The Scandinavian country in question, might just be Sweden, though didn't look into it.
High fat has grown in popularity because the actual effects it have. People have started to feel much better and lose weight at the same time.
It's unfortunate the way the government treated Annika Dahlqvist when she first started recommending her diabetes patients to avoid carbohydrates and start with high fat instead. I think at some point she was shut down and prosecuted, but I am not sure.
Yes, Denmark. It was scrapped after about a year since the government found out the Danes were buying fatty products in Germany and Sweden. Classic Danish government.
It says Sweden a little further down the article. I've read that Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) is very popular in Sweden. They even have a LCHF magazine. The dietdoctor.com blog is written by a Swedish doctor.
One other recent study that jumped out at me was one on salt: apparently new studies are showing that CDC guidelines on sodium intake are far too low(1) and should be increased for health.
I wonder if much of the problem with the seemingly contradictory nature of studies like this the wide variance you see with us humans. I know good experimental design is about controlling for these variables, but it seems to be extremely difficult. Are the Danes in the above study eating something else that provides a benefit? Are they, on aggregate, more physically active than Americans? Is there a genetic variation present that means if I ate that much salt I'd have problems?
At the end of the day, I'll always take the guideline oft-attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything in moderation, including moderation."
here's another great one from Alan Aragon: "Avoid food avoidance."
I think the salt thing is somewhat a problem of causation vs. correlation. If you have hypertension it can be a good idea to limit salt intake; but salt intake does not cause hypertension.
I'm wary of any health advice that stems solely from epidemiological study. I'm not sure why we so easily take a hypothesis as a conclusion, and epidemiological study, while valuable, can only produce a hypothesis that requires a controlled experiment to test. Yet it seems 90% of the "red meat causes diabetes!" articles we see are usually framing a hypothesis as the result of an experiment.
I have an anecdote I feel like sharing. Please take it with a grain of... you know.
I've had hypertension since I was 17, but I never got on medication. I recently made the decision to completely give up added salt. I only ate my own salt-free cooking for about 6 months and I ate a diet high in meat, fish and vegetables. I did not pick up exercise. My BP dropped from 145/90 to 125/80 within the first month. I check my BP weekly and my average BP is 120/75.
My parents cook with a lot of salt, I notice this now when I eat at their place. I am confident that the high salt diet they "gave" me for so many years, combined with restaurant food, was the direct cause of my 5 year strugle with high blood pressure.
I could be wrong, but I am nonetheless very happy with the results of my diet based solution.
I think you'd agree that having hypertension at 17 is not typical, but being 17 and consuming a LOT of salt (junk food) is very typical.
So which is more likely; you're genetically predisposed to hypertension, which your high-salt diet exposed in your teens, or that your high-salt diet caused your hypertension?
I doubt your conclusion, but it does make me happy that you've found a solution that works for you!
Thanks. I see what you're saying and I think you're right. The point you were originally making about causation vs correlation is more clear to me now. I guess I'm guilty of letting myself get too excited over what worked for me.
After I realized how little we know about the human body I stopped worrying about these things and I now eat what makes me feel better. The reality is that in a lot of areas medicine don't' have an answer but they just guess given some observations. SO I started paying attention to how I feel after eating certain food. For example I noticed that a nice breakfast and rich salad for lunch keep me lucid for the day. I also avoid ingesting a lot of sugar at once and caffeine, with this I feel less tired at the end of the day. I don't track long term effects but for the past six months it worked pretty well, and without eating like a monk.
Discussions about salt always remind me of the story of the Russian Lykov family, who had spent 40 years living in isolation. When they were first found, they didn't even know WW2 had happened and the only gift they would accept from the outside world was salt, something they simply couldn't get enough of living in the forests of Siberia. They described living without salt as "torture".
Another video, a first contact with a tribe in Papau New Guinea, they introduce them to rice. At first they don't like it, but when they add salt, the tribe becomes excited and they share in it.
I lost over 50 pounds about 3 years ago now. And since then I have been relearning to eat and doing a good job at it.
One of the tricks of the eating healthy trade that I learned and has helped me tremendously, is to put fatty stuff into drinks; mostly teas and coffees. Like bulletproof coffee[0]. Often you hear don't drink empty calories, but as someone that has never counted a calorie I can attest that it is more important to avoid sugary drinks.
For anyone interested, I started with the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris and then migrated over to fatburningman[2] podcast after the slow carb diet. The only supplement company that I trust is Onnit[3], but I don't take a lot of supplements so I don't spend time researching them.
also, if you are struggling with weight loss, I will motivate you with the power of email. dlooeps2 [at] gmail, drop me a line .. I consider myself a fat guy that got skinny to eat more food. if that makes any sense.
