Has anybody seen this video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zVxA6yipv4

ETA:
I would add to this list Amy Dungan, Jimmy Moore, Andrew DiMino and possibly Dana Carpender. Oh, and the Drs. Eades, who wrote The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle because they had gotten too fat to do a weightloss cooking show. http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/...id-weight-loss/

I'm not trying to be mean, and I personally understand the ups and downs of weightloss. It's just that the prominent low-fat vegans really do seem to be quite slender, while the lowcarbers are, at the very least, struggling.

Just a drive-by comment: I don't know any of the "prominent" vegans, but among my friends, the vegetarians and vegans who are slender started out slender before they altered their diets. And I know plenty of porky vegetarians, people who always struggled with their weight, and they struggle still, meat or no. I personally gained weight as a vegetarian, and got rather sick.

My working hypothesis is that people start life with different levels of insulin secretion and sensitivity, for reasons ranging from mother's diet to way-back ancestry. Those of us who hypersecrete insulin for whatever reason are going to struggle on any diet we're on, and are going to tend to gain weight very easily. Once overweight or obese, in fact, we may never be lean, even on a starvation diet. Those who -- like my adoptive mother, and like a former prominent poster here who changed her diet every couple of years while her body remained entirely the same slender thing it was when she was eating a diet of coke and twinkies -- have little insulin to begin with, don't gain weight no matter what they eat.

My hunch is that slender diet gurus of any stripe tend to fall into the "never-been-fat" category. It's not an artifact of the diet, but of the body type they started with.

Who are the prominent low-fat vegans, and have they been at their low-fat veganism fairly consistently for decades as the Eadeses? All the Eadeses (and Jimmy's) gains show us is maintenance is hard and carb creep happens and there are consequences (fat gain) to carb creep.

Also, I pretty much agree with OregonRose. As we've seen numerous times in our microcosm here on the board, comparing one body to another in terms of weight loss/maintenance is pretty fruitless.

Finally, imo it's important to clarify whether the issue implicitly being discussed is "how to get as skinny-looking as possible", vs. focusing on health and/or body composition, or something else.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Put differently, if they can get by with the bare minimum smarts, most people will.

All the low-carb people in the clip were fatter before they went low-carb. All the vegan people in the same clip were never fat to begin with.

I agree with Rose, and I can cite the precise mechanism that keeps us fat in spite of all our efforts. It's a consequence of the years of hyperinsulinemia. It's called insulin-induced lipohypertrophy. Fat tissue grows bigger not only because it contains more fat, but also because it's made up of more fat cells. Those extra fat cells won't go away just because we cut carbs. The simplest explanation is that for equal insulin (or equal hormonal milieu counting all hormones), two fat cells will have twice as much fat as one fat cell. There is no reason for two fat cells to contain only half as much as they should. It's their job to contain a set amount of fat based on the hormonal signals they receive. Furthermore, those extra fat cells need to be fed just as much as every other cell so the supporting tissue like blood vessels will also grow bigger for that. That won't go away either just by cutting carbs.

But the clip title is "Low Carb vs. Plant-Based". So, to keep with the subject, here's a list of 16 experimental studies that compares low-carb to other diets:
http://www.dietdoctor.com/weight-lo...ing-the-science

The clip is not science though it is compelling, isn't it. It's compelling because it does not draw any conclusion, we do. We're allowed to make up our own mind based on a simple comparison of fat people and lean people, and an associated dietary approach with each group. But then, the list of 16 experimental studies also allows us to make up our own mind, however it does not allow us to imagine a falsehood, namely that "If these guys follow their own diet... Their pictures speak a thousand words." The falsehood is that if they do follow their own diet, then that's why they are fat. That list doesn't allow this falsehood because when they put fat people on the same diet those fat gurus presumably follow, they lost more weight than on any other diet.

In other words, the clip here is an observation, and the list of 16 experimental studies is a test of the hypothesis that the observation generated, namely "low-carb makes us fat".

I also put in my $0.02 but from my experience, the vegan crowd doesn't like science.

I never heard of Pam Popper before, but the others have all been thin and well-known for their diet for many years. McDougall (whom I dislike heartily, based on interviews I've read and videos I've seen) wrote his first book back in the 80's.



I guess it is easier when the boundaries are more clearly defined. The vegans in that video all eat no animal products and no fat. The amount of carbs allowed on a lowcarb diet is very personal and flexible. But all of them? Do we know that carb-creep is at fault?



This is true. We don't know who started out thin and who started out fat. But, for people peddling weight loss books, being thin would be a good advertisement. And, by the same token, being overweight...not so much.



Again, though...these are people who have written weightloss books. I agree that thin doesn't necessarily equal healthy. But if you're telling people how to be thin, you should probably be thin yourself.

They do look to be in pretty good shape to me. Especially Dr. Esselstyn, who is close to eighty. I would also add John Robbins to that list.

Yes, that's the correlation effect. It's intuitive to believe that the association is evidence of cause and effect, and that one will tend to always be thought of as the cause also intuitively. In this case, it's the status of diet guru and their body fat. It's more intuitive to believe that it's their own dietary advice that made them fat, than to believe they became diet gurus precisely because they were fat. Though both are equally valid conclusions.

