Before the 1950s, it was common wisdom that carbs tended to make one fat.
After grain-industry lobbying and government money backed Ancel Keys' hypothesis, there was a reversal.
Now it looks like his hypothesis was a long and lengthy diversion.

For Jason:

Can I have a summary in text? I'm not an animal; I like to read information.

He's saying obesity is caused by insulin resistance rather than the other way around which was the old paradigm.

I believe insulin resistance is caused by eating beyond one's starch tolerance, which varies widely, for years and years. Eating "low fat" and "healthy whole grains" has been disastrous.

The number of copies of AMY1 genes (amylase production which digests starch) one has, is strongly correlated with blood sugar spikes after a starchy meal.

According to a widely discredited paper published in a non-peer-reviewed journal, by Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a senior researcher at MIT who specializes in computer science and artificial intelligence (but not biology, toxicology, medicine, chemistry or agriculture), half of all children born in American will have Autism by the year 2025 because of Monsanto.

Autism Rates To Increase By 2025? Glyphosate Herbicide May Be Responsible For Future Half Of Children With Autism



I post this, as both the original paper and the ensuing debate make numerous claims of varying credibility about gut flora, which I know is a subject of keen interest to several in this thread.


Another scientist, who is somewhat less discredited, supports Seneff's conclusion by drawing the following correlation between the use of herbicides produced with glyophosate (the magic bullet chemical that Seneff predicts will kill us all) and the number of 6 years olds who benefit from the federal Individuals with Disability Act (IDEA) over the time period of 1993-2010:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1427997662




This study demonstrates, in a similar fashion, that a decrease in the number of honey-producing bee colonies in the US directly causes an increase in marijuana consumption by juveniles:

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1427997662

Is there anyone in this thread that still takes Seneff's claims seriously?

A quick search of this thread shows that the name Seneff has only been mentioned once previously in this thread (on Jan 26 of this year), and the only response was from you claiming that her connections were "tenuous" and that more evidence was needed.

So, given that there's been virtually no discussion of the subject at all, I honestly don't know whether anyone takes her seriously or not.

I just figured you'd enjoy some more gut-flora-related things to warn us all about. The article does, after all, recommend avoiding a number of different food products which are generally recognized as safe.

Scientists (sort of) settle debate on low-carb vs. low-fat diets

By Ariana Eunjung Cha August 14


Decisions, decisions. If you're looking to lose weight, should you go for the mango smoothie or the artisan cheese plate? The poppy-seed bagel or the cashew snack?

If you're unsure, join the crowd. For years nutritionists have debated the same kinds of questions -- with some arguing that a low-fat diet is the way to go, while others insisting that a diet with restricted carbohydrates is better.

With each academic study on the subject, public sentiment seemed to sway one way or the other. In the 1980s and ’90s, low-fat diets were the fad. In recent years, low-carb diets became the thing. It was enough to give the modern-day dieter whiplash.

Seeking to settle the debate, scientists from the National Institutes of Health set up a very detailed and somewhat unusual experiment.

They checked 19 obese adults (who were roughly the same weight and had the same body-mass index) into an inpatient unit at the NIH clinical center, for two-week increments.

For the first five days of each visit, the volunteers were given a baseline diet of 2,740 calories that was 50 percent carbohydrate, 35 percent fat and 15 percent protein. This wasn't very different from what they were eating before. But for the following six days, they were given either a low-fat diet or a low-carb diet, each having 30 percent fewer calories. Each participant was also asked to exercise one hour a day on the treadmill.

Then the researchers put the volunteers in metabolic chambers -- a sealed, climate-controlled room hooked up to a battery of recording and analyzing devices (kind of like the ones they use for lab rats) -- for five days to see what would happen.

After analyzing everything from how much carbon dioxide and nitrogen they were releasing to their hormone and metabolite levels, the researchers concluded that the calorie-per-calorie, low-fat diets beat out low-carb diets. During the study period, the minimum detectable difference in cumulative fat loss was 110 grams.

