'Dr. David' Lets Loose On Low-Carb

I'm going to do something today that I rarely do. I would like to post a response I received from someone about one of my blog posts without making any comments about it at all. Once you read this very long essay from a fan of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, the man who made several personal comments regarding the death of the late Dr. Robert C. Atkins the other day, I think it will become abundantly clear why I don't need to say a word in reaction to this. However, YOUR comments are certainly welcomed and encouraged if you feel so compelled.

Are you ready? This is from "Dr. David" who is a member of the forum message board at Dr. Fuhrman's web site. He has quite a bit to say here, so prepare to get your fill of this one. Here goes:

Mr. Moore:

I expect my comments to mean little to you, as I feel you fall into the category of "believers" and nothing I say however scientific or accurate will change your mind, but I remain the eternal optimist, so I will give it a try anyway! (And in the meantime, maybe I'll save the lives of some others who may read this.)

By the way, I am a Physician, one of those rare ones who treats patients with respect and as equals (though not necessarily equal in knowledge). That is why I address you as Mr., rather than by your first name, which I always thought was a demeaning way for physicians to act. (That is, to expect to be called "Dr.", but at the same time, call their patients "Sue" or "George", like they are children next to them.)

To get to the points:

1) To say that Dr. Fuhrman was having a "heated subject of discussion" because he was answering someone else's comments on another weblog and trying to correct some facts is inaccurate.

2) Dr. Fuhrman is incorrect in one way (at least) that I am aware of. He does not mention the obvious. He did not even need to know the now publicly available info (no matter how regretably it was released) that Dr. Atkins was fat, out of shape, and had had an MI (a heart attack), and had atherosclerosis (clogging of the arteries due to too much fat and cholesterol in his own Atkins diet) to figure out what Dr. Atkins died of. I am a Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Physician who before that training had two years of training in Internal Medicine, so I am well versed in a wide range of medicine. I’ve also had advanced training in Traumatic Brain Injury and its causes, consequences and Rehabilitation, which is relevant to this topic.

So, let’s consider how Dr. Atkins died:

He fell down on an icy street, and hit his head with such a hugh degree of violence that he cracked his skull, had a Traumatic Brain Injury, bled into his brain, and eventually had swelling of the brain which killed him.

What does this say about his physical health before his fall? Quite a lot! I have never met anyone who fell and hit their head violently unless one of three conditions were true. Either a) they were drunk as hell, or b) they were severely debilitated (could barely walk), or c) were unconscious BEFORE they hit the ground. Now, I vote for number 3 (or c) for Dr. Atkins, as I have never heard anything about him being a lush (a), nor about him being very debilitated (b).

If the answer were b, that would mean that his diet had ruined his health at the relatively young age of 72 years old (and I doubt you’d want to concede that). So, c it is.

This means most likely one of two things. Either he had a heart attack which slowed/stopped the flow of blood to the brain or pacemaker in the heart long enough to cause unconsciousness and make him fall to the ground unable to protect his head; or he had a seizure. It is very unlikely he had a seizure, as, if he had, it would have continued or worsened after he hit his head, and there were witnesses, including his wife who would have gladly testified/stated he had a seizure to distract people from considering his having had a heart attack.

Therefore my medical opinion is he had a heart attack, became unconscious and violently hit his head. Think about it, have you ever fallen and hit your head? If so, it was because you were in a room and you hit the wall. But did you ever fall in the open (a street like Atkins did) and not have your hands or elbows catch the fall for you? And if he tried to stop his fall, but couldn’t, why didn’t he have fractures of his hands, fingers, &/or arms from attempting to? from the instinctive level reaction which we all have to falling?

3) Newsflash (to quote you) -- it doesn’t matter if Dr. Atkins has passed on, if his erroneous theories left un-opposed will lead to thousands of people without adequate training believing them, and resulting in their early deaths due to heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure etc. (Would you stop fighting Hitler’s or Stalin’s lies just because they were dead, if they still had a big influence that was hurting people? After all, they’re not here to defend themselves!)

