RawNut
Sun, Dec-01-13, 19:21
tracing a chain of ideas
Sometimes the assumptions that scientists start with about what is “good”, “healthy”, or “normal” can cause them to interpret results in a completely different way than someone starting with different assumptions would have. Then, the resulting conclusions become the assumptions in the next round of interpretation, leading to a chain of logic in which one questionable assumption leads to another.
We recently read a paper in which the authors made a series of logical steps, and it became almost comical to us how at each step we would have interpreted their results in an opposite way than they did.
When the results of their experiment are looked at from our perspective, it suggests an intriguing hypothesis:
Maybe some of the health benefits a ketogenic diet are due, not just to the diet being low in digestible carbohydrate and thus leading to ketosis, but also to being low in indigestible fiber and thus starving certain gut bacteria.
Or, to phrase the same hypothesis differently, maybe one mechanism by which a glycolytic or high-fiber diet causes health problems is that it feeds harmful gut bacteria, and the presence of those bacteria causes the health problems.
If that hypothesis were true, it would imply that if you are eating a low-carb diet, then including a lot of low-carb vegetables would feed these hypothesized harmful gut bacteria and reduce some of the potential health benefits of a low-carb diet.
in brief
The purpose of this article is two-fold:
First, to compare the authors' interpretations of the observations to ours, given what we know about the metabolic effects of ketogenic diets.
We draw attention to the fact that the metabolism of germ-free mice is strikingly similar to that of ketogenic dieters. This similarity holds at the whole-body level in terms of behaviour and physical characteristics, as well as the level of mitochondrial energetics. We show that these characteristics appear to be beneficial.
Second, to raise the following questions:
Are some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet mediated by starving gut bacteria, and if so, does eating fiber (i.e. low-carb vegetables) reduce some of the health benefits of a keto diet? Would eating a carbohydrate- and fiber- free diet confer some keto-like benefits even in the absence of ketosis?
Continued here: http://www.ketotic.org/2013/11/similarities-between-germ-free-mice-and.html
Sometimes the assumptions that scientists start with about what is “good”, “healthy”, or “normal” can cause them to interpret results in a completely different way than someone starting with different assumptions would have. Then, the resulting conclusions become the assumptions in the next round of interpretation, leading to a chain of logic in which one questionable assumption leads to another.
We recently read a paper in which the authors made a series of logical steps, and it became almost comical to us how at each step we would have interpreted their results in an opposite way than they did.
When the results of their experiment are looked at from our perspective, it suggests an intriguing hypothesis:
Maybe some of the health benefits a ketogenic diet are due, not just to the diet being low in digestible carbohydrate and thus leading to ketosis, but also to being low in indigestible fiber and thus starving certain gut bacteria.
Or, to phrase the same hypothesis differently, maybe one mechanism by which a glycolytic or high-fiber diet causes health problems is that it feeds harmful gut bacteria, and the presence of those bacteria causes the health problems.
If that hypothesis were true, it would imply that if you are eating a low-carb diet, then including a lot of low-carb vegetables would feed these hypothesized harmful gut bacteria and reduce some of the potential health benefits of a low-carb diet.
in brief
The purpose of this article is two-fold:
First, to compare the authors' interpretations of the observations to ours, given what we know about the metabolic effects of ketogenic diets.
We draw attention to the fact that the metabolism of germ-free mice is strikingly similar to that of ketogenic dieters. This similarity holds at the whole-body level in terms of behaviour and physical characteristics, as well as the level of mitochondrial energetics. We show that these characteristics appear to be beneficial.
Second, to raise the following questions:
Are some of the benefits of a ketogenic diet mediated by starving gut bacteria, and if so, does eating fiber (i.e. low-carb vegetables) reduce some of the health benefits of a keto diet? Would eating a carbohydrate- and fiber- free diet confer some keto-like benefits even in the absence of ketosis?
Continued here: http://www.ketotic.org/2013/11/similarities-between-germ-free-mice-and.html