Hi Rose–

MRE

I am enjoying these blogs so much I am hardly getting any work done!

Hi Kris–

MRE

I read another book by an MD that was promoting a low carb diet and claimed saturated fat was fine unless you were obese and then should follow a low saturated fat diet until the weight was lost.

As you can see from all my writings both in the books and on this blog, I think saturated fat has gotten a bad rap. I eat a lot of it myself and don’t see anything wrong with overweight people eating it as well. If you really want to see what the scientific status is of the whole idea that saturated fat is bad, read Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s an eye opener.

It is also important to remind that one of the reasons why elderly people have insulin resistance is because of sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass).

This is the main raeson why weight training works for fat loss (just look at those chubby aerobic and cardio enthusiasts and the lean, muscular drug free bodybuilders to see what I mean). Weight Training increases muscle mass and hence increases insulin sensitivity, which in turn also decreases insulinemia (more insulin sensitivity in the muscle cell means that you need less insulin), leading to an increase in lypolisis.

Hi Miguel–

MRE

LOL–Mike, were you never a starving student who needed everyone’s share in order to eat at all?
When I first moved off-campus, I moved into an apartment where one roommate was orthodox, and they already had a kosher kitchen. Only neither of them could cook very well–I was replacing the roommate who had made most of the meals. I was the only one with any kind of steady job, but all of us realized that kicking in $5 apiece every week would buy us a lot food that going it alone to support separate meal choices. So we pooled our cash and I learned how to keep kosher.
Some friends of my father’s were Jewish and ‘Aunt Sadie’ actually had two kitchens.
So I decided to try it–called Aunt Sadie for some recipes and guidance, picked up a Jewish cookbook, and jumped in. After a month, the other six people in the house suggested that they’d be willing to kick into the food budget if I was willing to cook for all three apartments. My own diet was already almost completely meatless at that point, so kosher dairy wasn’t much of a stretch, and it was just as easy to cook and shop for nine as it had been for three.

I only choked on the process of keeping kosher when our orthodox roomie wanted to use a blow torch on the apartment’s ancient (gas) oven to make the kitchen kosher for Passover…I had this mental picture of her blowing up the kitchen and suggested she could do that job herself!

Now inquiring minds know. Thanks.

MRE

was wondering if you could expand on your response to scott who wrote about needing 75 g carbohydrate after intense workouts. do you think low carbohydrate diets needs the additional subclass of “low carbohydrate, high fat”? my experience is that most people are unaccustomed to eating the quantity of fat necessary to perform athletically. by example, a chicken breast with salad and a marbled ribeye steak with buttered vegetables are both low carb, tho’, the latter has way more calories and fat.

after all, i think there is a documentary showing (“untrained”) bushmen in the kalahari running down prey on foot. so grueling was the chase, they had to hire an olympic rower to run with the camera. also, if i remember correctly, v stefansson reported that french trappers in the 19th century paddled in canoes 14 hours a day, every day, consuming about 14,000 calories a day of pemmican(80% calories from fat, 20% protein).

from an evolutionary perspective it doesn’t make tons of sense to me that arduous activity would require a glucose supplement…

so, is it possible that the “bonking” that occurs during exercise on LC diets is a fat/calorie deficiency? could it be potassium related, too? i remember speaking to you after your lecture at boulderfest 2004 and you mentioned something about potassium being anti-catabolic and how hypokalemia is common on strict LC diets…..

thanks for your great blog.

You make good points. I suspect that, if anything, the adaptation period varies considerably among individuals. I know that a lot of people don’t necessarily need the extra glucose, but some seem to. Maybe they haven’t totally adapted yet.

http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/1/1/2

Cheers.

I’m no expert on cancer but this guy is:

http://hubpages.com/hub/How-I-Cured-Stage-4-Cancer-in-Two-Weeks-For-Less-Than-The-Cost-Of-A-Night-At-The-Movies

He cured himself from stage 4 cancer in under two weeks, without the chemo of course.. It seems to have helped a lot of other people as well. The protocol is simple and is based on 60-year research of another doctor, Dr. Revici. It is interesting that it also uses a lot of butter, among other things (plus other fats like cod liver oil).

He has a book too but he’s giving all the information for free and he replies to readers’ questions. It can’t hurt if you take a look. Good luck.

Exactly, I think as an example that while people in a future “low carb” culture may eat more “meat” per day the would eat less cows/year. The “low fat” culture trimms away the fat and organs from the cattle and are less effective in utilizing the output of herding.

And why not use other sources of “meat” in the future? In many countries there is a tradition of eating insects and scrubs, perhaps other types of “cattle” can produce better nutrition with less input?

Here in Sweden we had a problem a few years ago with a type of swarming beetles eating tree’s after they had been felled by a landwide storm. My thought as i read that was “here is an opportunity for future farming”.

Hey David–

MRE

This article may help clarify:
http://www.kosherquest.org/bookhtml/CHEESE.htm

I understand that the Israeli study LC dieters were using Atkins–but there is a highly developed kosher vegetarian culture which evolved from the foods available in kosher dairy meals (including fish, which is not considered meat.) Kosher dairy based vegetarian food is pretty easy to make low-carb, and was/is the foundation of many of my own vegetarian low carb meals.

No, I’m not Jewish–but I did keep an orthodox-compliant kosher kitchen for a year in college. We were broke and kosher meat was pretty much out of our budget, except for the occasional celebratory roast chicken, so it was maybe an 80% dairy kitchen, including as much fish as we could afford (oh, the days of 5 for $1 tuna…). With that experience I ended up cooking the Sunday supper for the university’s kosher kitchen (to cover the regular weekend cook’s day off.) Apparently it’s okay for a gentile to prepare a dairy meal that conforms to all dietary rules, as long as I didn’t *make* the kosher cheese I used in my blintzes.

Pat (aka Gaelen)

Hey Pat–

MRE