It’s understandable that his wife may genuinely miss him, but if we must cause her some pain to save hundreds of thousands of lives, then we should keep talking about his wrong ideas. Also, she has a severe conflict of interest in this case, since the Atkins foundation sold for about 1/2 a BILLION DOLLARS, of course she, as a major shareholder wanted to keep the value of the foundation up, at least until it sold, earning money off of his misinformation campaign (which he fooled himself with also) (and to give her the benefit of the doubt, she may very well believe his misguided ideas herself, and not just be cynically getting rich off the misfortune of others).

4) His misinformation: He invented his diet during his internship -- (when he knew little to nothing about nutrition by his own admission - after that he was invested into his own idea, and sought only to prove himself right, not to find out the truth, and there has never been a reputable study showing his diet was a HEALTHY way to lose weight) - as a way to lose weight without having to do anything fancy or comprehensive in the way of coming up with a plan. Some of his ideas are true. That is the danger of the Atkins Diet, it, is based on a half truth.

The half truth part is in two sections: a) you CAN lose weight by forcing your body into the VERY UNHEALTHY situation of living in ketoacidosis (although it will Kill your Kidneys eventually - after 20, 30 or 40 yrs, and it won’t show up on your lab values WHILE the damage is being done, because the creatinine doesn’t start to go up until your kidney functions have been 90% destroyed!) and b) he’s right about the white flour, pasta, bread, bagels, pizza crusts, candy snacks etc. all are bad for you, cause diabetes, rot your teeth, and probably cause/contribute to mood disorders, but he’s literally Dead Wrong about the other half of the truth. He has amended his ways some by admitting that you’d all die on his diet alone, but he turned that into another way to earn money off the nutritionally undereducated American populace by selling them vitamins they wouldn’t need, if they weren’t on his toxic diet!

Here’s the other half of the TRUTH: c) except for protein, meat has no nutrients in it!!!!! Then why, you ask do they always say vegetarians need supplements because they don’t get enough Vitamin B12 if they don’t eat meat? Well, actually, the Vitamin B12 found in meat is there due to fecal bacterial contamination of the meat with bacteria during the slaughter process. That’s right, meat has no important nutrients, and B12 is a contaminant! The reason we like it is it is a very concentrated source of protein, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, of FAT.

When cavemen were starving, they needed to have their taste buds tuned in to fat sources, just so they’d get adequate calories. We no longer have that problem (at least not most places in America - and definitely not those where we are worried about losing weight.) The other part of the truth he didn’t know, or didn’t let out was d) you CAN get everything you need from a vegetarian diet, but most vegetarians are also part of the nutritionally undereducated American populace! For example, people can claim to be vegan (pure vegetarian without even milk or honey), simply by eating potato chips and drinking coke. Obviously they will die soon also on such an unhealthy diet.

On the other hand, when REAL vegetarians are scientifically studied as happened in a major study in California some years back, they are found to live an AVERAGE of 13 yrs longer than the rest of us. And this isn’t just 13 yrs of being old, but of being healthy, not in a nursing home, and not recovering from a stroke or MI (heart attack).

5) So what is a healthy diet? There is a physician whom I thought was full of shit when I first heard about him from my wife, because he said that you shouldn’t take beta-carotine as a supplement. I had done 30 yrs of research into nutrition, and everything I knew about it said it was good for you. It is basically 2 Vitamin A’s stuck together, and the body doesn’t break it down into Vitamin A unless the body needs more Vitamin A, so it could not overdose you. It also is an antioxidant and thus helps scavenge up free radicals which are what cause cholesterol to be changed into oxidized LDL and make it stick to the walls of arteries, so it is fighting heart disease.

