The Fats You Don’t Need to Fear, and the Carbs That You Do
well.blogs.nytimes.com
well.blogs.nytimes.com
In most normal people, meaning without diabetes and other metabolism problems, the liver doesn't immediately convert sugar to fat. Rather extra sugar is converted to glycogen which can be easily accessed for energy. What happens when a runner carbo loads the night before a race? The pasta she eats is coveted to glycogen and stored in the liver not to fat.
However, when the liver storage of energy is full, it then converts the excess to fat. Think about this for a second. The glycemic index and load don't apply because most people convert excess blood sugar to a readily available energy stored in the liver as glycogen not fat.
The problem is that Americans culturally never deplete the storage of energy in the liver because of two reasons; first, Americans snack all the time and drink sugary drinks, and, second, which I don't understand, we have developed an idea that we should eat huge third meals at night.
A big dinner will completely replenish the energy stores in the liver leaving excess sugar that will be converted into fat during sleep. Perhaps, it is smarter to eat a decent breakfast that contains simple sugars which are absorbed faster into the blood stream, a big lunch which will provide energy for the rest of the day, and a small dinner to satiate hunger.
For a person who wakes up around 7am the fast should begin around 5pm in order to let the sugars deplete around bed time. There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping. And then in the morning break the fast.
There is no reason to have big dinners which are ridiculous.
Actually there is a very big reason for why your advice is harmful, for me at least, but I suspect that for others as well. At 5pm I'm still at work, which means that whatever meal I'll have will be fast food and not a home cooked meal.
But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family, as in that moment during the day that can be shared without feeling rushed and if you want to sit together with your wife and kids, anything less than 8pm is not doable, as afternoons are usually unpredictable, as for example that's also the time of day when people go shopping or solve other chores.
The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and I'm willing to bet that this trait of modern life is much more harmful than fats, carbohydrates or whatever identified nutritional element is the enemy du-jour.
You can also take a "home cooked meal" with you to work - for lunch purposes.
> But even more problematic is that dinner is also the perfect opportunity to sit together with your family
It is an opportunity - why do you think it is the _perfect_ opportunity?
> The family dinner is a matter of cultural inheritance that we've been forgetting and ...
There are many ways to share time together - it's not necessary to eat while doing so.
Everyone is different. If someone is really thin they probably should eat a massive third meal because the body does need stored body fat too.
Why not both?
What is interesting is the mechanism that causes low glycemic food to digest slower. It's the fiber! Processed Uncle Ben's has .6 grams of dietary fiber per serving while brown rice has 3.5 grams per serving. For the same reason brown rice takes much, much longer to cook breaking down the cellulose to make it palatable, brown rice takes much, much longer to have it's energy absorbed into the blood stream, the fiber.
When a person eats low glycemic therefore high fiber foods, they are getting the same amount of satiation per same quantity of food, but that fiber is passing through without being absorbed. So, people eating low glycemic foods are consuming less calories for the same level of satiation. That is the 10,000 ft view but it more complicated than that because different foods have different levels of satiation based on many things that are more than just physiological but also psychological.
The article says that high blood sugar levels lead to weight gain which isn't entirely true in most people. High blood sugar levels while the liver has stored as much energy as it can in the sugar analogue glycogen leads weight gain and eating low or high glycemic foods doesn't matter.
Things do get a little more interesting, and the science becomes a little weaker, when you start thinking about nutritional timing in the context of body composition instead of overall weight. For instance, muscle protein synthesis remains pretty constant in someone with protein at most meals. But you are able to "spike" it about once every 3 hours (the mechanism seems to have a threshold around 8g of leucine, after which it can't be spiked again for another 3 hours).
So in theory the optimal way to eat the same number of calories, all else being equal, is evenly divided into a meal every three hours you are awake.
But it's a micro-optimization and doesn't make a huge difference, and again the science isn't super well reproduced there. People certainly succeed at elite levels with many different meal timings.
