Health & Family My low carb weight loss journal (LCHF)

One Minute Ketogenic Cheesecake - Fight Fat With Fat

 

@Simon Hampel I buy mine online in bulk from The Biltong Man (factory in Maroubra or Matraville or somewhere around there - you can visit and purchase directly too).

Best brand I've found.

The supermarket ones are quite high in carbs and it's more of a jerky rather than a biltong.

 

Interesting. I don't use any sugar substitutes either but I always thought Stevia was ok if I was going to. But then again, it is highly refined and this has tended to cause issues with food in the past. I wonder if it would be possible to grow the plant yourself and use the whole leaf? I imagine it would work for some applications and not others?

Is Stevia Safe? - EatingWell

You can make your own Stevia extract but it looks like a lot of work to me.

How to Grow Stevia and Make Homemade Stevia Extract

 

I agree @Simon Hampel. I saw a paleo dessert cookbook and thought it was delusional. It's just gluten free, "sugar" free junk food. Lots of whipped cream and baked food, because paleo man had beaters and ovens

 

Video against any non -vege
How much of this is true?

It is true you are losing weight by cutting down carbs. But, are you increasing your health risk by increasing fat food?

 

One very simple dessert idea is 1 cup of cream mixed with a couple of scoops of protein powder. If I'm feeling energetic I'll get the hand blender out to mix it properly otherwise just stir it in.

Sugar free aeroplane jelly is also a good option.

 

Interestingly, that's not actually accurate. The truth is actually very alarming and should make us question whether we should trust researchers at all.

Based on the results of his 1970 "Seven Countries" study, American nutritionist Ancel Keys concluded that dietary fat was to blame for high serum cholesterol and thus for heart attacks. British physiologist John Yudkin disagreed, naming sugar, especially fructose, as the cause of heart disease as well as cavities, obesity, liver disease, and some forms of cancer.

Yudkin's 1972 book, "Pure, White and Deadly," argued that dietary fat and saturated fat are harmless. He was quickly attacked by Keys. Greg sums up what followed: "Keys won." In response to the work of Keys and other advocates of low fat consumption, in the 1970s, the food industry successfully manufactured a huge market for its own processed foods, which contained little saturated fat but lots of sugar.​

Sugar vs. Cholesterol: John Yudkin vs. Ancel Keys

I don't know when more accurate information started to emerge but here is an article from 2014.

However, in recent years, scientists have seen the ill effects of completely replacing saturated fat with carbohydrates, particularly the simple carbs that are found so commonly in processed foods. A large analysis published in 2009 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that swapping saturated fats with carbs had no benefit in reducing people's risk of heart disease.​

Heart Disease and Diabetes Risks Tied to Carbs, Not Fat, Study Finds

Following that advice that fat is bad and sugar is good has developed a whole bunch of countries with sick, fat populations. How could this have happened? One claim is that scientists were bribed to promote fat as the cause of heart disease.

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.​

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

Basically it came down to the fat hypothesis (Ancel Keys) vs the sugar hypothesis (John Yudkin):

Ancel Keys was brilliant, charismatic, and combative. A friendly colleague at the University of Minnesota described him as, “direct to the point of bluntness, critical to the point of skewering”; others were less charitable. He exuded conviction at a time when confidence was most welcome. The president, the physician and the scientist formed a reassuring chain of male authority, and the notion that ***** foods were unhealthy started to take hold with doctors, and the public. (Eisenhower himself cut saturated fats and cholesterol from his diet altogether, right up until his death, in 1969, from heart disease.)

Many scientists, especially British ones, remained sceptical. The most prominent doubter was John Yudkin, then the UK’s leading nutritionist. When Yudkin looked at the data on heart disease, he was struck by its correlation with the consumption of sugar, not fat. He carried out a series of laboratory experiments on animals and humans, and observed, as others had before him, that sugar is processed in the liver, where it turns to fat, before entering the bloodstream.

