Monthly Archives: April 2013

Alcohol-proof your liver. SFAs.

it probably has other benefits, too. 

Tissue lipid turnover, adipose vs. liver.

Can the saturated fat & MCTs in dark chocolate & coconut oil protect liver against the ravages of alcohol?  Tonight?

The studies discussed in “The liver is evil but need not be punished.  SFAs”  entailed chronic alcohol feeding in combination with a high saturated fat/MCT diet – the animals were given a liquid diet of complete nutrition and a LOT of booze.   Not very applicable to humans, imo [hopefully].  Which brings up the question: how long does it take for coconut oil & dark chocolate to flex their hepato-protective muscles?

wine and dark chocolate

Fortunately, [if tissue fat composition is in fact the relevant protective factor], unlike adipose fat which hangs around for years (Beynen et al., 1980 & Katan et al., 1997), liver fat appears to turn over quite rapidly.

For example, a single shot of radiolabeled oleate is cleared out of the liver within a few days, whereas it lingers significantly longer in adipose of rats (Iritani et al., 2005).  And this is actually enhanced in rats fed a higher fat diet.fat-free diet

Similarly, a study on diet-induced changes in liver fat in humans showed that after only 3 days of low carb dieting, liver fat significantly declined in 5/10 patients, and in all of them by day 10 (Hollingsworth et al., 2006):liver fat time course

Shoutout to Mike Eades for directing me to this study.  Whatever happens after 3-10 days, I suspect, will reflect the new dietary pattern – you are what you eat?  :/

I don’t put too much stock in generic nutrition textbooks, but those data are rather close to estimates put forth by Frayn, Arner, and Yki-Jarvinen (2006, free full text):Frayn

Translation: while a single meal of dark chocolate and coconut oil may not acutely protect the liver from alcohol [tonight], a few days’ worth just might.

Others?

Red meat.   While the saturated fat content of red meat is expected to similarly bolster liver resistance to oxidative stress, another component – carnitine (of the recent TMAO infamy) – may also provide some benefit by enhancing liver fat turnover (Kepka et al., 2011 sorry no full text, so only in theory).  Taurine, also found in red meat, also prevents some alcohol-induced liver pathologies [in rats] (Kerai et al., 1998 & Pushpakiran et al., 2005).

Coffee, too (Gallus et al., 2002Tverdal et al., 2003; Klatsky et al., 2006; Lopez-Garcia et al., 2008Sugiyama et al., 2010).  Probably has more to do with prevention of lipid peroxidation via antioxidant polyphenols.  just sayin’     …compared to the SFA’ers, would those on a high PUFA diet benefit more from coffee in this regard?

The culprit isn’t red meat or TMAO, its cigarettes & sedentary obese HFCS PUFA empty calories – the bona fide confounding factors in most anti-nutrition propaganda.

 

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Molested fats, Op. 139

or
Trans fats, part IV

Proceed with caution, this is an exploratory post.  Replacing CakesCookiesPiesPastriesBreadCerealsBiscuitsPizzaMuffins with [insert any whole food item here] is just a good idea.  And more reasons to eat dark chocolate.

In Inflammatory, trans, or linoleate? the idea was explored that it might not be the theorized textbook pro-inflammatory end products of omega-6 fats that give them a bad rap, but rather the foods that contain them – ie, “cakes, cookies, pies, and pastries” (Kris-Etherton et al., 2012 NHANES), or “bread, cereals, cakes, biscuits, pies, pizza, and muffins” (Meyer et al., 2003 from down under).

dark chocolate

Further, what starts out as an omega-6 fat can easily become peroxidized or isomerized into an oxidized or trans fat, respectively, via industrial molestation or just plain old cooking (eg, Romero et al., 1998, Marmesat et al., 2012, & Minami et al., 2012) – even just a few minutes in the microwave (Herzallah et al., 2005)!  I don’t know exactly what all of these end products are for sure, but they might look something like this:ox linoleate

Thus, the culprit may not be native Dc9,c1218:2n6 linoleate.

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Liver is evil but need not be punished. SFAs.

What to serve with a liquid lunch, and a recipe for chocolate.

It’s like a feed forward downward spiral.  If you don’t eat saturated fat & MCTs prior to imbibing, then liver intentionally makes more PUFAs for the alcohol-induced burning ROS to molest.  Liver is evil but need not be punished.  SFAs.

Brief background: (Kirpich et al., 2011 & 2013)

Researchers studying alcohol in rodents know where they’re going and like to get there fast.  70 drinks per day fast.  Granted, rats metabolize faster than humans so it’s likely a little less… but a little less than 70 is still a lot of sauce.

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Non-sequiter nutrition V. The neglected fats

update: I learned a new trick.  If you haven’t been receiving the regular updates to which you subscribed, it’s probably due to spam filters.  Cure: find the update in your spam folder and reply to it.  You don’t have to write anything, but the mere act of replying somehow tells your spam filter that the email wasn’t spam.  It works for gmail, fwiw.

I [still] predict public approval of dietary fat will come along at a snail’s pace, and it won’t be a pan-approval of dietary fat at all.  Instead, it will be selective approval of individual fatty acids.  First, it was the medium chain fatty acids found in MCTs and coconut oil.  Then, it was the fish oil fatty acids eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids (EPA and DHA, respectively).  Then, palmitoleic acid.  Corn and soybean oil, on the other hand, are being appropriately recognized as bad.  The utter hatred and fear of saturated fats is starting to wane, and we might even see a transition back to lard before I die (circa 2113).  But today’s post is on another topic: trans fats, oxidized fish oils, and dairy fat.

What happens when dietary fat is abused?

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salt makes you thirsty, soda makes you hungry.

As previously discussed, DRINK was a randomized intervention study that gave children either regular or diet soda for a year and surprise surprise, the regular soda drinkers gained about more body fat than the diet soda drinkers (de Ruyter et al., 2012).  And in the follow-up, with an opposite study design, overweight & obese children who continued to drink regular soda gained twice as much weight as those who cut their intake (Ebbeling et al., 2012).  There was no apparent black box in the latter study as the kids who stopped drinking soda also decreased their intake of other foods…

-does not compute-fructose

wait a minute … By switching from regular soda to diet, you just end up compensating by eating more of something else, right?  My initial response to that has always been that it doesn’t matter – ANYTHING else is better than a straight shot of 100% HFCS (+ some other chemicals).  But those kids didn’t do that.  they ate less of other foods.

 

Does HFCS soda make you eat more?

A recent study has put a little more fuel on this fire.  Similar to the abovementioned two, it’s not a sophisticated study designed to accurately assess the impact of regular soda on appetite, satiety, hunger, etc., but it supports the theory that diet soda negative calories are NOT compensated for by eating more of something else.


Food and beverages associated with higher intake of sugar-sweetened beverages (Mathias et al., 2013)

It was another big cross-sectional NHANES study that simply asked how much regular soda, diet soda, and other foods kids were eating.Mathias data 1

They showed that as soda intake increased, so did total calories, which could simply mean the soda was adding calories to their diets.  This would indirectly support the opposite of the above mentioned theory, namely, that soda calories aren’t compensated for.  But it gets better (or worse, depending how you look at it):Mathias data 2

soda didn’t simply add to the total calorie intake.  More often than not, calorie intake increased above and beyond that contributed by the soda.  And it wasn’t just that bigger kids were drinking more soda and eating more food – these data were controlled for body weight.  The authors estimated that for every 100 kcal of soda drank, an additional 36 – 86 kcal of food was eaten.

salt makes you thirsty, and now soda makes you hungry?

 

calories proper

 

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