What was your experience and opinion of Four Hour Body? I've heard recommendations for it, but its marketing speak of "AN UNCOMMON GUIDE TO RAPID FAT-LOSS, INCREDIBLE SEX, AND BECOMING SUPERHUMAN" has always turned me off to it before I started.
I did 5 weeks on 4HB (only 5 weeks due to my schedule, it's not easy when you have all 3 meals a day out of the house...), and felt fantastic. Circulation in my legs seemed to improve, more energy and lost about a stone in that time.
His book is basically a glorified repost of exercise science and nutrition research, and not all of it is true. Like anything else, it works just fine but obviously fails to meet the hype.
I approached with the attitude if this random dude says I can lose 20 pounds in one month (more weight than I could conceive losing) I was going to do exactly what he said to see if he was right. And I loved it. Anyone I suggested the book to has told me it changed their lives. For me, I went from eating 2 super sized fast food meals a day to lean and local and I think the 4 hour body really helped to re-introduce me to eating correctly more than anything.
Don't let the marketing ruin the book for you. It's a great book, everyone exaggerates a little.
Tim Ferriss is legit. The marketing speed is definitely strong, but there's substance behind it. His four-hour workweek, for example, was showed me how to create a successful business I enjoy (and work more than four hours on).
I don't like the slow carb diet personally, but it's better than what most people are eating, which I think was his goal.
The four hour body is meant to be read in parts, I wouldn't read it cover to cover. Read it with an open mind. If there's something you disagree with or wouldn't want to do, ask why he recommended it, rather than trying to prove it wrong. (Though do try to prove stuff wrong....just not as a knee jerk reaction)
I recommend it, but obviously it won't deliver on that type of hyperbole. I'm on month ~3 and I've lost significant weight but more importantly it's a very manageable diet that I expect to stick with.
I agree the alpha brain took a few days for me to realize it was amazing, but now I swear by it. I have been taking the entire primal care, day and night, for about 10 days now and I have never consistently felt this good in my life.
Also, I found Cilep[0] to be really useful once or twice per week. This makes me feel like adderall but with appetite.
A slight tangent to the parent topic, but should HackerNews be about nutrition as much as it has been in the last few days? The comments are frequently woefully ignorant of any current nutritional science and often anecdotes of how one trend diet or broscience factoid helped them achieve their goals.
As much as the discussion can be interesting its not really on topic for what this site is for no? What gets worse is when a group of people uneducated on the topic begin an echo chamber of poor advice and "it worked for me!" mantras we get a pretty sickening discussion that would be frowned upon if it was regarding an actual technology topic.
I see what you mean. I think the reason why it may be appropriate here is that poor health and being overweight are big risks in the field of programming. If you are not actively managing your health as a full-time programmer your health will likely degrade. More solid data is needed, that is true. Unfortunately the accepted facts on this issue are turning out to be suspect.
I see what you mean. I think the reason why it may be appropriate here is that poor health and being overweight are big risks in the field of sedentary occupations.
I read that several years ago, some farmers figured they could fatten up their cattle by feeding them more fat, so they fed them a bunch of coconut oil. But instead of getting fat, they lost weight.
For cows grass is also predominantly carbs! Grass is mostly fiber, which is converted into carbs by the intestinal flora of the cow.
So why does corn fatten them better? Is it the macronutrient makeup of digested grass vs digested corn, or is it simply that corn is more calorie dense than grass?
My understanding is that it's the difference in glycemic index. Corn has a GI of 60, whereas spinach has a GI of 0 (couldn't find the GI for grass, so...). The higher the GI, the more impact on blood sugar and insulin, and insulin causes the body to use sugars over fat for fuel. So how does corn stack up against, say, table sugar? Table sugar has a GI of 68, so cows (or people, for that matter) that consume a lot of corn will have nearly identical effects on their insulin and blood sugar if they were to instead eat an equivalent amount (in terms of carbs) of table sugar.
Though I'm not a doctor, that's my understanding.
Edit: Also, there's the compounding effect of insulin resistance. The chronically elevated insulin levels result in decreased insulin sensitivity, which means that the body will require more insulin to move glucose out of the bloodstream, while further preventing the use of fat for fuel.
yes, although I'm not an expert it is my understanding that it is the ease with which a food is converted to simple sugars or the glycemic index because then you get the insulin spike
You're still treating cows and people as equivalent: thanks to the microorganisms in their guts, cows break down fiber, which is entirely indigestible for humans.
Unless you know the glycemic load of both digested corn and digested grass for cows you can't compare them with the figures for humans. And more importantly, drawing nutritional wisdom from such a comparison is foolish at best.
"Unless you know the glycemic load of both digested corn and digested grass for cows you can't compare them with the figures for humans. And more importantly, drawing nutritional wisdom from such a comparison is foolish at best."
I agree with what your saying. Given what I know about nutrition in humans, I'm suggesting that maybe there's a similar effect in cows. Perhaps someone can chime in regarding the GI for cows, and if similar, it might be something worth further researching.
