Biggest Loser nutritionist Dr. Michael Dansinger was inspired by Atkins

Filed under: Celebrity,Podcast — @ November 24, 2010

In Episode 421 of “The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show with Jimmy Moore,” we hear from diet researcher and diabetes care advocate Dr. Michael Dansinger who was the lead researcher on a famous study published in the January 5, 2005 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association called “Comparison of the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone Diets for Weight Loss and Heart Disease Risk Reduction” that found low-carb worked just as well for weight loss and health improvements as all other popular diets. It laid the groundwork for future studies like Gardner, Shai, and Foster comparing low-carb diets to other nutritional approaches that have all shown low-carb diets should not be so quickly dismissed. These days he runs the “Conquering Diabetes” blog at WebMD while offering diabetics an effective low-glycemic dietary approach to treating their disease. In his “spare” time, Dr. Dansinger is a nutritional consultant on the hit NBC-TV weight loss reality show The Biggest Loser. Although I’ve interviewed him at my blog a few years back, this is the first time he’s ever been on my podcast.

Listen to Dr. Michael Dansinger talk about how the Atkins low-carb diet got him interested in researching nutrition and weight loss as a physician in the late 1990s, how low-carb helped him lose some weight in a “pleasant” way, his disappointment in the lack of research available about low-carb diets, why he invested five years into conducting his diet comparison study, why he is a fan of individuality in diet, the monumental change happening in conventional wisdom with health experts like Dr. Andrew Weil, why the bias against low-carb “irritates” him, how you can change the minds of people who oppose high-fat, low-carb living, the frustration of “low-carb” diet studies that don’t put study participants on a genuine Atkins-styled diet, why ignoring the individuality of the diet flaws diet comparison studies, why he believes more diet research is not needed, why diet adherence improves through coaching and accountability, his plan to begin a network of diabetes reversal clinics by late 2011, his program at Tufts Medical Center to help diabetics reverse the impact o their disease, why he prefers a moderate-carb approach for people with diabetes, why forgoing labels about diet helps lower the guard of low-carb skeptics, the diet used behind-the-scenes at The Biggest Loser, why a 1500-calorie diet is perfectly fine even with the heavy exercise promoted on the show, why many of the former contestants seem to gain back their weight lost on the show, how he got his WebMD blog writing about diabetes, why he gives the thumbs up to Dr. Neal Barnard’s vegan diabetes therapy, his diabetes drama poem to President Barack Obama, his reaction to whether First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign will make an impact, the harmfulness of the “toxin” we consume known as sugar, why the combination of sugar, starch and fat is like “bullets and guns,” his response to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines releasing next month and what his “food pyramid” would look like, and his study comparing his dietary approach with the USDA pyramid.