The Magic of Meat and Potatoes and Fat

#23

Hi MattWisti, I plan on staying in ketosis as it’s been beneficial to me, in greatly reducing inflammation, water retention, and pain. So if all that returned I’d take it as a sign I was out of ketosis, or that the potato was not so beneficial afterall, and would drop the experiment.

#24

Only extra calories can make us fat so it’s not that simple. One can eat tons of starches while cutting just fine too. It’s rather individual and poor @never2late talks about tiny amounts :slight_smile:
I consume fruit juice regularly and it’s perfectly fine for me. And that’s way “worse” than starches, definitely for me. And alcohol is even worse as it’s a toxin, no doubt about it. Amounts matter a lot.

Starches aren’t “fattening” (making maintenance harder) for everyone. While I always comment against the too popular “potatoes are the most satiating food” statement, I can imagine they satiate some people wonderfully. They do my SO, after all. Much fat works less well for him, triggering overeating therefore being fattening in the previous sense.

Okay you probably meant in general, for most people. I am not sure about that either, I would blame simple sugars and modern habits way more. Was there a study or at least N=1 experiment using almost only starches as carbs and involving people who don’t eat unnecessarily? That would have been interesting. I think I wondered about it for myself but if I stray farther from carnivore, I immediately add sugar, not starches… Even when I stay very close to carnivore, my tiny little plant carb is mostly sugar. (I’ve just looked up walnuts, mostly sugar, tiny starch for net carb content, I didn’t know that.)

(Chuck) #25

Then explain how I gained weight on a diet that was high carb, but the calories were way below what my baseline of calories just to be breathing each day, and I was walking an average of 5 miles a day. I don’t buy that you have to eat over the calorie limit to gain weight anymore, now I am eating 500 calories a day more on low carb and losing weight, where before I was eating 500 less and gaining weight.

#26

Hi Chuck, possibly it was to due with lowered metabolism? Increasing exercise or reducing calorie intake can do this, as the body is both very good at adapting and downregulating. Dr. Fung talks extensively about this. And now that you’re not depriving your body or doing strenuous exercise your body might be happier, and possibly revved up your metabolism? These are just musings of mine, we are all so different and our results from our own experimental approaches will vary.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #27

And starches are nothing but extra calories, so it is that simple.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #28

That, and the extra insulin required to deal with all the extra glucose (also known as carbohydrate). Studies comparing an ad libitum ketogenic diet with a calorie-restricted high-carb, low-fat diet show that the ketogenic subjects lose more and keep it off better.

#29

I saw 100 for Jasmine rice, my fav :slight_smile: Higher than table sugar according to the data I have found. Lol.
Not like I care. I eat rice so extremely rarely that I want the best tasting one for me.
Basmati is the lowish one, I hate it.

Good thing eggs are a more than perfect replacement for most carbs in most cases… My lifesaver darlings. I never had to stoop low enough to get them from supermarkets, thankfully.

Wow! We did that when I was a kid, it was INSANE work (stupid bugs, among others), half of the garden went for that and we still had to buy a lot… Well we ate very much potatoes, that’s sure…
I have worse soil and little place now, I only grow tomatoes (much work and money but the store-bought ones are pretty tasteless even in summer!), parsley, young onions, garlic and radish (various kinds in various colors). And sorel but that was sowing once, staying forever, green enough not to need the tiny veggie patch, it looks good anywhere. Perfect for lazy me but I just chew a few leaves per year.

Considering how modern people usually eat, you must be right in many cases. Of course, SOME of them may eat great just too much. Or having some hormone problems.

If it gives all the necessary nutrients for the one in question, it should be fine… No matter how we feel. Just meat can be enough, people proved it, I am unsure about only one kind though some people do it without problems for years…? I am a bit with you but I do need variety anyway so I definitely won’t limit myself nearly as much ever. But if someone finds that one single cut gives them everything needed, I wouldn’t worry about them. I don’t even worry about myself and I tend to lurk close to carnivore with my almost exactly zero amount of ruminant meat… But my body seems to handle pork quite fine.

And some people gain a lot of fat from carnivore food. So many factors are in play. I am ready to believe potatoes trigger overeating in your case, they do in my case as well. Still better than eating sugar, though. I probably wouldn’t gain fat eating just fatty meat and potatoes. But eating potatoes and not eating sugars and peanuts and whatever? That’s not my style… So they wouldn’t do any good to me.

