About Diet - Part 1

It's hard to get excited about something that starts with "die"

JOGOS Public Assets, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons - lettering added by author

I’ve been quite vocal about the state of modern medicine and the damage that the cartels of Big Food and Big Pharma have caused us. The logical question is “What should you eat if you want to be healthy?” I’m not a doctor, but given the type of training the most doctors get on nutrition, that may be an advantage. I’m also not a nutritionist, but I do follow a really excellent one here on Substack:

Nutritional heresy no. 4: You probably don’t eat enough red meat

Given that, what business do I have telling folks what to eat? Fair point. What I do have is the results of an 8 year study involving the effects of diet on the health of two participants. You won’t find this study in any scientific papers, mostly because it was conducted on my wife and myself. We’ve made lots of mistakes, which has ultimately led to something that is working really well for us. In this, and subsequent pieces, I’ll do my best to share our experiences with you in the hope that it may be useful on your health journey.

Diets

You can look at a diet in two different ways. It can reference the preferred form of food for an organism, such as grass being the best diet for a cow. But most people associate the word diet with a technique for losing weight by changing the type and amount of food you eat. Having been overweight to the point of obesity for most of my life, I’ve tried a lot of diets. All of them had varying degrees of suffering, and the result was always the same. As soon as I went back to my usual way of eating, the weight returned and brought along a little extra as a bonus. On retirement I was determined to lose the weight and keep it off, in the hope of lasting a few more years before the inevitable “old age” maladies arrived.

The first diet we tried was the Candida diet. Candida is a type of fungus that lives on and within the body. Normally it’s controlled by bacteria and does not cause a problem, but if it gets out of control it can cause issues with skin and digestion. It likes sugar, which often leads to overgrowth, and I personally think that causes a craving for sweets. So maybe we had Candida overgrowth that was causing excess weight. There are many diets available online to correct this, so we bought one that seemed good and gave it a try.

These diets are hard core. Because of Candida’s fondness for sugar, there is nothing sweet in the food list. It’s largely root vegetables, like turnips and rutabaga, which are likely not at the top of anyone’s list. The most palatable item on the list was coconut, which does kill off Candida. Did we lose weight? Yes, but mostly because we weren’t finding much good to eat. Within a few weeks we couldn’t take it any more and quit.

Next we decided to try being vegetarians, after watching a documentary on the health benefits. This opened up a lot of food choices, particularly those that are grain-based. (Per the documentary, Oreos are vegetarian. Woohoo!) Unfortunately this did not get us away from processed food, and we put back some of what the Candida diet took off.

Being a hard core computer nerd, I apply logic to every problem. Logic says if you want to lose weight, stop eating. When done properly, fasting is a great way to not only lose weight, but to stay healthy. We went into it without doing much research. First we tried one day a week without eating. If you have not become fat-adapted (we were not) and you have insulin resistance (we did), then you spend most of your fasting day planning on what you’ll eat the next day. Then you’ll indulge in the same bad foods and cancel out all the benefit of the fast.

At this point I was doing a lot of Internet searching and I found Mark Sisson and his Paleo diet. It is built on the idea of eating like our ancient ancestors did, which is why it’s often called “ancestral eating”. By definition it eliminates food that did not exist before processed foods, and avoids grains. This diet was sustainable, and did cause some weight loss.

Eliminating grains and sugar can go a long way to help with weight loss.. However Mark was just warming up with Paleo. He and Brad Kearns wrote The Keto Reset Diet, which explained the ketogenic diet. It focuses on using the body’s natural system of burning fat when food is scarce. That worked really well for our ancestors, but since the advent of farming, food is only scarce in places where it can’t be grown. Even then it can be shipped in. In our time we just never have had the need to burn all that stored fat.

There are several aspects of Keto that make it attractive. First, and foremost, you are never hungry. Protein and fat takes longer to digest, unlike carbohydrates which are quickly reduced to glucose and dumped into the bloodstream. That leads to the cycle of sugar-induced highs, followed by crashes. Only a limited amount of glucose can be absorbed into the blood at one time, and insulin will turn the excess into fat. When the glucose in the blood has been used up, hunger returns. Being dependent on carbohydrates means that the body has been flooded with insulin. Over the years, cells become resistant to the signals that insulin is sending. Thus this up and down cycle leads to the condition we call “hangry”.

Another great selling point for Keto is that it removes some of the erroneous restrictions put on us back in the 70s. Butter is preferred over margarine. Bacon is no longer a death sentence. Eggs are back on the table. These are all things that were normally eaten by generations of people as recently as my grandparents. My paternal great grandmother ate bacon every day, and used the fat from it as shortening for the bread she also baked. She did this while living in her own home, caring for a son who had developmental difficulties stemming from a high fever at age 12. She died at 95.

