Low Carb should not be High Protein

Over at Primal Wisdom I read this post today. I have my own comments on the news article, which can be found here. I really wanted to read the original journal article, but it's new and the library doesn't have a subscription to the journal. Going off the abstract, it sounds first of all like a bullshit study.

Why? Well let's start with this. The assumption that a low carbohydrate diet is high in protein. It isn't. Or shouldn't be anyway. Unless you're a body builder. A low carbohydrate diet should be high in fat, not protein. The amount of protein they fed these 17 obese men is more than I consume on a typical day, some days by double. My protein intake is generally 70g to 130g. They fed these men 137-139g of protein.

My other main problem with this study, and why I think it's really irrelevant without even having to read it, is it's short duration and it's use of 17 men as subjects. Under powered and sexist to boot LOL

I think it's an obfuscation, what they're doing. They're attacking animal protein by attacking the low carbohydrate diet. In the case of the above study, I assume that they fed the people in the low carbohydrate group primarily animal protein. How else would you keep your carbohydrate count so low?

This whole attack on animal protein brings me back to something I was reading last night. They blame the protein in dairy for cancer. How did they come to that conclusion? By feeding people skim milk. The study I was looking at also lumped "all dairy" together and implied that "all dairy" had protein.

"Except for cheese with an insulin score of 45, milk and all dairy products including yoghurt, ice cream, cottage cheese, and fermented milk products have potent insulinotropic properties."¹ [emphasis mine]

All dairy? Really. What about butter? Heavy cream? They have no protein. They have very little lactose, if any. You tell me how that's possible. I say it isn't. I say someone has an agenda and it's against animal products. Gee, I wonder who would have an agenda against animal products. I'll let you draw your own conclusions on that one.

"In a one-week intervention study of 24 pre-pubertal eight-year-old boys the effect of daily intake of 53 g of either lean meat or skim milk (1.5 l per day) was studied with regard to insulin and IGF-1 responses. In the skim milk group insulin significantly increased by 105% (from 22 to 45 pmol/l) and IGF-1 significantly increased by 19% (from 209 to 249 ng/ml) [12]. There was no significant increase in either insulin or IGF-1 in the meat group."¹ [emphasis mine]

Of course their insulin levels are higher in the skim milk group, the meat didn't have sugar (lactose) in it, and second of all, skim milk is not milk as you drink it from the cow. I mean, how stupid does one have to be? I went back and looked at the study that they're talking about, and talk about some confounding variables. The children were allowed to choose the diet they ate. Yes, you read that correctly. The children ate whatever they wanted, and simply were required to drink 1.5 liters of skim milk (12 of the boys) or eat 250g of low fat meat (the other 12). Consuming the milk apparently raised their IGF levels. But did it? Was it the milk? The protein in the milk? The lactose in the milk raising their insulin levels? The lack of fat in the milk so there was nothing to mediate their insulin levels? Some other dietary factor since there was no set diet? I mean, it could have been anything. I won't even get into the fact that it's under-powered and was only one week in duration.

Is drinking a large quantity of skim milk good for you? Hell no. I say you should never drink skim milk. If you want to consume milk, make sure it's whole, and better yet is straight from a dairy cow, not processed commercially.

"Milk consumption results in a significant increase in insulin and IGF-1 serum levels comparable with high glycaemic food. Insulin induces hepatic IGF-1 secretion, and both hormones amplify the stimulatory effect of GH on sebocytes and augment mitogenic downstream signalling pathways of insulin receptors, IGF-1 receptor and fibroblast growth factor receptor-2b."²

In other words, is it really the protein alone, or is it more likely that it's the lactose? And when they say "milk" do they mean skim, whole, or what? Because each kind should in theory have a completely different effect on your insulin levels.

One place to look for good information on what ketogenic diets do is in the one place that they're standard and acceptable. And that is in the treatment of epileptic seizures. About half of people, children included, will have a positive response to a ketogenic diet in helping control their seizures. This study found that IGF-1 was greatly reduced in a ketogenic diet, to the point where it stunted the growth of the children.³ A ketogenic diet is extremely low carb, basically near zero carb and low protein too (it's a high fat diet), and these children undertook it because being short is preferable to having seizures.

