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A boat full of carbs
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Something to add to the thought process.... we are complex animals, difficult to get those laboratory conditions correct I suppose.... http://www.bbc.com/news/health-28797106
If nothing else, adopting a LCHF diet has made me question many more aspects of dietary studies/reports/advice. So while before I might have read that BBC article and come away from it thinking that yes of course, saturated fat is implicitly bad for you, and that someone putting on weight was clearly an undesirable consequence of eating more meat as the article author suggests, nowadays I look at a sentence like:After a month of bacon sandwiches and burgers I had piled on the weight and my blood pressure and cholesterol levels both soared.
…and instead of concluding/accepting that eating lots of meat makes you fat and less healthy, I start to wonder how much the increased carb intake implied by “sandwich” and “burger” contributed to the (implied) negative outcomes. I’ve absolutely no idea how to answer such questions, but the fact that such questions are not even mentioned in the article makes me question the quality of the content and the reliability of any conclusions or suggestions contained within it.
So an LCHF diet certainly continues to offer me health benefits that I value, but leaves me fretting over far more stuff that I simply (and ignorantly, for the most part) took for granted before. All that fretting increases my risk of stress-related illness by 10% (study group of 1), shortening my expected life span by 30 minutes per year (the accuracy of this claim by me has been “independently” verified by me). So my new diet is healthier (for me), but is killing me faster. I shall generalise wildly and conclude that good health is bad for you and invite Horizon to make a program on that. (Contact me quick Horizon, I'm dying here you know!
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Well the problem with saying "these studies are plain ridiculous" is that we are seeing this reported through a documentary which summarises and simplifies the studies. It is impossible to go back to the original studies without the specific references to them and assess whether they were ward controlled of "free humans", the latter of course being completely uncontrolled.
The odd thing about that Horizon program is that, based entirely on the article, it appears to be looking at studies and presenting info based on them, which would be interesting I think, but they seem to have tacked on the bit about the presenter trying a particular type of diet and making what seem like broad conclusions on the basis of perceived results. It seems an odd thing to throw into the program and to me seems to dilute the value of the core part of the program. Or perhaps the program is separate to the dietary trial by the presenter, maybe I'm just misreading the article (brain fade, I may need more carbs ).DaithiMC wrote:What I am trying to figure out at this stage in my life is how to grow old healthily, i.e., I'd rather just "stop" one day than have a slow lingering meander through a chronic, progressively debilitating disease.
I share your concerns and aims. For quite a while I've been trying to address this in other aspects of my life (e.g. I stretch regularly as I believe it'll contribute to better mobility for longer later in life) but for far too long I've been very casual about really considering the long term impacts of my diet. That's one of the positive side effects of my trying to adopt a LCHF diet, it has made me think more about the consequences of what I eat - I'm pretty sure I'm a long way still from an "ideal" diet, whatever that might be, but making a conscious effort to figure out what that should be feels like half the battle.0 -
The odd thing about that Horizon program is that, based entirely on the article, it appears to be looking at studies and presenting info based on them, which would be interesting I think, but they seem to have tacked on the bit about the presenter trying a particular type of diet and making what seem like broad conclusions on the basis of perceived results. It seems an odd thing to throw into the program and to me seems to dilute the value of the core part of the program. Or perhaps the program is separate to the dietary trial by the presenter, maybe I'm just misreading the article (brain fade, I may need more carbs ).
I share your concerns and aims. For quite a while I've been trying to address this in other aspects of my life (e.g. I stretch regularly as I believe it'll contribute to better mobility for longer later in life) but for far too long I've been very casual about really considering the long term impacts of my diet. That's one of the positive side effects of my trying to adopt a LCHF diet, it has made me think more about the consequences of what I eat - I'm pretty sure I'm a long way still from an "ideal" diet, whatever that might be, but making a conscious effort to figure out what that should be feels like half the battle.
Yes, I think carrying out "experiments" on top of an already simplified summary of the science can make the science seem unimportant. One of the principal problems of course is that he is a population of one. He is a trained medical doctor though and tries to interpret the outputs by engaging in a practical way but the outputs of these studies are so longitudinally focused that I don't know what he can achieve in a month. He did a better job of interpreting the Intermittent Fasting research which unfortunately though, gave rise to the fad 5:2 diet.
From what I have studied so far on nutrition - which has slowed down as I have changed work and so am not involved so much in medical diagnostics anymore, here are some observations (not facts!!):
1) Caloric Restriction: best recommended way for weight loss (no qualifier on dietary composition so "weight loss" can mean varying compositions of fat and lean mass loss).
2) Intermittent Fasting: good for weight loss (not as good as CR), short-term fasts appear to emphasise more fat loss than lean mass. Potentially (though the potential looks good) better for chronic disease control as fasting reduces the number of cycles of inflammatory processes and promotes cellular repair rather than cellular replacement.
3) Volume: large volumes of food obviously drive weight gain and also the inflammatory process, even if the large volume is biased towards only one or two groups so high protein diets will still give rise to weight gain if there is a significantly higher caloric value in the volume taken in. Gorging in intermittent fasting regimes doesn't show up as having long-term adverse health effects (yet! ) but I have read one study indicating that taking in a daily calorific quantity in one evening meal can lead to higher risk of CVD.
3) Quality: We all intuitively know about the more Fruit and Veg but this is in the context of including it in the mix, not adding it to the volume, of what is already being eaten. The "five a day" doesn't mean "at least" five a day - so 45 items of a healthy food will still drive adverse health! In relation specifically to sugar I saw one review of the literature looking at the types of sugar (fructose v glucose v galactose) which indicates again, that the quantity of the sugar (carb load) is likely more detrimental than the type of sugar.
One other area that is attracting interest which may reveal that low carb diets, from a health (physical and mental) perspective have merit is the area of Advanced Glycated Endproducts - effectively proteins to which sugars become irreversibly bound. Some of these proteins have functions which become blocked by these bound sugars so effectively become inert in our circulation and are deposited over time in ways that it is supposed can lead to premature aging including neural disorders, so keeping your sugars on the equilibrium point for immediate use by your body means that these proteins can function as designed and are not "mopping up" excess sugars.
I can now only study this stuff in my spare time so this will remain the sum-total of my observations for a while yet!0 -
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