The Truth About High Fat Diets

[James IV]

We make fat from non-dietary fat, as well as the small amount of fat in all non-fatty food naturally.

"We can make all of the saturated fats like palmitate and stearate and we can desaturate stearic acid to make oleic acid and our own series of polyunsaturates.."

"We make fats from sugar, starch, and amino acids. Even the brain has enzymes to make new fats."

Ok, but we can make glucose from muscle tissue. Which many argue shows the essentiality of dietary glucose. Would this not apply to fat as well?

Just because we can do it, doesn't necessarily mean it's preferential.

 

[Westside PUFAs]

Yea you are chasing your tail at that point. Two to three days of lean tissue loss is pretty catabolic. All that to lose adipose tissue is not worth it in my opinion. One may say but you lose the fat at least but exactly to your own point we wouldn't need as much sugar if we weren't too active. So there is really no option to build back up the muscle without resorting to using more and more sugars in the diet. Not a good plan of attack.

MSWOF (or in Steve Pavlina's case, he did it at home without MS) is done for many reasons. He is still fully functional there at 40 days. He can walk. He can grab the bowl of melons and eat. He didn't lose much muscle. This is a natural built-in adaptation. The only exception is MCAD deficiency, in which case a person wouldn't even lose any muscle because they won't go into ketosis so they will have to eat or die. If someone is the type to worry about losing their gains then they are very likely to not be interested in MSWOF in the first place as they likely only care about aesthetics and not long term health. This is a strategic thing done for long term health and for some, spiritual reasons. Losing some muscle is not important to the type of person who's interested in it. If it's a fitness type person who happens to be into it then they know that they can easily gain the muscle back in a short amount of time.

Ok, but we can make glucose from muscle tissue. Which many argue shows the essentiality of dietary glucose. Would this not apply to fat as well?

Just because we can do it, doesn't necessarily mean it's preferential.

That doesn't make sense because making something from your own tissue is different than making it from food. Also, fat and sugar are two different molecules that serve different functions.

 

[jb116]

MSWOF (or in Steve Pavlina's case, he did it at home without MS) is done for many reasons. He is still fully functional there at 40 days. He can walk. He can grab the bowl of melons and eat. He didn't lose much muscle. This is a natural built-in adaptation. The only exception is MCAD deficiency, in which case a person wouldn't even lose any muscle because they won't go into ketosis so they will have to eat or die. If someone is the type to worry about losing their gains then they are very likely to not be interested in MSWOF in the first place as they likely only care about aesthetics and not long term health. This is a strategic thing done for long term health and for some, spiritual reasons. Losing some muscle is not important to the type of person who's interested in it. If it's a fitness type person who happens to be into it then they know that they can easily gain the muscle back in a short amount of time.



That doesn't make sense because making something from your own tissue is different than making it from food. Also, fat and sugar are two different molecules that serve different functions.

No I get it, I do understand the logic of it however throwing out the baby with the bath water isn't a sound long-term plan to me. Yes you lose fat. Yes that concept isolated in a vacuum equates to long-term health but our biology isn't in a vacuum. To say that for those that aren't interested in muscle or they don't want to lose their gains is a loaded statement because that leads one to believe that only losing fat is long term health. IMO, remaining reasonable with fat intake (wherever you function best, excluding pufa of course) while enhancing metabolism through weight training and long distance walking and keeping carbs reasonably higher (again individually based) is the much better plan albeit slower plan. I think the expedience of fat loss through these extreme measures are attractive to a lot of people but in the long term, within context, not a vacuum, where we consider good lean tissue; good metabolism as a sustainable and non-metabolically compromising method of being healthy give one the most comprehensible form of healthfulness. As I mentioned, and having worked with people from these metabolic states, although they lose fat, it's difficult for them to be in a "strong state" and building muscle. A lot of muscle bound individuals will argue you can be in a strong state and use ketosis but funny enough many of those individuals are also overlooking the tremendous amount of protein they take in: technically not ketosis.

 

[Fractality]

There are studies where they radioactively labeled fat that was ingested and then traced it. It showed that it went striaght to adipose tissue storage. From your lips to your hips. Most people don't have enough muscle mass to consume all those FFA before they go into adipose tissue storage.

I was actually going to start a thread on the question of how much muscle mass is optimal for burning fat at rest. Do you know? Also, can you confirm that fat is stored in adipose tissue regardless of whether the person is in a caloric deficit?