In fact, a lot of the literature is rife with making low carb synonymous with high protein. Like this study where they fed mice more protein than fat (46% v. 35% respectively). That's a lot of protein. Not to mention it throws in a confounding variable, so that when they declare that low carb diets do not slow tumor growth, one has to wonder how they know this. If they had fed them a higher fat diet, they might have noticed some benefit, since we know that protein affects insulin production, and insulin levels are probably a driving force behind a lot of nasty things. In fact, in this study IGF-1 was higher in the low carb group than in the high carb group, and I'm sure that is due to the protein, since insulin drives IGF.

So the point of all this? When eating a low carb diet, it should be primarily animal fat (none of that synthetic vegetable crap), your protein should probably be 15-20% depending on your activity level, and your carb count should be as high as you can tolerate and still lose/maintain weight. And don't listen to stupid journalists, and be wary of researchers, because I don't think most of them know what they're talking about.



References:

1. Milk - The promoter of chronic Western diseases. Medical Hypotheses 2009; 72(6): 631-639

2. Role of insulin, insulin-like growth factor-1, hyperglycaemic food and milk consumption in the pathogenesis of acne vulgaris. Experimental Dermatology 2009; 18: 833–841.

3.Growth dependence on insulin-like growth factor-I during the ketogenic diet. Epilepsia 2009; 50(2): 297-303.

Frankenfood

Is what you're eating real or is it frankenfood?

Listening to an Interview with David Gumpert by Jimmy Moore over at Livin' La Vida Low-Carb about raw milk, I wanted to tell a funny story about a kid who grew up on a dairy farm, as related by the dairy farmer we get our raw milk from.

If for one minute you think that the milk you buy in the store is anything like the milk that comes out of a cow, you've never had fresh milk directly from a cow. Luckily we live in Texas, where you are allowed (as if it should even be a question) to buy raw-milk directly from a dairy. There is also recent legislation to make it legal for dairies to sell their products off the farm, i.e. in towns and cities where most people live.

The dairy farmer we get our raw milk from told us how their kid, on the first day of school, received a carton of milk in the lunch room. He took a sip, and took it back up to the lunch ladies and told them it had gone bad. They gave him another carton, he drank a sip of it, and promptly took it back up as well. It tasted bad to him. At that point, they realized he was a dairy farmers' kid, and gave him chocolate milk for the rest of the time he was in school there. Why? Because pasteurized-homogenized-transported-hundreds-of-miles milk is simply bad milk. I'm not saying that all milk should be raw, rather anything produced in a large industrial dairy has to be pasteurized, because they're not clean. Local small dairies are clean though, so there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to sell their product.

A little history, pasteurization came about because people did used to get very sick off of raw milk. Back then they did not understand germ theory, did not have antibiotics, and did not have sanitation or refrigeration either. Pasteurization made milk safe to drink for city people in an age of no refrigeration. We on the other hand, living in the 21st century, have sanitation, we understand bacteria and how disease is transmitted, and we have refrigeration as well. It is perfectly safe to drink raw milk because of this. Sometimes we get caught up living in this advanced era, and forget that as late as the civil war doctors did not know how disease spread, and killed many soldiers they were trying to save because they did not wash their hands between procedures. That was only 150 years ago. One of the first to discover that washing your hands might prevent the spread of disease was Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered this in the mid 19th century, and was thought to be a quack and was ridiculed by his contemporaries. So much for knowing so much.

The moral of this story? Real, fresh food doesn't taste like anything you find in the store. It's like the fresh green beans we grow in the summer. They're so much better than anything you find in the store, even ones from the produce department, because they haven't been transported a thousand miles. When we can't eat them all, we freeze them, and they then aren't as good. Doing things like canning, and freezing food, changes the taste. It doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to realize that it probably changes the vitamin content and the overall healthful nature of the food too.

Individuals are always stupid: Rawesome Raid

"We're not going to take this sitting down! We're going to take it standing, on top of a step ladder, throwing a lawn dart at a barrel of DDT and while eating only half of our recommended daily fiber." LULz

"Individuals are always stupid." --David Atchison, Assistant Commissioner for Food Protection with the FDA, propagator of a nanny state, because not only can you not think for yourself. You shouldn't.

Oh noes! Trans fats might make you depressed...

o_O

Articles are popping up today about how trans fats cause depression. Now, I'm not saying artificial trans fats are good, quite the opposite. It seems they cause damage on a cellular level as well. But you know what else isn't good? The quality of research that has been put into some of these articles. Like this one:

"Of all these, the participants with a high level of consumption of trans-fats, artificially present in industrial cakes and biscuits and in fast food, and naturally in certain full-fat milk products, "showed an increase in risk of depression of up to 48% compared to those participants who did not consume these,"..."