Even gaining or not gaining fat the same from potato and glazed donut, I am pretty sure the latter is way less healthy. I pretty much against added sugar though I tolerate it in tiny amounts. Like 1g per month in my condiment, that isn’t ideal but it’s nice. I don’t eat it willy-nilly…

Wow, a tiny bit of French fries make your body worse? You are quite sensitive then. I am not. A potato is better than half an apple or 10g honey…
Still, glazed donut is the WORST. It doesn’t even seem food to me. It never did.
Okay I stop my very very personal opinions here. But still, white flour + sugar + flavorings + some kind of fat, surely something bat + who knows what must be unhealthier than some potatoes for the average person. Starches need to break apart to become glucose to begin with… But I am against many food industry ingredients too.
But potatoes are already over 9000 for you, I get it. Like me and white/wholemeal flour. I don’t care which, they both are clearly bad for me. But not as bad as table sugar… (I love honey, coconut sugar and fruits too much so I just can’t put them together with simple table sugar that I stopped buying decades ago… But yep, I look at a fruit and know it’s not healthy for me either. But it’s still a lovable thing with positive things like being super delicious even though too sweet too often.)

And I stop reading here, this thread is on fire!

#30

Hi Paul, I agree with the idea of elevated insulin if one eats say, 5-6 small meals, and carby ones at that, snacking on both fruit and vegetables etc, but in a situation where a person eats two meals a day, perhaps composed like this, half a baked potato, a piece of pork shoulder joint, and half a glass of raw milk on the side, and perhaps for the second meal later in the day, the other half of baked potato, and some prawns or fish fried in butter, and half a glass of raw milk, or a piece of raw cheese. I don’t think these two meals would spike insulin the same way snacking continuously throughout the day on fruits, vegetables, nuts and salads would, as there is plenty of time for insulin to fall, and the body to recover. And of course, a lot of people snack on far worse things, but I just thought of using those foods as an example. Time restricted eating becomes useful here, as Dr. Fung has mentioned several times in his youtube videoes. Dr. Fung isn’t against keto or particularly pro keto, he just doesn’t see the WOE as bad in any way, and believes it can be beneficial, as do I, because of the perks of ketosis. But he believes first and foremost in the benefits of fasting with regards to insulin, and in removing processed foods, sugars, refined grains and carbohydrates. But he does say not all carbs are equal.

#31

If you eat them as extra calories, yep. I can relate, they tend to be extra for me too.
They are very needed calories for my SO though, good fuel for him.
That’s why he eats lots of potatoes and I don’t. When I do, I accept they are extra calories but I enjoy the hell out of the super crunchy selves so it makes it worth it. Very, very, very rarely as I get perfectly fine crunch from carni food too and 12 years with almost zero potatoes pretty much took away my interest in them.

(Bob M) #32

For me, potatoes are one of those things that are…weird. We go to a steakhouse that refuses to change out the baked potato for veggies, so I usually order it “loaded” (butter + sour cream) and eat half or more of it.

I don’t get any negative reaction, although I don’t know what my blood sugar does. This is a place with a “free” salad bar, though, so I usually have salad, then steak, then finally potato, so I THINK that my blood sugar rise should be fairly small. (When I had my CGM, we didn’t go to this restaurant, so I don’t know the actual blood sugar response.)

I don’t feel like eating more, either.

Contrast that with fries. When I was on The Croissant Diet, I made my own fries using tallow I made from beef suet, which is >50% saturated fat. What you hear from those advocates is that if we just ate McDonald’s fries from back when McD’s used tallow to fry, we wouldn’t be fat.

So I made fries using a new Alton Brown recipe where you bake the potatoes, cool overnight in the fridge. Cut them into fries and fry them.

I was using my fryer (with tallow as the “oil”), and also fried up other stuff (thin hamburgers). I made I think 3 large potatoes. My wife and I ate ALL of the fries, and wanted more. And that’s on top of hamburgers on lettuce, and I ate a bunch of those too. My wife forbade me from making them ever again.

There is something about processing the potatoes for me that makes me eat more. I’d put it in order this way, from less likely to overeat at top to more likely to overeat at bottom:

1-boiled potatoes in a stew; whole baked potato (with/without butter and/or sour cream)

2- Mashed potatoes

3- Fried potatoes

I personally don’t think 1 is bad, although I rarely eat these. I don’t want to continue eating just to get potatoes. If this is what you’re doing, if you can handle a lower carb diet that’s not keto, then go for it. (I was following a guy on Twitter who lost 80+ pounds while keeping his carbs between 80-100 a day.)

When I was on TCD (the croissant diet, where oddly enough I only ate croissants once – enough to know I could eat 5 of them and want another), I made either regular potatoes or sweet potatoes with what he called “butter oil” (basically ghee + stearic acid). I think sometimes I added cacao butter too.

