Quote from Aleksey on April 21, 2024, 7:25 pm

I got chonky for the first time in my life after taking CLO on Morley Robbins' so-called Root Cause Protocol, and then continued getting fat on a Ray Peat inspired diet (I say a diet and not the diet because he didn't really advocate for a particular diet but all of his followers think he did). On a strict low vA diet I lost a bit of weight but I also didn't feel very good. My current diet is more manageable but is also very slow for losing weight. I have somewhere between 50–100% of the RDA of vA per day because I eat eggs and some other foods with moderate vA for various nutrients and as an allowance for variety. I would like to lose more weight but the first priority is to function well. My weight peaked at around 180 lb. Right now I'm around 175 lb. I try not to get stuck in any one ideology but I try things and see what helps.

Quote from Jiří on April 21, 2024, 9:20 pm

@jessica2 "So my guess is that Asians health is in proportion to the starch that they DON'T eat"

But the same goes for eating fat...

"Asians and rice is an interesting scenario. I do know one thing that the Asians got from consuming white rice alone; and that's beriberi."

That's why combination of white rice and pork works for them so well. Pork is high in thiamine. But they were not eating only white rice as carb sources. They were eating legumes, root vegetables as well and there you have your thiamine as well..

Simply they were on high carb diet and they were far from obese and sick.. Deal with it..

Quote from tim on April 22, 2024, 3:42 am

The way I see fructose and fat is that the threshold between healthy and unhealthy levels is determined by liver function.

Fructose was not in short supply pre civilization, please see my posts about honey and tree sap here:

https://ggenereux.blog/discussion/topic/anyone-here-consuming-honey/?part=2

Here's a snippet:

"Honey contributes roughly 70 percent of the diet by weight and 80 percent by calories (Ichikawa 1981; Terashima 1998), making it the largest component of the Efe diet during the wet season."

Here's a post I did on hunter gatherer grain consumption:

https://ggenereux.blog/discussion/topic/hadza-hunter-gatherers/?part=4

Quote from tim on April 22, 2024, 5:47 am

@jessica2

VLDL is not measured directly, it is estimated from the measured triglycerides.

People that consume a ketogenic diet tend to have lower triglycerides and thus lower estimated VLDL but have raised LDL.

Why?

Because in ketosis ketones are produced in the liver reducing the need to export triglycerides.

This doesn't mean that less VLDL is produced. VLDL can vary in size. It tends to be smaller, containing less triglycerol on a ketogenic diet.

Because LDL originates from VLDL this means that either LDL uptake and metabolism by the liver on a ketogenic diet tends to be slowed and/or VLDL production tends to be higher.

Introduction to Lipids and Lipoproteins

The endogenous lipoprotein pathway begins in the liver with the formation of VLDL. The triglycerides carried in VLDL are metabolized in muscle and adipose tissue by lipoprotein lipase releasing free fatty acids and IDL are formed. The IDL are further metabolized to LDL, which are taken up by the LDL receptor in numerous tissues including the liver, the predominant site of uptake.

Low-Density Lipoproteins (LDL)

These particles are derived from VLDL and IDL particles and they are even further enriched in cholesterol. LDL carries the majority of the cholesterol that is in the circulation. The predominant apolipoprotein is B-100 and each LDL particle contains one Apo B-100 molecule. LDL consists of a spectrum of particles varying in size and density. An abundance of small dense LDL particles is seen in association with hypertriglyceridemia, low HDL levels, obesity, type 2 diabetes (i.e. patients with the metabolic syndrome) and infectious and inflammatory states. These small dense LDL particles are considered to be more pro-atherogenic than large LDL particles for a number of reasons (8). Small dense LDL particles have a decreased affinity for the LDL receptor resulting in a prolonged retention time in the circulation. Additionally, they more easily enter the arterial wall and bind more avidly to intra-arterial proteoglycans, which traps them in the arterial wall. Finally, small dense LDL particles are more susceptible to oxidation, which could result in an enhanced uptake by macrophages.

A Ketogenic Low-Carbohydrate High-Fat Diet Increases LDL Cholesterol in Healthy, Young, Normal-Weight Women: A Randomized Controlled Feeding Trial

The current trial shows that feeding healthy, young women a ketogenic LCHF diet rich in saturated fatty acids for four weeks results in profound alterations in the blood lipid profile. In comparison with a control diet recommended by the Swedish National Food Agency, eating LCHF induced an increase in LDL cholesterol, a leading cause of atherosclerosis. LDL cholesterol increased in every participant with a treatment effect of 1.82 mM. We found an increase in both small, dense LDL cholesterol as well as large, buoyant LDL cholesterol. We also report an increase in ApoB indicating an increase in the total number of atherogenic lipoproteins in the circulation. These alterations should be a cause for concern in young, normal-weight, healthy women following this kind of LCHF diet.

