I have read a big ol' pile of nutrition books in the past 33 years. I generally learn at least a little something from each one, or at the very least am reminded of a point I may have forgotten. But in his new book Wheat Belly, Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist from Milwaukee, and author of Track Your Plaque, and the Heart Scan Blog has written a book in which the majority of the information is new to me. I am agog. And excited - I am a big nutrition geek, after all; it's thrilling to have this sort of stuff presented to me, and presented in such a readable form.

Dana Carpender's CarbSmart Espresso Chocolate Chip Brownies

If you look back through the Ask Dana archives, you'll see I have written, in the past, about pork rinds, the fact that they are not, as some assume, egregious junk food, but actually the most nutritious thing in the snack aisle. In that article, I mentioned that once, years ago, an outraged online detractor of low carb diets threw in my cyberface the accusation that I ate pork rind cake. That accusation is now true.

So what did you do last Saturday? I had several dozen low carbers in my backyard! The Second Annual Low Carb Meet & Greet was a smashing success, or at least I thought it was.

Chances are you've seen the news already: Fructose can cause cancer. Specifically, this study looked at pancreatic cancer, a particularly deadly and intractable form of cancer, and one that has been increasing in frequency. I was unable to find the full text of this article, but gleaned that it demonstrated that cancer cells are particularly able to use fructose to reproduce, fueling tumor growth.

My nephew Henry and niece Halliday came to stay with That Nice Boy I Married and I this past week. We had a super-great time with them, as we always do - went to the county fair, did a little geocaching, watched a few movies, and just generally hung out.

The low carb world has been abuzz with the news that Diabetes Health Magazine recently published an article, Type 2 Diabetes: From Old Dogmas to New Realities - Part 2 by a registered dietician and diabetes educator named Hope Warshaw. Ms Warshaw wrote this article, she says, to debunk two what she calls "common old dogmas" regarding diabetes management.

This is the CarbQuik Low-Carb cheese biscuit recipe as published by the manufacturer, Tova Industries. Low Carb Cheddar Cheese Biscuits Recipe with CarbQuik

First of all, there are no monolithic Powers That Be. There are a whole lot of different Powers That Be, and they all make up their minds separately, in their own time, and they all have their own motives. There are, for instance, medical schools, a whole lot of medical schools, and a great deal of the funding for those medical schools comes from the pharmaceutical industry, as does a lot of the money for medical research. That's a clear danger, but the alternative, at least as far as I can tell, is to fund medical schools and medical research with tax money. For good or ill, a large faction of Americans is very much against that.

Dana Carpender's Peanut Butter-Coconut-Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

For years and years, mainstream health authorities have been denying that sugar is detrimental to health. The only proven ill-effect of sugar, they insist, is that it rots your teeth.