Denise Minger's different kinds of magic

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I love her presentation!

Probably not true!

Who is a bastard who wrote "why"?

Magic rocks!   :)

I highly recommend to listen to her video. She is reviewing some old studies showing therapeutic effects of the very low fat high carbohydrate diets (VLFHC). Low fat means well below 10% preferably about 2%. When I begun my high fat low carb experiment back in 1999, which grew into my ongoing lifestyle nutrition to this day, I was aware that the very low fat natural food diet has been successfully used in halting progression of coronary heart disease and MS. I was familiar about Pritikin and Dr. Swank work. Prior to 1999 I was experimenting with vegetarian nutrition but I found it unpalatable, unless a sufficient amount of fat was added. More than 10%. So for me finding dr. Kwasniewski's Optimal Diet was a "gift from God", or I should say a gift from a friend of mine (Andrew S.)! Kwasniewski's Optimal Diet is high animal fat low carb diet (HFLC). After noticing back then that the VLFHC diets have some therapeutic property, I had many questions (i.e. "question everything"). One of them is about the long term viability and the side effects. Like with every therapy, there may be side effects. Are there side effects of VLFHC diets? How do people do on such nutrition scheme fare in the long term? Longevity issue? Longevity with a robust health or not so well? The same question can also be asked about any other diet, including the HFLC diet.

Unlike most other low carb promoters at that time (1970-ties - 1990-ties), dr. Kwasniewski did acknowledge that a high carbohydrate diet may also be healthy, quoting Japanese rice based diet as an example. He also insisted that, on such a diet (1) fat intake must be limited to abut 10% and (2) a sufficient amount of (lean) protein must be consumed. Insulin sensitivity is very high on such a diet because the intake of fat is very low but the pancreatic insulin secretion is medium. Insulin cannot be too low, due to carbohydrate-based metabolism. Typically it amounts to about 20-30 iu per day, based on my understanding and from reports by t1 diabetics (quoting from memory so verify this before you requote me!)

Dr. Kwasniewski also noticed, based on his patients record, that a particular proportion of macronutrients, consisting of about 35-45% of fat (by calories) and about 45-35% of carbohydrates is particulary unhealthy and makes people prone to developing diabetes and atherosclerotic heart disease. Kwasniewski also noticed that it causes a peculiar form of neuro-degeneration for people in their 40-ties and 50-ties manifesting itself in form character disorder (psychopathy). He called that dietary zone "dangerous middle zone". Pancreatic insulin secretion has to be very high (typically 40-60 iu/day or more) on such a diet in order to overcome the insulin insensitivity induced by the high fat intake.

He also noticed that as soon as you up the total fat intake to above 50% of calories then these pathological effects gradually subside and the diet becomes healthy again, even therapeutically healthy. The widely popular diet he publicized in the 1980-ties, arrived at the macronutrient proportions P:F:C (Protein to Fat to Carbohydrates) in gram per day per 1kg of ideal body weight of 1:3-3.5:0.8 to 1:2-2.5:0.5 . This typically works out at way over 60% (typ about 85%) of fat by calories. Notice that fat has 9kcal/g, glucose 4.5kcal/g and protein 3.5kcal/g (or less if used anabolically). Interestingly, Kwasniewski also found that his patients with coronary heart disease begun reversing and recovering. So his patients with many autoimmune disease such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, IBS, and other - also recovered on his diet! Even though the HFLC diet is the exact opposite of the VLFHC diet, it nevertheless produced surprisingly similar (if not greater) therapeutic effects! Notice that the insulin sensitivity (and the effect of fat upon it) becomes irrelevant due to very low intake of carbohydrates. Kwasniewski quoted insulin requirement at this point, to be about 6-10 iu/day. How did he measured it? By observing his type 1 diabetic patients!

What Denise Minger has done, is rediscovering and publicizing that fact that there are 2 dietary zones that have therapeutic properties, not just one diet!

