolic rates to compensate. I know of many skinny people who eat enormous amounts of high calorie foods, and have no willpower whatsoever and no weight problems at all. I know overweight people who live in a perpetual state of deprivation who remain steadfastly overweight in spite of showing incredible restraint.
Every diet study I have seen shows initial weight loss of 4-5kg or so then plateauing (and often some regain of part or all of the weight lost) in spite of continuing strictly on the same regime, even in controlled environments, so what does that tell you? If it were merely a factor of simple calories in versus calories out why is there not a linear decline in such studies that continues until “normal” weight is reached?
I’m sorry, Levelgaze. As a fellow medical practitioner, I can tell you that what you and I were taught about nutrition at university was and remains complete bunkum. The difference for me is I never believed it in the first place.
80
OK Winston,
As a fellow medical practitioner, I can see that neither of us is going to change the other’s mind.
Tell you what – send your fat patients to me, I’ll get their jaws wired so they can only get calories through a straw, and we’ll see how that works.
I know the answer already.
34
Jaw wiring is hardly conducive to good health. Of course an Auschwitz diet will lead to weight loss, however there are dramatic effects such extreme responses to weight gain can have on overall health. It is clear that intermittent fasting is good for you, but it is not clear that being in Changi or Auschwitz leads to good long term health options.
Such an extreme intervention does nothing to strengthen your case, as it is clearly not a sustainable approach, and when the wires are eventually removed, I’m not sure that long term results are achieved. I’d suggest you attempt to process what I’m telling you rather than being so intellectually lazy.
41
Winston,
I know that we now live in an age where it far more important to be a polite liar, than to tell the truth and be roundly crucified for it. I prefer not to be a liar.
I have just watched you wriggle and weasel every which way to avoid admitting that obese humans consume more calories than they expend. Which is just my argument, no more, no less. Perhaps you could try doing your patients a favour by telling them bluntly the facts of life (and thermodynamics) – they just eat more than they should.
34
Level,
I’m not weaselling anywhere. I’m merely pointing out that the body is a dynamic system with compensatory homeostatic mechanisms. The evidence that is most compelling, as I said below, is that purely restricting calories alone does not induce weight loss beyond the first 1-2 weeks. This is what studies tell us.
If it is a simple as you say, why does this not work universally even in controlled environments like jails or mental institutions?
31
Winston, as much as it pains me, I have to agree with LevelGaze. First let me say that I agree with your last sentence:
Now has anyone studied how any individual sheds (or maybe Shits) excess calories once consumed, until they have reached their “genetic predisposition” weight Unless someone has a paper that gives evidence to the contrary, I have empirical evidence that EVERY obese person is in denial about their eating habits and caloric intake. Every practitioner has been lied to about the same when the obese person presents to the practitioner.
Now I am not a fellow medical practitioner but I have first hand empirical evidence including my own radiation therapy induced starvation weight changes and subsequent weight recovery.
Your move gentlemen.
20
Please let me rephrase:
To:
As much as it pains me to disagree with you Winston, I have to agree with LevelGaze.
21
80% of a person’s energy exposure is due to their basal metabolic rate.
Are we suggesting that this is an inter-individual, or even intra-individual constant, because if so you are wrong- sorry?
Yes, obese people can fool themselves with regard to underestimating their intake, but what is cause and what is effect, and are all calories from all sources the same? I know of many people with weight problems who go onto “light and easy” style meal plans who lose weight and state that they are eating MORE than they ever have. How do you reconcile that?
I really suggest you listen to the first of Dr Fong’s lecture series and you will understand why calorie restriction does not lead to weight loss. I doesn’t work, period. And so it is therefore not simply a case of calories in versus calories out, or else obesity would be something anyone would easily overcome with minimal assistance and a modicum of perseverance- in practice this is not true- EVEN IN CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENTS WHERE CALORIE INTAKE AND RIGID EXERCISE REGIMES ARE UNDERTAKEN. So, again, I ask, if it is that simple, why is it a problem?
31
Winston, How could it be “light and easy” but be MORE calories? I can’t imagine that marketing could overcome that flaw. Why do they feel they are eating MORE? That could easily be other psychological or physiological effects. The point would be better reconciled if you could explain why some obese people ARE able to lose weight by reducing calories and exercising? I don’t have to prove those success stories with mysteries or of them lying about their intake.
I don’t doubt that the issue can be complicated for many reasons. I also know that the “calorie” content of what people consume is flawed. Ethanol for example even though it has caloric content, cannot be converted to weight gain. But I’ll be hard pressed to accept that calories in are not important with respect to obesity.
11
Winston,
To you at 12.17, to me.
If you genuinely think caloric restriction is somehow mysteriously ineffective after 1-2 weeks, I suggest you do a study of your own and have a look at the progress of hunger strikers (serious, not token ones) to see how their weight goes after 2 weeks until they die at about day 74.
I’m not going to argue with you any more, life’s too short and it’s unseemly for a couple of medical practitioners to brawl in public.
33
Mark,
I’m not saying calories are unimportant, just that it is more complicated than that. Low fat and low fibre intake for the same calorie intake will lead to different results on weight in the same individual, all other things being equal.
Nobody is saying that some blame doesn’t fall to the overweight person, but medication, illness and stressful circumstances can have marked effects on altering our bodies responses both hormonally and metabolically.
Just to give an example,
Choosing to fast and feeling positive about it (for health or religious reasons perhaps)will have a markedly different response than someone who fasts due to severe distress, for example when a husband leaves the wife and she can’t sleep or eat- guess what happens when the acute stress subsides, and initial weight loss returns to baseline, especially if that husband for example makes the divorce really prolonged and difficult for the woman and leads to chronic lower level stress- she will feel mentally fatigued, her incidental movements will slow down, she will eat more at the end of the day, not feel like breakfast because of nausea, make low fibre refined food choices possibly of no greater calorie level because she can’t stomach it, might feel belatedly hungry at the very end of the day before bed, feel too exhausted to even do light exercise, remains indoors avoiding sunlight, etc, etc. I’m sure this woman, even if her calorie intake was unchanged, would continually gain weight above her baseline, and especially relative to someone with similar calorie intake who is moving more normally just doing their daily activities, eating a wholesome breakfast (though there lies controversy), getting light sun exposure, and eating higher fibre and more nutritious food, even though the calories may be identical.
31
Hormones.
Rather than debate with him without understanding the theory we’re discussing (whether it’s right or wrong), why not take Winston’s suggestion and watch Dr. Fung’s videos so you actually understand it?
If then you have remaining objections, they can be talked about intelligently.
I am almost amazed how you will not let yourself understand that psychologically abnormal, if impressive, individuals willing to commit suicide for a cause are not any more of a useful model for medical treatment for the masses than is wiring people’s jaws shut.
50
Level
I have done a study of my own- I lost 14kg in 3 months 2 years ago- from 100kg to 86kg (180cm)- following my own advice, not standard guidelines or dietitians- essentially low carb high fat would describe it most closely. I noticed a few things along the way of interest.
One, as you lose weight, your body image of yourself alters- you actually think you look bigger as you lose weight away from your starting point (anorexics also have similar body dysmorphia). Your hunger increases as you lose weight, even if you chose foods and time them to promote satiety. Eating fruit as a snack actually makes you more hungry, and needs to be avoided, whereas this effect doesn’t occur if fruit is added to a meal.
As to 2 medical practitioners “brawling” in public, I would suggest that if climate scientists could be similarly robust in their disagreements then perhaps CAGW would not be such a pseudo-religious exercise and may have maintained at least a veneer of science instead of adopting a cult-like dogma. I think it is refreshing to disagree, although perhaps some of the cross purposes of this argument would not occur if it was appreciated that no one is suggesting calories are “unimportant”, or that calorie expenditure is unimportant, merely that other factors interplay and enhance or negate this simplistic “equation”.
60
Christoph, do you mean the “light” has more or less (or special) hormones or the “easy” does?
If you mean the consumer of the product, I really doubt that their hormones change the calories of the meal.
01
@C Dollis, 1.21pm.
Looks like we have a tag team situation here. OK, C Dollis.
Just show me where, in any of my comments, I suggested that these were suitable methods of long-term treatment? You prove yourself just another idiot by trying to misrepresent me through alleging things I never said. These crude tactics are well recognised on this blog where we tend to deal in hard facts, plain speaking and solid science rather than euphemisms, sophistry and downright lies. Which you plainly prefer.
I’ll repeat it again so you can get it through your thick skull into your pea-brain. It’s simple enough. No humans can consume less calories than they expend and also gain tissue mass.
25
Winston,
In your post at 1.08 pm to Dave you touch on the subject of self-image – how different attitudes can end up producing different results. By way of support I offer an example from my youth.
As a teenager I was a competitive swimmer and during the winter months I was required to work out five nights a week at my coach’s gym, which was open to the public. One winter I was partnered with a fit but very thin and wiry Italian guy in his late thirties.
He was a brickies labourer and I knew exactly what that entailed as I did the same work for one of my uncles during school breaks. I honestly couldn’t see how working in a gym for an hour a couple of nights a week could possibly do anything for him.
Nonetheless, by the end of winter this guy looked like a winning contestant in the Mr Universe competition. He had bulges on his bulges. I asked my coach about it and he said it happened a lot. As far as Ray (coach) could tell, when the guy was at work shovelling mud, what he was thinking about was work, maybe family, bills, what he was going to do that night, whatever.
But in the gym, watching himself in a mirror pumping iron with exactly the same muscles as he used on the job, his mind was in a different place. It was thinking about the new, magnificent body he was building himself.
So that is what happened.
.
To you, Winston, Dave, and Levelgaze, may I just say thankyou for such a lively, informative, and interesting debate.
That is exactly how scientific differences should be thrashed out.
As an outsider looking in, may I also add that, to me at least, your respective points of view are much closer to each other than you may think. Read as a whole, there seems to be very little dissension on causes, effects and outcomes, only on the weighting that should be assigned to each.
91
MV,
You’re unusually mellow this afternoon.
Is everything all right?
40
@ Levelgaze..
no mention of climate change or politicians..
∴ nothing to fire him up ! 🙂
30
Apart from my progressive congestive heart failure now making my feet swell up like a couple of balloons, yes, LG, everything is alright. But thanks for asking.
Actually Andy is pretty close to the mark.
It makes a nice change, just sitting here reading, learning, absorbing from you, Winston, Dave, Christoph and others, instead of having to bang stupid heads together over sloppy science, corrupt climate claims, erroneous engineering and putrid politics.
Even JB, MattB and Gee Aye a barely tolerable today.
But only barely.
30
@MV, 3.46
Love the alliteration!
Take care.
20
So that’s your point here? That humans don’t have some sort of Einstein–Rosen bridge bringing in energy and mass into their bodies in lieu of eating?
I will concede that.
Now what you need to look at are the multitude of factors that affect behaviour including ability to adhere to a diet or any other medical recommendation you’ve made. Slightly off-topic from fasting, but behold, the most important study in medicine: Adverse Childhood Experiences by Vince Felitti, MD – 13 minute version
It started as a study in obesity so isn’t that off-topic.
Essentially there is one more variable to throw into the mix, although Winston did touch on it:
You seem to favour disposing of your duty as a doctor by simplistically saying, “Eat less, move more,” despite the total failure of this model for almost everyone it’s prescribed to.
What fasting (and somewhat similarly, varying carbohydrate intake cyclically) does is greatly increase the body’s sensitivity to hormones, especially insulin and leptin. The latter is particularly important in driving eating behaviour.
This is most definitely a non-linear dynamic system and isn’t solved by a doctor handing a patient a chart that says, “1800 Calories a day and discipline, voila!”
Not for most people anyway.
Besides, think about the fasting intervention itself for a moment. It introduces stochastic variety into our lifestyle which is similar to what our ancestors did back when obesity wasn’t a huge issue. Even if you’re stuck with your “Calories are the key, and that’s it,” paradigm, you must acknowledge that refraining from eating any of those periodically could help reduce average Calorie intake.
Indeed, it’s easier to focus on this periodically rather than constantly: willpower is a limited, finite resource, and the ability to emotionally self-regulate and carry out such things is highly-variable, partly due to genetics and largely due to upbringing, the effects of cortisol on our developing nervous systems, etc. — all things Winston appears to understand.
These are scientific principles, incidentally, not witch-doctery. We’re incredibly-complex biological organisms, not steam engines.
50
And Chris,
We haven’t even touched on the influence of gut bacteria and its influence upon rates of GIT absorption of various nutrients and foodstuffs, or the fact that drives for hunger can be driven non-specifically by other deficiency drives such as thirst (inadequate fluid intake making one inappropriately hungry, which the brain misinterprets as desire for food), a lack of nutrients similarly, or even a lack of emotional fulfilment which also drives hunger once again because the body fails to interpret accurately what it is lacking.
Without even discussing Leptin resistance or even the impact of eating a little too quickly which is known to impair the Grehlin feedback of satiety when the stomach is full (and one of the reasons gastric banding can be very successful aside from the physical restriction of gastric expansion being its effect on Grehlin secretion). The list goes on.
30
For goodness sakes, Mark, watch the videos.
I mean the effects that different foods and food-timing have on the body’s production and utilisation of hormones.
40
I watched the video. There is nothing I’ve said, and plenty more I never got to say, that conflicts with Dr. Fung.
For the record, Dr. Fung agrees with what I said at exactly 14:15 in the first video.
If you and Winston were a bit more careful in reading what I said we wouldn’t be arguing about this point and could have moved on to all the more interesting aspects and you both might have heard my own experience. Experience with the medical professionals with regard to calorie-only focus that was wrong enough. In fact advice that could be harming a great deal of cancer patients that are struggling with involuntary weight loss. But you won’t get to hear it because you don’t know when to shut up and listen.
There is a fundamental fact that Levelgaze and I are making that frankly is so obvious that debate about it makes you look and sound foolish at best. Let me state it so that you might see your problem.
A human being will not gain weight if they consume zero (0) calories. Can you agree with this?
Further, a human being will not gain weight if their total combined burn of calories exceeds their intake of calories.
Do you agree?
01
Neither of us said anything different.
The question is what do individuals do with energy after it’s consumed. I.e., a reduction in intake can lead to a reduction in BMR or activity or, soon, an increase in intake as the body’s appetite as regulated by hormones and personality variables and so on kick in. Periodic fasting is a useful intervention for improving these variables. Telling people to eat a monotonously-low-Calorie diet is not.
And even if it could be followed, you don’t get as much of the beneficial effects of increasing insulin sensitivity by periodically reducing serum insulin levels greatly. This pulsatile eating pattern mimics what we evolved doing and is protective against diabetes.
30
Mark,
You and I have known each other vicariously for some time.
There is no disagreement. What is the effect of not eating on the body. You catabolise your muscles so that when normal diet resumes, your fat to muscle ration will be irreversibly altered, not for the better.
Do you think this is serious, measured and appropriate advice for someone to sensibly lose weight?
“Hey Doc, I’m a bit overweight, what should I do?”
“Don’t eat”
To me the question resolves around what sustainable, long term approach would best improve the overweight patient’s health, and be successful at helping the patient lose fat (not just weight). Extreme calorie restriction to zero is not what we are talking about and misses the point. Also, the body is a dynamic system that responds differently to calories depending on the source of those calories, since digestion and metabolism of those calories depends on their source.
I hear you, Mark, but I think you have the wrong end of the stick as to what I am trying to point out to you, and to Levelgaze for that matter. Best wishes to you and thanks for the discussion nonetheless.
20
Winston, Christoph and Levelgaze, I hope you are all still reading this thread so as to see this post of mine. I may ramble a bit because I can’t type as fast as I think so bear with me. My purpose here is to glue together :
First off, I think I understand why Levelgaze reacted as he did with regard to calories. Winston and Christoph counter reacted in a way, frankly, that while was predictable (not wrong mind you), was almost exactly opposite of what would have been more effective. The issue of calories is perceived from two directions; pure physics and the actual observations. Winston and Christoph were short cutting to their point of view but that shortcut (i.e. to say “it isn’t the calories”) doesn’t sit well with someone aware of the physics. Calories in IS the issue and Dr. Fung confirms this but that I’ll get to later. to I’ll end this part with a suggestion that IF you’re going to bring this subject up in a group of people more familiar with physics, you have much better results if you change your approach and delivery slightly.
Enough on that.
My own experience with this subject of diet and weight loss and goes back 15 years or more but was taught to PhD level and harshly a few years later when I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer of the tonsil. After a Radical Neck Dissection and with 3 nodes positive I underwent a full course of radiation therapy (XRT). This was over 7 weeks of pure hell with the radiation side effects of both severe swallowing pain and lack of saliva. I did not receive a PEG tube for feeding and was provided liquid Ensure (which I quickly learned to loath) and told to do the best I could to consume “calories”. It was at this same time I found a book called “beating cancer with nutrition” and the author made it clear that to improve treatment outcome one must swear off sugar. It isn’t my intent to give any support to this book but I did stop eating any sweets or adding sugar to anything I ate. Additionally, because of the loss of all saliva, I could not eat bread, crackers, potatoes and rice or pasta was also difficult. I managed to eat a fair amount of other food by processing it through a blender with milk, cream, broths etc. It still hurt like hell but my doctors were happy that my weight was within their requirements. I still lost over 30 lbs went from 185lbs to 155 lbs. in about 6 weeks. By now perhaps you’ve noticed similarities with what diet Dr. Fung has suggested would result in weight loss. You might also believe that it was the side effects of radiation therapy. What becomes more interesting is that I maintained my eating habits of no sugar and little carbohydrates for many years after treatments ended and during that time I could not gain weight. Two years out I found I was rather severely hypothyroid (a side effect of radiation) and that theoretically should have made weight gain probable but it didn’t. It was not until I regained some (albeit small) saliva and figured out how to eat breads potatoes and carbs that some weight gain was achieved.
So to bring this full circle, I believe Dr. Fung is onto something because it makes sense AND I think quite by accident, I stumbled onto exactly what he is saying and lived it. Since then, I’ve taken much more notice of my eating as well as many others around me. Some of those others have obesity problems (a few grossly so) and based on my observation, most of them are in complete denial of their eating habits. They further lament how “nothing works” to lose weight. For years I’ve told some to consider cutting out starch and sugar with limited success hampered, I’m sure, by the USDA Food Pyramid where carbs and starches are at the base, fat at the top and protein just below it. This Pyramid was first published in the early 90’s which seems to be about the time Americans were found to be increasing in girth and that in spite of seemingly endless increasing efforts to “eat right and exercise”. Not surprising if y ou compare that to what Dr. Fung is saying.
