Brad Marshall

Fat From The Previous Meal Sets The Metabolic Table

After publication of The Croissant Diet, which promotes a diet combining highly saturated fat and starch for weight loss, I got a lot of questions along the lines of whether it mattered if fat was eaten before starch. Or maybe protein should be consumed first? The proposed mechanism of the croissant diet is that saturated …

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An Alternative Hypothesis For The Rise And Fall of Heart Disease In The US In The 20th Century

OR: An Ode To Vitamin K2 Summary It is still something of a mystery why heart disease rates in America climbed precipitously in the first half of the 20th century and then steadily declined from 1960 on. The single best predictor of heart disease deaths is arterial calcium. The dietary factor that most affects arterial …

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Disastrous Trends in American Bacon

In The Croissant Diet specification, I advise against the consumption of pork fat. This is ironic since The Croissant Diet is loosely based on the historical diet of France and when I was at The French Culinary Institute every recipe started with the line “Saute pork belly in butter”. So why am I now saying …

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The French Diet in Upstate New York

In my previous post I defined The French Diet as a diet where the staples are starch and dairy fat. Cornell Cooperative Extension produced a series of informational pamphlets in the thirties and forties with topics such as “The Clovers in New York” and “Simplifying Home Sewing”. You can peruse them in the Cornell Digital …

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The Curious Case of Nanan and Huain

Another interesting finding of “Diet, Life-style and Mortality in China” is that there was a huge variation in caloric consumption in different regions of China without a corresponding difference in body weights. This is the most notable in two neighboring areas – Nanan and Huian – two places on the Southeast coast of China with …

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Chinese Office Workers Eat More Than Americans

In The ROS Theory Of Obesity I stated without providing evidence that Chinese people in the 1980s were lean while eating a high starch diet. In the comments thread, it was suggested that perhaps the Chinese were thin due to lack of available calories. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around. When I wrote …

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