> There is no reason to have readily available sugars while sleeping
Night time is when humans are most hormonally active, and going to bed with an energy surplus will help engender a more anabolic state.
I can only speak from my own experience– but I'm a tall, skinny guy and if I don't eat for longer than a couple of hours, I start getting low blood sugar symptoms. My heart starts racing and I have trouble focusing or sleeping.
I did some reading about it, and I can't remember the exact science, but I think I read that if your blood sugar levels are too low, your brain worries that you'll go into a coma and it'll try to keep you awake.
Now that I wrote that down, it sounds a little pseudosciency, but that's consistent with my experience. Would love to hear from anybody who has a better understanding.
Eating a calorie-controlled diet is primarily a psychological challenge. They should therefore eat with whatever frequency and quantity they personally find makes sticking to a calorie-controlled diet easiest, whether that's eating 2 meals a day at 07:00 and 13:00, or eating 5 meals a day, or eating 1 meal a day at 21:00, or whatever works for them.
This is not convincing. According to [1] it seems like system glucose utilization is only about 10-20% lower during sleep.
Muscles store even more glycogen than the liver btw (~500g vs ~100g).
I rest my best after a nice dinner, whereas skipping it means that I'll take longer to fall sleep and more often than not end up waking up way earlier than I should.
.. which requires that lunch be the main meal, which could be difficult in countries where eating at your desk is normalised.
De-novo lipogenisis from sugar in practice does not happen humans. If you do something goofy like keep dietary fat under 5 grams and eat hundreds of grams of carbohydrate some monounsaturated fats can be synthesized, but it's fair to say that it basically doesn't happen.
Any fat on your body came directly from fats you ate. Sugar and carbohydrate only matter with regard to weight loss to the extent they displace fat metabolism.
In terms of fattening macro-nutrients, the rank would be fat > sugars > protein.
People keep ignoring this simple fact (that fat is already fat after all), yet argue endlessly about physiological stuff and ancestor mumbo jumbo.
Or do I have to bring up the people who have lived on nothing but twinkies or McD for a month and stil lost weight?
Define "reasonably" and "restricted". Otherwise, you might as well say "If everyone just did the right thing, everything would be as it should!" which has no actionable component.
>>"people who have lived on nothing but twinkies or McD for a month and stil lost weight?"
....but suffered dozens of other health problems that'll lead to an early grave.
"Super size me" -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521/
http://www.sott.net/article/126285-Supersize-me-revisited-un...
http://www.cracked.com/article_20585_6-famous-documentaries-...
Moral: popular media is a horrible source of scientific knowledge
http://observer.com/2015/10/here-are-the-people-coca-cola-ha...
And? Did he did he supplement the diet by eating Coca-Cola's money as a source of fiber? Because it still sounds like he only ate twinkies and lost weight.
Or are you suggesting that his data was falsified?
Better demonstrations would be: * Compare people eating the same number of calories below requirements, but one on the twinkie diet and one on a healthy diet to see comparative changes in markers * Perform the same experiment as before, but this time with both groups eating the same number of calories above maintenance.
Which, if I understand correctly, is the whole point of the demonstration. You'll lose weight on a calorie restricted diet almost no matter what you eat. So long as people understand that weight loss should not be the sole measure of health, I don't see what the problem is.
The problem is, a calorie restricted diet alone isn't always sustainable. Eg if you're eating crap, but so little that you don't gain weight, it's still going to mess you up (lethargy, irritability, lack of focus).
A twinkie has 135 calories (or 270 for a pair). It isn't a hard thing to fit into your diet if you aren't constantly snacking on things.
On the other hand, if you're riding the razor's edge and trying to do something crazy like get into lower single digit bodyfat while gaining muscle and strength, even a little junk food can make a noticeable difference. I recognize that isn't the typical case though.
But hey, maybe 20 different scientists ran the same experiment and only the one time when it was successful got published. No way to know for sure.
