[soso]

Originally Posted by Noturningback

Speaking of native diets, I just ordered the Canadian documentary My Big, Fat Diet.

~Danielle

I saw that on TV a couple of months ago.. it was pretty good in a quiet sort of way.. very encouraging to see people doing better...

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by BrianSCohen

I might actually expect this as low carb diets cause an initial disturbance in glycogen stores. Many people going on low carb diets like Atkins report quick losses. Often people would claim that initial weight loss is water, and some of it is. ...

I have heard this argument too. But I find it unconvincing, simply because the numbers don't add up. The average person can store about 300 grams of glycogen. And 4 grams of water is stored with each gram of glycogen. So when our glycogen stores are full, we are carrying around 1,2kg of water with it. If we assume that eating low carb lowers glycogen to half of its normal levels, it would represent a weight loss of only 750 grams. Low-carbers in the study lost 6,5Kg in the first 5 months.

Having said all that that, I doubt that glycogen levels drop that much when eating low-carb anyway. Two thirds of glycogen is stored in the muscles, and it is not available for satisfying energy reguirements elsewhere in the body. It has to be used in the muscle in which it was stored. I also don't believe that liver glycogen is depleted by low-carb eating. It is a critical energy reserve, and the body wouldn't allow this to happen. Liver glycogen is kept topped up through gluconeogenesis if necessary.

My glycogen reserves certainly pull me out of a hypo just as readily now as they did when I was eating high-carb. I think the notion that low-carb eating leads to water loss is indeed a red herring.

[REDLAN]

I might actually expect this as low carb diets cause an initial disturbance in glycogen stores. Many people going on low carb diets like Atkins report quick losses. Often people would claim that initial weight loss is water, and some of it is. ...

There is an interesting critique/analysis of this study by this blogger

Junkfood Science: Round eleventy-seven in the diet wars

She suggests that the difference in initial weight loss between the 2 groups is down simply to differences in calorie intake.

The low carb dieters had decreased their calorie intake by between 102-305 Kcalories a day more than the other dieters in the initial 6 months. Hence the greater weight loss.

The weight regain in the middle of the study occurred despite the dieters cutting their calorie intake further. Low fat dieters went down a further 100 Kcal per day, mediterranean dieters went down a further 67 Kcal per day, and the low carbers cut their calorie intake by a further 30 Kcal per day.

Now for an interesting critique on the end of the graph at the 2 year mark...

If you examine the graph it shows that the low fat dieters are on a slight rising trend, while the mediterranean and low carb dieters are pretty much level. The reason the curve flattens off, is because of how the researchers handle subjects who dropped out of the study. What they did was to assume that when a subject dropped out, they managed to maintain their weight loss until the end of the study.

So...

If the group are on a slight rising trend, this will have the effect of flattening the curve.

and for the drop out rates...

22% of the low carbers had gone by end of the study
15% of the mediterranean dieters had gone by 2 years.
and only 9% of the low fat dieters had dropped out by the same point.

So for statistical purposes one fifth of the dieters are counted as though they maintained their weight loss until the end of the study. This is bound to introduce bias into the study.

[matingara]

Originally Posted by REDLAN

22% of the low carbers had gone by end of the study
15% of the mediterranean dieters had gone by 2 years.
and only 9% of the low fat dieters had dropped out by the same point.

i wonder if the "low fat dieters" are influenced by the omnipresent media and advertising industries which tireless extoll the virtues of "low fat".

it seems that EVERYONE is sold on the "low fat" message and sell it - it is a truly viral message.

the other day i had lunch with some work colleagues. i ate one of the meals i know i can eat. chicken and avocado salad. (yummo).

after we were done i popped into the supermarket to buy a bag of spicy bbq pork crackling - in case i might need an afternoon snack.

my colleague said, "how can you have such a healthy lunch and then buy such a fat laden, unhealthy thing?".

i was going to explain (again). but just shrugged.

as it turned out i wasn't hungry enough to eat the snack later that day. this is the usual case these days.



