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[lrgiblet]

Seth,

I'm intrigued by your hypothesis.  And I'm giving it a go myself.

I'd love to hear you directly address a couple points that have come up in this "Science/Theory" forum.  Perhaps you've already addressed them.  If so, I apologize.  I admit I haven't had a chance to read all 80,000 posts on your forum :-D

1.  I'd love to hear you chime in directly on the hypothesis that the "set point" is mediated by insulin and the fat cells.  It seems that some plausible theories in that vein can accommodate the "set point" phenomena from your article.

I don't think you have to be committed to a "brain-mediated thermostat thingy" model of the set point, but could remain open to various ways of explaining the "set point" phenomena.

I didn't see a direct reply from you to NTB's fuller insluin/ghrelin/vagus nerve/leptin theory as stated in reply #8 of this thread (point 4):

http://boards.sethroberts.net/index.php?topic=2169.0

. . . you did make a reply in the very next post (reply #9), but you didn't actually address NTB's fuller settling point theory there.  You did claim that prediction is more valuable than accommodation in that post.  (Of course there is a large literature on the prediction/accommodation issue in the Philosophy of Science, and it's not entirely clear that prediction is any more valuable than accommodation in an evidential sense -- though it does feel psychologically more compelling).

2.  I'd also love to see good estimates of these numbers:

# who have tried SLD and failed
# who have tried SLD and succeeded

Of course the first thing you'd have to do is define success and failure -- good luck with that :-D

My concern, though is that it's not clear you can rely on the voluntary reports of dieters on the blog and forum.  If those who don't succeed aren't as likely to report as those who succeed, the anecdotal data won't be representative, and will result in an over-confidence in the theory.

Perhaps, if you proactively solicited the experiences of those who didn't see good results, more such stories might come out of the woodwork, though I still think that those who have succeeded are much more likely to still be hanging around your blog and forum than those who failed. 

That's what Gary Taubes would call a good scientist, right, . . . one who actively tries to disprove his own theory.

Of course a proper study would be best.  Any news on that front?

3.  I love your article here:

www.sethroberts.net/about/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf

While I'm asking for the moon, . . . it would be great if you could make a chart listing each of the phenomena needing explaining, and comparing some alternative theories with regard to how well they explain the data:

I suppose I could do that myself, but it seems that such a chart would actually be very useful to you in explaining your theory.  And I'm sure you would do a much better job of it.

In that chart, I'd love to see you compare your set point theory, NTB's set point theory, and perhaps some other live hypotheses.

Thanks.

Jim

[dshack]

+1  I eat a very-low-carb, insulin-controlling diet, and get results that sound identical to SLD people. I'm curious about the overlap in mechanism.