My friend Steve Salerno -- editor and uncredited coauthor of my first book, The Testosterone Advantage Plan -- has emerged as the most impassioned critic of America's self-help industry.

In this op-ed in the L.A. Daily News, he goes after an even bigger target:

I'd answer that question differently. I wouldn't blame the diet industry first, since just about any weight-loss plan can work in the short term. The problem lies elsewhere -- the diets are unsustainable (too low in calories, too restrictive in food choices, too incompatible with the realities of the dieter's life), the dieters fail to make lifestyle adjustments, or the diet and dieter are a poor match.

Later in the column, Steve writes this:

I think there's a pretty good reason why the average person doesn't trust medical professionals to give honest and useful information about weight loss. Would the diet industry even exist if doctors actually knew how to help people lose weight? Put another way: If doctors were as bad at cardiology as they've been at weight control, I might very well be writing books about preventing heart attacks, instead of diet and exercise. (Then again, since diet and exercise can help prevent heart attacks, I'm sort of doing that already.)

The biggest reason not to trust doctors when it comes to weight loss is that they worked so hard for so long to keep their patients away from low-carb diets. There's no single diet solution for every person and every problem -- humans are too diverse for that -- but there are clear advantages to low-carb diets for people who have diminished insulin sensitivity. Insulin is the master hormone that determines where food goes after you put it into your mouth, and carbohydrates stimulate insulin more than any other nutrients. People with malfunctioning insulin end up with too much of this food floating around in their bloodstreams, like drivers trying to navigate in Manhattan at rush hour with all the traffic lights switched off.

Logic says that if a system is overloaded, the first thing you do is reduce the load. It's the old "if you find yourself in a hole, quit digging" idea. No cardiologist would tell a patient with a weak or damaged heart to go out and run laps. And yet, doctors remain reluctant to recommend low-carb diets for reducing excess blood sugar and allowing a patient's insulin levels to return to normal.

Which brings me to this interview in T-nation with Jeff Volek, who designed the diet for Testosterone Advantage Plan. The entire interview is worth reading, but I was most intrigued by these comments he makes near the end:

I had no idea they could do that with blood tests.

Weekend blog meat

• The big fitness-industry news is that the American College of Sports Medicine has new exercise guidelines. To my complete astonishment, the ACSM recommends 60 minutes a week of higher-intensity exercise as an option. As I wrote in New Rules of Lifting, short bouts of intense exercise have a life-extending, heart-strengthening effect that's far greater than what you can get from extended bouts of walking or the other non-strenuous activities that official organizations like to recommend. But there's still a lot of room for improvement in the new guidelines, as Andrew Heffernan explains in learned detail here.
• Weird science: A doctor who faked research to claim a major scientific breakthrough actually did make an important discovery. He just didn't realize it.