As an occasional visitor, I class these protests with the UK doctors who called for a law banning blades with pointed ends who have forgotten what a scalpel looks like.

As a patient, I would sign a petition that those of us without dietary restrictions be allowed to order from any/all in-hospital [deliverable] food establishments.

In two of three hospitals I have been in for more than a week at a time, the hospital-supplied meals were actually not that bad. but selection was limited to perhaps three meals from the in-house hospital kitchen. And at most one cup of non-decaf coffee per day [breakfast only], though decaf was always offered. And rarely milk, only one-percent at that.

At the third, the meals were frankly not at all palatable. That hospital did not have any in-house facility for cooking (other than staff-area microwaves), so to a large extent I understand that the caterer had problems. But I am grateful to the person who tipped me off that said caterer had other things on the truck which their staff would let me order, in addition to the 3-choice hospital-decreed menu. So after a week of identical-looking-and-tasting meats supposedly from three different animals I started orderng off-menu sandwiches/burgers, guessing what might be available. Including whole milk amd non-decaf coffee...

Because, as we all know, hospital meals are SUPER healthy. Like the diet they shoveled into my mom, a diabetic with heart failure, last time she went in. It was heart-healthy whole grain bread with chemically-extracted seed oil treated with more chemicals to change its texture, color, and flavor so that it didn't make her throw up, virtually no protein because it's "bad for her kidneys," plastic cups of fruit packed in heavy syrup, and juice drinks who first ingredient was water and second ingredient was high-fructose corn syrup!

Obviously, everyone on the planet should be eating these healthy meals, and there's NO WAY that a fast-food restaurant like McDonald's can serve up the kind of healthful meals that the hospital's kitchen can!

It isn't the plain potato. It is the refined starches, french fries and all the oil and fat we load onto the potato that links it to obesity and diabetes. It's like only looking at people who eat banana splits every day, then blaming their obesity on the banana!

Whole food, including potatoes and real whole grains are healthy, certainly more so than a McDonald's hormone-injected, ammonia washed, pink-slime-filled burger.

"In a 4-year prospective study of 36,787 adults which was done one year after the Nurses's Health Study, researchers, working independently from any food industry sponsors, investigated the association between a variety of dietary patterns and type 2 diabetes (3) The study results, which were published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, looked at potatoes and diabetes and also looked at cooking method and only found an association with potatoes when they were cooked with oil. They concluded that consuming a variety of cooked vegetables, including potatoes, cooked in ways other than frying, was associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes."

http://www.facebook.com/notes/jeff-novick-ms-rd/potatoes-diabetes-dietary-trends-truths-about-taters/434650191818

The ladies in my office sometimes go out for a McDonalds run at lunch (I work in a small town, MickyD's is, like, huge here) and I always order a salad with griled chicken and ranch dressing (I cant do bunless burgers at MickyD's, I don't like the taste).

One of the girls told me the other day, "Ya know, ordering a salad from McDonalds is kinda like going to a whorehouse and asking for a hug...."

She has a point....

"In a study titled "Fast food hamburgers: what are we really eating?" pathologists at the Cleveland Clinic dissected burgers from eight different fast food chains to find out what was, or wasn't, inside. Published in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, the paper begins with "Most consumers presume that the hamburger they eat is composed primarily of meat." But what did they find?

Similar to a previous dissection they had performed on hot dogs, the researchers discovered waste and by-products including connective tissue, nerve tissue, cartilage, bone, and in a quarter of the samples, Sarcocystis parasites. But surely these "fillers" were the minority, right? Unfortunately not. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the amount of actual meat (muscle flesh) in the burgers ranged from 2.1 percent to 14.8 percent. Instead of fries, perhaps fast food cashiers should be asking, "Do you want meat with that?"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/pink-slime_b_1374137.html

It's really unbelievable and sickening what the meat industry is selling us. I grew up on a cattle farm, and what's mostly in these burgers would've been discarded as scrap, not served on the dinner table.

Whole grains make cows put on fat. And they are true herbivores, not omnivorious scavangers turned preadators.

So if grains make animals designed to eat plants fat, what do you suppose it does to humans who are not designed to eat such plants?