In closing, I am very sorry that our discussion became contentious and counter productive. More sorry that I crossed words with Dr. Winston and unintentionally upset what I consider to be a very good internet friendship. I was not challenging your knowledge Winston and I have no illusion that I could or should really. My first comments were to try and illicit responses from you and Christoph that would be palatable to a new reader that might stumble onto Jo’s site and further assuage the concerns of those readers holding traditional understanding of calories in over calories out. Unfortunately Levelgaze went down the path of traditional. It is humorous to note that Dr. fung and anyone else could could save a lot of trouble by saying “Weight gain or loss is about the SOURCE of calories’ and sound much less fringy to someone thinking in the traditional way.
Anyway, you’ve now heard my story, heard me agree with Dr. Fung and I’ll be interested to see this topic get much wider attention.
As a postscript, I’m surprised that no one commented about high fructose corn syrup in connection with obesity and type 2 diabetes. HFCS replaced cane sugar widely in foods and beverages sometime around 1980 (if memory serves right) also corresponding with the start of US obesity rise.
10
Mark, no hard feelings.
I’m certainly glad you were able to survive cancer. I know how scary a diagnosis of that can be.
I don’t believe that you are understanding Dr. Fung’s position correctly, however. Yes Calories are a factor as without incoming energy we couldn’t survive. But remember a Calorie is a sort of arbitrary measurement that comes from burning some biological matter and determining how much it raises the temperature of water. What happens in the body with incoming fat, protein, and carbohydrates — and all of the variations of those as well as the macronutrients — is far more complicated. And certainly Dr. Fung believes food timing is an issue, as well as the quality and variety of nutrients.
Dr. Fung has whole series of Internet articles on Calories and obesity and looking at his graphs alone where he disses what he calls the “CRaP” theory, “Calorie Reduction as Primary”, I think disabuses one of the notion that Fung believes Calories are the main point.
Sure, in a sense they are, if by Calories you mean the enormous diversity that is food, and if you also mean what your body does with the food, not just how much of it you intake.
Art De Vany put it extraordinarily well when he said:
20
The most widely used HFCS formulation is nearly identical to ordinary sugar in terms of fructose:glucose ration. It isn’t so much that it’s worse for you, it’s that it’s cheaper and is used much more as a result. That, plus the dietary fat hysteria.
20
Christoph, thanks for the reply comments, especially the ones re cancer. Yes it was startling diagnosis and at age 40 besides. One of the cancer types now thought to be caused by HPV (that being another subject worth talking about some day).
With Regard to:
I must not be translating my thoughts clearly because I have no disagreement with this quote whatsoever. Further, I’d be willing to wager that LevelGaze would also agree. The ONLY thing I have a problem with is the generalization that over eaters are somehow not responsible for their obesity. Sure there are exceptions and yes it would appear from studies that overeating by it self may not cause obesity. Obviously there would seem to be a sliding scale or scales of significance in play.
There have been studies that suggest HFCS may be a problem. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/76/5/911.long It may not be HFCS so much as the fact that since it is so cheap it is now found in nearly any prepared food. We Americans are deluged by HFCS and sugar in our foods. Sweeter foods sell better apparently.
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Mark,
There was never, nor could there ever be, any opinion you could hold that could alter the high esteem in which I hold you, nor my genuine fondness for you. I actually enjoy people (especially broad-minded intelligent people like you Mark) holding contrary views to myself, and relish vigorous discussion about it, as I am not threatened intellectually about being in error, nor in disagreeing with someone I believe is extremely knowledge.
I have I believe stated above that calories in /calories out is simplistic and unhelpful and I stand by that, but it is not to suggest that calorie intake should be ignored or is irrelevant. Merely that the food taken into our bodies is processed differently, including digested metabolised and excreted, according to a myriad of chemical, hormonal and biological processes. I agree most are in a degree of denial of their overall calorie intake, but in some cases this is due to ignorance regarding which foods are calorie dense as opposed to those that are not.
I am currently treating a colleague whom I diagnosed with Ca of the tonsil, and you have my deepest sympathy with regard to the horrific experience you have no doubt endured to hopefully eradicate this disease. So, it would upset me greatly to think that anything you or Levelgaze said to me upset me in any way, because I can absolutely assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.
10
Winston, I’m truly sorry to hear of your colleague. If they are interested there is a web forum devoted to oral cancer support founded by a fellow survivor: http://oralcancersupport.org/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm
I’d be happy to offer whatever I can to help by way of support as well. In some respects I was blessed to have gone through radiation treatments before chemotherapy was widely prescribed. Chemo adds another layer of hell to an already bad time.
On the positive side, I’m nearly 13 years out with tolerable side effects even including the Radical Neck Dissection. I would offer that if your colleague still has to face this surgery, there is a version that spares the sternocleidomastoid and I strongly suggest looking into that. IMRT therapy has somewhat improved the negative aspects of RT. It was not available to me locally at the time.
Also I’m sure you know of the link to HPV and I would encourage that the test be done on the tumor. Survival is trending better for HPV positive tumors.
20
Just to acknowledge and thank you for your replies, thoughtful and insightful as always. My colleague is happily completely in remission some 3 years on.
I also look forward to our ongoing posts on Jo’s site over the next year or more, and hopefully you and I can be amongst those at the forefront of standing up for rational and enlightened thinking, intellectual rigour and scientific principle.
The truth is and should always be paramount, and dogma and faith have no place in objective assessment of complex issues, whether it be CAGW or the failures and fallacies in Medicine, or any other discipline for that matter.
I look forward to our ongoing conversations over the internet both together and with other contributors to the site, and I hope you continue to value our friendship, whether we agree or not on a topic being entirely within the scope of mutual respect and tolerance of difference of opinion. Without the latter it would be a very dull and regressive world. Signing off for now, to be continued further down the blogroll.
Cheers, Mark, and all the best to you and your loved ones for the New Year and beyond.
20
@Dollis, 3.14pm
You persist in being as thick as [SNIP***], plus some more obfuscation thrown in.
You “concede” there’s no “Einstein–Rosen bridge” effect here, but that’s something I never postulated just to dismiss in the first place. I was never much interested in worm holes anyway (why don’t you just use common terminology that everyone else recognises? Is it just to give yourself a false sense of intellectual superiority?).
Until Winston weighed in with his this-and-that speculations on human psychology, different types of calories, and god knows what else (which you then compounded), on my part this was only about the conservation of matter/energy – something a lot of people here seem to have become confused over, or forgotten. Calories in, calories out, and that’s a brute fact that no amount of New Age mumbo-jumbo can escape, although it tries to because there’s money in it.
I note you’ve had the presumption to question my “duty as a doctor” (not that I care). I’ve taken the liberty of checking out your facebook page and you seem to be (correct me if I’m wrong) somewhere on the fringes of “alternative medicine”. Just who the frick do you think you are? The next new age guru, peddling your suspect wisdom with it’s superficial scientific knowledge?
Not that it’s any business of yours, but I do tell my patients the hard facts of thermodynamics, then we get down to the business of how to go about it.
04
Jo –
You snipped my last paragraph.
Ah, well, I suppose you have to keep the lawyers comfortable.
13
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is trivially true, but it would be like saying methamphetamine would have almost no effect on weight because it has almost no Calories.
Or olanzapine, for that matter.
Or insulin.
30
LOL
10
Not intending to disagree, LevelGaze, but just curious.
Would you consider that a bird’s egg, completely encased in its shell as all bird and reptile eggs are, actually gain weight as the incubation time progresses?
00
See also here…..
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2385179/I-reversed-diabetes-just-11-days–going-starvation-diet.html
20
Fascinating.
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I’m not sure if what I embarked on last June was a ‘crash diet’ but whatever it was it worked more effectively than I could have hoped for.
I was 15.25st (I can’t understand the metric system, so I still use the old Imperial system) back at the start of June last year. I felt bloated and too heavy and decided, more out of boredom than anything (and I didn’t and don’t have diabetes), to make some changes. I wanted to lose weight but I didn’t fancy doing any exercise as I’ve always found exercise excessively tedious and frankly I didn’t want to try and lose weight by driving up my appetite. Seemed very counterintuitive to me, but maybe that’s just me.
So – TLDR – instead I just changed my diet quite dramatically. Out went all the sweets, fatty foods, full-fat dairy products and excessive portions, etc. I don’t drink alcohol so that was never a factor. Infact, I’d say of everything I changed, simply getting my ‘portion control’ under strict new management was probably my most effective strategy overall, combined of course with better eating.
By the end of December last year I had lost 3.25st, taking me down to where I am now – just under 12st. I find maintaining what I now consider to be my ‘natural’ weight is far easier than I imagined and I really want to stay at this weight. I look better, feel better and I would recommend it to anyone. No exercise involved. Not bad for around 7 months of very minimal effort on my part.
It can be done. You just have to want to do it – and you really don’t have to join an expensive diet plan (I didn’t), go train at gym (I didn’t) or try anything ridiculously faddy (I didn’t).
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Once again the way in which we, that is humanity, homo sapiens as a species evolved is being rediscovered in the health problems our way of life is now creating.
Our ancestors before the beginnings of agriculture which itself took perhaps some two or three thousand years to make the transition from a hunting and foraging based society to a full agricultural society some 8000 to 12,000 years ago, often had a periods of great plenty in food when the seasons were good to periods of a great shortage of food and consequent hunger and starvation.
This was the case for all of the perhaps couple of million years that it has taken for homo sapiens to evolve to where we are today as a species.
The settled agricultural period of mankind’s existence is no more than perhaps some 8000 to 12,000 years in the past, an almost infinitesimal period of time in the history of the evolution of our species so we still are equipped in the evolutionary sense to deal with a highly variable diet in both type and particularly in amount both on a day to day basis as well as over much longer periods of time .
We are simply not adapted to having large amounts of food every day with out a break and without very irregular periods of food shortage and sometimes severe hunger, a situation to which we are evolutionary adapted as of a necessity for our ancestors to survive in the very harsh and unforgiving world of nature.
Today we have constant access to and eat considerable amounts of food every day.
We do this day in and day out and an hour to hour basis for many which is the eating habits situation today for probably some half to three quarters of the global population.
As a species that evolved to cope with an ever changing level of food availability ranging from extreme scarcity to gluttonness excess until very recently as in some 8 to 12 thousand years ago, we are not yet evolutionary adapted to that type of a constant replenishment of our food consumption and the constant topping up in fact of the protein and starch components of our food every few hours through out the day, every day. week in and week out’.
Nor do we any longer have the age old natural self selection pattern of the fittest of the species that can and will evolutionary adapt over time to the constant supply of nutritious and adequate food as the natural selection attributes of our species that would enable it to cope with the changing food consumption patterns has been negated by the advances in hygiene and medicine in the last couple of centuries that now enable even the least evolutionary fit to also survive and breed.
So am I surprised that a low calorie near starvation diet seemingly has some apparently very curative outcomes against a specific health problem ?,
No! But I would not call diabetes a disease. It is a health problem brought on in my opinion by the fact that vast amounts of food are constantly available to modern man and our ages old evolutionary back ground has not been adapted to dealing with this type of, in the evolutionary sense, constant excess food consumption.
Something that not many recognise that most of us find eating a pleasant way of not only satiating our hunger but also for many, a way of doing a lot of mental soothing in what is now a very constant stressful life style compared again to the evolutionary environment where great stress would have been applied for short periods followed by periods of very quiet non stressfull living amongst the close support of your tribal or family group.
I suspect that many other ills of modern man will finally be found as treatable by recognising and bring back into play some of those ages old ways that we as a species have evolved to deal with but which modern civilisation has overwhelmed those evolutionary mechanisms leading to what appears to be serious health problems in such a high percentage of our modern populations.
Would I go back to living in those pre civilisation conditions? Not on your bloody life!
I have ofen thought about just how good we here in Australia really do have it in this world of ours and I intend to take full advantage of that for as long as I live which at over 75 years old , may not be for many years longer.
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what a lovely just so story. Did you get your understanding of evolution from the same text that uses a lower case letter to start a genus name?
27
Quite a radical discovery.
Does this confirm then that Diabetes is primarily caused by eating too much ?
00
No. Too often.
70
PS. Appreciate this has already been gone into at some length by earlier commenters, though I may have missed the point.
00
Too much eating is the problem, not too much reading.
Or rather eating too much of the wrong stuff (eg. carbohydrates – there’s that derdy carbon again).
10
Jo,
Me thinks this deserves a Jo Noba post of its own.
Al Gores “Inconvenient Truth” book sells now for $1
http://twitchy.com/2014/01/05/1-too-much-al-gores-an-inconvenient-truth-sold-at-steep-discount-pic/
Again, market dynamics reveal what’s rally happening.
People aren’t buying this global warming shit anymore, while they freeze and can barely pay their electricity bill.
Do you hear that you global warming supporting self snips! Nobody want to spend another $1 reading your CRAP!
30
Sonny, As one who prices books for sale in an Opportunity/Thrift shop I price all the AGW promotion books (Gore, Flannery et al) at twice the price I put on the rest. If people want to buy trash they have to pay for it!
40
That was nice to see an article about another ‘scientific consensus’ other than the ‘climate’ one. I am interested to see the ‘climate debate’ put into better context. I know it is not the only ‘scam’ that is put upon us and I doubt very much that it will be the biggest or indeed the last. So what are some other ‘scientific scams’ of past and present? And should we expect to see some correlation between the ‘deniers’ of the ‘climate consensus’ with ‘deniers’ of other ‘controversial claims’?
If the ‘climate scam’ was at least one of our top scams as some say, could we for example make a list of the top ten scams and perhaps see what sort of correlation we have amongst ‘deniers’? Are perhaps ‘deniers’ generally more logical thinkers (across a wide range of issues) or do we find ‘deniers’ more ‘grouped’ and wedded to particular issues? What should we expect to see?
The ‘merits’ of fluoridation of drinking water, for example, seems to have a ‘consensus’ among the ‘medical’ profession and there is a smaller(?) number of ‘deniers’ of this ‘consensus’. Will these ‘deniers’ overlap with the ‘climate deniers’?
How about the Apollo deniers and the 911 deniers and the Kennedy deniers? Which ones are ‘deniers’ which ones are ‘conspiracy theorists’, which ones are ‘nutters’? There is sciences involved in all of those in one way or another.
I think that with the ‘climate debate’ in particular, both here and in some of the forums, there seems to be a focus on establishing who is actually ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ which of course is fine, but why stop there? It seems to be a bit taboo to talk about why so many erudite scientists might have got it so wrong and what are the ramifications of that? Do we need to go back and audit many more well accepted ‘consensuses’?
Is there ever a justification for ‘scamming’ the public?
Propaganda during ‘wartime’ is one example where the public might be fed deliberate lies and there is plenty of well documented historical evidence of that, and yet we seem to be generally accepting of this form of deception.
Over history man has been told that bad weather events and climatic disasters were the result of angry Gods and that man needed to collect sacrifices, gold and other various commodities in order to appease these Gods and make things good again and man dutifully accepted this ‘consensus’ and did these things.
Is the UN simply the new (green)god we are being called upon to appease and the AGW disciples the new holy liaisons or high priests who are spruiking it?
So when is it acceptable to deceive the public?
I think that there is a little inconsistency here and perhaps a little fence sitting to criticise the ‘consensus’ of the medical profession and then to add in a little disclaimer that one should seek the advice of a doctor before embarking on such a potentially dangerous diet if indeed this ‘advice’ is potentially flawed, harmful or just plainly wrong. The disclaimer really should work both ways.
Should we be seeking the advice of the IPCC before embarking on our next coal burning spree as we ‘know’ it could ruin our very existence?
20
Joe,
Great question. Unfortunately Jo and many other climate bloggers have had no choice but to distance themselves from the other great scientific conspiracy theories of the past 100 years (lest they be dismissed outright as complete nutters)
Indeed many if the conspiracy theories you have mentioned do have some serious scientific (and basic logical) backing.
You won’t get a proper conversation about them here though. Infact, the same climate change realists are likely to call you names and employ the same tactics as the global warming scammers do.
To me this explains exactly how it is possible to get away with many ridiculous lies than it is to get away with just one. Each #skeptic/denier/conspiracy group will focus on one major issue and tacitly give support to another by refusing to engage outside a well defined battle line.
50
Thanks Sonny, but it just strikes me as very strange that you could possibly ‘tackle group think’ by only being game or prepared to debate a single issue – that is more about establishing the wrongs and rights of a single issue and really does give any ‘denier’ a bit of a bad name as they may get branded as ‘narrow minded zealots’. Surely the ‘denial skills’ have a more broadly scientific basis and one could expect some of those denial Venn diagrams to overlap?. Does it promote the whole scientific peer review process as a bit of a scam if reviewers dare step outside their ‘field of expertise’? It seems to promote the old fear of persecution or heresy that the early scientists faced being afraid to confront issues that may ‘give you a bad label’.
What is the point about establishing which chair belonged where on the Titanic (or was that the Olympus? 🙂 ) Shouldn’t we be concerning ourselves with why the boat is sinking?
We are potentially being spun a huge myth and we don’t seem to be at all concerned that trusted and highly regarded professions are engaging in this. Why are we not looking more at the psychological science issues here rather than the physical sciences – they are every bit as valid. Is this a simple case of a huge number of scientists doing bad science or is it deliberate deception? Perhaps someone is driving this deception for some ‘noble reason’? Yes? No? Maybe? We just don’t seem to care about why. Are we going to be any better off when we finally ‘decide’ the truth on this when we may simply move onto another scam?
If I come to you the doctor and tell you that I have spiders crawling up my arms and under my skin, would it be sufficient and appropriate for you to tell me that there are none and take a photograph to prove it. Surely the issue for you as my doc is not one of disproving the existence of spiders on my arm?
The diabetes issue raised by Jo is totally valid, I don’t take issue with that, it just seems to be way out left field when I try to find any debate on any group think issues outside of AGW on Jo’s blog. I find it a bit strange too that Jo writes in past tense when describing the consensus view on diet and diabetes. I would suggest that nothing much has changed despite the fact that ‘scientists’ have published this small study which supports claims made by many ‘lesser qualified’ persons in the past.
10
They are not every bit as valid. You would just be playing into the hands of the Lewandowskys of the world. The physical sciences must be applied first to figure out what is probably real and what is definitely not real. Only when the physical sciences have shown that your opponent’s hypothesis is wrong can you then psychoanalyse them to figure out how they went wrong.
If psychoanalysis is your first step then you’ve put the cart before the horse.
The usual psychology explanation for deluded conspiracy theorists is that they demand an outcome of enormous impact or complexity be explained by a commensurately powerful or complex cause.
eg1 Sagging public support for carbon taxes by independent public suspicion of IPCC professionalism, versus “The Climate Denial Machine” theory.
eg2 WTC Building 7 brought down by fire, falling debris, and cascading structural failures, versus the covert explosives “inside job” theory.