We could also call it the salesman effect. When you want to sell anything, especially a body image product, you better look your best. That's why we use young beautiful professional female models to sell beauty products, and lean muscular men to sell bodybuilding products. And so the clip is basically a sales pitch.

None of the diets in those studies was vegan, and all are around 30% of calories from fat - a far cry from the "no animal products, no added fat" diet of the people in the video.



But the diet in question, that of Esselstyn, McDougall, etc., was not studied. So, it's a falsehood to say that "they lost more weight than on any other diet."

Most of the vegans in that video looked sickly skinny to me and none of the "low-carb gurus" looked what I would consider to be "fat," but that being said I also would not consider Loren Cordain or Barry Sears to be low-carb, I don't know much about 2 of the others, and Dr. Atkins was only 60lbs overweight when he dies because he had swelled up in the hospital after sustaining a head injury that proved fatal. So they really don't have much of a case!

Btw though, I tend toward obesity but on lc I honestly look about as anorexic as do those vegan gurus

Notice they didn't show any pictures of my one true paleo hero, Ray Audette

...than on any other diet tested.

Not such a far cry. A low-carb diet is high-fat, thus higher in fat than the other diets tested. This refutes the idea that it's fat that makes us fat, and refutes the idea that even less fat like whatever Esselstyn et al advocate would somehow make us leaner than more fat. I mean, why would fat make us lean when we eat more of it, but then suddenly make us leaner when we ate barely any? I can think of one reason - malnutrition. There's nothing better than malnutrition to cause weight loss at a fantastic rate, even faster than low-carb no matter how low-carb you go. Ancel Keys proved it with his semi-starvation study back in the 1940's. In fact, the diet he used then is best described as mostly plants, very little meat, very little fat. Remind you of anything? Sure, the diets Esselstyn et all advocates. But then that same diet also causes fantastic deep constant hunger, emaciation, and neurosis, that led to self-mutilation in one case.

None of those studies you linked to proves that "fat makes us lean", just that lowering carbs does. I don't think there's any reason to believe that any of those people are malnourished. And you can't honestly compare their diets to Ancel Keys' starvation diet, since they don't limit calories.

For one thing, you're allowed to be fat if you're a low carber.

In the eyes of vegans, if you aren't thin then you aren't a low fat vegan, especially if your raw. Have a look at this site: http://30bananasadaysucks.com/2012/...is-not-working/

30 bananas a day is really bad about covering up those who get fat but I've also heard former McDougallers claim they'd been banned for no good reason.

I saw the video last night and now I am very confused.It didn't help to find out that Dr.V.Keys lived to be 100 and his wife 97.I have changed my woe completely to low carb,only struggeling with portion size,but experimenting how to get it right,and now this.These vegan guys look pretty good for their age and I am now over 50,still trying to figure it all out.I don't think I could go vegan,it's all too complicated and time consuming and I love the simplicity of lc.I do feel good on it as well,sleep well etc.but the video and its message gave me a disturbed night sleep.I doubt,all of a sudden.What,if I got it all wrong and they have found the solution....I need this forum more than ever.Thanks for being there.

More appropriately, those studies cannot distinguish between the effect of cutting carbs, and the effect of adding fat. I can honestly compare a low-fat diet to Keys' semi-starvation diet because they are fundamentally identical. A low-fat diet that contains mostly plants does limit calories by virtue of being indigestible to humans. If humans can't digest plant fiber, then how can we extract the calories contained therein? If we refine and process those carbs to make the calories contained therein available for absorption, we're basically reverting to the starting diet - high-carb low-fat. As we know here from experience, that kind of diet makes us fat. But then if we also cut fat even further, and since fat actually nourishes us in more ways than one, then we will suffer malnutrition. That's exactly what Keys found out.

I said necessity is the mother of invention. However, necessity is not automatically the mother of success.

Also, there's a fundamental principle that says one does not need to be able to perform the tasks that one teaches. Thus, a teacher might know a whole lot about a subject, yet still not achieve personal success with same. The opposite is also true. One can achieve success without knowing a whole lot about the subject.

I think you just have to look at recent events with Jimmy Moore to realise there are other factors at work here. Jimmy's weight had been climbing despite being strict, so he had blood tests to show he wasn't reaching ketosis. He played around with macronutrient ratios and found in order to reach ketosis he needed to take his protein down to 10-15% and increase his fat to 85%. This is a sign of someone having a severe insulin reaction to protein as well as carbs (I have the same problem). Now that he has ensured with blood tests that he is reaching ketosis, his weight is dropping again - I think if I remember rightly, in excess of 30lbs in a month.

Most people who end up low carb have tried other diets and found that they didn't work for them, lots have metabolic issues that mean weight loss is particularly hard and so is maintaining that loss. This applies to the gurus too.

The vegans changed their diet primarliy for ethical reasons, or maybe perceived health benefits, not weight reasons. If you want to compare like for like, you should compare low fat vegan gurus with paleo gurus - Many paleo gurus weren't ever obese, and took up paleo mainly for health rather than weight issues.

Comparing a former obese, metabolically challenged person on low carb, with a non-metabolically changelled, low fat vegan in the weight maintaining stakes is truly unfair - they don't have the same issues, they didn't start from the same place.

Lee