Definitely not suggesting that what applies to humans always applies to cows.
If you had said "pigs" instead of "cattle" it might have been relevant, but cattle are herbivores with 4 stomachs who send their food through the system several times (aka chewing their cud). Similarity to humans is pretty low.
Lately I've been on a diet of vegetable fats and proteins, almost no carbs (only fiber). Lots of avocados and seeds (chia, flaxseed, sunflower, sesame) which have approximately 50% fat content 45% protein 5% fiber. I lost body fat while eating as much as I wanted of that, along with yoghurt, eggs, cheese and veggies, the only thing off the table is bread, although I eat some once in a while.
People eat too many carbs in their daily life and don't even notice and they carry lots of long term health risks.
The macronutrient content of your diet has nothing to do with how much you gain/lose. The only way you are losing weight is that you are in a caloric deficit. Whether that's from increased activity, decreased energy intake, or a combination of these, there is no other way (besides liposuction).
The low-carb thing is just a trick to get you to eat fewer calories. Not to say it's not valuable - whatever works for you - but low-carb is much more about limiting calories through food avoidance than anything about carbs.
Although you did say "lately", and moving to low-carb will lead to a lot of initial weight loss. But this is due to water-loss as your glycogen stores are depleted (every gram of stored carb energy gets stored with 3-4 grams of water). Again, do whatever works for you, but it grinds my gears to see all this unfounded carb-hate these days.
The thing with carbs is that they don't really satiate you as much as fat and protein does. You'll stabilize on a much lower weight if you (partially) remove bread, pasta, rice etc. from your diet. It requires so much less willpower to lose weight without them.
But carbs are also less fattening than fat (on active individuals who constantly deplete glycogen stores, if you sit at work all day chances are you won't need many) when overfeeding.
Agreed. But it's not the carbs themselves, it's the calories in the carbs, and the fact that most of the snacks we eat are carbs. Avoid carbs and you avoid most snacks, which makes it easier to maintain a caloric deficit.
It was the same rational in the 1980s, but FAT was the villain then. Avoid fat and you avoid loads of calories (9kcal/g v.s 4kcal/g for carbs) which makes it easier to lose weight. But low-fat or low-carb is irrelevant if you're eating a surplus of energy, it's just going to make fat from that surplus irregardless of the macro proportions.
What if the macronutrient content of your diet affects your metabolic rate? I mean I see the value of the "bucket with a hole in it" model of human weightloss but the body is a complex biological machine full of feedback mechanisms so maybe that model isn't always sufficient.
Macros do not significantly affect metabolic rate. Exercise does though.
Glycogen (carbs) is the preferred fuel for almost every cell in our bodies. All the fat & protein we eat that ends up used as metabolic fuel will first be converted into carbs. Now granted the thermal effect of these macros are different (it takes more energy to turn protein into fuel than it does to convert table sugar) but the idea that "you need to eat fat to burn fat" is a myth.
everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own facts. Glycogen is the preferred fuel, which are giant chains of glucose (carb) molecules. I've done keto, and you have to be very careful as even a small amount of carbs will quickly shift the body out of ketosis and back into using glycogen. Doesn't the fact that ketosis is so fragile indicate to you that it's not the preferred state? Homeostasis reigns, and the body gets away from ketosis whenever it can. It's an extreme state.
Do they? Everything I've read about keto diet is that it will make you less "short-term energized" - you're lacking glycogen, i.e. you won't be able to sprint as much.
If we are talking about control over body fat, it's not so much about metabolic rate, as about mobility of the stored fat. If your adipose fat does not respond to reasonable caloric restrictions, you're simply going to have a hard time.
It is not actually hard to burn mobilized fat. Each one of us burns a whole lot of dietary fat in a given year: a lot more than what we have stored in our bodies. Why is it that we can burn through all that dietary fat, far in excess of how much body fat we can burn in the same period? Because that fat it is mobile: it is circulating in the body in a form that is ready for use.
Thermodynamics provides us with a summary of what is going on, which doesn't reliably translate to a method. If we measure the total energy output of the body while and monitor the energy input, then the body mass and composition changes will be reliably related to those variables.
Not all body composition changes are favorable, though.
If you could simply cut 500 calories a day, and reliably have the deficit made up by burning body fat, it would be laughably easy for anyone to achieve a vanishingly low body fat level.
High fat/moderate protein/low carb (so not exactly the 50/45/5 ratio of the post you replied to) can affect insulin resistance. Are you implying that insulin resistance has no affect on weight gain/loss?
being fat/obese and/or sedentary is a major contributor to insulin resistance. Your protein/fat/carb intake is not a significant contributor at all outside how much of them you're eating is keeping you fat/obese. Calories > Macros
Wow, I just disagree with everything you're posting on this thread. You're certainly entitled to your opinions, but be aware that people who do keto think you are just so wrong.
