No-Bologna Facts
- There’s never been a single study that proves saturated fat causes heart disease.
- As heart-disease rates were skyrocketing in the mid-1900s, consumption of animal fat was going down, not up. Consumption of vegetable oils, however, was going up dramatically.
- Half of all heart-attack victims have normal or low cholesterol. Autopsies performed on heart-attack victims routinely reveal plaque-filled arteries in people whose cholesterol was low (as low as 115 in one case).
- Asian Indians – half of whom are vegetarians – have one of the highest rates of heart disease in the entire world. Yup, that fatty meat will kill you, all right.
- When Morgan Spurlock tells you that a McDonald’s salad supplies almost a day’s allowance of fat, he’s basing that statement on the FDA’s low-fat/high-carbohydrate dietary guidelines, which in turn are based on … absolutely nothing. There’s no science behind those guidelines; they were simply made up by a congressional committee.
- Kids who were diagnosed as suffering from ADD have been successfully treated by re-introducing natural saturated fats into their diets. Your brain is made largely of fat.
- Many epileptics have reduced or eliminated seizures by adopting a diet low in sugar and starch and high in saturated animal fats.
- Despite everything you’ve heard about saturated fat being linked to cancer, that link is statistically weak. However, there is a strong link between sugar and cancer. In Europe, doctors tell patients, “Sugar feeds cancer.”
- Being fat is not, in and of itself, bad for your health. The behaviors that can make you fat – eating excess sugar and starch, not getting any exercise – can also ruin your health, and that’s why being fat is associated with bad health. But it’s entirely possible to be fat and healthy. It’s also possible to be thin while developing Type II diabetes and heart disease.
- Saturated fat and cholesterol help produce testosterone. When men limit their saturated fat, their testosterone level drops. So, regardless of what a famous vegan chef believes, saturated fat does not impair sexual performance.
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Thanks alot for the reaction.
It’s actually kinda weird that you respond =p it feels like you are a celeb (since in my eyes you should be), and it’s so cool of you that you still read and react to (all?) the comments! Real respect for that!!
Greets
I don’t feel like a celebrity. I feel like a guy who made a documentary, created a blog, and is lucky to have so many readers who want to participate in the on-going conversation.
hmm kay
Got another question.
The book ‘Know your fats’ by Mary G. Enig isn’t in the list of recommended books, why?
And, are there other documentaries about this subject? More about the food itself (not how it’s made and stuff), but mostly about what is good and all.
Thanks
Ralph
I plan to update the book list someday. “Know Your Fats” reads like a chemistry book, so I’m not sure most people would find it useful.
“My Big Fat Diet” is a good documentary, and CJ Hunt’s film “In Search of the Perfect Human Diet” should be released early in 2011.
Yea I read a bit in ‘Know your fats’, and it does (the start at least) read kinda badly.. I’ll look through it some other time to see if it’s all the same.
What is the best book about fats? I know you have a list, and I might read all of them Some day, but since I’m a student now, I don’t have unlimited time to read everything I want to read. Good calories Bad calories? I need 1 that reads well (like Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle), is very informative and ofcaurse isn’t bologna =P
I’d also like to be able to help you.. is there any way?
Thanks again
Ralph
If you only have time for one, Good Calories, Bad Calories would be at the top of my list. Yes, it gets into some biochemistry, but that’s why it’s worth the effort; you end up understanding so much.
Hi Tom i just recently decided to do a low carb diet but i dont want to eat animals. Its not that there bad i guess its just the way they are treated and they chemicals which mimic the female hormone estrogen which is 1 of the many contributing factors to Americas problems. So i was just wondering instead of doing low carb with animal products would it be better to do it with healthy unsaturated sources like Avocados Nuts and Seeds and some Salmon?
I’d suggest picking up the latest Atkins book, “New Atkins For a New You.” They have eating guidelines for vegetarians.
There’s no study that any single factor causes heart disease, like most diseases, it’s caused by many factors. Designing a study that controls everything from genetics to environment leaving diet as the only factor would be impossible, trying to do that within one sub-category of one macronutrient would be beyond impossible. This is why epidemiological studies are useless.
Over-eating causes insulin resistance too, not just too many carbs. You can eat a caloric deficit at 300g of carbs a day and be very insulin sensitive, especially if you’re active and depleting glycogen. Furthermore, you can get fat on a low carb, low insulin diet. You didn’t disprove the calories in, calories out insulin fat storage aspect at all, because you ate a 10cal/lb of bodyweight diet, which is a severe caloric deficit. Eat a low carb caloric surplus and see how well you go.
Epileptic children do well on ketogenic diets, which are low carb and high fat, there’s no requirement for that fat to be saturated.
You agree that demonising a single macronutrient caused a heap of problems, so why will demonising carbs help anything? The exact same thing will happen, people will not follow the intended guidelines (there was never a guideline to eat in caloric surplus, every obese person has thus broken that nutritional guideline), and when people start eating 1000 calorie steaks at each meal, you can explain to them why they’re not losing weight.
BMI is a statistical measure which is accurate over a population in which the outliers cancel each other out, on large populations (sample size > 1), it is very well correlated with body fat % and mortality risk.
No, of course you won’t lose weight if you consume all the fuel you need in your diet. No one claimed otherwise. You need to tap your fat cells for fuel to lose weight. But if you are insulin resistant and try to do so on a high-carb diet, you will have a difficult time tapping the fat cells, and your metabolism will slow down. In lab experiments, researchers have pumped mice full of insulin and then cut off their food supply while continuing to pump them full of insulin. The mice lose weight and starve to death — but they don’t burn up their body fat. They “lose weight” by digesting their muscles and organs, because excess insulin locks up the fat cells.
I have consumed a zero-carb, high-calorie diet, by the way. I did it for four weeks while working on a cruise ship. Bacon, eggs, sausage, steaks, burgers, cheese, green salads with bleu cheese dressing, but zero sugar or starch. I didn’t gain a pound. Not one. And don’t give me the ol’ “it was a low-calorie diet in disguise” line, because there was no way it was anything but a high-calorie diet.
Hi Tom i was just wondering are carbs really the major culprit? I mean you can find plenty of other populations that eat carbs and are fine take for example the chinese and japanese with their rice and the Peru with their starch based diet there not suffering from obseity
Two things: 1) The carb intake in those countries is not as high as people generally assume. Sure, the asians consume rice, but they don’t consume sodas, donuts, triple-decker sandwiches, dinner rolls, little Debbie Snack Cakes, Chunky Monkey ice cream, etc. I once saw stats on the Asian diet, and the total caloric intake was around 1800 per day. The average American these days is consuming around 400 carbs, which is 1600 calories just for one macronutrient. 2) As Dr. Lustig pointed out, those populations consume very little fructose, which is the worst carb of all. If you are raised on rice and sweet potatoes and don’t screw up your metabolism with donuts, soda, Captain Crunch, little Debbie Snack Cakes, Chunky Monkey ice cream, etc., you can probably consume a high-carb diet without getting fat. But if you do have a screwed-up metabolism, you cannot tolerate anywhere close to the same number of carbs.
First you say that you can’t lose weight unless you eat in a caloric deficit, then you say you ate in a caloric surplus and didn’t gain weight. Seems like a bit of a contradiction. I’m not against low-carb diets, they work for some people and that’s great, but they’re not the answer to the obesity epidemic, there are a lot more factors at play there.
The carbohydrate metabolism in rats is very different to that in humans, so studies on rats and insulin and everything else is always quite trivial, but beyond that, being injected with insulin continuously is quite different from eating a high carb diet. With a high carb diet, your insulin rises after you eat a high carb meal, then lowers inbetween meals, especially while sleeping overnight, whether you gain or lose weight will be determined by if you’re in a caloric deficit or surplus. Sure, some people with hyperinsulinemia the study would apply to, but not everyone who is overweight has that condition. Beyond that, eating a mixed meals with carbs, protein, fat and fibre won’t have a huge insulin response. But even still, protein has a large insulin response, so you can eat a low carb diet and have huge insulin spikes.
Two different issues: losing weight vs. not gaining. To lose weight, you need a reason to tap your energy reserves. But in the absence of a mechanism to store fat, your body is capable of burning off excess calories through increased metabolism, a rise in body temperature, additional futile cycling, etc. In the over-feeding studies conducted by James Levine, naturally-lean prisoners increased their calorie intake by thousands per day but didn’t gain anything close to what the calories in-calories out equation would predict. One prisoner consumed 10,000 calories per day for 200 days and only gained nine pounds. My son tried to gain weight while playing basketball, overate like crazy, but couldn’t put on more than a couple of pounds. Clearly there’s more to it than simple calorie counts. Farmers give hormones to animals to fatten them up for good reason. They know it works. I also had a friend in high school who had to take hormones for a medical condition and hated it because the hormones made him fat. He literally went from skinny to fat in one year.
The insulin response will depend on your degree of insulin resistance and your individual response to various foods. Protein supposedly has a large insulin response, but it also triggers glucagon, which acts against insulin. I’ve checked my blood sugar after a variety of meals, and protein meals never push me above 100. By contrast, a small serving of pasta (supposedly low on the glycemic index) pushed me to 175 for nearly two hours. In theory your insulin should drop between meals, but if you’re insulin resistant, you may have elevated insulin for most of the day, whether you’re eating or not.
I made a detailed response, but I don’t think it made the queue, perhaps because I used a few links which your blog may have detected as spam.
All I can do is suggest you do some googling, ‘overeating neat’, ‘insulin an undeserved bad reputation’ and ‘obese underreporting.’
You can also gain weight due to hormones (birth control pills etc), but that doesn’t apply to most people. Most people are eating too much and moving too little. How does your insulin theory explain the fact that all calorically restricted diets work if they’re followed, low carb diets have been around forever yet haven’t cured the obesity problems (have a look at some low-carb support forums where people are eating minimal carbs but not losing weight, probably has something to do with calories), and the fact that demonising one macronutrient lead to a heap of problems in the past. Also, the innuits dont eat any carbs but have no problems getting fat.
Also, since hdl/ldl is so wrong, why did you continually quote it in your movie? Why not quote your a1c, fasting glucose and other inflammation markers? Talk about vested interests of researchers, the eades have put out a string of low-carb books, do you think they would admit if they’re wrong?
Pasta has a high glycemic load, and blood sugar rises often don’t correspond with insulin rises, such as the insulin response to dairy, or carb and fat meals. You can still get fat even with minimal blood sugar rises.
Anything with multiple links gets killed by the spam filter.