Incidentally you cant even digest most 'whole grains' unless they are ground open. Take corn, most of it goes straight thru to your bowels whole because your stomach acid is too weak to peirce the shell around the kernal

In the GI clinic, to assess intestinal transit time they have a patient eat a can of corn, mark down the date and time they ate it and then the date and time they first see the corn appear in their poop. It's because corn is virtually undigestible in nearly all forms.

With my first pregnancy I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes despite eating very low carb, skinny, no family history, et cetera. For the test you drink glucose and then they draw your blood one hour later. To pass the test you blood sugar level has to be below 130. I had to monitor my sugars 4 times a day and keep a diary of everything I ate to discuss with my doctor and nutritionist. I continued eating my high protein low carb diet and my sugars were always in the 70-80 range. The nutritionist flipped out on me saying my sugars were not well controlled because my diet did not contain nearly enough carbs and that I must consume at least 30 grams of carbs. She made me a meal plan that contained fat free foods and no meat, but heavy on fruits and whole grains. All stuff that should not be eaten. More proof that doctors and nutritionists are idiots.

"So if grains make animals designed to eat plants fat, what do you suppose it does to humans who are not designed to eat such plants?'

It all has to do with caloric density. Of course, livestock is fed so many grains that they will eventually become fat, but that's pounds and pounds of nothing but grains! And this is only because they won't eat meat or dairy, which are both rich, calorie dense foods.

We are the only species that feeds our young the breastmilk of another species. And we do so even after adulthood. Most species wean their young after a few months. Even cows don't continue to drink cow's milk! We are the only species that continues to drink milk for the rest of our lives...and not even our own.

Here is the caloric density table:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gTLpTq1nQk

Fresh Veggies are around 100 cal/lb
Fresh Fruits around 250-300 cal/lb
Starchy Veggies/Intact Whole Grains around 450-500 cal/lb
Legumes around 550-600 cal/lb
Processed Grains (even if their Whole grain) around 1200-1500 cal/lb
Nuts/Seeds around 2800 cal/lb
Oils around 4000 cal/lb

They did studies, and what they found is if the calorie density of the food is below 400 calories per pound, no matter how much participants ate, they all lost weight.

Between 600-800 calories per pound, with some moderate exercise, they all lost weight.

Between 800-1200 calories per pound, people gained weight, except for those with very high activity levels

Over 1200 calories per pound, everyone gained weight

So, despite all the BS we've been fed, it's still calories in/calories out. LC folks are just eating fewer calories than normal because they're not eating from the lower end of the calorie spectrum. They're eating from the higher end, while eliminating refined starches, most vegetables, and sweets, etc.

The LC crowd maintains that they have some sort of "metabolic advantage", but even Eades admits that studies show it's only about 200-300 calories...if the "metabolic advantage" even exists, which is doubtful, it's not significant, and hardly worth risking your overall health over.

And, anyway, why would any of you keep trusting the meat industry when its so obvious that they're prioritizing their profits over your health? Did you not read what was in your average hamburger? It's like trusting the TSA to feed you.
No rational person would do that, yet with meat, we just lay down and swallow it...because we can't imagine an alternative. What else are we going to eat?

Trust me, we have alternatives. It takes some adjustment, but you don't need to consume the unhealthy garbage they're pushing down your throat.

Basically, I've gotten so furious over this - how the meat and drug industries have LIED to us!

I had a young woman who had to cancel her honeymoon at my place because she was diagnosed with MS. I was so grateful that I was able to send her this:

http://www.drmcdougall.com/video/diet_ms.html

If any of you dare watch it, apparently, they've known since the 50s that a plant-based diet helped cure MS symptoms, yet doctors won't tell their patients about it - just letting them degenerate, end up in wheelchairs and/or dead - because they think the diet is "too hard" to follow, plus there's no money in recommending diet over drugs! Well, when it's your life on the line, most of us would likely do whatever it takes, even if that means giving up our beloved meat.

McDougall is involved in a clinical trial in OR involving MS patients, which promises to show (what they've known since the 50s!) that a plant-based diet offers relief from MS symptoms.

Yet, Mcdougall doesn't want his name on this study because he knows that the "vegan crazy" lable will be applied...that shows what kind of character this man has over those just selling books.

A coworker has a bag of pre-popped cheesy popcorn in her overhead storage bin at work. It's an off-brand. It makes me laugh because it has in big letters "WHOLE GRAIN POPCORN".