On average participants lost 463 grams on the low-fat diet vs. 245 grams on the low-carb diet by the end of the six-day diet period. The researchers projected out what might happen if they stuck to those diets for six months and found that the low-fat group would end up losing six more pounds on average than the low-carb group.

"In contrast to previous claims about a metabolic advantage of carbohydrate restriction for enhancing body fat loss our data and model simulations support the opposite conclusion," Kevin D. Hall, a senior investigator at NIH in biological modeling, and his co-authors wrote in Cell Metabolism on Thursday.

The study appeared to be a response to recent theories about how low-carb diets work. Proponents have said that decreasing carbs decreases insulin secretion, which leads to increased fat oxidation and burning of calories.

But, the researchers wondered, "While the first law of thermodynamics requires that all calories are accounted, could it be true that reducing dietary fat without also reducing carbohydrates would have no effect on body fat? Could the metabolic and endocrine adaptations to carbohydrate restriction result in augmented body fat loss compared to an equal calorie reduction of dietary fat?"

Does this mean that if you're on a low-carb diet that you should switch to a low-fat diet? Not necessarily.

The researchers acknowledge that "translation of our results to real-world weight-loss diets for treatment of obesity is limited." The design of their experiment relies on strict control of food intake -- which "is unrealistic in free-living individuals," they said.

Likewise Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Healthline News that while the study was “rigorously conducted,” it “doesn't really portray real life situations.”

David L. Katz, founder of Yale University's Prevention Research Center, emphasized that despite the fact that the study is down on fats, scientists still believe fats aren't nearly as bad for us as we once thought.

“In my view, this is a reality check,” Katz told Forbes. “It does not invite us to go back to preferential fat-cutting, but it does invite us to get past the new folly of preferential carb-cutting. My hope is this study provides a nudge not from one nutrient fixation to another, but in that direction: Food, not nutrients.”

The takeaway: The most important part of dieting isn't necessarily the kind of diet you chose when it comes to low-carb vs. low-fat, it's whether you stick to it.

Scientists (sort of) settle debate on low-carb vs. low-fat diets - The Washington Post

LOL at the reporting. I've read it (the study, not the BS reporting on it). It's sad the testing was so short. Also would have been nice to include a very low carb (less than 50g/day) group to compare to as well.

There's something I've found to be true among pretty much all proponents of "non-traditional" self-improvement methods, be they diet programs, multi-level-marketing systems, etc. That thing is that whenever a new study or paper is published by a scholarly source which in some way wholly or partially contradicts the claims of these proponents, no matter how solid the science, there's always "one little thing" that the researcher got wrong which would have somehow changed the whole outcome.

Indeed, the optimistic idea that changing just "one little thing" can turn "the whole system" on its head is so deeply ingrained in the popular psyche that internet marketers have been exploiting it for year in the forum of clickbait ads. How many times* have you loaded a webpage and seen a crudely-drawn add jiggling at you from the sidebar, promising that you can boost your credit score, eliminate acne, slash your car insurance bill, decrease belly fat, pay off your mortgage in half the time, increase testosterone, reverse hair loss, or prepare for the upcoming tyranny under whatever president was just elected, simply by following "This One Weird Old Trick!"
Modern organized religion works in pretty much the same way. Each religious sect is the "true belief" above all others, because they either do or do not eat certain foods, or attend worship services on a certain day of the week, or pray to a certain saint or another, or wear a certain type of underwear, or baptize their faithful by a certain method, or clip the foreskin from male infants, or whatever.

Same idea. We like to believe that whatever system we adhere to works better than any other, because we understand the one crucial detail which the rest of the professional and academic world has either overlooked or ignored.



In this case, the study was (to the best of my knowledge), the first to be carried out in a completely controlled clinical environment, where the participant's food intake and chemical output could be monitored with absolute precision. As it was, the participants were required to spend one full month (in two two-week segments) in this sealed environment. How much longer would have been reasonable?

