Today’s carbgrrl musings are a little less overtly scientific than at times in the past, and a little more speculative and personal. You see, a friend loaned me a diet book that wasn’t actually 100-percent horrible, and it offered an insight that resonated with me in a big way.

The book was Michel Montignac’s Eat & Lose Weight For Good: The Montignac Weight-Loss Plan, in a UK edition. (This is probably the US equivalent.) My friend and I had discovered a mutual appreciation of GCBC, and she thought I’d like this book too.

Montignac has a wonderfully blunt style, and he seems to enjoy shocking his audience. Very French! He’s written quite a few books, focusing on what I’d call a hybrid low-glycemic/”French girls don’t get fat” approach. This book has a couple of scientific boo-boos, for example extolling the virtues of fructose (?!?). But he has a good handle on the sheer variability of people’s responses to carbs. (Atkins had the same, with his emphasis on finding your personal Critical Carbohydrate Level for Losing.)

This passage reached out and grabbed me:

Some people have been able to remain slim all their life, although they have bad eating habits. This is because they were blessed with a very healthy pancreas that has not lapsed into hyperinsulinism, despite the heavy glycaemia inflicted on it over a long period of time.

Others — and these are the majority — also started off with a healthy pancreas that enabled them to stay slim for many years despite their bad eating habits. And then, when they were about 30 or 35, and certainly by the time were 40, they started to put on weight. In later years, some even became obese and diabetic. Their pancreas held out for several decades, but in the end it succumbed to the abuse it had suffered.

And then there are those, like me, who arrived on earth with a sub-standard pancreas that was inherited. The chances of having a frail pancreas, if your parents were obese and therefore hyperinsulinic, is high. It is almost certain in any case, if the diet from an early age is hyperglycaemic. [p. 47]

I suspect he’s just described my pancreas: feeble, rickety, frail, sub-standard. Some of my friends (probably with brawny he-man pancreata) seem incredulous at the crazy lengths I go to even to avoid gaining weight at this point, having to cut out just about any slightly scary carb and some nominally okay ones (mmm, oatmeal). It’s like I’ve used up my lifetime allotment of normal insulin response.

Notice that Montignac suggests two factors to consider: heredity and environment. (With risk factors on both sides of my family, and with a history of dieting in the idiotic 70’s and 80’s, I bet I’ve got both.) One or both might explain one of the outcomes of an exercise in occupational medicine, done at DuPont in the late 1940’s to help executives lose weight and avoid the new epidemic of heart disease in America. Taubes recounts the tale:

In June 1949, [Alfred] Pennington published an account of the DuPont experience… All of this seemed paradoxical: the DuPont executives lost weight on a diet that did not restrict calories. Carbohydrates were restricted in their diet — no more than eighty calories at each meal. “In a few cases,” Pennington reported, “even this much carbohydrate prevented weight loss, though an ad-libitum [unrestricted] intake of protein and fat, more exclusively, was successful.” …. If [one executive] ate any carbohydrates, “even an apple,” Pennington wrote, his weight would climb upward. [GCBC p. 330, Ch. 20; bold added]

Heredity and environment are the filters through which I now view all women’s magazine articles, studies, and public-health pronouncements about obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome. Maybe low-fat does work — for the young, or the pancreatically strong. Maybe it works now but it contributes to later yo-yo effects. If we had an easy way of testing both axes, maybe we’d have a shot at predicting who will lose weight on which diet at which juncture in their lives without lasting damage.

Speaking for myself, I just can’t take the chance anymore.

We originally prepared the flow diagrams using that wonderful tool, WebSequenceDiagrams.com. Paul then doctored the resulting PDF files with a special new technology: overlaying the diagrams with translucent gray boxes that have holes strategically cut out of them, and then — this was the tricky part — moving the holes. (I think Paul is using this special technology as part of his JavaOne session on Designing and Building Security into REST Applications for explaining OAuth tomorrow. He may even have enhanced the special technology by then. Don’t miss it!)

The protocol peep show starts…now.

• Step 0
• Step 1
• Step 2
• Step 3

(Check out the other entries in this blog category for more explanation.)

Bacon is all the rage these days. It’s almost…overexposed. Luckily there are still ways to have fun with the subject (other than eating it, of course).

Now, being a big bacon fan myself (we actually wrapped our Thanksgiving turkey in bacon last year), I wondered: what could I possibly add to people’s enjoyment of this savory treat? I know, I could try and convince you it’s healthy!

