Illustrations from the first edition and from my blog.

The art of science. The science of art - 1.

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The first edition of Nutrition in Crisis was called The World Turned Upside Down.  Also a popular song from Hamilton, the reference was to the myth, possibly true, that, in the American Revolution, when the British surrendered at Yorktown, they marched out playing a popular tune of that name. The subtitle, The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution, drew an analogy between the two revolutions. The cover of the book was drawn by my daughter, Robin Feinman, showing George trying to get into his old Army uniform.

There is some attention to detail. Washington’s colors were blue and buff. I had read somewhere the mistaken idea that generals in the US Army could design their own uniform, along the lines of the Eisenhower jacket. I thought this might be the origin. The story was not true. It was not a real tradition. Blue and buff and the Ike jacket were isolated examples.

What to Eat.

Chapter 1 provided a summary of the book, at least the part that answered the basic question: what should I eat?  I listed the three rules for dieting:

These were carried over to the second edition, Nutrition in Crisis, but I took out the reference to the low-glycemic index carbs (low-GI) which I don’t think is a reliable rule. It seemed like a good principle originally because it emphasized the effect of the carbohydrate rather than the nutrient itself. But it is not blood glucose per se that is always the goal. Also, the actual measurements are too variable. Most of all, it seems like a device for getting around saying total carbohydrate restriction which is really the most reliable approach. I am especially embarrassed that I used to teach low-GI because it stressed experimental measurements rather than theory but it’s just not accurate.

In any case, I tried to emphasize that the best diet was the one that works, the one you can follow. It doesn’t matter how theoretically sound it is or how reasonable the principles it’s based, if you don’t lose weight, you don’t want to keep doing it. You want the diet based on experience rather than theory. I tried to illustrate it with an old joke and my daughter made an appropriate cartoon.

The guy goes to the butcher and sees that pork chops are $8 a pound.

Customer:“Why so much? Across the street, he is selling them for $5 a pound.”

Butcher: “Why don’t you buy them there?”

Customer: “Today, he’s all out.”

Butcher: “When I’m all out, they’re only $2 a pound.”

Readers did not get the joke, that is, they did not see the relevance. I tried to explain it but once you do that, you’re out.  So I removed it from the second edition.

Calories

The working assumption of traditional nutrition is that only calories count. It is common to invoke the first law of thermodynamics which is a conservation of energy law. On that principle, it is claimed that metabolism is arranged so as to distribute nutrients in an orderly way as in Refrigerator Woman, below. My last post explained that there is more to the first law. Total energy may be conserved but the distribution of that energy between work (chemical work, what you want) and heat (which may be wasted), is variable. The relative amounts of biochemical work (metabolism) vs. heat — the efficiency of processing different macronutrients — is not conserved between diets. In this, I pointed out that the first law contains the seeds of the second law which says that all (real) processes are inherently inefficient.

The Second Law.

Unlike the first law, which is a conservation law, the second law is a dissipation law. Except in theoretical constructions like absolute zero, all processes are inherently inefficient. The key concept is the entropy which represents a measure of probability or information, the degree of organization. High entropy means high probability. If the energy is constant, the entropy will increase because, barring some other effect, things will assume the most probable state. In chemical thermodynamics, reactions occur if they reduce energy or increase entropy or if they decrease the so-called free energy, a combination of both. The second law is not always easy to understand. It can be stated in different ways but one form says that it is impossible to spontaneously (no work) transfer heat from a cold body to a warm body. Obvious enough but TWTUD described the historical paradox of how to violate the second law. Here’s Robin Feinman’s illustration of the famous thought experiment and the action of Maxwell’s demon.

The original experiment proposed by Maxwell was somewhat more sophisticated and it was only later that somebody else called his actor a demon. The demon sat on a membrane separating two compartments of a box. One compartment had a hot gas and the other, a cold gas.The partition had a little door, a very well-machined, well-oiled door whose openings and closings did not require any real amount of work and did not generate any heat. The demon would look into the cold gas and if he saw a fast moving particle, he would ever so gently open the door and let the particle into the hot compartment. He could, similarly, let slow moving particles move from the hot gas to the cold gas. The net effect was to transfer heat from a cold body to a warm body, a clear no-no according to the second law.

What’s wrong here? Was the second law not universal? This paradox completely stumped physicists of the nineteenth century. It’s because it’s about probability and randomness and they were not used to thinking like that. The answer to Maxwell’s paradox is that it is not really a paradox so much as another way of stating the second law. It’s a statement of how the world is. Information costs. It is impossible make such a set-up without doing work. If you could use some fancy electronic device to set up a sensor to distinguish between fast and slow molecules, it would have to do work.

The bottom line is that if you want to store fat less efficiently, pick a diet that has the highest entropic cost. (Different foods are digested and metabolized with different entropies, that is, different efficiencies).

Carrot Nation

The recent puritanical and truculent activity of vegetarians and the diffuse “plant-based,” movement is at odds with the supposed improvement in your personality from not eating animals. In fact, we see some serious attempt to have government impose control raising the specter of prohibition. Most recently, Hizzona’ Eric Adams, Mayor of New York is planning to interfere with school lunches or something. Coincidentally, I had had a long talk with him when he was State Senator on the value in changing dietary guidelines for people with diabetes. He seemed to understand the ideas behind carbohydrate restriction I must have done something wrong. I did not know at the time that he had diabetes and I was surprised to find out from an article in the media that he successfully brought it under control with a vegan diet.  I congratulate him on that but he believes that if he can do it, anybody can. Highly unlikely, but either way, I see incipient prohibition and that’s not a comforting idea.

So I could not resist the play on Carrie Nation who was a radical member of the temperance movement, famous for attacking alcohol-serving businesses with puritanical zeal and a hatchet. She originally simply protested at saloons but, because of a divine vision, she was compelled moved on to smashing bottles of liquor with rocks and ultimately with her trademark hatchet. Original photograph and contemporary cartoon at the end of this post.  Robin Feinman’s cartoon captures the feeling. A future post will update the blog in which I described the limitations of the plant-based strategy.

Original photograph and contemporary cartoon below.  The cartoon refers to an event where Carrie attacked a saloon on Washington’s birthday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Nation.