He noted, too, that while humans have always been carnivorous, carbohydrates only became a major component of their diet 10,000 years ago, with the advent of mass agriculture. Sugar – a pure carbohydrate, with all fibre and nutrition stripped out – has been part of western diets for just 300 years; in evolutionary terms, it is as if we have, just this second, taken our first dose of it. Saturated fats, by contrast, are so intimately bound up with our evolution that they are abundantly present in breast milk. To Yudkin’s thinking, it seemed more likely to be the recent innovation, rather than the prehistoric staple, making us sick.​

The sugar conspiracy | Ian Leslie

All of this makes me wonder why we trust science at all!

TL;DR we have known that too much sugar causes heart disease since the 1960s but an interested group of scientists pushed science into promoting that fat causes heart disease out of self interest.

 

@Simon Hampel , in regards to inflammation and carbs, not all carbs are the same.
Low-glycemic carbs like oats, whole wheat pasta or brown rice which have low impact on blood sugar levels help reduce inflammation from some paper that i read a while back. Sat/trans fats, jut like high-glycemic carbs(juices, canned fruit) are more know to cause inflammation than Low-glycemic carbs.

 

This could happen at any time though. If a particular piece of research is published how do I know whether it lacks scientific rigour?

I agree. I am not sure we should have let science anywhere near nutrition though. It is a fact that there was a lot less CVD before nutrition science started telling us what to eat (and got it wrong).

I agree. It is very scientific to continue to question and re-test previously "proven" things. It is unscientific to not challenge a hypothesis. That makes me wonder why the fat-heart hypothesis was allowed to stand unchallenged for so long. Scientists really dropped the ball on that one.

Back to statins. It has been assumed cholesterol is bad. Actually, that's not correct because our bodies produce cholesterol to help us heal and cholesterol performs other important functions. Essentially, statins are fighting a natural process. I can't see how that could have a good outcome. Pretty much we should be looking at what we eat, that causes the damage that our bodies produce cholesterol to heal. Lowering cholesterol is as simple as cutting those things out of our diets. I did that years ago and my cholesterol profile is excellent.

I would say keep questioning, keep learning and don't trust nutrition scientists. First they told us that eating cholesterol (e.g. eggs) would raise our cholesterol (wrong). Then fat is bad, don't eat fat (wrong). Then mono-unsaturated fats and poly-unsaturated fats are good and saturated fats are bad (wrong). The latest research indicates that some kinds of saturated fats are protective against diabetes. The question is, should we trust this research?

 

I am not sure that is quite right either. For example, yoghurt is known to be healthy but it has saturated fat, which is supposed to be bad. So nutritionists have recommended low fat yoghurt, but that is often full of sugar. So is low fat yoghurt really better? Recent research (if we can trust it) indicates that full fat yoghurt is fine after all.

Not all saturated fats increase the chances of developing diabetes and some could help protect against the disease, a study has shown.

The kind of saturated fat found in dairy products such as yoghurt is likely to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, say scientists.​

Some saturated fats could help protect against type 2 diabetes, study finds

Makes more sense to me.

I don't think glycaemic index is all it's cracked up to be either. For example, a snickers bar has a glycaemic index of 68 and a potato has a glycaemic index of 104. Its a bit of a worry to me to follow a system that thinks a snickers bar is healthier than a potato.

Sweet Potato, at 54 is pretty high also, but I am not aware of any research linking Sweet Potato to inflammation.

In terms of carbs, fat and inflammation, I don't think it is a simple as saying low GI carbs lower inflammation but saturated fats cause it. If you have a look at the study "Comparison of low fat and low carbohydrate diets on circulating ***** acid composition and markers of inflammation", which compared a very low in carbohydrate diet (VLCKD) with a low fat diet, the there was an overall greater anti-inflammatory effect associated with the VLCKD.