I've resisted asking her if she has ever heard of hulled popcorn.

Not all nutritionists are idiots. I was put on a low-carb diet when I had gestational diabetes in 2009. I hardly gained any weight during the last three months of pregnancy, after gaining 50 pounds the first 6 months.

I started that diet again recently because we're planning to have another child. Adjusted, of course, for my weighing less now due to not being pregnant. In 6 weeks I've lost 7 pounds!

I forgot to mention that I had been exercising regularly, but I stopped around the same time I started the diet because we were moving, and I was too busy to exercise. Also they took our elliptical.

Amy advises us to eat hamburgers loaded with bone, connective tissue, hormones, and washed in ammonia. Even if meat is the ideal food for humans, which is debatable, it's not THAT kind of meat.

I'm not a vegan. I still eat fish because I live where I can either catch it myself or know the people who do.

If I want a burger now, I'll go to my dad's farm and kill the cow myself. I know what that cow has been fed and what it hasn't been. And I would make sure they didn't grind up the bone and other scraps and add it to my burger. 2-14% muscle meat isn't an acceptable percentage.

You can fool yourself that you're eating healthy because you're thin. Vegans as well as meat-eaters do this. But there's more to health than being thin. We must be conscious of what is actually in the food we're eating, and, in the case of meat in this country, it's not a pretty picture.

If that makes me sound radical, it's because the truth usually does sound radical to those who've never looked at an issue another way. The first time Luj started telling me about circumcision, for instance, I thought he was radical. But he kept linking me to the evidence - not just one or two anecdotal stories - but many. Eventually, it was the total weight of the evidence that changed my view.

We rarely question the things we've done all our lives, and the way we eat is one of them. But I'm learning that a lot of that is based on false information. Our food industry is extremely powerful, politically connected, and largely corrupt. Only a handful of companies actually control almost all the food that ends up on store shelves, though there are thousands of different labels that make us believe we're being offered choices.

It's a scary situation that effects the health of all of us, which is pretty much born out by how sick and fat we've become.

But it's NOT the plain potato that's making us sick and fat. Or the bowl of oats or rice. Only a small percentage of people actually eat low fat, whole foods like this in a healthy way. Only a small percentage ever did!

The majority, who are sick and fat, are eating highly refined foods and meat daily. We can certainly blame the bun, and the greasy fries, but we've got to be willing to look at the burger too.

Also, I'd just like to add that Dr. Wahls is actually eating a plant-based diet - something like 9 cups of fruits and vegetables a day. Plus, she eliminated dairy. She only eats grass-fed beef.

Except for the meat, this doesn't conflict much with the plant-based approach to treating MS which has been proven successful since the 50s. Wahls likely halted the progression of her disease through eating so many nutrient-rich vegetables, as well as eliminating much of the animal product from her diet by excluding dairy.

She eats fruit, which many low-carbers claim is bad, no dairy, and way more vegetables than meat, so I'm not sure why the Paleo crowd thinks her plant-based diet disproves the healthfulness of a plant-based diet.

“Now I eat much more like people would have eaten 50,000 years ago, mostly raw, and mostly plants,” Wahls says.

We are the only species that feeds our young the breastmilk of another species. And we do so even after adulthood.

We are also the only species to use fire and plant plants and build permant structures and use money and mathmatics.

Grain was not a something to be found durrring our development so its use is just as alien as milk

The only nutrient vegans can't get is B12. Every other nutrient is easily and abundantly supplied from plant-sources. But no one has to give up meat entirely to eat a plant-based diet and reap the health benefits.

Too many calories make us fat. Most people cannot eat rich foods, like meat and fat, AND carbs without getting too many calories. So, they eat a peice of fruit and think it was the fruit that made them gain weight...or at least I used to think it was the carb not the olive oil-soaked salad that was making me gain. But it was simple calorie overload.

I once made an eggplant parmesan dish. I didn't bread the eggplant because that would've been too much carb. But I fried the eggplant slices in oil, then put all that healthy (high calorie) low carb cheese on it. Yummy!

I ate that every day for lunch for about a week and I gained 3 pds. I was aghast! It's so low carb!!! Now, I just have to laugh. The eggplant soaked up all the oil like a sponge. At 130 calories a tablespoon, there was probably 5000 calories in that dish just from oil! No wonder.