Eating only one type of food for weeks will almost always result in losing weight, because it would disrupt the gut flora, as well as deprive one of necessary vitamins/minerals.
Anecdotal evidence if fine for discussion, but no one should act upon it without medical supervision.
The problem is that nobody can seriously eat only twinkies at a caloric deficit indefinitely. He was getting his caloric needs from sugar, and he was avoiding weight gain by undereating. If he kept it up for say, a year, he would have experienced all sorts of nasty symptoms– irritability, etc.
I'd liken it to staying awake for 3 days. Sure, you can do it, but it's not sustainable.
I mean, I could have a diet of pure whiskey for a month and lose weight. Weight loss on its own isn't healthy, especially if its only temporary.
10 weeks of changing your diet in general will probably lead to weight loss as long as you're not increasing your total calories, but that doesn't mean that the diet is sustainable long-term. If you live on say, a few donuts a day, you'll lose weight, but it'll also give you terrible sugar crashes and you won't be able to focus. You'll be irritable. It will really suck, and you'll either end up eating more or seeing your quality of life suffer.
I used to weigh about 100 kilo's, until I changed my diet to LCHF, now I'm about 70. A few months ago, as a test, I switched to Soylent for 2 months, and gained almost 10 kilo's.
I just think a high carb diet is not something that is compatible with an office job.
But how much you are able to stuff yourself with isn't the full story without knowing how long it takes you to get hungry again.
How much?
> But how much you are able to stuff yourself with isn't the full story without knowing how long it takes you to get hungry again.
Certainly less than 2 days.
WHAT?! Please make a YouTube video. I will show all my friends and family. The amazing Peanut Butter Eating Hero.
My issue is keeping the weight down. I've been in Dublin for three months and lost about 10 kgs (nasty commute, stressful job and so on). I've been back for two weeks and gained back two kgs. Wife's a great cook :)
I think you've succinctly expressed one of the core issues that we have as individuals and as a society: we love tasty food more than we love healthy food. We generally consider meals that derive flavor from fats and sugars as great/tasty/enjoyable while we relegate more healthy options as that which we only eat to either make up for or "save calories for" the meals that we really enjoy.
It not only helps in counting calories it also gives daily articles and a set of TO-DOs. I was 275 lbs around 2.5 months ago but since then have lost 22 lbs.
Regarding 'keeping the weight down', I learned from this app itself why it is difficult:
1. Not eating anything for a week is not only a bad strategy to lose weight it is actually a good strategy to gain weight afterwards. In my own experience whenever I tried to lose weight by eating less I lost a lot of weight but gained more than what I lost afterwards. You cannot stay hungry forever and if you lose more than 2 lbs per week your body goes into starvation mode, burning any stored energy rapidly, and rapidly storing anything you eat afterwards as fat just in case you don't get food again. Body is more intelligent than we think. 2. Once a fat cell is born it craves fat and that makes you hungry. Rapidly losing weight by staying hungry will only remove fat from fat cells but won't kill them. Weight loss must be sustained for longer time to have any permanent effect. 3. I have replaced white rice with brown rice, white bread with whole grain wheat bread and started eating sprouts and corn, oranges, guava etc. other fruits. Sprouts are killer deal man - you eat 200g of it you will hardly feel hungry for hours. 4. You need to do some physical exercise everyday - not intense, just walking is okay. But you have to be consistent so your body learns how much energy you are going to lose anyway and doesn't store much fat.
I have yet to start heavy exercises but I like the effect on my body :)
Fats, proteins, etc. are all important. Within eating a reasonable number of calories, make sure that the portion of calories from each source is appropriate. If you focus solely on calories, you will lose weight but you will also lose other aspects of your health.
My diet is primarily comprised of vegetables, beans, eggs and whey protein with a moderate amount of lean meat. I easily clear 225g/protein/day and ~120g/fiber/day, and I consume a lot of fermented vegetables (which definitely have a strong satiating effect).