Anyway, it’s astounding how much fat potatoes can suck up. Really unbelievable. I would eat this as a test to see if high saturated fat would blunt my hunger.

One problem, though, was the calories. While I’m about as anti-CICO as you can get, the amount of calories in a serving of these things was huge. I think that’s one reason I gained so much weight on TCD – eating thousands of calories.

(The idea behind TCD was that you would eat this, and the saturated fat would cause you to not be hungry, so you’d lose weight. If I ate a massive amount of saturated fat, I would not be hungry, but I was also eating massive calories.)

For potatoes, I don’t mind having them that often, in their less-processed versions. Though I don’t have them very often, I don’t think of them as that bad, as they don’t cause me to overeat.

(Chuck) #33

over the winter here I don’t do much exercise other than the indoor bike a few days a week. It is becoming Spring here, I will be out on the trails as soon as the rains stop flooding them. But I was exercising more, eating less on high carbs and still gaining weight over the winter here I have eaten low carb, I don’t consider what I am doing keto, but I am eating 500 calories more each day easily and losing a little weight a long and the difference in my waist an belly is amazing to me. I fully understand that calories should be important, but I have a hard time accepting that I can be eating more calories, and moving less and losing weight where before I was gaining on much less calories and a lot more movement.

(Jane) #34

It was the first time in over 5 years I had a plate of fried rice and haven’t had anythign more than a spoonful since. I was curious since wearing a CGM.

My garden is a crazy amount of work, but not the potatoes. I don’t spray and we haven’t had a problem with bugs so far. I plant them, forget about them and harvest them in late summer. I use landscape cloth around them to cut down on the weeding and have a watering system on a timer.

#35

Did you ever fry aubergine? A single one used up the 100g fat I poured in the pan. I didn’t add more to test if it could soak up more. That thing is a sponge, now I know. One shouldn’t just give it whatever it uses, IDK why I did.
Potato needs less though I forgot what the deep fried spiralled one used. I normally just fry boiled in skin potatoes (after peeled and cubed) and I traditionally use very little fat for them, I decide how much. A huge panful gets around 30g, it’s enough.

Fat and carbs? Best way to trigger massive overeating in me, by far. I never get satiated due to the lack of protein. Yes, there is a tiny bit in potatoes, not enough. Not even when I use eggs in abundance. Good food, by the way, fried potatoes with eggs, my SO often makes them for breakfast or any other meal (some sausage and some great spice mix based on coarse chili doesn’t hurt either, even I almost get tempted). It satiates him as well as anything else (except very fatty food, that’s bad, the satiation is delayed so triggers overeating and then he becomes unwell. didn’t try again to figure out when to stop, carbs work for him wonderfully. with fat and protein but it’s for the day, he is fine with lowish protein meals, very much unlike me).

Mom watered the garden 2 hours a day (I still think it wasn’t strictly necessary but it’s true we usually don’t have rain for 2 months in summer). I collected bugs for hours if I was willing, there were zillions always… They allegedly go for the tomato plants too and indeed, I saw them there too but they mostly ate the potato plants. Poor things lost their leaves rapidly even though I did what I could. When Mom was a kid, there were barely any, they arrived not long before that time. But now it’s a problem. At least where our garden was. I don’t see any here but I don’t see potato plants either. The tomatoes are bug free. Different areas have different problems. Where I lived in my first 25 years had fleas so the cats often got some but I never saw a tick there. This place has ticks galore and barely any fleas. Surely the Colorado potato beetle isn’t so common everywhere either. That old garden was in a village where almost every garden around us had potatoes, that surely didn’t help.

#38

Hi MattWisti, I’ll be looking out for this sign. I must’ve been in ketosis for several months, because I haven’t felt hungry for several months, and seem to have lost interest in food. I never plan my meals or think about what I’m going to eat that day or the next day, but I research nutrition. I eat mostly 2 meals a day, and each time my body gives me a gentle nudge it wants some nutrition, so I feed it and follow the body’s hunger and satiety signals. This doesn’t feel like starving to me as at each meal I usually eat till I’m pleasantly stuffed and then go hours until the next meal not feeling hungry at all. But I remember feeling hangry, yes. That was back on my HC/LF WOE which I ended in favour of keto 12 Oct 2022. Then, I would get hangry or peckish, never feeling full, feeling in fact, I remember hollow, one hour or two after eating a whole shop bought pizza, of course, something must’ve been wrong with how my body assimilated those refined foods, as I never gained weight from them, but was dizzy, weak and lightheaded. But on keto all that went away, and very quickly that hungry and peckish feeling went, but also the lightheadedness and dizziness. I think it was a major thing that I quit wheat and gluten, which the ketogenic WOE called for. And these days, as I say, hunger never rears its head, I can go several hours without food still feeling comfortable and satiated. So if I get hangry again or begin to experience lightheadedness, from probably it was that my blood sugar kept dropping back then, I’ll take it as a sign I’ve left ketosis. Thanks for your reply.