"Grain was not a something to be found durrring our development so its use is just as alien as milk"

Yes, but perhaps grains aren't harmful to us and dairy is. Dairy has been linked to many more health issues than grains.

I'm just saying I grew up on a dairy farm and I never questioned why cows didn't continue drinking milk...or why we drink it for the rest of our lives when most species stop after weaning, and none consume other species' milk.

Doesn't it make sense that breastmilk of any kind is really meant for that rapid growth period right after birth?

"We aren't adapted to eat grains and sugar."

Straight sugar, perhaps, but we have adapted to grains and starches. We specifically have amalyse in our saliva for breaking down grains and starches (cats, for instance, do not). We've been eating grains for at least 14,000 years in all major civilized populations. How long is an adaption supposed to take?

Besides, genetically, we're most similar to apes, who are mainly herbivores and fruit-eaters. It makes no sense that we wouldn't be adapted to fruit-eating when apes are.

Amy, Davis is a cardiologist with an opinion based purely on his observations. No clinical trials. Nothing. Anybody can write a book, but that's not science-based.

No doubt many of his patients improved when they gave up grains, but I bet it wasn't quinoa or barley. It was most likely donuts and refined grains, and all the sugar that comes with them. Voila! They got better! Must be the "wheat belly"...well, maybe it was, more accurately, "donut belly".

It's important to distinguish between whole grains and refined grains. Just like it's important to distinguish potatoes from french fries.

Well, it suprises me how closeminded you are about this topic, Amy. You normally allow posters here to discuss matters and debate freely, but, on this, you seem to only want your opinion aired and to shut down free speech. I don't see why it is wrong for me to post about this. If you aren't interested in examining plant-based nutrition, maybe someone else here is.

You're wrong about whole grains. If you would broaden your sources beyond Taubes, Eades, and this new low-carb darling, Davis, you could see that. Yes, they need to know how to read research, and that includes not just cherrypicking and presenting the research that supports their own opinions and theories, like Taubes does (who was caught outright misquoting multiple researchers' views in his 2002 NY Times article).

All your sources are straight from the low carbers, and whoever they're toasting at the moment (Wahl being a perfect example, which is actually funny since she explicitly states she eats a plant-based diet! She eats only grass-fed beef, and I eat only fresh fish, yet her dietary opinion is valid, whereas I'm labeled a "vegan evangelist"?).

Humans clearly adapted to eating starch and grains. They've even found more copies of the amylase gene in populations that traditionally consumed more starches.

"Amylase is thought to have played a key role in human evolution in allowing humans an alternative to fruit and protein. A duplication of the pancreatic amylase gene developed independently in humans and rodents, further suggesting its importance. The salivary amylase levels found in the human lineage are six to eight times higher in humans than in chimpanzees, which are mostly fruit eaters and ingest little starch relative to humans." ~ American Scientist. March–April 2010.

At any rate, there's no such thing as a healthy fast food burger either ("just toss the bun!"). I'm sorry, but I'm just not going to be able to bite my tongue whenever you endorse eating that crap, which you do all too often. It's one thing to promote grass-fed beef, but McDonald's without the bun is not health food.

It wasn't just one researcher. It was multiple researchers. I don't know how you can look at what he did - blatantly misrepresenting their views to make them seem supportive of a high fat/high protein diet in a national puplication - as having integrity.

http://www.observer.com/2002/11/out-of-greasy-pan-into-fire-for-baconbesotted-author/

And, once again, you're going to attack McDougall personally. I see absolutely no evidence that he's an "animal rights nutter," and you've provided none. He is a doctor, who had a stroke at age 18, which he apparently attributed to his high fat, meat-heavy diet, and since then, for over 30 years, his focus has been on plant-based nutrition, not saving bunnies. He has a treatment facility in CA, treating real patients and tracking their success on a plant-based diet.

Eades doesn't have to do the same, but his credibility for supposedly helping "thousands of patients" on a high fat/high protein diet would be greatly enhanced if he'd spent at least some of his years in practice documenting that claim with actual clinical data - not just that he got them thin (which McDougall does also) but that he got them HEALTHIER.

