Patrick--
Are you eating your cookie fat-free? Because you list your carb and protein on this experiment, but not the fat. I wasn't sure when I posted whether you were testing the optimal diet, or the low-fat diet, but with protein/carb ratios gleaned from the optimal diet.
I was thinking last night, when I should have been sleeping. Reading this forum too late at night plays hell with my circadian rhythms.
(How nerdy can a joke get?)
Anyways, what I thought was, in mice the high fat ketogenic diet and the high-fat diet have totally different end results. Same with rats. What it comes down to, is that if you mix a certain amount of fat in with chow, the animals will get fatter when they eat it. Let's just say you hit that effect with 50 percent fat by calories for the sake of illustration. But if you pour
more fat on the food, lets say to the point where 85 percent of calories are from fat, the rodents are actually less likely to become obese.
In my last post I mentioned how adding fat to carbs, while it might lower peak blood sugar, might prolong the elevation of blood sugar well above the fasting level all the same. What if you add more fat? If carbs are lowered at the same time, maybe the absorption of carbs could be slowed down even more; maybe the absorption of sugar from the intestine could be slowed down so much that much of the sugar coming into the system just displaces gluconeogenesis.
My favourite part of GCBC is the part where he writes about glucose (or at least carbohydrate) metabolism having glycerol phosphate as a byproduct, and this being needed to keep fats stored as triglyceride. Blood sugar being elevated over a longer period of time means substrate for the production of glycerol being available over a longer period of time. Visceral fat is more active than your standard adipose tissue; it has a greater tendency to break down into free fatty acids. Free fatty acids increase gluconeogenesis in the liver; makes sense. If free fatty acids are elevated above a certain level, it makes sense to start producing triglycerides; you'll need some glycerol to do this; you'll need some sugar to produce the glycerol.
If you look at the ketogenic diet for children with epilepsy, the fat used is generally saturated. There's a product called KetoCal that's a pre-mix for this purpose. About a year ago I looked it up, and the main ingredient was hydrogenated soy oil. Artificially saturated, but saturated all the same. I ran across a more recent ad for the product the other day, and it was listed as 'modified soy oil' or something to that effect. I don't know if they stopped hydrogenating the stuff, or just stopped fessing up about hydrogenating it, knowing that most people trust their doctors and won't look too closely at the labels.
Anyways, I'm wondering if there's a reason why they use saturated fat in this diet, beyond shelf life? Does it slow down the absorption of carbs more than polyunsaturate or monounsaturate? If it were best to choose between very slow absorption of carbs, and never raising blood sugar above a certain critical level, or to simply get it over with, have a higher blood glucose level for a shorter period of time and then spend more time in the fasting state, than a third alternative of the muddy middle ground, then maybe types of fat, and differential effects of those types of fat on the rate of intestinal absorption of carbs would come into play, a type of fat could be advantageous under one strategy and disadvantageous under another one.
Intermittent fasting fits nicely into this picture, food is jammed into a shorter period of time, presumably when actually eating, insulin is driven higher, as is blood sugar, but in between feedings more time is spent in the fasting state.
Money again ! We could have the scientific means of correcting obesity, but of course no one could afford it. With more research, they could actually find a method of producing this hormone in a cost effective way.
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