Category Archives: fat

High Meat, Low Carb During Pregnancy

Posted on May 8, 2017 | 7 comments

The Motherwell Studies

Around 50 years ago a group of expecting mothers were asked to increase their meat intake to about a pound a day and cut out the carbs (Campbell et al., 1996). They assessed a variety of traits of the infants and again when they were all grown up.

The babies were healthy, but as adults they tended to have higher blood pressure (Shiell et al., 2001), higher cortisol response to stress especially if the diet was also low in green vegetables (Reynolds et al., 2007), and modestly worsened glucose tolerance (Reynolds et al., 2007).

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Energy balance, fat, Protein

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Steak Fam and the Wild Mustard Plant

Posted on May 2, 2017 | 1 comment

There are many different types of beef cattle which have been selectively bred for specific qualities or properties.

A lot of info here, “Knowing It: Beef Cattle”

 

 

Scottish Angus x Longhorn = Black Angus.  Apparently, Longhorn beef was unpleasant and tough but they bred well.  Scottish Angus beef was tender but they didn’t breed well.  Cross ’em and problems solved.

Hereford cattle are inexpensive and were bred for feed efficiency.

 




 

Piedmontese cattle are double-muscled and less marbled than Angus, and they’re often crossed because it’s hard to give birth to a fully double-muscled babe.  Seems like it would help if momma was the Piedmontese, too.

 

 

Wagyu: main breeds are Japanese Black, Japanese Red, Kobi, and Sandai.  Allegedly fed beer and given regular massages LOL

Angus vs. Wagyu: look at that marbling –>

 

 

More info from American Cowboy and Steak Perfection.  And a comprehensive list of breeds here.

 

Needless to say, we aren’t eating the same animals as our ancestors: all of this selective breeding… it’s kind-of-like GMO.  Also, we would’ve been domesticating the slow and less intelligent animals because the fast and smart ones would’ve gotten away.  I’m not saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s not what the hunters were a’huntin way back when.

If an animal has been bred for a trait that increases growth hormone (GH); is it really that different from an animal treated with GH to induce that trait?  [rhetorical]

 




 

Same goes for plants.  Check out this awesome infographic:

 

Thank you for all you’ve given us, Wild Mustard Plant.

That’s all for now!

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calories proper

 

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, fat, muscle, Protein

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The BROAD Study or Meat

Posted on April 6, 2017 | 7 comments

Is eating meat necessary?  Optimal?

THE ANSWER MAY SURPRISE YOU

Hint: it’s more important to not eat processed refined junk foods.

 

Exhibit A. The BROAD study: a randomized controlled trial using a whole food plant-based diet in the community for obesity, ischaemic heart disease, or diabetes (Wright et al., 2017)

Tl;dr: it worked.

 

 

The longer version: it was a low-fat vegan diet supplemented with 50 ug B12 (methylcobalamin) daily.

 

“Participants were advised to eat until satiation.

We placed no restriction on total energy intake.

Participants were asked to not count calories.”

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diabetes, diet, empty calories, Energy balance, fat, mortality, Protein

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A timeline of ketoadaptation

Posted on February 26, 2017 | 5 comments

This is how ketoadaptation works (when it works), chronologically, on physical performance (I think):

 

 

Dark grey line: the gradual increase in performance for someone training on a regular diet.

Red line: performance declines on keto initially, but is back to baseline (light blue line) by week 3.

Light grey line: as long as ketoadaptation doesn’t impair performance, similar gradual increase in performance for someone training on a regular diet.  Parallel to the dark grey line.  May even catch up to the dark grey line.  I don’t know, but probably not as per FASTER – long-term LC athletes were not superior to their LF counterparts.

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, Energy balance, Exercise, fat, insulin, Ketosis, muscle, Protein, strength

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Fish oil supplements

Posted on January 26, 2017 | 16 comments

A fattier cut of salmon (think: skin-on, high skin-to-flesh ratio, etc.) has about ~2 g EPA & DHA (fish oil, FO) per 100 g, or ~10 g per pound.  Average price (around here, this time of year) is ~$10 / lb.  So, about $1 / gram FO, in 50 g salmon.  See also, the Fish Blog.

 

As reasoned in The poor, misunderstood calorie, FO from seafood is roughly 4x more effective than FO from supps.  There was no head-to-head study comparing seafood to supps, but a study on seafood with half the dose of FO was twice as efficacious as a study on supps.  Half the dose + twice as efficacious  = 4x.  The greater bioavailability and assimilation of FO from seafood can only explain a small part of this… I suspect other nutrients in seafood explain another part, and displacement of other calories by the protein in seafood further explains another part.  But this post is about FO per se.

