Food journal update, and then some!

So.  The food journal has been going well :)  I've managed to finish two days, and I'm working on the next few, they are in process and I will be (occasionally) keeping track of days in the future and number-crunching them.  I have not been able to get every day down, as I haven't accurately recorded every day (In fact, I only have about a week total accurately reported...).  I've also done a bit of skipping around... I have some food journals done from late August and early September and from the past couple days.  I also found that certain home-made things are difficult to figure out the contents of, like home-made chicken broth.  For that reason I have decided to skip those days on which I ate home made broth altogether, as I have no way of accurately measuring my intake based on this homemade item.  Some time in the future I may try to replicate the homemade broth and get a better estimate of the contents of it, but I'll be honest when I say that I will have no idea how to measure anything in it except for the free-floating fat.  Maybe I could assume that all the sugar in all the vegetables used to make the broth were leeched into the liquid, whereas all the fiber and probably the starch has mostly remained in the vegetables, then since I discard the veggies I wouldn't get those.  Then I could assume that most of the fat from the chicken used to make the broth was rendered out of the skin (let's say, 80% of it?), then since I generally add the meat back to the broth to make the soup, the contents of that will be easily determined.  Vitamin C and some certain b-vitamins will be destroyed by the long cook times, but most vitamins should be unaffected.  And maybe I can figure out the minerals that I'd get leeching out of the bones (though I don't really know how).

At any rate, that sounds like a lot of work.  Maybe I will just avoid home-made broth in the future for the sake of easier food journaling.  I hope to turn the excel file into something easily viewable here so you can see what my eating has been like in general.  Before I do that though, I may want to get a few more days done and try to make the spreadsheet look a little nicer.  I'll summarize what I have so far though.

It's been an average daily intake of around 3500 calories, 70-80% of them from fat, about 30g of carbohydrates, about 10g of which are fiber, and around 130g of protein.  I have been consuming sufficient levels of most vitamins and minerals, save vitamins C and D, and magnesium (though this does vary a bit).  A larger portion of my fats are monounsaturated than are saturated - beef and most meats have more monounsaturated fats than they do saturated fats.

I want to talk a little bit about what this proves, and a lot about what it doesn't prove, and to clarify my frustrated statements about what I think you can trust in terms of dietary advice. 

First of all, my diet is not a well-controlled experiment.  There are a lot of variables that I changed when I switched diets.  I started consuming more fats and less carbohydrates, without doubt.  I have drastically increased my calorie intake.  I probably am consuming more protein, but maybe not.  The types of fats I am eating are different.  I am consuming different amounts of cholesterol (not that I think that matters).  I am consuming dramatically more sodium.  I am not consuming vitamin C in large quantities.  I am exercising regularly.  In addition to these variables, there's the one that I wanted to change in order to test something, and that was the basis of my diet.  The basis of my diet switched from omnivorous to what is probably about 90% animal based, and in doing so I disproved the theory that eating animal fats will give you heart disease and kill you (at least, it hasn't been as swift as lots of people would have predicted).  I am under the impression that this variable was the important one, because it essentially determines the rest of the variables I listed (except for exercising - but if this diet + exercise is not killing me, it is unlikely that this diet alone would kill me.  Nothing we know about exercise shows it to have such a powerful effect that it can reverse the effects of an extremely unhealthy diet to the extent it has in my case). 

Nevertheless, my experiment has still been poorly controlled, so that limits what it can prove and disprove (as does the size of my sample... n=1 is never a good thing).  Basically all I can disprove is universal statements, such as "all animal product-based diets will rapidly degenerate your cardiovascular system."  All I can prove is that this diet has the ability to make a person gain weight in the presence of exercise, much of which appears to not be fat.  My experiment of one has disproven (as if it had to be done) claims that a person cannot have a functioning brain or be athletically productive on an extreme low carbohydrate, or even possibly ketogenic diet (but since I have not accurately determined whether or not I am in or have been in dietary ketosis at all, this last part is a bit adventurous).  I have disproven the claim that such a diet would lack essential nutrients.  I have proven that scurvy cannot be the result of low intake of vitamin C, and there simply must be another variable involved (even with the citrus I have been eating, I haven't been getting nearly enough vitamin C, especially when you consider that I don't always eat lemons and limes).  Because of my lack of proper controls, I can't tell you that my diet is superior for muscle and strength increases to any other diet (or for that matter, inferior to any other diet).  I haven't proven that this diet is healthier than any other diet, except for those outrightly guaranteed to kill you quickly (or I suppose those known for a fact to be unhealthy, like unsupplemented veganism).

