Fairchild, while I sympathize with your general wariness that not all published research is necessarily valid (especially when the spin doctors get a hold of the material) on the other hand..
Speaking just for my personal experiences, one critical difference for me between low calorie and low carb is that one of the two violates your own principle of even being able to eat until satisfied... I can't do that on random-food low-calorie dieting (nor low-fat-low-calorie dieting), where I can easily do that on low carb eating. Apparently I'm not the only one who observed the problem of generic low-calorie dieting, as we see by a thread right on our own board here about failure-prone Weight Watcher's dieting:
http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=136308
My best fat loss results are after I've eaten three meals a day; when I eat just two, my metab slows down, and I frequently stall. Countless others mention this too, in greater detail. So much for the Common Wisdom of low-calorie eating being the cure for all. A calorie is just a calorie in a bunson burner in a clinical lab, but the human body is a marvelously more complicated instrument in how we process those varying caloric sources via our varying digestive pathways and nutritional biochemistry. Why don't you agree?
Also, the "Common Wisdom" of applying Cause and Effect is what misled (in another recent post) a British actress to wrongly associate her recent kidney infection with low carb dieting (see the post for the great posts easily explaining why it was likely due to causes other than low carb dieting - she wasn't even doing the Atkins Diet correctly anyhow).
It's also "common wisdom" by some that "bread's been around since Day One and therefore wholesome" (forgetting that what people at as bread back then isn't overprocessed white Wonder Bread)
It was also Common Wisdom for quite a long time that the sun revolved around the earth. The only way we moved past that was to question Common Wisdom and conduct studies, theorize and question that Common Wisdom.
The term Common Wisdom, I think, is somewhat even of a misnomer. What's Common Wisdom for one group of people/culture/region/era is not such for another group.
Again, while I sympathize with your rightly pointing out that one shouldn't take as gospel whatever latest "study" supposedly claims, on the other hand, we do need to learn more and not rely solely on the subjective limits and variations of past wisdom - and which past era does one refer to... William Banting's overall latter-19th century era had it wrong, although his published empircal research being a light shining forth against it, just as Dr. Atkins' latter-20th century book in his era.
Perhaps with enough peer-reviewed studies (these *are* important to do, Fairchild... if enough of them are properly done, it will help The Cause by providing more definitive information, longer-term clinical results tracking, etc.) combined with successful healthy low carb dieters shouting at the rooftops of their own empiracal research, there will become a non-controversial "core" of "common wisdom" about low carbing someday soon, with the "controversial" part merely being in the variations within the low carb WOE.
Hybrid Mode
