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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

Wow, another study that fails to actually include a low carb diet:

>"During the test phase, high, moderate, and low carbohydrate diets varied in carbohydrate (60%, 40%, and 20% of total energy, respectively)"

A low carb diet is going to be 100g (~ 400 cal or 20% caloric intake) per day at the absolute maximum. Really it should be half to a quarter of that and you will not feel the need to restrict your eating at all. The way it works for getting to a normal weight is that you feel less hungry if you limit your carb intake to those levels.

It's amazing how awful this academic nutrition research is, they just make up their own false definitions about things then draw conclusions about what people care about.

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Low carb is not (only) keto. And given the fact the ketosis changes completely the rules of the game, I would actually put keto in it's own category.

So 100g of carbs seems like a reasonable number if you want to be sure that your subjects do not enter ketosis.

I would put 100g as the upper limit of what you would eat on a low carb diet in a day.

Keto diet is ideally no more than 20-30g of carbs per day, with the majority of your calories coming from fat macros. This study would explain why keto enables shedding body fat so quickly (which is usually waived away, by myself included, as satiation from fats and protein vs carbs).

>"Keto diet is ideally no more than 20-30g of carbs per day, with the majority of your macros coming from fats. This study would explain why keto enables shedding body fat so quickly"

How so? Even their lowest carb diet was much higher than 20-30g per day.

I assume (perhaps incorrectly), that if their lowest carb diet tested is still much higher and they're seeing metabolism increases at that carbohydrate intake level, the effect would be more pronounced at even lower (ie keto) carbohydrate intake levels. Speaking only for myself, when I've utilized the ketogenic diet to lose weight, I can lose upwards of 3lbs a week doing nothing (maintaining a sedentary lifestyle) except restricting carbohydrate intake below 20g/day (eating my fill of eggs, bacon, hamburger, and cheese).

This completely ignores any gut microbiome changes (and corresponding nutrient absorption changes that might occur) due to a change in diet.

Yes, you simply consume less calories on a keto diet because you feel less hungry. For whatever reason consuming carbs over a certain threshold is addictive.

Either way, they did not include a keto diet. Instead they used a "relatively low carb" diet of 20% carbs. Since ketosis is an entirely different metabolic state there is no reason to extrapolate from 50%-5% (keto). They have no theory so they need to actually measure this, and every single academic nutrition study I've ever seen on % carbohydrates in the diet fails to do it.

You cannot get "macros" from fat - you get energy, but you need more than energy to survive. If you don't get carbs, your body breaks muscle tissue to produce it. There's also evidence that muscle is burned first before fat deposits. The only thing that fasting does and people misunderstand the results is increasing HGH, but any growth factors are cancer factors,m too. Increased metabolism also means faster aging.

I corrected that part of my comment ("with the majority of your calories coming from fat macros"). Regarding "If you don't get carbs, your body breaks muscle tissue to produce it", this is a myth (as long as you are consuming an adequate amount of protein; strength training is helpful if able) [1]. Your body will produce ketone/ketone bodies (an adequate substitute for bodily organs demanding glucose) once your glucose stores are exhausted, and will continue to do so as long as you restrict ingestion of carbohydrates and don't run out of body fat.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1373635/

> More recently, Willi et al. examined the efficacy and metabolic impact of a VLCARB in the treatment of morbidly obese adolescents [4]. Six adolescents weighing an average of 147.8 kg consumed the VLCARB (25 g of carbohydrate/day) for 8 weeks. The results indicated that the weight loss with VLCARB is rapid, consistent, and almost exclusively from body fat stores. Changes in lean body mass, as estimated from DEXA and urinary creatinine, were not significant over the term of treatment. Bioelectrical impedance measurements reflected a greater loss of lean body mass, but changes in total body fluid and electrolyte content, as a result of dietary ketosis, may complicate these measurements.

> Although more long-term studies are needed before a firm conclusion can be drawn, it appears, from most literature studied, that a VLCARB is, if anything, protective against muscle protein catabolism during energy restriction, provided that it contains adequate amounts of protein.

You can't eat protein on a fast. Protein also increases blood sugar, and too much of it is detrimental in many ways and growth factors such as IGF-1 being just one.

