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  #16   ^
Old Wed, Oct-07-15, 20:27
NoWhammies's Avatar
NoWhammies NoWhammies is offline
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Maybe the key is to put the body into some type of nutritional crisis as it relates to macronutrients, and it doesn't matter whether that crisis is that you're experiencing extreme limitation of carbs or fats, or you're experiencing severe food scarcity. At either end, the body's adaptation and survival responses kick into gear to promote health. The rest of the time, during times of nutrient prosperity, the body doesn't have to fight so hard to live, so it doesn't work as hard on creating good health.
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  #17   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 02:27
rightnow's Avatar
rightnow rightnow is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by teaser
I've said this before, but I really think that if there's something to this low-fat "magic" Denise is talking about, it might be worth it for open-minded people to look at some sort of intermittent approach. When they take mice and feed them a diabetes-inducing diet one week, and low-fat chow the next, back and forth, they're protected from the development of diabetes. Planned phases of different approaches could help steer clear of some of the deficiencies likely to develop, later if not sooner, on a really restrictive, low meat and fat diet.

Or, maybe it is really about nutritional malnourishment all along. Maybe just eating a few muscle meats and cheese and a few veggies sometimes is not enough to nourish a body deficient in a lot of things for a long time, even if lowcarb/highfat is otherwise a decent diet. Maybe the reason people have trouble staying on a given plan or benefit from occasionally doing other plans is simply because by eating different foods, they are getting a dose of different nutrients.

PJ
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  #18   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 05:55
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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Could be. A diet that could sustain a person indefinitely, as long as they start from a level playing field might not actually correct a nutritional deficiency. An example--beef tallow, butter or coconut oil might have enough essential fatty acids to prevent an essential fatty acid deficiency. But feed an animal a purified, fat-free diet long enough to cause an essential fatty acid deficiency, and these fats are very poor at reversing it. The diet that prevents disease isn't always the diet that reverses it, it depends on the status going in. A person three days away from realizing they have pernicious anemia would obviously not respond well to the Rice diet (unless the program involves copious b12 supplementation.

Good points from Ketopia. At the same time--the bits about study drop-outs etc., people being uncounted because the doctor assumes that not responding=not complying are valid. But that's on the group responder/non-responder level. With something like diabetic retinopathy, though--I think statistical significance shows up in a single subject. That doesn't mean that you've found something that will work in all subjects, even all compliant subjects. But this is like Dr. Bernstein's diabetes diet--the effect is strong enough that even just Dr. Bernstein's individual results, before he ever took in a patient, were statistically significant. Extraordinary results require very few subjects to be statistically significant.

One point against the non-compliant patients being kicked out in the Rice diet data is that the diet was applied to a large extent on an in-patient basis.

I like to look at something like the potato hack or rice diet as a sort of specialization--the body is given an opportunity to try to optimize for glucose metabolism vs. fat, and it either can or it can't. Calling this reversal of diabetes doesn't really work for me, because it's a matter of definition. If diabetes is tolerance of carbohydrate, which is the definition Denise seems to go by, then maybe being able to eat rice, with normal blood glucose, as long as you don't eat fat, is a cure. But if diabetes is a more complicated metabolic derangement--an intolerance of both fat and carbohydrate--then that doesn't wash. Saying, low fat is a cure if blood sugar/insulin are normal, even if adding fat would reverse the tolerance, but low carb is not a cure if blood sugar/insulin become normal, because adding carbohydrate would reverse the tolerance--that doesn't wash for me. Perhaps for somebody that either approach would work for--the intolerance is to those muddy, middle of the road diets that Denise writes about. That's my main problem with Denise's current approach--not obviously that there are therapeutic benefits to be had from low fat, but dismissal, on the wrong grounds, of the benefit with low carb.
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  #19   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 08:06
Nancy LC's Avatar
Nancy LC Nancy LC is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NoWhammies
Maybe the key is to put the body into some type of nutritional crisis as it relates to macronutrients, and it doesn't matter whether that crisis is that you're experiencing extreme limitation of carbs or fats, or you're experiencing severe food scarcity. At either end, the body's adaptation and survival responses kick into gear to promote health. The rest of the time, during times of nutrient prosperity, the body doesn't have to fight so hard to live, so it doesn't work as hard on creating good health.