It tends to ignore the fact that energy expended by metabolism is a black-box function that takes energy absorbed from food as just one of its input parameters.
If you restrict calories below a threshold (that varies by individual), the body will flip genetic switches to enter famine survival mode. It will adjust metabolic functions to slow down weight loss by any means possible. When the restriction ends, some of those switches do not get toggled back to their previous state. So if you have ever tried a diet that included severe calorie restrictions or extended fasting, you may forevermore find it much easier to gain weight than lose it.
So if you want to go by the thermodynamic hypothesis, it is far safer for you in the long run to hold your diet constant and either increase exercise or thermogenesis (i.e. live through a winter at one of the poles).
Channel swimmers burn about 40 Mcal of energy. Marathon runners burn about 3 Mcal. But their bodies will prefer to use up all glycogen stores before digging in to body fat, and now some will eat glycogen gel during the event to avoid "hitting the wall" entirely. Fat-burning is maximized only after depleting glycogen, or when exercising below the aerobic threshold (and possibly also below the lactate threshold), between 60% and 70% of your maximum heart rate. Obviously, this would ordinarily set a hard limit on the number of kcal you can reasonably expend via exercise to lose body fat.
Thus, the uncanny effectiveness of ketogenic diets and "bonk training". Those practices intentionally deplete glycogen stores beforehand, so any exercise done in that state burns more body fat, regardless of your exercise intensity. Ordinarily, you could have 1500 kcal or more of glycogen stores. That's enough for 15 miles of running, or 2 hours of cycling. And that's a lot of exercise to do before you start to get more permanent fat-loss results.
It is much easier to eat just enough protein to serve the short-term needs of your body, eat the remaining caloric requirement to avoid switching to starvation mode as fat, and avoid all carbohydrates like the plague. Your body converts only as much protein as it needs into sugars, but not enough to replenish its glycogen, and switches to using fat as its primary energy supply, so any additional kcal you expend are coming directly from adipose reserves. (This sort of lifestyle may have unintended side effects.)
People don't want to just "lose weight". When they say that, they usually mean "lose fat". And that goal is a lot more complex than just kcal in minus kcal out.
We still don't fully understand how diet, exercise, metabolism, and appetite work together to produce visible effects on the body. But we do know that a single dietary strategy will not work for everybody, particularly the "just reduce calorie count" strategy.
What a bunch of crap. They said the same thing about cholesterol after fucking up monumentally and the history repeats itself over and over again. Just man up, recognize how incompetent you are, how your non-scientific advice has been hurting people over the past 50 years and switch jobs because the science you're practicing is nothing more than a cult.
> He explained that saturated fat, found in fatty animal foods like meats and dairy products, raises blood levels of cholesterol and is not healthy
There is zero evidence that saturated fats are unhealthy. Fats don't make you sick. Neither do carbohydrates. Humans have been eating fats and carbohydrates ever since the dawn of men. It's part of our identity as omnivores.
What actually changed is making food an industrial process whose output is processed/synthetic food, which is much more profitable, while riding the waves of crap coming from nutritionists, coinciding perfectly with the obesity and diabetes epidemic. Low-fat milk for example is still on sale with health claims, even though it's a well known fact that it's much more unhealthy than normal milk.
The gist of it was, that there is no observable correlation between the intake of saturated fats consumed, and heart disease. There is however correlation between consumption of meat products and heart disease. A point was made specifically that balancing the diet with vegetables specifically counteracts these negative effects.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Fat-Surprise-Healthy/dp/145162...
This article will give you a good primer on nutrition with a focus on gaining weight:
http://www.barbellmedicine.com/potpourri/584/
If you have any other specific question I'd be happy to chat through them but HN is probably not the best venue. My contact info is in my profile, I love talking about this stuff so feel free to reach out.
So I agree with you, and my point is not to say that carbs are good for you or bad for you, but that anyone saying a major macronutrient group is good or bad without context has a large burden of proof.
