Subcutaneous versus visceral fat: How to tell the difference?

The photos below, from Wikipedia, show two patterns of abdominal fat deposition. The one on the left is predominantly of subcutaneous abdomi...

You can eat a lot during the Holiday Season and gain no body fat, as long as you also eat little

The evolutionary pressures placed by periods of famine shaped the physiology of most animals, including humans, toward a design that favors...

Slow versus slow-brisk walking: Effects on type 2 diabetics

I am not a big fan of reviewing new studies published in refereed journals, particularly those that make it to the news. I prefer studies ...

Can intermittent very-low-calorie dieting cure diabetes?

The health effects of very-low-calorie diets (VLCDs) adopted for short periods of time (e.g., 5 days) have been the target of much recent ...

The megafat could be the healthiest

Typically obesity leads to health problems via insulin resistance ( ). Excess calories are stored as fat in fat cells up to a certain poin...

Waist-to-weight ratio vs. body max index

The optimal waist / weight ratio (WWR) theory ( ) is one of the most compatible with evidence regarding the lowest mortality body mass ind...

You can eat a lot during the Holiday Season and gain no body fat, as long as you also eat little

This post has been revised and re-published . The original comments are preserved below. Typically this is done with posts that attract man...

Waist-to-weight ratios in pictures: The John Stone transformation

John Stone is a bodybuilder and founder of a bodybuilding and fitness web site ( ). There he has provided pictures and stats of his remark...

Could grain-fed beef liver be particularly nutritious?

There is a pervasive belief today that grain-fed beef is unhealthy, a belief that I addressed before in this blog ( ) and that I think is ...

An illustration of the waist-to-weight ratio theory: The fit2fat2fit experiment

In my previous blog post, I argued that one’s optimal weight may be the one that minimizes one’s waist-to-weight ratio. I built this argum...

What is your optimal weight? Maybe it is the one that minimizes your waist-to-weight ratio

There is a significant amount of empirical evidence suggesting that, for a given individual and under normal circumstances, the optimal we...

Drs. Francisco Cervantes and Marivic Torregosa, and the 2013 Ancestral Health Symposium

Last year I traveled to South Korea to give presentations on nonlinear structural equation modeling and WarpPLS ( ). These are an advanced...

No fat gain while eating well during the Holiday Season: Palatability isolines, the 14-percent advantage, and nature’s special spice

Like most animals, our Paleolithic ancestors had to regularly undergo short periods of low calorie intake. If they were successful at procur...

The steep obesity increase in the USA in the 1980s: In a sense, it reflects a major success story

Obesity rates have increased in the USA over the years, but the steep increase starting around the 1980s is unusual. Wang and Beydoun do a g...

The 14-percent advantage of eating little and then a lot: Putting it in practice

In my previous post I argued that the human body may react to “eating big” as it would to overfeeding, increasing energy expenditure by a ce...

The 14-percent advantage of eating little and then a lot: Is it real?

When you look at the literature on overfeeding, you see a number over and over again – 14 percent. That is approximately the increase in ene...

The lowest-mortality BMI: What is its relationship with fat-free mass?

Do overweight folks live longer? It is not uncommon to see graphs like the one below, from the Med Journal Watch blog ( ), suggesting that, ...

The 2012 Arch Intern Med red meat-mortality study: The “protective” effect of smoking

In a previous post ( ) I used WarpPLS ( ) to analyze the model below, using data reported in a recent study looking at the relationship betw...