I've lost 33 pounds since May eating LCHF. I just eat until I'm full, and I feel much better. So really all I've changed are my macros.
Macros > Calories.
You should read a Gary Taubes book, and see what you think.
I disagree with what jp555 just said as well (from what I've read, I think that high-GI foods do negatively impact insulin resistance), but I think you don't quite understand his other comments. The point is, because you changed the macros, you're feeling full much sooner (because fat makes you more "full" faster than sugars), which causes you to eat less calories, which causes you to lose weight. Calories > Macros in that sense.
FYI beef spikes insulin higher than rice does. Insulin is released when we eat any food, both stopping the mobilization of fat and driving this food energy into cells to power metabolism. This is analogous to not drawing money out of your savings when you have cash in your hand.
As far as the spiking of insulin, it's just proportional to the rate in which food-energy enters the blood stream. It's not itself bad, and only when it does not work like this do we identify it as a problem (eg. diabetes). But there's this pervasive misunderstanding that spiking insulin is what causes insulin resistance. It's not from the insulin directly, it's from the chronic overfeeding (or other health problems) that's causing the insulin to stay high and drive the resistance adaptation. It's similar to the cholesterol myths. High cholesterol can be a signal that your immune system is dealing with inflammation; but it's that inflammation that is the problem, not the cholesterol.
My point was that the idea that carbs are somehow worse is fallacious. Chronically eating too much can contribute to insulin insensitivity; what you eat is much less important than how much you eat.
If you really want to keep insulin low and maximize fat mobility, nothing beats not eating anything at all. Light exercise like walking in a fasted state (more intense exercise shifts metabolism away from fat and back to fast-energy carbs) is a very effective tactic to target fat loss. But of course this needs to happen in the context of appropriate daily caloric intake. Never subjugate fundamental principles to minor details.
That's not how it works, according to all the biochemistry text book I've read.
If protein is the blocks for building muscle, carbs are the mortar. You are not gaining loads of muscle without carbs. You just waste a lot of money on protein the body then has to (very inefficiently) convert into carbs. Even if you're young and less than advanced strength, you can only naturally grow 1-2 pounds of muscle tissue a month doing everything perfectly, no matter how much protein you eat.
Great to hear you're getting strong, but I think you'd feel pretty silly if you knew how much more effective you would have been if you ate carbs. You would have grown faster, and not had any more risk of getting fat.
ketogenic diets have loads of health benefits (reduction of insulin sensitivity, reduced incidences of epileptic seizures, etc). I am unaware of studies that point to benefits of high carb diets.
You will need to provide source for the "People eat too many carbs in their daily life and don't even notice and they carry lots of long term health risks".
And preferentially one that also compares with asian diets since they have with lots of carbs.
Asians have a very high carb tolerance from having lived with a high-carb diet for thousands of years. Comparing your diet to an asian's is definitely not a good way to determine whether it will be healthy for you.
fyi, if you're interested in losing weight using this approach the /r/keto subreddit is quite good and very encouraging.
I won't say its for everyone, but it certainly worked for me, and after getting over the initial hump I felt better than I ever had. Huge amounts of energy, feeling great after 4 hours of sleep, brain feeling like I was grasping concepts and finding solutions quicker.
I've lost 20 pounds following that approach without being hungry.
I noticed /r/keto was FILLED with success pics--and I mean 150 lbs. lost type success pics. And the difference, compared to other diet subreddits was that the success pic posts did not say "...and I had bariatric surgery" which is amazing to me.
Anytime I read about keto diet, I read that there's much less of the "short-term" energy, e.g. you can't sprint as much (but long runs are ok). Did you experience that as well, or was it uniformly high-energy?
I'd say thats probably true, but likely has more to do with training than diet.
I would do intervals of walking/running while pushing my son in his stroller and have no problem with it, even while quite overweight and never being a runner. I shocked myself the first time I did 3 miles without really thinking about it or feeling very winded.
Yes. Animal fats particularly. We know from the fossil record and studies of traditional societies that even bone marrow (high and dense in fat and calories) is prized. Science shows it to be unbelievably rich in all sorts of good stuff.
There are some theories out there that modern human brain development was strongly tied to the ability of early humans to make tools to successful extract as much marrow out of an animal carcass as possible. It's basically the raw building blocks brains are made out of. Plus it increases wound regeneration and boosts your immune system.
The science of nutrition is so stunningly complex and difficult that lots of notions about what to eat and not eat have been overturned time and time again. The only thing that seems to have held out is to eat a wide variety of foods from all sources. Limit sugars and sweet things, eat lots of fiber, protein and fats. Cook in butter if you need to use oil. It's better for you and it tastes better.