Searching my new Kindle version of GCBC confirms the contention of the hardcover index that, not counting a whole bunch of references to Francis Bacon, there’s only one real discussion of bacon in the book. It goes a little something like this:

The observation that monounsaturated fats both lower LDL cholesterol and raise HDL also came with an ironic twist: the principal fat in red meat, eggs, and bacon is not saturated fat, but the very same monounsaturated fat as in olive oil. The implications are almost impossible to believe after three decades of public-health recommendations suggesting that any red meat consumed should at least be lean, with any excess fat removed. …. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak in lieu of bread or potatoes would actually reduce heart-disease risk, although virtually no nutritional authority will say so publicly. The same is true for lard and bacon. [GCBC, Ch. 9, pp. 168-9]

So given a chance between “turkey bacon”:

…and actual turkey wrapped in actual bacon:

…why not go for the real yummy thing?

A bunch of us also ran sessions to collect use cases for the general area of user-managed access, in breadth-first and depth-first fashion.

With IIW sessions taking place simultaneously in areas A through J, it’s impossible to attend everything you want to. Judi Clark generously recorded a large handful of sessions to help people time-shift, and one of them was the ProtectServe session; many thanks to =judic! You may want to open up the easier-to-read versions of the slides and protocol diagrams alongside.

If you’re curious about all this ProtectServe and relationship management stuff, but you’re coming in fresh and don’t want to start with an out-and-out geekfest, a great place to start is the video from my recent talk at the European Identity Conference.

If you’re curious about octopi and corn, on the other hand, don’t miss Asa Hardcastle’s FUN!!! session on the Wakame open-source library…

Whatever you call us/them, we’ve been keeping busy lately working on them. Now’s a great time to pay close attention if you’ve got stubborn identity issues.

For starters, the Concordia survey on identity federation — our first survey — went splendidly. The survey results are on the Concordia site, and you can also find some nice graphs directly on SurveyMonkey. One hundred and three people completed the survey, with interesting results. It appears that complex federation topologies are no longer a rare beast. Don’t forget to check out all the “other” comments.

We’re now gearing up to do a second survey, on identity assurance this time. If you’re interested in this subject, feel free to add your desired survey questions here.

Of course, we Concordians participated in a huuuge identity workshop prior to the RSA conference a few weeks ago — with over 700 people coming through the doors at one point or another during the day. The presentations are available, and also don’t forget to check out the OSIS “I5″ testing results.

And now we’re in the planning stages for a Concordia workshop to be held at the Burton Catalyst conference in San Diego in late July. Our theme is Use Cases Driving Identity in Enterprise 2.0: The Consumerization of IT, and we’re actively soliciting your problem statements, use cases, solutions, and issues in the form of short position papers. If you’ve got a one-pager — or even a paragraph-sized abstract — that describes an Enterprise 2.0 identity topic you’d like to bring up, please send it along to our intrepid Britta Glade at britta [at] projectliberty.org as soon as you can. The agenda will grow and evolve online, right before your eyes. We’ll conduct this workshop in more of a traditional mold — lots of interactive discussion.

Wouldn’t you like to be a Concordian too?

I’m putting together a one-day Web Services and Identity course with a great lineup of additional lecturers: Paul Downey, Marc Hadley, and Rich Salz, all of whom have taught at the School before. Some of my previous posts (2007, 2006) give the flavor of the event and my series of courses.

You won’t want to miss any part of the week — you’ll sharpen your skills, you’ll hang out with great people, and you’ll get your questions answered about how to apply the hottest tech (check out all the new course subjects!) to your hottest business problems. What are you waiting for? Register already!

(If you’re the hesitant type, you can just follow along on Twitter at @xmlsummerschool for now, but make sure not to miss any registration deadlines…)

Seeing as how I’m late to the blogging party, I’ll just do a link roundup here:

• Download the whitepaper itself: Microsoft “Geneva” Server and Sun OpenSSO - Enabling Unprecedented Collaboration Across Heterogeneous IT Environments

• Check out the Smoking Monkey’s post, BFF . . . OpenSSO and Microsoft “GENEVA” Server Interoperate — it’s silly and yet it gives important context to the scenarios and technologies we chose to test

• Take a look at Jacki DeCoster’s entry on the official Sun “On the Record” blog noting the news

• Go visit Mike Jones’s blog for lots of “Geneva”-related links

• Get the official word on “Geneva” Beta 2 straight from the Microsoft Forefront team blog

• And, of course, check out OpenSSO.org for all sorts of OpenSSO news

A big thank-you to the Microsoft and Sun team members, who worked in close coordination to turn around the testing and the paper so quickly. Naming a few names (please forgive me if I left you out): Mike Jones and Caleb Baker from Microsoft and Sidharth Mishra and Julie Costello from Sun really pulled out all the stops. Let’s do it again sometime soon, shall we??