Insulin IS a hormone. Every time you eat, you produce hormonal reactions. If the hormones you take by mouth can make you fatter, so can the hormones you trigger with your diet.
Saying that people are fat because they eat too much is as illuminating as saying some people are alcoholics because they drink too much. It doesn’t address why they drink too much, what causes the craving. Unless you believe that Americans were disciplined for 200 years and then suddenly, in one generation, decided to start eating too much just for the heck of it, the “eat too much” explanation doesn’t say anything useful. Hunger is biochemical, and people are eating more because they’re hungrier. My grandparents never left the table hungry either.
If you starve yourself enough, of course you’ll lose weight. First off, you’ll lower your insulin levels simply by eating less of the same junk. Secondly, losing weight is not the same as losing fat. I once semi-starved myself down to 165; the love handles remained but I started losing my muscles.
Low carb diets have indeed been around a long time and before the Lipid Hypothesis scared everyone away from fats, they were what doctors recommended to obese people. Lots of people go on them and then go off because they’re not willing to live without bread or pasta or potatoes.
HDL is a useful marker. LDL isn’t. I quoted it in the film because according to the anti-fat hysterics, my LDL should’ve gone up, but didn’t. Don’t know my a1c. Fasting glucose on last test was 85, BP 115/65, HDL 64, Triglycerides 70, Total cholesterol 203.
This could go on forever, so if you don’t mind, watch this video and the others following it and tell me where you disagree:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEH0OZVHmvQ
I know insulin is a hormone, and I know high insulin levels from a meal in the presence of a caloric deficit will still lead to fat loss, and low insulin levels from a meal in the prescence of a caloric surplus with result in fat gain.
[How exactly do you KNOW both of those things? Where's your proof? In lab experiments, researchers have taken animals who are beginning the hibernation season (high insulin levels) and cut their food supply in half -- they got JUST AS FAT as the control animals eating twice as much. In James Levine's overfeeding studies, prisoners who were naturally lean couldn't gain weight, even with thousands of extra calories. Other overfeeding studies have shown the same result in lean people. So again, where's your proof? I'm hearing strong opinions so far and that's it.]
This should tell you that insulin is not the key player here,
[What I just cited above should tell you otherwise.]
although some people will be better able to maintain the deficit in the face of low carbs (food preference, satiety, insulin resistance etc),
[
1) why are you even mentioning insulin resistance if you don't think insulin is involved in all this, and 2) it's been demonstrated that people on low carb diets spontaneously eat less ... ever wonder why? What does "satiety" mean? It means they're not as hungry because the fuel isn't getting locked up in their fat cells by insulin.
]
but this doesn’t change the fact that without a caloric deficit, you can’t lose fat.
[And for the second time, no one claimed otherwise. But you are assuming different foods have no effect on your metabolism, thus altering the calories-out side of the equation. You are also forgetting that research has shown -- over and over -- that dieters can end up with slowed metabolisms.]
Now you can throw out type 1 diabetics who have no insulin and could eat 10000 cal a day and not gain weight, but that’s a special population with a complete absence of insulin, not an overweight person on a low insulin yield diet.
[So let me get this straight: you believe insulin works in an all-or-nothing fashion? If it's completely absent, you can't gain weight no matter how much you eat, but if it's merely very low, that has no effect on gaining or losing weight compared to high levels of insulin? That's an ... um ... interesting take.]
The hunger angle doesn’t cover all the reasons why people over-eat, but I’m glad you brought it up. Some high insulin foods (potatoes) are very fulfilling, so insulin doesn’t necessarily cause hunger. People often eat when they’re not hungry, and people often eat foods with a low level of satiety (low fibre, low nutrient density, low fat), which does make them hungry. Now, protein is also the most fulfilling macronutrient, and this is why ad-lib low carb diets usually trump high carb diets, because high carb diets are usually low protein, so when you’re comparing the efficacy of low carb high fat to high carb low fat, if you don’t keep protein intake constant, then your study is worthless. If you look at most of these diet comparisons, they were done on self-reported food intake (horribly inaccurate, google ‘obese underreporting’) and the protein wasn’t the same. So yes they ate less, the controlled their hunger better, but this had nothing to do with carbs, it has to do with protein. A comparison of two protein matched diets with carbs and fat being changed, in metabolic wards (accurate food reporting), shows minimal change in body composition regardless of how much low fat or low carb you go, keeping protein constant.
[Cite 'em. And show me the figures comparing fat loss, not merely weight loss.]
This misunderstanding about the difference between a low carb diet and a high protein diet is repeated endlessly through the research. Again, high calorie low satiety processed food is much more available these days than it used to be, we live much more sedentary lives than we used to (even you mentioned this in your film) and what it all comes back to is calories in, calories out, not insulin. We’re eating more because we can consume a lot more calories without becoming full, and high calorie food is cheap and delicious, and we’re working sedentary jobs, driving everywhere, not playing sports and so on, so we’re eating more and burning less. Do you disagree with this?
[I agree that crap food is less filling. I don't agree that we become sedentary first and fat second, and the research backs me up. Dr. Robert Lustig treated kids for cancer and noticed they later all became fat and lethargic. He rightly suspected the cancer treatments had screwed up their insulin levels and gave them an insulin-supressing drug. They all lost weight, and their parents told Dr. Lustig the kids suddenly, spotaneously, without anyone harping on them about exercising, became active again. Without insulin causing their fuel to be stored, they had energy to burn again.]
You don’t need to educate me on the difference between fat loss and weight loss, save that for all the people who quote the 4-7 day long studies comparing weight loss in low carb diets vs high carb diets which didn’t adjust for water loss from glycogen depletion during the initial stages of a low carb diet, and assume the difference is the ‘metabolic advantage’ of low carb diets.
[Check the Foster study, see the dramatic difference at 6 mos. Is that still all glycogen depletion, six months in?]
Funny you should mention starvation, high carb refeed periods are often used to help fat loss after it stalls out on a low carb diet from the body crashing hard and low leptin levels.
If you lost muscle, it was because you didn’t eat enough protein or weight train properly, carbs/insulin had nothing to do with it.
[Good guess, but wrong. I made sure I consumed at least 100 grams of protein every day and I was exercising to try to lose weight faster. The point is, I couldn't get my body to burn any more body fat, and it started turning to muscle to make up the deficit.]
So as your doctor said you should stick with a diet you can do for the rest of your life, so if people can’t eat low carb forever, it’s not a good diet. Long term compliance trumps the magic effects of insulin. Also, are you saying everyone ate low carb before the obesity problems started? Defining low carb as below 100g carbs a day, that’s hardly true.
[I wouldn't tell anyone to stick to a diet he or she hated. Life's too short. I don't miss sugar and starch at all, so I'll happily do this forever. No, obesity rose when our carb intake went up and we crossed a threshold.]
Biomarkers often improve favourably when you lose weight, regardless of what you eat. Blood pressure also tends to lower on low carb diets due to the diuretic effect of low carb eating. I just find it ironic how you harped on about inflammation, yet didn’t even track your a1cs.
[My doctor didn't track my a1cs. Since I feel great and all my other markers are good, I don't really care. The clinical studies showed bigger improvements in cardiovascular markers for the Atkins diet independent of weight loss.]
The problem with gary taubes is he started with a false idea (the obese don’t eat more than the lean) then cherry picked the data to fit his conclusion/hypothesis. The 1980s study he based this off was junk (self reported food intake, again, please google ‘underreporting obese’ for more on this) and even the researcher admitted to its inaccuracy. From there he did what the low fat and cholesterol guys did (picked the data that suited them, ignored that which didn’t), and went on to cherry pick nonsensically epidemiological data, rat studies (again, carb metabolism in rats not the same as humans) and very old studies which have been improved upon by current research (which taubes ignored). In conflicting evidence he has no response (such as all the people who lost weight on high carb diets or not lost weight on low carb diets), completely ignoring how things work in the real world. He’s done the very think he criticised everyone else for, which is laughably hypocritical.
[And you're basing these accusations on ... ? You clearly haven't listened to anything the guy has said lately. He's never denied some people lose weight on low-fat diets. People who aren't insulin-resistant seem to lose weight equally well on either kind of diet. He's also never claimed that people who eat 5,000 calories per day of low-carb food will lose weight, which is what some people seem to think it means.]
Fosters study:
“The low-carbohydrate diet produced a greater weight loss (absolute difference, approximately 4 percent) than did the conventional diet for the first six months, but the differences were not significant at one year. The low-carbohydrate diet was associated with a greater improvement in some risk factors for coronary heart disease. Adherence was poor and attrition was high in both groups. Longer and larger studies are required to determine the long-term safety and efficacy of low-carbohydrate, high-protein, high-fat diets.”
[If you read the study, you'll see that by the one-year mark, the low-carb dieters had raised their carb intake quite a bit. That's why I used the six-month figures, when both groups were still on their diets and the drop-out rate was low. By the end, Foster was "imputing" the results and including estimates for the drop-outs in his figures. Considering that the low-calorie group had a fairly low calorie limit and the low-carb had no limit, the extra weight loss should tell us something. But I agree that longer-term studies would be useful.]
Minimal differences after a year, and they weren’t even eating the specified diets the whole time, hardly lets you hang your hat on a large amount of extra fat loss from low carbing. Again, I said that low carb diets have their place, but they’re not the answer to everyone, as compliance is often bad, as you agreed compliance is key, so why did you make this such a large push in your film?
[I don't believe any diet is the answer for everyone. Our metabolisms and tolerance for carbs can vary wildly.]
In regards to prisoner overfeeding, google ‘overeating neat,’ I can’t use many links or my post will get deleted. Also google ‘insulin:an undeserved bad reputation’ for a very good read.
[Yeah, I read that guy's stuff. If insulin isn't necessary for glucose uptake, that must be news the diabetics who used to wither away and die before insulin shots. He also doesn't explain why insulin will make aneroxics eat and gain weight.
Side note, kind of funny ... my wife is reading a book on raising chickens. One part warns against letting them get too fat and says if a chicken is getting fat, stop feeding it grains.]
I’m not saying insulin has no effect, but insulin doesn’t trump thermodynamics. Even you agree that without a deficit you won’t lose weight.
[I'm always amused by people who claim what Taubes wrote would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Taubes has a degree in physics from Harvard. He isn't claiming energy magically disappears. He's saying that the body can adjust its use of energy dramatically according to the energy available at the cellular level. That's why hibernating animals can get just as fat on half as much food. The hormones demand they get fat, so their bodies adjust to the lower food intake and they get fat.