How could it be bad for you? Well, I read his book, then looked up some of the original sources to verify what he said, and he was right, it is bad for you, in excess! (which is the way it comes in supplement pills) How can that be? Well, it turns out that the human body has something like 200 caratinoid receptors, each of which has its own slightly different job. So what happens when you take a lot of beta caratine is all these DIFFERENT receptors are all FLOODED by this ONE substance, and thus they can’t do their slightly different functions in the cellular mechanisms. Let me use an analogy, imagine taking the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra with 200 different musicians and 200 different musical instruments, and replacing them all with 200 guys playing the guitar. Can you see how the Orchestra wouldn’t be able to play Beethoven, because of the lack of Cello, Bass, Tympany Drum, Organ etc?

Similarly, I was not slowly ruining my health, like the Atkins diet does, but at least degrading it some (or not optimizing it) by depriving those receptors of the multiple different subtle influences they need to make my cells play their symphonies at their best.

There is also a doctor that my wife told me about (she used to tell me a lot about different doctors and their theories, to try to find some way to get me to stop making her take vitamin pills!), anyway, this doctor said that there is a formula by which you can calculate a health index or level. This obviously had to be based on you getting ALL the right nutrients in the right amounts, and getting them with adequate calories to maintain health.

The formula is: H = N/c

When you know what this means, it is like E = MC squared, in that it is compact, and Brilliant! The H stands for health, the N for nutrients, and the c for calories. In other words, as long as you are getting the minimum calories you need, the more naturally occuring (in food) nutrients you can get crammed into that number of calories, the healthier you are.

So, who are these two brilliant doctors, one of whom came up with the first really good formula for nutritional health, and the other of whom knows thousands of facts and figures and information about the workings of the body and interactions among the cellular level nutrients? They are the same doctor who was a World Class Athlete before he went to medical school and who has studied nutrition all his life, and who has never been overweight like Dr. Atkins was (on his own weight loss diet): one and the same, Dr. Fuhrman, the author of Eat to Live, which book, by the way, is NOT A RADICAL VEGAN diet. In fact, if you look in the back of the book, he has multiple RECIPES that INCLUDE MEAT. So that destroys the argument that he is a radical.

Also, he recently gave a speech I heard, where someone asked him if cutting out all meat would be better for you than just cutting down to 5% or 10% of your diet. He stated that he did not know, as there is NO scientific evidence for that at the present time. He said that there is evidence that for populations of people, for every time you reduce their diets by 5% or 10% less meat, they are healthier, have fewer heart attacks, fewer strokes etc. BUT HE SAID that just because that is true, DOES NOT MEAN we can extrapolate downwards to where no data exists, and assume that this pattern holds true all the way to zero! So he is COMPLETELY INVESTED IN THE SCIENCE, NOT in his own “radical agenda” nor in his prejudiced opinion about where the data “should” lead to!

6) So, Mr. Moore, let’s get to your condition as an excellent example. I congratulate you on losing 200 lbs., (and I mean this sincerely, and I also understand your loyalty to Dr. Atkins and his diet that did do you a lot of good - temporarily), however if you were 500 lbs, you still have a long way to go to get healthy, unless you are about 9 ft tall. And the lab tests you published show you are in very bad shape.

First of all, most Dr’s are full of shit, with no training in nutrition. I studied nutrition for 30 yrs BEFORE I even went to med school (I went later than most) and knew more about it with only a Bachelor’s degree in a Social Science than did others I knew who had graduate degrees in the biological and physiological sciences. The ONLY SAFE LEVEL OF TOTAL CHOLESTEROL is LESS than 150, not 200 as most lab results show, and as most doctors believe. How do I know this?

Not from Dr. Fuhrman, but from the doctor who headed up the biggest Cardiac Study in American history, the man/doctor/scientist who ran the Framingham Heart Study for 30 years. He stated that 1/3rd or almost 35% of heart attacks occur in people with TOTAL (not LDL) Cholesterol of between 150 and 200, and that the only group of people who had a ZERO heart attack rate were those whose TOTAL Cholesterol was BELOW 150!!!! This is a fact, not my opinion!

This means you are in grave danger with a total cholesterol of 252! And it also means that the LDL of 172 is horrible, even if some of it is what you at one point called “good LDL”.