You're moving the goal posts. We're not talking about a fast, we're talking about a very low carbohydrate diet. The paper I reference demonstrates that a carbohydrate restriction does not incur muscular catabolism when protein is a component of your low carbohydrate diet (which should primarily be fats to prevent excessive protein from kicking you out of ketosis).

Not really as low-carb diets are done mostly by people who do IF. Not all carbs are not evil! We've evolved to digest milk in adulthood and take advantage of slow carbs. The bad carbs are the refined ones - we haven't had much of these in the past. Low-carb diets are especially unsuited for women. If you look at people who lived healthy and long lives, they weren't gulping on coconut oil and refined MCT oils. Anyway, I don't think empty sugar calories are much different than empty fat calories. Carbs bring more nutrients than fats like coconut, for example. Nobody also cares on the microbiota effect of fat overload! Again, if you have epilepsy or schizophrenia, okay, no doubt, keto is great as therapy, but is it great for just anybody and does it lead to a long healthy life? There are no data to support such a statement! On the contrary, all anecdotal data points that moderation is the best strategy. Oh, wait - 6 meals a day is also a modern brainfart - people used to eat 1-2 times a day with no snacking! So, enough fad diets with no scientific proof behind them! The only thing that makes sense today is backed by research - maintain mitochondrial QC, cycle mito fusion with fission - all chronic diseases pretty much are caused by dysfunctional mitochondria, and I don't think keto supports that strategy well!

> as low-carb diets are done mostly by people who do IF

What? Maybe, but I think citation is needed there. The most widely popular keto diet, Atkins, doesn't say a thing about fasting - when you boil it down, and don't do any of the stupid carb-replacement recipe trickery that a lot of people do, Atkins equates to: take your normal meal with meat, starch, and vegetable, and stop making the starch, eat a little more vegetable if you want. Voila, there goes 500-1000 calories a day, more if you're eating starchy/sugary snacks. And you won't be hungry between meals. It's not rocket science.

I'd say what the parent refers to as intermittent fasting is just feeling less hungry...

Yes, the more frequently you eat, the faster your metabolism gets, and you get hungry faster. I'm not sure why people came up with the nonsense that faster metabolism is better as since when accelerating aging is desired? Well, muscle mass also ups basal metabolic rate, but that's a bit different mechanism.

You missed the part where the body uses Glycogen resources while on a high carb diet and stores excess carbs as fat. You only lose fat if your blood glucose levels are low enough. And obese people often are pre-diabetic and actually have to eat low carb and fast to get their levels low enough to actually burn fat.

Not at all. Don't eat excessively, and caloric restriction is the way to go and proven over the ages - Okinawans have a rule of how much to eat - read about it!

Diabetic people actually need carbs as if they use insulin shots, they often get hypoglycemic. If you have an active lifestyle, your BG actually just replenishes your glycogen depots and possibly you don't have much excess fat anyway. So, live a healthy lifestyle and then a moderate diet will work just perfectly!

Anyway, fat deposits in moderate size are not a bad thing. In fact, in many cases, they save lives - the evolution did not invent them without a solid reason. Yes, excessive fat is bad for men as it's feminizing, but doesn't have a huge impact on women when you look at the studies. There's also a good reason why fat is not so easily mobilized.

>"Don't eat excessively"

Yes, a low carb diet makes people feel less hungry, so they eat less. A (supposedly) "normal" carb diet makes many people hungrier than they should be so they eat excessively.

That's not true. Fast carbs make you hungry again. Slow carbs satiate pretty well. Eating frequently also makes you hungry faster. Two meals a day with slow carbs won't make you eat more.

Well, all you need to do is try it to see for yourself. It takes a week, just eat meat and cobb/greek salad and broiled broccoli and green beans or whatever. Basically just cut out the grains (+ potatoes/fries, etc) they try to trick you into eating. That is all it takes.