Just read a study where researchers cut calorie intake in obese mice by 5% for a month. The mice lost muscle and gained adipose tissue. The researchers speculated stress hormones made them fatter.]
So what’s the big deal with insulin? Hunger? As I said, protein (and things like potatoes) are very satiating despite elevating insulin, fibre and fat in a meal slows down and diminishes blood sugar increases, minimising blood sugar crashes, controlling hunger. But this doesn’t have a huge amount to do with low carb eating.
[Hunger, yes. If insulin is packing calories into your fat cells, they're not available as energy for your cells. When I lived on a high-carb diet (my failed experiment with vegetarianism) it took a LOT of food to satisfy my appetitie, then I was hungry again a few hours later. After a breakfast of bacon and eggs, I'm not hungry for at least six hours.]
Metabolic rate slows down on all diets, as well as low carb ones.
[If you lose weight, your metabolic needs will diminish because you have less body mass to feed. That doesn't mean the slowdown is equal on all diets. ]
So you agree that the obese consume more than the lean? because that is the entire premise taubes missed in his book, and based all of his cherry-picked data on. Or do you think they consume the same amount?
[Some do, some don't. I'd say it's more that some lean people can eat a helluva lot. My son eats way more than I do and literally cannot gain weight. He's thin as a rail, and it's not from exercising. Same with his mom, his grandfather, and his mom's sister. I believe most obese people eat a lot because they have to eat a lot to stay in homeostatis. Staying in energy balance means being able to store and retrieve fat quickly enough to keep blood sugar level. If the fat-retrieval part of the system slows down because of insulin resistance, they become fat to overcome the resistance.]
You dont care about markers of inflammation despite discussing their importance at length in the film? Again…odd.
[Doctor didn't choose to measure and I didn't think to ask. I think it's unlikely that will all other metabolic markers looking good and with me living on a diet of real foods, no processed vegetable oils, etc., I'd have an inflammation problem. I had a lot of aches and pains when I still ate wheat, but not anymore.]
100g of protein a day, no wonder you lost muscle. If you weighed 200lbs you should have been consuming 200g of protein and doing heavy weight training to preserve muscle.
[At least 100 grams per day, usually more. Going by the formula in Protein Power, I need somewhere around 130 grams per day. The smart strength training website says likewise.]
Hopefully this link gets through:
http://www.thelivinlowcarbshow.com/shownotes/423/lyle-mcdonald-ep-238/
[I think I heard that one, but I'll listen again. One or two links will usually come through. More than that, it's up the spam filter.]
You say that no diet is the answer to everyone, but it didn’t seem like you left the option of anything other than a low-carb diet in your movie from what I recall.
[If I covered everything I wanted to cover in the film, it would've been a mini-series. We have a population with rampant diabetes and pre-diabetes. For insulin-resistant people, low-carb is the best option. And we're not talking zero-carb here ... I consumed an average of 100 g/day, up to 140 on some days.]
(I forgot to mention it, but I did find your movie humorous and a good rebuttal to supersize me, although I thought the answer that insulin was the problem not excess calories was silly).
[You and I view the cause and effect from opposite directions. You believe we're eating more because ... I'm not sure, actually. You believe we increased our calorie intake dramatically in one generation because we've decided to become slobs? Because the food is there? My grandma always had leftovers in the fridge, so she wasn't eating less because there wasn't food available.
I believe we're eating more because all that pre-diabetes means insulin resistance which means high insulin which means fat being stored without being released efficiently which means hunger.]
Again, low calorie limits vs ad lib low carb doesn’t mean much as people tend to eat more protein on a low carb diet (satiety, protein intake has nothing to do with carb intake when choosing a good diet) and the fact that people tend to eat 40-70% of their calories from carbs, if you cut their carbs out, and significantly increased their pro and fat, then would be eating more food but less calories, feeling fuller, and I don’t see the issue in this, but the problem is in why it works, it works because they’re eating less.
[Hunger is the result of the body not getting what it needs. That could be 1) not enough protein, 2) not enough micronutrients, or 3) not enough fuel available at the cellular level. High insulin will cause #3]
I don’t remember saying you had to eat grains, you can eat fruits and starchy veggies for your carb needs if wheat irritates your joints, and that’s a logical fallacy about chickens, grains are calorically dense and easy to over-eat, that doesn’t mean they possess any uniquely fattening properties beyond their caloric yield.
[You do realize the "experts" tell us to eat grains because they're not calorically dense and full of fiber? Fatty foods are the most calorically dense. Farmers all over the world know to feed their livestock grains when they want to fatten them up. ]
By contrast meat and vegetables are satiating and hard to over-eat, this means that they’ll likely cause you to eat less due to satiety, and again, it’s eating less due to non-insulin related satiety (water, fibre, protein) that makes them eat less and lose weight.
So much evidence used by low carbers is on special populations, animals, and using self reported food intakes (up to 50% inaccurate, google ‘obese underreporting’ if you haven’t yet), this makes for interesting arguments and theories, but it hasn’t been shown to be applicable in humans, in gcbc taubes spent ages talking about animals self-regulating their food intake (eating more when food was diluted etc), then assumed a similar mechanism applied to humans, but it doesn’t.
[Food intake surveys are lousy, agreed. Taubes has to rely on animal studies because if you proposed a study in which you pumped humans full of insulin and then starved them, most ethical committees would frown on the idea.
How do you know a similar mechanism doesn't apply to humans?]
This is what happens when you start with fault data (the bad study in 80s that lean eat the same as obese) and look at everything else with that in your mind, you’re seeking confirmation of your own theory, not the truth.
[Answer me this honestly: Have you even read Good Calories, Bad Calories? I don't think you have, because you keep accusing Taubes of taking positions he didn't take. Yes, he mentioned one piece of evidence that the obese don't eat more, but the rest of the book is absolutely, positively NOT based on that idea. Most of it explores what ramps up hunger and therefore OVER-EATING. He explains why obese people have to EAT MORE to remain in homeostasis. So you're criticizing a position he never took and assuming the entire book sets out to confirm a theory that it doesn't try to confirm. I get the feeling you've read critiques of the book, but not the book itself. (If you did read it, read it again; your memory of it is faulty.)]
There are things which aren’t atkins which also aren’t vegetarianism (which I don’t think is a good diet), and just because a diet isn’t <50g carbs a day, that doesn’t make it 300g a day. There’s a middle ground too.
[I consumed 100 g/day in the film. The average intake in America today is closer to 400 g. I'm not suggesting -- and never did -- that everyone needs to live in the Atkins induction phase for life.]
I thought the takeaway places in the USA still used vegetable oils? How did you avoid them?
[Cook meals at home.]
Protein power, doesn’t mike eades follow super slow training? That’s a pile of trash, no one has preserved muscle or gotten strong training like that.
[Wow ... I'm trying very hard not to yell insulting words right now. You just tried to tell me that I haven't actually experienced what I experienced. I switched to Fred's method and, after feeling stalled for years, got a lot stronger. My chest filled out. My thighs filled out. My arms got thicker. At our health club, I now work out with the entire stack on the leg press, leg curl, and back extension. I'm two plates from the bottom on the chest press, military press and tricep press. I increased weight I use on the bicep curl by 30 pounds. I'm 52 years old and increased my strength faster using Fred's method than anything else I've ever done.
No one has preserved muscle or gotten stronger doing what I do, eh? Where the @#@$% do you get off making that statement? Next time, ask someone who's tried it instead of parroting other people's opinions. ]
Ask any decent strength coach or body composition expert (I highly suggest the work of lyle mcdonald and alan argaon) and they’ll tell you that you need more like 200g protein with heavy weight training to preserve muscle.
[Yes, I'll be sure to do that. I'd like them to explain how I went up 40 pounds on the chest-press machine without actually getting stronger or preserving muscle, which, according to you, I couldn't have done since I didn't adhere to your ideas. Jesus Christ, now you're just embarrassing yourself. Would you care to also tell me my eyes aren't actually blue?]
If you’re game, lyle’s book ‘The Ketogenic Diet’ is an excellent read as well as the free articles on his site.
Wouldn’t 150g of carbs a day be causing too much insulin secretion to lose fat? Wouldn’t it become a slippery slope into carb bingeing and diabetes?
[Like I said several times, carb tolerance varies. Plenty of people can consume 150 carbs without going into fat-storage mode.]
I don’t agree that everyone needs to eat a heap of grains or 300g of carbs, because I don’t believe in what the food pyramid says, but I also don’t believe that low carb is the only way to go. However, it seems that you don’t believe that low carb is the way to go either, or than a moderate amount of carbs like 150g will make you fat. So I’m not 100% sure on what part of my statements you’re disagreeing with?
[I disagree with your belief that levels of circulating insulin have nothing to do with increased fat storage, leading to increased hunger and lethargy. That's what Dr. Lustig found when he gave the cancer-treatment kids an insulin-supressing drug. Insulin went down, hunger went down, body weight went down, activity went up. Those are people, by the way, not rats.]
You ate a caloric deficit, didn’t go crazy on carbs, got in sufficient protein and fat, did some exercise and lost weight. Thats what I’ve been saying all along?
If you wanted to prove taubes theory, you would have not exercised (he said in the book, which I read), that exercise doesn’t help weight loss, cited a bunch of studies where diet wasn’t controlled (they exercised then ate more, surprisingly didn’t lose weight), ignored studies where people improved fat loss while dieting by doing resistance training (only looked at aerobic training), ignoring things like improved muscle insulin sensitivity and glycogen storage from weight training.
[Make up your mind. If weight training improves weight loss by improving insulin sensitivity (I agree), then insulin has something to do with it. If aerobic activity doesn't improve weight loss, then it's not just about burning calories. Even the calorie-counting researchers whose works I've read agree that aerobic exercise doesn't seem to do much for weight loss, which means it's not just about burning calories.]
You should have eaten you’re maintenance calories or more (assuming 16cal/lb maintenance, probably around 3200 calories, low carb (all starches make you fat according to taubes), and then seen how successful you were losing fat. What you’re done is prove what I’ve been saying (moderate carbs, good levels of pro and fat, + exercise + caloric deficit = fat loss), and which is what most main stream people say, so I don’t see what’s so incredible about what you did in the movie?
[Most mainstream experts recommend low-fat, high-carb, low-calorie diets and aerobic exercise.]
Fat is more calorically dense, but less palatable.
[WHAT?!! Where the hell did you come up with that (ahem) fact?! That's the big bugaboo the experts are always whining about ... oh, gee, if only fat didn't taste so good, people would stop eating it. Please cite at least one piece of research showing that fat is less palatable than, say, whole grains.]