It doesn’t matter what your initial point of view on these issues may be, the physical evidence (if any) must be the first item on the agenda.
Even if it turns out later in hindsight that your opponents argument was mistaken, you can’t defend your own viewpoint by accusing your opponents of mental disorders. It’s a logical fallacy. You cannot establish your own innocence by proving the guilt of others.
That is why the psychological science issues are not as valid as physical science issues at this stage of the climate debate.
The psychological issues may become pertinent after there is a plausible physical explanation matching all available physical evidence. If a consensus emerges because no other interpretation of evidence is possible, that may be the time to bring out the shrink’s couch. We are not at that stage because The IPCC’s mantra of 2°C per CO2 doubling is not the only possible explanation for historic temperature trends.
(The Svensmark Effect and Planetary theory is going to kick the warmists’ butts.)
10
Thanks Andrew, but I am not sure I can follow your reasoning there. I guess I am wondering why we find ourselves in a position where we have to, as you say, “figure out what is probably real and what is definitely not real”. All that physical science and figuring out is costing us a lot of money and if we are to follow it through to some more logical outcome, it is going to cost even more. If I was to conjecture that the inside of Neptune was in fact made of cheese I don’t think anybody would spend a cent to prove that right or wrong. So how is it that we have got to this point in the climate debate? Surely even at the point where scientists were split 50/50 it would be apparent that half of the world’s scientific brains were wrong, as Jo points out the arguments are pretty much mutually exclusive – one group is wrong – we are not living in two parallel universes (well probably not). Surely even at this point it may be cheaper to bring in the psychs and have a chat and a tea with all these scientists. Do you honestly believe that this is all just an honest mistake on the part of half the world’s great scientific brains? Or do we need to consider perhaps some ‘driving force’ that has made this an issue (but not my cheese one)? As I mentioned elsewhere here, deception is sometimes deliberate and indeed tolerated by populations and the science of deception is based in psychology. If we keep spending billions on this scientific battle and lets say we manage to dispel the myth, then another similar myth just pops up, lets say the earth is beginning to wobble more from digging minerals out, are we expected to go through it all again, more billions spent until we sort out the physical science first? How about a bit of preventative measure to preempt such scams? I would suggest that many people with a good understanding of human psyche could identify a scam with very little need for physical science. Perhaps an app for the iPhone, a BS detector!
Interesting to read your position on the WTC7 event, I mentioned elsewhere that I was very interested in how those ‘denial Venn’ diagrams might look. I guess that view too would put most of the same Pro-AGW Governments on the ‘correct’ side of that ‘WTC7 debate’ but on the ‘wrong’ side of the ‘climate debate’. That in itself is interesting but probably just from my psych point of view.
00
Hi Joe,
I really appreciate the point you are making. Unfortunately, unlike the Neptunian Cheese theory, man made climate change actually seems quite reasonable and logical based on the perspective of many people – that man has a profound (and often negative) affect on the environment. It uses some primary school theories “greenhouse warming” and extends them to create a potential catastrophe. It’s only after detailed research and consideration that an individual can a) appreciate the absurdity of the theory based on empirical evidence and observing the horrid unscientific behaviour of the warmists and b) overcoming an innate trust in authority and experts and developing a bs detector.
As for WTC 7, there is absolutely no doubt that this building was intentionally taken down, due to its total, uniform collapse at free fall velocity, the fact that its collapse was announced on some news channels PRIOR to it’s collapsing and that the building owner alluded to the building being “taken down” an fabricating a conversation with a fire department chief who later denied a conversation ever taking place, an that building owner public ally refusing to comment on the matter at a later date.
10
Joe the reality is that, IMO, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that big business/money/power will do what it can do to stay rich and powerful, regardless of “truth”. Sometimes they may have science on their side, other times not, but it makes no difference as the science is of far lower importance than is the outcome of getting rich. It is why it is difficult to draw conclusions between two different wildly independent issues based on where the money is. Conspiracy nutters will however always side with the conspiracy… and those who blindly follow mainstream opinion will invariably side with the mainstream opinion… so your “side” is full of people who know nothing and and just repeat crap, no-matter which side you are on. Personally I think it is best to ignore them, no-matter how much fun it is to engage/goad.
17
Projecting again, Matt?
30
Dammit Mattb, for three sentences I could believe we’d agree like old chaps at the pub. Then you blow it.
In case you haven’t noticed, your premonitions about “conspiracy nutters” results in your own conspiracy theory.
Your move nutter.
31
MarkD Winston, I read it as Mattb suggesting that both “sides” of the debate have conspiracy theorists, and it was better to ignore them.
Am I right Matt? Does that mean that the people who claim we are funded by a big-oil conspiracy are nutters?
31
Jo, I don’t agree.
He suggests any sides are interested in protecting their wealth (I assume that there are wealthy Leftists and wealthy warmists also concerned right?).
Matt drew the long bow without qualifications or exclusions: Anyone whom believes in conspiracies is a nutter.
I would love to have him recant, adjust, morph, or more likely ignore…….. Begin holding breath
10
Upon rereading all of our comments I withdraw my disagreement with Jo and my last sentence.
I do invite Matt to make clarifications.
01
I don’t.
20
Winston, no need to. We agree more than we don’t.
20
I am getting somewhat fed up with all this talk of conspiracy. So let me clarify what is legally implied by the term.
A conspiracy, is when two or more people or organisations plan, and decide, in secret, to work together to achieve a given purpose.
If an individual person has a good idea, plans, and works to fulfil a goal, that is not a conspiracy.
If somebody else notices what the first person did, and does the same thing, that is not a conspiracy.
If two people, coincidentally, have the same good idea, and independently act upon it, it is not a conspiracy.
If several hundred people see what is happening and join the band-wagon, that is still not a conspiracy.
So to claim that some common motivation, that is evident in a group of people, is a conspiracy requires proof that it was planned. Find evidence that the planning was done in secret, to get bonus points.
So all of this discussion about a group in society doing, “… what it can do to stay rich and powerful …”, is not a conspiracy. It is plagiarism, maybe, but not a conspiracy.
It is not a conspiracy if a number of researchers decide, quite independently, to adjust previous measurements downwards, in order to give an inflated trend. It is still not a conspiracy if one researcher does it, and others arbitrarily copy the practice.
If, however they send emails to each other discussing the best way to adjust previous measurements downwards, then, at that point, is when it becomes a conspiracy. It has to be planned and premeditated.
80
The guy who “managed” the adjustment of the Australia temperature records used to work with or for Phil Jones of Hadley CRU.
What does that make it ?
10
Probably, job security.
I am not saying that conspiracies do not exist, they obviously do. But you need to separate the design and planning of a set of actions, from the execution of those actions.
There is no doubt in my mind that Phil Jones conspired, with others, (i.e. planned) to falsify the historic temperature record.
The people who actually made the changes were just following instructions, and were not conspirators if they were not involved in the original decision.
If they thought that what they were being asked to do was wrong, they could have blown the whistle, and been protected, at least in the UK. The fact that they didn’t, may make them complicit, but it still does not make them conspirators, just people who feel very alone, and very scared.
30
I think I prefer the word “Collusion”
10
Conspiracy and collusion are more or less synonyms. I note that some dictionaries list “conspiracy” as one meaning of “collusion”.
The primary differences between them, is that the word “conspiracy” implies defining an abstract goal, or outcome, without determining the approach or detail; whereas “collusion” implies the secret planning and execution of activities, by a number of people working in concert, to achieve an outcome that could be either material or abstract.
10
Also, the guys who “looked after” the NZ temp record, what was their pedigree?
00
I presume you are referring to Jim Sallenger?
I seem to remember his name appearing in the Clmategate emails, so I presume (although have not checked) that he was a co-conspirator with Phil et al.
But I am glad you asked because we have discussed this before on this blog. In fact, Joanne says, in comment #32.1.1.1, “… the word ‘conspiracy’ has been overused to the point of meaninglessness. If you are going to use it, make sure you use it vis the dictionary definition of it, or it won’t be published here.”
The dictionary definition is:
conspiracy n.
1. an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.
2. a combination of persons for a secret, unlawful, or evil purpose.
3. Law. an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.
10
If Justice Whakaaro is amenable to hearing matters of law at this juncture, and if the Court will indulge me in some amateur legal appraisal, I wish to argue jurisdictions of Commonwealth heritage present several legal impediments to skeptics convicting warmists for conspiracy in the matter of voodoo climatology.
Your honour, I refer to the case of R v Bertomeu & Ors [2003] QDC 575 in the Queensland District Court.
In deciding whether an application for separate trials should be granted to four applicants accused of conspiracy in robbery, the judge referred to several precedents. One precedent found:
However the need for a fair trial for each accused can be infringed when evidence implicates one defendant much more than the others. This is important because a distinction is made between conspiracy cases and the more usual cases of substantive evidence. In a conspiracy case the co-accused must all be convicted or all be acquitted of the same charge.
The judge finally cited the decision in the case of Baartman as precisely outlining when a case cannot proceed as a single conspiracy case:
Skeptics can therefore expect that, even if a conspiracy exists, none of the warminista will ever be legally convicted of conspiracy because of several impediments:
1) The available evidence of fraud will be much stronger against some accused than others, which prevents a conspiracy case from being made on technical grounds.
2) The conspirators committed their acts in different countries so no single national jurisdiction can hear a conspiracy case. The UN International Criminal Court certainly claims to be committed to prosecuting transnational fraud (implying international conspiracies) but its association with the World Bank might be seen as prejudicial given the number of loans for coal plants the World Bank refused on global warming grounds.
I trust my learned colleagues will appreciate that, despite the chances of a conspiracy ever being legally proven being very slim, they may enjoy theorising about such illicit arrangements purely as a modelling activity for the purpose of estimating where incriminating evidence may potentially be found.
No further arguments, yer onna.
00
nutters to the left of me, nutters to the right. A Conspiracy nutter would believe in any conspiracy of any flavour (well most of them anyway). I was not suggesting that anyone who agrees with any particular idea that may be lumped in with “conspiracy theory” is a nutter.
11
Matt, for once, I more or less agree with you.
But we didn’t plan to agree, so it is not a conspiracy.
40
Matt, is religion a conspiracy? That’s how I see the climate ’cause’, as a quasi religion.
10
Religion would only be a conspiracy if those in charge knew it was false but were making it up to achieve something. There is no way to prove it is false… so it’s not a conspiracy.
10
Matt’s blanket statements about those who don’t hold to the socially-approved “scientific” consensus in any area at any give time are a canard.
He hasn’t thought it through.
If he had, he would realise yourself, myself, Anthony Watts, and may others once believed the mainstream consensus — indeed, had no implicit objection to it and of course want the planet including the environment and humanity to do well — but diverged when we realised the evidence was weak at best, contrary at worst. Further, resources are finite, those nearest the poverty line are most deeply affected … and we still want what’s best for the planet, the environment, and humanity.
What’s more, we care about truth more than socially fitting in and taking the easy path. Indeed, that’s been a recurring theme in groundbreaking science.
In some areas of science, I’m firmly with the consensus. In other areas, I am not. I take it on a case by case basis and can change my mind when the facts warrant.
50
you’ve misunderstood my so called blanket statements.
04
Actually this is demonstrably false. For example Finland used to fluoridate the drinking water but stopped doing it in the 90’s because of health issues. Fluoride is great to your teeth when in your tooth paste, but there is no reason to drink it. Drinking too much of it causes fluorosis (I got a mild case of that), that makes the teeth discolored and brittle, as well as other health issues. Even if drinking it in specific amounts would be beneficial, when it’s your drinking water you have no way of administering it accurately. You can’t seriously give people recommendations about maximum amount of water they should drink each day.
Although some western countries still fluoridate their water, others don’t. And in both cases the reason is health related. See the map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fluoridated-water-extent-world.svg (Note that the map also shows natural fluoridation – in some areas the ground water naturally contains some fluoride)
Western countries that fluoridate the water would appear to be: Usa, Ireland, Australia, Israel and New Zealand. The rest don’t. And it’s not like those fluoridating countries were more “advanced” or “health concious” than the rest.
You would really struggle to find an issue that is less based on scientific consensus than water fluoridation – even though I really believe that in the countries that still do it, it is explained as to be exactly because of a scientific concensus. And of course based on thousands of studies (of which they cannot for some reason produce a single one).
01
Nick Cater wrote about one.
Larry Pickering too, although a pinch of salt may be required.
Bird Flu.
Swine Flu
Y2K
Agenda 21, although that is more Orwellian than mere scam
Speed kills ( contentious, maybe, but sells a lot of speed cameras to greedy governments)
00
I no!!! 5C o warming by 2100, aren’t we all shaking (freezing) in our boots.
http://mobile.news.com.au/technology/science/university-of-nsw-study-predicts-5c-global-warming-before-2100/story-fn5fsgyc-1226792866392
Has anyone notices that basically no articles on “global warming” (translation “bullshit”) allow comments?
IT’S TIME THESE SCIENCE FICTION CRIMINALS WERE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.
40
Ahhhhh it’s a polar vortex! Here to freeze me with the chilly hellfire of global warming!
Oh my how that boiling freezing warming colding hurts!!!
Do you warmings (like lemmings) realise how snipping stupid you sound to even the most mildy intelligent person??
40
Hmm,
Teacher! Sonny has turned the word “snipping” into an expletive.
10
O/T – well there you go – all my posts on the Guardian’s “Should Australian newspapers publish climate change denialist opinion pieces?” have been removed.
90
You got censored. Sorry your opinion does not support Agenda 21.
60
Not to worry – my internet cache has the original page which I’ve saved.
70
I have just had my account locked @theConversation.
Not much of a conversation. I’m guessing it was in response to a comment that claimed Ross Garnaut was a conservative economist.
I pointed out to the commentator that Garnaut is a paid up member of the Fabian Society with a link and some one should notify the Fabian Society. They don’t like the truth over there.
10
OK – here are the posts – note the Recommend figures. Clearly that’s why my posts were erased.
ME – 05 January 2014 8:00am
Recommend 43
David Karoly is the most quoted, interviewed, published climate scientist in Australia – he
published a peer reviewed paper (Gergis 2012) last year that was withdrawn almost immediately
due to shocking errors yet has never been re-submitted.
Tim Flannery is also quoted, interviewed, published yet he is a paleontologist, not a climate
scientist.
Following your logic both should never be interviewed or published.
Gina Reinhart is a sceptic because she listens to her highly qualified team of Geologists who
advise her.
Why don’t you dispel Lord Monckton’s message instead of attacking the man and his character.
His predictions have been far more accurate that Tim Flannery’s and he knows more about the
science than David Suzuki who the ABC gave a whole one hour program to.
Perhaps you should heed the words of scientific luminary, Pierre Darriulat. For nearly 50 years,
his professional life has been devoted to particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter
physics, and astrophysics. For seven years, he was Director of Research at CERN – one of the
world’s largest, most famous, and respected laboratories.
“The way the SPM (IPCC Summary for Policy Makers) deals with uncertainties (e.g. claiming
something is 95% certain) is shocking and deeply unscientific. For a scientist, this simple fact is
sufficient to throw discredit on the whole summary. The SPM gives the wrong idea that one can
quantify precisely our confidence in the [climate] model predictions, which is far from being the
case.”
“When writing the SPM, the authors are facing a dilemma: either they speak as scientists and…
recognize that there are too many unknowns to make reliable predictions…or they try to convey
what they “consensually” think…at the price of giving up scientific rigour. They deliberately
chose the latter…they have distorted the scientific message into an alarmist message”
Alarmist: 05 January 2014 8:36am
Recommend 4
You complain about people not being climatologists and then say geologists and Monckton have
got it right, do you notice a tad of hypocrisy there?
Me – 05 January 2014 8:58am
Recommend 22
I wasn’t complaining about people not being climatologists – I was pointing out that Alex White
the author was.
Quote:
” Ken Green was introduced as a reviewer of the IPCC report as well. Ken is not a climate
scientist, so has not special expertise in this field.”
Another poster – 05 January 2014 11:09am
Recommend 12
One does not need to be a climatologist to be right or wrong. It all comes down to FACTS not
people. Monckton backs up his assertions with facts and you will find that most of them come
from IPCC sources so there is no point quibbling them.
You do not need ANY qualifications to see that IPCC predictions (of the future, you know) have
all failed miserably.
Me – 05 January 2014 2:37pm
Recommend 9
What confuses me is that someone of the caliber of Dr Pierre Darriulat can make a public statement like he did about the integrity of the IPCC and it’s scientists and it doesn’t phase the alarmists one iota. They just brush over it.
Poster – 05 January 2014 4:39pm
Recommend 2
Just to be pedantic, the word you wanted is “faze”, not “phase”. The phase (like the way I did that, eh?) the alarmists are in is, ironically, that of denial: there can be nothing wrong with what they believe, anyone who questions it has to be vilified.
Poster – 05 January 2014 4:55pm
Recommend 0
“As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate
change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again to inform the public and to advise
leaders about the perils that humanity faces. As scientists we understand the dangers of
nuclear weapons and their devastation effects, and we are learning how human activities and
technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth”
Stephen Hawking
– See more at: http://www.rtcc.org/2012/01/06/stephen-hawking-warns-of-climate-disaster-
ahead-of-70th-birthday/#sthash.twihdxGa.dpuf
What confuses me is that a scientist of the calibre of Stephen Hawking, AND EVERY NATIONAL
ACADEMY OF SCIENCE IN THE WORLD, can endorse AGW as real and happening, without any
qualifications about the integrity of climate scientists, and it has no effect on sceptics at all.
Instead, they focus on the one person they have found that tells them what they want to hear.
Actually, no, it’s not that confusing.
Me – 06 January 2014 3:01am
Recommend 1
Ah – the old argument from authority:
I believe the world is flat, all the science bodies believe the world is flat, even the Pope
believes the world is flat, therefore the world must be flat.
Poster – 06 January 2014 12:42pm
Recommend 0
Ah, the old ‘I don’t recognise legitimate expertise’ argument.
Except, of course, its impossible to live in modern society without recognising the expertise of doctors, engineers, airline pilots etc.
Btw, the argument from authority is not a fallacy; it only becomes a fallacy if the authority in question lacks the relevant expertise, or differs from the consensus view of experts in the area.
Look it up.
Me – 05 January 2014 1:31pm
Recommend 8
So the heat is hiding in the deep oceans is it – where is there evidence for that lame excuse? To get to the deep oceans it would have to go through the upper ocean wouldn’t it? Yet the upper ocean has remained steady since the Argo buoys were installed in 2003.
There is no evidence that violent extreme weather is increasing!! Why don’t you get your facts correct before you accuse others of not knowing the science.
You just use the consensus argument:
I think the earth is flat, everyone I talk to thinks the earth is flat, even the Pope thinks the earth is flat, therefore the earth must be flat!