I've done it, actually, and do it frequently - as an Orthodox Christian, our Nativity Fast just started and we eat beans and lentils, and I lose weight after each fast, and I never feel hungry. Don't fall for the marketing stuff! Eat traditional foods, and you will feel great! I stopped feeling hunger after I eliminated the refined carbs breakfast from my routine, and practice 16-hour IF daily. Initially, I was into the ketotard camp, but my liver paid for the fat overload, and I did not lose stubborn fat - and how could I when I was ingesting copious amounts of it not allowing the mobilization of my own! I started to lose weight with the Orthodox fasts when you have long periods of no dairy, meat, or fish. The cycling between vegan and omnivore diets has been great, and no wonder millions have been practicing it for hundreds and thousands of years! I laugh when I see people wasting so much money on exogenous ketones or fancy fats, which nobody in human history has been eating in such amounts! This is no different than raw kale juice. People make the mistake of not understanding hormesis and that each nutrient (micro or macro) has a range of positive influence on health and any intake outside of that range is detrimental. And that this range is never open on either end! Even small amounts of radiations are beneficial and at the same time - huge amounts of plain water are toxic. The tricky part is that the rage is specific to each person, it depends on the genotype, epigenetic, and many other factors such as climate, location, time in the day and year, and so on. All these diets ignore the most recent scientific discovery - epigenetics! We should eat what we're best adapted to and I'm sure my ancestors did not eat coconut oil, nor limited slow carbs like beans and legumes. On the contrary, they've had a balanced diet, did not avoid fatty meats, but didn't overeat fat either. For sure they didn't have the habit of snacking and didn't eat breakfast, and for sure ate within 6 or 8 hours. And, last, but not least - they didn't sleep as little as I or you do. Sleep length and quality are finally getting attention in the whole puzzle of health! Chronobiology is now getting more and more attention and it goes back to what I said earlier - we should stick to what we're adapted best to... unless we want to sacrifice our lives to influence (not necessarily positively!) the lives of our successors!

> "I've done it, actually, and do it frequently - as an Orthodox Christian, our Nativity Fast just started and we eat beans and lentils, and I lose weight after each fast, and I never feel hungry."

I doubt you really feel that comfortable because then why wouldnt you eat like this all the time? Just that you are referring to it as a "fast" tells me you are craving food. If you ate less because you felt satiated, you wouldnt refer to it as a fast.

I don't even know what you are talking about regarding overeating fat. My experience is just cut out the grains and sugars and eat whatever else you want. If you crave fat, then you eat it. There is no overeating involved. That is the entire point, if you keep your carbs low enough you do not want to overeat anything. There is no self-control involved, in fact you need to sometimes force yourself to feel like eating for social/etc reasons.

There is also no need to purchase "fancy fats", you do probably have to prepare your own food though since sugar is added to everything prepared for you.

>"All these diets ignore the most recent scientific discovery - epigenetics!"

This is hardly recent, and while I'm sure it has some sort of relationship to a persons optimal diet, no one has any idea what that is.

You have no idea what you're talking about, honestly. Our family does not use sugar at all. And, no, I don't feel hunger and 90% of what you mean by "hunger" is habitual, not real hunger caused by ghrelin. When we fast, and it's unfortunate that English has such a misrepresenting word, we don't get tempted by meat and dairy. I am not supporting vegetarianism and veganism, on the contrary, but I don't think the meat overeating habits are healthy and the data shows it. For example, upping your growth factors, overloading yourself with iron, eating charred meat is proven to be detrimental to health. Now everybody's lining up to buy bone broth not knowing that bones often accumulate heavy metals like lead and America is polluted with lead, but that's not just all. Anyway, my point was that people should eat quality foods aligned with their genetic and epigenetic profile, use the least possible processing and stick to traditional cooking methods. Don't eat too much carbs, don't eat too much fats, don't eat too much meat - this is the optimal strategy at this point as I've been following diets for nearly 20 years and there's no perfect on except the balanced real-foods one!

>"upping your growth factors, overloading yourself with iron, eating charred meat is proven to be detrimental to health."

All I did is stop eating bread and preparing my own food so there was no sugar in it. So this extreme diet you are talking about seems like a strawman to me.

>"people should eat quality foods aligned with their genetic and epigenetic profile"

No one knows what this would be.

> "Don't eat too much carbs, don't eat too much fats, don't eat too much meat"

Which your body lets you know via a satiated feeling without gaining undesirable weight. "Too much carbs" seems to be over 50-100 g/day for most people. If it wasn't, they wouldn't eat more than was healthy.

Fat provides energy. Vitamins and minerals are either fat or water soluble. Meat will provide copious protein and all of the amino acids of which they are made, essential ones and those humans can synthesise themselves. An all meat diet is perfectly healthy as long as you have enough energy, vitamins and minerals, all of which can be tackled by eating adequate fat.

