AGE RAGE and ALE: VLDL degradation and Krauss

When you are waiting for a paradigm shift, you look at the old school dinosaurs with incredulity. One such dinosaur is Krauss. Who is Krauss? Well, you know that time worn phase of Churchill's:


"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on"


That man is not really Krauss. Krauss is more like a little kitten, just beginning to use a litter tray and making such a mess trying to bury the truth that it doesn't manage to cover it effectively... The smell is pretty much a give away and someone has to empty the litter tray anyway.

This is Krauss burying the unsavoury truth about low carbohydrate diets as best he can, taken from the abstract.


"Moreover, beneficial lipid changes resulting from a reduced carbohydrate intake were not significant after weight loss"


The kitten's litter tray had to be emptied by Feinman and Volek, who know the truth when they smell it. You can read the full text here but this is the summary:


"Although some effort is required to disentangle the data and interpretation, the recent publication from Krauss et al. [1] should be recognized as a breakthrough. Their findings, presented in Figures 1-5, make it clear that the salutary effects of CR [carbohydrate restriction] on dyslipidemia do not require weight loss, a benefit that is not a feature of strategies based on fat reduction. As such, Krauss et al. [1] provides one of the strongest arguments to date for CR as a fundamental approach to diet, especially for treating atherogenic dyslipidemia"


Don't you just love that first phrase! So that's Krauss, just an introduction. Bearing in mind that all of these people live within the lipid hypothesis.

Why focus on Krauss? Well he wrote this commentary on the paper teasing apart the mechanism of the fasting triglyceride lowering effect of fish oils.


Here is the title of his commentary:


Hold the antioxidants and improve plasma lipids?


It never ceases to amaze me how someone who knows so much about the detail of VLDL production can be so stupid. The first thing is that back in the 1990s the original fish oil work showed that adding vitamin E actually increased the hypolipidaemic effect of fish oils. Maybe Krauss doesn't read old stuff from the wilds of scandinavia. Giving vitamin E by mouth is not remotely the same as dropping some vitamin E or desferroxamine on to cultured liver cells in a petri dish. Ancient practical work makes that crystal clear.

The other bizarre lack of perception is that it is BECAUSE saturated fats are not prone to peroxidation that they don't drop VLDL counts. He actually says this. For goodness sake. The man knows so much. He almost understands, but never quite. Saturated fats don't drop VLDLs, specifically because there is no need for the body to panic about saturated fat based VLDLs entering the blood stream. They don't peroxidise. Maybe Krauss has never heard of Kitava, unless he sees it as a potential market for mass stain medication...Sugar coated VLDLs may be another matter, whatever their lipid content.

And then of course you have to ask whether lowering triglycerides with fish oil does any good at all. The answer to that seems to depend on which study you cite. In some they help, in some they don't. But Krauss can't see beyond a lab number.

Peter