It also slows the blood sugar response, and causes more long term satiety (people eat more cals in a meal if its fattier, but eat less in the whole day, again many studies have only looked at how much was eaten at one meal based on high or low fat). Furthermore, nothing to do with insulin here.
[Lord almighty ... once again, you're not asking yourself why. If people eat less in a day when they eat more fat, why? Simply saying it's satiating is meaningless. Why is it satiating? If it works by slowing blood sugar response, then you've just proved my point -- food that spike blood sugar lead to hunger.]
Animals have different carb metabolisms to humans, and injection them with insulin is not the same as humans eating carbs, even in the insulin resistant. People are eating 400g carbs a day you say, jimmy moore said in his interview with you that he was eating 1000g of carbs a day, I don’t see this suggested anywhere in the guidelines (which I don’t agree with 100%, but if they say 300g carbs and you eat unlimited carbs, that’s not following the guideline, so you can’t blame the guideline for that).
[I can blame the guidelines if they convince people to consume 300 carbs, which spikes their blood sugar, which spikes their insulin, which stores fat instead of burning it, which makes them hungry and also causes their blood sugar to drop because fat is not available for fuel, which makes them crave sugar, which makes them eat more carbs. I'd also blame the government if they recommended people smoke 10 cigarettes a day and then it turned out people were smoking two packs.]
Fruit and veg have far more fibre and nutrients per calorie than grains, and grains have more nutrients per calorie than low fat oreos. It’s a continuum, not absolutes. Again, this comes back to me not agreeing completely with the guideline, but getting annoyed when people say ‘I followed the guideline and ate 600g of carbs a day and got fat’ well people were never told to do that.
[See above. If you create guidelines that set off a biochemical chain reaction that results in carb addiction, yes, we can blame the guidelines. You saw the film. It's damned hard to get 300 carbs per day without loading up on sugar or starch, so we can't use the "they should get those carbs from vegetables" excuse. Most people don't want to eat 10 pounds of green vegetables and carrots per day.]
Food intake surveys are lousy, but that’s what taubes based his whole hypothesis on, eating more doesn’t make you fat (the self reported food intake study says so), so there must be another mechanism, then he went hunting around with that in his mind and ignored conflicting evidence.
[Read the book again. Whole chapters dedicated to what makes us EAT MORE. You seem to have decided his book is about how insulin makes you fat without eating more. If so, you didn't comprehend the book. The mechanism is insulin driving hunger and fat storage, which drives over-eating and lethargy. Exact same thing Dr. Lustig found with the cancer kids -- not rats, not based on food surveys, but real kids.]
Then there’s the you’re eating more because you’re growing example. Further proving I read the book (very carefully), what about the study (in gcbc) where growing obese kids were fed 400 calories a day and kept growing despite losing fat, how did they accomplish this growth without eating a caloric surplus?
[Because they burned fat to make up for the deficit. At 400 calories per day, insulin would be low enough to release fat.]
I’m referring to your movie diet, how did you avoid vegetable oils there?
[I didn't. That's why my HDL dropped, as I noted in the film.]
I said gotten strong, not stronger. If you’re severed detrained (only walking), coming off various low-protein diets (zone, vegetarian) and haven’t changed training methods in years, of course you’ll see some improvements. The problem here is what I call strong would be benching 225lb for reps, or deadlifting 350lbs for reps (both with a barbell), not adding a few lbs to a chest press machine.
[You said no one builds or preserves muscle using slow-burn, which is utter bull. I switched from the standard weight-machine workouts as originally demonstrated by the health-club staff to slow burn, then got bigger and stronger. A lot stronger. I went from 200 on the bench-press machine to 240 for my workouts. I see guys half my age at the club who don't lift what I lift for workouts.
Speaking of confirmation bias and not being willing to look at the evidence, let's review your response to that one: "Nobody builds or preserves muscle using slow burn." So I tell you I switched and got a lot stronger. Uh, oh, well, uh ... let's see, I could admit I made a statement I can't actually back up, or I could explain how, after declaring there are no black swans and then being shown a black swan, it's not ACTUALLY a black swan, thus allowing me to engage in confirmation bias and keep my previous belief. Hmm, tough decision ... I'm going to go with, "You didn't actually get bigger and stronger because you weren't strong to begin with."
How can I put this ... you look like a fool for that one. By the way, I've met Fred Hahn in person. He's very muscular, and very strong.]
Why have people eaten more in the last generation (feels like I’m repeating myself here), many factors ranging from cheaper, tastier and more convenient high calorie low satiety foods, more stress, longer working hours, less sleep, more sedentary jobs, more sedentary lives, less sport, less walking, more high calorie low satiety food marketing, less home cooked meals, less phy ed in schools, computers, +100 other factors that comes down to eating more cals and burning less cals, the difference ending up in excess fat.
[Or it could be that appetite is regulated by hormones. The cheaper high calorie foods are high in refined carbohydrates, which is EXACTLY the term Taubes used over and over in the book ... refined carbohydrates. ]
Brad
Again, low calorie limits vs ad lib low carb doesn’t mean much as people tend to eat more protein on a low carb diet (satiety, protein intake has nothing to do with carb intake when choosing a good diet) and the fact that people tend to eat 40-70% of their calories from carbs, if you cut their carbs out, and significantly increased their pro and fat, then would be eating more food but less calories, feeling fuller, and I don’t see the issue in this, but the problem is in why it works, it works because they’re eating less.So to paraphrase Anthony Colpo, low-carb doesn’t work because low-carb works!
Don’t you see the massive contradiction in your statement, of course people eat less on low-carb, but that’s the whole f..ing point. Ask you why they eat (spontaneously) less on low-carb, or to reformulate, why do they eat more on high-carb.
Also be extremly aware of the fact that weight gain and weight loss are 2 very different things, you can not conclude on weight gain from weight loss diet experiments and vice-versa.
Bingo. Saying people eat less on low-carb and leaving at that doesn’t ask the right question: why?
gallier, you obviously haven’t talked to many low-carbers. Many will tell you that they can eat as much as they want (calorically, not satiety based), because their insulin levels are low and ‘you can’t store fat with low insulin levels,’ this works for a while, then plateaus.
[You're citing the inability to LOSE more fat as proof that 'you can't store fat without insulin' is wrong? Do you see the difference between not making deposits and not making further withdrawals?]
They insist they’re eating <50g carbs a day and have no idea why fat loss has stalled. They wonder if it’s the artificial sweeteners or coffee spiking insulin, the sugar alcohols etc etc, and when you ask them how many calories they’re eating they insist that calorie counting doesn’t work and that they have no idea how many calories they’re eating. If you agree that low carb works because it makes people eat less, then you’re ahead of the pack by a long way. Again, this isn’t a problem, eating less without having to think about it is fine, and I see no problem with it, the problem is the person I’m describing above who are beyond help. If you’ve never met these types of people, then you haven’t talked to enough low carbers.
Feel like I’ve gone over why people eat less on low carb 100 times, increased protein intake (it’s rare to find a study comparing low fat and low carb that matched protein levels) and fat intake leading to more satiety, the fact most delicious foods are high in starch/sugar, it’s easier to eyeball portion sizes on a low carb diet, it takes away 40-70% of where people were getting their calories from before, ketosis can have hunger-blunting effects and result in better blood glucose control (but blood glucose isn’t perfectly matched to insulin response, and high insulin foods can be high satiety too, potatoes example), and again, blood glucose can be controlled while still eating carbs, assuming they’re high fibre carbs, and sufficient protein and fat is eaten with the meal. So, there is a small role of insulin (as I’ve said repeatedly), but this doesn’t trump calories in/out, which is seems you’re finally agreeing upon.
[I'm not 'finally agreeing' on anything. Once again, try to wrap your head around this: no one, including Taubes, has ever claimed calories magically disappear or that the calories in don't match the calories out in a closed system. The claim is your body can wildly adjust its use of calories depending on what you eat.
With a car, gasoline is calories in and miles driven is calories out. If my car's mileage drops from 35 mpg to 25 mpg and I now put in more gas to go the same distance, that doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics. It simply means something has gone wrong in the system. What we have here is me saying something has gone wrong with the car, perhaps it was that sugar that went into the tank and gummed up the works, and you responding with By gosh, nothing trumps gasoline in versus mileage out, so the real problem is putting too much gas in the car, and the cure is to stop putting so much gas in the car, and we can't blame sugar because some people put potato starch in their cars without any trouble, so that proves sugar isn't really the problem.
And, for the -- what, 10th time now? -- Taubes placed the blame, over and over and over, on "easily digestible, refined carbohydrates." Bringing up the wonders of high-fiber carbs therefore does nothing to dispute what he wrote. ]
Fat by itself is not palatable, try having a glass of olive oil, coconut milk, a few spooonfulls of lard or a giant helping of mayo. Fat, when mixed into things like chocolate bars and cakes becomes very palatable, no one is going to sit there and eat a stick of butter, but they could consume it in processed food easily.
[You just proved my point again. When you eat fat alone, your body says 'enough.' Mix it with sugar, and your body immediately squirts out insulin, which clears your bloodstream of nutrients and ramps up hunger, so you keep eating.]
So now you’re up to a special population who had a disease and were given insulin lowering drugs, close to average people eating a low carb diet, but still not there yet…
[I see ... so since these kids had a disease, the fact that suppressing their insulin levels led to spontaneously eating less, losing weight, and becoming active again actually proves nothing about the effects of insulin. High circulating insulin triggers fat storage and increased hunger in kids treated for cancer, but not in the rest of the population ... is that your position? If so, it looks rather desperate.]
I have said insulin has a role, but it’s not the key determining factor. They exercised and then ate more, which has as much to do with ‘I exercised so I earned this 2000 calorie hamburger’ and it does with hunger and so on. Furthermore, aerobic exercise has been shown to play a key role in weight maintenance long-term, and as I said, weight training is beneficial for fat loss. However, taubes boils it down to ‘exercise doesn’t help fat loss.’
[And again, I've read works by researchers who are all about calories in versus calories out, yet they admitted (reluctantly) in their own papers that attempts to induce weight loss through exercise don't seem effective. I'm sure Taubes is simply mortified that he didn't look into the effects of weight training, but since he was disputing the idea that we should simply eat less and move more to lose weight, I'd say checking the effects of aerobic exercise -- the type of 'move more' the experts recommend to lose weight -- was quite legitimate.]
You seemed quite big on a libertarian personal freedom/choice/responsibility stuff in your film, no one makes you eat fast food, no one makes you not exercise etc etc, now you’re all ‘insulin makes you fat and lazy’ and all that, why did people have to change their eating when the government put out the regulations?