Next, your BUN/creatinine ratio of 20 shows you are dehydrated. This is probably due to your acidic condition. I think this is one other place where Dr. Atkins was actually right (so far my score for him is 3/5 - 3 out of 5 ain’t bad except that missing the other two (listed above as c and d under #4) can kill you.

This other part I’m referring to is the fact that Dr. Atkins did recommend that everyone drink 8 (or was it 10) glasses of water a day. This is necessary to try to minimize the damage you are doing to your kidneys by constantly excreting acids through them. By the way (again) you are much more likely to get kidney stones on the Atkins diet also, because your kidneys in self defense, have to try to neutralize all the acid you’re throwing at them, so they have to work overtime to produce base in the form of bicarbonate. When the acid and base get together, they cause the precipitation (falling out of) calcium, thus causing kidney stones.

7) Then there’s another problem caused by the Atkins diet. That is, when you keep your body in a state of acidity, your body tries to balance this off by neutralizing the acid by manufacturing a base. The base is manufactured from phosphate. Where do you think you get the phosphate? Your body leaches it out of your bones! How is phosphate stored in your bones? As calcium phosphate. So as your body is constantly fighting the acidity, it is pulling the calcium out of your bones as an incidental negative side effect (friendly fire) of pulling out the phosphate. Your body cannot just stick the calcium back in, so what happens is you pee it out. So, on the Atkins diet, you are peeing your bones away, and you are causing yourself to have premature osteoporosis (thinning of bones which leads to fractures and debilitation).

8) Atkins’ misguided diet also does major damage to your gall bladder, but I don’t have time to go into all that now! (I heard that sigh of relief!) I hope you appreciate the time I’ve given you, because at about $200/hr I’ve just given you about $500 or $600 worth of advice, and spent 2 and 1/2 to 3 hrs thinking about your problems and trying to help you with them, far more than your actual doctor has at any one time, I’m sure! Also, I’ve known at least 2 people who’ve had to have their gall bladders removed not too long after they started on the Atkins diet.

9) I agree with you, that you shouldn’t start on a statin drug (like Lipitor or Crestor which can cause severe side effects in muscle tissue (myositis &/or rhabdomyolysis), unless there’s no other way for you to get your cholesterol down. But there is such a way. Dr. Fuhrman has written a book about how to bring down cholesterol (entitled Cholesterol Protection for Life), but more importantly, he has had HIS METHODS SCIENTIFICALLY INVESTIGATED and directly compared with Lipitor, and his diet reduced cholesterol MORE than did the statin drug! (and remember, he’s not a radical, he does have recipes with meat in them, and has stated that science does not support the assumption that eliminating ALL meat is necessarily healthier than just reducing it a lot.)

Whew! That was a mouthful.

Best Wishes with your health, and please try to evaluate the facts, not just jump to conclusions that people who disagree with your hero, Dr. Atkins, must be wrong.

“Dr. David”

Any thoughts? There's a lot to consider here from "Dr. David" I know, but what do you think about any part of what he wrote? I'll be quite interested in what my readers think about this doctor's comments. "Dr. David," are you ready for what the readers of "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb" think about your advice? Brace yourself, sir!

4-11-06 UPDATE: THANK YOU for your excellent feedback to what "Dr. David" had to say about the Atkins diet. You all have done an excellent job rebutting what is essentially a whole lotta BS to put it lightly.

Here's what one of my regular readers wrote about this post:

Had a chance to read Dr. David's letter this morning. Sheesh. My opinion? Well, to borrow his own words: "First of all, most Dr’s are full of shit..." I don't know about all doctors, but I'd certainly say he falls under that category. So what if he has studied conventional nutrition! That doesn't mean squat to me as nutrition as it is taught today is as full of holes as the Swiss cheese that it counsels you not to eat because of its high fat content. Furthermore, what sort of doctor uses such language? The minute he resorts to potty mouth, he loses all credibility with me. A rational, coherent outline of his position would command my attention even if I were still to disagree with him in the end.

By the way, I really salute your taking on the vegetarians and vegans! I don't think there's anyone better suited to the task. Needless to say, they really irritate me no end.