Keto in male vs female mice

(Brittany Allen) #1

Does anybody have more information on the differences between male and female keto dieters? Does Dr. Fung ever talk about estrogen or “carbing up” for women?

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

The main difference I’ve noticed on these forums is that men lose pounds but want to lose inches, whereas women lose inches but want to lose pounds. :grin:

Of course women’s hormonal situation complicates keto for them. One has only to peruse the many, many threads on keto and menstration or keto and menopause to see that. But the main benefits, the reversal of metabolic damage, inflammation, heart disease, dementia, and so forth, seem to be pretty much equally distributed between the sexes.

(Stickin' with mammoth) #3

I’m assuming the male mice lost weight right away and pranced around holding their loose fur out for everyone to admire while the plump female mice simmered furiously in the corner, plotting the most painful passive aggressive revenge they could muster in a cage. Otherwise, I don’t believe the experiment.

[quote=“PaulL, post:2, topic:83054”] men lose pounds but want to lose inches,
whereas women lose inches but want to lose pounds.
[/quote]

It sounds poetic, too bad it’s not true. Women who lose enough inches to appear radically thinner to their friends don’t quibble much over numbers.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #4

They had an erroneous assumption that keto limits fiber, most of us aren’t concerned at all about fiber. The ratio of protein to fat was a lot more fat percentage than 99% of keto eaters eat. And it’s a really good thing that most of the women here aren’t mice because they do seem to benefit from keto just in a slightly different way than men. :cowboy_hat_face:

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #5

I’m glad to read that, because there have been a few newbies lately who have appeared obsessed with their scale readings, to the point of ignoring every other benefit of their new way of eating.

Interestingly, although this appeared to be pretty much a gal thing when I first joined these forums, we seem to be getting guys now who feel the same way.

I’m hoping that they will all eventually move from this point of view, because there are so many great benefits that come from a ketogenic diet, and fat loss also seems to come in time to those who need it, no matter how slow it is in the beginning.

(Stickin' with mammoth) #6

Were you the one in here who said, “Throw away the scale” or something to that effect? If keto ever becomes a religion, that should be one of the five top commandments after Thou Shalt Not Sugar and Thou Shalt Not Engage Vegans in the Comments Section.

Here’s how you nip that crap in the bud. Never seen it not work. Two questions.

Question One: “How much weight would you ideally like to lose? [Thirty?]”

Question Two: “Would you rather look like you’ve lost thirty pounds and have the scale show no change or lose those thirty pounds and continue to look the same way you do now?”

Takes 'em a second or two but it eventually sinks in.

(Todd Allen) #7

were fed either a control diet (CD- 7% fat, 47% carb., 19% protein) or KD (75% fat, 3% carb., 8% protein)

Looks like a sloppy study. Poor choice of macros, why drop protein from 19% to 8% for keto? Why don’t the percentages equal 100 or even each other between control and test diets? I didn’t bother to look further but I expect the diets as typically is done for “science” were composed of highly processed crappy ingredients like soybean oil and casein protein since you can’t control macros precisely with natural whole foods.

Nutritional Scientist definition:
Someone who locks an inbred animal in a stress inducing small metal cage with little to do but eat from a bottomless feeder with foods of unnatural processed ingredients and believes variations in the balance of ingredients produce results of meaning for humanity.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #8

Excellent! Gonna use that. :+1:

(Stickin' with mammoth) #9

This, this, and this. I can’t remember where, I’ll post it when I find it, but one of our esteemed scientist keto champions mentioned how a lack of stimulation in caged rodent studies skews the results via the stress response.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #10

My experience is with rats, rather than mice, but Peter at Hyperlipid (who is a vet by profession) says that it is difficult to get either species into ketosis. With rats you have to run the carbohydrate below 1% and even then you have to supplement with choline (I think he said). Mice seem to be a little easier to get into ketosis than that, but I’m not surprised by the variation in protein levels.

Your point about crappy research food is well-taken, nevertheless. The standard ketogenic diets available from Research Diets and from Teklad are horrifyingly bad, and I’ve read in certain studies of custom diets that were even worse. Even the standard rat and mouse chow is not great; Peter calls it “crapinabag.”

This is not supposed to be true any longer, though I can’t vouch for actual practice. In the rat world, we are well familiar with the U.S. standard for the humane treatment of laboratory animals, because the standard for caging rats is such an improvement over what the average pet-shop employee will tell you is acceptable. If I didn’t have rats of my own (and bringing home diseases from work weren’t a real concern, therefore), I’d love to work as a lab-animal enrichment technician. Getting paid to play with rats and mice all day is my idea of heaven!

(Bunny) #11

Estrogens do stop fat burning to a point but I am very suspicious that it has more to do with excessive estrogens getting trapped on the thyroid receptors (where they don’t belong) and a leaky gut, those two axis (co-factors) right their will make all attempts at burning body fat futile…