Poster – 05 January 2014 1:52pm
Recommend 4
These are facts established by scientific scrutiny, excuse-making of these established facts is simply denial.
You appear to be saying that people should be banned from any discussion about the accuracy of these ‘facts’ – although we know that there is a lot of valid discussion about systematic errors and correction algorithms both for land-based and satellite temperature data collection.
Don’t you see that this is simply an indefensible position?
These are facts established by scientific scrutiny, excuse-making of these established facts is simply denial.
You appear to be saying that people should be banned from any discussion about the accuracy of these ‘facts’ – although we know that there is a lot of valid discussion about systematic errors and correction algorithms both for land-based and satellite temperature data collection.
Don’t you see that this is simply an indefensible position?
Poster – 05 January 2014 2:11pm
Recommend 4
These are facts established by scientific scrutiny, excuse-making of these established facts is simply denial.
You appear to be saying that people should be banned from any discussion about the accuracy of these ‘facts’ – although we know that there is a lot of valid discussion about systematic errors and correction algorithms both for land-based and satellite temperature data collection.
Don’t you see that this is simply an indefensible position?
The place for such a discussion is in the scientific journal that publishes papers on those issues, so that scientists with the relevant expertise and experience can judge the merits of your argument.
Bypassing that process, and presenting your objections directly to the general public, is completely inappropriate.
Doing so, and then implying that because you have made these criticisms, climate change is not a problem we need to do anything about, is blatant manipulation of public opinion.
60
Ya just wanna slap these people round a bit sometimes, right? So much annoying about all that, but I’ll pick this bit…
Okay let’s look it up at fallacyfiles.org. An argument from authority fails when:
If you are a warmist then you should stop reading at this point as this requirement of lacking expertise suits your argumentative purpose. Skeptics keep reading. 🙂
Ah, and what sort of bias does a person hired to study the Global Warming Problem have? Will they declare their job to be redundant due to there not being a problem? Welll… eventually, but they will string out the grant gravy train for as long as possible. That would be the rational self-interested thing to do, after all.
Even when the Authority has all the appropriate credentials and experience for the problem domain, this does not mean they or anyone else have sufficient expertise to give a reliable answer for the specific problem. Whether one wants to trust their best estimate anyway is a matter of choice.
The argument from authority is ultimately an economic argument (not a logically valid one), because obtaining the real logical reason for believing a proposition takes lots of time and study that you cannot afford to do, so you’re willing to take the risk of trusting someone to give you a tailored conclusion. Presumably the more costly their solution the better their track record should be before you believe it.
How are those climate model predictions going again? Not so good eh!
50
Howdy.
It appears you can get the benefits of calorie restriction (dieting) by intermediate fasting and then eating normally for the non fast days (See caveat at the end of my comment). Intermediate fasting has multiple benefits including as you note reducing insulin resistance.
Michael Mosley (a UK doctor and investigative reporter) was in an interesting PBS (Public Broadcast System) documentary that included interviews with some of the key scientists in the US that are doing research on intermittent fasting. The documentary includes blood work tests on Mosley (who is pre-diabetic and generically propone to type 2 diabetes and has a family history of atherosclerosis) before and after fasting. Mosley’s insulin resistance dramatically dropped as a result of the fasting and his other blood indictors dramatically improved. This is a link to the PBS video.
http://vimeo.com/54089463
Eat, Fast, and Live Longer with Michael Mosley
The intermittent fasting scheme which many people are now trying (myself included) is the 5:2 plan. Calorie intake is restricted to 500 calories for woman and 600 calories for men on the fasting days (two non consecutive days of calorie restriction per week and eating normally for the other days. Most people find that they look forward to the fasting days as you have more energy on the calorie restricted days. (I eat two small meals on the fasting days (lunch and dinner) and workout before lunch and go for a long walk before dinner. Food tastes better after the fast. Mosley has written a book that includes an overview of the research and outlines the 5:2 plan. I did not purchase the book, as I watched the PBS documentary and then did my own research. I noticed however that there were over a 1000 recommendations for the Morley’s book at Amazon.com and all of those writing lost weight and had more energy.
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/michael-mosleys-five-biggest-health-myths-20130920-2u3vb.html
A second myth concerning diet is the super high protein myth. I would highly recommend the book Forks before Knifes which is written by a senior researcher who was the Director of the China study (the largest, longest, and most comprehensive dietary study ever done on to determine the links between diet and disease.) The China study results has confirmed with research on mice. If you want to reduce the hormone IGF-1 which is a factor in the initiation of cancer (by intermittent fasting) you must also reduce the amount of protein in your diet, in addition to intermittent fasting. (Note Mosley’s IGF-1 testing in the documentary was done after calorie restriction and a vegan diet for the period a calorie restriction. The insulin resistance benefits can be achieved without changing the protein intake, the IGF-1 benefits cannot which is validate by the 20 year China Study and by other research, cannot.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673798/pdf/nihms95561.pdf
40
Excellent comment. I’ll be sure to check out these two links.
40
William, it bothers me when a country like China, that seems to have a problem supplying a lot of protein, comes out with a study expressing this kind of result. But that is just me……..
20
The China–Cornell–Oxford Project was initiated in the early 1980s and was completed before the current China-US economic competition. It is a joint US/Chinese research project. Other studies have validated the results. Our ideas concerning nutrition are mostly due to television advertisement and the US department of agriculture whose existence is to push agricultural products not to reduce health care costs. Treating people for ‘Western Diseases’ is a multi trillion dollar industry. There appears to be no incentive for health care providers (hospitals/doctors) to change people’s diets so they do not get sick. The game changer is the US has run out of money to pay for health care (and everything else).
Currently 1 out of 10 Americans has type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, in the US is predicted to increase to up to 1 in 3 by 2050 based on current trends. 20% of the new cases of type 2 diabetes in the US are adolescents; which is astonishing as type 2 diabetes, was once a disease that was limited to middle age and the aged. The problem in the US is sugary pop which is consumed in enormous amounts by the poor.
The director of the China Study, Colin Campbell, grew up on a dairy farm which is interesting as research changed Campbell’s fundamental views on nutrition. The data from the China Study (300 peer reviewed papers) indicates that majority of the Western disease are caused by diet. The US is currently spending $2.7 trillion dollars per year on “health” care. Campbell estimates based on the research that 70% to 80% of the US health care expenditures can be eliminated by a change in diet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study_(book)
The initial China dietary research was initiated by Chairman Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai) as he was dying of liver cancer and wanted to understand why. The initial China research in the late 1970s showed that there were some villages that had very low incidents of ‘Western diseases’: cancers, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and so on and some that did not.
Rural Chinese eat what is available locally and eat the same diet for generations. Based on the first study a joint US/Chinese research team was set up to study the health of 6500 people in rural Chinese villages over 20 years. This study was unique due to the length of the study, the fact that the diet was the same for each individual village and did not vary during the study period, and that the research included periodic blood tests and medical examinations to follow the progress of the diseases in the study group.
10
Without added comment on the study you cite, the American Diabetes Society quotes the total Diabetes rate (type one and two combined) at 8.3%. This is contrary to your 1 in 10 for type 2 alone.
I invite you to re check all your references
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/
10
You might be right. Probably depends on genetic ancestry too.
For example, native populations (I’m part Amerindian, although it applies to Maori, Australian aboriginals, and many others) have much higher rates of diabetes and obesity (and, yes, alcoholism). Significant cultural factors aside, these are probably related to the fact that large quantities of refined carbs (and alcohol) are new to their/our diet.
I will say that if you add prediabetes and obesity, which is usually a stepping stone on the path to type-2 diabetes, the amount of people affected is much higher than 10% even if you look at the broader population.
30
The 8.3% statistic was for 2011, this is 2014. The 1 in 10 number was quoted from the US department of disease prevention. The 1 in 10 number includes an estimate of undiagnosed type 2 diabetes cases. Note also that there are 79 million (25%) American that have pre diabetes and are starting to damage their bodies.
US CDC (Center for Disease Control)
http://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/2010/r101022.html
One in 10 U.S. adults has diabetes now. The prevalence is expected to rise sharply over the next 40 years due to an aging population more likely to develop type 2 diabetes, increases in minority groups that are at high risk for type 2 diabetes, and people with diabetes living longer, according to CDC projections published in the journal Population Health Metrics. Because the study factored in aging, minority populations and lifespan, the projections are higher than previous estimates.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/06/health/diabetes-cost-report/
5 million more people living with diabetes
The American Diabetes Association (Association) released new research today estimating the total costs of diagnosed diabetes have risen to $245 billion in 2012 from $174 billion in 2007, when the cost was last examined. This figure represents a 41 percent increase over a five year period.
“I know of no other disease that’s increasing at (about) 8% per year,” said Anderson, president of medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association. “That to me isn’t surprising, it’s troubling…
…An estimated 22.3 million people were living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes in 2012, according to the new report, up from 17.5 million in 2007.”
http://www.diabetes.org/for-media/2013/annual-costs-of-diabetes-2013.html
Diabetes, a serious and life-threatening disease, has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S. with nearly 26 million adults and children living with the disease. An additional 79 million have prediabetes, placing them at increased risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
20
I tried this diet about a year ago and it worked. It reduced my sugar levels to pre-diabetic levels (Levels considered to be “at risk” rather than fully diabetic. It is 800 calories per day for 8 weeks. That consists of 3 drinks of horrible water based slurry and 230g of non-starchy vegetables per day. Everything else is banned except for water and tea without milk or sugar. My weight went from 85kg to 70 kg. (about 13.5 stones to 11.0)
It improved my cholesterol and blood pressure. It is tough mentally with deprivation of meals being much more difficult than the physical hunger, especially after 3 weeks of it when morale is low and still a week away from the mid-point.
My medical centre did not approve because their dietician didn’t want the responsibility so I did it myself and kept them fully informed, promising to abort if there was the slightest medical problem. I measured blood pressure, sugar, weight and girth daily.
50
having issues that require modifications to diets, I know it is hard. Until you realize the alternatives. While I salivate when my wife, children and grand kids sit down to a hot pizza and I munch on my rabbit food, I find strength in telling myself that the possible alternative is an Insulin shot.
So while a greatly reduced caloric diet is hard (for even me – italian dressing is not calorie free), the incentive is living a better life without getting stuck several times a day!
30
Phil
Well off thread but going back to our “tourist” friends…
—————————————————————————-
Twits occur in all shapes and flavours, amongst them are the “Planet Savers”;
One Professor Turney, (known as Chris), desired he should be known as this.
And so he planned his own crusade, somewhat pricey, but mostly paid
By largesse of the public purse – not for the last time, nor the first.
The purpose of this noble goal – to sail towards the Southern Pole,
To collect, collate and then report, all data of the climate sort.
Thus confirming something we all “knew” – the evil role of CO2;
Such changes he would clearly show, compared to Mawson, years ago.
Now, that doesn’t seem like much a plan, but Chris is not your “detail” man.
Apart from that, not much to do, just hire a boat with Russian crew.
And, to document the climate ruin, invite some cronies and camera crew in.
(These climate types, I don’t know why, are rarely, rarely camera shy.)
The ship sailed southward, out to sea, and all was going, swimmingly,
But, as the Polar waters beckoned, a fact arose – no-one had reckoned:
For, despite what they had oft been told, the South Pole still was BLOODY COLD!
And, nearly 60 k’s away from shore, the ship was blocked, could go no more.
Chris gazed upon the icy sea; “Let’s disembark, – just follow me,
To explore the ice; it will be awesome – we’re gonna do a Dougy Mawson!”
So the kiddies all got off and played, but, tragically, they overstayed;
When they returned, the time had passed – the ship by now was stuck and fast!
These latest antics off the coast, had worn quite thin with Russian host;
To Chris he cried: “You little jerk! You’ve cost me time and lots of work!
I’m sure you thought it would be nice, to take that frolic on the ice;
You came back late, now, thanks to you, my ship is firmly in the pooh.”
“Your mission’s goal was crystal clear – you had but just the one idea,
To preen and ponce, pontificate, while casting judgement on our planet’s fate;
And to earnestly parade your views, while looking good for camera crews.
But I’d be more impressed, my climate chap, if you’d learnt to read a weather map!”
“I think you’re wrong, my Russian friend; I know exactly how this will end.
The climate models clearly show, a future lack of ice and snow,
And that’s the bestest science we have got – it certainly did cost quite a lot;
I predict tomorrow, or perhaps today, we’ll free this ship and sail away.”
Three days later…
But cold it was, and stuck they stayed – a few were getting quite dismayed:
“Oh won’t you come and save us please – we’d much prefer not stay and freeze –
And, if your ship needs to burn some fossil fuel, it’s quite OK, we’re really cool.”
The icebound victims were at wit’s ends, and sent some “selfies” to their friends…
Help arrives – who’s the turkey now??
STILL to be continued… They get back to Hobart January 22nd.
Cheers,
Speedy
20
During my hiatus from Joanne’s site, your prose and poetry was one thing I did miss a lot. It is good to read your creations once again. Excellent!
00
Interesting story Jo.
One of the reasons I have developed such a passion for debating AGW is the very point you make at the start “Sometimes the consensus deniers are right, which is exactly why the term is so pointless and so profoundly unscientific.”
I have been stung, really hurt by the actions of Flannery, Oreske, Cooke and Co. In that they consider this topic beyond debate. Frakly from my perspective I dont care whos right or wrong. Im not emotionally attached to my position nor would I consider it a “loss of face” if it turns out Im on the wrong side of the issue. What I am interested in is the TRUTH! The only way the truth has any chance of being discovered is if minds are kept open and questions fly thick and fast.
EVERYTHING is open for debate in my world. Sure you might say that gravity is not up for debate, but sure it is! Its going to be a short conversation when we get to dropping an object to test the hypothesis, but whats wrong with having the conversation?
As I often do in topics related to critical thought, questioning and reasoning, I defer to the late and very great Neville Kennard…
“Being curious may bring you back to the conventional wisdom, or it may not; but at least you’ve arrived there of your own accord and not just followed the crowd. Be a sceptic, a contrarian, an iconoclast even, if you have the where-with-all for it. Most don’t, so it will never be a crowded field.” Neville Kennard 1937-2012
I will continue to regard warmists and AGW proponents generally as nothing more than politically or emotionally motivated until I see evidence of their willingness to engage in a debate without denigrating anyone asking questions. That is when this topic will become scientific and not before. Right now its pure ideology from the warmists side. They arnt even willing to re-examine their own data (HADCRUT warming pause etc) those of them that even know what the data is an where it comes from (Suzuki).
So whether its diet or whether is climate, everything is up for questioning in the minds of thinking individuals. The process of questioning is not an attack on science, it IS science!
50
published in the “ClimateConsensus-the 97% Section by John Abraham & Dana Nuccitelli”, hosted by the Guardian.
7 Jan: Guardian: The Weekly Standard’s Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media’s climate failures
The Weekly Standard suggests we should gamble our future on the climate scientist who’s been the wrongest, longest
Posted by Dana Nuccitelli
PHOTO CAPTION: The Weekly Standard’s Lindzen article was puffier than a drag from a cigarette – which Lindzen also denies cause cancer. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
The conservative media may currently be the single biggest roadblock to addressing the threat posed by human-caused climate change…
Make no mistake about it; Lindzen has made a career of being wrong about climate science…
In my extensive research into Richard Lindzen’s climate papers and talks, I’ve never been able to find an instance where he ***predicted how global temperatures would change in the future, other than to say in 1989,
“I personally feel that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small,”…
Today’s conservative media outlets are rarely willing to consider the scenario in which 97 percent of climate scientists and peer-reviewed research are correct…
(THE BIG FINALE)This Weekly Standard article exemplifies the problem with today’s conservative media, as they ironically help stick us with government greenhouse gas regulations rather than encouraging a potentially more effective free market approach favored by economists, including conservative ones.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jan/06/climate-change-climate-change-scepticism
LOL. Laughter is the best medicine?
20 Dec: NYT: Jan Hoffman: Who Says Laughter’s the Best Medicine?
Just in time to protect patients from the dangers of holiday cheer, a new scholarly review from a British medical journal describes many harmful effects wrought by laughter…
At the very least, the new review could be considered an affirmation for the perpetually dour. If 2013 was the year of the worried well, the authors imply that 2014 is poised to be the year of the humorless healthy.
The analysis, “Laughter and MIRTH (Methodical Investigation of Risibility, Therapeutic and Harmful),” was drawn from about 5,000 studies. It appears in BMJ, formerly known as The British Medical Journal, which for more than 30 years has traditionally featured rigorously researched but lighthearted articles in its Christmas issue. A deputy editor, Dr. Tony Delamothe, said that the MIRTH study was indeed peer-reviewed — presumably by a doctor with a carefully managed sense of humor (or humour).
This year, companion studies in the issue include “Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?” , “The survival time of chocolates on hospital wards: covert observational study,” and “Operating room safety: the 10 point plan to safe flinging” (among the cautions: “Before flinging, identify your target and the area beyond it” and “Never fling an instrument straight up into the air”)…
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/who-says-laughters-the-best-medicine/?_r=0
00
Dana Nuccitelli –
looks like the Left aren’t listening to you either:
China’s CNOOC to abandon wind, biofuels – source
BEIJING, Jan 6 (Reuters) – State-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) is shutting down part of its renewable energy business, a company source said on Monday, as it looks to sell its wind and biofuels projects and shift its focus to coal-to-gas…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.3548629?&ref=searchlist
00
Coal to gas was how the UK did industrial/commercial gas supplies up until 1940’s or so.
There are old gas making buildings all over the place. Some of them are wonderful pieces from an architectural point of view
and have been converted to many different purposes.
I’m guessing the US has lots of them around the place too.
One assumes that modern technology will be somewhat more efficient though. 🙂
00
Yes, we did the same in NZ and the byproduct was Coke which we burnt in our central heaters in those days.
00
Later than than. In the UK it was North Sea oil and gas which shut down the Town/Water gas business. **
janama; coke production was a different process; basically heating the coal to get the various liquids available. The coke was used mostly for steel production.
**O/T but helped reduce suicide/accident rates as Town gas (like car exhausts) contained carbon monoxide which is toxic. Didn’t help the chap in England who turned on the natural gas to commit suicide and after half an hour gave it up. Turned gas off and thinking it over sat down and lit a cigar. Boom..no house. Not counted as suicide.
00
Bloomberg trying to stir up some protest!