This was third in an annual series, but I was a newbie. I’d assumed that “IAM and GRC” was the traditional focus here and that the consumer side of things was the outlier. But Bavo DeRidder, a tireless commenter during the event and an old EIC hand, noted that the greater emphasis on GRC this time around lent a serious business atmosphere to the proceedings. The attendance seemed quite healthy — despite the down economy — so perhaps GRC was the turn-on for lots of the delegates?

Because of the business-y feeling, I was surprised and delighted to see all the tweeting going on. Tim Cole provided witty running commentary during the talks, and then found his emcee duties greatly eased by reading all the relevant tweets out loud after each talk. :-)

Before the conference started, quite a few folks came to the Munich OpenSSO Community Day. Lots of community members shared their activities, questions, and use cases; slide decks and related materials are being posted on the OpenSSO wiki. (The cherry on top, later in the week, was a “best innovation” award won by the OpenSSO Fedlet. Whoo-hoo!)

Also before the conference started, a handful of my Sun colleagues (you know who you are) put in some quality beer-drinking practice time. Oh, my goodness. I know I’m a lightweight (figuratively speaking) when it comes to alcohol, but their performance was impressive. Everyone had slowed down by the time we got to the famous Hofbräuhaus on the third night, but even so, those liter-sized beer mugs made me feel like a little kid at the grownups’ table. (I mostly had wasser mit gas.)

Keynotes were sprinkled throughout the conference, giving a good balance between broader and more focused topics. I gave a keynote on the first day. Ever wondered what it’s like to give a talk in an IMAX theater? Intimidating, that’s what. My colleague Ludo Poitou (pictured on the left above) took some great photos during the week, and somehow managed to fit my huge slide projection, huge podium self, and tiny (only by comparison) real self into this one.

My talk was on The Care and Feeding of Online Relationships — a subject I’ve spoken on before, but I feel like my understanding has come much further since my first explorations on the topic a year ago. This time I presented what I hoped was a tightly argued case for the “permissioned data sharing” problem space, along with — for the first time on a public stage — a brief case for the ProtectServe/relationship manager paradigm as the solution space, and even as suggestive of what Enterprise 2.0 entitlement management might look like. I’ve posted the slides, and video is available to attendees (log in to see video links in the agenda). [UPDATE: They've made the talk available on YouTube; see the comments below for more info.] I had fun doing a video interview with Felix Gaehtgens about my talk right afterwards; anyone can view that. Next step for this work: discussing use cases at IIW8, a mere handful of days from now.

One last quick story: An important theme of my talk was the way in which OAuth helps to meet some of the requirements I’ve laid out for permissioned sharing. So it was a real delight to learn that OAuth won one of the Kuppinger Cole EIC awards this year for “best new/improved standard”. I knew it was up for an award ahead of time, and through coordination with Chris Messina and Eran Hammer-Lahav on behalf of the community, I agreed to go up and accept/retrieve the physical artifacts associated with this honor. Chris has written up the story here. (Come on down to IIW8 to see the little statuette and certificate in the “flesh”.) Sincere congrats to the entire OAuth community!

And one last photo: I saw this near one of the entrances to the Rosenheimer Platz bahn station. What does it all mean?

(Thanks to all the folks at Kuppinger Cole + Partner for putting on one heck of a show. Now to get on with the recovery process…)

If you follow these things closely, you might have heard about a “NewOrg” getting started to bring lots of identity interoperability workstreams together, or an “IDtbd” group for identity harmonization with a name to be determined. Well, it’s determined now — and by the way, kantara, appropriately, means bridge.

In this video I outline my reasons for supporting Kantara:

If you support Kantara’s mission:

Foster identity community harmonization, interoperability, innovation, and broad adoption through the development of open identity specifications, operational frameworks, education programs, deployment and usage best practices for privacy-respecting, secure access to online services

…consider joining as a Member to help make it happen. If you’ve got hard-won knowledge about gaps in the identity picture, or clever ideas about solving problems, consider diving in to one or more of its groups as a Participant — it doesn’t cost a penny.

At the least, make sure to follow @KantaraNews on Twitter. This initiative will be buzzing with lots of activity very soon, and you won’t want to miss any of the goings-on.