 

 




 

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Posted in Dietary fat, fat, Fish

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Turmeric and DHA

Posted on January 20, 2017 | 21 comments

Turmeric is about 5% curcumins by weight, or it takes about 20 grams of turmeric to get 1 gram of curcumins.

But you can’t go eating it by the spoonful because: 1) that’s nasty; 2) it’s messy and stains everything yellow; and 3) it’s not bioavailable, like, at all.

2g curcumin vs. 2g curcumin + 20mg piperine:

Fortunately, bioavailability is drastically increased by black pepper &/or dietary fat.  For this reason, most curcumin supps contain either piperine or some sort of lipids.  I’m not a big fan of piperine because it seems to non-selectively increase the absorption of tons of things – and there are some things we don’t absorb for a reason: they’re toxic… so I’d rather just use a little pepper and take it with some seafood.

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, fat

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LCHF negates performance benefit of training. O_o

Posted on January 8, 2017 | 16 comments

It takes about 3 weeks to become fully ketoadapted and you don’t really get more ketoadapted thereafter, at least as per max fat oxidation rates (which seems a pretty good surrogate, imo).

Important point: “Athletes who drop carbs cold turkey suddenly suck.”  And performance usually recovers by around week 3.  This has been confirmed in nearly every proper study on the subject, in a variety of contexts.

 




 

Which brings me to the latest alleged slam on keto & physical performance:

Low carbohydrate, high fat diet impairs exercise economy and negates the performance benefit of intensified training in elite race walkers (Burke et al., 2016)

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, Energy balance, Exercise, fat, insulin, Ketosis, muscle, Protein, strength, TPMC

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HANGRY! (part deux)

Posted on December 26, 2016 | Leave a comment

Effects of diet composition on postprandial energy availability during weight loss maintenance (Walsh et al., 2013)

Now, we’re getting somewhere!

3 diets (carbs 10%, 40% or 60%; protein was higher in the lowest carb group). Four weeks. CROSSOVER.

Then a test meal which approximated the diet assignment. Total “energy availability” in the blood was approximated by measuring the calories in blood glucose, free fatty acids, and ketones.

 

energy availability and metabolic rate

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, Dietary fat, Energy balance, fat, insulin, Ketosis, Leptin, Protein

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These dudes ate a ton of sat fats and nothing bad happened

Posted on December 20, 2016 | 16 comments

Study: 12 weeks, obese men, very high fat low carb (VHFLC) vs. low fat high carb (LFHC) (Veum et al., 2016) #FATFUNC

 

Pictorially:

 

 




 

It wasn’t explicitly AD LIB, but pretty close.  I say this because that is the magnitude of appetite decline we might expect when people go on The Hunger Free Diet(s), eg,

 

^^^ GOOD IDEA

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, circadian, diet, Dietary fat, Energy balance, Exercise, fat, insulin, Ketosis, muscle, Protein, Sugar, TPMC

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VEG*N

Posted on November 25, 2016 | 27 comments

I’m not vegan but the “Anti-Vegan Because B12” argument is lame.  B12 insufficiency is largely due to malabsorption, not steak deficiency.

Also, oysters SMOKE meat for B12. Seriously, over a full day’s supply in one medium-sized oyster. Can meat do that?

Many people take supps, but somehow anti-vegans think B12 invalidates veganism.  It doesn’t.  Also, 1) tons of B12 in oysters; 2) nori B12 works in humans and rats; and 3) mushrooms still haven’t been ruled out as a legit source.  Whether you consider these foods vegan or not is a different story.  Many non-vegans are B12-deficient, too -> all the steak in the world won’t help if you can’t absorb it.

I’m not undermining the severity of B12 deficiency, just noting some basic facts.

My bias: things like T2DM, obesity, and even some cancers and mood disorders are due primarily to circadian arrhythmia, sleep, & LIGHT… and secondarily to diet.

When it comes to diet, mostly plants plus some animal is optimal for humans in our modern #context, regardless of which Ice-Age Paleo-Fairy Tale™ you subscribe to.  Things like sleep, LIGHT, and activity, among others, seem way more important than debating historical [theoretical] dietary minutiae.

Lastly, this particular debate isn’t “vegan vs. keto.”  THEY’RE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.  “Eco-Atkins” is a thing.  Animals provide a convenient source of LC protein, but it can be done without them.

 

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Posted in Advanced nutrition, diet, fat, fermentation, fiber, Grains, insulin, Ketosis, microbiome, microbiota, Protein

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