Traditional societies actually do a pretty god job on many of these fronts. There's some things they screwed up on, nitrates aren't real good for you, but limited amounts of alcohol is. Yogurt is great for you, but Bracken (Fernbrake) turns out to not be so great an idea. Many traditional diets are usually rich in variety, and many of the good things you should be eating, and usually don't have too many of the things you shouldn't be eating. Don't confuse traditional with customary. A customary full-English breakfast every day is something north of 1,000 calories, but there's not much reason to assume it's a good traditional foodstuff. It turns out oatmeal with some fruit is probably better for you.
If in doubt, variety variety variety. As evolved opportunistic omnivores, our bodies are superbly evolved to eat a little bit of just about everything, but don't do so well on lots of one kind of thing. Humans are one of the few species on the planet that can do what we do, and it turns out, just like with any animal, that we kind of have to do what we do to live right.
Interesting theory regarding bone marrow consumption and early human brain development... Can you recommend any articles or research on the topic to learn more?
Earlier scientific work has shown that bone marrow cells can enter the mouse brain and produce new neurons. However, the new study is the first to show that this phenomenon can occur in the human brain. The study appears in the January 20, 2003, online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Tooled up
But around two million years ago, telltale cut marks on the surface of animal bones reveal that early humans were using crude stone tools to smash open the bones and extract the marrow. Stone tools allowed early Homo to get at a food source that no other creature was able to obtain - bone marrow. Bone marrow contains long chain fatty acids that are vital for brain growth and development. This helped further fuel the increase in brain size, allowing our ancestors to make more complex tools.
The tools made by habilis are called 'Oldowan tools'. The process used to make these tools was incredibly simple. Hominids picked up one stone, known as a core and broke it with another, known as a hammerstone or percussor. This gave them a sharp cutting edge that could pass through an animal's hide.
Some of the oldest stone tool use we've discovered appears to be tied into marrow extraction by pre-human species about 3.4 million years ago. Long enough for evolutionary forces to have a major impact.
Another fruitful line of evidence for early hominid diets is from analogy with modern humans, rather than other living primates. In a recent paper Cordain et al, (2001) also argue that the observed increased brain size through time in the Homo line requires the consumption of animal products. They point out that there are two essential fatty acids, docsahexaenoic and arachidonic, that are essential to brain development in modern humans, and the best sources of these two fatty acids are bone marrow, and particularly ruminant brains. Therefore, the consumption of these animal products would have facilitated expansion in brain size and increased cranial capacity over the long term. Similar arguments regarding omega-3 fatty acids are presented by Chamberlain (1996, 1998).
There's tons more. It's pretty well researched and the hypothesis is generally accepted.
There's a documentary somewhere that demonstrates marrow extraction with recreations of millions year old stone tools. There's some co-evolution arguments about the orientation of our hands and the size and strength of human triceps (designed to hold and smash), but I can't find the papers on those right now.
The only unhealthy fat is trans fat. All other forms of fat are good (provided you count the calories). Also fats contain leptin, which helps reduce fat! However, protein does a better job of giving that "full" feeling.
There are questions about polyunsaturated fats as well, i.e. vegetable oils. The book "The Big Fat Surprise" [1] talks about this in some length if you're interested.
There is perhaps no other topic of human health we intentionally complicate more than nutrition and supplementation. Every year there is a new study contradicting what we believed to be a solid truth about what we eat, and for every study that says you should eat fat/red meat/salt/alcohol, there is another study that says you shouldn't. This extends to even the most seemingly defensible advice, like taking vitamin D for fair-skinned individuals in cold climates. I had spoken with a medical school professor on how he was now redacting that advice upon new research that came out of a highly regarded, peer-reviewed journal. It seems nothing is safe when it comes to what we ingest.
Fundamentally, it comes down to eating whole, unprocessed foods in sensible amounts and moving around in a manner that provides enough stimulus to fend off disease and atrophy. Everything else is majoring in the minor and varies wildly by individual. There are plenty of lean, healthy individuals on high carb, low fat diets; same with high fat, low carb. If you stick to those fundamentals and experiment with a diet and exercise regimen that is sustainable for you, you will have success. It astounds me that we continuously need to drill into our brains that a diet of salads and the fresh catch of the day is healthier than TV dinners and the drive-through.
Eating fat the correct way is important. When possible I try to not cook with fats (except for coconut and rice bran oils that are not badly damaged by heat). Rather, after a meal is cooked and the heat is off, then I add a little flax, olive, etc. oils.
Not too far off topic: I have a cooking web site (http://cookingspace.com) that provides useful nutrition information on recipes: not just a breakdown of micronutrients, but information of which food ingredients contribute how much to micronutrients. Preparing and eating food is a major hobby :-)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadHigh fat has grown in popularity because the actual effects it have. People have started to feel much better and lose weight at the same time.
