Battle of the Obesity Experts!

Sam Feltham and Zoe Harcombe "battle it out" over 5-a-Day!

UPDATE:  

@CarbSane @zoeharcombe Thank you for the critique Evelyn but that Sky interview was last year and my opinions have evolved from then...
— Sam Feltham (@samfeltham) June 22, 2013

I've now asked him how he was eating in 2010.  He's already, in another tweet, said he was lifting 2X/day back then for a competition in Men's Health.  Due to time constraints he only lifts 12 min/week now.  

That 5000 Calorie Jokesperiment

Note:  I started this article with the intent of it being a single stand-alone before Smash the Fat's Sam Feltham had done his final summary of his overeating stunt.  Since then, however, he has written said summary and I've written two posts discussing this disconnect between the you-can-eat-all-the-calories claims and the current uber-restrictive low carb plans many long time low carbers are actually following themselves.  See:  Fast or Feltham and Fast or Feltham II

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Apologies in Advance:  I wrote this with updates/edits over several days and with "new information" coming in the interim.  It could probably use a good bit of editing and crunching down, but as this is just a blog, I'm going to publish it up w/o wasting time on that.  Please forgive the length, repetitiveness, etc.  Thanks!

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Eating more fat ... Why where ever did anyone get that from?

I received a link to this interesting post by Zoe Harcombe in the Inbox the other day:  What's this 'trying to eat more fat'?!  Zoe writes:

Hi all - I've spotted a couple of comments from people saying that they're trying to eat more fat and the second one got me worried enough to start a thread. ...

The Harcombe Diet is a diet based on a 5 day Phase 1 which is mostly meats and veggies (unless you are, as Zoe was for 15 years, a vegetarian, then you can substitute some brown rice, which makes no sense from a protein standpoint, but whatever).  Once you've cured your candida overgrowth which is one of the  prime reasons for obesity according to Harcombe, you move to other phases of the diet.  Harcombe believes in the separation of fats and carbs at meals on a metabolic "food combining" basis.  You don't want to eat carbs with fat because ... well ... the insulin!  Despite negativity about low fat diets, Harcombe counsels food separation and that you should basically eat low carb or low fat at any individual meal.  But she admits:

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Metabolic Advantage, Obesity and Eric Jequier

Since I had the whole metabolic advantage thing on my mind writing my last post, and "Anonymous LC Author" mentioned Feinman and Jequier, I was reminded of something that's bothered me for a while now regarding citations of Jequier's work. 

A calorie is a calorie violates the second law of thermodynamics argues for the potential of a metabolic advantage in low carbohydrate diets.   Oddly enough, they ultimately make a first law argument for the MA, but that's a subject for another day.

It was this paper that introduced me to the work of Eric Jequier after which I stumbled upon the subject of my most popular post to date, Nutrient Fates after Absorption referencing this Jequier paper:  Nutrient effects: post-absorptive interactions.  But the Feinman & Fine paper cites a different Jequier paper to which the TEF values of macronutrients can be ubiquitously traced in LC circles.  That paper being:  Pathways to Obesity.  

Surely that paper is all about how we eat too many carbohydrates, right?  One might think so given that Jequier and his reported TEF differences are so often cited by those advocating for the supremacy of  low carb and/or those fingering carbohydrates as the cause of obesity.  But when one takes a closer look we see he feels quite differently:

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