By far, though, the best part of a Keto diet is the weight loss. It happens quickly and continually as you keep your carbohydrate intake low. I bought an app for my phone that allowed me to find the carbohydrate content of most of the foods I ate. Keeping the total to 20 grams per day or less had the effect of making the pounds fall off rather dramatically. Previous diets had gotten me down from my all-time high of 235 down to about 215. Within a few months of going Keto I was down to 156, my lowest since middle school. At that point my beloved begged me to back off, as I was beginning to resemble a concentration camp survivor. My doctor, stunned at how much I had lost between two consecutive visits 6 months apart, told me, “Don’t lose any more weight!”

Keto

The name Keto comes from the word ketosis. That’s the process the body goes through in converting stored fat to energy. Instead of burning glucose, the liver converts fat to ketones and puts them into bloodstream. Our bodies are capable of existing comfortably with either type of fuel. However if you’ve been on a carb-heavy diet for a long time, your body is probably no longer adapted to this model.

There are a lot of good reasons for eating a low carbohydrate diet, but I need to stress that you should not jump into it based simply on what I’ve written. I’m not a doctor. I’ve never been to subjected to any medical training beyond first aid courses. If you have been diagnosed as pre-diabetic, Keto could probably prevent you becoming full on diabetic. If you already have a condition that has you on prescription drugs, you should consult your doctor before doing anything. Of course as soon as you say the word “Keto” you’ll likely get push-back from the doctor. Typically a low-carb, high-fat diet will elevate cholesterol scores. Eating more fat will raise the level of dietary cholesterol in your blood, but that’s not the kind that causes the blockages in your arteries. Nearly all doctors have been taught that high cholesterol leads to heart disease, even though countless studies have shown that this is not true. The pharmaceutical companies that manufacture statins also promote this lie, and they control what the “safe” cholesterol numbers are. Your doctor may want to monitor you more frequently than normal, which is fine. As your health improves, it will help to convince your doctor that Keto is not the danger she’s been told, and you’ll feel better and better as time goes by.

There’s another very important reason to discuss Keto with your doctor before trying it. You may, like my friend Julia, have a predisposition to a condition that can be triggered by some of the foods you eat. See her post about that here:

For God's Sake, Don't Eat Steak...But Who Really Has a Stake in Low-Carb Diets?

Most books about transitioning to a Keto diet emphasize increasing your fat intake dramatically. That fat will get processed by the liver to become ketones. However there are multiple types of fat. The best for moving to keto is saturated fat. These are things like butter, lard, cream, olive oil - fats that are natural and chemically similar to what your body makes. The worst is polyunsaturated fat, which is more than likely what you’ve mostly been eating up to now. These fats remain liquid at room temperature and are mostly sold for cooking, in salad dressings, or as ingredients in packaged food. They are composed of unstable molecules that can break apart when heated, and a lot of heat is required just to refine them from the seeds of these plants: corn, cottonseed, canola, soybean, safflower, and sunflower. Commercial food may also be cooked in rice bran oil or grapeseed oil. When broken down these oil molecules oxidize to become toxic compounds that overwhelm the body’s natural anti-oxidants. If you want to get healthy with Keto, it is critical that you avoid these “hateful eight” oils.

So what can you expect when starting on a Keto diet? After a few days you may experience what is called “Keto flu”. A body that has been relying an a heavy dose of carbohydrates every day has to readjust to become fat adapted. Often a boost of electrolytes will help: just drink water with a pinch of salt added. If you drink coffee or tea, cut back a little to ease off the caffeine. Diet sodas should be stopped. They don’t have calories or sugar, but the artificial sweeteners trick the body into reacting as though they do, which will produce insulin in response. Ideally go water-only until you get through this period. I find that sparkling mineral water is a good option. (This from someone who used to go through several liters of soft drinks every week!) If you are feeling really bad, eat a carbohydrate, but choose something like an apple, not a package of Oreos!

You may also feel a twinge now and again as fat, that’s been stored from seed oils, starts to get released. Toxins from those oils can be released into the bloodstream as the fat is burned. Because this fat is much harder to shed than the natural fat your body created, it can take up to a year or more to get rid of it. Once it’s gone you’ll be amazed at how much better you feel. As a point of reference, I had been on Keto for nearly 2 years when the mental fog I’d fought for decades finally cleared. My brain started working better than ever before and I was writing some of the best software I’ve ever written. I believe this was a result of my seed oil fat finally leaving.

In my next post I’ll offer up some tips and sources, as well as some more advanced strategies. For a deeper dive into diet, here are some of my favorite sources:

The Books

Lies I Taught in Medical School by Dr. Robert Lufkin

Deep Nutrition by Dr. Catherine Shanahan

Dark Calories by Dr. Catherine Shanahan

The Fatburn Fix by Dr. Catherine Shanahan

Unlock the Keto Code by Dr. Steven Gundry

Metabolical by Dr. Robert Lustig

Nature Wants Us to Be Fat by Dr. Richard Johnson

Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia

Other Resources

Your Nutritionist Recommends

Dr. Cate

Remnant MD

Food Lies - Brian Sanders

Unsettled Science

Levels Health