Quote from tim on April 22, 2024, 7:29 am

@jessica2

You've been going on about me being wrong about high triglycerides. I never mentioned triglycerides I mentioned VLDL.

I just carefully broke down for you why I'm not wrong and provided references and this is your response?...

You point out that LDL is estimated when you get a blood test without seemingly realising that this makes the tests you have done less relevant but the studies like the one I just posted that measure LDL directly more relevant.

Quote from tim on April 22, 2024, 8:09 am

@jessica2

You want estimated cholesterol levels from two people when there's a whole body of science freely available to read.

Do you see how ridiculous that is?

De Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

Quote from Sarabeth on April 22, 2024, 10:03 am

When I get a chance, considering my anything-but-boring life, I love reading these discussions when they focus on n=1. We can all feel bolstered by our own experience when things are going well and we read "the science" that backs up our nutritional ideology...but it's when things AREN'T going well that this practice falls apart, and since my family's health has fallen apart in so many instances and in so many different ways at various times, I have been forced to question my ideology both in its initial form, and the fact that every time I've made major dietary shifts, I find that my ideological penchant just longs to shift to, to have SOMETHING to grasp on to during those moments of sadness as I stand in front of the refrigerator, wanting to fill the emptiness in my gut with something delicious and familiar. So it's somehow reassuring to hear from anonymous Internet People who are also striving to improve their health, and to hear about their troubles and successes. It's like looking into the mirror and possibly being able to spot something behind you that you just couldn't see when looking straight ahead...or at least, that's the corny metaphor that feels apt right now. 🙂

Anyway, I'm already digressing. My dietary history: I was a lacto/ovo vegetarian from birth until age 30, with several years of veganism thrown in during my teens, and an evolving "healthier" eating style so that by my late twenties I had realized that canola oil was not super healthy, and the combination of processed foods that vegetarianism requires if one wants to eat anything more than rice and beans was starting to worry me. I was also extremely volatile in my moods and functioning depending on my "blood sugar," and I had to eat constantly throughout the day or I would "crash."

Meanwhile, I went through two vegetarian pregnancies, births, and lactations, and when I was thirty, I had a six year old with declining health and increasingly autistic symptoms and a raging eating disorder.

The Intervention period of my family's life was basically between 2010 and 2019. During this near decade, we dived into GAPS (very "nutrient dense", very low carb, very high fat, and increasingly - because I can't seem to do anything halfway - full of an insane amount of veggies and organ meats and fermented dairy and eggs). My "hypoglycemia" went away - whether due to animal fat and protein or some other means I'll never know, but even with radically different macros this stability remains. Through incredible amounts of hard work (partly because our child was so sick, and partly because the dietary approach was not addressing all of the issues), we got our child onto a better path, and then proceeded to have two more kids. Along the way, we continued to eat low carb, high fat, high protein, no more corporate processed food ever. (Someday I'll write down the intervention I would implement to deal with my child's terrible/poor functioning gut if I had it to do all over again... Hint: it does not involve eating no sugars or starches (not even one strawberry!) for two entire years!!)

After about three years of this, however, it was clear that GAPS wasn't the cure-all I had hoped. My third child had severe feeding challenges, the fourth had her own brand of woes, and importantly, my husband and I weren't the pictures of health you'd expect from folks who spent about 1/3 of their income on food, and every "spare" moment cooking. I tried increasing our protein, which worked great for one of my kids, and made me feel nauseous. My husband tried a "milk cure" at one point, drinking nothing but raw milk for two months straight, and this allowed him to gain weight for the first time in his life (most folks report weight LOSS when following a milk cure, but I often think that inability to gain weight is just the flip side, metabolically speaking, of inability to lose weight...so while others regain weight after a diet, my husband loses it, and after the milk cure was no exception). We tried the Wahl's protocol (more and more and more gallons per week of rainbows of vegetables, the Gundry diet (low protein and low lectins), we tried low histamine, low salicylate, lower fat...

The interesting thing I find is that there is often an effect - improvement or otherwise - simply due to a dietary change. ANY dietary change. This has happened often enough that I feel sure it is an aspect of things that we biohackers must consider. I slowly learned not to report results or proselytize for at least six months, but preferably for two years or more. These days, if we notice nothing at all after two weeks of an intervention, I consider the experiment not worth continuing. And if we notice something good, it has to really prove itself worthwhile in order to continue beyond a couple months or so, and not just the we-changed-our-diet aberration. I'm looking for results here!