You don't need huge amounts of fat to absorb vitamins. For example, all vitamin D3 pills have a drop of olive oil. Ketotards eat a huge amount of fat thinking they are providing nutrients. Yes, you need fats, just like you need carbs, but not in excess. Meat has vitamins and minerals, too. I'm not against meat, I'm against overeating when you're 30+.

What is your point then?

An all meat diet is perfectly healthy if it includes enough fat. You started off by saying that you can’t get anything but energy from fat and that you need more than energy to survive.

> You cannot get "macros" from fat - you get energy, but you need more than energy to survive.

That’s not true. If you eat fat as part of an all meat diet you’ll have enough energy and nutrition to survive without problems. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a diet that was mostly fat with some lean meat worked as well.

> If you don't get carbs, your body breaks muscle tissue to produce it. There's also evidence that muscle is burned first before fat deposits.

Neither of these are true either. If you’re fasting and you stop exercising you will lose muscle rapidly as it gets broken down but if you continue exercising you’ll lose fat and a very small amount of muscle, accelerating over time.

> Ketotards eat a huge amount of fat thinking they are providing nutrients. Yes, you need fats, just like you need carbs, but not in excess.

If you’re eating nothing but meat you do in fact need fat to get enough nutrients. Given that carbohydrates are unnecessary to a healthy diet and meat is also unnecessary any notion of excess that claims to be acultural is ridiculous.

> Meat has vitamins and minerals, too. I'm not against meat, I'm against overeating when you're 30+.

This is the first time you’ve mentioned age or overeating. Every statement of fact you’ve made has been wrong. What was the point of taking part in this discussion?

No statement I've made is wrong. Obviously, growth factors are necessary when you're young and pro-cancer when you're old and have higher cancer risks. I'm just clarifying as obviously, the obvious facts are not clear to this audience!

Anyway, I keep saying - surviving and thriving are two different things. I want to thrive, not just to survive. I get tired of people giving the Inuit as an example. Yes, they survive on predominantly fatty meat (although they eat starchy roots, too, okay, "ate" as they've modernized), but I don't want to be anything like them, sorry, no offense! There are many tribes who are healthier, look better, and eat plenty of starches! Here's a recent article [1] about a tribe, which loads on starches, and looks and functions better than the Inuit. :D

Food is information. Eating high-fat may give some immediate results, but we have no idea what's the effect in long-term - nobody has such diet, sorry!

Also, cite a study claiming that carbs are not necessary for health? You're making a mistake again and again - just like fats carry other nutrients such as vitamin K, D, etc., carbs also come in concert with many others. It's 2018 and it's clear to all camps that refined foods are empty. I'm not asking you to eat refined tapioca starch, I'm telling you that you should eat sweet potatoes, yams, beans, legumes, etc. Of course, there's no perfect food and many plants have natural anti-nutrients just like meat and dairy do, but, again, we've evolved to handle lectins and others decently not to mention that many cooking practices also evolved unknowingly to reduce the toxicity.

I am surprised that nobody here argues an obvious detriment of carbs - their role in the formation of endogenous AGEs (advanced glycation endproducts), but, of course, for their formation, you need protein, too. At the same time, animal products are rich in exogenous AGEs [2].

[1]: https://www.unilad.co.uk/life/life-of-indonesian-tribe-in-re...

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3704564/

"Low-carb" as practiced freely is also dangerous long term, luckily the scientists know better than to go to unreasoned extremes.

How is it dangerous if you supplement Minerals?

As soon as a diet requires adding supplements, it is no longer a diet that can be used for a lifetime IMO.

Eat fatty meat including organ meats and you can eat nothing but meat for years with no ill effects health wise.

http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm

Not true. If it was the Eskimos, Inuit and other people who lived in the Arctic circle before modernity encroached there would have been unable to survive. If you’re eating all lean meat you’ll have some kind of deficiency disease inside a month. If you eat fatty meat as well you’ll almost certainly get everything you need and if you eat organ meat as well as muscle and fat we know you can eat that for a year with no ill effects whatsoever.

http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm

http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/09/two-brave-men-...

What danger are you referring to?

Actually, 25g total (including fiber carbs) would be low carb.

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