A similar article in Runners World expressed the exact same concern as you regarding a desire to see carb reduction to 50g/day (as opposed to 140 g/day as was done,) but also noted that "The enhanced weight loss seen by low-carb dieters jibes with prior studies that have shown rapid results from such dieting. Experts believe this effect is related to the large amount of water lost from the body when carbohydrates are restricted. Hence, this loss doesn’t represent a true change in body tissue. Also, the low-carb weight-loss advantage generally disappears after six to 12 months."


For those who wish to read the original paper, it is here: http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/...131(15)00350-2

You're projecting. Nobody is discussing raspberry ketones.

Contrarian nonsense deleted.

By the power of Greyskull, I have the power.

The hypochondria and pseudoscience thread
 

Lol.

Diet fads are much like politics in the way they are defended and contrarians are vilified.

Over the months and years I've found more and more evidence (such as the study Joe posted) that falsifies Gary Taubes' simplistic "carbs drive insulin drives obesity".

The simplistic hypothesis appears to be wrong; either it's completely wrong, or there's more nuance to it.

Couple of things I noticed with the linked study. First is that the subjects had healthy morning blood sugar and insulin levels. It's possible that the success some people have with reducing carbs instead of fat are among those with some degree of blood sugar dysregulation - and in those people reducing carbs is the most important first step towards health.

Second is that the study didn't report the subjects' reported hunger levels (or I missed it). This is very important for being able to stick to a diet (as Joe pointed out). A lot of low-carb dieters report reduced hunger, making it easy to continue long enough to lose significant amounts of weight.

And 3rd, FWIW 140g carbs/day is "moderate carb" not low carb. That's about 3 cups of rice a day. This study tested "reduced carb" not "very low carb" (ketogenic), which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Typical threshold is 50g/day with moderate protein. Ketosis is well studied and is known to be very effective in the *short term* for rapid weight loss and improving blood sugar regulation, as well as for treating seizures and some other nervous system issues. It's also well known that switching to a ketogenic diet can produce discomfort in some people for the first week, making it difficult for them.

Individuals vary significantly in how many carbs they can metabolize properly. The # of copies of the "AMY1" gene one has has a big effect. Indeed individuals in cultures that historically ate a lot of starch tend to have more copies.

And intense exercise greatly increases the # of carbs an individual needs and can metabolize well.

Lastly FWIW, (and this has little to do with the hypothesis being tested in the study), the reduced-carb group had over double the recommended Omega-6 intake (probably from crappy "vegetable" oils), the low-fat group had insufficient Omega-3, the reduced-fat group ate a lot of sugar and probably refined grains too (which promotes unhealthy gut flora). Not good in the long term.

(Low-carb dieters should probably supplement with prebiotic fiber such as Inulin and Resistant Starch)


In this talk "Lessons From the Vegans", Denise Minger has an interesting hypothesis. That there are benefits in both very low fat and very low carb diets (in the short term), with some similarities between them:

^ I wish we still had props. As it is, all I can give you is :likecat:.

More antagonizing, content-free flamebait from mgeoffriau deleted.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1439747651

Damn that's a hell of a reply. Maybe this is a touchy subject.

Anyways, you said,

And the study said,

And then a rest period, switch the groups and repeat. I've read that article as I'm sure you have too.

I said,

And that's what I meant.

I'm not discounting the study, I think it's awesome they did it. I just wished it was more than 6 days of monitoring them on there new diet. And it would have been nice to compare to a very low carb group too. If this is insulting, or a bad question, or anything like that then my bad!

Here's an article discussing the study Joe posted:

Whole Health Source: More Thoughts on the Recent Low-fat vs. Low-carb Metabolic Ward Study

Mostly what's already been mentioned, plus 1 more:

- The reason the low-fat group lost more fat in the 6 day test is probably that the low-carb group was burning through their glycogen stores. A longer test may have shown different results. This reasoning is based on deduction from earlier studies.