Lucillle

Some people say motorized biking is the debil. Some people say that Epstein is the debil. Some people say the federal income tax is the debil.
Personally, life would be sad without cannoli and good quality chocolate, I just can't look at them and see pure evil.

livedarklions

Not sure how Epstein just got compared to starch, gotta say vilifying him is not much of a stretch.

willibrord

Do you have evidence for this assertion?

ThermionicScott 

This thread has some remarkable legs, despite the absence of the OP.

Must be the starch.

wolfchild

Yes chose keto if your goal is to get heart disease, cancer, diabetes and shorten your lifespan.

BillyD

Moderation is the key. Nobody says to abstain, just don’t get reckless with life’s pleasures, or there’s a price to pay.

Lucillle

I totally agree.

Lucillle

Can you cite proof of your assertions?

wolfchild

Some of the healthiest and longest living people around the world don't follow keto diets.

Fahrenheit531 

"I choose starch." -Kato

Leisesturm

Since when is starch (i.e. carbs) a 'supplement'? That's what I wanna know.

Fahrenheit531 

The Moderator's Code.

livedarklions

Start there:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/l...135-X/fulltext

Lucillle

That is far, far from being any kind of proof of your allegations.

Lucillle

That is an interesting study, thank you for posting it. Lots to read and ponder.

willibrord

Thank you.

critique of said study

https://cluelessdoctors.com/2018/08/...mpression=true

and the PURE study of 135 000 participants also from the Lancet

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/l...252-3/fulltext

willibrord

If you have the time watch this vid with Nina Teicholz. It could change your life.

canklecat

Valid point. Might be more accurate to think of carbs as fuel. That's the mind game I played to remind myself how to enjoy a few junk carbs and sugary snacks on occasion. I try to time my consumption of donuts, etc., to coincide with bike rides or hard workouts.

I don't do full keto but just by changing my mindset about junk carbs and sugar. and when I consume them, I've peeled off 10 lbs of body fat I didn't even realize I had in excess over the past year. Didn't really feel like much of a sacrifice either.

I also take supplements -- DHEA, pregnenolone, magnesium lactate, extra Vitamin D and calcium my otho doc insists upon -- but I regard them with a bit of skepticism despite it. Perhaps that's why they tend to stick in my craw. I'm swallowing skeptically. I'd like to believe they help, but for all I know it's just getting my thyroid med in balance that's really making the difference. Who knows.

I'm gonna have a donut -- oops, scratch that, "starch supplement" -- tomorrow morning after my PT session. I'll have earned it.

canklecat

I shouldn't be surprised the keto diet has come around again. It was briefly semi-unpopular during the mid-1970s/early '80s, about the time Jim Fixx helped popularize jogging and marathons for regular Joes and Jills, in the same way Tom Cuthbertson's "Everybody's Bike Book" helped make cycling mainstream in the US by making it accessible.

I was in the Navy at the time and a couple of friends were told to lose weight or face disciplinary action, including discharge. They tried the keto diet. They did weekly lab tests to check for ketoacidosis and other complications. I doubt most folks doing keto nowadays have any real idea of whether it's actually good for them. If they lose weight and feel okay, they're probably okay. But who knows.

It was effective for one fellow, who quickly peeled off a lot of body fat. We also bike commuted the 10 miles to work a few times a week. He said the hardest part was giving up beer and deserts. I doubt he stuck with it. That takes a whole cultural change, including a cooperative family.

It didn't seem to work so well for the other guy. I suspect the other fellow wasn't really trying. Can't say I blame him. Despite being a butterball the guy was remarkably quick, agile and athletic. He was a fierce competitor on the racquetball court. Besides being darned good at it he could block half the damned court without drawing a hinder call.

I tried keto back in the 1970s when I was an amateur boxer, trying to keep down to welterweight. My lab results seemed screwy to the doc, but I'm not sure there was anything really wrong or they just looked for anything out of spec for the average guy of my demographic. If I'm recalling correctly they were more concerned about protein in my urine, probably from some marathon workout sessions without hydrating enough. This was back in the bad old days when many coaches -- especially football and boxing -- told us to avoid drinking too much water. Supposedly it would toughen us up. Good way to die too. I resumed drinking as much as I wanted and the problem cleared up.

Then, as now, the easiest way I found to burn off excess body fat was long moderate cardio workouts -- bicycling, running, whatever we can sustain for at least an hour, preferably longer. No need to sacrifice all carbs and sugars. And I was less prone to bonking when I trained my body to burn fat. But we were mostly guessing back then. It's only been fairly recently that our hunches seemed to be confirmed.

Even before "keto" was a thing, boxing and wrestling coaches knew the elite athletes did better when they minimized sugar and junk carbs. It wasn't just sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. Trainers recognized patterns in more disciplined athletes, and noticed those same athletes suffered performance deterioration when they strayed even slightly from a disciplined diet.