 

[James IV]

MSWOF (or in Steve Pavlina's case, he did it at home without MS) is done for many reasons. He is still fully functional there at 40 days. He can walk. He can grab the bowl of melons and eat. He didn't lose much muscle. This is a natural built-in adaptation. The only exception is MCAD deficiency, in which case a person wouldn't even lose any muscle because they won't go into ketosis so they will have to eat or die. If someone is the type to worry about losing their gains then they are very likely to not be interested in MSWOF in the first place as they likely only care about aesthetics and not long term health. This is a strategic thing done for long term health and for some, spiritual reasons. Losing some muscle is not important to the type of person who's interested in it. If it's a fitness type person who happens to be into it then they know that they can easily gain the muscle back in a short amount of time.



That doesn't make sense because making something from your own tissue is different than making it from food. Also, fat and sugar are two different molecules that serve different functions.

Good point. Should have said you can make glucose from dietary protein. Which would have been a better comparison.

I still don't think having a mechanisim for conversion of macronutrients is a good argument for or against their essentiality in the diet.

I realize fat and sugar are different.

More and denser muscle and structural
tissue means a higher metabolic rate.
So if that's what you are going for, then you are likely to want to preserve what you have. Losing even a few lbs of lean tissue can change your metabolism noticeably. Now if you are overeating to maintain a muscle quantity higher than what is "natural" for your body, I think that can come with its own set of problems.

I'm not against fasting, or low fat diets for some individuals. I intermittently fast myself.

 

[Westside PUFAs]

I was actually going to start a thread on the question of how much muscle mass is optimal for burning fat at rest. Do you know? Also, can you confirm that fat is stored in adipose tissue regardless of whether the person is in a caloric deficit?

It depends on age, height, gender and how much fat tissue you currently have. It also depends on what your definition of optimal is and what type of look you think is healthy and desirable. The general answer is more muscle than fat and if not excessively fat but skinny, still toned muscle for overall health. You're second question is a brilliant question. I think the answer is still yes because there seems to be a order of a "line" of fat that would be released first that is going to the muscles and the newly ingested fat goes to the back of the line. Think of those men who have both a lot of muscle and fat at the same time. WTF is going on with them. It's important to remember that a person can have a lot of muscle and not appear as if they have a lot of muscle. It's often only once they take their shirt off that you see it. With the shirt on they just look lean, like this guy when he has his shirt on:

 

[schultz]

I still don't think having a mechanisim for conversion of macronutrients is a good argument for or against their essentiality in the diet.

I agree. There are things we need in the body that aren't considered essential but that we benefit from consuming like niacin and glycine. There are some benefits to consuming fat, even though we can make fat endogenously, like digestion for one thing. Taste is another. Fat soluble vitamins.

"So I think the best cleansing diet is one that increases your liver’s action and just tasty food is one of the things that will stimulate your liver’s action, or sugar and thyroid are the other main things that activate the liver."

another...

JR: So the question is, if the body can make all the saturated fat it needs, what's the importance, if any, of consuming saturated fats?

RP: One thing is that it makes the food a lot pleasanter to eat. It makes it digest more efficiently and steadily. Experiments with a loop of intestine…they would put just proteins, or just carbohydrates, or just fats in at a time; and they found that the digestion was very poor until you had all three types of food present at the same time. It was as if the intestine needed a complex stimulus before it would really effectively start absorbing and digesting the food. So it's partly a stimulus to your intestines to handle the protein and the carbohydrate effectively. and It’s a signal of satisfaction, that helps to lower stress, to have fat and sugar in your food.

 

[yerrag]

I agree. There are things we need in the body that aren't considered essential but that we benefit from consuming like niacin and glycine. There are some benefits to consuming fat, even though we can make fat endogenously, like digestion for one thing. Taste is another. Fat soluble vitamins.

"So I think the best cleansing diet is one that increases your liver’s action and just tasty food is one of the things that will stimulate your liver’s action, or sugar and thyroid are the other main things that activate the liver."

another...

JR: So the question is, if the body can make all the saturated fat it needs, what's the importance, if any, of consuming saturated fats?

RP: One thing is that it makes the food a lot pleasanter to eat. It makes it digest more efficiently and steadily. Experiments with a loop of intestine…they would put just proteins, or just carbohydrates, or just fats in at a time; and they found that the digestion was very poor until you had all three types of food present at the same time. It was as if the intestine needed a complex stimulus before it would really effectively start absorbing and digesting the food. So it's partly a stimulus to your intestines to handle the protein and the carbohydrate effectively. and It’s a signal of satisfaction, that helps to lower stress, to have fat and sugar in your food.

