Machka 

From FitDay ... 9 Diets You Should Avoid ...
https://www.fitday.com/fitness-articl...thy-diets.html

Fat Boy

That's a pretty vapid source of information. If you're looking for a more scientific and rigorous analysis of the paleo diet, then this link is more complete.

lenA

Either you're in a ketogenic state or you're not


That's the bottom line and what works for some of us weirdos who find no useful purpose for eating starch in sugar or following an almost LCHF or a sorta LCHF

sweet potatoes? ..Oh Puleeze find another thread

wolfchild

That's the biggest problem with modern paleo diets, it's become way too dogmatic with too many do's and dont's... Primal or Paleo doesn't mean it has to be 100% ketogenic..Starchy roots are just as Paleo as meat and fat...There is archeological evidence that primal man ate starchy roots..I agree that carbs are not necessary for "survival", but they are necessary for optimal athletic performance.

GeorgeBMac

ThankS for link. If Paleo will make me sing like that, I'M IN!

MEversbergII

This is true. It's also interesting to note that the recent skeletal find in Spain features a man that, near as can be told, couldn't digest starch (or dairy, for that matter).

M.

Sixty Fiver

I watched the little video in the sidebar... it was promoting a diet that was low fat and higher in fruit and we know that most things that are low fat are only made palatable by adding more sugar.

This way of thinking is going the way of the dinosaur... the low fat experiment has been a failure.

I picked up coconut oil yesterday, it is one of our major sources of calories and I regularly eat 4-6 tablespoons of it a day. It is 100 calories per tablespoon so it can comprise as much as a third of our daily caloric consumption.

As for carbs and carb loading... I try and stick to less than < 100 grams a day but it does not bother me if I go over a little while my wife cannot tolerate any excess carbs.

I would say that the primary benefits of a lower carb diet for me have been improved energy and stamina, smiles from my dentists who says my teeth and gums look great, a wife that thinks she married a 25 year old and not someone who is pushing 50 (who looks great in his "skinny" jeans), and the increased mental clarity.

I would also have to say my hair has gotten thicker and my skin looks much better... those laugh lines have softened considerably.

MEversbergII

I could never get into the whole eating straight coconut oil thing. I usually limit myself to a single meal, and I can easily go into 1600+ calories with it without having to add any kind of fat.

M.

Sixty Fiver

Virgin coconut oil is quite tasty...

lenA

You're are right. A true ketogenic diet is an entirely different approach from a paleo diet. As for optimal athletic performance, I'll be happy to weigh that, against the overall health benefits of HFLC for an average ability former clyde like myself.

GeorgeBMac

Only for those whose taste buds have been numbed and blunted by the high fat diets...

Too adapt a highly enjoyable, fulfilling low-fat diet takes two things:
1) Change the equation -- and start cooking without centering a meal around high fat foods...
2) Give your system time to adapt from the addiction of high fat and high sugar content meals...

Once that is accomplished, low-fat can become nutritious, fulfilling, and tasty.

The biggest drawback of it is that you have two choices for food: Home cooked or at a medium to upper scale restaurant. The rest of the pizza, bar food, and fast food establishments -- as well as processed foods -- are off limits. Yes, I know there are exceptions, but usually those exceptions are the reason why people say that low-fat diets "are only made palatable by adding more sugar"...

Sixty Fiver

The HCLF meeting is down the hall.

My taste buds are gonna enjoy the hell out of some bacon now.

GeorgeBMac

Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt anything. I just wanted to clear up a common misperception about HCLF diets that you brought up...

Fat Boy

Absolutely absurd. I've said before that I don't eat a 'Paleo' diet per say. I don't. Having said that, this diet is not tied to any particular macro split and inventing some sort of diet dogma is about as off-putting as a venereal disease.

A. Plants have evolved over the years and things that we can eat now we couldn't eat in Paleolithic times. Also, there are things that we don't eat which our ancestors did because it's no longer social accepted (for instance, insects). That's OK. Why does it have to be some sort of historical reenactment when it should ultimately be about food quality?

B. To me, a smart diet is eating one that derived from as natural sources as possible and with as little processing as possible. This is regardless about how you choose to go about it.

C. If you look at hunter/gatherer cultures (recent or from times past), you'll find a huge variance of foods. The traditional diet of the Inuit (eskimo) population was based on whale and seal blubber. It was probably north of 80% fat and they got along well on it. The traditional Kitavan diet is 70% carbohydate (primarily from roots/tubers). They also eat about 20% fat which is largely made up of that awful saturated variety. The traditional Okinawan diet is 50-60% carb (sweet potatoes are very common and they eat significantly less rice than other Japanese) and relatively higher protein than the rest of Japan. They also tend to be larger and longer lived than the rest of Japan. None of these cultures, whether high or low carb, deal with issues associated with metabolic syndrome or modern 'civilized' diseases like type-2 diabetes. There's a lesson there.