I was thinking about that too. Or maybe having bombs drop on your village or being whipped by your doctor were the cause?
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  #20   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 09:14
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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You could look at this from a learning/adaptation perspective. If you look at keto/fat adaptation, and the way it's sort of looked at in "our" crowd, the paleo/low carber/intermittent fasting types. It can take a while to adapt to a high fat diet, and it's harder on some than others. Why? Maybe because it's been so long since they've eaten a diet that's predominantly high in fat. Various enzymes needed for efficient fat metabolism are kept at a lowish level, in people who have been predominant glucose burners for a long time. Subtle differences in fat intake--35 vs 40 percent, or even 45 vs 35--that's a pretty mild stimulus. 80 percent, now there's a stimulus. The same can be said on the other end, slight increases in carbohydrate can only be expected to give slight adaptations--or maybe none at all, the stimulus could be too weak.

Matt Stone used to suggest full-sugar ice cream and crap like that to develop metabolic flexibility. Just exactly the sort of foods that cause it in the first place. I sometimes think of mixed sugar/fat foods as "white noise" foods. Rat pups exposed to real white noise fail to properly develop the part of the brain that discriminates between different sounds. So they hear any noise--the whole region lights up, they get seizures. The cure is exposing the animals to various simple tones, get the brain to slowly rewire itself. Complex chords wouldn't work, only simple tones. If I wanted to take a shot at metabolic flexibility, I wouldn't expose myself to a complex food with a middle of the road macronutrient content, I'd spend some time in the extremes. Learn scales before chords.

Acute opposed to chronic stress can improve blood glucose in rodents. Hanging rats by their tails, and other mean stuff. Probably have to fit any exercise protocols where an electric zap grid is the motivator as well. I guess it depends on how often the whippings were.
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  #21   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 10:29
NoWhammies's Avatar
NoWhammies NoWhammies is offline
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One of the things all the contradictory studies indicate to me is that, when it comes to studying the human body, we're spinning our wheels. We measure one variable and often do it poorly, not accounting for confounding factors, using ineffectual study design, etc.

Then, we look for an easy way to interpret the study data and apply a simple, one-note conclusion instead of realizing that our conclusion is maybe one piece of an extremely complex picture. It's a huge flaw in the way we currently study diet and disease and interpret data.

I'm not sure Occam's razor applies in the human body. I don't believe the simplest explanation is always the most likely one, because we are incredibly complex biological organisms with enough variations from person to person that a simple generalization would never cover everyone. Plus, there are so many variables - from the biological, such as differing hormonal levels and interactions, to psychological, such as how thought processes affect health, to the behavioral, such as how compliant subjects are with study protocols and how other non-study-related behaviors may affect outcomes. Maybe the answer is that we try to make it too simple, when clearly it isn't.
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  #22   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 11:15
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teaser teaser is offline
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Yes... there's no way to do a low protein study without being low in all those amino acids. Then you could guess an effect was caused by one amino acid, drop just that one--and get a similar effect. But you might just have gotten lucky, you could get a similar end result, but it could happen for a different reason. Or drop all the fat from the diet--there could be consequences to the lack of every free fatty acid type that you're not eating, now. The actual desired result could come down to just the palmitic acid, or just the linoleic, not fat in general. The Rice Diet in particular is very low in linoleic acid, in mouse models, all sorts of diabetes/obesity inducing diets aren't, as long as linoleic acid is low enough. Denise questions that idea here;

Quote:
Perhaps the only areas of overlap with an ancestral framework are that all that rice would’ve provided a decent source of resistant starch, gluten was nowhere to be seen, and the uber-lean diet would’ve smashed polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) intake to smithereens. (If you haven’t caught wind of the PUFA-hatin’ yet, these fats are garnering quite a bad rap due to their unstable, oxidation-prone structure—especially omega-6 PUFAs, the pro-inflammatory Evil Cousins of omega-3s. But even PUFAs as a whole have taken a clobbering in some spheres (hello Ray Peat!), and higher-than-trivial intakes have been indicted as a cause of many terrible things.)

Indeed, after my AHS talk, a few people contacted me suggesting it may be the PUFA reduction that improved sugar metabolism and other aspects of health, thus allowing rice dieters to thrive on an otherwise nonsensical diet. And more broadly, that rock-bottom PUFA intake might be the biggest reason low fat, plant-based diets have any positive effect on chronic diseases to begin with. That would leave saturated and monounsaturated fat in the clear, needlessly nixed in the quest for better health.

I might be inclined to guess the same thing, if not for one human-sized monkey wrench by the name of Roy Swank.