[Let me try to follow your logic here ... Since no one in government actually forced people to eat more carbs, we can't blame the government for putting out dietary guidelines that were based on bad science? We now blame the citizens for following what they were told was good advice? If you have a point in there somewhere, I'm not getting it.]
Why couldn’t they just continue eating what they had been? It seems like people were helpless to stop their carb addiction after the big mean government forced them to all eat high carb low fat, and they couldn’t help but get fat, which again is quite a big change of pace from before where you said people have a brain and can make good decisions for themselves.
[If you are given bad information and told it's good information, you can use your brain all you want and still make a bad decision.]
So they were in a deficit and burned fat, yet kept growing? Interesting.
[Uh ... what exactly is so difficult to understand here? I'm growing, so my body uses my food intake mostly for growth and taps my fat cells to provide energy.]
This is an issue of semantics, you think because you have 240lbs on the chest press that’s strong. Load 225lbs onto a barbell (free weights) and see how many reps you get bench pressing it.
[You should read 'Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).' Great book, describes how some people, having taken a public position on an issue, feel compelled to defend it to the very end, no matter how much contrary evidence is presented. You're now a perfect example of what the authors described.
You stated no one ever got stronger or preserved muscle on slow burn workouts. I explained how I did in fact get a lot stronger -- going up 40 pounds on a chest-press machine is 'stronger,' no matter how you choose to define 'strong.'
Your response: Hmmm, I can't POSSIBLY admit that perhaps some people do get stronger on slow burn because I already said that doesn't happen, so I must now jump through mental hoops to explain why 'getting stronger' doesn't actually mean 'getting stronger' unless it fits my defintion of 'getting stronger.'
I am not a naturally strong or muscular person. In school I was one of the weak kids. Now I'm 52 years old and, at my health club, I work out with more weight than most of the guys there, including many who are half my age. I use the entire stack or nearly the entire stack on most of the machines. If you really need to find a way to explain to yourself how I'm not actually strong and didn't actually get stronger in order to avoid simply admitting you made a blanket statement (nobody gets stronger on slow burn) that isn't true, knock yourself out -- but you look like an utter fool in the process.]
Or put 350lb on the floor and deadlift it a few times. If you think fred hahn is strong and muscular (despite not being able to strict overhead press 135lbs and looking as he does) and that you didn’t look obese in your film with 30% bodyfat, then this is a issue of two completely different perspectives on body composition, and more of an issue of opinion I suppose.
[If you don't think Fred looks strong and muscular, I presume you are built like Arnold Schwarzennegger in his Mr. Olympia days.]
The fat alone thing is a taste issue, not an insulin issue.
If you think people who had a disease and then took insulin lowering drugs is the same as regular people eating a low carb diet, then I think this discussion has pretty much run it’s course. I also think you should look at yourself and your film for some of the ‘defending your position to the bitter end’ type stuff.
I said no one gets STRONG doing slowburn. You keep quoting me as getting ‘stonger.’ If you think using the chest press machine is a good test of strength, that’s fine. However, I think you may be surprised as to how little strength carryover there is for a 225lb barbell bench press (an actual powerlifting strength exercise). If you don’t believe me, next time you go to your health club, put 225lbs on the bar and see how many reps you get. If fred hahn’s physique is what you’re after, I’m sure a low carb diet and slowburn training will be exactly what helps you get there.
Good luck with your other film projects and stand up, and have a nice day.
“Protein power, doesn’t mike eades follow super slow training? That’s a pile of trash, no one has preserved muscle or gotten strong training like that.”
So I went up 40 pounds on the chest press without preserving muscle, and lifting an entire stack for 10 slow reps doesn’t qualify as ‘strong.’ Okay, you have a nice day too.
Is he gone yet?
(deep exhalation of relief)
I enjoy those debates, actually. I just get annoyed (as I’m sure you noticed) at blanket statements such as “No one ever gained or preserved muscle with slow burn,” which clearly isn’t true. Double annoyed when he couldn’t just admit a mistake on that one and so had to start re-defining “strong” to exclude 52-year-old men who lift entire stacks on weight machines. If there’s no single diet that’s best for everyone because people are all different (agreed), then there’s sure as hell no single best way of working out for everyone, either.
Hey I wanted to thank you again for opening my eyes and helping me to make much much smarter and choices for my body. You are one person I can say I truly look up to.
I have a few questions that’s been burning in my mind though. First I wanted to ask about (apologies in advance) bowel movement. I’ve always heard that it’s healthy to “go” at least twice a day. Since I’ve switched to a low-carb high-fat diet, I’ve noticed I’ve had to use the restroom very rarely, much less frequently than before. Is this a normal occurrence?
Another question is about coffee/caffeine. I’ve been drinking a cup or two of black coffee with cream after my morning meals. Is caffeine ok for us to be drinking, as in, does it harm our bodies? I hear so many conflicting things about this. What’s your take?
Thanks again!
Dr. Eades has posted or tweeted several articles on caffeine. Bottom line: don’t worry about it. Enjoy your coffee. I don’t believe there’s a “correct” schedule for bowel movements. If you’re concerned, perhaps some psyllium or probiotic supplements will help, along with more green vegetables.
Hey Tom,just wanna add some ideas to this awesome conversation.
I believe that a large part of hunger is mainly the body fulfilling its needs to maintain nitrogen balance so protein is of prime importance.That said I believe the RDA for protein and weighing 180 pounds I only consume 90gms protein with no muscle loss and a muscular body.I go to 60 though and muscle burns away.
Asians eat low protein but they are also a very small race stature wise so need less.They also do not eat copious amounts of rice as stated around the net instead eating like you said close to 1800cal.
Why did you in your movie go low carb at the end.The eating less calories beginning netted you health gains and I thought that months more of that would of kept it going.
This issue on farmers removing grain if the animals are getting fat is kinda ridiculous to me.Doesn’t anyone see that grains are so much higher calorie dense foods compared to these animals normal diets.How much grass equates just one pound of grain(why a cow HAS to graze all day long)….how many bugs does a chicken have to eat to equal a cup of corn meal?
The very-low carb month at the end was, by design, a diet very high in saturated fat. Dr. Eades challenged me to give it a try and watch what would happen with my cholesterol.
Just wanna add to above that people eat very little protein and just fulfilling a measly 60gms is hard with bagels and rice etc.So they eat alot of carb foods to compensate for the little amounts of protein in them and also protein that is not complete.
Thanks Tom. I didn’t mention before that I loved Fathead movie. It Spurlock’s nonsense even more ridiculous.LOL at end of one month of Mcdonalds he,doc and wife were scared he would die of a heart attack. I like your reasoning and have always felt that we all have a certain level of carbs we are comfortable with as you point out.
Yes, Spurlock apparently felt the need to play up the drama … Look, I’m risking my life to prove a point, etc.
Hi tom
First I want to say its a GREAT documentary and I am recommending it to everyone.
It would be great if you do another documentary (or talk about it) about high intensity exercise vs long steady cardio since its also a GREAT debate in weight loss programs. I believe in short high intensity exercise since ,as you say lol, mother nature isn’t stupid. We evolve fast running to hunt and escape predators NOT doing long slow jogs that catabolice our muscles and hence slow our metabolism. what do you think?
No plans to make another documentary, but CJ Hunt is coming out with one soon that will probably cover some of that territory.
Hello Tom
forgot to mention that in your documentary you are mentioning a life style of foods much like the paleo diet. The only difference I see is that you ate some dairy foods like cheese and butter that is not present in the paleo diet. have you heard of this diet? if so do you see something wrong with it?
I believe a paleo diet is the probably the healthiest of all. I couldn’t go paleo while making a documentary about living on fast food, of course.
btw, there is a mechanism for fat uptake into adipocytes without insulin over at
hyperlipid:
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/search/label/Weight%20loss%20when%20it%27s%20hard%201
Another summary of 21 studies relating saturated fat to heart disease:
google “Siri-Tarino SAFA CVD Risk.pdf”
The whole idea that something your body is capable of producing itself
(sat. fat, cholesterol) could be bad to consume is ludicrous.
Hi
Im just wondering what can I do when I have Carbs cravings. I been in a low carb diet with High intensity exercises and lost 5 pounds in one week. But recently my mind was asking for a ice cream and I could not take it anymore and I went and got a BK sunday plain (23g Carb) and I hate it myself for that.
Is cravings means you “need” the carbs or is it mostly psychological?
It’s biochemical. Carbs tickle the same part of your brain as cocaine. It’ll pass in time, but in the interim, Julia Ross (author of The Mood Cure) recommends taking glutamine to offset the craving.
Don’t hate yourself for it. Just get back on track.
Hi,
I understood about carbs and natural protein. but now i m in dilemma about Protein shakes. My trainer says that it would be good for me if i take protein shakes just after my workout. I eat meat only 2-3 times a week but am ready to eat lot of egg whites. Can someone help me in here? Are protein shakes safe? Do i really need it?
I am 5ft 9, weigh 88 kilos, and have real good lower body strength due to cycling, running and squats. Have weak arms and upper torso (compared to my size).
any comment would be welcome.
I think protein shakes are great after a workout. I seemed to pick up strength after including them on workout days.
Tom, my wife and I just finished watching Fat Head and are still in a little shock. We are both obese and have struggled with diets for years. Your film has given us hope! Do you list somewhere on this site the food logs you used for making the film? I am curious about how to get started. Or would it be better to stick to a diet described by one of the experts? If so, which one do you recommend?
Thanks!
I wouldn’t recommend trying an all-fast food diet. That was an experiment to make a point about the supposed evils of dietary advice. You’ll find good dietary advice in The Primal Blueprint, A New Atkins for a New You, or any of the Protein Power books. Links are available on the Recommended Reading page.
If you’re curious to see my food log, it’s linked in the left-hand sidebar of this blog under Helpful Links.
Wow, that was a really interesting debate. I’m glad I stumbled upon this. I have a couple points to make: I am a “lifer” vegetarian but I eat plenty of eggs, yogurt, low-fat cheese and other animal fats/proteins in addition to veggie proteins. My “regular diet” is roughly 60% carbs, 20% fat and 20% protein. Its very satiating, and I don’t miss meat (though I wouldnt know b/c its been so long). I eat very little sugar (except fruit) or “white” carbs. When I get the occasional carb craving, usually I can have one really good treat (like a cherry cordial) and be fine. I account for the calories. Here’s the thing I’m trying to figure out and I would love your input on- every once in a while I’ll binge- and its disasterous. For me, the binge triggers a craving cycle thats really hard to break- It can take weeks, or sometimes longer, to get back to my diet. I could eat a whole container of oreos during a binge easily. I really thought it was an emotional response, but the insulin cycle is really really interesting.