I wanted to include another note about the glycemic index. Processed white rice has .6 grams of dietary fiber while unprocessed brown rice has 3.5 grams of dietary fiber per serving. Often the glycemic index is a function of fiber because the fiber slows down absorption of sugar so it happens slower over a longer period of time; white rice has a glycemic index of 50 and brown rice has lower index of 38.
High fiber foods are more satiating per calorie because of the fiber. It's possible that low glycemic foods which are unprocessed lead to weight loss because of they are higher in fiber which just passes through the digestive system but feel just a filling. But I still disagree with the article that blood sugar spikes lead to weight gain in most normal people because the liver can absorb the sugar and release it later without converting it to fat.
Here are some GI values for rice from the Mendosa GI list... http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm
The nominal GI of white rice is 73. But various brands and preparations can cause the GI of NS white rice to vary from 43 to 90. Long grain varies from 50 to 76. Uncle Ben's in a pouch runs around 48.
The nominal GI of brown rice is 68. But again, brand and preparation introcuces much variance, from 50 to 87.
The nominal GI of converted boiled white rice trends lower at 38 (Uncle Ben's) but can run as high as 87.
However from an authoritative article of 1000 foods in Diabetes Care from 2008, the GI of white rice is 89 and brown 50. http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-eating/glycemic_index_...
In the end, it seems you have to be very careful about exactly which products and preparations you're comparing.
People want to vilify processed foods, but processing isn't inherently bad. Aspirin is basically processed willow bark, and it is more effective, precise and pleasant to consume. Granted, most processed foods haven't been designed with optimal nutrition as a goal, but the potential is there. We shouldn't be anti-processed foods, we should just demand that food manufacturers design "functional foods", rather than just try to create the cheapest, most addictive food possible.
As for the skim vs whole milk debate, a couple points - for starters milk fat is quite poor from a health standpoint, being high in palmitate. Additionally, the single biggest problem most people have is consuming too many calories, so why would you hold up the higher calorie option? It isn't like there are a ton of fat soluble vitamins in milk that you lose switching to a reduced fat option, it's just empty calories.
Yet most of those studies have been shown to be flawed and are contradicted by newer studies. The world's health organizations have been back-paddling on this, because wouldn't you know, the trans-fats that we ended up eating on our quest for low-fat are the fats that are actually linked to cancer or cardiovascular disease.
> People want to vilify processed foods, but processing isn't inherently bad. Aspirin is basically processed willow bark
Aspirin is not food. Name a processed food that proved to be healthy.
And it is true that we as humans have always modified our environment and selected for the traits we wanted in our domesticated crops and animals. We also adapted to new foods, like cow milk. But this process has lasted for tens of thousands of years at least, whereas current "innovations" are newer than 30 years without us knowing enough about food and nutrition to make health claims. One day humanity might get used to the current blend of processed foods based primarily on corn, soy and fossil fuels, but I for one refuse to be the sacrice generation ;-)
> milk fat is quite poor from a health standpoint, being high in palmitate
Milk is a very complex substance and this reductionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism) doesn't apply well to food. Here's one study that claims that people consuming high-fat milk are not more prone to cardiovascular diseases and even more so people consuming high-fat milk are less likely to get fat from it, versus people consuming low-fat milk: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00394-012-0418-1
Here's another study showing that people consuming full-fat diary have a 69% less risk of cardiovascular disease: http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v64/n6/abs/ejcn201045a.ht...
> the single biggest problem most people have is consuming too many calories
Yet those extra calories are not coming from high-fat milk, but from the cheap high-fructose corn syrup that has been flooding the market for tens of years due to subsidies, most of it ending up in the processed food we consume, including low-fat milk, because in case you don't know, in the process of stripping the fat from milk and of ultra-pasteurizing it, the milk loses its texture and taste, plus it has to travel a lot, so it has to be supplemented with things such as powder milk, artificial colourants and preservatives (based on petroleum) and HFCS.
> It isn't like there are a ton of fat soluble vitamins in milk that you lose switching to a reduced fat option, it's just empty calories.
