Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Obesity Related Diabetes & How Gary Taubes has it all Bass Ackwards

Starting sometime in April, I started coming across a deluge of new information related to diabetes -- the classic obesity related T2 diabetes (roughly 80% of T2's are obese, those are the ones I'm talking about here).  There's so much, and by research groups I'd "researched" before, I'm simply amazed I somehow never came across it before.  It's frankly sidetracked me quite a bit from where I was going before the first light bulb over head find, because it all just seemed to fall in place like dominoes fall in some of those intricate arrangements that I'm always intrigued by.  

The first discovery was not in a journal article, however.  It was that I finally got my paws on Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, 4th Ed (2004) and 5th Ed (2008).    This book is cited frequently by low carbers due to the fact that in recent years Taubes snickers at how stupid the scientists who wrote the book are with two short excerpts he claims are in conflict.  You probably know what I'm talking about, where one quote discusses all the ways insulin puts and keeps fat in cells, and then the next one states something to the effect that obesity is the result of calories in exceeding calories out.   Around that time I came across this interesting, almost memoir, written in 2004 by Richard Hanson.  It's even poignant at times and I enjoyed reading it.  As Taubes tells it, he ran Chapter 22 in GCBC by Hanson (and he's thanked in the credits) and had interviewed him for the book.  A major component of Taubes' Adiposity 101 was the part of this chapter dealing with our old and forgotten molecular friend:  glycerol phosphate aka alpha glycerol phosphate aka glycerol-3-phosphate, I'll call it G3P.
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