-- Joel.

[Real4]

Originally Posted by fgummett

If you look to the North you will find the Inuit who until the rest of us came along and "civilised" them ate only what was seasonally available. For most of the year that was seal/walrus/whale meat, organs, and fat/blubber, fish at other times, and at others, greens and berries. Inland they might get Caribou and some greens by eating their stomachs. Food was barely if ever cooked. From what I understand, they had little to no incidence of CVD, or Type 2 Diabetes... both of which genetically they are very prone... as they found out as soon as they started eating from Canada's Food Guide
If I were a scientist looking into the best practices for healthy eating I might be asking the Inuit elders a few questions

Primitive examples are just that primitive. No one wants to live the life of these people, which usually was short and miserable. You have to live into middle age to get Type II, people who die early don't get it. Any "go backwards" solution is self-delusion.

[sprzepiora]

Originally Posted by Real4

You have to live into middle age to get Type II, people who die early don't get it.

Except for the young teenagers now getting T2 at alarming rates. Although I am not disagreeing to your original statement. I just wanted to point out that insulin resistance is happening to younger people.

[cyberus]

Originally Posted by sprzepiora

Except for the young teenagers now getting T2 at alarming rates. Although I am not disagreeing to your original statement. I just wanted to point out that insulin resistance is happening to younger people.

A quick look at the labels of the average teens daily diet should give a clue as to why.

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by BrianSCohen

... Now that I have finally read this paper, it actually is quite interesting. ....

Michael Eades (of Protein Power fame) reviews the study in this blog Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D. » Low-carb diet trumps low-fat diet, yet again

There seem to be some curious anomalies ...

[DeusXM]

I’m sick and tired of the Inuit example forever being put forward as a reason for the ‘correctness’ of a low/no-carb diet. It’s simply not a valid reason. Anyone who argues in favour of it also has to concede that the moment an Inuit so much as looks as a potato, they have a coronary. People of Inuit descent have far higher rates of heart disease at younger ages than, say, people of white European descent. Why? Because the Inuit have lived in a society which for thousands of years didn’t have access to carbs. As a result, their genetic code means they’re less able to deal with carbs in the same way as say, a white European, who is descended from a population that’s lived pretty much exclusively on bread and beer for the last few thousand years.

Similarly, if having carbs really was an issue, why is it that the Japanese have the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity in the world, despite having a diet based almost entirely on rice?

You cannot put forward the fact that one ethnic group is able do well on one particular diet and then claim it is the same for all people. You can’t even claim it’s valid to you unless you are part of that ethnic group. The sad fact is that the ‘right’ diet for anyone is far more dependent on your genetic make-up than what someone selling a diet book would credit.

If you are descended from Inuit, then yeah, you probably might want to stop eating carbs. If you’re not, then maybe you need to look at little more at the basics of your origins.

People always put forward this ludicrous ‘Paleolithic’ diet ideology, arguing that because we in the Stone Age did nothing but hunt and eat mammoths, then we should eat lots of meat and fat. Ignoring the fact that we’re not in the Ice Age (meaning our metabolisms are significantly different)…who can tell me when we started making bread and cultivating crops?

Here’s the thing – you can’t. We have a rough guess at around 10,000BC, based on the fact that’s when we get the first physical evidence of this. But ask any scientist about the possibility of it happening far earlier. The answer will surprise you. Funnily enough, bread, seeds and wooden farming implements don’t tend to survive for more than 10,000 years. So we’ve no physical evidence of farming. Yet there is evidence of advanced trading of things like beads dating back to at least 40,000BC – of actual markets and people travelling vast distances to trade. Can a society that is dependent on the next hunt really do something like this?

