 | Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 14:18:05 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
It's no surprise that on a paleo-ish lifestyle that your macros come out that way, given you have complete choices (unlike, say, the Inuit). I would venture to guess that with rare exception, most paleo eaters are going to be within reasonable distance, give or take 5-10% either way on any one of the nutrients. But even at 30% carb, it's still substantially less than the Zone, which is why I've only ever seen it work for one person -- my aunt -- who has been doing it since the beginning. However, she is a fabulous cook, only ever eats whole food, ever, and she fasts once per week.
Her meals are truly spectacular and I think it's more about that than her higher level of carbs.
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| Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 13:15:36 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: rrlv_frsh
According to Gary Taubes (_Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories_), it should be possible to lose weight by reducing carb intake and increasing fat to maintain the same total calories. On p. 401 (2008 softcover edition), he writes:
"One interpretation of these results [obesity studies] is that we could remove the carbohydrates from the diet and replace them with fat, and weight would be lost, perhaps without hunger, because insulin levels would drop, even if the total calories consumed did not."
Instead of 20% carb and 55% fat, might 15% carb and 60% fat work better for weight reduction without hunger? What experience have others had with such an approach? Are there complications or barriers that Taubes' analysis doesn't mention? There are always personal taste preferences, of course. What about other factors, such as digestibility and/or palatability?
In general, fat becomes far more attractive to eat when mixed with carbs of some kind, either starches or sugars or both. Just imagine spoonfuls of pure fat, compared to fat mixed with sugar (as in fudge and cake frosting), or fat mixed with starch (as in gravy and potato chips), or fat mixed with both sugar and starch (as in cookies and cakes).
I've also found that natural starches (but not refined, concentrated sugars and starches) make digestion far more comfortable, as well. Nothing seems to soothe a distressed digestive system as effectively as natural starches, in my experience.
Taubes' point seems to be that to control weight, all we allegedly need to do is control carbs. This seems a little different than controlling weight and overall health through "paleo + calorie restriction." Paleo, according to Taubes (p. 69), consisted of 22-40% of calories from carbs, 28-58% of calories from fat, and 19-35% of calories from protein.
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| Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 14:42:12 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Monica Hughes
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://fa-rm.org
rrlv, you raise some good points.
Personally, I've found it undesirable to try to lower carb intake to zero for weight loss purposes. It might actually work for me, but I've heard too many reports online of people trying it and it not working for them. Besides that, it's just hard to stick to. After a week or two of such a diet with no weight loss, I lost interest. It's basically a meat and egg diet. That said, it's nearly impossible to gain weight on such a diet, but then I'm not gaining weight with minimal fruit and milk intake daily, either. So I just found it boring and pointless.
I've found that intermittent fasting is capable of getting insulin sensitivity back to where it should be really fast. I lost 10 lbs. straightaway doing low carb. But the next five took forever just doing low carb. The next three came off relatively easily by intermittent fasting. I suspect if I now kick in high intensity workouts along with IF 1-2x per week, I'll lose even more and relatively easily. I still need to lose about 10 lbs, possibly more. It's been awhile since I read Taubes, but to my recollection he doesn't discuss IF much. He also thinks exercise is pretty much useless for weight loss, but I think this is simply because he's evaluating studies where your basic cardio has been done. I'm not sure that's Taubes' fault. Have there been studies evaluating IF combined with high intensity workouts? I doubt it, but it's not something I've investigated intensely. Much of this is anecdotal, but it has solid evolutionary logic behind it. Keith Norris' website would likely be a good place to start. http://theorytopractice.wordpress.com/
In short, I think you're right that the "paleo" approach is a bit different from low carb, whether we are talking paleo sensu Cordain or some other paleo definition, like that of Mark Sisson. I see signs that the low carb people are beginning to evaluate their thoughts about the value of fasting and/or exercise in weight loss. I think that's good. Maybe they'll turn out to be right... or not. Either way, I think Taubes is intellectually honest. So is Eades. I don't think either of them have such a myopic focus on carbohydrates that it will prevent them from accepting any other evidence wrt what helps us lose weight.
Personally, I strongly suspect, and my own experience indicates, that there *are* other factors governing weight loss, particularly for those with thyroid issues. I've just seen too many comments online now indicating that low carb only gets people so far -- and I have no reason to doubt these peoples' sincerity or efforts, particularly when mirrored by my own experience. Furthermore, there are reports of success on relatively high carb diets that cut out frankenfats, soy, sugar, and modern grains -- like some people on the vegan McDougall plan. I'm not an advocate of veganism and don't think it's optimal, but I think there are specific metabolic reasons for the success these people see, and it makes sense from a biochemical perspective depending on what they were eating before (I don't have time to go into it here).
In any case, when low carb doesn't work, the person may have thyroid issues or may need to kick in IF or high intensity workouts (I suspect both in my case). Perhaps most importantly, eating low carb doesn't mean you're going to be eating quality, nutritious foods. Low carb processed foods are still full of stuff we never ate for 99.5-99.9% of our evolutionary history, including soy, gluten, and vegetable oils. My readings suggest that these can all wreak havoc on a person's hormones, digestion, and/or metabolism. In more specific terms, it may not matter if something is zero carb if it has a wheat protein you're intolerant to (gluten), lectins that are binding to your insulin receptors (soy incl. soy protein), isoflavones that are disrupting your endocrine system (soy incl. soy protein), and omega 6 fats that are setting up an inflammatory cascade in your body leading to heart disease and cancer (vegetable oils).
Some low carb people (NOT Taubes, Eades, Diana, or anyone else's blog I comment on, IMO) including Atkins, have fallen or fell into the same pattern the low fatters have: excess, reductionistic focus on macronutrients. In other words, they think if you don't eat carbs (or fats) everything will be A-OK. I don't think Taubes has fallen into this, but this may be a slight blind spot of his, since his online explanations of the good health of traditional cultures that eat lots of carbohydrate (even grains, traditionally prepared) are just not completely satisfactory to me. Stephan Guyenet of wholehealthsource.blogspot.com has brilliant explanations for these things that fit the totality of evidence that we have, including the data of Weston A Price. In my opinion, Guyenet is one of THE foremost nutrition researchers on the globular intrawebz (as one of my favorite bloggers puts it). He has an excellent ability to pull together research from all of these different diet "sects" -- even including the findings of some of the low fatters -- and make coherent sense out of almost all of it. Get yourself over there. :) Also, I would highly recommend a reading of Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, if you have not done so. You'll be blown away. I read Price over a year ago, then went over to the "low carb" side after reading Taubes, but then began to realize that I could not reconcile everything I read in the "low carb" community with Price's research, which IMO is the best combo of nutritional studies we have to date.
Two years ago, if someone told me to eat foods my great great great great grandparents ate, prepared as they traditionally prepared them in order to lose weight and avoid chronic disease, and that certain foods (such as wheat, soy, vegetable oils, or refined sugar) are just plain bad, I would have called them a pseudoscientific quack. However, that type of approach makes a lot of sense to me from an evolutionary perspective. And when you delve into the biochemistry of these foods and how they wreak the havoc they do on human metabolism, it makes even more sense and validates the evolutionary logic. Our current understanding of how various chemicals in foods affect our bodies is improving, but it's still far too primitive for the type of confidence needed to construct a designer, synthetic diet of certain macronutrient ratios and vitamin and mineral concentrations. This is basically what BOTH the low fatters and the low carbers (i.e. Weight Watchers and Atkins types) advocate, with all their prepackaged processed foodstuffs that are supposed to somehow work magic because they omit a macronutrient... |
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