++

 

[Mito]

From the article in OP:

Storage “Efficiency”

Another argument about high fat diets is that fat is burned when consumed so it is not stored as efficiently as carbohydrate. This claim also makes zero sense when you think about it. Dietary fat, when consumed, is either utilized for energy or stored directly in its “native” state as a fatty acid molecule. Dietary carbohydrates are either utilized for fuel, stored as muscle glycogen, or converted into fatty acids and then stored. There are more “checkpoints” and “conversions” that must occur, and each biochemical conversion requires energy to do so. In theory, storing carbohydrates should be less efficient than storing fat. Here are the relevant biochemistry pathways just to show your the giant cluster that is DNL.*

This is exactly what the data tells us (Table taken from 10, adapted from Blaxter 1989).

Dietary fat is stored as body fat with roughly 96% efficiency. Dietary carbohydrate is stored as body fat with roughly 80% efficiency, while it is stored as muscle glycogen with roughly 95% efficiency. It is quite clear that dietary fat is stored far more efficiently as body fat than carbohydrate.

We can say with about 95.8% confidence that diets high in fat intake are more efficient at storing food calories as fat than diets high in carbohydrate intake.

 

[dbh25]

What % fat of f/c/p is a high fat diet?

 

[Mito]

What % fat of f/c/p is a high fat diet?

One of the studies (cited by the author) that compared a high fat diet to a base line diet used 80/5/15 for the high fat diet as compared to 35/50/15 for the baseline diet.

 

[yerrag]

Wow! What that first image shows is that when the mitochondria isn't involved, glucose cannot be converted to fats. Is it the same as saying that if glucose doesn't get into the Krebs cycle, our body won't be able to produce fat endogenous from glucose?

 

[dbh25]

One of the studies (cited by the author) that compared a high fat diet to a base line diet used 80/5/15 for the high fat diet as compared to 35/50/15 for the baseline diet.

Thanks Mito.

 

[Mito]

Wow! What that first image shows is that when the mitochondria isn't involved, glucose cannot be converted to fats. Is it the same as saying that if glucose doesn't get into the Krebs cycle, our body won't be able to produce fat endogenous from glucose?

Technically it's dependent on the accumulation of excess citrate in the mitochondria. If the cell has more fuel than it can handle, then citrate can't continue to the next step in the the Krebs cycle and the excess citrate accumulates in the mitochondria and moves to cytosol for fat synthesis.

Chris explains it better.....fast forward to about the 11:15 mark.

 

[Fractality]

It depends on age, height, gender and how much fat tissue you currently have. It also depends on what your definition of optimal is and what type of look you think is healthy and desirable. The general answer is more muscle than fat and if not excessively fat but skinny, still toned muscle for overall health. You're second question is a brilliant question. I think the answer is still yes because there seems to be a order of a "line" of fat that would be released first that is going to the muscles and the newly ingested fat goes to the back of the line. Think of those men who have both a lot of muscle and fat at the same time. WTF is going on with them. It's important to remember that a person can have a lot of muscle and not appear as if they have a lot of muscle. It's often only once they take their shirt off that you see it. With the shirt on they just look lean, like this guy when he has his shirt on:

Thanks for your reply. It's not so much what type of look I find healthy moreso it has to do with what amount of muscle is adequate and what amount of muscle is optimal for burning majority of fats at rest. Body fat probably has a lot to do with it as insulin sensitivity is reduced and muscle gain is hindered at higher body fat percentage. The reason I ask is that I've stopped weight lifting for almost a year and have lost perhaps 10-15% of muscle mass (mainly in my arms). I'm 26 yo male 6'2 around 175 and body fat around 13-15%. I wonder if it is worth getting into weightlifting again. Connor Murphy (the guy in the video you posted) uses anabolic/androgenic steroids. I've wondered if it is worth doing one "cycle" to maximize muscle mass for longevity purposes and then never touching steroids again.

 

[michael94]

Nice contribution schultz

 

[yerrag]

Technically it's dependent on the accumulation of excess citrate in the mitochondria. If the cell has more fuel than it can handle, then citrate can't continue to the next step in the the Krebs cycle and the excess citrate accumulates in the mitochondria and moves to cytosol for fat synthesis.

Chris explains it better.....fast forward to about the 11:15 mark.

Thanks. Do you know if it's just the liver cells doing the conversion from glucose to fats?

 

[michael94]

Just need to figure out how to convert air nitrogen to protein then we can all move on to bigger things
: )

Thanks. Do you know if it's just the liver cells doing the conversion from glucose to fats?

 

[yerrag]

Just need to figure out how to convert air nitrogen to protein then we can all move on to bigger things
: )

Yeah, if ketone bodies can reach out and grab the nitrogen from air, instead of the ammonia and urea floating in our blood. Oh, didn't haidut mention in an interview with Danny Roddy that ketone bodies can combine with ammonia and produce amino acids?

 

[Dante]

Oh, didn't haidut mention in an interview with Danny Roddy that ketone bodies can combine with ammonia and produce amino acids?

Protein Vs Keto Acids