Anyway, after that first several years of mostly very low carb GAPS, I crashed, personally. I was experimenting with keto and super high fat, and I had the worst symptoms of my life, and I had to admit that even prior to the keto experiment, I wasn't feeling great. (I have always been slender, and thus far I weigh the same no matter what diet I happen to be on, which also makes it easy for my ideology to hitch a ride on the diet of the moment! Plus people can easily attribute my physique to whichever diet I was following when they met me!) My worst symptoms are psychiatric in nature, but by 2013 I had labs to show that after three years of higher fat and higher protein, I had not recovered from vegetarianism (my zinc and b12 levels were in the toilet), and I had introduced some new unfortunate problems: extremely high cholesterol and triglycerides (LDL, VLDL, HDL...all of it was super high), and other inflammatory markers were high. Plus I was constipated. Plus my vitamin D was super low.

I read Paul Jaminet and we began eating a lot of "safe starches", still with no (desired) weight gain for my husband, nor any ill effects for the kids. I felt MUCH better with starch - not the roller coaster I used to feel as a vegetarian, but as if the starch were filling in the horrible jagged edges that the high fat and/or high protein versions of my diet were causing or exacerbating.

I started taking Walsh protocol supplements (particularly zinc and b6), which saved my life at the time. And I kept taking them for six more years, which allowed me to regain a level of thriving that I had never experienced. Still, though I was now eating a ton of starch and not so much fat, my lipid panel was a scary thing, and i was taking more zinc than it seemed possible for 1 person to need, yet my blood levels were not all that high. Plus there were other things that still weren't improving.

Something that I learned early on when I was desperately seeking to heal my son, and then later myself and other family members, is that it (almost) doesn't matter what the fossil record shows, and what we hypothesize that ancient people ate. The (unprocessed foods) diets that can sustain a healthy person are many and varied, while a diet necessary to not just maintain but actually HEAL a sick person....is as unique as that person's fingerprint. It doesn't mean that aspects of healing diets aren't shared, but I started to see that even the vegetarian diet that I was prepared to blame for all or almost all of my woes apart from the large factor of Modern Day Environmental Toxicity/vaccines and other drugs/etc...could in theory be a therapeutic protocol for somebody else. And after frequenting the keto/paleo/etc. message boards for several years, it was very clear that some things that worked for growing and healthy 20 year old males (and some proportion of 20 year old females, although I found that many more women than men do NOT do well with lower carbs, for reasons I can only theorize relates to gut flora) were not necessarily the right approach for six year old boys, or middle aged women, or even the people doing those diets, whatever they were (substitute any dietary ideology for "low carb" and you get my drift). Much more useful is trying to find even one or two n=1 experiences that mirror your symptoms _and show a person who exhibits many years of improvement_.

(This is why I find this forum so fascinating and useful: there are so many people coming from so many broken places, and we are all looking for pieces of the puzzle and have tried a unique combination already. Plus, most of us have been down so many roads that we can at least try to check our dogma at the door. :). The most useful collection of ideas has come to my family from these conversations here - first the idea of vitamin A toxicity in general, then the ideas of B1 depletion, the ideas about trying beans, eggs, sourdough wheat, nuts and seeds in the context of vitamin A toxicity...and then of course there are things we're still looking for, like: why has one of my family members not responded to almost ANY dietary interventions save one, 14 years ago?? At that time, stopping a grain-heavy vegetarian diet and switching to GAPS put eosinophilic esophagitis into near instantaneous remission. Last year, EE remained in remission even after we started eating sourdough wheat bread again for the first time in 13 years. Yet, this person shows no response at all to a low vitamin a diet in general, nor to any other, and retains frustratingly varied symptoms. Why?! What makes a person's constitution or gut flora so incredibly stable, while other family members "react" to everything and subtle changes? This I wish I knew!!)

