Gary Taubes, science writer, is busting out in Britain and the Telegraph is there. This is the same book that was released in the States last year as Good Calories, Bad Calories. The book is tauted as challenging the conventional wisdom on diet and calories, and does in a sense. What Taubes does is take a long look at historical diet thinking, modern thinking and the knowledge that comes in between. Those of us that help people lose weight for a living already know most of what Taubes disusses.

Atkins knew it. The Eades know it. The Paleolithic Diet does it. So does the No-S Diet and the Lunch Box Diet. The Mediterranean Diet depends on it. Even the American Diabetes Association has had to accept it.

What is it? It’s a simple fact. Obesity has more to do with consumption of carbohydrates than any other factor. Period. No matter the dietary mix of proteins and fats, it’s the white stuff that does in the best of dieters. The bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, tortillas and such. These ready sources of blood sugar cause a physiologic cascade that results in rapid weight gain and worse yet, stimulates the cravings for more carbohydrates.

The negative impact of high carbohydrate diets becomes clearer all the time. Carbohydrates result in higher inflammatory states, for instance.

For those looking to lose weight, control chronic diseases including high cholesterol, and contribute to their overall health through diet now is the time to find ways to curb the refined carbs and steer toward a diet more biased to protein and healthy fats. Oh, and for those looking at the Mediterranean diet, add a little red wine.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times wrote an excellent summary piece on the dangers of plastic water bottles. These can be as subtle as heavy metals leaching out of reused bottle water bottles to endocrine disrupting compounds found in otherwise seemingly benign polycarbonate bottles.

Officially, polycarbonate bottles are completely benign with their major contaminant being bisphenol-A. Of course, that’s the official word. Bisphenol-A is a know agonist for estrogen receptors which means that it can in adequate concentrations activate the receptors. The implications are significant. Activating or blocking receptors can interfere with the normal actions of estrogen in females or stimulate estrogen like responses in males and children. Not good, right? It’s worrisome enough that the city of San Francisco banned products for children and infants that contained bisphenol-A in 2006. It does look like they repealed this ban, though.

So what does this matter for adults? This is one of those ongoing scientific arguments. Literature suggests that in-utero exposure to bisphenol-A increasing the lifetime risk of obesity. The chemical industry has spent a lot of money trying to quash this and self described non-partisan think tanks have pumped out paper after paper. The scientific community continues to come up with small study after small study that points to bisphenol-A being less that fully benign. Canada has labeled the compound: inherently toxic. What’s the truth?

Well, for sure bisphenol-A can speed development of fat cells. Exposure to bisphenol-A can speed growth and puberty as well as increase body weight in mice. Whether these are at concentrations similar to what one gets from bottled water is really unknown. Whether the same can be noted in humans is also unknown.

The take home, very likely is to use non-plastics for your water bottle filled from a home reverse osmosis filter. Of course, realistically, most of us will shrug off the risk and use cheap water bottle bought from the warehouse store. It’s not like we haven’t been warned, but like so many things it’s calculating the risks versus convenience.

Scouting through the literature today revealed a study in the journal Circulation. This study showed that low testosterone was a predictor for cardiovascular disease in aging men.

Searching the archives of this same journal finds that in 1999, this study found, “Short-term intracoronary administration of testosterone, at physiological concentrations, induces coronary artery dilatation and increases coronary blood flow in men with established coronary artery disease.” The study actually infused testosterone at normal levels into the coronary arteries of men and observed the flow rate effects on the arteries. Italian researchers found that normal testosterone levels improved ischemia in men who already had heart disease according to this study.

This is one journal and 3 studies. All of these show positive findings relative to testosterone levels in aging men. Searching the endocrine literature reveals more of these kinds of studies. Looking back to last week, the bias of JAMA is more apparent the farther one looks into specialty specific journals.

The new issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association has published a Dutch study on the use of testosterone in aging men. This is interesting because the study itself comes to some interesting conclusions. The Dutch researchers concluded that oral testosterone replacement in men improves lean body mass but did not result in weight loss as seen in other studies of the hormone. They also used a quality of life measurement scale that resulted in no measurable quality of life improvement. The study also showed no improvement in cognitive function amongst those in the study. The study is followed by a lengthy comment and literature review.

Several problems with the study appear on even the first reading. While the Dutch researchers checked for low testosterone in the men in the study before starting medication they did not monitor the testosterone levels through the study. It is entirely possible that the doses of testosterone were inadequate to see the kinds of results that have been documented for testosterone before. Also, the study used oral testosterone for supplementation. Oral testosterone is not considered by those in the know to be acceptable for testosterone replacement. Even the Endocrine Society notes that there are risks of negative effects on the liver from oral testosterone only in their clinical guidelines. Additionally, the paper in JAMA refers to itself as being a “large study” despite the fact there were only 237 test subjects. I personally don’t consider anything less 1000 large, but clearly JAMA differs with me on this. Really, there are statistical rules for analyzing data from numbers as small as 30 and extrapolating to larger populations but this is a dangerous game which is also why so many studies are done over and over again.

The AMA also has a history with anti-aging medicine that’s not good. The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M) has on several occasions made official responses to JAMA articles on hormone replacement because JAMA coverage is universally negative despite what makes it into the endocrinology journals. The responses include this one from 2002 and this one from early 2007. JAMA and the AMA have demonstrated what appear to me to be a political bias against hormone replacement as demonstrated by their ongoing choice to publish only negative studies of hormone replacement.

Since JAMA is very widely read by physicians and covered heavily in the mainstream media, it’s important to make sure you find a physician that reads more than just JAMA if you intend to age against the machine.