D. I think a ketogenic diet has a place. If someone is trying to live with diabetes (either variety), then I think it's a very smart way for them to live. If someone is trying to lose weight, I think it's a good way to do it without being hungry all the time. I do not think it's a good way to optimize athletic performance.

The simple truth is that carbs give you a fast burning fuel source that fat burning does not. While ketogenic, I lost probably 25% of my threshold power while on a bike. It was a _big_ difference. It's taken some fiddling to learn how to fuel correctly, but I've pretty much got it figured out at this point. When I'm going to do something that uses a lot of glycogen or is significantly anaerobic, I make sure I've got some carbs in my system. When I'm not doing that type of work, I have fewer carbs. I can lift weights just fine without many carbs in my system, but I can't go on a hard bike ride. It just doesn't work.

Fat Boy

I think what 65'er was talking about was anything in a supermarket labeled, "Low Fat". If you look at what they've done in the last 15-20 years, they've reduced the fat and increased the sugar, specifically high fructose corn syrup. If you were just to make cookies that were the same recipe as it was 50 years ago and simply reduce the fat, then no one would buy/eat them because they taste like crap. So, the food companies have ratcheted up the sugar content to make people like it. Snackwells, anyone?

Another great example of this logic is yogurt. I small container of yogurt may have 20+ grams of sugar but it's commonly seen as healthy because there's no fat. Well that's just B.S.. You're better off nutritionally with full-fat yogurt that has significantly less sugar. If you get the stuff that has live cultures, then it actually has less sugar than what is on the label because those bacteria eat the the lactose while it sits.

Sixty Fiver

We are probably a little more health conscious than most and seem to arrived at similar places albeit by taking different routes.

I observe what people buy at the grocery store as does my wife as she works there... it is pretty stunning to see how much crap people buy and probably have no idea that most of that low fat food they buy has some form of added sugar as without that, their hunger would not be sated.

It is pretty much a given that when manufacturers started taking the fat out of food they replaced it with sugar... and this comes as surprise to most people.

We shop around the outside of the store, buy from local producers, and do all our cooking at home.

More and more it seems that researchers are focussing on what has been going wrong over the past 40 years and the finger is pointing at sugar and too many carbs in the North American diet and not enough healthy fat. More and more nutritionists are also seeing that things like wheat and many grains cause a host of problems for people...

Whether one is vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous you have to ensure that your fat intake is adequate and that refined foods, refined oils, and too many carbs are eliminated... this in itself will cure many ills.

According to current health guidelines we should be eating 50-145 grams of protein / day, 210-290 grams of carbohydrates, and 40-65 grams of fat. Those same guidelines also suggest that we find those healthy fats in margarine and canola oil.

So we have reduced our carb intake to 30 - 100 grams a day, generally eat 60-70 grams of protein and the caloric deficit you get from reducing carbs is made up with fats which are more nutritionally dense. For me this means I aim for 170 grams of fat per day and a good percentage of that comes from coconut oil

So my 100 grams of bacon this morning was almost 900 calories with 32 grams of fat and the cup of bulletproof coffee was 250 calories with 40 grams of fat... coconut oil usually makes up half of our daily fat intake, another 20-30 grams comes from full fat dairy / cheese, and the rest comes from tasty critters and the olive oil and butter we use on vegetables and nuts provide a mix of all three macros with a higher fat to carb ratio.

A couple of eggs a day provides about half the protein we need.

On a physiological basis... we do not require carbohydrates as our body can produce all it needs but I like my veggies and a little bit of fruit and the odd handful of organic corn tortillas with come salsa.

Our diet is far from boring... I am making pork souvlakis and greek salad for dinner tonight and will BBQ despite the frigid temperatures we have. There just won't be any potatoes or rice on the side and instead will serve up some beans with butter and basil.

GeorgeBMac

I think the statement was:

"...we know that most things that are low fat are only made palatable by adding more sugar..."

And, that is the problem: generalizations get made -- and then are assumed to be true when it's repeated often enough.

You bring up good points, but you are not talking about a HCLF diet: You're talking about a junk food diet. But, the Atkins people (and their look alikes) tend to lump all carbs into the American junk food diet -- and then condemn them.

... That is why you will never hear a serious HCLF proponent call it a "HCLF diet" -- that's a label created by the carnivores. It opens the door to allegations that it promotes the use of added or concentrated sweeteners (or try to pretend that "a carb is a carb, is a carb")...