Not all calories are created equal and milk is rich in essential nutrients that we need, like calcium, vitamin A and D, phosphorous or B vitamins amongst others. Even its fatty acids are essential for us. And there are recent studies showing that the fat in milk helps our body absorb it better, yet we are stripping it out, then enhancing its taste in a process meant to fool our senses. You think it's just the fat that goes, but that's not true.
Want healthy processed food ingredients? Try whey protein, oat fiber, coconut flour (it isn't just ground coconut), resistant corn starch, fish oil (purified to remove heavy metals and the like) or medium chain triglycerides. All of these are better for you than the whole foods they're derived from.
You realize with the epidemiology studies you linked me that the answer is almost certainly not some "magic substance" present in milk fat, but a confounding factor that correlates with consumption of whole fat dairy? I've seen epidemiology studies showing butter intake is the single best predictor of adiposity among a wide variety of measured variables; shouldn't the "magic of milk-fat" result in butter-consumers being leaner?
Basically all the vitamins and minerals present in whole fat milk are also present in skim milk. As for the fatty acids in milk being essential, there are two essential fatty acids: linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid. Linoleic acid makes up about 3% of the fatty acid composition of milk fat, while alpha-linolenic acid is only at about 1%; not exactly a great source.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "enhancing its taste in a process meant to fool our senses", the skim milk I buy has 2 ingredients: milk and vitamin d.
I take issue with this claim. Neither is more healthy than the other. Whole milk has a lower glycemic index, and a higher ratio of fat to carbs/protein. But that's not always desirable. For instance, a higher glycemic index is more effective for building muscle (but also fat). So it's really a situation of matching behavior to goals.
I'm curious to hear a list of carbohydrates that humans have been eating since the dawn of men. Surely not glazed donuts. Did cavemen make bread?
Also, the first crops to be domesticated were grain crops.
Yes.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/humans-feas...
Some would say it is the lack of fiber.
Edit: as a side note I love your username :)
It seems the best default is to try to simulate what we've been eating for a past 50000 years and modify accordingly.
When I first tried slow carb diet I lost 5kg in 3 weeks and my general well being improved. I tried it again, but the effect wasn't that strong.
The concept, which on its face is worthy of consideration, and is explained in the ads, is to consume a small amount of sugar an hour or so before your main meal to trick your body into feeling satiated before you reach for "those extra helpings at mealtime". Judging by the items they show being consumed, they're talking about ~100 calories.
And when they came out, I found them useful to put the calorie content of sugar into context, "18 calories per teaspoon". Given the insane anti-sugar propaganda of the time (and ever since), the ads provided some real value.
Now, I don't know if the theory is correct, it doesn't address my eating issues, but it's very much not "eat sugar as a pick-me-up".
It is unfortunate that very few researchers study nutrition as it relates to longevity or optimal human performance. There's very little money available for that type of work, and well-controlled nutrition studies on humans are expensive.
Tomorrow's blog headline: SCIENCE PROVES FRENCH FRIES ARE THE HEALTHIEST WAY TO EAT POTATOES
[1] junk food satisfies you 10x more but leaves after taste, or sugar heavy, fat heavy feel in you.
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For me, it's implicit that optimizing diet can only be done on an individual basis. It's pretty obvious, at least to me, that taking maternal twins and having one be active while the other remains inactive for most of their lives leads to the need for different diets between the two.
The other thirds are the 100 trillion microbes that make up your microbiome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiota), and the fact that we still don't know hardly anything about the relationship of various foods and how we eat them to health. Especially since different genomes and microbiomes make this particularly difficult for quality research.
Exercise and youth can negate much of a bad diet, but it will likely catch up to you eventually. Better markers than your weight might be HDL (should be high), triglyceride levels (should be low), and fasting blood sugar. If those are optimal, you're probably doing fine, but there isn't really a case to be made that you should continue to eat poor food choices if you can avoid it.