Eating Academy

For those of you who still believe it's OK or even good to eat a lot of saturated fats, if you look at the studies it's not much of a controversy:" Whether saturated fat is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a question with numerous controversial views.[1] Although most in the mainstream heart-health, government, and medical communities hold that saturated fat is a risk factor for CVD, some hold contrary beliefs." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat_and_cardiovascular_disease_controversy

Anecdotally, I've read 50% of people who go on Keto see a huge 2-3x increase in triglycerides and LDL-P (Particle count as measured by NMR) - the #1 risk factor for cardiovascular disease. More LDL particles bouncing around in your arteries = bad. People with a condition that makes them break down more LDL have much less artheroscleriosis:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa054013
People with a condition that makes them have more LDL particles get more artheroscleriosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_hypercholesterolemia
Read Peter Attila's exposition that goes in detail (eating cholesterol is fine though): http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-part-i
Keto could work, but it's a hyper-pro level high-risk diet requiring frequent blood work and still avoiding saturated fats keeping them primarily monounsaturated which makes it very hard to follow. Plus it sucks for weightlifting..

Surprisingly, very low fat diets might be…

Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek have done a lot of research into high performance athletes using a ketogenic diet (see, for instance, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance[1]). Extreme endurance athletes are using ketogenic diets as a tool to smash records in ultramarathon running[2].

Nobody needs carbohydrate. That doesn't mean carbs are necessarily bad, but the long-time trope that you have to have them if you want to move further than your couch is just silly and has long been disproven (if, by nobody else, hunter-gatherers who had gone days without food while running down a kill).

Phinney and Volek have found interesting things about fat and high-intensity exercise:

* Fat utilization in keto-adapted individuals that is, literally, re-writing textbooks. Levels of fat mobilization that have never been seen in laboratories is being recorded. This likely has a genetic component, what I would consider the opposite of the multiple copies of the amylase gene that highly carb-tolerant people seem to have.

* Fat requires less oxygen to utilize, leading to less lactic acid, less muscle tissue damage, and faster recovery.

* Keto-adapted athletes are much more efficient in their use of their glycogen stores, using less when passing 70% VO2-max and replenishing supplies faster. They do not store as much glycogen as carb-burners, so the net effect winds up being about the same amount of power from glycogen between carb and fat burners.

That doesn't mean there are no…

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, just someone who is curious about how the body works on a high level.

To better understand cause and effect, a question that Peter Attia asks is that, do children eat more and grow (gaining weight as they age), or is it because they are growing that they eat more? Nutrition turns out to be a lot more complex than just calories in and calories out. It looks like that is a manifestation of something deeper, like growth hormones triggering a different type of metabolism.

He asks the same question about obesity. Do people get fat (elevated number of triglycerides stored in the fat cells) because they are eating more than expending energy? Or, are they eating more because of hormonal imbalances? He (along with many other doctors) suggest that it is actually the effect of insulin that causes the body to be conservative with the expending of energy. Insulin resistance also leads to diabetes, which is strongly correlated with obesity. So the hypothesis is that it is out of control insulin (due to sugar intake, HFCS, simple carbs, prevelant in american diet) that is the cause for the obesity epidemic, and not just less exercise (although exercise can be used to eliminate the excess glucose in the body which triggers the insulin response).

Here are some of his talks:

TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhLBPPtlrY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAWdHYSrh7M

And his blog

http://eatingacademy.com/

I mean you no offense, but to me it sounds like your understanding of nutrition science is 10 years in the past.

I do want to point out naturally occurring transfat has very different properties than the artificial common forms. I have never seen a well designed study show a low-fat diet to be superior to a high-fat-moderate-protien-very-low-carb one (usually referred to as VHFLC). I'd be interested if you know of any.

It is no longer generally accepted that dietary cholesterol is dominate factor unless you have mutation such as some of the PCSK9 mutations. Your body syntheses much more cholesterol everyday than you actually eat. The latest US government dietary guidelines has drastically shifted its position on cholesterol, write-up: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/

We have since learned many things such as the importance of HDL/LDL ratio as being predictive over just LDL for example.

This is a very complex topic and I would recommend this series written by a MD: http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-part-i

This is a 5 part series befitting the complexity of the issue at hand.

A great read on this same topic:
http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/is-sugar-toxic

"What I find frustrating about this debate is that most people yelling and screaming don’t fully define the terms, perhaps because they don’t appreciate them (forgivable) or because they are trying to mislead others (unforgiveable). The wrong question is being asked. “Is sugar toxic?” is a silly question. Why? Because it lacks context. Is water toxic? Is oxygen toxic? These are equally silly questions, I hope you’ll appreciate. Both oxygen and water are essential for life (sugar, by the way, is not). But both oxygen and water are toxic – yes, lethal – at high enough doses."

You are absolutely right. There was a lot of manipulation that went on with the food pyramid, but a lot of studies in the last 5 years have shown that the relationship that we once thought existed (red meat=bad) is false. There are also well validated studies showing that the nutrition science that has been taught for the last few decades about our relationship with sugar, fat, food in general, and how cholesterol affects our bodies is wrong.

Dr. Peter Attia's "The Eating Academy" (http://eatingacademy.com/) is a great place to learn more about what we are finding out about how certain foods actually affect out bodies.