6 Jan: Bloomberg: Dirtiest Coal’s Rebirth in Europe Flattens Medieval Towns
By Stefan Nicola and Ladka Bauerova
Across the continent’s mining belt, from Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic, utilities such as Vattenfall AB, CEZ AS and PGE SA are expanding open-pit mines that produce lignite…
The projects go against the grain of European Union rules limiting emissions and pushing cleaner energy. Alarmed at power prices about double U.S. levels, policy makers are allowing the expansion of coal mines that were scaled back in the past two decades, stirring a backlash in the targeted communities…
Lignite demand worldwide is forecast to rise as much as 5.4 percent by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. At the same time, it estimates consumption must fall 10 percent over that period to achieve goals endorsed by EU and world leaders to hold global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century…
(LOL) Lignite’s revival is concentrating attention on the drawbacks of the fossil fuel and may actually bolster support for renewables such as wind and solar power, according to Barry O’Flynn, a director in the environmental finance and clean technology team at Ernst & Young LLP…
Now, Poland, which gets almost 90 percent of its electricity from coal, is stepping up use of the fuel as a way of ensuring energy security and maintaining employment in some of the nation’s poorest regions…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-06/dirtiest-coal-s-rebirth-in-europe-flattens-medieval-towns.html
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A bit O/T isn’t it Pat?
Or are you arguing that a coal diet slims down electricity bills?
11
I went on the fasting diet for three months leading up to Christmas – I found 600 calories an easy target (tuna, steamed vegetables, celery etc for snacks, green and black tea etc). It was made easier by the knowledge that the next day you could eat and drink what you normally ate – there were no long lasting dietary deprivations!
I lost weight, looked better and felt much healthier than I had for years. And after falling off the wagon over Christmas and New Year, I have noticed a general all round decline so today I am cheerfully back on the 5/2 regime.
10
Good luck. I am back on the 5:2 plan also. The people who reviewed Mosley’s book noted if one sticks with the plan it becomes part of life and easy to maintain. I noticed an immediate improvement in blood pressure. There are other benefits related to balance (something to do with the inner ear, see Mosley’s special for details), in addition to stopping and reversing insulin resistance. As noted the IGF-1 benefit requires less animal protein consumption. One of the researchers in the special noted that there is actual neuron grow in the brain that occurs when there is fasting which is very interesting. It appears the body’s systems do not work correctly if we are constantly in feast mode. Certain key body repairs are done when there are shortages of food which before super markets and refrigerators was a normal regular occurrence.
This is a link to the PBS video.
http://vimeo.com/54089463
Eat, Fast, and Live Longer with Michael Mosley
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2673798/pdf/nihms95561.pdf
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A slow day at work so have followed this topic with much interest.
I am a fat bastard with Type 2 that I have had for about 11 years.
Was tempted to try the 5/2 after watching Michael Moseley’s doco.
I dropped 9kgs in a couple of weeks after having a gall bladder infection and subsequent liver abcess.
BSL dropped and I cut down on my diabetic medication accordingly.
Gall bladder surgery ensued and I am now fixed but then of course put back on the weight.
Diabetic medicines back to pre surgery levels.
I know that weight loss equates to better health all round so I really should try and drop the odd 30kgs or so.
Can’t see myself being able to do the 5/2 regime but will give a weight loss program a go.
Should be able to lose some pork before the next Ice Age .
10
Keith, 5:2 looks daunting, but maybe try just 1:6 to start with. The weird thing about fasting is that it’s hard at first, but gets easier after a few hours. And you always know that “it’s only a day”. Long term diets can be harder mentally…
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Keith,
I just did my first day back after Christmas and New Year – there are websites with recipes and if you choose the right foods, it can be a tastier and easier experience than you think. I only stopped over Christmas because I was travelling and I wanted to enjoy myself knowing that I could return to 5:2 and its lifestyle without any problems.
I genuinely look forward to the fasting days but when they do get a little dull, I know that tomorrow I can have that steak dinner with a glass of wine (or two), or an extra skim cap rather than tea in the morning, so good luck.
00
If climate science had posted a study with 11 areas where the climate was changing rapidly, would anyone here have suggested that the holy grail of climate change proof is out there and skeptics should rethink their claims??? This is a tiny study. Eleven people do not extrapolate to millions. Yet this is indicative that majority science can be wrong? This looks very much like a double standard to me. (And yes, Jo did point out the tiny study–but that does not take away from the idea that a tiny study with limited value in no way indicates mainstream science is wrong. No more than heat in Australia indicates global warming.)
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That is a good point Sheri. I too have noticed that Jo will often mention points which really are quite contrary to the notion of dispelling group think or confuse the debate but will temper her words with a ‘…..just sayin’ at the end or perhaps a footnote disclaimer at the end of the main article. That I do think is a bad practice and more ‘marketing’ of science ideas rather than proper debate. Why dedicate an article to a cold day in Egypt and talk about the weather when it is not a good scientific point for the debate at hand? Someone else is just as likely to dedicate an article to a record hot day in Australia to similarly ‘market’ their position on the science. That tactic should be left to the Alan Jones’ of the media world.
————————————–
REPLY: Not even close. They say “it’s warm, therefore climate change is real”. I say “it’s cold, it means nothing, but we are all alive, and it’s interesting, go ahead and talk about it”. They are paid by us, but illogical and deceptive. I am unpaid, but honest. After you have finished attacking the paid public servants for misleading people and wasting our money you can complain about volunteers for allowing small talk on their blogs OK? – Jo
02
My ‘Talk about the weather’ quip was not meant in the usual sense of ‘small talk’ – small talk and big thoughts are usually the very best thing. I meant that ‘the weather’ and ‘the climate’ are two very common terms that get bandied around incorrectly in the ‘debate’ and it is usually not accidental as they work very effectively on the masses for both sides of the debate. I just hear it as noise that does nothing for an honest debate. I know that you and probably many of your readers definitely appreciate the distinction and that you don’t generally misuse the terms but hearing about a boat load of scientists stuck in the ice or snow in Egypt here , is nonetheless still noise. (even if it is worth a chuckle – technically I guess I can’t say it is ironic even if tempted).
Hey Jo, I can’t go attacking public servants, I am a pacifist and my sharpest weapon is that hooky looking question mark over by the righthand shift key 🙂 plus truly I think most of the public servant agents of the climate scam are foot soldiers and don’t have the free range to dream up these scams. Like any other soldier they just go out do what they are told and ask no questions. – cheers.
00
Sheesh :- ) After five years of rational posts I though I might have earned a polite request for more information … Above there are links to a couple of larger studies and many appropriate caveats. There are hundreds more I could have linked if I had the time. The results of this study are not that radical to people who have read even a small number of low carbohydrate, low calorie, paleodiet, intermittent fasting research papers. Apologies for the randomness of this quick list.
E.G.
N. Halberg, et al Effect of intermittent fasting and refeeding on insulin action in healthy men J Appl Physiol, 99 (2005), pp. 2128–2136
Anson et al 2002 Intermittent fasting dissociates beneficial effects of dietary restriction on glucose metabolism and neuronal resistance to injury from calorie intake
“Nevertheless, intermittent fasting resulted in beneficial effects that met or exceeded those of caloric restriction including reduced serum glucose and insulin levels and increased resistance of neurons in the brain to excitotoxic stress. Intermittent fasting therefore has beneficial effects on glucose regulation and neuronal resistance to injury in these mice that are independent of caloric intake. “
This review links to many of those papers.
Rev Assoc Med Bras. 2013 Mar-Apr;59(2):167-73. doi: 10.1016/j.ramb.2012.09.003.
Effects of intermittent fasting on metabolism in men. Azevedo FR, Ikeoka D, Caramelli B.
…Animal models have shown positive changes in glucose (lower plasma glucose and insulin levels) and in lipid metabolism (reduced visceral fat tissue and increased plasma adiponectin level), and an increased resistance to stress. Despite the limited number of samples studied, positive results have been reported on the impact of IF for human health. IF is reported to improve the lipid profile; to decrease inflammatory responses, reflected by changes in serum adipokine levels; and to change the expression of genes related to inflammatory response and other factors.
Intermittent fasting modulation of the diabetic syndrome in sand rats. III. Post-mortem investigations. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21069262
The effects of intermittent or continuous energy restriction on weight loss and metabolic disease risk markers: a randomized trial in young overweight women.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20921964
Fasting and inflammatory disorders:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20484916
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11155351
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20430134
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19377768
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16181450
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14757997
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890437
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11252685
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10479237
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10434573
Eg: Effects of Food Restriction on Pancreatic Islet in Spontaneously Diabetic Torii Fatty Rats. Ishii Y, Ohta T, Sasase T, Morinaga H, Miyajima K, Kakutani M.
J Vet Med Sci. 2010 Sep 22. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 20877155 [PubMed – as supplied by publisher]Free Article http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jvms/advpub/0/advpub_1009130333/_article http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jvms/advpub/0/1009130333/_pdf
See also Cellular stress response: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18629638
a novel target for chemoprevention and nutritional neuroprotection in aging, neurodegenerative disorders and longevity.
30
Jo, my response to Sherri’s comment was not meant to be a challenge to the gist of your diet article nor disrespect for your 5 yr. body of work here which I must confess to not being all that familiar with having only recently started looking at your blog. Like most of these scientific claims, I am more interested in the process that takes us to some end point of understanding (hopefully one that one could call a ‘scientific truth’). I like your idea of challenging group think but by providing a ‘long list’ of research papers supporting the view expressed in that study you first mentioned seems to be just a numbers game again. How did we get to the turning point where the former popular beliefs became past tense and wrong or probably wrong? Have the ‘consensus’ numbers now simply swung in favour of an intermittently low calorie dietary regime and more importantly, where did we go so scientifically wrong as to put many lives at risk? Have all the anti-dieters and authors of the anti-diet research papers (and I would presume there is an even longer list here based on the comments in your article) now retracted their views or have they simply become outnumbered by more players joining the game? We have the same dilemma for the anti-cholesterol regime which has been thrown into the limelight by some of your ABC colleagues recently and are we expected to again just wait on the ‘consensus’ to stop swinging or do we somehow ignore any consensus? Surely the litmus test must be when the former supporters of the old regime now recant their views? I would venture to say that medicine and diet are probably up there with the climate debate in terms of importance of not letting a good civilization go to waste.
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If historians had posted a study with many old and ancient examples of climate changing rapidly would Sheri be able to explain why this is suddenly not natural and normal?
Why should climate cease changing as much as it did in the past?
00
Let me beat Rereke:
Hail Joanna, we who are about to diet, salute thee!
20
That is a very old joke – it originally comes (I think) from Groucho Marx, in a Crazy Gang movie.
00
But don’t let me stop you using it.
00
Sometimes it is best to remember old things e.g. I am re-reading H.H. Lamb Climate, History and the Modern World.
Revised 20 years ago and in my opinion still 20 years ahead of the current AGW gang.
After that Wine, Terroir and Climate Change by John Gladstones, who remembers science from before the internet.
10
About 9 months ago I had a blood test where it was discovered my blood sugar levels were very close to pre-diabetic. My doctor suggested another blood test in a couple of months hinting that medication might be necessary. After a little research and reading the UK Daily Mail article I decided to cut my calories down to 1000 per day and walk a couple of Kilometers a day. 2 months later I had lost 2-3 inches of my waste and my blood sugar levels were prefect.
20
Basically, one’s health is about habits and the accumulated effect over the long run.
If you constantly throw crap (excessively) into your body every day and don’t move (exercise), you’ll pay for it as a consequence.
Its not a hard concept to pass onto children.
11
Could the reduction of smoking in western societies coincide with an increase in pleasurable eating to get that dopamine hit? Never seen any stats on that.
[Dopamine is the chemical that mediates pleasure in the brain. It is released during pleasurable situations and stimulates one to seek out the pleasurable activity or occupation. This means food, sex, and several drugs of abuse are also stimulants of dopamine release in the brain, particularly in areas such as the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex.]
10
.
Larry Pickering has an interesting article on the link between society’s cessation of smoking and the general rise in diabetes, obesity, heart disease and more.
An interesting read.
http://pickeringpost.com/story/tobacco-fibs/2553
10
His problem there is he rant’s there is no problem with tobacco, then inserts 3/4 of the way down that he only smokes rollys to avoid the chemicals in ciggies. But I’ve never actually seen an anti-smoking ad say “tobacco gives you cancer”, it is always about the carcinogenic chemicals in ciggies. My brother smokes those electronic vapour things and it’s fine with me.
Linking to the Sweet Poison thing though… I’d suggest that in iceland and Japan they have diets that do not facilitate cancer growth as much as US/UK/AUS diets.If your diet is crap then smoking is a significant risk factor.
I also note he has no references? Just assertions.
11
The clinical evidence suggests a strong causal link between personal tobacco use (not convinced about the passive variety, too convenient and seemingly tenuous to me) and cancer. That said it just seems far too convenient to me for AGW acolytes to regurgitate that particular discussion in defense of their stance on science in general. Not saying you’ve done that here Matt but I’ve seen it happen many times before, a bit like evoking a connection between us and Nazi Germany as a means of discrediting us. Most people avail themselves of mind altering substances at some time in their lives and maybe thats just what we do, a part of our social fabric. There must be a very good reason why our brains produce that Dopamine.
I suspect a few here run the risk of buggering up keyboards with spilt Pinot.
20
Really?
Love to see that myself.
Got a link?
01
No but I bet a clever clogs like yourself could find one. You could buy some smokes and it say’s so right there on the packet. Surgeon General no less. Are they lying to us? Am I wrong?
10
I’m not on any side in that argument, I have never bothered researching it.
But your response reads to me as an argument from authority.
You have made a statement, and been asked for evidence.
00
LIke you I have never researched it either but my comment was anecdotal and based on what we’ve all been told for years now by health professionals.
00
Isn’t that precisely what we are discussing in this thread? And more generally what this site is all about?
Questioning what we’ve been told by the “professionals”?
I asked for a link to evidence of a causal link between tobacco use and cancer because I have spent a major part of my adult life seeking one . . . without success.
This is not as a result of some passing, casual interest in the subject. Even before I was born I was diagnosed as having a lung deficiency that meant I wouldn’t even survive childbirth. I did, but my parents were told not to become attached to me because I wouldn’t survive a week. My mother went home and I was not even given a name until two months later when my parents were contacted and advised to come and collect me, because, somehow I had survived. It was the first they had heard of it. Up till then they had treated me as a a stillbirth.
For the first six years of my life I spent every winter in Princess Margaret Hospital for children, with lung infections. Over the next twelve years I tried different ways of dealing with my illness with varying degrees of failure, then shortly before my eighteenth birthday I tracked down my childhood doctor, and had a heart to heart. He advised me to take up smoking, based on his observations as a POW in Changi.
That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have only been back in hospital with lung-related illness twice – both times after I gave up smoking “for my health”.
.
For over thirty years I have desperately wanted to prove myself wrong, and find this “causal link between tobacco and cancer”. Truth is, as far as I can tell, there isn’t one. In fact, I have never even come across a study involving tobacco, only manufactured cigarettes, with all their added chemical carcinogenics.
Even then, nobody has ever shown a causal link. Over the years tens of thousands of lab animals have been been literally gassed to death with cigarette smoke over an extended period of time, without a single specimen ever developing a cancer or other life-threatening condition, attributable to the smoke.
.
Today the biggest killers in our society are heart disease and conditions related to obesity, like diabetes.
Both are ultimately linked back to stress.
Tobacco consumption quells appetite, and relieves stress.
The growth in these conditions pretty-much exactly parallels society’s cessation of smoking.
Think about it.
00
I have real problems with the words “causal link”.
I would accept “correlation”, because the evidence implies that people who are prone to developing cancer, also have a tendency towards tobacco use; or vice versa.
But as far as I am aware, an actual causal mechanism, between cancer and nicotine, has not yet been identified in humans.
And by causal mechanism, I mean A always leads to B. Saying that A “only sometimes” leads to B, implies the presence of at least one another factor, C, that makes the determination.
Epidemiologists have a lot to answer for. They pretend that C doesn’t exist, and the media fall for it every time, and turn a hypothesis into a certainty.
01
The first medical concern shown was by London physician John Hill, who in 1761 warned that snuff takers were at risk of developing nasal cancer. However he didn’t publish clinical figures until 1791. Given the additives in snuff, this was hardly conclusive proof that tobacco was at fault.
Cigarettes became popular in England in 1870-1880’s. By 1910 the public were calling them coffin nails. Not proof but people saw a connection.
The first medical warning re lung cancer seems to have been by Dr. Adler in 1912, but the first statistical correlation was made in Germany in 1930. There was a good deal of work in Germany in the 1930’s which indicated a strong link between cigarettes and cancer. This fitted in with Nazi dogma, but didn’t stop issue of cigarettes to troops in WW2. Naturally the Nazi link made the case against cigarettes lose respectability.
I have no idea whether it is tobacco or other cigarette ingredients which are at fault. I note in passing that chewing tobacco is considered a worse risk. Pure nicotine is toxic, but like so many other things (e.g. arsenic) may well have beneficial effects in low doses.
 
10
Correlation does not imply causation is true to a point, but doesn’t change the fact that correlation is evidence. And there is a whole lot of correlation.
Besides, even if I or no one else knows the specific microbiology involved, it isn’t hard to imagine that putting burning smoke that makes people cough and also tars up their lungs plus has umpteen chemicals, natural and otherwise, thrown in might cause mutations that lead to cancer when, in fact, smokers do have higher cancer rates.
Count me with the mainstream on this one. Besides, smoking stinks, hurts breathing, discolours stuff, is a stimulant drug that leads to people feeling agitated when they don’t have access to it, etc. So even if it doesn’t cause cancer, I’ll stick to coffee.
Which, if not drank at too high a temperature, is correlated with lower cancer (and diabetes) rates, but sure can lead to the whole agitation thing. Nothing is perfect in this world.
If you want to smoke, by all means I support your right to. But adults who smoke indoors around kids bother me, largely because I remember hating it as a kid. I — and my doctor — asked my parents to stop this, but they wouldn’t. They wanted convenient, frequent access to the drug more than to help me breath properly.
It is what it is. ACEs and all.
20
.
So, Graeme and Christoph, no actual real evidence of anything.
And yet you “believe”.
Just like a global warming advocate does.
And yet you can’t see the similarity.
Does anybody really wonder why things are the way they are?
.
Enough hypocrisy for one day.
Time for bed.
01
MemoryVault,
If putting more CO2 into the atmosphere was consistently followed by a rise in average temperature rates, and this held true over the near and short term, wasn’t a lagging indicator … if there was no pause, if the data looked a whole lot different than it does … if solar and other natural cycles didn’t correlate more closely with temperature data … then I would assume I likely have misestimated the feedbacks and the consensus theory is more likely true.
If you can’t understand this, I can’t help you. Enjoy your sleep, which I expect you to find rejuvenating based on past experience and a lot of correlative data.
Or maybe I’m just wrong about the sleep → feeling less tired theory and it’s a function of the head’s nearness to pillows.