The thing is, set points for body weight, blood sugar levels (a body “glucostat”), blood fats (a “lipostat”), and even body temperature have been tested in the scientific literature to try and explain how hunger works, and found lacking. What turns out to matter most for making you feel hungry vs. sated is the availability to the body of utilizable fuels, seen in toto.

On this subject, Gary Taubes makes this recommendation in GCBC:

Several variations on this hypothesis [about hunger and availability of utilizable fuels] were published from the mid-1970s onward by LeMagnen and others. The most comprehensive account was published in 1976 by Edward Stricker at the University of Pittsburgh, and Mark Friedman, then at the University of Massachusetts and now at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Their article, “The Physiological Psychology of Hunger: A Physiological Perspective,” should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in eating behavior and weight regulation. [GCBC, Ch. 24, p. 433]

Go ahead — click that link above. You can buy the article, if you like, for the low low price of US$11.95.

Or, don’t! This is where I demonstrate that carbgrrl has gone around the bend. I went and got the paper, studied it closely, and present here a layman’s summary of its arguments and conclusions. You’re welcome. :-)

(I’ll do this in two parts. Part 1 — call it Energy Metabolism 101 — is below the fold. I’ll provide Part 2, The Hunger, in a later post. As always, I will gladly accept all error corrections and pointers to research that disputes or usefully refines the information below.)

Energy Metabolism 101

Your body deals with food consumption and energy expenditure in two phases. (The article reviews the literature on hunger in rats, but this is how metabolism works for humans too.) Your body needs energy all the time, but doesn’t eat all the time. So:

1. “Postprandial” is when your body sets about handling (both burning and storing) the food you’ve just eaten.
2. “Postabsorptive” is when, having fully dealt with your last meal, your body begins consuming itself for longer-term energy needs.

Postprandial: To a first approximation, here’s what happens in the postprandial stage. You break down all those nutrients into their constituent parts and then distribute them among the jobs of (a) providing immediate energy to the brain, muscles, and other body tissues and (b) storing the rest as fat and muscle (plus a bit of glycogen in the liver). The organ doing most of the heavy lifting is the liver; for “liver-centric” diagrams vs. my energy-obsessive ones, do check out the original Friedman-Stricker article. [UPDATE: See the comment thread for detail on how muscles use glucose for immediate energy; this diagram is oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy.]

What’s the takeaway? Mainly that energy (both the immediate kind and the stored-for-later kind, as you’ll see in a moment) can be gotten from any dietary source. There’s lots of redundancy here. The article notes that “[W]ith but a few exceptions, each of the various metabolic fuels is equally capable of providing energy in all tissues.”

Postabsorptive: Okay, what happens once everything is burned or stored? You need to begin mobilizing fuel out of your tissues to keep you alive. In the postabsorptive phase, your body burns fat (and what other limited storage it has) to keep running. Here’s what that looks like, again to a first approximation.

What’s the takeaway? Mainly that there’s humongous redundancy around ensuring that the brain is well supplied with energy at all times. The article notes that “The supply of fuels to the brain is elaborately defended even during prolonged fasting” and goes into detail about the ways in which the brain is covered against all contingencies (except extreme starvation) by routings and syntheses of glucose from various sources. As a second priority, muscle tissue is spared as much as possible.

Fat storage and usage is a more dynamic process than you may think, and the liver conducts this whole energy symphony with precision. The article notes:

Adipose tissue participates actively in metabolism by removing the excess nutrients that are usually obtained during each meal and by releasing them in the subsequent postabsorptive period. This tissue thus provides a massive energy buffer that prevents dramatic shifts in nutrient supply despite the episodic nature and inconstant magnitude of food ingestion. The liver complements the function of the adipose tissue and ensures that nutrient supplies are sufficient and appropriate to the specific needs of individual tissues.

A few pointed observations: Okay, this is me talking for myself again.

• No, you don’t need to eat carbs to make sure your brain is supplied with energy. (If that were true, I’d be dead by now.) You’d have to go to quite a bit of trouble — like getting to the advanced stages of starvation — to prevent your brain from being first in line for all food and body-tissue sources of glucose.

• Remember the stuff about insulin “masking” body fat and making it harder to burn, putting a priority instead on clearing whatever carbs are currently flooding your bloodstream? That makes your fat less available as a utilizable fuel source.

• If you succeed in making your fat pretty much invisible, your postabsorptive period will be less effective, you’ll need more postprandial episodes just to keep yourself running — and your supposed “body weight set point” will magically rise.

• Exit question: How do you suppose you can get it to fall?

(Stay tuned for an eventual Part 2!)