It's unfortunate the way the government treated Annika Dahlqvist when she first started recommending her diabetes patients to avoid carbohydrates and start with high fat instead. I think at some point she was shut down and prosecuted, but I am not sure.
I wonder if much of the problem with the seemingly contradictory nature of studies like this the wide variance you see with us humans. I know good experimental design is about controlling for these variables, but it seems to be extremely difficult. Are the Danes in the above study eating something else that provides a benefit? Are they, on aggregate, more physically active than Americans? Is there a genetic variation present that means if I ate that much salt I'd have problems?
At the end of the day, I'll always take the guideline oft-attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything in moderation, including moderation."
[1] http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20140402/cdc-salt-gui...
I think the salt thing is somewhat a problem of causation vs. correlation. If you have hypertension it can be a good idea to limit salt intake; but salt intake does not cause hypertension.
I'm wary of any health advice that stems solely from epidemiological study. I'm not sure why we so easily take a hypothesis as a conclusion, and epidemiological study, while valuable, can only produce a hypothesis that requires a controlled experiment to test. Yet it seems 90% of the "red meat causes diabetes!" articles we see are usually framing a hypothesis as the result of an experiment.
I've had hypertension since I was 17, but I never got on medication. I recently made the decision to completely give up added salt. I only ate my own salt-free cooking for about 6 months and I ate a diet high in meat, fish and vegetables. I did not pick up exercise. My BP dropped from 145/90 to 125/80 within the first month. I check my BP weekly and my average BP is 120/75.
My parents cook with a lot of salt, I notice this now when I eat at their place. I am confident that the high salt diet they "gave" me for so many years, combined with restaurant food, was the direct cause of my 5 year strugle with high blood pressure.
I could be wrong, but I am nonetheless very happy with the results of my diet based solution.
So which is more likely; you're genetically predisposed to hypertension, which your high-salt diet exposed in your teens, or that your high-salt diet caused your hypertension?
I doubt your conclusion, but it does make me happy that you've found a solution that works for you!
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russ...
Another video, a first contact with a tribe in Papau New Guinea, they introduce them to rice. At first they don't like it, but when they add salt, the tribe becomes excited and they share in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd0I1xAICOc
One of the tricks of the eating healthy trade that I learned and has helped me tremendously, is to put fatty stuff into drinks; mostly teas and coffees. Like bulletproof coffee[0]. Often you hear don't drink empty calories, but as someone that has never counted a calorie I can attest that it is more important to avoid sugary drinks.
For anyone interested, I started with the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris and then migrated over to fatburningman[2] podcast after the slow carb diet. The only supplement company that I trust is Onnit[3], but I don't take a lot of supplements so I don't spend time researching them.
0.https://www.bulletproofexec.com/bulletproof-coffee-recipe/
1.http://fourhourbody.com/
2. http://fatburningman.com/
3. https://www.onnit.com/
also, if you are struggling with weight loss, I will motivate you with the power of email. dlooeps2 [at] gmail, drop me a line .. I consider myself a fat guy that got skinny to eat more food. if that makes any sense.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140908083748.ht...
Don't let the marketing ruin the book for you. It's a great book, everyone exaggerates a little.
I don't like the slow carb diet personally, but it's better than what most people are eating, which I think was his goal.
The four hour body is meant to be read in parts, I wouldn't read it cover to cover. Read it with an open mind. If there's something you disagree with or wouldn't want to do, ask why he recommended it, rather than trying to prove it wrong. (Though do try to prove stuff wrong....just not as a knee jerk reaction)
So if you drink milk or eat yogurt don't go for fat free go for the full monty that way you will be fuller.
I lost 60 pounds over the last 6 months and mostly by running, swimming and staying away from bread/pasta/rice without being religious about it.
Also, I found Cilep[0] to be really useful once or twice per week. This makes me feel like adderall but with appetite.
[0]https://www.upgradedself.com/ciltep-nootropic-stack-60-ct
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwY4H3cNTH0
As much as the discussion can be interesting its not really on topic for what this site is for no? What gets worse is when a group of people uneducated on the topic begin an echo chamber of poor advice and "it worked for me!" mantras we get a pretty sickening discussion that would be frowned upon if it was regarding an actual technology topic.
ftfy
grass fed cows grow much much leaner than those on corn
So why does corn fatten them better? Is it the macronutrient makeup of digested grass vs digested corn, or is it simply that corn is more calorie dense than grass?
Though I'm not a doctor, that's my understanding.
Edit: Also, there's the compounding effect of insulin resistance. The chronically elevated insulin levels result in decreased insulin sensitivity, which means that the body will require more insulin to move glucose out of the bloodstream, while further preventing the use of fat for fuel.
Unless you know the glycemic load of both digested corn and digested grass for cows you can't compare them with the figures for humans. And more importantly, drawing nutritional wisdom from such a comparison is foolish at best.