I was always taught that deprivation was the failure of all diets, so I always thought it was better to give in to the occasional peppermint patty, but maybe what I am really doing is F*%*ing up my insulin response regularly…..
A binge sounds like an insulin problem. Best advice I could offer would be to get a glucose meter and see what kind of reaction you have to different foods in your diet. If you check an hour after eating and your blood sugar is above 125, you probably ate something that your body doesn’t handle well.
Hey, Tom. I have a ton of questions, so I hope I’m not too annoying by asking you all of them. You mention in your film that, over time, with a large consumption of carbs and sugar, your insulin forces your fat to store itself in the fat cells; and, overtime, the longer these insulin levels remain high, the larger these fat cells grow (of course, in order to store all of the fat the insulin is trying to preserve). Obviously, now that your fat storage units are larger, your body will fill those storage units up before releasing the energy to other cells and organs. So, here’s my question, if you have had a diet high in carbs and sugar for a long period of time (like I have), how long does it take for the low or no carb diet to effectively “shrink” these fat storage cells? Also, how does the science work behind that.
Thanks!
In a nutshell, the idea is to lower insulin so your fat cells can be efficiently tapped for fuel. You’ll still need to create a calorie deficit to burn body fat, but it’ll be easier for that to happen with the fat cells open for business. How long it takes depends on a number of factors, including how much insulin resistance you need to overcome.
[My answers follow your questions, in italics -- Tom]
I have to say that I enjoy reading your blog, I’m do a lot of personal research on nutrition, I mean I don’t claim to be an expert of anything nutrition related, but I have been trying to make sure I am eating the foods that give me enough macronutrients and micronutrients. I’ve been lucky enough to win the genetic lottery in terms of being slim, so my main worry is basically that I eat properly so I can dominate in the squash court and live a high quality, full life. So, first, full disclosure, my diet is basically ovo-vegetarian. (Don’t worry, we can still be friends) As far as I have seen in terms of diet books that I have read, the one that has stood out the most is Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrmann. Most of these books advocating vegetarian diets seem to be just as carb phobic as low carber diets. Essentially he thinks its ideal that we don’t eat any wheat, and should avoid soy products as a sole source of vegetarian protein. So I don’t follow his diet as law, but I use the knowledge from that book in my diet. I eat a few eggs in the morning for breakfast, eat a large salad, full of nuts and legumes at lunch, and generally stir fry some more legumes (at least 2 cups a day) and veggies in olive oil in a bed of quinoa that I would eat in probably the same volume as a East Asian eats rice. And I get along pretty well, my vitamin labs always come back without any problems (iron, vitamin d, and calcium are always good). And fruit here and there. I get about 60 gms of protein a day, I can’t tell you how many carbs or fat I get because I really only worry about getting enough protein.
But, ok. This is essentially what I consider to be “the healthiest diet”. As far as my own knowledge goes I have to agree with what you have to say about starchy high carbohydrate vegetables. My family is a meat and potatoes kind of family, so, on days when I’m home for the holidays and feeling especially lazy, I’ll just take the meat out of a meal they’ll make. So I’ll eat like… some corn and some white potatoes. Obviously I’ll feel like taking a nap after eating this pretty much exclusively carb-starch meal, and hungry two hours later with serious sugar cravings. So, I’m not denying what you are saying about carbohydrates is true. Essentially I eat next to no refined carbohydrates (when I’m eating as I should do).
Ok so mainly my questions are as follows.
1. Do dieticians really say that we should limit our fat intake and increase our carb intake? If anything the Dr. Oz, Dr. Furhmann (even Dr. Barnard, but I’m also not his hugest fan) group has said that we should limit our saturated fat AND our refined carb intake, and eat only unrefined whole foods. Maybe it’s true, I look in my Mom’s fridge and see all the low fat food she buys is incredibly carb laden and gross (like the gastronomic hairshirt that is no fat sour cream). But is that really a function of dieticians advice? Or just a function of fad diets and an uninformed populace? Yes, maybe weight watchers would say that she should eat no fat products, but Dr. Fuhrmann would not advocate for any of this essentially fake food. If anything I see a bit of a misrepresentation of (some) low fat diets, as a lot of them do advocate lowering your carbs significantly.
[Yes, most dieticians recommend getting 60% of calories from carbohydrates and limiting fat intake to < 30%. That's also what you find if you do the math on the nutrition labels the government requires, and it's what the 2010 Dietary guidelines promote.]
2. Ok, so there’s no link between saturated fat and heart disease. Ok, awesome, I love eggs (maybe I should start cooking with coconut oil). So, ok, I’m still not entirely convinced that this means that we should go full tilt high meat low carb. It seems like many of the “problems” of Atkins are eliminated, by supplementing these diets with lots of fibrous leafy greens because they are packed with micronutrients etc. etc. So, what I’m wondering are these diets healthy because they are full of saturated fat from meat, or are they healthy despite the fact that they are full of saturated fat? The main reason I don’t eat meat is because ok, yes I’m a liberal global warming hippy that is trying to reduce the amount of energy inputs I require, but as well, if you look at who lives the longest, It’s Seventh Day Adventists who eat a mostly ovo-lacto vegetarian diet, and Okinawans whose fat mostly comes from polyunsaturated fish sources. Ok, maybe it’s their (the SDA’s) eschewing of alcohol and coffee, or their religious life, but I think I’ll put my money on diet in the correlation game. And if I wasn’t enjoying my diet, or feeling satiated by it, or my ability to be active was diminished, I wouldn’t follow it. So, as a second question, do you deny that it is beyond the realm of possibility that a diet like mine is healthier than a paleo diet or atkins related diet?
[Seventh Day Adventists prohibit drinking, smoking, drugs, candy, sodas, and all kinds of other detrimental habits. So do Mormons, but Mormons aren't vegetarians. Mormons have longer lifespans (slightly) than Seventh Day Adventists. In both cases, we're seeing the results of generally healthy lifestyles. Okinawans consume the most meat and animal fat (mostly pork) among Asians, and also live the longest.
I'm sure a diet like yours is ideal for many people. (Any diet that cuts out all the refined garbage is an improvement.) I tried the lacto-ovo route, but it doesn't work for me. Without red meat, I gradually become lethargic. So what works for you might not be ideal for me and vice versa. Saturated fat isn't detrimental to health, as more and more studies are concluding, so I don't think it's a case of "despite." ]
I know you like to point out that East Indians have the highest levels of heart disease in the world, but it’s pretty much due to genetics, or perhaps the ridiculous amounts of (hydrogenated) ghee they cook everything in.
[Genetics plays a role, absolutely. But the vegetarian Indians still have higher rates of heart disease than the meat-eaters.]
3. And my final question. I know you love to rail on vegetable (especially corn) oil. But along with the studies that show that there are no links between saturated fat and heart disease, there are studies show that replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fat can have a protective effect on the heart. I don’t have the exact source of these studies but I read it in this news article. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/rethinking-saturated-fat-its-not-your-hearts-enemy/article1462757/ . But… in the case that I am completely wrong. Do I just start cooking with coconut oil and stop using the only vegetable oil I use… (cold pressed olive oil) problem solved?
[No reason to give up olive oil. It's a natural fat. Squeeze olives, you get oil. Humans have been consuming olive oil for many centuries. Corn oil, soybean oil, etc., aren't natural fats for humans. We'd never be able to consume them without modern processing. Coconut oil is great, though. Awesome taste and cooking properties, and with the added health benefits.]
I really hope there is no hostile tone in my typing, as I do want this to be a friendly discussion.
I really do enjoy reading your blog, and you have taught me a lot. Thanks!
[Thank you for the comments and questions.]
“Kids who were diagnosed as suffering from ADD have been successfully treated by re-introducing natural saturated fats into their diets. Your brain is made largely of fat.”
This makes me wonder if the government WIC program has led to an increase in ADD amongst children. I wonder this because at least in TN pregnant women and women with children older than 2 are required to purchase reduced fat or fat free milk under the program. When I was pregnant with my first child my husband lost his job, we went and applied for WIC. After I was informed that I would not be allowed to use the voucher to purchase whole milk, I, of course, asked for an explanation. She explained to me that pregnant women did not need the fat in the whole milk. I was completely confused. I am creating a whole human being, and I need no fat. Interesting. I used exactly 0 of the WIC vouchers because that did not seem logical. When I asked why a person with a one year old could buy whole milk. The answer, a one year old needs the extra fat for brain development. Which I assume makes sense given that at 2 years old the brain is done developing. Yeah, did not think so.
Unbelievable.
Hi Tom,
I just finished watching your documentary and really enjoyed it. Thanks for putting this great information out there!
I do have a question that wasn’t addressed but has been on my mind since I’ve been looking into a more “natural” type of diet: What is your take on (or understanding of) beans and legumes? I love to eat garbanzos, black beans, etc… but have been reading that they’re not a natural source of food for people. Like peanuts, they can’t be eaten raw and require processing to make them consumable and non-harmful to humans. My wife says “they grow naturally so can’t be bad for you” but to that one might counter “so do poisonous mushrooms and many other plants that can, in fact, kill you”. What do you know about this topic? Is it best to eliminate beans from my diet?
Thanks again!
John
Dr. Weston A. Price found that beans were part of the diet in many native cultures where people were healthy. However, they soaked the beans to neutralize the lectins. My wife puts beans in her chili, but she soaks them first. I don’t eat many of them, but I don’t feel any negative effects when I do.
Hi Tom,
Have just watched your movie and absolutely loved it! Have you heard of The Harcombe Diet by Zoe Harcombe? It is a diet growing in popularity in the UK and I have been following it since October 2009. I found out about your movie through fellow dieters posting a link to your you tube movie clips and I have now posted a link to your website in my blog with a recommendation to purchase the DVD. The number one focus of The Harcombe Diet is eating real food as nature intended, but Zoe also looks at the reasons we over eat. Like you she also considers blood sugar and insulin spikes and dips to be one of the things that can cause us to crave food but she also looks at Candida and Food Intolerance being two other major causes. I was just wondering if you have looked into either of these conditions as being issues to consider?
Happy New Year!
Laura.
I haven’t had a chance to read her book yet, but I’ve heard her interviewed. Great stuff. I haven’t looked into Candida or food intolerance to any great degree, but what she said on those topics in her interview makes sense.
