Metabolism, Diet, and Disease Conference update and a job posting

I promised in my last post — yes, far too long ago — that I would give an update on the Metabolism, Diet and Disease Conference, which was held at the end of May in Washington, DC. As the months passed, I was waiting to hear from the organizers that they had posted a video of the panel discussion that ended the conference, and now, as of a few days ago, they have.

The conference itself was rather remarkable. The idea was to bring together from all disciplines researchers working on the various pathologies associated with insulin resistance. It was organized by the editors of BioMed Central, who had come upon the idea after reading The Diet Delusion, which is the British edition of Good Calories, Bad Calories. I was enlisted to help organize and suggest and recruit speakers and executive committee members. The conference also provided the opportunity  to get researchers who had worked on carb-restricted diets — Eric Westman and Jeff Volek, in particular — presenting in a non-nutrition venue to researchers who might otherwise never take their work seriously or at least never imagine that it had relevance to their research in insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia and the related pathologies. Eugene Fine was also there with a poster on his just published pilot study on ketogenic diets and cancer —  ”Targeting insulin inhibition as a metabolic therapy in advanced cancer: A pilot safety and feasibility dietary trial in 10 patients.”

What I found most fascinating about the conference was how beliefs shifted over the course of the three day event, from unconditional faith in the conventional wisdom to openness and scientific curiosity about the kinds of alternative hypotheses put forward by myself and others.  On the first day of the conference I was having arguments/discussions with researchers about the laws of thermodynamics and how they apply to obesity (or don’t, as I believe) only to find myself sitting with them on a panel on day three as they agreed that the role of refined grains and sugars in cancer and cancer therapy had to be taken seriously.

With that, I highly recommend reading the BioMed Central blog post on the last day’s panel discussion and then watching the video of the discussion itself to see how it played out. You can see for yourself how beliefs and opinions had shifted so that the outcome of the panel discussion was probably something that few of the researchers going in would have ever imagined. I’m not optimistic enough to think that this is a long term change in thinking, or at least not without other factors, experiments and influential researchers keeping the momentum up — and, of course, the science has to turn out to be right or at least mostly right. But it certainly gave me hope that the kinds of issues we’ve been raising again and again outside the research community will soon be addressed critically (i.e., not in a knee-jerk, dismissive manner)  by researchers within the community.

This brings up item number two in this post, and here I’m going to be cribbing considerably  from what Peter Attia recently posted on his blog — theeatingacadmy.org . This is our update on NuSI, the Nutrition Science Initiative, and a job we’re hoping to fill in the near future.