Roy Swank is not a monkey wrench, unless maybe if you're looking at M.S. specifically. Just because obesity, diabetes, and cancer might link to polyunsaturated fat, that doesn't mean that polyunsaturated fat has to make things worse in every dietary/disease context imaginable. For the average person, the biggest threats are heart disease, diabetes, cancer. For a person with m.s., the biggest threat is m.s. Multiple Sclerosis is a serious disease, slowing down its progress could increase lifespan even if it did increase the probability of cancer or other diseases in the long term.
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  #23   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 16:36
MickiSue MickiSue is offline
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Dr Terry Wahls is not a monkey wrench, either. But she made entirely different changes in her diet to reverse secondary progressive MS.

I'm not nearly as knowledgeable as many of you about the intricacies of these studies. But I do know that much too much is made of rodent studies, attempting to apply them in their entirety to humans. As Karen noted, we are exceedingly complex organisms, and Occam can keep his razor, here. The simplest explanation for a singular phenomenon is an entirely reasonable goal. For feeding studies, where, even if one one foodstuff is fed, one needs to account for both the presence of that foodstuff, and the absence of all others: it just is too confining.
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  #24   ^
Old Thu, Oct-08-15, 21:41
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Speaking of Multiple Sclerosis: http://www.davidwheldon.co.uk/ms-treatment.html

It appears that some forms of MS are treatable with an antibiotic protocol. If this is true, and if MS also responds to dietary intervention, then combining the two should produce much better results.
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  #25   ^
Old Fri, Oct-09-15, 07:59
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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Martin said;

Quote:
It appears that some forms of MS are treatable with an antibiotic protocol. If this is true, and if MS also responds to dietary intervention, then combining the two should produce much better results.


Obvious possible connection to gut bacteria there. There are studies showing that a high fat diet increases the endotoxin load on the host, endotoxins are incorporated into chylomicrons before absorption. That's more a total fat thing than a saturated fat thing, but type of fat can also affect how much endotoxin makes it into circulation. The Wahls diet does attempt to address gut health. And in the context of a high sugar diet, there's lots of evidence that a high fat diet might result in a "bad" gut biome.


Endotoxin-->leaky gut, sugar+fat (alcohol also helps)-->increased endotoxin load, leaky gut. Toll-like receptor 4? There are receptors that respond to endotoxins--and also to advanced glycation endproducts--if you block them, you also block the diabetes inducing/obesity inducing/inflammatory effects of these substances. I'm talking dietary advanced glycation endproducts here. These are elevated when meat is cooked, example

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/art...04564/table/T1/

Quote:
Beef, steak, pan fried w/olive oil 10,058 AGE kU/100 gram serving
Beef, steak, raw 800 AGE kU/ 100 gram serving.


Butter is also an excellent source of AGE's, although we're talking per 100 grams here--put it on a per-calorie basis, and things look a bit better.

Quote:
Butter, whipped 26,480
Corn oil 2400



But whatever's wrong with corn oil, it's a lot lower in AGE's, by calorie or gram.

Not that I lay awake worrying about AGEs in food. With the tie-in with immunity for both AGE's and endotoxins through toll-like receptors, though, it seems possible that there's some relevance to an immune disease like multiple sclerosis.

For full disclosure, I did have a full cup of heavy cream for breakfast. I've considered going a stint with raw meat, but the only one I feel comfortable with is beef, and that's kind of pricey lately.
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  #26   ^
Old Fri, Oct-09-15, 09:15
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Nicekitty Nicekitty is offline
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Wow, that's a whole new wrinkle on AGEs, I had no idea that they were absorbed from the diet. I don't recall reading about dietary sources from any of the books discussing AGEs (such as Grain Brain, Atkins Diabetes Revolution, etc...) All the great animal products--cooked meat, butter, cheese, etc...are apparently very high in AGEs! Got to look into that and possible receptor blocking some more.

I just have to believe that humans have developed some way to ameliorate a high dietary intake of AGEs--we've been cooking for, what, 50,000 years now? Got to be some genetic fix for that. But I could see how this very much supports a raw diet for all animals--they don't cook, make butter or cheese, etc...My husband is starting to get nervous about my dietary inquiries now...
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  #27   ^
Old Fri, Oct-09-15, 09:25
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Endotoxins are produced from the death of bacteria particularly. The implication is that fat is antibiotic in the gut. These endotoxins stimulate an immune response. The link I posted illustrates a mycoplasma (chlamydophila pneumonia) infection as the primary cause of MS. If the immune system recognizes the infected cells, they may kill them when fighting the infection. So, boost immune response, kill infected cells. On top of that, mycoplasma infect immune cells so that even though they go to the infection site to fight the infection, they re-infect the same site simultaneously. So, boost immune response, kill infected cells, re-infect healthy cells. The end result is a progressive destruction of tissues.

