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Comment by a8da6b0c91d | Hacker News Reader

You have to eat zero fat on a sustained basis and absolutely gorge on sugar to make lipogenesis happen at all. The body can store pounds of sugar as glycogen. In humans lipogenesis is an extremely inefficient process that burns up nearly 30% of the calories in conversion.

Zero fat, high sugar diets have been a proven way to get lean for decades. If you put people on a very low fat diet with a good amount of protein (say 90 grams), you can allow them to eat sugar and starch ad libitum and they will get lean. No need to count calories.

https://www.drmcdougall.com/2013/12/31/walter-kempner-md-fou...

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Are you seriously linking a study from the 40s from a blog post hawking a book? Please go read the last 80 years of nutritional research.

Humans are very inefficient at converting carbohydrate to fat; we don’t do it under normal conditions. (The cost for this conversion is 30 percent of the calories consumed.) Subjects overfed large amounts of simple sugars under experimental laboratory conditions, however, will convert a small amount of carbohydrate to fat. For example, both trim and obese women fed 50 percent more calories than they usually ate in a day, along with an extra 3 ½ ounces (135 grams) of refined sugar, produced less than 4 grams of fat daily (less than 1/8 ounce). That’s just 36 extra calories stored as fat per day. You’d have to overeat all of those extra calories and table sugar every day for nearly 4 months just to gain 1 pound of extra body fat.

6 . Hellerstein MK. De novo lipogenesis in humans: metabolic and regulatory aspects. Eur J Clin Nutr. 1999 Apr; 53 Suppl 1: S53-65. 7 . Acheson KJ, Schutz Y, Bessard T, et al. Glycogen storage capacity and de novo lipogenesis during massive carbohydrate overfeeding in man. Am J Clin Nutr. 1988 Aug; 48 (2): 240-47. 8 . Minehira K, Bettschart V, Vidal H, et al. Effect of carbohydrate overfeeding on whole body and adipose tissue metabolism in humans. Obes Res. 2003 Sep; 11 (9): 1096-1103. 9 . McDevitt RM, Bott SJ, Harding M, et al. De novo lipogenesis during controlled overfeeding with sucrose or glucose in lean and obese women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec; 74 (6): 737-46. 10 . Dirlewanger M, di Vetta V, Guenat E, et al. Effects of short-term carbohydrate or fat overfeeding on energy expenditure and plasma leptin concentrations in healthy female subjects. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2000 Nov; 24 (11): 1413-18. 11 . McDevitt RM , Bott SJ, Harding M, et al. De novo lipogenesis during controlled overfeeding with sucrose or glucose in lean and obese women. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec; 74 (6): 737-46. 12 . Danforth E Jr. Diet and obesity. Am J Clin Nutr. 1985 May; 41 (5 Suppl): 1132-45. 13 . Hellerstein MK. No common energy currency: de novo lipogenesis as the road less traveled. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Dec; 74 (6): 707-8.

> Humans are very inefficient at converting carbohydrate to fat; we don’t do it under normal conditions.

You must have a strange view of "normal conditions." Fat is actually a more-efficient, longer lasting source of energy than carbohydrates.

From the first citation in the above comment:

>De novo lipogenesis in humans: metabolic and regulatory aspects. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981

"Eucaloric replacement of dietary fat by CHO does not induce hepatic DNL to any substantial degree. Similarly, addition of CHO to a mixed diet does not increase hepatic DNL to quantitatively important levels, as long as CHO energy intake remains less than total energy expenditure (TEE)."

I agree with you, have you read this? It's from 1958 : http://www.ourcivilisation.com/fat/index.htm

Agreed :)

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