20
*near and long term
20
Sex leads to pregnancy, but not always.
Yes, we understand many of the individual steps in that particular chain now, but you don’t have to understand the whole chain nor does it have to happen in every instance for the relationship to hold.
20
Christoph,
That is argument by analogy, and a false analogy at that. In the case of pregnancy, we have identified “factor C” as being a cyclic process. Early oral contraceptives disrupted that cycle. We also know that factor “D” is the age of the female, and that factor “E” is age of the male, and so on.
The volume of causal information we have about sex, is far greater than what we have about smoking, primarily, I guess, because we are more interested in sex than in smoking.
But, we also know more because, nobody claimed that recognising a correlation between sex and pregnancy was the end of the matter. People recognised that women didn’t always get pregnant after sex. People recognised that some women never got pregnant at all. And some people believed that a woman could get pregnant without sex.
Not everybody who smokes, develops cancer (or heart disease), there is no direct and consistent cause and effect. There is only the precautionary principle, based on a correlation that some people who smoke get cancer. But not everybody who smokes gets cancer. So we are still missing “factor C”, even though the PR machine is telling us that, “The science is settled”.
01
And, of course, our discussions over pregnancy and smoking are only analogies for discussing climate science, where even less is known, and where we are more reliant on dubious maths, to statistically define the behaviours of processes that we don’t even understand.
01
OK, perhaps I would have been better advised to use the word ‘correlation’. Interesting discussion though and yet again I learn something. Now, about so called ‘passive smoking’…
00
Can you define, “passive smoking”?
00
@Rereke Whakaaro
When someone lights your fire?
00
The ingestion of ‘second hand’ tobacco smoke and it’s apparent correlation to cancer. Rereke, your comments at 43.1.1.1.2 re Epidemiologists neatly explain why I have a problem with this notion. Too many C’s….
00
Here’s another consensus that might be due for a crash.
The Zwally et al 2005 study of Greenland shows a small mass gain of ice and Antarctic ice loss in the peninsula and mostly gains elsewhere.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/igsoc/jog/2005/00000051/00000175/art00001?token=004a14828f227b76504c486646257023442f247a4259316a332b257d7241255e4e6b63318c
Just seems to agree with a deceleration in SLR found in most of the recent studies.
00
Read “Sweet Poison” by David Gillespie
It explains every thing
10
I do wish it had a slightly less sensationalist name though. When I tell people “yeah it’s a pretty straightforward diet, just cut out sugar, it’s not faddy at all”
“What’s the book called”
oh “SWEET POISON!!!!”
01
I have a friend who tried to cut out sugar after reading that book. Interestingly enough he started noticing just how many foods contain lots of sugar, and how, if he just followed his instincts, he would choose these foods. For example, he noticed that he wanted to put tomato sauce on stuff, so he looked at the label and discovered it had huge amounts of sugar in it.
21
It is hard. I was listening to this story being debated on New Years Eve…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2530885/Cut-sugar-intake-HALF-New-health-warning-says-limit-cut-five-teaspoons-day-fears-contributes-heart-disease.html
So I started to look at how much “added” sugar was in some of the things we regularly eat and discovered you would have to choose pretty carefully in order to avoid just accidentally eating more than 5stp per day of added sugar.
I cut out sugar in tea and coffee some time ago and I havnt put sugar on anything in the same way we do with breakfast cereals for ages. But still if your partial to a chocolate and red wine as I am, limiting sugar means cutting things out….. sadly…
10
Safetyguy, dark chocolate has very little sugar. Same for dry wine. Both you and John are observant though, sugar is everywhere in prepared foodstuffs. Much better to buy foods in unprepared state or at least read the labels. Remember too that refined starches are pretty much the same as sugar once eaten.
00
You have to worry about our scientists today.
Stomach ulcers theory, global warming theory, diabetes theory, can’t that mob get anything right?
10
yep the scientists have got the stomach ulcer thing 100% correct as far as I can tell.
14
I agree with Matt. There is a strong consensus among scientists and in the peer reviewed science about the cause of stomach ulcers. You don’t still believe it is stress do you?
02
Of course I don’t believe it is stress.
Our scientists did however, for a century or so, & had to be dragged, kicking & screaming away from that belief.
20
Yes, a successful application of the scientific method. The strange thing is that despite being wrong, there was some wisdom in those old school stomach ulcer people not wanting to jump straight onto this new idea. Changing tack too readily is often counterproductive.
00
“Changing tack too readily is often counterproductive.”
Whats a definition of complete and utter irony?
00
Jo, your blog has outdone it’s very high standards with this post and thread. What a contrast with the warmist blogs.
30
That’s all I can take. When Jo gets high marks for behaving like a climate science, I have to leave. At this point, I really cannot tell the difference between warmists and skeptics when it comes to science. Each one grabs whatever they want to believe. I can’t take this anymore. No science anyway left on the planet.
33
Actually, no Sheri.
Jo gets high marks for posting an article on a provocative subject (complete with a whole heap of her own caveats), and encouraging and allowing open discussion and debate on the matter.
YOU are the one “behaving like a climate scientist”.
You disagree with the article, fine.
Your POV is welcomed, noted and respected.
Trouble is, that’s not enough for you.
Because not everybody agrees with you, they are wrong and you are right, and since they can’t see that, you’re taking your bat and ball and going home to sulk.
Fair enough. You’ve been a valued contributor, and I’m sure you’ll be welcomed back should you change your mind.
70
Well, Sheri, your comment was certainly bereft of it.
40
And yet you have managed to bring a sense of sanity to those of us who have been soldiered in the trenches for years.
I have always enjoyed your comments, even though I have not felt compelled to respond (that is probably a good thing).
I, for one, would be sorry to see you depart.
21
ABC chooses only a consensus-believer to raise “concerns”, attack govt “credibility”. Greg Hunt declining to appear means it is being objective, i guess?
7 Jan: ABC Breakfast: Heavy polluters won’t be penalised under Direct Action carbon plan
Matt O’Neill: The federal government has raised concerns about its commitment to tackling climate change…
The Abbott government’s credibility on tackling climate change is ‘hanging by a thread’, according to the CEO of the Australian Climate Institute John Connor…
The no-penalty proposal is included in a government Green Paper, which is now open for comment…
Mr Connor says that even the target of five percent is insufficient, and criticised the government for eschewing its international commitments of cutting emissions by up to 25 per cent by 2020…
The five per cent were reductions [that] if everybody else did would have us heading towards four degrees warming, which would definitely be against Australia’s national interest, massively increasing our costs for business, as well as for agriculture and for our cities and our country towns in terms of the extremes that we would face.’
‘It’s about risk management, and a voluntary approach to risk management is no approach at all.’
Environment Minister Greg Hunt was invited to discuss his government’s Direct Action plan, but was unable to join Breakfast.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/heavy-polluters-wont-be-penalised-under-direct-action/5187448
00
“heavy-polluters-wont-be-penalised-under-direct-action”
Nor should they be. The DAP is about CO2, which is NOT A POLLUTANT.
Heavy polluters should be penalised under the usual pollution laws, to the hilt !!!
00
And the “Climate Institute”…………..
No clash in vested interests there….. of course not !!
——-
“The Abbott government’s credibility on tackling climate change is ‘hanging by a thread’,”
At least I can agree with this statement..
He needs to drop the DAP, kill the RET and the Carbon Tax (will no replacement)
That would restore his credibility with the people who voted him in.
10
I suspect – after reading Theodore Dalrymple – you could write a similar article about heroin addiction andf cures.
10
Sorry its off topic,
but over xmas I found raw (hand written) rainfall data from my grandfathers farming days – its a continuous daily record from about 1920 to 1942. His farm was one of the government releases for those willing to delevelop (clear trees) in the “new” country just north of Esperance, WA. Its all enetered on the government issue worksheets they handed out in those days – which includes the rules for sighting the gauges too. Is it worth pulling together into a digital format and writing it up? perhaps comparing to other “official” records?
Comments anyone?
50
It wouldn’t hurt, and may even be interesting. I guess it depends on whether you have the time, and the patience.
But. Be prepared for the keepers of the official record to tell you that your grandfather was a dirty denier who was falsifying his records, or incompetent, or both.
00
I think it is.
My father kept a record of such data on the inside walls of the pump house. For each year from 1920 were recorded the date planting started, the date harvest started, the yield for each quarter section, the grain and species rainfall for each month, etc. This record was continuous until the year he moved to town being 1977.
I remember marvelling at the trend as planting and harvest dates slowly, gradually became later in the year. The growing season became shorter, since the rate at which it warmed in Spring and the rate at which it froze in fall were different. Fortunately as the years went by strains were available which matured earlier.
I recall that in the early 20’s planting always began in the last week in March, with harvest beginning in late July. By the mid 70’s first planting was typically near mid-May, with harvest beginning early September.
Unfortunately, the old pumphouse, as well as the entire homestead, has been levelled and is now part of a Hutterite colony. (I should have said earlier that this farm is in Southern Manitoba)
“Climnate change” completely disconnected from any “warming” (since temps then went up slightly in the 30’s and 40’s then started down to the late 70’s and up slightly until the end of the century)and completely unrelated to the CO2 which made the region the “breadbasket of the world” in the 1920’s. Incidentally, up until the mid thirties this vast “breadbasket” was cultivated with horsepower. There were more Percherons in NA during that era than all other breeds combined. Talk about your methane!
10
I think it was Dr Norman Swan (from that left-wing organisation the ABC) who mentioned that he worked as a doctor on Biggest Loser. I can’t remember the exact details, but at the start of the show roughly half the contestants had type 2 diabetes, while at the end none of them had type 2 diabetes.
But he is an establishment doctor, so I don’t see how he could say this 😉
11
his left wing leanings showed when he was one of the first to report on and promote the work of two future nobel prize wining heliobacter culturists
10
they probably stopped wining once the won the prize though
11
The problem with “taking the pi$$” about the ABC being “left” as some posters on this forum would argue it is. Is that it glosses over the bizarre nature of the relationship between “the left” and environmentalism.
Julia Gillard is more or less soley responsible for the depth of the confusion between left politics and environmentalism in Australia. Her desperate grasp for power that resulted in the Labour Greens coalition Govt. dragged the Labour party away from its traditional roots and values and down the road of a set of beleifs and values that are almost the ideological opposite of left politics.
Environmentalism is at its heart, basically half baked Malthusian rationalism combined with an appalling lack of historical knowledge and baked in an oven of overly emotional knee jerking. In the absence of a power grab situation like the 2010 election, Labour has so little in common with The Greens, an alliance of the sort we have just suffered through is so unlikely as to be improbable. Its the very lack of understanding around Malthusian rationalisms among the modern green and left movements that sees them stumble together in an attempt to align what are basically opposing philosophies. You have the group who cannot deal with the idea of anything associated with industrial progress aligned with the group who basically stand for industrial progress as it is the agreed vehicle for social betterment via employment and education.
My point is, throwing out a term like “that left wing organisation the ABC”, like its somehow insulting or mocking anyone here just further demonstrates your own complete lack of understanding about left and green history. The ABC might well be a left leaning organisation, I don’t really have a strong opinion on it or care that much. But what I do know is the vast majority of people in the ABC who hold strong green beliefs would also no doubt describe themselves as left and most likely vote Labour. The only reason they find themselves in this position of personal dichotomy is they, like you, have no idea what you stand for. You just wring your hands and spout slogans without any cohesive structure to your beliefs and or values, so you come here to taunt others in an attempt to boost your own esteem.
Most of the regular posters on this site understand the bizarreness of the links between Labour and The Greens so your mocking is wasted. We already find enough humour in the fact that the leaders of both parties are so ignorant of their own histories and so desperate for wealth and power that they happily and ignorantly abandon those values at every opportunity. The party of the worker puts in place policies to destroy industry (particularly manufacturing) while the party of the environment signs up to a carbon tax and trading system that they themselves described then and now as utterly inadequate. Its a joy to watch for anyone with enough of a grasp of political history to appreciate the irony of the situation and sickening cynicism of the players.
The fact that its lost on you is…. well… unsurprising…
30
Agree. I suspect the ‘Old Left’ wouldn’t have a bar of modern environmentalism since it runs contrary to the interests of the people they represented.
Even from afar here in NZ Gillard seemed to be an appalling prime minister. She did some risible deals with some very deluded and arrogant people to keep herself in power
Your previous government was nothing but a high stakes game of poker.
20
Agree. I suspect the ‘Old Left’ wouldn’t have a bar of modern environmentalism since it runs contrary to the interests of the people they represented.
Even from afar here in NZ Gillard seemed to be an appalling prime minister. She did some risible deals with some very deluded and arrogant people to keep herself in power
Your previous government was nothing but a high stakes game of poker.
00
Deja Vu??
20
You are really batting a thousand, safety guy.
Earlier you expressed your dismay at the reluctance people show to discuss, debate, or allow themselves to voice their opinion for fear of being trampled by the madding crowd.
You are really hitting the nail on the head. The essence of democracy is this continual discussion of different points of view and principles. Without that, people forget the principles for which they stand.
And above you drive the nail further, by illustrating that few people actually own principles, or at least are unable to comply with them. I truly believe that this human condition is at the root of our current political dilemma.
20
Recently there was a self proclaimed Trotskyite commenting on Bishop Hill on green policies. He wasn’t in favour of them at all.
00
Gillard was a good PM.
04
Compared to what?
30
Compared to Kevin, and compared to the current one.
01
Anybody would look good compared to Kevin – I would look good, compared to Kevin – except he has nice hair, and I have none – perhaps that is why people voted for him?
Jury is still out on Tony. As an impartial outsider, my observation is that he has a lot of manure to dig through before he can get to the potatoes.
00
Hi John, maybe by consensus of Women for Gillard, but factual evidence doesn’t seem to support that theory.
20
If you mean that Gillard was successful in achieving personal objectives at the expense of everyone else, then perhaps you have a point, JB.
At uni in the 80’s, in her involvement in the Socialist Forum, she became determined to achieve the following:
a) Destruction of the ALP, because it was not sufficiently Marxist. Arrange for its destruction and evolution to an extreme Left postiion. Engineer this destruction using the techniques of teh Fabian Society.
b) Prepare the nation for submission of sovereignty to an UNelected, UNdemocratic global dictatorship through the destruction of the economy and institution of the principles of Cloward-Piven.
c) Become independently wealthy simultaneously.
IF your criterion for a “good PM” is a achieve personal objectives, then perhaps you are correct. If this is the case, then perhaps you could consider Joe Stalin, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceaușescu, as successful as well.
20
Julia Gillard was a narcissistic control freak with no regard for anything or anyone.
Julia had 2 main motivations.
1. The gaining and holding of power
2. Creating a legacy to enshrine herself in history (NBN, NDIS, Carbon Tax etc)
Far from paving the way for women to achieve higher offices in public and private life, Julia single handedley(sp) set back the cause of women’s empowerment by at least 2 generations. It will be some time before either of the major parties flirts with the notion of a female leader again and her performance in general undermined the efforts of professional women in a way that she should certainly be remembered for.
Amanda Vanstone has written and presented on radio several interesting observations on Gillard’s performance and her legacy for women.
http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/gillard-brought-voters-contempt-upon-herself-20130616-2ocfn.html
One of the most pertinent points Vanstone makes is that Gillard flip flopped between the acted personas of powerful female in charge and utter dribbling victim at will. Vanstone compared Gillard (unfavorably) to Angela Merkel and made the comment that Merkel has managed to maintain respect, femininity and gravitas in a far more difficult political environment than Australia, without ever having to play the victim or misogyny cards. Gillard’s willingness to portray herself as weak and under siege in order to try and garner sympathy was common and disgraceful. The fact that the person who holds the highest office in the country could portray themselves as a cowering bashing victim was a sight to behold.
As a Labour PM, Gillard was not only woefully unprepared for the job, she completely abandoned Labour/Left values in order to gain and hold power as I described above. In the end even her staunchest supporters (Shorten and Co.) turned their backs on her because they knew she was completely unfit for the position.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/gender-war-misfires-for-julia-gillard-finds-newspoll/story-fn59niix-1226669081181
She consistently proved she was completely out of touch with general population and continued to delude herself that being an “intellectual” was going to be enough to save her in the end. Knowing better than everyone else on everything is fine if your a King or Queen, but not of much use in a representative democracy.
http://www.news.com.au/national/labor-still-running-at-record-low/story-e6frfkvr-1226083148770
Your assessment of Gillard is not only provably wrong, its further evidence of the fact that you lack the ability to recognise inadequacy when it happens to be associated with the things you think you believe in. Gillard was without doubt the least effective, most divisive, dishonest and disingenuous PM Australia has ever seen. The fact that she is now tasked with lecturing to young aspiring political hopefuls at Adelaide University is just the latest travesty of fate for both her and her unfortunate charges. She can now stand up front of a group of people and spout nonsense and re-write history till her heart is content, which at the end of the day is all she did as PM anyway.
10
Gillard will soon be facing several charges in relation to the AWU slush fund but also others for attempting to cover up the fraud after the fact!
On advice, if Gillard is convicted of the alleged fraud and associated criminal actions then she will lose all entitlements, regardless if she is sentenced to two years jail.
20
Ah Scaper,
But as John will tell you, Julia Gillard is absolutely positively the best Australian female PM of Welsh extraction to have been investigated for fraud while still in office, ever!
Just imagine how much “better” a PM she could have been if she had have robbed a bank, or run over a schoolkid at a pedestrian crossing while driving under the influence, or had developed a $1000.00 a day methamphetamine habit.
10
You must love Obama.
00
Please be EXTREMELY careful if you attempt this and see that you very closely monitor your blood sugar. When the body begins to metabolize body fat, the blood sugar can spike and you can accumulate ketones. This can be FATAL if not monitored closely and can result in a heart attack. This happened to someone very dear to me who was a type 2 diabetic and went on a crash diet to lose weight but who was not monitoring her sugar. Apparently she thought it was alright to skip her insulin if she had not eaten anything. It was fatal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketoacidosis
10
This is extremely dangerous for an insulin-dependent type 1 diabetic, not much of a concern for a type-2 non-insulin-dependent diabetic.
What will happen with a fasting regemin is that both fasting and after-meal blood sugar will go down over time as will hb1AC. Ketones will rise during fasting, which they must to compensate for the lessened intake of either carbohydrates or protein producing glucogenesis.
Ketonuria after Fasting may be Related to the Metabolic Superiority
Basically the more ketones produced during fasting for a non-type-1, the greater is the association with metabolic health.
The fasting approach is appropriate for non-insulin dependent diabetics, although with close monitoring and medical support, it can help many diabetics reduce or get off insulin and other medications.