I won't say anymore about this because this thread is for the carnivores amongst us and I do not want to hijack it. Again, I was simply responding to what I thought was a misrepresentation the "HCLF" diets...

Sixty Fiver

You do not have to be a carnivore to adopt a higher fat diet... this is a misconception that you and others seem to be holding on to and also seem to think fat is a four letter word.

What low carb and paleo folks have in common is a shared thought that the daily allowance of carbs is far too high.

GeorgeBMac

Agreed...
... and now, "Back to our regularly scheduled programming..."

transporterjr

Perhaps off topic, perhaps not...I was reading about "eskimos" and how they did not suffer from "white man diseases" like diabetes and heart problems, yet eating an incredibly high fat diet, and I believe, with no veggies/berries at all (At least for a huge part of the year). Only with the introduction of flour and sugar did some serious problems occur.

Note, I am going off memory, which gets more dangerous every year, but a quick check of the always 100% correct internet reveals..
"t’s surprising to learn how well the Eskimo did on a high-protein, high-fat diet. Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes, and protracted winters, the traditional Eskimo diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates. Mostly people subsisted on what they hunted and fished. Inland dwellers took advantage of caribou feeding on tundra mosses, lichens, and plants too tough for humans to stomach (though predigested vegetation in the animals’ paunches became dinner as well). Coastal people exploited the sea. The main nutritional challenge was avoiding starvation in late winter if primary meat sources became too scarce or lean."

I think fat has been given a bad name. Meanwhile, carbs (which I crave) make up the base of the food pyramid for years?

elcruxio

I get the type two but care to elaborate how type 1 would be improved by a ketogenic diet?
I know it can be done and some kooks even promote keto for type 1's but I personally see it as reckless and dangerous. Not to mention sports goes out of the window if no carbs are to be had.
Artificial insulin is an extremely potent drug and when double dosing long affecting and short affecting also potentially deadly (a pump can kill as well but not as easily in my view)
SO basically keto diet would mean extremely small doses of insulin but also a constant risk for acidosis. Since one would be constantly ketogenic it would not be a major leap to turn the reaction sour due to lack of insulin (mistake in dose) and cause a huge acidosis in very short order.

As a side note.
I read a study about the carcinogenic properties of different foodstuffs. It was a bigger scale study which combined the results of several smaller studies. Even as almost every foodstuff had a carcinogenic pillar, most also had a noncarcinogenic pillar. It was this relation of these two pillars which determined the outcome how dangerous different foodstuffs were in terms of cancer. Milk for example was neutral, many veggies were non carcinogenic and unsurprisingly meat was carcinogenic to a relatively high extent. Sugar was very bad as was salt. But the biggest baddies by far (actually to a massive extent) was bacon.
May be that pork is highly carcinogenic as is salt and combining the two causes a nasty combination.

Astrozombie

I've been hearing about this on NErdfitness and a podcast called Dogmadebate, I always thought it was weird to drink cows milk as humans. Trader Joe's has coconut milk that's gluten/lactose/dairy/soy free. I hear Lactose intolerant was our natural state thousands of years ago...

In the movie "Fat Head" the same theme was touched on....as well as a PBS special I saw about Alzheimer's/inflammation/glycemix index .

Though I have heard brown rice is great if you want to get buff, so i'll take it little by little.

Fat Boy

My thinking about type 1 is that by reducing the total amount sugars that your body has to deal with that you can reduce some of the negative effects of the disease. Reducing one's A1c number and overall reducing blood sugar variations seems like it would be a positive. I'm not a doctor by any stretch, though, so it's not as if I'm coming from any position of authority on the subject.

There are other diseases that are affected favorably by a ketogenic diet, such as epilepsy. I've also read that some forms of cancers respond favorably to a ketogenic diet.

For me, the big downside to the ketogenic diet is athletic performance. It really does take a hit. Normal physical activity is fine, as is overall strength. If anything, I was a bit more mentally alert through the day. Cycling performance was a joke, though. What was previously a tempo power level quickly became something north of threshold.

wolfchild

I think the reason why bacon is carcinogenic is because of how it's cooked. Frying any type of meat in oil at high temperature is going to create all kinds of nasty toxins in the meat. The healthiest way to cook meat is to boil it, or roast it or stir fry very lightly at low to medium temp. Even barbequing too much can produce carcinogenic substances in the meat...I still think that the best way to eat beef or beef liver is to eat it raw, but nowdays it's getting too dangerous to do that . I've done it long years ago but I wouldn't eat it raw now.

lenA

I'm happy for you Fat Boy.... I get the same rush from a hand full of nuts and a hard boiled egg...I hope you're happy for me