Hi Tom,
I enjoy your work! You go the extra mile with the blog and recommended books and everything. But one thing I noticed you failed to mention was sodium intake and how that affects health. What does sodium do to the body?
The research on sodium is all over the map, which means we can’t conclude much of anything. The evidence indicates that sodium can increase hypertension somewhat, but only in people who have damaged kidneys. For people who don’t fall into that category, even extreme reductions in sodium have failed to produce any benefits.
I’m trying to figure out your argument. In as much as I can tell, you’re trying to contradict Spurlock’s misleading factoids by citing your own misleading factoids…
You claim that cholesterol is not the problem, but inflammation.
(You also undercount the typical Fast Food calorie count by drinking diet soda. As a former employee, I am sure McDonald’s has very exact data on how many customers choose diet soda over those with non-diet. I would bet the majority choose non-diet. In the interest of fairness and accuracy, shouldn’t you ask them for their data the same as you ask Spurlock?)
(To your credit, you do acknowledge that you went on a calorie restricted diet and increased the amount you exercise, BUT I’m left wondering if you have ever heard of the term “ceteris paribus?” It’s very easy to look up on wikipedia. LIKE Spurlock, you’re not really doing an apples to apples comparison.)
I looked up info on a proto-typical meal at McDonald’s using information on “nutritiondata.com” (Hopefully, you don’t consider them part of the huge government/CSPI conspiracy against you. For the record, I comparied calorie counts on McD’s own web site, and they gave fairly similar calorie counts to ND.)
Assuming someone orders a Big Mac, Large Fry and Medium Coke, you wind up with a single meal containing 1260 calories, and an Inflammation Factor of a little under -380.
By most standards, that is a lot of calories. While the science on “Inflammation Factor” is new and developing, the recommendation is for an IF of POSITIVE 50. After one McD meal (around -379), you’re about 400 too low.
[About 5 cups (+80 IF per cup) of raw spinach should compensate. How often do you eat that much spinach in a day?]
I’ve completely ignored satfat and cholesterol, which seems to be your main boogey man, why haven’t you judged McD on IF??????
For that matter, Glycemic Load is a little under 60, while 100 is the recommended maximum for a day. That doesn’t sound very good either.
What’s your point again???
Info from ND follows:
Info from nutritiondata.com
BIG MAC, 563 calories, Glycemic Load 20, -138 Inflammation Factor (“moderately inflammatory”)
McD French Fries (Large), 487 calories, GL 30, -164 IF (“moderately inflammatory”)
Del Taco beverage: Classic Coke (Medium), 145 calories, GL 6, IF -48
McD’s web site reports a Medium Coke at 210 calories
Del Taco beverage: Classic Coke (Large), 233 calories, GL 10, IF -77
What exactly are my misleading factoids? Please cite the statements in Fat Head that are wrong or misleading. Show me how, like Spurlock, I set out a list of rules and then didn’t follow them, etc.
Dude – First thanks for allowing me to post, a lot of lesser folks would censor any criticism. Kudos for keeping an open mind! Cool.
[My responses interspersed with your comments for the sake of clarity -- Tom]
Second, thanks for responding.
“What exactly are my misleading factoids? Please cite the statements in Fat Head that are wrong or misleading.”
Well, let’s start with the first MINUTE of the documentary, where you manage to make two statements, that are at best misleading, and at worst flat out wrong.
Statement One:
First, you claim that the difficulty of finding obese people to film in public indicates that government data on (high levels of) obesity is/are wrong.
If you make the (false) assumption that obesity is randomly distributed in the population, and that you are filming at random, then perhaps the argument would hold some water.
My impression is that you filmed around (suburban) Chicago, which is predominantly white*, and in a region of the country (see URL to map below for regional distribution of obesity) that has lower levels of obesity than other (mostly poorer) sections of the country. Furthermore, people who go out in public probably “skew” younger, and obesity tends to increase with age. So, you’re not even viewing a random sample of relatively affluent, less-obese white people.
[Those clips were shot in two locations near Los Angeles and another in Washington, DC. I'm not aware of any data that the obese don't go out in public. The statement about the exaggeration of the obesity epidemic is based on data from Prof. Eric Oliver's book. My experience in trying to find enough big, fat people to capture on film merely confirmed what he'd already told me.]
*And you acknowledge, to your credit, that more poor, Blacks, and Hispanics tend to be obese.
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/DDT_STRS2/NationalDiabetesPrevalenceEstimates.aspx?mode=OBS
Since you routinely wear a Cubs jersey (if my patron Saint Steve Goodman will forgive me for dissing the Cubs), it’s like assuming that in any given year, the Cubs have an equal chance to the other 29 teams in baseball of winning the World Series. If random chance applies, the Cubs should win the Series once every 30 years (29 + 1 = 30)… Lest you forget, in the last 30 years the Yankees have won the World Series 5 times and the Cubs have not even played in it once.
[Did you have to go and bring up the incompetence of my Cubs?]
Your logic seems to be something like this. You film the Cubs for thirty years waiting for that championship season and then conclude that there is no such thing as the World Series because they never appear in one. Sorry, but you’ve failed to grasp the concept of a “random sample.” Yours isn’t!
[Again, if you watch the film you'll see a full explanation of how and why the obesity epidemic has been exaggerated. You can read Prof. Oliver's book for the detailed data. The clips were merely a visual reference for what the data reveals, not any kind of sample on which I based my conclusions]
Statement Two:
You claim that the “government” defines you as obese.
Yes, at times, parts of the government have said that men with more than 25% body fat are “obese.” In the Doctor’s office you use an electronic device that measures fat % and you come in at over 30. So according to that measure, you are obese.
[Truth be told, there are multiple ways to measure obesity, and all of them have "issues" - especially electronic devices such as the one you use in the documentary. The most accurate measures tend to be prohibitively expenisive.]
The usual “government” measure of obesity is BMI. You list your height as 5’11″ and your weight as 206.5 pounds. According to every BMI calculator I checked, your BMI (at the start of Fat Head) is 28.8. According to current NIH/WHO practices, since your BMI is below 30, you are “overweight” – NOT obese! Furthermore, your weight declines in the film, so unless you’ve put more weight back on since finishing the documentary, you are LESS overweight – NOT obese.
[There are two ways the CDC -- a department of the government --defines obesity: BMI > 30 or body fat % > 30. Nearly all other health organizations use the government's definition. So yes, according to the government, I am (or was) obese. My body fat % was over 30. So I'm still not sure what you believe was misleading.]
(There, this isn’t a flame, because instead of calling you obese, I’m calling you less overweight! ~(-: )
From Wikipedia:
It is not clear where on the BMI scale the threshold for “overweight” and “obese” should be set. Because of this the standards have varied over the past few decades. Between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. Dietary Guidelines have defined overweight at a variety of levels ranging from a BMI of 24.9 to 27.1. In 1985 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus conference recommended that overweight BMI be set at a BMI of 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women. In 1988 a NIH report concluded that a BMI over 25 is overweight and a BMI over 30 is obese. In the 1990s the World Health Organization (WHO) decided that a BMI of 25 to 29 should be considered overweight and a BMI over 30 is obese, the standards the NIH set. This became the definitive guide for determining if someone is overweight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Varying_standards
[As Prof. Oliver explained in the film and shows in his book, it was the updated definition you just cited that re-defined millions of people as overweight or obese. So again, what's misleading in the film? The paragraph you just cited agrees with me.]
“Show me how, like Spurlock, I set out a list of rules and then didn’t follow them, etc.”
More substantively, going back to my first comment, if you’re going to claim that inflammation is more of an issue than cholesterol, shouldn’t you take into consideration the inflammation levels caused by fast food? I’ve listed Inflammation Factor levels for a standard (not a Spurlockian exaggeration) McD’s meal, and it’s pretty bad!
[And at what point in the film did I recommend people eat french fries and drink sodas? The section about inflammation was there to dispute the idea that FAT causes heart disease, not to contend that a meal including a large order of french fries and Coca-Cola doesn't. If you actually watched the film, you saw me turn down french fries and state specifically that I drank no sugary sodas at all. I made it clear that if anything is to blame for metabolic syndrome and heart disease, it's refined carbohydrates. So, at the risk of repeating myself, exactly how does anything in the film constitute misleading the audience?]
So you’ve said, the anti-SatFat crowd are misleading everybody and we should pay attention to inflammation instead, and then you ignore the fact that fast food fare is inflammatory as well – besides just being high in SatFat. That strikes me as ignoring your own rule…
[Rule? What rule? I literally have no idea what rules violation you think you see here. What rule did I state on screen and then ignore? I blamed metabolic syndrome on excess carbohydrates and then demonstrated how I was avoiding excess carbohydrates while living on fast food. I did exactly what I said I'd do and posted my food log to prove it. Food isn't inflammatory because it's "fast" ... people consume sugar, white flour, and chemically processed vegetable oils at fast-food restaurants, sit-down restaurants, and at home. Go to a grocery store and look at the garbage people put in their shopping carts. What the research shows, over and over, is that people who like to eat junk do exactly that -- they eat junk, whether they're at home or at McDonald's. Blaming McDonald's for the preferences of sugar addicts is as silly as blaming the local tavern if your neighbor is an alcholic.]
Have you read the China Study? This is based on 30 years of qualified studies on nutrition. Not sure you can hold a candle to that.
If I held a candle to that utterly dishonest piece of propaganda, it would be to burn it. Campbell cherry-picked the data that supported his preconceived beliefs, and completely ignored LOTS of data that disputed his beliefs, as others who’ve examined his original data sets have noted. As a scientist, he’s a joke.
Hi Tom!!
Thank you for producing such an entertaining and informative documentary!! My 10 year old son and 13 year old daughter watched the whole thing with me today (my son thought the CSPI guy was hilarious) and they learned a lot while having a great laugh! I’ve been doing a paleo kind of approach–meat, vegetables, bit of legumes and no dairy except for cream in my coffee and cooking with butter…. feel great, lots of energy and much better mood!
Thank you for watching. Your kids are lucky you know how to feed them right.
Hello Tom.