The ‘Paleolithic’ diet is a nonsense argument. So is the Inuit diet. There are at least 40,000 years of evolution standing against the idea that we all need to eat lots of meat and never touch carbs. It remains that the majority of CHD issues arise more from the decline in exercise and the rise in overall calorie intake. The rates of heart disease increase almost in sync with the increase in the use of the car. I would strongly suggest the reason people on the low-carb diet in this study lost the most weight was because a low-carb diet is almost inherently lower in calories than a higher carb diet. As with all things relating to diabetes, keeping everything in balance is the key. Unfortunately that advice doesn’t sell a lot of books or diet products since it indicates that it’s actually your own personal responsibility to look after your health. It’s much easier to blame ‘big pharm’ or someone else, isn’t it?

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by DeusXM

... People always put forward this ludicrous ‘Paleolithic’ diet ideology, arguing that because we in the Stone Age did nothing but hunt and eat mammoths, then we should eat lots of meat and fat. ...

To me, the thinking behind the Paleolithic Diet is useful because it demonstrates that eating fat is actually ok. And it does this in an an accessible, non-scientific way that I can understand. During most of my life, I followed "doctors orders" and stuck to the high-carb way of eating. When I got to the age of about 45 it was told very sternly by doctors and dieticians that I was getting into the high risk age group for CVD, especially in view of the diabetes. And that I must limit my consumption of fat.

The problem was that my body doesn't run well on glucose. It caused major problems, with both the diabetes and the epilepsy. It was the paleo diet ideas that made me realise that maybe eating fat isn't as bad as it is said to be. It gave me the reassurance I needed to give low-carb eating a try. After seeing the positive results from eating this way over the last 5 years, I am now happy that I made the right decision.

I certainly eat a lot more carbohydrate than the paleoliths did. I also eat cheese and drink alcohol, which are very "neolithic" foods. But I don't think any of these foods are particularly harmful. And if the paleolithic experience is anything to go by, the protein and fat I eat won't do any long-term damage either.

[asmo]

Boy I agree with the concept that people have to find out what works well for them.

It seems the real issue for diabetecs is the effect of a diet on their sugar concentrations and their associated general health/heart health over their life time. Ya gotta have a diet you can live with.

While weight is important isn't the most important issue.

One over the counter pill that has worked form me as an alternate to statins is salmon oil.

[BlueSky]

I found Gary Taubes' comments on the Israeli study really interesting. He focuses on the heart health issue, and he asks why the powers that be (the AHA) refuse to take these studies seriously :

"These trials are fundamentally tests of the hypothesis that saturated fat is bad for cholesterol and bad for the heart. They’re not just about which diet works best for weight loss or is healthiest, but what constitutes a healthy diet, period. (This is the point I made in my Times Magazine story six years ago). Specifically, these low-fat/low-carb diet trials, of which there are now more than half a dozen, test American Heart Association (A.H.A.) relatively low-fat diets against Atkins-like high-saturated-fat diets.

In this last test, the A.H.A. diet was about 30 percent calories from fat, less than 10 percent calories from saturated fat; the low-carb diet was almost 40 percent calories from fat, around 12.5 percent saturated fat. In this particular trial, as in all of them so far, the high-saturated-fat diet (low-carb or Atkins-like) resulted in the best improvement in cholesterol profile — total cholesterol/H.D.L. In this Israeli trial, the high-saturated-fat diet reduced L.D.L. at least as well as the did the A.H.A. relatively low-fat diet, the fundamental purpose of which is to lower L.D.L. by reducing the saturated fat content.

So here’s the simple question and the point: how can saturated fat be bad for us if a high saturated fat diet lowers L.D.L. at least as well as a diet that has 20 to 25 percent less saturated fat?

It could be argued (and probably will be) that the effect of the saturated fat is confounded by the reduction in calories, but the A.H.A. diet also reduces calories and in fact specifies caloric reduction while the low-carb diet does not. It will also be argued, as Dean Ornish does, that the source of the saturated fat was not necessarily meat or bacon, but beans or other healthy sources.

But the nutritional reason why meat has been vilified over the years, is that it’s a source of unhealthy saturated fat. It’s not that meat per se is bad — unless you buy the colon cancer evidence, which has always seemed dubious — it’s that the saturated fat in meat makes it bad. So the argument about the source of the saturated fat is irrelevant.