There's a scene in the 1950s movie "The Joe Louis Story" depicting a real event in which Joe's beloved trainer, Chappie Blackburn, scowled at Joe for breaking training by having a single small slice of birthday cake. This was foreshadowing to his loss to Max Schmeling. Actually Joe lost because he was a sucker for an overhand right counter over his low jab, a flaw he never really corrected. He just overwhelmed Schmeling in the rematch before Max could get a chance to soften up Louis with those repeated counters.

But mostly it was an interesting bit of minutiae because it revealed how disciplined athletes are expected to give up most pleasures for the sake of their sport. In the 1980s Sugar Ray Leonard quipped that one of the hardest things about training to box at the elite level was having to abstain from even a single beer during training. No unnecessary carbs whatsoever. And you could see the difference in his later performances. Leonard had the sheer talent and ability to box at peak level for years longer than he did, but he couldn't discipline himself to keep down to his optimal weight of around 150 lbs. At slightly heavier weights he looked softer rather than cut and well defined, and was just a tick slower, enough to make him look ordinary rather than superhuman. Same thing happened to Tito Trinidad. Tito was an all time great welterweight, but was just a little soft and slower at middleweight and couldn't carry off the same elite level performances. All because of a tiny extra bit of junk carbs and body fat.

BTW, if you read Michael Crichton's novel, The Andromeda Strain, you might remember the old alcoholic who survived the mutating virus because he was in acidosis from poor diet, drinking Sterno and popping aspirin. But sci-fi is a poor basis for advocating a diet.

wolfchild

In our day and age almost any whole food can be bastardized and processed into a supplement and sold at triple the price of the whole food it originally came from.

bakerjw

I lost weight on the Atkins diet. I didn't feel bad other than missing carbs. I wasn't exercising at the time too.

I lost even more weight with a low glycemic index diet. Very coarse grains, vegetables, lean meats, etc... I still eat this way. The 21 whole grain bread that I eat now is unbelievably dense and has a low GI number.

The way that I see it, as hunter/gatherer humans evolved, some would live in areas where winters would be harsh. They might have stored some foods for the coming winter; however, when stores were light due to drought and all that was left was meat, it was likely very lean. I've never hunted and eaten a fat rabbit, deer, quail, pheasant or grouse. Animals will fatten themselves up a bit going into Winter but once hard times hit, their fat reserves are what keep them going. Eskimo types that live on seal, whale and other marine mammals have almost always had a diet high in fat and they seem to do well with it.

Always points to ponder.
I will say though that a diet high in processed starches and sugars combined with a sedentary lifestyle will make you fat.

livedarklions

I'm not going to get much deeper into this, as I think the keto diet is a fad that's getting pretty close to running its course. I just don't think there's enough people who can sustain such a whacky regimen, and frankly I know I'd be sicker than a dog if I tried it, and I don't think I'm unusual in that regard.

That blog post is pretty much worthless as a refutation. Without getting into the woods, there's objections in there that are just absurd, especially the one about excluding adjustments to diets in the wake of a heart attack--her objection to this is not an objection to what they actually did.

I don't think the two studies are incompatible, as the one I posted demonstrated a u-shaped curve that showed increased mortality with high carb percentage. I don't have access to the full article you posted, but there doesn't seem to be anything in there that would suggest that a virtually all-fat diet is a good idea.

BTW, this brings up one of my main objections to the keto diet. Not only do you have to forego carbs (which makes getting fiber rather difficult), you also have to tightly limit protein consumption to maintain ketosis. A low protein diet is an awful idea for older people, and certainly for anyone who engages in endurance or body building activities.

Hard pass.

livedarklions

Avoid the evolutionary logic, recent archeology where they're actually sampling fossilized human poop shows that diets varied so much regionally that there's almost no way to know what kind of diet your ancestors were genetically adapted to. There's a lot of reasons that someone from southern Italy would probably have died if they had been forced to switch to an Inuit diet and vice verse, for example.

The most recent research seems to indicate that the proper balance of macronutrients and calories in/calories out is an individual characteristic, and that one size fits all diets are simply impossible.

I congratulate you on finding a diet you can sustain and, it sounds like, enjoy.

bakerjw

The human body is quite adaptable especially with the intermixing of people as travel increased.

livedarklions

But the extent of that intermixing has increased very fast in terms of evolutionary scale, so we're fairly closely descended from people who probably never travelled more than 100 miles from their birth place. When you scramble those genetics up in myriad ways, who knows what the best diet is going to be for your metabolism?

Also, keep in mind that metabolism is largely determined by mitochondrial DNA, which is entirely matrilineal, and therefore requires mutation to change from generation to generation. You could have a widely varied geographic heritage on your father's side and even on your mother's father's side, but have matrilineal DNA from a population isolated in a village high up in the Alps, for example.

Last point on evolution--success in adaptation is defined as surviving to reproduce, so it's really a very low bar in determining a good diet. Almost anything will allow you to do that. That's a far cry from answering the question "what diet will keep me healthy into my old age?" not to mention "what won't make me fat?"