I agree with what your saying. Given what I know about nutrition in humans, I'm suggesting that maybe there's a similar effect in cows. Perhaps someone can chime in regarding the GI for cows, and if similar, it might be something worth further researching.
Definitely not suggesting that what applies to humans always applies to cows.
There is some evidence that medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) are good for humans, and coconut oil is typically about 2/3 MCT. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-chain_triglyceride)
People eat too many carbs in their daily life and don't even notice and they carry lots of long term health risks.
The low-carb thing is just a trick to get you to eat fewer calories. Not to say it's not valuable - whatever works for you - but low-carb is much more about limiting calories through food avoidance than anything about carbs.
Although you did say "lately", and moving to low-carb will lead to a lot of initial weight loss. But this is due to water-loss as your glycogen stores are depleted (every gram of stored carb energy gets stored with 3-4 grams of water). Again, do whatever works for you, but it grinds my gears to see all this unfounded carb-hate these days.
It was the same rational in the 1980s, but FAT was the villain then. Avoid fat and you avoid loads of calories (9kcal/g v.s 4kcal/g for carbs) which makes it easier to lose weight. But low-fat or low-carb is irrelevant if you're eating a surplus of energy, it's just going to make fat from that surplus irregardless of the macro proportions.
Glycogen (carbs) is the preferred fuel for almost every cell in our bodies. All the fat & protein we eat that ends up used as metabolic fuel will first be converted into carbs. Now granted the thermal effect of these macros are different (it takes more energy to turn protein into fuel than it does to convert table sugar) but the idea that "you need to eat fat to burn fat" is a myth.
It is not actually hard to burn mobilized fat. Each one of us burns a whole lot of dietary fat in a given year: a lot more than what we have stored in our bodies. Why is it that we can burn through all that dietary fat, far in excess of how much body fat we can burn in the same period? Because that fat it is mobile: it is circulating in the body in a form that is ready for use.
Thermodynamics provides us with a summary of what is going on, which doesn't reliably translate to a method. If we measure the total energy output of the body while and monitor the energy input, then the body mass and composition changes will be reliably related to those variables.
Not all body composition changes are favorable, though.
If you could simply cut 500 calories a day, and reliably have the deficit made up by burning body fat, it would be laughably easy for anyone to achieve a vanishingly low body fat level.
I've lost 33 pounds since May eating LCHF. I just eat until I'm full, and I feel much better. So really all I've changed are my macros.
Macros > Calories.
You should read a Gary Taubes book, and see what you think.
As far as the spiking of insulin, it's just proportional to the rate in which food-energy enters the blood stream. It's not itself bad, and only when it does not work like this do we identify it as a problem (eg. diabetes). But there's this pervasive misunderstanding that spiking insulin is what causes insulin resistance. It's not from the insulin directly, it's from the chronic overfeeding (or other health problems) that's causing the insulin to stay high and drive the resistance adaptation. It's similar to the cholesterol myths. High cholesterol can be a signal that your immune system is dealing with inflammation; but it's that inflammation that is the problem, not the cholesterol.
My point was that the idea that carbs are somehow worse is fallacious. Chronically eating too much can contribute to insulin insensitivity; what you eat is much less important than how much you eat.
If you really want to keep insulin low and maximize fat mobility, nothing beats not eating anything at all. Light exercise like walking in a fasted state (more intense exercise shifts metabolism away from fat and back to fast-energy carbs) is a very effective tactic to target fat loss. But of course this needs to happen in the context of appropriate daily caloric intake. Never subjugate fundamental principles to minor details.
I've gained a ton of lean muscle mass while lowering body fat, solely by eating high protein/fat diet.
If protein is the blocks for building muscle, carbs are the mortar. You are not gaining loads of muscle without carbs. You just waste a lot of money on protein the body then has to (very inefficiently) convert into carbs. Even if you're young and less than advanced strength, you can only naturally grow 1-2 pounds of muscle tissue a month doing everything perfectly, no matter how much protein you eat.
Great to hear you're getting strong, but I think you'd feel pretty silly if you knew how much more effective you would have been if you ate carbs. You would have grown faster, and not had any more risk of getting fat.
Here's a quick run down of how it really works: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/how-we-get-fat.htm...
Stop spreading this. There are people eating +400g of carbs a day while being exceptionally healthy.
And preferentially one that also compares with asian diets since they have with lots of carbs.
I won't say its for everyone, but it certainly worked for me, and after getting over the initial hump I felt better than I ever had. Huge amounts of energy, feeling great after 4 hours of sleep, brain feeling like I was grasping concepts and finding solutions quicker.
I noticed /r/keto was FILLED with success pics--and I mean 150 lbs. lost type success pics. And the difference, compared to other diet subreddits was that the success pic posts did not say "...and I had bariatric surgery" which is amazing to me.
