Part 1. Guts
Nice review article about the great diversity of carbohydrate-modified diets used in the treatment of gastroin-testiness.
Short-chain carbohydrates and functional gastrointestinal disorders (Shepherd, Lomer, and Gibson 2013)
this handy table:
the full version (click to enlarge, print, and use as a cheat sheet):
Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, microbiota
Tagged bifidobacteria, FOS, fructooligosaccharides, galactooligosaccharides, GOS, inulin, microbiota, prebiotics, probiotics
Once thought to be the holy grail of energy expenditure manipulators and a potential cure for obesity – fail. I don’t have great evidence for this; it’s really just a hunch.
A new mouse study has provided some additional fodder for speculation, however.
The theory & background info: increased BAT activity can effortlessly burn away excess fat mass by using fuel to create heat instead of energy. This model was most aptly summarized by the title of Dr. Efraim Racker’s 1963 ediorial: “Calories Don’t Count-If You Don’t Use Them.” At best, I don’t think BAT is a panacea. At worst, we might’ve learned our lesson long ago from DNP (circa 1938; also McFee et al., 2004; Miranda et al., 2006; Tewari et al., 2009; and Grundlingh et al., 2011).
In a slurry of publications in 2009, researchers re-ignited the quest by showing cold-induced BAT activation in healthy humans (Virtanen et al., 2009):
Posted in Advanced nutrition, empty calories, Energy balance, ephedrine, nicotine, TPMC
Tagged calories, calories proper, diet, empty calories, energy balance, energy expenditure, fat, nicotine, nutrition, obesity
it probably has other benefits, too.
Tissue lipid turnover, adipose vs. liver.
Can the saturated fat & MCTs in dark chocolate
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
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.
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):
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):
Translation: while a single meal of dark chocolate
Others?
Red meat. While the saturated fat content of red meat is expected to similarly bolster liver resistance to oxidative stress, another component – carnitine
Coffee, too (Gallus et al., 2002; Tverdal et al., 2003; Klatsky et al., 2006; Lopez-Garcia et al., 2008; Sugiyama 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.
Posted in Advanced nutrition, chocolate, coconut, diet, Dietary fat, fat, wine
Tagged alcohol, calories proper, chocolate, diet, empty calories, high fructose corn syrup, nutrition, wine
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).
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:
Thus, the culprit may not be native Dc9,c1218:2n6 linoleate.
Posted in Advanced nutrition, Dietary fat, empty calories, fat, Trans fat
Tagged artificial ingredients, calories proper, empty calories, fat, nutrition, processed food, sugar, trans fat
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.
Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, insulin, pair-feeding, Sugar, TPMC
Tagged calories, calories proper, carbs, empty calories, energy balance, fat, insulin, nutrition, sugar
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
What happens when dietary fat is abused?
Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, fat, Fish, Protein
Tagged calories proper, diet, empty calories, fat, nutrition, processed food, sugar, trans fat
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-
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% HF
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.
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):
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?
Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, Fructose, Leptin, Sugar
Tagged calories, calories proper, carbohydrates, carbs, diabetes, empty calories, energy expenditure, fat, high fructose corn syrup, insulin, nutrition, obesity, soda, sucrose, sugar
Take a group of obese people (> 250 lbs) and put them on a massive calorie restricted diet. They lose weight and metabolic rate plummets. Weight loss fail? In most cases, yes. But a recent study showed that the decrepit post-weight loss metabolic rate gradually improves in parallel with an increase in dietary fat ingestion to such a degree that even after two long years: totally food intake was almost back to normal, energy expenditure improved, and all this happened despite continual weight loss. In other words, obesity is not permanent.
Decreased energy density and changes in food selection following Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (Laurenius et al., 2013)
Statistically speaking, no diet on Earth comes close to RYGB in terms of weight loss success. Long term. Seemingly permanent. It’s the closest thing to a cure we’ve got.
Body weight is down by 30%, and energy expenditure is rising faster than a speeding bullet. because food intake is increasing while body weight is dropping – they’re probably more active too ** weight loss than more exercise –
But there’s a more mystical aspect to RYGB
Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, Leptin, Sugar, TPMC
Tagged body composition, calories, calories proper, carbohydrates, carbs, diet, empty calories, energy balance, energy expenditure, fat, gastric bypass, insulin, leptin, nutrition, obesity, RYGB, sugar
Niacin vs. ketosis
Part I. Rodents
It is thought: niacin causes red itchy face (> 100 mg/d) and acutely lowers FFAs; chronically, it raises some questionable fraction of HDL (> 1000 mg/d) and probably causes diabetes.
It is speculated: niacin
It is known: niacin is ketogenic in rats. Repeat: niacin is ketogenic in rats.
Niacin aka nicotinic acid and nicotamide aka niacinamide both fulfill the requirement for Vitamin B3 (ie, prevent pellagra). But only the former causes flushing… and only the former is ketogenic (two apparently unrelated phenomena).
Whether you’re strictly adhering to a diet or just doing your own thing, if year after year your GP is prescribing more and more medications to stave off morbidity and keep you intact, then the diet you’re following is most likely Fail. The same is true if your body weight is creeping upward or your quality of life is creeping downward.
The glaring Fail of all 3 diets in the recent Mediterranean Diet Study for the medications criteria threw up a huge red flag. As a brief refresher, at baseline and 5 years later, prescription medication usage was as follows:
Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, insulin, Ketosis, mortality, Protein, Sugar, TPMC
Tagged Atkins, calories, calories proper, carbohydrates, carbs, diabetes, empty calories, energy balance, fat, insulin, mortality, nutrition, obesity, protein, sugar