Yet, none of the low carbers, including Atkins himself, have apparently been willing to do this. Why do you think that is? I mean, this diet hasn't just emerged recently. Atkins was touting it way back in the 70s. Before that, there was Banting at the turn of the century. There's been plenty of time to do clinical studies proving to the medical establishment how healthy the diet is...unless, of course, it's actually not.

This is your blog, btw. It sucks my time as well, but if it sucks yours that seems somewhat reasonable since it's your living. Nothing says you have to respond. I've been on many threads here where you barely responded, so it's a bit weird to blame me for not making it to the bank.

Grains werer originally cultivated for booze.

Keep in mind no one is arguing vertables ate bad, just grain.

You can eat vegtables, and meat(if you really wanted to) without cooking it. The same can not be said of most grains

But I do agree with you about beef production, which is why I raise my own

Yeah right, I'm trying to justify my "unhealthy way of eating" while you're recommending "In and Out burgers"? Who is really trying to justify things here?

My diet of whole grains, vegetables, and fish has been the healthy diet of asian populations (and many others) for centuries. I have absolutely no need to "justify" it because there's virtually no credible evidence that eating this way is unhealthy. Even if grains are suspect, there's certainly no proof that they are as bad for you as high fat, hormone-laden, bone-filled burgers!

I challenge you to find any qualified, mainstream dietary researcher who would say brown rice is worse for your health than fast food burgers.

However, on your side, there's always a lot of criticizing of studies and research because the vast majority of credible research (independent of the food industry and the Atkins Foundation) links high meat consumption with disease or death.

As a plant-based eater, I don't have to worry about that because there are virtually no studies suggesting fruits and vegetables cause cancer or coronary disease. Yet, Taubes and Eades have to spend a lot of their time trying to assure their followers that every new study indicting meat is so poorly conducted that it can't possibly be valid, and that high cholesterol doesn't really matter, and that eating loads of saturated fat is actually healthy.

Talk about brainwashing! Their message is basically, "Ignore all the mainsteam science and dietary research that for decades has linked heavy meat consumption to heart disease and cancer. Listen to our opinions instead."

None of this seems to worry you. Nor does Taubes misleading of researchers he interviewed and misrepresentation or ommission of research so aggregious that The Washington Post wrote about it a few weeks later! (His excuses are lame, and he basically admitted that he ambushed those researchers, saying they had "no idea what they were getting into," meaning how he was going to misuse their words). Nor does Eades twisting of the Egyptian mummy issue to make it seem like mummies were of poor health because they ate grains when they, in fact, ate a Western-style diet of rich, fatty meat.

You don't seem to seriously question any of that, so I'd suggest it's you who is blinded by your low carb gurus and the religion they preach. Their agenda is to sell books, and to do it, they're spinning facts and misleading people, who are just desperate to lose weight, but are probably unwittingly trading in their long-term health in the process.

Here's a critique of Taubes' book "Why We Get Fat" by the founder of Ottawa's Bariatric Medical Institute - a multi-disciplinary, ethical, evidence-based nutrition and weight management centre. He's not a vegan and even agrees with Taubes on a lot of points.

"All that said, I found Why We Get Fat to be an extremely difficult read. Not because the writing wasn't engaging. On the contrary, Taubes is an excellent writer. I found the book difficult to read because for reasons I can't understand, Taubes seems to have decided to abandon journalistic and scientific integrity in place of observational data, straw men and logical fallacy."

http://www.weightymatters.ca/2011/01/book-review-gary-taubes-why-we-get-fat.html

Again, more anecodotal or observational "evidence" from the Paleo crowd. Do you know of any independent, non-low carb endorsed research, or is this truly the best you can do? "Me and my sisters all gained weight" (uh, maybe they weren't following the program very well?) or "they didn't look healthy to me" (after one weekend of observation?)

This is what you consider science based? It's all written by people with a strong bias against plant-based eating.

You (and they) can't really criticize McDougall for anything specific or prove his diet doesn't work (or prove he's actually motivated by saving bunnies), so you resort to innuendo, observational gossip, and character assassination.

You're like Ben-David with gay people. All he needs to hear is that someone is gay and he's already concluded that they're promiscuous and deviant.

All you need to hear is that someone is "vegan" and you've concluded that they're an "animal rights nutter".