The question hinges on whether saturated fat raises cholesterol and causes heart disease. One way or the other this trial is a test of that hypothesis. It’s arguably the best such trial ever done and the most rigorous. To me that’s always been the story. If saturated fat is bad for us, then these trials should demonstrate it. They imply the opposite.

Why does the A.H.A. continue to insist that saturated fat should be avoided, if these trials repeatedly show that high saturated fat diets lead to better cholesterol profiles than low-saturated fat diets? And how many of these trials have to be done before the National Institutes of Health or some other august institution in this business re-assesses this question? After all, the reason the food guide pyramid suggests we eat things like butter and lard and meats sparingly (and puts them high up in the pyramid) is that they contain saturated fat. This is also the reason that the A.H.A. wants to lower even further what’s considered the safe limit for saturated fats in the diet".

Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D. » Follow up on the Israeli low-carb study

[fgummett]

In case anyone still has a fear of saturated fat, here is another piece from Gary Taubes where he cites data provided by the USDA:

...consider a steak — to be precise, a porterhouse, select cut, with a half-centimeter layer of fat, the nutritional constituents of which can be found in the Nutrient Database for Standard Reference at the USDA Web site. After broiling, this porterhouse reduces to a serving of almost equal parts fat and protein. Fifty-one percent of the fat is monounsaturated, of which virtually all (90%) is oleic acid, the same healthy fat that’s in olive oil. Saturated fat constitutes 45% of the total fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which is, at the very least, harmless. The remaining 4% of the fat is polyunsaturated, which also improves cholesterol levels. In sum, well over half — and perhaps as much as 70% — of the fat content of a porterhouse will improve cholesterol levels compared to what they would be if bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed instead. The remaining 30% will raise LDL but will also raise HDL. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak rather than carbohydrates might actually improve heart disease risk, although no nutritional authority who hasn’t written a high-fat diet book will say this publicly.

[cyberus]

Originally Posted by BlueSky

I found Gary Taubes' comments on the Israeli study really interesting. He focuses on the heart health issue, and he asks why the powers that be (the AHA) refuse to take these studies seriously :

(rant mode on )
(tin foil hat in place )

I said it before and I'll say it again ... established organizations are mostly run by people that have an interest in maintaining status quo, for financial and/or scientific status reasons.

What would happen if the AHA suddenly changed course on high carb low fat? What would happen to all the money they get for the use of their heart healthy "stamp of approval", and what would happen to the reputation of all the scientists whose entire careers are based on the party line research? The same applies to A Diabetic A and other "mega-orgs", what would happen to all the money they get every year for "research for a cure" if the cure was actually found and it was something as simple as a change in diet OTHER than the 50yr old standard?

As an example look at the "cold fusion" claim made a while back (which I think was done to prove this point), only 1 or 2 universities actually attempted to duplicate it, dozens of universities and research labs set out, by their own admission (via the papers generated), to prove that the research was invalid and couldn't be done !!!

In the case of diabetes, type 2 especially, how much money would be lost by pharma-corps on meds and test supplies, by labs doing a1c tests 4 (or more) times a year, by doctors like my mothers that brings her in for a test monthly and "adjusts" her meds while giving her the same old tired diet bullkrap?

(whew .. ok rant over)

[fgummett]

Agreed^^^ I'm sure Dr Ancel Keys and the others who started the low-fat (high-carb) frenzy had the very best of intentions and were genuinely trying to help. But now between the massive packaged-food industry, government and other bodies that have a vested interest in the current orthodoxy it is hard to see things changing soon. It is especially hard to get a study funded that does not fit the current dogma. And please don't take everything you read in the media as a proven fact.
Thing is they don't even call it a high-carb diet... "low-fat" seems to make sense, but as we know to our cost, if you change one element it affects others, so up went the carbs... and what carb did they find that was cheap and plentiful... HFCS!