In fact a sign that this is working is that during a fast lab results will show low serum insulin, relatively low blood sugar, and fairly high ketones simultaneously. The fact that insulin and blood sugar are both low is a sign that your body is more sensitive to insulin’s effects, that the diabetes is abating.
20
Diet or exercise, the age old dilemma.
Exercise requires motivation. Not easy.
During my time in the RAAF, I was posted back to Wagga Wagga to teach the electrical trade, and I was there for 5 years.
I was always used to the sporting life, Cricket all Summer, along with golf and tennis. Winter was golf tennis squash and long distance cycling, well 15 to 20Km anyway.
Back at Wagga Wagga, and into the sedentary life of Instructors in the staff room etc when not teaching, my weight ballooned out to 105KG. The RAAF was, umm, not all that keen on fatties, and it was err, gently put to us that we needed to slim down a bit, and (I know, I know, long discredited) they used BMI. The target weight for me at 5foot 10/11 was 79KG. so that was going to be a haul. Luckily a group of six of us were all in the (relatively) same boat, so we started an exercise regime, jogging, well, walking to start with followed by circuits in the gym for an hour.
I had never dieted, and I didn’t in this case, just relying on that jogging, as we dropped the gym work after ten weeks, and by this time there were only three of us left, and then two after a further 10 weeks. Now finally able to jog the full 4 or 5 Km, the 2 of us decided to do the Airfield at Wagga Wagga, and if you have Google Earth you can look it up. It’s a distance of 7.25Km, Marked out with KM marks by the PTI’s as it is a regular training run course, and from every work day on, we both ran the Airfield, and in the end I got it down to a tick over 34 Minutes, just a polite jog really.
It took me exactly 12 Months to reach that target weight, and I stayed there for the remaining time in the RAAF, still running that Airfield every day, and then on posting to Amberley, a similar run there, and also after I was discharged.
The motivation was to get back down to the target weight, which I did.
Years out of the RAAF, and the running eased away as I aged, and then it stopped.
I (very slowly) put it back on and now, mostly sedentary, I was back up and stable at 95KG.
7 weeks ago, I had a recurrence of my lower back pain, an occluded disk, that usually goes back in after a couple of days. This time it just got worse, to the point I could only stand with extreme difficulty. Sitting was painful, and I could only walk with the aid of a shoulder high staff, which we got on our Honeymoon at O’Reilly’s back in 1981.
Everything was just constant pain. My GP sent me for X rays, and I was then recommended an image guided facet joint injection of steroids, a truly fascinating procedure done under the cat scan machine to guide the injections, and here’s a short video showing how its done.
Image Guided Facet Joint Injection
The pain relief was instantaneous, and I went back for a second treatment a few days later at a lower joint.
With this, I went back to my GP and explained the relief.
Then, in an almost throwaway line, he mentioned that walking would help. I’m past jogging now at my age (almost 63) and I had heard that walking was actually a better exercise for you. That throwaway line caught my attention, and I asked him how much. He mentioned around an hour a day if I wanted to be serious. So (let the search engine be your friend) I went looking. I already had some good joggers (Adistars) so I started out with 2 KM and after 10 days I was up to 6 KM. I’ve now got that down to a little under 54 minutes, around 6.8Km an hour. I can’t help it. When I exercise I just have to be doing it to the hardest I can manage.
Friends and family told me that I shouldn’t be exerting myself so strenuously at my age. I asked my GP, a Chemist friend who is an exercise trainer as well, and another exercise trainer as well.
When I gave them all the facts on what I was doing none of them were concerned. My heart rate gets up to 140, and they said that was OK.
Now, here’s the motivation part.
In those now seven weeks, I’ve only missed four days, every morning at 7.30, off for 6Km.
Oddly on the days I missed, I felt my back tightening a little, so there is my motivation.
I have altered the way I sit now, and I’ve also noticed other little niggles are going away as well. I got shin splints at the start, but walked through them, and now I have no problems. My knees (fast bowler’s curse in my case) are even getting better. The heat is a bit much, as most mornings, even that early it’s in the high 20’s, low 30’s as we are in the midst of a heat wave. (so they tell me!)
As a side effect, I’ve already lost 4KG, so it’s helping with that also.
So, here I have MOTIVATION.
I could never diet at all, never have at any stage during my life, so I just have to do it with exercise.
All I needed was the spur.
I’ve seen so many friends, and also family as well, diet and fail miserably, so my opinion is that diet is really only part of the solution.
I wasn’t going to comment here, but it seems (in some cases here) enforced diets do really have a place.
The problem I had was I thought that this lower back problem was something that was going to trouble me continuously as I aged, but a simple offhand, almost throwaway line has given me the thought that while there was a medical solution in this case, it’s a personal life style change that could end up being the answer here.
Sorry to take so much space here on boring old personal stuff, but I wanted to add the perspective of exercise into the mix.
Tony.
70
Not really.
Hippocrates said let your food be your medicine, not push-ups.
When people increase their activity by exercise, they tend decrease it in lifestyle. This may not be true to soldiers under compulsion or elite athletes, but it’s true for the majority.
The Myth about Exercise – Exercise Part I
(Dr. Jason Fung is not saying excercise causes obesity. He’s in favour of exercise for other benefits. He’s saying it’s a remarkably weak obesity intervention over the long term.)
Why Exercise is not Effective for Weight Loss – Exercise part II
However, if you are an outlier and exercise made the difference for you, possibly through increasing your motivation overall, congratulations.
20
The research supports Hippocrates’ assertion that let your food be your medicine. Exercise cannot compensate for diet. The research supports the assertion that roughly 70% to 80% of the Western diseases (arthritis, heart disease, strokes, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and so on) are caused by our goofy diet. The Western diet has 10 times too much sugar, 10 times too much animal protein, and includes cow’s milk. We are not calves, we are a different species. We are the only species that drinks another mammal’s milk. A portion of the small proteins in cow’s milks are absorbed in our blood stream causing autoimmune diseases, such type 1 diabetes and arthritis. Our body unlike a carnivore cannot process super high amounts of animal protein; we have a long intestinal track as opposed to a short intestinal track. We become acidic and hence lose bone mass when we try to eat 10 times too much animal protein. The maximum amount of animal protein we can consume daily without health affects is less than the size of playing card. This assertion was confirmed by the China study and other research. There are hundreds of peer reviewed papers and 20 years of research to support those assertions. The American John MacDougall was a trail breaker in the field of healing people by a change of diet. MacDougall treated 1000s of people for dietary disease, in a hospital setting, by changing their diet and all of them have recovered if they changed their diet. MacDougall summaries the science and the dietary changes in his book: The McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss.
The movie ‘Forks Over Knifes’ discusses the China Study research and discusses the work of ex-heart surgeon Caldwell Esselstyn. Esselstyn became discourage with surgery as he found that the majority of his patients became sick again. Surgery treated the symptom not the cause of atherosclerosis diseases, breast cancer, and prostrate cancer. Esselstyn due the failure of surgery, decided to try dietary changes to treat the cause of the disease. The vast majority of Essestyn’s patients who changed their diets recovered. In the movie two patients are treated for dietary disease, by a change in diet. In one month, both patients experience a dramatic improvement in blood pressure and in blood markers. The program works due to how our bodies work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forks_over_Knives
Through an examination of the careers of American physician Caldwell Esselstyn and professor of nutritional biochemistry T. Colin Campbell, Forks Over Knives suggests that “most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods.” [2] It also provides an overview of the 20-year China-Cornell-Oxford Project that led to Professor Campbell’s findings, outlined in his book, The China Study (2005) in which he suggests that coronary disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer can be linked to the Western diet of processed and animal-based foods (including all dairy products).[2]
10
Tony,
The only way I have ever managed to lose weight is by making a conscious effort to eat less. And it becomes more difficult with age since the human body seems to prefer accumulation of fat over burning the calories as we get older. Read into that whatever you can but eating less really does work. And it ain’t easy! 🙂
10
Actually there has never been a consensus that type 2 diabetes can’t be cured with diet. The issue has always been that patients with type 2 diabetes aren’t willing to make the necessary lifestyle modifications and that’s why medication is necessary.
20
It doesn’t help that doctors were and mostly are recommending the wrong lifestyle modifications.
20
My Doctor is very blunt.
“You are going to die”, he said.
“But not just yet, you just have a rather bad cold.”
10
Seems back in the 80s, the most lethal malady was a Russian Cold. Let’s hope you do not have one of those.
00
Indeed. The Russian Cold was quite a common malady, particularly in holiday destinations in Siberia, I understand. Especially if you went there in winter.
00
Yes, like Tony from Oz, diet is not something I intend to alter drastically. Sigh.
00
My Doctor told me to try a Mediterranean diet to improve my health.
Well, my health has certainly improved, but the cost of the air fares is killing me.
80
Wine, olives, feta, and more of that RAGU with a lamb kleftiko and followed by delicious thick Greek yoghurt with honey
00
You shouldn’t need to go beyond Melbourne for that.
00
There’s no evidence that it can be “cured” by diet either. I’ll qualify that by saying, “credible evidence” if you like. On the other hand it’s been known for a long time that good diet can help manage diabetes. The controversy seems to be about exactly what kind of diet is best.
Until I find a solid case for a different opinion I’ll stick with what I learned from a long marriage to a diabetic. The cells in the pancreas that produce insulin are attacked by the body’s immune system and are partially or completely destroyed by that attack. Diabetes can also arise from the normal aging process and the same thing results, insulin dependent diabetes. But the two are differentiated by cause. I can’t see any way that diet or anything else can reverse this damage once done, no matter the cause.
The greatest cruelty of all for anyone suffering from a chronic debilitating disease is for this kind of “study” to appear and start raising false hopes. I know, I’ve been there.
10
Jo, a couple of observations about this topic. A recent article in the Australian newspaper mentioned that to induce type 2 diabetes in rats they were fed a high fat diet. In regard to humans, patients of cardiologists, Drs Ornish and Esselstyn, who were now following a very low fat diet (maximum 10% fat of total calories) also experienced a sharp reduction in blood glucose levels. Many of these patients were similarly cured of their type 2 diabetes. Is it possible the likely low fat content in the diet rather than the lack of calories was the reason for the outcome?
10
Fat has more calories/gram then either carbohydrate or protein.
01
It’s about wheat and sugar people. The governments have been lying about it for years (Suprise suprise). If you are overweight you need to look at the two links below. Quite simply they’ve changed my life!
http://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/372-wheat-belly/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzPnnDDCIjo
When you listen to these, you’ll find what “Nutrition” has in common with “Global Warming”, (two myths propogated by governments and the “scientists” that get paid tax dollars to advise them)
20
I have often wondered if compulsory exercise – as in a regimen of so much per day – could wear out body parts prematurely. Like hearts and joint cartilage, for instance.
A guy in my class who became a famous athlete, ran a half-marathon regularly before breakfast and went on to win medals only to have a triple-bypass 30 years ago. As a couch potato; I’m OK and everything still works.
00
Real science from a study 2 years ago that looks surprisingly like the study posted on this blog:
http://www.nhs.uk/news/2011/06June/Pages/type-2-diabetes-and-low-calorie-diets.aspx
“As such, very limited conclusions can be made from this study. Contrary to some news reports, it provides no evidence of a cure for diabetes.”
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Everyone who has Diabetes (Type 2) and generates plenty of data from blood glucose test strips knows that:
1.Systematic reduction in eating any type of food reduces blood sugar levels about 2 hours after having the meal so the claim that a starvation diet “cures” diabetes needs clarification.
2. Consistent increase in the consumption of any food raises the post 2 hour blood glucose level.
3. Moderate exercise (1/2 hour brisk walking) post that 2 hours can reduce blood sugar levels immediately after the completion of the exercise by up to 6 mmol/L.
4. If the exercise is done immediately after the meal there is very little change in blood glucose levels immediately after the exercise.
5. One can by maintaining a reasonable diet, which may include snacking between meals to reduce the risk of going “hypo”, keep blood sugar levels at between 5 to 7 mmol/L 2 hours after eating. (5.5 mmol/L is about the average for a non diabetic. 8 mmol/L is generally accepted as a reasonable upper level for a diabetic to aim for 2 hours after eating).
6. However after immediately eating the blood glucose levels in a diabetic will be anything up to 14 mmol/L.
So one would need to see when and how the data was collected before getting too excited about hailing the starvation diet as a cure. This skeptic is of the opinion, without more information, that the “cure” would only be temporary viz until the next decent good health sustaining meal regime was in place.
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7 Jan: BBC: Antarctic ships escape from ice trap as weather changes
The Russian research ship Akademik Shokalskiy and Chinese icebreaker Xue Long have broken free from Antarctic ice where they had been stranded for several days.
The Russian ship’s captain said a crack had appeared in the ice after a change in wind direction…
“We’re going slowly and zig-zagging, we’ve already moved more than 20 [nautical] miles,” Captain Igor Kiselyov of the Russian ship told Itar-Tass news agency.
“It’s tough going so far, a lot of mist, visibility is no more than 500 metres,” he said.
He confirmed that the Chinese ship was also moving and that Akademik Shokalskiy was just north of it.
“It may catch up with us – in that case, we’ll follow in its wake. But if not, we’ll get out together, independently,” he said…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25635690
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That pleases me 🙂
I imagine, and hope, that the AS crew are also well pleased to be free of both the ice and the dills (who are still in the great Southland at Casey, as I understand it)
Now cometh the propaganda wars. More merriment to follow
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Thank you Pat for the update. I appreciate your continual posts of real time news.
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Whenever anyone asks where I get all my informative Global Warming responses from I say I’ve got them off pat.
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Some two decades ago I read a report about a Russian doctor who was treating arterial blockage by means of a strict diet. It could have been a sham thing or it could have been killed off by the consensus.
One other point I would like to make is that Judeo-Christian tradition of fazting for 40 days on bread and water may have been based on knowledge collected during centuries ofexperience.
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I recall reading about a Finnish study that rquired participants to engage in exercise at the level of 1000kcal – 2000kcal daily. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the participants were shown to reverse atheromatous changes of the intimal arterial wall.
Today I met two individuals who informed me that the polar vortex was due to global warming. It compelled me to engage in an immediate mindfulness moment. It was inappropriate to engage with them on an informign dialogue.
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Thanks for the post, and especially for the comments. Since I have Type II, I can just make the decision to take my daily calorie count to a point asymptotic to zero, and then, bingo! Problem solved. My tomb stone inscription can then read, “He Beat Diabetes”. That somehow sounds better than, “He Was Fat”.
In spite of my awkward jokes this article is a wakeup for me and thousands of others. Thanks.
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I’m no expert but I recognize a red flag when one pops up in front of me.
Having been married to a childhood onset diabetic for 31 years, I will believe such a tall tale only when it’s been confirmed by large scale double blind studies and the short term results are proven to stay around in the long term. Otherwise it’s just another “study” of which we have seen many that don’t amount to a hill of beans once debunked by reality.
Please be careful if you’re diabetic. As far as the best evidence about the cause of diabetes goes, fatty tissue in the pancreas is not known to be a causative factor. And 600 or even 800 calories a day will not sustain most people in the long term.
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I do not mean to imply that losing weight if you’re significantly overweight will not improve you diabetes management and quality of life. It may even extend your life. But I’m in serious doubt that it amounts to a cure.
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Quite right Roy. You do need big trials. You might have trouble with the double-blind bit though. I mean, do you think I might not notice that I’m on a severely calorie controlled diet?
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John,
That’s a valid question and you’re right, it’s hard to think of a way to do it. My thought was a comparison of insulin levels of a control group of non diabetics with the insulin levels of the diabetic group with both groups on the same diet.
And it would be blind if those evaluating the results didn’t know who was a diabetic and who was not. It would require the cooperation of some volunteers who get nothing out of volunteering except possibly a fee for going through the trial. So lots of problems to be sure. But so far the thing’s not much better than anecdotal evidence, at least to me.
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Jo,
I can link you to all sorts of such wild looking claims about amazing cures, many of which you wouldn’t want showing up on your blog — which is why I won’t do it. The point is that wild claims area dime a dozen but real solutions are much more dearly priced by reality.
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Q. When does an Australian Climate Change Expedition become a Russian Research Vessel?
A. At 5:00am and 5:30am on 9 News this morning.
Obviously trying to avoid the stink of the consensus.
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Anthony Watts and co it right again.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/07/russian-ship-in-stuck-in-antarctic-ice-starts-moving-again-per-my-forecast/
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As I understand it you are better off lifting weights than walking long distances. Lifting weights creates muscle and creating muscle burns more calories than long walks plus it doesn’t wear out your joints.
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If you weigh 110 kg (like me) then walking IS lifting weights 😉
I’m going to try the 16 hour daily fast regime to improve my overall health.
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This is the same outcome I’d have expected based on the results from proponents of high protein diets. Irrespective of your views of a high protein diet, the results of studies so far have been that a reduction of intake of starch, sugar, and carbs in general leads to better health. Fat, on the other hand, seems to be a little less of the demon it is made out to be.
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some investigating going on about a Lewandowsky claim in a “Conversation” piece below. haven’t had time to check out fully, but others may have something to add:
7 Jan: ClimateResistance: Ben Pile: Re-Writing Mission History?
Stephan Lewnadowsky has an article at The Conversation, saying that sceptics are wrong, in their pointing and mocking of the failed Spirit of Mawson expedition…
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2014/01/re-writing-mission-history.html
6 Jan: Conversation: Stephan Lewandowsky: An icebreaker gets stuck in the ice, photos are used to mislead
(Disclosure Statement: Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Royal Society)
http://theconversation.com/an-icebreaker-gets-stuck-in-the-ice-photos-are-used-to-mislead-21736
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Isn’t Prof Lewandowski playing rather Fast & Loose with the truth, implying that it was Fast ice they were stuck in, rather than just being stuck Fast .
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I’m in the middle of reading South by Ernest Shackleton, a book which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone.
In the book, he classifies Sea Ice, or as he referred to it, Ice Nomenclature, and there were 7 classifications. (Ice Nomenclature 1 etc, etc)
Fast Ice was not one of those classifications, but it would be similar to some of his classifications, just with a different name.
The Endurance was ‘beset’ on 18Jan1915 and drifted, stuck in the ice for 10 Months drifting with the ice for hundreds of miles, (around 300 if the zig zag nature is straightened out) before finally being crushed and lost by what he referred to as Pressure Ice. (Umm, not bad for a wooden ship) See the map at this link and if you click on the map, it will open up much larger and easier to read.
Fascinating book.
Tony.
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7 Jan: ABC Australia: Lauren Day: Australian Antarctic Division research behind schedule after Aurora Australis diverted to help ice-bound ship
The director of the Australian Antarctic Division, Tony Fleming, says the delay will affect research projects, other resupply missions and the budget.