What I would disagree with, is her presumption that the VLFHC diet would:

- "results in healthier gut microbiome long term"

There is not proof or comparison studies done for VLFHC vs HFLC on that, while there is enough reports indicating the long term gut flora deterioration among vegans (I would put refs to Dr. Stanley Bass and Dr. Gian-Cursio reports on Natural Hygienists).

- "may do best for ApoE4 carriers"

No proof either, other than high serum cholesterol which does not always translate to a health risk, except for people eating in the dangerous middle zone.

- "may be able to restore and heal glucose tolerance which does not happen on the high fat..."

This is not true based on my personal observation. Initially yes, HFLC diet did not restore my glucose tolerance, it only allowed my body to bypass the issue by not showering my body with the excess carbohydrates. Whenever I tried to eat a little bit more than 50g of carbohydrates in a day, I would inevitably come to regret it! Carb-headache and nausea. Beer was especially bad for me. However, after about 2 years I noticed that I was able to increase that limit and add more than previously and after about 6-7 years I noticed that my carbohydrates tolerance has been totally restored! For example I can now consume a high carb dinner if I have no other choice without any adverse side effects. I don't do it often, but it is nice to know that my metabolism has completely been restored. I suspect it has to do with the mitochondrial regeneration. It takes about 7 years to regrow and renew most of our muscular tissues from our stem cells. I also found it that initially I had to watch not only the total carbohydrates intake, but I also had to limit the overall caloric intake from fat as well. Initially the total limit was about 1800kcal. Believe it or not that is actually perfectly sufficient for an adult leading an active life on the high fat diet, without any problems (I was 43 in 1999 when I begun HFLC and I weigh 64k, 173cm height) It was as if my metabolic channels were impaired for both macronutrients, for carbs as well as for fat, except the metabolism of fat, being more effective, allowed me to live better and have more energy in spite of the limitations. Again, that restriction is no longer applicable and lifted itself after about 7 years.

Stan (Heretic) Bleszynski

A long-time vegan guru changes from fatophobic to favoring saturated fat!

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Plant Oils Are Not a Healthy Alternative to Saturated Fat
By T. Colin Campbell, PhD July 21, 2016

My take on Dr. TCC's change of opinion about saturated fat:  I think his claims of expertise and consistency in terms of understanding the effects of various fats are not true, and it can be very easily checked by looking at his academic papers, popular publications and articles. He has always been the low fat exclusively plant-based diet promoter discouraging his followers against consuming any kinds of fats, especially dairy and animal fat. I would not be surprised if we shall soon witness a similar complete re-evaluation of his anti-animal protein beliefs as well, by himself or his colleagues.

In the last 15 years I have been warning many professional low fat vegan diet promoters on various forums, to bail out of their belief system earlier while they still could, rather than later. Not only to prevent hurting their  followers but also to minimize the damage to their own professional careers. The best time of jumping the sinking ship of low fat vegetarianism was a few years ago before it begun getting discredited rather than now when it is sinking like a boat anchor.

It is too late for Dr. TCC and others. He appeared to have sacrificed the truth about fats for short term career benefits in the past several decades of his work and now all that is coming back to bite him. However, all the pseudo-scientific anti-fat vegan garbage that various gurus have been spewing out in the mass media, on-line websites and in printed popular literature over the years is out there for all to re-read and ponder... - It cannot be undone!

(Thanks for the link, JC)

Quote (from somebody):
It's is not what is taken into one's mouth that can can be most harmful, it is what comes out!

Wiki Butter

Low IGF-I activity and a high stroke risk in vegans

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"IGF-I activity may be a key determinant of stroke risk--a cautionary lesson for vegans.", McCarty MF.

(Quoting here the first half of the abstract describing facts leaving out the second part containing some wishful thinking.)

