Just to be sure, I looked up baboons’ natural diet:

http://www.primatecare.com/odiet.htm
In the wild baboons eat leaves, blossoms, seeds, gum, pods from acacia trees, green grass, roots, flowers, herbs, bushes, roots and small animals.

http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Doi=156287
The habitat and plant feeding of 64 well-habituated, individually identified adult male and female yellow baboons was studied for 5 years at Mikumi National Park … Of the 50 most common grass, shrub and herb genera, 93% included plant foods.

I do research myself but rely on you to make sense of conflicting or confusing nutritional information. I have been following your low carb way of eating for a few years now with great success so I weight what I should (hurrah). Occasionally, say three times a year or so, I fall off the wagon, go face down in carbs and gain a huge amount in just a week or two. I combat this weight gain with IF but wonder if this is wise.

Could you please update your considered view on intermittant fasting? Hate to nag but you did promise….

Thank you,
Susan

Coming soon, I promise.

I’m 5′10″ male, 147 lbs. I’d like to reach 130 lbs (would be a 29″ waist) and then try to put on a decent amount of muscle while keeping the boyish waistsize. An analysis of the meal done on http://www.nutridiary.com (_very_ convenient website, IMHO) shows calories = ~1800; fat = 66%; protein = 19%, carbs = 15%. total carbs = 70 and dietary fiber = 40. Looks to me like I’ve achieved saintliness regarding the 30 EC per day. However, since it’s all in one meal I’m wondering if I’m inadvertently somehow defeating the benefits of LC.

In other words, and here’s the general question for you: If a LC’er gets down to 30 EC a day, but it’s all in IF’er’s one meal a day, is that a problem? I.e. is the good ~30 EC per day somehow undone by the bad ~30 EC per meal?

Thanks. Couldn’t find a discussion of this in PP, PPL, or on the blog, but maybe I didn’t search properly for it.

I don’t think it is a problem if you are IFing. If you’re losing and doing well, I wouldn’t worry about it.

If she’s 30 in 1958, why would her parents have to tell her about the Depression? Seems like she’d remember it just fine. That was her childhood. And wartime rationing–wasn’t she a teenager?–and Victory gardens and the whole bit. One of the ways to survive privation is to learn to make preserved (canned, dried, etc.) foods palatable. The cooking Betty learned at her mother’s side would have emphasized “making do.” And thanks to the sexual mores of the day, Betty is married. She most likely cooks whatever her husband likes best, saving her own favorites for lunches while he is at work. Food is not entirely lacking moral pressure: she nags her children to eat their (overcooked) vegetables, and her husband dutifully eats his “to set a good example.” If the old-country grandparents are still present, no doubt they complain that the children aren’t eating enough, and press more food on them. (Mine certainly did.)

My mother is pretty close to “Betty’s” age, and although I didn’t arrive until ‘59, I don’t think things had changed much since 1949. Her family had survived the Depression with a garden and a milk cow (right in town!). We had fresh vegetables from our own garden in season, otherwise something from the store, which might be fresh, frozen or canned. (Fresh vegetables were not usually affordable out of season.) Generally the vegetables, fresh or not, were overcooked by today’s standards. Potatoes were peeled every night, often before the rest of the meal was planned. There was often an iceberg-lettuce-and-tomato salad on the table. And we always drank milk with meals. In season, there might be homemade apple pie for dessert. Yes, the pie involved Crisco. But it’s certainly not true that people then ate everything out of cans.

My nieces have no idea how to make apple pie. And low-carb means I’m not making them very often. I think the art of apple pie is dying.

Are there any books or articles that you’d recommend to help become a more critical reader of these studies? You mention in a response above that you taught yourself how to do it, but was there anything that was particularly influential in the development of your skills? Thanks

I read a few basic books on statistics along the way (I don’t remember which ones) to familiarize myself with the terminology. I somehow escaped ever taking a statistics course in college, so my statistics is all self-taught. I mainly just went through a bunch of medical papers that I thought had come to incorrect conclusions to see where the authors went wrong or tried to fudge their results. By doing this enough, I ultimately taught myself what to look for.

How’s that for the latest medical information?

Judas F Priest!!!

Replacing the carbs with fats decimated my trigs, and I mean that literally.

Do these people breed??? If so they should be stopped immediately

Indeed they should be stopped. What a bunch of twaddle. Saturated fats have nothing to do with driving up triglycerides.

I guess I’m not aware of any new studies. Last I heard, this drug had been hammered by the FDA.

I’ve been zero carb and IF (all meat diet) eating one meal a day for the past five months, and lost 60 pounds that way. But I stalled out last month, did the math and realized that even eating once a day I was exceeding my BMR by about 50% calorically (the joy of fatty 2.5 pound ribeyes). Rather than cut back on the size of my meals I elected to try the lions-and-tigers IF method above. Dropping two eating days a week still kept the weekly calories just above my total weekly BMR. Thus far, eating five meals a week and fasting on Mondays and Fridays has broken my stall and gotten the weight loss rolling again.

I know my example is anecdotal, but the feeding of lions and tigers is an established practice and you may be able to find references that I can’t get to.

Additionally, back when you posted your request for article requests, I didn’t think to ask for you to do an article on the benefits/nutrition of the all meat diet. You often mention it as the best stall breaker, but all meat is something that I’ve never seen you go into in depth here or in your PPLP.

No, I haven’t written a post yet on an all-meat diet. I’ve got one twirling around in my head, but I haven’t committed it to electrons yet. I will post on the subject at some point, but it seems like there is always some new form of idiocy that needs to be addressed on a more timely basis, so I never get to the all-meat diet post. If the media would only learn to read these studies critically and quit giving coverage to them, then I could devote my time to more valuable subjects rather than trying to do what the media should have done in the first place.

Wow, did that story ever get picked up by the media. They ate it up; had a picnic with it; devoured it like piranhas; had a feeding frenzy; so to speak. The message the media presented was ‘all those wacky diets people try don’t really make any difference’. I suppose one could turn that on its face and say the low fat diet isn’t any better for weight loss than any other diet.

And of course, their low carb diet wasn’t what you or I would consider low carb.

Or in a more positive light, it could mean they (mainstream) are beginning to develop a face-saving path to a future low carb sanity. Nah, that’s too rosey a picture methinks.