Wow!! I actually was on the Atkins diet back in 2000! I am 5’3″ and had gotten up to 172 lbs! I decided to do whatever it took and the Atkins diet worked! I always felt great, never tired lost weight and was happy. Well like most people life got in the way. I was a military wife and I moved, with 2 kids, from Fla. to Vermont. Living with my parents made it difficult to follow my diet and low and behold I went back to my old way of eating. I gained some back but kept it in check. In 2004 I was thrown from my horse and broke my arm just above the elbow. I gained more weight from inactivity, then moved to WV in 2006. In that same year I divorced and was at 190 lbs!!!! I then began walking. I read Dr Oz’s book and changed the way I was eating. Walking became running then I added weight training and lost 54 lbs in a year. In my new relationship I started eating like my boyfriend and was in the gym less and am now at 160lbs! ARRGGH. He is very muscular at 6’2″ and 230 lbs. He could drop some body fat as well he says. We have been living a low fat high protein diet but way too many carbs as well. I am gluten sensitive so when I found gluten free breads and pastas I ate them. I am in the gym 4-5 days a week and the weight will not come off.
We watched your movie last night and we have started a new way of eating TODAY! I am so excited because i know I will see results and feel great.
It all makes complete sense. My mother and her brothers were big carb eaters and the are all type 2 diabetics. My mom has to inject insulin and has had breast cancer. She has other health issues that require meds. I am 45 and had gestational diabetes with my second pregnancy. I refuse to be in the state of health my mother is in at my age or when I am her age. At my last checkup my bp was 90/67. My resting hr was 63. Do not have my cholesterol results back yet. I am overweight but healthy. I want to lose the fat and keep my muscles. I feel that I will not miss the breads and pastas one bit.
So we have decided to do this without our family knowing, to see if they comment. When they do we will tell them all about the movie and get them on the path to better health.
Thank you so much for the informative movie, we both knew that fast food was not the culprit. I think my boyfriend got the most out of it because he always believed in carbs. Before we saw the movie I had told him of my Atkins diet and he insisted we need carbs for energy. Well it sure opened his eyes. He is as excited as I am. Of course it helps when you have someone to share with.
I’ll keep in touch with updates of how we do. Thanks again!!!
Here’s to renewed health for both of you. Let me know how it’s going.
I haven’t seen the Fat Head movie yet, but I’d like to point out one monkey wrench Morgan Spurlock throws into his own Supersize Me movie. Did you see Don Gorske, the guy who eats a lot of Big Macs? Have you noticed how … well … NOT fat he looks? Morgan mentioned that Gorske doesn’t eat the fries.
Frankly, I was surprised he included Gorske in the film.
Tom,
As an active runner, I’m always interested in hearing what best fuels your muscles in the days preceding a race. I’m currently reducing carbs to try and lose weight, what (in your opinion) is the best way to compensate for the bread and pasta that I normally would consume in order to replenish and maximize my glycogen stores?
Thanks, loved the movie,
John
If you run long distances, you may need more carbs, but that’s purely a guess since I’m not a runner. Mark Sisson (www.marksdailyapple.com) was an endurance athlete, so you may find an answer on his site or in his book.
Hi Tom.
Came across your 5 part clips today and thought it very good. Succinct, factual and also humourous.
After many years of reading around this topic you come to realise that there is a lot of varying opinions,misinformation,ignorance,intolerance and fanaticism when it comes to diet and/or exercise. I am sure that the great majority of people are utterly confused about how to be at optimal health.
I feel that it is relatively simple…eat very little, if any, of what man makes as food. Ie you can leave out (most)things that come in cardboard,wrappers, cans,plastic bottles etc.
It ain’t that hard,in fact it’s a lot easier.
On exercise…varyity is the key for mine. There is a lot more to exercise than merely trying to lose weight ( i should say fat). You can put on weight with exercise!
Exercise should be fun, can be social, can be calming,lots of things other than a chore!
Congratulations on the video
Steve
That’s pretty much what we do now, avoid foods that came in a box.
What great debate (for the most part). I think I’ll have to print this to digest all the information. My take on the issue and perhaps what Tom has truly fostered…think before you eat! I know I do now, but I feel we should ALL continue to question what we are being told/sold. Regardless of the source.
Hi Tom. I saw your site referenced on a forum, and I took and gender. I have to say that a lot of this is very informing, and I almost feel as if I have to unlearn everything Ive been doing for the past 35 yrs. I was recently diagnosed w/ Type 2 Diabetes, CHF, and Hypertension. I severely restricted my diet, as I became afraid of ANY food, and a ton of weight came off. The only problem was that I was having stomach and chest aches and pains which at the time felt cardiac were said to be stress induced. I was also on the whole grains/ carb heavy(150 grams) diet that the hospital put me on. I also am currently trying to restrict the caloric intake to 1500 cal per day. That does not seem like a lot, but I am 6’6″ and currently 282. I just want something that’s not terribly restrictive, but also healthy, as I tried Atkins back in ’00, but reached a plateau and felt that my body was shutting down. I will try to follow the less carb approach as well as limiting my intake on processed/refined foods. I’m sorry for the long winded reply. I just want to say thanks for illuminating a different path.
Good luck on your journey to better health.
in January, i decided to change my lifestyle and adopt a paleo/primal diet. I have an anxiety disorder that has challenged me for many years. the medications and their side effects have wreaked havoc on my life.
since I have switched my eating habits, i have had one anxiety episode in three months, versus several a week.
i wish we would stop being fed lies about what is good for us to eat.
I’m with you. Some people might still require medication, but it wouldn’t be nearly as many.
I LOVE YOUR FILM!
I’m 5’6″. 12 years ago I weighed 140lbs, but had to go on progesterone hormone injections for medical reasons, and gained 100lbs in 1 year WITHOUT increasing my caloric intake or decreasing activity. No one believed me. Especially not doctors. I gained another 20lbs over the next decade.
I tried low calorie, low fat, vegetarian, and vegan diets. I tried exercise. Nada. I was logging my food, and eating about 250 g of “healthy” carbs, and 1300 – 1700 calories a day (well under my BMR), but fat I stayed.
In September I started a ketogenic low carb diet for seizure control. I eat 60 – 70% fat, 25 – 35% protein, and 5 – 10% (5-20 net grams) carbs. My seizures have stopped, I’ve dropped 50 lbs in 5 months, and I feel fantastic! (My calories do also sometimes exceed my BMR, but I consistently lose weight.)
However, one very annoying side effect is that everyone I know keeps telling me that I WILL have a massive heart attack and die, and it’s only a matter of time. My naturally skinny husband has been worried about what all of the steak and eggs will do to me. I had read Taubes’ Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It, but couldn’t convince anyone else to give it a go. Now….I have your movie to show people!!! I’ve already been able to convince 5 people to watch it, and have bought it as a gift for some others. Thanks for putting the high-fat, low-carb ‘apologetics’ in a convenient and hilarious format, Tom!
Thank you for watching.
Hi Tom, I love the movie, I bought it.
I was wondering if you ever seen “Sugar the Bitter Truth” by Dr. Robert Lustig on Youtube, or seen any of Dr. Richard Johnson’s videos on Youtube.
Even though I totally agree with your movie and Eades opinions, I tend to believe that fructose is probably more of a problem for causing insulin resistance than starches are. Both doctors blame fructose more than glucose.
Starches consist of glucose, which people have been eating for a long time, but extracted pure fructose in high doses have not been ingested by people in the quantities we have been eating them, especially since the 80′s.
I tend to agree with them because I believe people have had time to adapt to a more grain oriented diet in the last few thousand years via natural selection.
I wondered if you had any thoughts on that.
Also, I was wondering if you ever had a chance to read Overdosed America by Dr. John Abrahmson. He is the reason I began to question government regulatory agencies like the FDA, USDA, and also the AMA and AHA. The corruption and influence that goes on within the FDA an medical community is inbelieveable!
This book really opened my eyes about the conflict of interest that goes on with agencies and financial ties to special interest. This book is what put me on the path to questioning government advice on what to eat, and health.
P.S. I love the New Detectives!
Yes, I’ve seen the Lustig and Johnson lectures. The film went in the can two years ago; if I were re-shooting today I’d emphasize that fructose is probably the main problem, although I still believe grains are a problem for many, many people because of the lectins and gluten.
Just saw your movie, and I loved it. (Glad you have a blog too, that helps!)
Now, can you verify this information, I’m sort of a black and white, it is or isn’t type of guy.
1. If I want to become carb tolerant, I should do light work outs, and eat 100g of carbs a day.
2. Don’t worry about high fat food, just don’t get over the daily recommended calorie intake, and make sure again, to stay under or at 100g of carbs.
3. Get a majority of my carbs from fresh fruits and vegetables instead of breads and grains.
Is all that correct?
Intense workouts apparently do more to improve your insulin sensitivity … sprints, lifting weights, etc. A high-fat diet is good for you if (BIG IF) you’re consuming natural fats. Avoid all trans fats and processed vegetable oils. Keep your carb count somewhere around or below 100 grams per day (go lower if you have a hard time losing weight), with most of the carbs coming from vegetables and low-sugar fruits, yes. I ate some hamburger buns on my fast-food diet, but these days I avoid grains almost entirely.
Wow, what a quick response, thanks for your information. So it is pretty safe to assume that if you eat anything processed you’re eating vegetable oils and unnatural fats. Unprocessed meats, regardless of natural fat content should not be feared when balanced with the correct amount of carbs, that are low on the glycenic index, and a healthy lifestyle that promotes insulin sensitivity and carb tolerance so you’re body doesnt produce too much insulin.
That pretty much sums it up. If you give up sugar, white flour products and processed vegetable oils, you’re halfway there already. Then it’s a matter of finding out how many carbs you can tolerate. For me, it’s not very many.
Hello my name is Lavonte Robinson, i’m a 15 year old teenager. And i am overweight. After trying many diets like low calorie and fat. I noticed it just wasn’t working out, I felt hungry and over ate. And now im on the only working diet which is The Atkins diet. After watching your movie on netflix’s instant stream. I finally knew why this diet was actually working. It went along with all the things you were saying. And after hearing people saying, “Oh the Atkins diet isn’t healthy, you’ll die if you eat like this.” I really needed something to prove why this was working. I really think this movie should be featured on the Atkins web site. I would love to say thank you, for going against all the odes and actually proving something. And helping me through, I do plan on showing this movie to all the people who doubted this way of living, including my grandmother, haha. Thank you for your time.
Best of luck on the new diet. You’ll lose weight and feel better too.
Well just to say something short, it is true that being fat does not reduce your sexual drive of course im not saying that youll last 2 hours in love making depending on your weight because that is influenced by the weight but overweight people are very sexually stimulated. That social stigma that overweight people watch porn all day because they cant get a girl, well it is and not true at the same time depending on the situacion and on how bad the situation of the obesity is but fat(tired of using the frase overweight) people have a very strong sex drive, in fact more sometimes than slim people. I dont know if its because of what we eat or because we have the weight we have but its the honest truth.