I would do intervals of walking/running while pushing my son in his stroller and have no problem with it, even while quite overweight and never being a runner. I shocked myself the first time I did 3 miles without really thinking about it or feeling very winded.
There are some theories out there that modern human brain development was strongly tied to the ability of early humans to make tools to successful extract as much marrow out of an animal carcass as possible. It's basically the raw building blocks brains are made out of. Plus it increases wound regeneration and boosts your immune system.
The science of nutrition is so stunningly complex and difficult that lots of notions about what to eat and not eat have been overturned time and time again. The only thing that seems to have held out is to eat a wide variety of foods from all sources. Limit sugars and sweet things, eat lots of fiber, protein and fats. Cook in butter if you need to use oil. It's better for you and it tastes better.
Traditional societies actually do a pretty god job on many of these fronts. There's some things they screwed up on, nitrates aren't real good for you, but limited amounts of alcohol is. Yogurt is great for you, but Bracken (Fernbrake) turns out to not be so great an idea. Many traditional diets are usually rich in variety, and many of the good things you should be eating, and usually don't have too many of the things you shouldn't be eating. Don't confuse traditional with customary. A customary full-English breakfast every day is something north of 1,000 calories, but there's not much reason to assume it's a good traditional foodstuff. It turns out oatmeal with some fruit is probably better for you.
If in doubt, variety variety variety. As evolved opportunistic omnivores, our bodies are superbly evolved to eat a little bit of just about everything, but don't do so well on lots of one kind of thing. Humans are one of the few species on the planet that can do what we do, and it turns out, just like with any animal, that we kind of have to do what we do to live right.
http://www.foh.dhhs.gov/NYCU/BoneMarrow.asp
Earlier scientific work has shown that bone marrow cells can enter the mouse brain and produce new neurons. However, the new study is the first to show that this phenomenon can occur in the human brain. The study appears in the January 20, 2003, online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
http://www.ninds.nih.gov/news_and_events/news_articles/press...
http://www.pnas.org/content/100/4/2088.full
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140808110709.ht...
In terms of archaeological record and Early Man
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Homo
Tooled up But around two million years ago, telltale cut marks on the surface of animal bones reveal that early humans were using crude stone tools to smash open the bones and extract the marrow. Stone tools allowed early Homo to get at a food source that no other creature was able to obtain - bone marrow. Bone marrow contains long chain fatty acids that are vital for brain growth and development. This helped further fuel the increase in brain size, allowing our ancestors to make more complex tools.
The tools made by habilis are called 'Oldowan tools'. The process used to make these tools was incredibly simple. Hominids picked up one stone, known as a core and broke it with another, known as a hammerstone or percussor. This gave them a sharp cutting edge that could pass through an animal's hide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YMfzhm8ao
Some of the oldest stone tool use we've discovered appears to be tied into marrow extraction by pre-human species about 3.4 million years ago. Long enough for evolutionary forces to have a major impact.
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v56/n12/full/1601646a.htm...
Another fruitful line of evidence for early hominid diets is from analogy with modern humans, rather than other living primates. In a recent paper Cordain et al, (2001) also argue that the observed increased brain size through time in the Homo line requires the consumption of animal products. They point out that there are two essential fatty acids, docsahexaenoic and arachidonic, that are essential to brain development in modern humans, and the best sources of these two fatty acids are bone marrow, and particularly ruminant brains. Therefore, the consumption of these animal products would have facilitated expansion in brain size and increased cranial capacity over the long term. Similar arguments regarding omega-3 fatty acids are presented by Chamberlain (1996, 1998).
There's tons more. It's pretty well researched and the hypothesis is generally accepted.
There's a documentary somewhere that demonstrates marrow extraction with recreations of millions year old stone tools. There's some co-evolution arguments about the orientation of our hands and the size and strength of human triceps (designed to hold and smash), but I can't find the papers on those right now.
Just in case anybody assumes "If I eat more bone marrow I'll get new brain cells built from the cells I eat".
This article is pretty spot on. The general rule of thumb is eat lots of fats, some protein, and almost no carbs.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Fat-Surprise-Healthy/dp/145162...
Fundamentally, it comes down to eating whole, unprocessed foods in sensible amounts and moving around in a manner that provides enough stimulus to fend off disease and atrophy. Everything else is majoring in the minor and varies wildly by individual. There are plenty of lean, healthy individuals on high carb, low fat diets; same with high fat, low carb. If you stick to those fundamentals and experiment with a diet and exercise regimen that is sustainable for you, you will have success. It astounds me that we continuously need to drill into our brains that a diet of salads and the fresh catch of the day is healthier than TV dinners and the drive-through.
Not too far off topic: I have a cooking web site (http://cookingspace.com) that provides useful nutrition information on recipes: not just a breakdown of micronutrients, but information of which food ingredients contribute how much to micronutrients. Preparing and eating food is a major hobby :-)