Open your mind, Amy, and stop completely depending on taubes and the Paleo crowd for your information. Mark's Daily Apple may *believe* McDougallers will all get fat and unhealthy, but that's not what the EVIDENCE says. That's not born out by the thousands of patients who have followed the plan correctly (or Ornish's, or Pritikin's, or Esselstyn's, or Fuhrmans) and lost lots of weight and reversed diabetes and coronary disease.

Mark's Daily Apple could've gone to rural China and observed them eating large bowls of rice, and concluded that their diet was unhealthy, but that's not what the EVIDENCE says. The rural Chinese were far healthier than us until we brought over our fast food burger chains.

You can't explain that, can you? No one on the low-carb side can. It's the asian paradox. If grains are so bad and fattening, why were the asians so thin and healthy?

That's the question that kept bugging me until I decided to really explore it, and what I've found is that there is no conclusive evidence that grains lead to obesity and diabetes. It is a theory - one Taubes fully endorses - but theories need to be proven by hard science.

The low carb crowd would skewer me if I did what you just did - find some comments about Eades saying, "me and my sisters didn't lose any weight low carbing" and present that anecodote as evidence. Present observations as proof! Correlation doesn't prove causation...haven't you learned that from them by now? It's what they always say when a meat study comes out.

Also, I find it incredibly unprofessional and immature of you to keep whining about how tiring this is and how you don't have time, etc. Then, actually suggesting I start my own blog (where I'm sure to have a lot of fatty vegan followers). Why - just because I disagree with you? You can't be bothered to civilly debate an opposing view on your own blog, or at least allow others to do so?

Don't respond. Go get your banking done. Get some rest. Let Luj and I discuss the evils of meat processing. Frankly, your responses are so personal and biased that it's better you don't respond.

Amy, you're the one who keeps posting crapthink - only anecdotal examples, not science. Some researcher lost 70 pds. So what? I don't dispute low carb diets create weight loss. I even fully understand why they do. It's all there in the calorie-density tables.

The way Mark's DA described how they ate at McDougall's treatment program was completely biased - for example saying "buns", like they were the kind you get with your fast food burger. He was trying to make the food sound unhealthy. But again, his description and opinion proves absolutely nothing.

You need to grasp the concept that whole grains are not refined grains. Breads, even whole grain ones, are a more refined, more calorie-dense food product, which is why McDougall doesn't recommended a lot of bread on his diet.

But there is still a proven difference in insulin response between whole grains, complex starches, and heavily refined grains and starches. They are not the same as eating straight sugar.

"A common teaching is that carbohydrates are bad because they cause blood triglycerides to increase (higher triglycerides are associated with more heart disease). These findings are based upon experimental designs using simple sugars and refined flours (and/or the subjects were required to eat more food than they could comfortably consume – they were force-fed).3 (Source: Vidon C. Effects of isoenergetic high-carbohydrate compared with high-fat diets on human cholesterol synthesis and expression of key regulatory genes of cholesterol metabolism. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 May;73(5):878-84.

"The rise in triglycerides is caused primarily by an increase in synthesis of these blood fats by the liver.5 For example, when people with already elevated triglycerides were fed a diet rich in sugar for 6 weeks their levels increased by 45.2%.6 However, when starches, the complex form of carbohydrate found in whole grains, beans, potatoes, and green and yellow vegetables, rather than sugars, are fed to people, the triglyceride levels do not increase.7 ~ Source: (7) Hudgins CH. Human fatty acid synthesis is reduced after the substitution of dietary starch for sugar. Am J Clin Nutr. 1998

See, there's a big difference. That's all I've been asking you to consider. This difference is clearly what explains the asian paradox. Asians, like all other grain/starch based populations, weren't eating refined starches or grains. For centuries, these grains and starches kept them slim and free of almost all of the diseases that plague us here in the west, because we're eating REFINED, PROCESSED grains and starches (plus loads of sugar).

Somewhere along the way, low carbers decided to lump all whole grains and complex starches in with refined grains and starches. This is misleading and unecessarily villifies a lot of nutrient-rich and satisfying plant foods, like potatoes, for instance.

Why do that when the science doesn't support it? I can think of no other reason other than that they're afraid that if their followers knew they could safely consume a plain 130 calorie potato without adverse effects, they'd abandon the low carb diet. So, it's their books sales that prompt them to promote this untruth.