I really, really, really wanted my son to not just improve a little, but to improve a LOT. I really, really, really wanted my own mental health to become stable and strong, not just while I took some probiotic or pill, but so that I could depend upon my body. I wish things were as simple as just altering macros, but even within our family of now eight people, different macros work for different ones of us and at different times. One of us needs more protein because of Growing Up. One of us needs more protein in order to not eat too many carbs. I definitely feel better on more starch, and have for the past six or seven years, although of course balanced by animal protein and good fats and NO more CLO or fish oil. 🙁 🙁

When I "met" @Lil Chick in 2019, while she was discussing this crazy idea of vitamin A toxicity, I took notice because she also had tried many years of WAPF style/whole foods eating, and had similar remaining issues to one of my family members. After I decided to try it - we didn't have any other diets left to try, that is for sure! - we had three different reactions, depending on the family member you talked to: one of us (I!) had a profound experience of detox, with gunk coming out of every orifice and pain and a "cold" for three weeks straight, before a whole lot of improvements became fascinatingly apparent. Four of us had pretty profound improvements right from the start, with one of my kids permanently recovering from a severe eating disorder within weeks of beginning low vitamin A eating. And one of us noticed....nothing, really, and still to this day notices not much even though we have eaten a low vitamin A diet since July of 2019 and now still eat a low- to moderate amount of A (now eating eggs, some avocados, some whole spelt, some dairy). A major improvement is in the number of foods we all can eat and tolerate on a lower A diet: beans, after only six months or so, and early last year, wheat and spelt sourdough.

Despite having tossed almost all supplements out the window in 2019, my labs have almost all normalized on a low A diet: zinc and D stay basically good without supplementation, and my lipid panel was the most profound: after lowering my A intake but changing macros not at all, my scary high numbers returned to nice low Vegetarian Style numbers.

Now it's just a matter of finding ever more hammers for the nails which 4.5 years of low to moderate vitamin A eating has not addressed by hammering! Not-eating corporately processed foods is absolutely a Thing for me, but within those constraints and others (one child is allergic to pork, nuts still sadly trigger my herpes...), I'm still seeking ideas: Why is my vitamin B12 still low, after ~seven years of supplementation? Can my absorption ever improve? Is it the cause of now all six of my children's midline defects and my full-on horrendous reaction to supplemental methyl folate, and my new baby's apparent B12 deficiency after birth even while B12 was literally the only supplement I took while pregnant with her? Did the vegetarian diet/malnutrition cause my poor liver health initially, and can my children have better health during their adulthoods? Is manganese a possible treatment for my and one of my offspring's terrible gum health and ligamentous laxity, or is it dangerous? What is up with our poor gums anyway?! Why does that same child have Reynauds, newly developing? What foods are more nutritious than harmful, and what else can I include or not-include to ever optimize??

Hey, thanks for listening, and for talking about all this stuff, in one of the only useful corners of the internet that exists. 🙂

Quote from lil chick on April 22, 2024, 11:24 am

A quote from Sarabeth's post above, which I thought was especially smart!   "Something that I learned early on when I was desperately seeking to heal my son, and then later myself and other family members, is that it (almost) doesn't matter what the fossil record shows, and what we hypothesize that ancient people ate. The (unprocessed foods) diets that can sustain a healthy person are many and varied, while a diet necessary to not just maintain but actually HEAL a sick person....is as unique as that person's fingerprint. It doesn't mean that aspects of healing diets aren't shared, but"

Quote from Janelle525 on April 22, 2024, 11:44 am

Quote from Jessica2 on April 21, 2024, 3:05 pm

@@janelle525 Oh so should I go search YouTube comments now for knowledge? Thank you that's so wise. Did I say I Googled anything? I posted several studies that it seems like you ignored earlier in the thread as well. I'm done arguing with you. Go argue with your husband about it now. As you said you already agree with Tim so let it be as it may.

 

I am not arguing for the sake of arguing, I have little desire anymore to be 'right' I am after the truth. Becoming attached to what we believe about nutrition won't get us there, though we all do it at times. 

I was referring to your comment "a simple search would give you all the information you need to know ma'am". Googling insulin is not going to give me all the information I need to form an opinion. That's why I said Chris' comment was important. Because it goes against mainstream science. And that is exactly what google would tell me. Mainstream views. I don't generally subscribe to much of what mainstream says, but I am coming around to the 'whole foods diet reduces cardiovascular disease risk' idea instead of just throwing it out as I normally do with everything they say. 

But in terms of carnivore and A1c, I could not find very many studies on people consuming only meat and fat, keto or low carb are the most common studies done. So I'm not sure how relevant it is, I believe meat only diets to be different than say an Atkins diet. Low carb is purported to lower A1c as well as whole food based diets but does have a risk of ketoacidosis. I pointed out the comment from youtube because it goes against the idea you can eat as much meat as you want and not get diabetes. Dr. Ken Berry promotes LOTS of meat, I've seen what him and his wife eat in a day, it's a lot of meat. It appears they don't find excessive meat consumption a risk for anything. We need to examine these diets carefully and not just believe the hype. I hope more carnivores offer themselves up to clinical studies because it doesn't seem like they are being done enough to show what the long term effects are of pounds of beef and bacon everyday. 

