Perhaps it is something you ate....

I've been reading a great deal about nutrition lately, and it seems the widespread idea concerning low-fat diets is largely mistaken.

Long story short, when consuming carbohydrates, the body metabolizes them first as sugars (they are sugars after all) and eventually stores them as fatty acids. This tends to increase the manufacture and use of insulin, too, in order to keep blood sugar levels reasonable. Whereas fats get processed rather differently. The idea is to reduce carbohydrates in favor of fats.

Now, nutrition in people is a remarkably difficult subject to study, but the evidence seems to be piling up.

This is really hard for me, as I've made low-fat into an art form of sorts, and have learned to embrace carbohydrates in all forms (see my blog). The mere thought of not choosing the leanest cut of meat, not favoring chicken breast, not eschewing cheese and butter, all seems unnatural, forced.

Who knows, I may go all in with the Paleo diet, too ;)

There has NEVER been sufficient evidence of a low fat diet being beneficial and there has always been some shaky evidence that it was very dangerous for young males to be on a low fat diet (suicide, assaultive behavior, homicide).

Insulin is more dependent upon sugar substitutes since they are what changes your gut bacteria.

Low fat diets have always been an attractive myth. Most sensible people stuck with butter rather than margarine. And low cholesterol means low sex hormones so why would anyone really choose a low cholesterol diet?

I gave up carbs 2 years ago and never
looked back. Not a diet, a lifestyle
change. Nothing with any kind of
flour, no corn or rice or potatoes.
I eat lots of fatty meat, like bacon,
sausage, pork and beef roast, burger.
Lost 40 pounds and am never going
back to carbs.

Right now in the slow cooker is sauerkraut,
cabbage, green beans, onion, and 2
pounds of polish sausage. Some carb in the
onion and beans, but its irrelevant. I keep
it under 25 grams a day. Most people eat
hundreds of grams a day. Eskimos flourished
on extremely fatty meat and little else.

I eat lots of eggs and cheese too. You get used
to no carbs, there are so many choices it's easy.

Quote: Evenbob

Right now in the slow cooker is sauerkraut, cabbage, green beans, onion, and
2 pounds of polish sausage. Some carb in the onion and beans, but I keep it under 25 grams a day..

I think that would qualify as a ketogenic diet.

There's also been some criticism about counting calories. I never really got into that, though I paid attention to the percentage of calories from fat in many foods.

The idea of calories has always puzzled me a bit. A calorie is a unit of energy. Now, it makes sense to measure energy in food, as one function of food is to provide energy, and it makes sense as a measure of activity, because you expend energy when exerting an effort.

But how does energy relate to body mass?

Put another way, do less calories equal less weight gain? Conventional wisdom has it so, but is it so?

One time I asked myself: If you eat 100 gr of anything, what's the most weight you can gain? The common sense answer is 100 gr, and that's wrong. The body also breathes, and oxygen is used a lot in organic molecules. So 100 gr. of X food will combine with how many deciliters of air? How much of that will be used by the body either as raw material, as energy or as energy store?

Further, 100gr of carbs contain 400 calories, while 100 gr of fat contain 900 calories. Does this matter?

I need to do more reading on the whole matter, but it seems I'll be changing my diet a bit, and exercising more. I've found that regardless of what I eat, I loose weight if I exercise regularly.

Quote: Nareed

Further, 100gr of carbs contain 400 calories, while 100 gr of fat contain 900 calories. Does this matter?

The body burns fat immediately as energy. If you
eat high carbs and fat at the same time, it will
burn the fat for fuel and store the carbs as fat
for future fuel. Works the same with alcohol,
it burns it for fuel right away and stores the
carbs you ate as fat.

Cut the carbs out and you will lose weight. But
people love carbs, sugar and grains and high
carb root vegetables is what they survive on.

The Wizard asked me years ago to weigh in on this, but I didn't see the message until just now.

Most of what appears in this thread is wrong and is directly refuted by decades of scientific research.

Quote: FleaStiff

There has NEVER been sufficient evidence of a low fat diet being beneficial...

No. The evidence of the benefits of low-fat diets is simply overwhelming. The research dates back several decades, prior to it into the popular press in 1990 when Dean Ornish showed reversal of heart disease with his program, centered on a low-fat diet. (Lancet) Thousands of patients in seven days on a low-fat diet reduced blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, and risk of cardiovascular events. (Nutrition Journal) This is just the tip of the iceberg, there is study after study after study after study about these benefits in the literature. Search PubMed.

Quote: FleaStiff

And low cholesterol means low sex hormones so why would anyone really choose a low cholesterol diet?

Maybe because they can read. Low cholesterol is a hormonal problem only when it's so low it's an illness. Low-fat, whole foods diets lower cholesterol (compared to the American average) but don't result in low cholesterol.

Quote: EvenBob

Eskimos flourished on extremely fatty meat and little else.

Only if you define "flourished" as having a short life expectancy and being rife with disease. "Eskimos have a similar prevalence of CAD (coronary artery disease) as non-Eskimo populations, they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, their overall mortality is twice as high as that of non-Eskimo populations...Mummified remains of Eskimos dating back 2,000 years have shown extensive hardening of the arteries throughout their brains, hearts and limbs....National Geographic carried an article about two Eskimo women, one in her twenties and the other in her forties, frozen for five centuries in a tomb of ice. When discovered and medically examined they both showed signs of severe osteoporosis and also suffered extensive atherosclerosis." (John McDougall, MD)

You cherry-picked Eskimos because it's the only example that you think supports your position, even though it doesn't. So let's broaden the scope: "All large populations of trim, healthy, athletic-competing, war-fighting people throughout verifiable human history have obtained the bulk of their calories from starches. Examples of thriving populations include the Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians, who ate sweet potatoes, buckwheat, and/or rice; Incas in South America who ate potatoes; Mayans and Aztecs in Central America were known 'as the people of the corn;' and the Middle East, formally known as 'the breadbasket of the world,' fed hundreds of millions on a diet of wheat and barley." (Frontiers in Nutrition journal)

Quote: EvenBob

The body burns fat immediately as energy. If you eat high carbs and fat at the same time, it will burn the fat for fuel and store the carbs as fat for future fuel.

This is the exact opposite of the way it actually works. (Dr. Ong Hean Yee, Cardiologist)

Quote: EvenBob

Cut the carbs out and you will lose weight.

As an overly broad statement, no. High-carbohydrate, whole foods diets have been extensively shown to promote weight loss. "HC diets are at least as effective as LC diets, leading to significant weight loss and a reduction in plasma glucose, HbA1c and low density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C) levels." (Nutrients journal)

I will likely not engage further here unless the rebuttals contain cites to actual science.

Man, that's a long arc of a response from 2015 to 2024.

Since I happen to think ultra-processed food has to be eliminated from the studies when you do comparisons, I'm not sure what to make of many nutritional studies. Popular cereals promoting whole grain, low fat, low cholesterol not the same as the actual ingredients in a simple version. Although I'm not a raw food proponent necessarily either. I believe fruit juice is a bad choice but fruit of the same juice isn't necessarily bad. We even changed our cookware over time, as that may matter what you were cooking or drinking (BPAs anyone, and now microplastics?). Pesticides and food fed to animals have changed over the years, and FDA regulations change on allowances or usages.

So, I consider it all more complicated to assess properly. I think I generally hate nutritional studies for that reason, but I still try to follow it all.

...because i have to eat everyday still...

Thank you BJ for a very good post, although nine years late. So good that I can't think of anything to counter it on.