Conversely, reducing fat intake inhibits endotoxins release, in turn inhibits immune response, infected cells survive, healthy cells are not re-infected. The end result here is survival of the host, relatively speaking of course.

In this explanation above, we can see why MS is characterized as an immune disorder, but in fact it's an infection, the immune response is normal - not disordered - but the tissues are destroyed and re-infected constantly by the immune cells themselves which are infected by the same mycoplasma. This is clearly demonstrated by the link I posted about MS, where antibacterial treatment - no diet manipulation - has the potential to cure MS outright.

One factor could be vitamin A, which is essential for the immune system, especially for an active on-going infection, where vitamin A gets depleted quickly. A low fat intake would reduce vitamin A intake, therefore lead to vitamin A depletion even more quickly, and eventually to immune suppression. Now we have two ways to suppress the immune response, the killing of infected cells, and the re-infection of healthy cells. But vitamin A depletion comes at a significant price, since it's involved in red blood cells regeneration, meaning that the host gradually loses strength, energy, vitality, endurance, etc.

I doubt anything said about those experiments. I suspect they never compared MS to a healthy person when determining vitality. They likely only compared sick-vs-sick, so a tiny bit of vitality would look much more important than if compared to the healthy where vitality was not restrained by the disease itself. You know how it would go, "Oh, you look good today, for somebody with MS". Another thing is the psychological effect of MS so that any self-reporting will be almost completely unreliable. The mental state here is "don't care 'bout nothin".

Bear in mind, the explanation above is my understanding, I don't actually know if any of it is true, but it makes sense to me.
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  #28   ^
Old Fri, Oct-09-15, 09:39
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nicekitty
Wow, that's a whole new wrinkle on AGEs, I had no idea that they were absorbed from the diet. I don't recall reading about dietary sources from any of the books discussing AGEs (such as Grain Brain, Atkins Diabetes Revolution, etc...) All the great animal products--cooked meat, butter, cheese, etc...are apparently very high in AGEs! Got to look into that and possible receptor blocking some more.

I just have to believe that humans have developed some way to ameliorate a high dietary intake of AGEs--we've been cooking for, what, 50,000 years now? Got to be some genetic fix for that. But I could see how this very much supports a raw diet for all animals--they don't cook, make butter or cheese, etc...My husband is starting to get nervous about my dietary inquiries now...

Closer to a million years, probably longer, since we discovered fire. We're likely the only species adapted to cooked meat, or cooked anything basically. Maybe dogs are partly adapted to it too, cuz of long-time relationship with humans, and cuz of short lifespan relatively. Regardless, I believe the bulk of AGE's in our body don't come from diet in the form of AGE's, but in the form of carbs, which then glycates protein after absorption, which is why we use HbA1c (one kind of AGE's, it's glycated hemoglobin) as a marker for recent average carb intake. And then we got ketones which stimulate the process of CMA - chaperone-mediated autophagy - the recycling of glycated protein. We produce more ketones on low-carb, so when we eat more meat and fat typically. We likely already had the ability to counter AGE's this way even before we became primates since BG is what normally glycates protein, and we've had BG running through our veins all this time, even without eating so much carbs. Ya so don't worry about AGE's in your food.
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  #29   ^
Old Fri, Oct-09-15, 09:54
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NewRuth NewRuth is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by M Levac
We likely already had the ability to counter AGE's this way even before we became primates since BG is what normally glycates protein, and we've had BG running through our veins all this time, even without eating so much carbs. Ya so don't worry about AGE's in your food.


And AGEs are only absorbed at a rate of 10%.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pdi.520/full
Quote:
AGEs formed in heated foods containing protein and fructose are absorbed with a bioavailability of about 10%, and their excretion is increasingly impaired as kidney function decreases. The contribution of exogenous AGEs may be greater than those formed endogenously.


Interesting how the last sentence seems to contradict the data. If I had an agenda to push, say, vegetarian, I'd be making a big deal of exogenous AGEs. But that's just me.

ETA - This table of dietary AGEs is very interesting. Fats appear very high in AGEs, even olive oil. But distilled spirits = 0! Cheers!!
http://thepaleodiet.com/rage-of-age...n-end-products/

Last edited by NewRuth : Fri, Oct-09-15 at 10:04.
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  #30   ^
Old Fri, Oct-09-15, 10:10
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GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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Right, still working my way through Denise's post and the comments on this thread, but it occurred to me that exogenous AGEs are metabolized differently than endogenous AGEs. Similar to exogenous and endogenous fats.

And when mentioning health-friendly carbs, then there's wheat . . .
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