Abstract

IGF-I acts on vascular endothelium to activate nitric oxide synthase, thereby promoting vascular health; there is reason to believe that this protection is especially crucial to the cerebral vasculature, helping to ward off thrombotic strokes. IGF-I may also promote the structural integrity of cerebral arteries, thereby offering protection from hemorrhagic stroke. These considerations may help to explain why tallness is associated with low stroke risk, whereas growth hormone deficiency increases stroke risk - and why age-adjusted stroke mortality has been exceptionally high in rural Asians eating quasi-vegan diets, but has been declining steadily in Asia as diets have become progressively higher in animal products. There is good reason to suspect that low-fat vegan diets tend to down-regulate systemic IGF-I activity; this effect would be expected to increase stroke risk in vegans. Furthermore, epidemiology suggests that low serum cholesterol, and possibly also a low dietary intake of saturated fat - both characteristic of those adopting low-fat vegan diets - may also increase stroke risk. ...

Vegans, dietary fat and Alzheimer's

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I like browsing through some vegan discussion groups looking at the papers, publications and studies they use to support their belief system. McDougall's forum is particularly useful because of their tenacity in trying to use science to justify themselves. Experience taught me that such studies are always ambivalent and very often prove a completely opposite views to those of the vegan believers who posted them.

The following study from 2003, did not disappoint me:

Dietary fats and the risk of incident Alzheimer disease.

The abstract looked very foreboding, for example, quote:

Persons in the upper fifth of saturated-fat intake had 2.2 times the risk of incident Alzheimer disease compared with persons in the lowest fifth

Not all is lost fortunately, because of the widely known practice in the medical "science" to print only the politically correct (i.e. false) information in the abstracts while hiding the true albeit inconvenient facts in the full text.

The facts are that the saturated fat data and most of the other results are generally not statistically significant!

The facts are that even when one takes the trend line across saturated fat quintiles and makes it appear statistically more significant than an individual datum (the so-called "p value for the trend") - the resulting p is still much greater than 0.05 and thus is still not statistically significant! Best illustration is the following (upper) portion of the Table 3:

The facts are that if you take the most basic age-adjusted only data (look at the first row called "Age-adjusted+"), there is no clear trend at all since the middle and the second highest saturated fat columns (quintiles) have exactly the same Alzheimer's risk as the lowest reference quintile of saturated fat!  The second and the third row (headed by "Multivariable" and "Multivariable... other fats") above are the more processed data, that seem to exhibit a weak rising trend, albeit also not statistically significant!  One shall always keep in mind that multivariable-corrected trends are dependent upon some specific model-dependent assumptions that may or may not be correct.

It gets more intereseting as one reads down the table. If one takes the above discussed saturated results on faith, beliving that the weak statistics may be reflecting some real underlying trend rather than being some artefacts of the data gathering and processing methodology (as I suspect is the case), then one should also take a notice and state that the rest of the data "proves" (also not statistically significanly) that the total fat consumption, dietary cholesterol intake, animal fat consumption and vegetable fat consumption all seem either not to correlate or to correlate NEGATIVELY (protectively) with the Alzheimer's risk! See the lower portion of the Table 3:

For example, the total fat consumption seems to be protective against Alzheimer's! The second lowest and the middle quintile in consumption of animal produce (indicated by dietary cholesterol!) also have higher Alzheimer's risk than the two highest quintiles! Animal fat consumption seems to show no correlation to Alzheimer - the trend curve is pretty flat except the third row ("Multivariable adjusted for vegetable fats and trans-fats") which shows a weak NEGATIVE (i.e. protective) trend!

Last but not least the bottom group Vegetable fats shows the strongest correlation in the whole study. That correlation is strongly NEGATIVE (protective), that is the more vegatable fat the less Alzheimer's cases! In fact that result, after "Multivariable adjusted for vegetable fats and trans-fats" - is the only one, alongside the omega-6 fat result ( which is basically its subset) that does exhibit a statistically significant trend!

Unfortunately for those who believe in the low fat dogma, this is not a good news! Especially when compared with other sources, see for example this and that.
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