I can also predict that I have disproven the calories in/calories out hypothesis of fattening.  Like I said, I dramatically increased my calorie intake, but if anything I have lost fat.  Despite the exercising that I do, it is unlikely that I am exercising enough to burn off all those calories that I eat in excess of what I used to - there simply must be another variable at play that is too difficult to detect with casual observation (recall the hypothesis from "Why Are Thin People Not Fat" which suggested that people up there unconscious physical activity, by twitching for instance, in response to excess calories - and if you haven't watched that, GO WATCH IT NOW).

I've also proven that my diet results in low post-meal blood glucose levels (~70).  I don't, however, have a standard to which I can compare this value.  I have not checked my fasting glucose levels, but they are likely lower if just by a smidge.  I cannot, however, describe what this means for a diabetic person.  I would like to be able to claim that the effect on a diabetic would be similar, but I didn't experiment on a diabetic.

I want to apologize for the rant I went on in my last post in which I decried any form of dietary advice.  I think there is good, solid, scientific dietary advice out there - I just think that without access to the original scientific paper, it is nearly impossible to determine that an experiment is a good one that actually proves things.  Conversely, it's really easy to figure out that an experiment (or just an observational study) is a waste of your time.  Furthermore, I think that Gary Taubes is a clear thinker and is an honest person, thus I trust his advice - but I do not have access to the original scientific papers he consulted to come to his "guidelines."  For this reason, I would still advise you to be skeptical of even his advice.  You should even be skeptical of advice concerning not eating sugar (at least in the specifics) - despite this skepticism, you should note that the consumption of sugar has known impacts on liver function and blood sugar and insulin levels.  I also think you should take my advice with a grain of salt - I don't have access to these studies and I can't show them to you.  Without these, the only reason you have to trust me is if you can cross-reference my information with another valid source.

There are some advantages to Gary Taubes' view of things.  You will note that in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, he calls his way of looking at nutrition the "alternative hypothesis."  He doesn't call it the "alternative fact" or even the "alternative theory."  This is a sign of someone who is being honest about how much he knows.  It's a sign of scientific humility.  It's a sign that this is believable stuff, with the caveat that there isn't enough to prove it yet.

Essentially, what I want you to do is be skeptical of the things you hear in the field of nutrition.  The reason for it is that there are a lot of dishonest or lazy researchers even with Ph.D's who will try to pull the wool over your eyes.  And there are a lot of people who see this as a way to profit from misinformation by spreading even more misinformation.  The true solution to the problem, as I see it, is to eliminate any respect that the field of nutrition gets.  If we can reboot the system and set new standards of scientific research in the field, then it will be difficult to deny the information they publish (much like we would feel about anything published in, say, a chemistry journal).

This is the subject of my paper, free from frustration (I had to tell my professor of argumentative writing that correlation does not imply causation.  Needless to say, my blood was boiling out of my eyeballs).  This is the heart of what I would like to convince people of.  Unfortunately, I hand-wrote the first "part" of the paper that was due October 2nd.  It's a 1000-word prospectus, so at least I can distill it down to a few sentences for you:

I want to argue for why you should disbelieve virtually everything you hear about nutrition.  First of all, because so much of what we read is based on observational studies incapable of proving things.  And second because those which are based on experiments are often poorly conducted in one way or another.  Next I wish to criticize popular print and unpopular, scientific journals for insisting on continuing to print falsehoods or at best misleading things.  Beyond that, I want to criticize specific issues within observational studies, to demonstrate that they show even less than an ordinary skeptic might think.  Next I want to criticize specific popular diet books and gurus, like the china study; and government guidelines.  Last I want to give my own personal experience and discovery of information - and explain that my ideas aren't new and shouldn't seem outlandish.  I also want to set a historical context in which all of this began to occur - there actually is a half-decent reason for it all.

I meant to post this a while ago, my bad... The food journal post is going to be the next one.  Also, I have an outline for my paper that is basically done, which will be posted.