I did find this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10380617/

It is very critical of high animal protein and saturated fat diets. It goes over how especially saturated fat participates in the translocation of LPS (endotoxin) through the gut wall via chylomicrons. This is why LDL goes up on high fat diets. So Tim is right to bring up your LDL number. 

"a high-fat meal containing sausage, eggs and hashbrowns (47% fat, endotoxin load: 420–840 ng/mL) resulted in a 42% increase in plasma endotoxin concentrations compared with a low-fat AHA meal (27% fat), despite a higher endotoxin load in the AHA meal (570–1140 ng/mL) [51]. While the AHA meal contained less saturated fat, it also contained plant foods, such as oatmeal, peanut butter, raisins and orange juice, which may have been mostly responsible for these protective effects....

...some evidence suggests a reduced LPS bioavailability when plant foods are co-consumed, perhaps due to the phytochemical or fiber content [135,136]. Therefore, high-fat diets which emphasize animal product consumption at the expense of plant-food consumption, such as the increasingly popular “carnivore” diet and the ketogenic diet, as well as the Atkins diet [137,138], may be particularly prone to elevated blood endotoxins and may increase the risk of CVD. Indeed, when subjects with established coronary artery disease switched from a vegetarian diet to an Atkins diet on their own accord, the severity of their disease increased by 52%, compared with a 21.8% improvement in the vegetarian diet group [46]."

This next section is important to our discussion on insulin resistance and what many of us were trying to help you understand. High saturated fat diets tend to promote insulin resistance vs high carb diets which typically promote insulin sensitivity. 

"...high-fat diets are associated with elevated fasting FFA concentrations (~0.8 mmol/L) in otherwise healthy individuals, for reasons discussed in the preceding section, which is higher than that of insulin-resistant lean individuals (~0.6 mmol/L), and comparable to obese (0.6–0.8 mmol/L) and diabetic (0.7–0.9 mmol/L) subjects [185]. Several clinical investigations demonstrate this increase in plasma FFAs following animal-product-based diets [45,186,187], which ties with increased intramyocellular lipid accumulation [188], the main driver of insulin resistance [189]. Saturated fat is much more lipotoxic than unsaturated fats, due to preferentially increased intracellular fatty acid deposition via upregulated diacylglycerol synthesis, as well as increased ceramide synthesis, a fatty acid metabolite [169]. Indeed, individuals consuming saturated-fat-rich diets tend to be more insulin resistant following a carbohydrate challenge [45,190,191], which falls in line with several animal studies [192,193,194,195]."

This is why I got on you about the vitamin E being needed because free fatty acids are elevated on low carb diets. It may be protecting you from some of the harm inherent in the diet. Triglycerides may be low not because high saturated fat diets are healthy but because "saturated fat consumption results in poorer triglyceride assimilation, due to the preference of diacylglycerol acyltransferase, an enzyme involved in triglyceride formation, for monounsaturated fats [169]. Thus, an elevation of FFAs is expected in subjects that consume saturated-fat-rich diets.

...Excessive saturated fat consumption results in increased fasting free fatty acid (FFA) serum concentrations, especially palmitate, due to reduced peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPARs) α and γ activity, resulting in reduced fatty acid oxidation and reduced storage in adipose tissue, respectively, due to preference of these PPARs for monounsaturated fats"

Also we can't forget as @tim-2 has pointed out already, excessive choline consumption can cause an increase in TMAO formation and therefore increase heart disease.  

"In excess, both choline and carnitine, once metabolized by host gut microbiota, result in the synthesis of trimethylamine [248]. The liver further metabolizes this product to trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), a compound tightly associated with atherosclerosis [249]. The consumption of red meat resulted in the synthesis of TMAO in omnivorous subjects, while vegan subjects did not experience this increase due to differing microbial populations preventing trimethylamine synthesis [248]. In ApoE−/− mice, carnitine ingestion significantly increased aortic plaque formation compared to animals which did not consume carnitine [248]. The pro-atherogenic effects of TMAO appear to be mediated by increased cellular oxidative stress as well as MAPK and NF-κB signaling, driving an inflammatory response in endothelial cells, VSMCs, and macrophages [249]." 

I think we should err on the side of caution and consume an omnivorous diet rich in whole plant foods if we want to avoid heart disease and insulin resistance.