Where is the big fat meta analysis?

#21

@Ernest

Okay fair enough. Then how about the fact that Japanese people have been studied and shown to be healthier than most other populations and their diet seems to play a big factor?

(Ernest) #22

@Fry Diet: a bunch of fresh seafood, fermented goodies etc. They don’t have that much processed food out there. Couple that with walking almost everywhere.
Kids are growing up eating real food. Their culture plays a part. They seem to still be well grounded into their ways.
I bet they don’t supersize everything or get down with the Big Gulp.

Suicide rate is high though.

#23

@Ernest

I am not arguing with your logic. All I am saying is that the same kind of data could be gathered for ketoers and I wish someone would do it, yet I fully understand that this is not likely to happen.

I think my initial mention of the Mediterranean diet and follow up with Japanese was in response to your statement that there is no perfect lifestyle. More or less, I was saying, there kind of sort of is, broadly speaking. And by that I mean that there are meta analysis showing that massive amounts of people were doing roughly the same thing and eating the same things and had good health. So when we look at those large data chunks it is reasonable to say that they are close to the perfect lifestyle.

If we had some meta analysis showing a million ketoers living healthily for on average of 85 years then that would be another close to the perfect lifestyle example.

Of course these lifestyles wouldn’t work for everyone, but, broadly speaking, they are the closest thing to such an idea that could be.

(Ernest) #24

It will happen once this way of eating catches on.
But by then, we’ll probably be in our 80s.
Maybe they’ll do studies on us for our kids.
Maybe Kerrygold Butter can fund a study. I’m sure their revenue has quadrupled in the past few years.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #25

We already talked about this one, if you recall, and the first point to make is that keto is not a high-protein diet, so this study is irrelevant to eating keto. Also the p-values on the observed correlations are so high as to make the correlations meaningless. Would you like me to give you—again–the link to David Colquhoun’s essay on p-values? Or did you save it when I gave it to you the first time?

#26

@Ernest

:joy::rofl:

Thank you for that. Kerrygold Butter study lol! But as funny as that is, it is actually plausible!

#27

@paul

Indeed. However I posted that in reply to a request by another user who was asking for what studies I was referring to.

As to protein, while we’re at it, it seems like opinions vary a bit and I find it difficult to really pin down how much I should be eating per day.

#28

On the way to a big fat meta analysis is the new project by world-class triathlete & entrepreneur Sami Inkenen (a ketogenic advocate since he turned around pre-diabetes with the help of Stephen Phinney MD) in partnership with Phinney as well as Tim Noakes MD, Jeff Volek PhD and lots of professional RDs. They founded a startup company (funded with $37M in venture funds) called Virta Health which provides medical team case management & personalized quick-response coaching to morbidly obese and diabetic people who are transitioning to LCHF/ketosis/lipolysis for health purposes, along with comprehensive lab testing supplies and an interactive app. Their case study documentations since launching are abundant and will serve for some compelling evidence that leads to a big fat meta analysis somewhere for sure!

I also really appreciate the solid attempt on meta analysis that Romanian Cristian Vlad Zot brought to his humble, compact book Ketone Power: Superfuel for Optimal Mental Health and Ultimate Physical Performance - wherein he refers to an accumulation of all the available studies pertinent to the LCHF way of life and examines nuances, scientific gaps, and questions that have yet to be answered.

And on the visual front - the documentary films by the Irish athlete Donal O’Neil cover a lot of scientific ground. He spent 3 years researching for his films Cereal Killer I and II both of which amplify the voices of elder scholars such as Phinney & Noakes while documenting the science behind Donal’s own ketogenic changes via lab testing adventures :smiley: They also introduce sport coaches and elite athletes (including Inkenen) who’ve undergone medically managed LCHF with stunning results for endurance and injury-prevention - and basically turn the “Food Pyramid” on its head.

#29

Negative studies of keto have been around since Atkins, and you’ve been keto for one year. Why would you choose NOW to let a few bad studies make you lose confidence in keto when you’re having positive results?

#30

@SlowBurnMary

Great! Thank you. And I find it heartening that none of these people are discovering that their subjects are having heart attacks caused by the diet! This makes that study showing ketosis causing arterial stiffening even more confounding but also makes it even more likely to be an isolated study with results peculiar to the people who were studied due to some factors that are not necessarily relevant to humans in general.

#31

@MelTar

Thanks, I see what your saying. It is because of the double whammy of finding out I have just barely high cholesterol (but high is high) and finding these studies at the same time. However The Great Cholesterol Myth has me feeling a bit better about cholesterol and speaking to all of the fine people on here have me feeling better about the likelihood of ketosis causing any problems at all with our arteries (if it really stiffened arteries for everyone, where are the heart attacks?).

#32

@Fry
Another book to pick up would be Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise. I don’t know if it’s been mentioned on any of your threads, but it’s a very thorough analysis of the studies that were used to justify US food guidelines, and as you read it you begin to question the validity of most dietary studies (for SO many reasons, many of them mentioned in this thread). Also, it’s well written and I found it a blast to read.

Re: other populations - I think the one really interesting study in Ancel Keys’ research was of the Greek (Cypriot?) islanders he looked at. The touted benefits of “Mediterranean” diet started with that study but no one seems to remember that the islanders do a LOT of fasting (also have a tight community, pick wild greens with outrageous mineral profiles, eat snails - high in Omega 3, it turns out- they’re outside in the sunshine and fresh air, are relatively active …). There’s just so much more to indigenous diet/lifestyle that it’s comically simplistic to reduce them to percentages of macronutrients - or one particular food - and think that we’ll learn something useful from that.

If you’re feeling good and you’re happy with your energy, performance, body composition - I think you can trust that. Maybe look to other areas - sleep, stress levels, time staring at a computer screen - if you want to take things to the next level?

#33

@Madeleine

Thank you. I am currently reading The Great Cholesterol Myth and am going to start The Art and Sience of Low Carb Living soon. Does the book you suggest provide information not found in these other two?

It’s also funny how Keys only used the seven out of twenty-two countries that supported his theories.

(bulkbiker) #34

Not funny more fraudulent…?

#35

I haven’t read either of those other two books (they’re on my list). My guess is that there’s overlap between the Teicholz book and The Great Chol Myth but I’m not positive.

Yes, re Keys: there’s a LOT of funny/fraudulent/ridiculous stuff, but the one thing that I think we could learn from his studies - some reasons for the health of the Greek islanders - has gotten totally lost. Honestly, I don’t even blame that on Keys himself. I think our way of seeing food and health is ridiculously simplistic (“they eat X and they’re healthy, therefore if we all eat X we’ll be healthy”) and his cherry-picking just fit right into that dopey paradigm.

#36

I have just barely high cholesterol also. My total is 225, but my HDL is 85 so I’m doing fine. I’ll have to take a look at The Great Cholesterol Myth.