Pyrian on 20/10/2014 at 19:02

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Heh. Yes, a significant change of diet frequently requires an adjustment period, and yes, yo-yo dieting is generally a bad idea. I don't think any of that says much about ketosis in particular (try suddenly going on - or off - a high fiber diet), and the various predicted consequences of prolonged ketosis have stubbornly refused to surface in real life, despite considerable academic interest in detecting them.

Look, I've never been on a low-carb diet and I've little interest in doing so. I don't think of myself as a proponent. But there comes a point where you have to just admit that the weight of evidence has long since squashed medical preconceptions. We simply have not evolved into requiring a grain-based diet; they've only been around for, like, 10,000 years. Its may even be more accurate to say that we're not as well equipped to handle a high-carb diet as a low-carb diet, but in fact most people do just fine either way (so long as they get their vegetables).

Pyrian on 21/10/2014 at 00:10

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No, it isn't. And I think we'd know by now if it was. People are just stubborn about the idea that it might be okay to eat differently. The condemnation of low-carb diets was immediate and remains evidence-free.

If there was "hilarious bad shit" going down, there would be incontrovertible evidence to that effect by now. Instead, the evidence tends to point in the other direction; low-carb high-vegetable diets result in slightly lower mortality rates.

Frankly, I think anybody who stands on speculation about biochemistry without matching in-life results is merely speculating about things they do not understand. All kinds of weird chemicals naturally crop up in our bodies in various amounts, any of which - even water - is toxic in sufficient concentration.

"Ketosis breath" is part of the shock phase. It goes away; if you ease into the diet, it probably won't happen at all.

DDL on 21/10/2014 at 09:47

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Sources? All my pubmed mining seems to indicate it's more or less equivalent to just 'eating the correct amount of calories', at best, but with many additional side effects. Of course, most studies have used fat diabetic people as their sample group, so it's a skewed dataset (presumably because slim trim healthy people don't really need to try new diets). Interestingly, the other widely used sample group is epileptics, for whom ketogenic diets tend to apparently help suppress incidence of seizures. With possibly an increase in sudden cardiac failure. :erm:
Also cancer patients, because tumours tend to be hilariously glycolytic.


"Low-carb, high-vegetable" isn't really a ketogenic diet, though. There's quite a bit of sugar and starch in vegetables. Also, tons of vitamins. And metabolically there's a huuuge difference between 'some' and 'essentially zero' carbs.
The public perception of atkins was basically "eat as much bacon as you want, but avoid all sugar in all forms ever", possibly because the public as a whole tends to be disappointingly stupid.

A lower carb diet means your body prioritises sugar supply to brain and red blood cells, because sugar can cross the blood brain barrier, and RBCs are obligately glycolytic because they don't have mitochondria. A "next to no carb" diet means your body goes O JESUS FUCK WHAT THE HELL and starts breaking down literally anything it can to make sugar. Fat? Yeah, a triglyceride contains a single glycerol, so chop off those fatty acids and dump them who the fuck knows where, but keep that glycerol because we can make that into sugar. Proteins? Yeah, we can deaminate a fair few amino acids to make three-carbon backbone structures we can use for gluconeogenesis, just dump the ammonia...somewhere. And if that doesn't succeed, generate ketone bodies because at least the brain can use those (RBCs are still fucked, though).
It works for weight loss, because you can eat all the fat you want and you'll piss away most of the energy as free fatty acids (keeping only the delicious gluconeogenic glycerol), but it's basically a starvation diet plus bacon. Ok, I'll give you this: a starvation diet plus bacon has got to be a hell of a lot better than a starvation diet alone, but it's still a starvation diet as far as your body is concerned. Also, atkins peeps tend to avoid all fruit and most veg, so vitamin supply is also questionable. Looking it up, it seems that this "shock phase" then does slowly reintroduce carbs, but I'd agree that dropping it entirely would be smarter.

If you want to argue that a diet that is lower in carbs is not harmful, I'll happy agree with that, but I'd hesitate to agree that a diet "so low in carbs that ketosis occurs" is similarly not harmful. Starvation is a thing our bodies can deal with, but it's not our optimal operating condition.

Essentially, your average western diet supplies the body with more carbs than are needed for brain and RBC metabolism and maintenance, and replenishment of muscle and liver glycogen stores....so the rest is turned into fat, along with all the other energy intake. That's what the body does with excess energy. Part of the problem is the fact that unless you do a ton of exercise you barely touch your muscle glycogen stores, and most people never let themselves get hungry enough to mobilise much from the liver, either.
People just plain take in more than they need or use. And if you're barely doing exercise you don't need protein for muscle repair, so after the small amount needed for general wear and tear maintenance, that all gets turned to fat (and possibly sugar) too.

The problem is not 'sugar', it's 'quantity of stuff'. If refined sugar was the incredible scourge people claim it to be, then you'd expect obesity to correlate nicely with the advent of agriculture, because suddenly holy shit look at all this lovely grain we can produce. Instead, obesity has only really skyrocketed in the last 40 years or so, a good 11,000 years after the advent of agriculture. 11,000 years is more than long enough for glaring incompatibility with nutrition source to become obvious, and 40 years is far, far too short a timescale for this effect to manifest.

What has changed significantly in the last 40 years of so is the sheer availability of cheap, tasty food. It is now depressingly easy to eat bucketloads of sugary fatty crap, all the time. The problem I have is that everyone seems to be focussing on the "crap" element (first the fatty crap, now the sugary crap), rather than the "bucketload" element.


Having said all that, I really, really wish humans had a glyoxylate bypass. "What's for breakfast? GIN!"

faetal on 23/10/2014 at 07:37

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That's a very obtuse response which doesn't add anything useful.

PigLick on 5/1/2015 at 08:26

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everytime you crack an achievement in a vid game do 10 pushups or run around the house. That should work.