Dr Fleming says the Aurora Australis will complete the resupply job at Casey Station before returning to Hobart.
“The incident has delayed our season so we need to do the resupply very quickly and get the vessel back to Hobart and turn around quite quickly to the next voyage,” he said.
“I understand that the taxpayer shouldn’t pay for this rescue mission so I’ll do everything I can to recoup the costs.”
The extra passengers will stay onboard during the resupply mission which is expected to take around five days.
Dr Fleming says while scientists are used to delays in Antarctica, there is a sense of frustration.
“The economic costs will be fuel and food and the charter costs and it’s an ongoing operation,” he said.
“So we don’t know how long the operation will take but we’ll calculate that when the ship gets back to Hobart.”…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-07/antarctic-research-delayed-after-aurora-australis-diverted-to-h/5189466
Dr. Fleming is sounding more & more like Frenot’s “counterpart”!
The rescue mission, which also initially involved the French ship the Astrolabe, has also impacted some Antarctic research programmes, according to Yves Frenot, director of the French Polar Institute.
The rescue mission forced French scientists to scrap a two-week oceanographic campaign using the Astrolabe, he said…
The Chinese have had to cancel all their scientific programme, and my counterpart in Australia is spitting tacks with anger, because their entire summer has been wiped out,” he said…
http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/world/a/20607004/us-icebreaker-heads-to-antarctic-to-help-stuck-ships/
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what a dishonest AAP account this is:
8 Jan: Herald Sun: AAP: Antarctic ice drama over as ships freed
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/antarctic-ice-drama-over-as-ships-freed/story-fni0xqll-1226797367263
compare with how National Geographic (which has been publishing the photos of AAE doctor/photographer Andrew Peacock)reported the Expedition BEFORE the ship got stuck! not a mention of the Shokalskiy:
17 Dec: National Geographic: David Roberts: Modern Explorers Follow the Century-Old Antarctic Footsteps of Douglas Mawson
Scientists set out to re-create an epic life-or-death trek, using today’s technology..
Last week, a 36-person team led by Chris Turney, an Australian adventurer and climate scientist, set out from New Zealand to retrace the historic journey of a scientific expedition to Antarctica that took place a century ago. The Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013-2014 aims to find the hut of Douglas Mawson, leader of the original Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), to repeat many of the original team’s observations and, time willing, to locate the South Magnetic Pole, one of the goals of Mawson’s expedition…
It won’t be easy. According to Turney, “Right now there’s a huge ice pack tight to the shore at Commonwealth Bay, three and a half meters thick.” Yet if the team can reach the hut, says Turney, “we’ll replicate Mawson’s work, using the twist of modern technology.”
His team’s scientists hope to record the temperature and saltiness of the Southern Ocean, make censuses of the bird populations, extract drill cores from the land ice, and send drones into the air to map the surroundings of Commonwealth Bay. These data may help to determine how much the climate has changed in what scientists have now proved is the windiest place on Earth at sea level…
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131217-mawson-turney-australasian-antarctic-expedition-south-magnetic-pole/
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On a previous thread I posted:
Two people replied that the link gives a “403 Forbidden” error message. My service provider had previously blocked IP’s from China that may have been malicious. This blocking has now been lifted. The site has not been down.
Could someone from Australia please test the above link and report if you still see a forbidden error? The link had worked for me.
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Works fine now, Greg.
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Thanks. I can’t understand why blocking IP addresses from China would affect your ability to see the site. The only comment from the ISP is:
“The only way I could see that impacting those users is if they were using some kind of vpn, proxy or other tunneling service. The only other explanation I have is that the IP data used for blocking was outdated (which doesn’t look likely).”
Does this make any sense?
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No problem.
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Works for me ken
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7 Jan: Metro.US: City breaks 118-year-old record as New Yorkers endure freezing weather and below-zero wind chills
Temperatures dropped to a low of 4 degrees in the city, according to the National Weather Service.
The previous record for Jan. 7 was set in 1896, when temperatures reached 6 degrees.
In Central Park, that record was broken before 7 a.m., when temperatures reached 5 degrees and continued to drop.
Wind chills reached minus 17 degrees just before 9 a.m…
http://www.metro.us/newyork/news/local/2014/01/07/new-york-city-record-cold-weather/
btw Lewandowsky repeatedly calls the Shokalskiy an “ICE-BREAKER”.
however,
Expedition Fiasco Leader Professor Chris Turney Fibs Yet Again: Now Claims Akademik Shokalskiy Is An “Icebreaker”!
http://notrickszone.com/2014/01/06/expedition-fiasco-leader-professor-chris-turney-fibs-again-now-claims-akademik-shokalskiy-is-an-icebreaker/
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Pat,
Check out the Guardian for 20140108 – Reports ALL 50 U.S. States have experienced below freezing (<32F) temperatures - including Hawai'i, Florida, and New Mexico.
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Sorry, The dateline should have read 20140107 – here is the link:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/polar-vortex-temperature-freezing-all-50-states
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While the name of New Mexico implies warm, it is actually a very mountainous state that regularly gets snow. Which means below freezing is normal for that state during the winter.
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Yes Phil, you are quite correct, the Rocky Mountains have a lot to answer for.
Would you care to comment on snow in Hawai’i?
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It is not unusual. You have to remember that the island of Hawaii is actually the tallest mountain in the world from base to summit. Most people do not realize that because most of it is under water. But still, the peaks rise over 10k feet above sea level, which means they get regular winter dustings.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/ASK/hawaii-snow.html
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Ken Gregory –
the link worked for me.
7 Jan:NBC Chicago: Record-Breaking Cold Grips Chicago
-15 recorded at O’Hare at 7 a.m. breaks record Jan. 6 low set in 1894 and 1988
By 8:30 a.m., the official Chicago temperature had dipped another degree, to -16…
With the wind chill factored in, Monday’s temperatures were in the -40 to -50 degree range and even lower across the Fox Valley…
http://www.nbcchicago.com/weather/stories/Dangerous-Cold-Temps-Chicago-238467651.html
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And just when you thought it couldn’t get any stupider.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/brutal-arctic-chill-means-parts-of-us-colder-than-mars-468276
I swear…. LOL Im giggling pretty hard right now but I think its because I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The stupidity of people just boggles me every day. AGW is truly the gift that keeps on giving if you have a functioning intellect and a good sense of humour. If not then I guess you can just use it as a substitute for religion…. oh wait people are already doing that.
Hmmm… just occurred to me, its kind of like a religion even atheists can enjoy isn’t it?
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OT
Warmer, wetter world is now actually a kind of drier colder, sort of moist but a bit coldy/warmy world with some dryness and a bit of warmth… when its not cold…a bit…
http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/07/is-climate-change-responsible-for-record-cold-in-u-s/
Drinking Game: Read the link above and have a drink every time the words “may”, “might”, “maybe”, “sort of” and a ? are used.
See you in the ER 🙂
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You watch.. January 2014 will be another “HOTTEST EVVA” month !!!
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EVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! no takey backies!
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I like this one..
““In some bizarre sense, to deny global warming is to question the ability of the Air Force to put the right sensor on the heat-seeking missile.””
Did he really say that? . only in his most BIZARRE nonsense. !!
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Because the US Air Force has NEVER missed its target right?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/26/AR2008082600301.html
This is what Im saying the last couple of posts.
Its like climate science is reaching the “Chewbacca Defence” level of arguing a point. Its just utter nonsensical drivel.
http://youtu.be/clKi92j6eLE
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And he says something about heatwaves in Australia.
Hands up.. Has anyone experienced a heat wave?
Been a pretty darn “ordinary” summer in Newy so far.
(I think it may have got a bit hot where only the frill-necks live, but, like, that’s never happened before, has it!.)
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Pretty cool here for summer Andy (central Vic) Monday was a high of 13c and I wore overalls and a jumper all day outside.
Oh to be on topic I might keep my winter fat for this summer just in case.
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““Eventually the losers are our grandchildren and their grandchildren.””
And there the silly emotional blackmail, because it all they have !!
No Richard Alley.. YOU are the loser, right now !!!
You have caught Norwegian Blue Syndrome…. NBS…. Never-ending B*** S*** !
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an amusing little saga…bear with me:
still stuck in the Travel section:
8 Jan: SMH; Andrew Darby: Antarctic escape: Akademik Shokalskiy, Xue Long break free from pack ice
The fortnight-long Australian-led operation to rescue two ships trapped by pack ice at Commonwealth Bay in Antarctica is over, after the vessels freed themselves…
The Shokalskiy, whose 52 rescued passengers were transferred to the Australian ship Aurora Australis, advised AMSA that it was headed for Bluff, New Zealand, where it was due for another tourist cruise***…
http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/antarctic-escape-akademik-shokalskiy-xue-long-break-free-from-pack-ice-20140108-30gtb.html
in the Technology/Sci-tech section! nice little pr stunt for CSIRO, complete with unnamed “film crew”:
8 Jan: SMH: Ben Westcott: CSIRO ‘apologises’ for lack of research on dragons
The CSIRO has promised to step up its dragon research program, after a seven-year-old girl wrote asking them to make her a dragon…
Mrs Lester said she had hoped they’d write back and say it can’t be done, but the CSIRO had another idea.
In a tongue-in-cheek statement released on Monday, the CSIRO apologised to the nation for their lack of a dragon research program…
“This morning when the film crew left, Sophie said ‘I forgot to tell them they can come back when we have a dragon’,” she said. “I told her they can’t do it now, it might be very long time but they’re looking into it.”
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/csiro-apologises-for-lack-of-research-on-dragons-20140108-30ggg.html
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the funny thing is CSIRO has not had a word to say about the AAE Expedition, but they made the MSM with this:
28 Dec: Hobart Mercury: CSIRO tells Tasmania to brace for fire and drought conditions
AS global warming progresses, Tasmanians must brace for more drought and extreme bushfire conditions…
Lead Author Wenju Cai said a positive IOD had been associated with major wildfires in southeast Australia, coral reef deaths around Indonesia, and increased malaria outbreaks in East Africa…
http://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/csiro-tells-tasmania-to-brace-for-fire-and-drought-conditions/story-fnj4f7k1-1226790905851
yet note this is CSIRO big-wig, Penny Whetton, partner of Janet Rice, the Greens Party Senator-elect for Victoria, who was on the Shokalskiy:
Wikipedia: Penny Whetton
Penelope Whetton (born 5 January 1958) is a climatologist and an expert in regional climate change projections due to global warming and in the impacts of those changes…
In 1989, she joined the Atmospheric Research division of CSIRO (later becoming CMAR CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research). Whetton became a research leader in 1999 and a research program leader in 2009.[3] She was a Lead Author of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, and of the Fourth Assessment Report which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with Al Gore).[4] She is currently a Lead Author of the yet to be released Fifth Assessment Report…
***Whetton lives in Footscray, Victoria with her spouse Janet Rice, a Greens politician and former Mayor of Maribyrnong, and their two sons. In 2003, Whetton underwent a sex change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Whetton
how did i overlook the Rice/Whetton connection? someone was posting vague references about this on WUWT, but i didn’t follow up. even now i wouldn’t be surprised to find some CSIRO personnel were involved in the AAE expedition.
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One day CSIRO will regret ever being part of the AGW scam and hoax. It’s a shame really as it was a very reputable and serious organization one one stage, and still is in parts. I know because I use to work there many years ago for over 15 years.
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8 Jan: BlueMountainsGazette: B.C. Lewis: Lawson man’s Antarctic escape
It wasn’t quite the trip to the Antarctic that Dr Ben Maddison of Lawson was expecting.
The academic and adventure guide was one of 52 expedition members on board the Russian chartered ship the Akademik Shokalskiy when it became trapped on the ice on Christmas Eve, near Mertz Glacier in Commonwealth Bay, attracting international media headlines…
Dr Maddison, a polar history specialist, spent his days waiting for rescue helping run a program of art classes and Russian lessons, even finding the time to stage the 2014 Antarctic Writing Festival on the ice.
He said the trip’s website had registered over half a million hits and “last I heard there have been more than 13,000 press items since we got beset on the ice… it is history making”. The expedition even unwittingly becoming part of the debate about climate change.
Dr Maddison’s voyage was part of a five-week landmark trip celebrating the centenary of the first Australasian Antarctic expedition led by Mawson… He was on board to deliver history lectures and said he would use the experience to deliver lectures about escaping the ice and look at “how ships beset in Antarctic ice escaped – or not”…
Dr Maddison was trying to bring the unsung working class heroes of the polar regions to the world’s attention and did an early launch of his book Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration 1750-1920 about the issue…
http://www.bluemountainsgazette.com.au/story/2009312/lawson-mans-antarctic-escape/?cs=12
given the Australian Antarctic Division celebrated the Mawson Centenary in 2012, this entire Turney/AAE fiasco is even more bizarre:
Austn Govt: Australian Antarctic Division: AA Magazine: Issue 22: Mawson Centenary Special, 2012
http://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-us/publications/australian-antarctic-magazine/2011-2015/issue-22-2012
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btw Maddison is, of course, still with the Aurora Australis –
– The Aurora Australis will head towards the Casey base to complete a resupply before heading to Australia. Dr Maddison said he was enjoying being a “five-star refugee”. They are not expected to arrive back in Australia until January 18 at the earliest. –
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finally:
the Turney expedition looks more & more like a CAGW media stunt. certainly the media were included in the select group to go to Cape Denison where they cleaned up the huts & carried out a zillion scientific experiments in 12 hours!!! but the official mawson centenary was held 2011-2012 & our MSM knows that:
20 Dec 2011: Douglas Mawson centenary trip to Antarctica frozen as cold reality sets in
ONE hundred years after Douglas Mawson’s first Australian-led Antarctic expedition was almost defeated by thick pack ice, the same problem has stumped those seeking to follow in his wake. Unusually dense ice floes off the coast of East Antarctica, and particularly Mawson’s landing spot of January 1912, Commonwealth Bay, have in recent days repelled private expeditions seeking to commemorate the centenary of the historic event…
http://article.wn.com/view/2011/12/20/Douglas_Mawson_centenary_trip_to_Antarctica_frozen_as_cold_r/#/related_news
14 Jan 2012: ABC: The ‘A’ factor
Posted by Karen Barlow, ABC:
Heavy fog has rolled in during air transport for the Mawson centenary commemorations and we are now grounded on the Aurora Australis.
Half the landing party is over at Mawson’s Huts while the rest of us remain on fast ice 20 kilometres away.
I was actually on an aborted flight. I almost made it.
Amid much excitement, ABC Producer Ben Hawke, AAP journalist Lloyd Jones, the CSIRO’s Steve Rintoul and myself boarded the squirrel just after 2pm…
The Mawson centenary commemorations can’t happen without us. The Antarctic Division’s Tony Fleming and historian Tom Griffiths are supposed to be officiating the event.
This journey to follow in Mawson’s footsteps is not over yet.
http://blogs.abc.net.au/news/2012/01/the-a-factor.html
6 Jan 2012: ABC: Mawson centenary voyage heads south
Mawson’s huts will provide the backdrop for the celebrations…
A time capsule will be installed at Commonwealth Bay.
It contains, among other items, a message from Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
“We ran a competition with school children to ask them what they saw as the future of Antarctica, and the winning entries will be inside this time capsule as well as some information about the current Antarctic program,” Dr Fleming said.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-05/mawson-centenary-voyage-to-set-sail/3759792
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meanwhile, on A-PAC, Australia’s Public Affairs Channel????? – not only was Sharan Burrow on repeat with her climate justice talk, Christine Milne was then on CAGW repeat, and now the following is on repeat:
Melbourne Uni: Imagine 2033: How We Achieved A Healthy and Sustainable Post-Carbon World
Speakers include: Anna Rose!
http://ideas.unimelb.edu.au/events/imagine-2033-how-we-achieved-a-healthy-and-sustainable-post-carbon-world
& then following shortly afterwards is an hour & 18 mins of Will Steffen (on repeat) talking about Climate Change to the media in Canberra.
and murdoch’s foxtel funds this channel!!!
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As long as there’s an audience for it it’s worth showing ! while it serves to remind the casual viewer that a Barmy element still exists.
They’ll no doubt have a dedicated channel for it in years to come ( if they haven’t already), like Comedy Gold.
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[…] … was that Type 2 diabetes was largely irreversible. Prof Taylor asked 11 volunteers, all recently diagnosed, to go on what he admitted was an “extreme diet” of specially formulated drinks and non-starchy vegetables, for eight weeks. […]
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Australian Aborigines, born to mothers living “off the land” found that they were very prone to developing type 11 after spending time in town living on the white man’s high calorie diet.
They found that on reversion to bush tucker for a while that the diabetes disappeared.
It has always been known that type 11 was basically reversible in contrast to type 1.
The early work on diabetes was helped greatly by the information gained from the study of the “Dutch Winter Hunger” during World War 11 when food was scarce in Europe but women still conceived in those difficult times.
Up to a point T11 is a disease created by the disparity between the insulin setting given the infant by the mother and the inappropriateness of that setting for dealing with increased calorie intake of the child in better times later on.
KK
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One important addition to the diet of Types 1 and 2 Diabetes patients would be transmax resveratrol, the supplement which has been shown in multiple double blind, peer-reviewed studies to lower blood glucose, reduce body fat, increase insulin sensitivity and protect against the adverse health consequences of both Type 1 and 2 Diabetes. Two new human clinical trail results were just released ten days ago by prestigious medical schools, one using Bioforte and the other using Transmax Resveratrol on by patients who were also taking Metformin like drugs. In these studies blood pressure and the above parameters were all improved versus taking Metformin alone.
—-
Thanks, I shall look them up. I know other resveratrol studies have promised much but not kept up with the hype. Here’s hoping… Jo
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To Jo or others who want to make your fasts easier (more natural, effortless, fun) I got this $9 fasting hypnosis audio MP3—you’ll make that pittance of money back after one successful fast!—off of cdbaby (it’s also on Amazon) and it’s really good.
Here’s a different one for free on YouTube also, but I recommend both as the first one is simply outstanding. The guy (a dual PhD, I believe, who is also an artist) also has a well-done Facebook page with far too few Likes (go Like it) considering the excellence of what he’s made.
Both hypnotherapists are from Ireland. I guess fasting is catching on in that part of the world! In any case, they have nice voices and you have nothing to lose by trying.
Feel free to pass on the word. The above is emphatically not an affiliate link—I am not financially associated with them in any way aside from being a happy customer and fan. If you want to google the titles yourself instead, be my guest; they are:
and:
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Also, I don’t follow the canonical 5:2 plan. These are excellent for most any intermittent fasting approach. I left a glowing review on both Amazon and cdbaby as well as YouTube because, well, they rocked. Ended up chatting with the producer of the for-sale one on Facebook. He was exceptionally nice and grateful for my one small order—give him another one!
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