Maybe I'm wrong about this protein thing


(Bob M) #1

Here’s an interesting blog article from Amber O’Hearn:

https://www.mostly-fat.com/mostly-fat/2021/03/does-fat-from-your-plate-displace-fat-coming-from-your-thighs-not-necessarily/

(And yes, it talks about rabbit starvation…though I’m still not sure that’s a “thing”.)

I might have to do some better testing. Maybe there’s a way to add some fat, and possibly cause morning blood sugar to go down and ketones to go up?

I’ll have to devise a test for this.

Though I might have to test, which means ketone strips and blood sugar strips.


25 grams can't be magic right?
(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #2

Thank you for the link! I think a lot of blocks suddenly align themselves.

Ref Phi2020:

Ref Wol1998:

Amber’s Protein, Gluconeogenesis, and Blood Sugar January 20, 2013

Ref Mul1971:


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #3

It’s a ‘thing’:


(Diana) #4

So this if funny. Have you seen all the recent challenges with MCT oil? It doesn’t make sense why it would make anyone lose weight if it has to be burned before body fat. Interesting. Glad I never even thought of trying it.


(Bob M) #5

So, the problem with anything epidemiological, which is what Michael gave by the Speth article, is you can’t determine WHY they did what they did. Merely saying that people did not eat lean animals in the Spring does not prove that it’s the leanness that’s bad.

For instance, I could argue that this is what we WANT, since we’re trying to lose weight:

Don’t we want our appetite to decrease? Isn’t that the point?

But I tried to find some research about what happens if you eat a lot of protein daily, as to fasting (12 hours, morning) insulin level. When I was fasting (multi-day, 36 hour, etc.) a ton, my 12-hour fasting insulin was low, below 5. Eating now, my 12-hour fasting is between 8-10 normally.

I can find no study examining how the amount of protein you eat during the day affects your 12-hour fasting insulin level. Without a home insulin meter, and some careful diet design, this won’t be known.

That is, maybe high daily protein intake is “bad” because of the increased insulin? There’s no way to test this, though.

And let’s assume protein decreases ketones. Do I really want to add fat to “chase” high ketones? If I knew the exact amount of fat to eat to cause my body to burn fat, that would be ideal. But there’s nothing telling me this level.

And what happens for someone like me, 7+ years into this? When I used to fast 4.5 days, my ketones would be very high (4, 5+ mmol/l) the final day of fasting. The last time I did this, last year, my ketones ended up being less than 2, and that’s after 4.5 days fasting.

Anyway, I think I need to design some diets to test. A diet that puts me squarely in the high P:E, “You are about to DIE because of the amount of protein and lack of fat you’re eating!”, camp. Then keep adding fat over time.

The problem: there are no good metrics to measure success. Fasting insulin could help, but how many times can you get this? Twice? Seems like too small to know what’s going on.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #6

I don’t think the culprit is ‘high’ protein intake by itself, but high protein intake sans energy input in the form either of fat or carbs. As noted earlier, at about 35-50% of total caloric intake the cost of extracting energy from protein exceeds the amount of energy that can be extracted. Aside from any nitrogen issues.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #7

Do we? What is the reasoning here? I would have thought we want to keep the appetite at a level where the metabolism is running full blast, so that there is energy for fueling the day’s activities, growing stronger, reproducing, etc. I’m not sure that decreasing appetite is the actual goal.

Someone eating ketogenically to lose fat might want their appetite to be set at a level that will permit both dietary and excess stored fat to be metabolised, but what is supposed to happen when the excess fat is gone? (We do need a certain amount of body fat, after all, so we don’t want to burn it all off.) At that point, don’t we want our appetite to be high enough for all our energy expenditures to be provided for?

The whole point of that famous chart of Dr. Phinney’s, as I understand it, is to show that eating to satiety gradually increases the appetite as the excess fat gets consumed. By the time the person is in the maintenance phase, all needed calories have to come from diet, since there is no more excess stored energy to draw from.

Here I have to ask what the point is of knowing the numbers (apart from increasing the general sum of human knowledge, of course). We too often fall into the trap of trying to manipulate the marker, once we have one, instead of understanding the underlying condition and dealing with it. It appears to me, reading posts like this, that the goal is to learn the numbers in order to be able to manipulate the numbers, instead of learning what the healthiest way is to eat.

I think we already have a good notion of the latter. The American diet was once praised for its high quality, because we ate the most meat. And the result was that for several generations, Americans were the tallest, strongest, and healthiest people around. For most of its evolutionary history, in fact, the race has been able to survive and thrive (infectious diseases aside) without knowing our insulin and glucose levels or even what protein, carbohydrate, and fat were.

You are assuming this is a bad development. How do you know that it’s not perfectly normal and healthy? Suppose your measured ketone level doesn’t really need to be that high? If the elite athletes studied by Phinney and Volek had very low levels of ketones but appeared to be extremely fit, why then are low ketone levels a problem? Isn’t it possible that they are part of good health?

Of course, I am biased against the notion that we should be trying to out-think two million years of evolution, but that’s just me.


#8

To me, appetite is merely the desire (and I saw that as definition anyway), not how much food I need to eat for satiation but I understand how is it used here.

We don’t want it to decrease to the point that we are starving… Obviously.
I want to lose fat, gain muscle, get more energy and have a suberb metabolism, thank you :stuck_out_tongue:
In my case, reducing my food intake was needed, yes. But I reach the perfect food intake using fatty meats and eggs, leaner protein probably would cause me undereating and being miserable for some minutes before I would quit that style.
I had some way more protein rich as usual days lately when I ate big amounts of leaner meat but I still needed much fat to get enough energy to function properly. The ratio changed drastically but it would be super weird to live on protein and it’s not even healthy (or anywhere near to be realistic for most people).

I don’t know about my ketones and it’s perfect for me, I just saw that line and reacted.


(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #9

I wonder if we could reframe ‘rabbit starvation’ as the ultimate CICO diet.