Comparison of low fat and low carbohydrate diets on circulating ***** acid composition and markers of inflammation. - PubMed - NCBI

My take on all of this: I am happy to eat my oats, sweet potato and saturated fats from dairy and coconut. But I will avoid trans fats and limit my consumption of foods like snickers bars.

Milk Fat Does a Body Good

 

@Perthguy , the point was that carbs that cause a rapid change in your blood sugar level would affect insulin levels which is the main issue. In general, refined carbs, snikers for example would be worse and same goes for potatoes which are not the healthiest food on the planet by the way.

So from a carb induced inflation point of view, a Snikers bar might be better than a potato but not from a wholistic point of view. A fairer comparison would be say oats vs potatoes.

As for fat, i'm not too sure about it to be honest simply because of the point you raise in regards to every other day new studies proving/disproving something.

To my mind, if it comes from a natural food resource, eat it, in balance or at least based on your needs, meaning if you run 100kms a week, good luck surviving on a low carbs diet for example.

 

The insulin hypothesis is also probably wrong, it's probably perfectly normal for food to spike insulin. Both carbohydrates and proteins provoke an insulin response. They have to or we would die. That doesn't mean that refined carbs like sugar and white flour are good for us. It is almost certain refined carbs promote inflammation but the cause is not clear.

Supposedly potatoes are not the healthiest food but a lot of the science that tells are that has been disproven, so maybe potatoes are ok after all? I would still rather eat a potato than eat a snickers.

As for white potatoes, in reality a plain, medium potato can actually aide in weight loss/maintenance. Potatoes are an excellent source for vitamins C and B6, a good source for fiber (which keeps your stomach satisfied longer) and manganese, AND they have more potassium than bananas! Plus, each potato has only 110 calories, making it a great choice to maintain a healthy weight.​

About The Buzz: White Potatoes Are Not A Healthy Choice? - Fruits & Veggies More Matters

I would watch the toppings more than worry about whether a potato is healthy.

Professor Tim Noakes would have said the same. Professor Noakes has been physically active all his life and has run more than 70 marathons and ultra-marathons, including seven Comrades Marathons. Now well into his sixties, he still runs 21km races regularly. Professor Noakes has always promoted the importance of carbohydrates for athletes and followed that advice himself... until he developed type 2 diabetes. This is an interesting quote from an article about Noakes.

One thing Tim Noakes never expected to happen, ever, was him getting fat. From his early twenties into his late forties, his weight had always hovered around 176, lean for a man of his height. By the time he turned 60, in 2009, he had ballooned to 225 - which gave him a BMI of 29, just shy of obesity.

Worse, he had somehow become diabetic. His blood-sugar level had edged up toward 150 milligrams per deciliter when it should have been well below 100. “He was a marathoner who became obese and diabetic,” says Gary Taubes. “He was angry.”

It was even scarier because his father had also been diagnosed with diabetes in his sixties, and it eventually killed him. Noakes worried that he’d contributed to that outcome by going along with the conventional wisdom about what his dad’s diet should be: low-fat, high-carb. “I realized that I’d just sat passively by, because I’d been trained to think he was being treated properly,” he says.​

The Silencing of a Low-Carb Rebel

So the Professor who wrote the book on sports nutrition and followed his own advice ended up with type 2 diabetes. This is very concerning. He has dropped the carbs and is back running again.

It's controversial though.

In interviews, [Professor Noakes] has told readers to “rip out” the nutrition chapter of The Lore of Running because it advocates eating carbs. He and his followers now insist that runners and cyclists perform better when they become “fat adapted,” even at the elite level.

Most mainstream sports scientists don’t agree. Athletes need both carbs and fats, says Inigo San Millan, a sports physiologist at the University of Colorado who has worked with professional cyclists for two decades. Fats are for long, slow, distance efforts and carbs for higher intensities. Cyclists and runners who switch to low-carb diets often have trouble.​

The question remains though. How did a marathon runner develop type 2 diabetes? Food for thought.