Where do these people get off? I'd really like to know. I'd like to know how you can have a survey of people and act like it's a clinical trial. I'd like to know how you can have confounding variables out the wazzoo and act like you've controlled for a single variable. I'd also like to know why these people don't understand that CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. It's so simple, and yet soooooo beyond the grasp of your basic nutrition "expert" or "journalist".

I don't need to point out that industrial cakes, biscuits and fast food are very high in carbohydrates. But did they decide that carbohydrates cause depression? No. Of course not.

But the thing that is really wrong with this article, and why I decided to write about it, is that it equates naturally occurring trans fats with the industrially manufactured ones. There are trans fats in nature, but they are not the same in chemical structure as the commercially developed ones. The most common one, Conjugated Linoleic Acid does indeed occur in dairy, eggs and meat. (Of course, those are all bad for you! Run away!) What's ironic, is CLA is known to be an anti-carcinogen. Yeah, how does that grab ya? Certain forms of CLA also reduce inflammation and thereby prevent cardiovascular disease. What was that about not eating eggs, whole milk and meat?

And even Time jumped on the band wagon, and failed to do any research on the difference between artificial and naturally occurring trans fatty acids:

"The results of the study may be especially bad news for Americans. While the average Spaniard gets about 0.4% of his or her calories from trans fats — mostly from natural or whole-food sources like milk, butter, meat and cheese — Americans log an average of 2.5% of total calories from trans fats. Americans not only eat more overall, but also eat worse-quality food, getting many trans fats from sources like processed snack foods and fried or fast food."

What do these "journalists" get paid to do? Copy and paste? It took me five minutes to find out about CLAs, and to realize they're not the same as artificial trans fats. But more than that, I realize that this "study" is flawed, and not even worth considering as evidence of anything, except that out of 12k people, a few got depressed.

When the dietary guidelines don't fit your agenda, get litigious

When I saw the headline 'PCRM sues federal agencies over dietary guidelines', I chuckled, since I consider the dietary guidelines a crock, and really, what place does the government have telling us what to eat? And then I read the story, and it just about made my blood boil.

Their problem isn't that the government is telling us what to eat, their problem is the government isn't promoting a vegan diet.

"'Yet Defendants intentionally use inconsistent language, ambiguous phrases, and biochemical terminology to avoid providing clear dietary information and guidance for the general public regarding the health benefits of reducing consumption of meat and dairy products. This is due to Defendants’ conflicts of interest.'...

Asked if the PCRM's lawsuit were less a device to correct any problems with the dietary guidelines and more a tool to promote the group's vegan diet, Barnard said the question itself was focused on the wrong issue. He said the evidence is overwhelming that plant-based diets are more healthful and not reporting such information, in clear and unambiguous terms, in the dietary guidelines is misguided."

Of course the USDA has a conflict of interest, and so does PCRM! In other words, yes, they are attempting to use the dietary guidelines to promote their vegan diet. The evidence is NOT overwhelming that a plant-based diet is more healthful, in fact, if you've read Good Calories, Bad Calories, you'll know that it's the freaking OPPOSITE. It's like Orwell's 1984, War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, and bloody hell if Ignorance isn't Strength.

It's not that I have a problem with people eating a vegan diet. Quite the contrary, if you want to wreck your health, that's your prerogative. It's a free country, eat whatever you want. In fact, if you want to go to McDonald's every day and eat 5000 calories like Spurlock did and gain a ton of weight, then by god, that's your god given right. If you want to eat tofu and sit in a drum circle all night, that too is your god given right as an American. If I want to eat venison I killed myself every night, it's none of your damned business and if you don't like it, you need to STFU. We do not need a nanny state telling us we need to eat one way or the other. THAT is what is wrong with the food guidelines.

What we need, is someone telling us the TRUTH about what medical research finds out, and then we as THE PEOPLE get to decide whether we want to act on that knowledge or not. Anything else is not worthy of a free people.

My mum-in-law just this morning was saying that as soon as more people start eating low carb and paleo that these militant vegans will petition the government to add a tax to everything that has animal fat in it, on the premise that it's bad for us like cigarettes. And indeed, on many forums I have seen the consumption of animal fat compared to smoking cigarettes, as if the two have anything in common. Unfortunately, my mum-in-law may be right.