(Alec) #39

Committed carnivore here: potatoes are from the deadly nightshade family. The clue is in the name.

#40

net info: All potatoes actually contain low levels of natural toxins called glycoalkaloids . The toxins are produced by the potato in response to stress, which is green potatoes, which have been exposed to UV light, can contain high levels. Potatoes that have a lot of bruising, sprouts or “eyes,” or that taste bitter may also have high levels of toxins.
toxicity from solanine and chaconine.

SO NO ONE be eating those tinted green taters ya sometimes see out there and don’t be eating those ‘weirdo odd green potatoe chips’ one finds in the bag sometimes LOL, not like any of us are eating those :slight_smile:

Now one has to eat like 4 lbs of bad taters to hit toxic bad levels, but for many, a tater isn’t worth the issue of the natural toxins they do contain.

For the 'few vits/minerals, potass. etc. that a tater does provide, all of the same vits/mins and more actually can come from alot better food sources, like meat/seafood fish and fowl easily. When ya ‘really look at a potatoe’ from its possible toxin levels and its nutritional value it comes in low on the scale of a quality food.

I tell ya, when one reads up on taters they ain’t all that warm and fuzzy really :partying_face::scream_cat:

#41

Hi Fangs, to tell the truth, I’ve not been that big on potatoes for the last couple decades since moving to the UK. I seldom would eat them, and seldom ate chips. But I read about how they are an alkaline food perfectly balancing the acidity of meat, and thought it would be a good combination. And I also read about the vitamins and minerals, especially potassium potatoes could provide. I’ll have to do a bit more reading about them I think, as I wasn’t aware of the toxins, though I know foods from the nightshade family might impact some, so will research that. The potatoes I was looking to get were grown without the use of pesticides and chemicals, but I haven’t looked into the potato in itself as potentially toxic. I know I reacted poorly to refined grains and sugars in the past though they didn’t make me gain weight they made me ill, but I can’t for the life of me remember feeling ill from eating a potato. And I would eat them a lot growing up, back in my country, Norway, before I moved to the UK, as norwegians are big on fish, potatoes and meat. We are also big on soups. As I’ve said before I don’t see carbs as the enemy, but sugar and processed foods, and also how we think about foods, as with anything, balance, it is part of life.

#42

Hi Fangs, I’ve now looked into it a bit more, regarding the glycoalkaloids, and yes, it appears to be a problem. As it’s not just how we consumers store the potatoes, but how the farmers grew them, and though they can be organic as in leaving out the use of pesticides and chemicals, it doesn’t say anything about how much UV light the tubers have been subjected to. I have eaten bitter tasting potatoes on occasion, and also sprouted ones, and believed at the time the taste was just due to different brands of potato. So this was food for thought. Thanks for the heads up about the glycoalkaloids, I’m looking more into it. Man, when I was growing up I just thought of food as food, as we didn’t eat processed foods but kept to whole foods, and I never knew about the toxicity of anything. I suppose those levels of toxins naturally occurring in food become more apparent as we grow older, away from our youth.

#43

oh yea growing up we never think about our food, we just inhale it cause we like it :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

and one has to remember an animal will run, hide, fight etc. for survival.
plants don’t have that advantage, so they sit and protect thru toxins. ‘safe to eat me maybe’ or ‘highly poisonous, best not eat me, lol’-----so they rely on those chemical reactions/toxins for protection and we know, if they repel pests and more, then dang, there is something in that ‘we eat’ that while ain’t gonna nail us fast as in poison to die soon, does have to having some type of internal effect on us as we ingest it over and over…again, just food for thought on it all.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #44

I learned, as the owner of pet rats, to be very careful what I fed my babies. A lot of plants have toxins in them.

As mentioned, potatoes can contain various toxins, which is why one must always cut out the eyes and any green bits before cooking. Apple seeds contain prussic acid—cyanide—and so do the pits of fruits in the peach family. Avocado flesh also contains toxins in the pit and near the skin. Even lemon and orange peels contain a chemical that causes cancer in male rats (d-limonene). Cashews contain urushiol, the active toxin in poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac, and must be very carefully treated, or the reaction will be highly unpleasant (I ate a bad can of cashews not all that long ago, so I speak from experience). Cassava is also toxic and must be very carefully treated before cooking (no more tapioca for me!). And so forth.