This diet reminds me of the time my wife was on EN (Enteral nutrition) for 4 months (tube feeding direct into the stomach). She lost weight very rapidly and was never hungry during that time but she gained the lost weight quickly all back when the tube was removed. The EN fat macro is mostly PUFA but rapid weight loss is still very commo…
This diet reminds me of the time my wife was on EN (Enteral nutrition) for 4 months (tube feeding direct into the stomach). She lost weight very rapidly and was never hungry during that time but she gained the lost weight quickly all back when the tube was removed. The EN fat macro is mostly PUFA but rapid weight loss is still very common. There is even a KEN version (Ketogenic Enteral nutrition e.g: see https://nutricia.ca/ketocal-41-lq-unflavoured ) as an epilepsy treatment and also used for rapid weight loss. Again : the fat macro is mostly PUFA. So, I'm wondering, is it the blandness or predictability and continues supply of fat or is it the way fat is sensed in the esophagus or is it really the saturated fats/absence of PUFA in cream ?
Interesting, this reminds me of an old study from the 60s or 70s that was mentioned in The Hungry Brain by Stephan Guyenet. They gave obese people this "drink machine" that they could suck EN type nutrient sludge out of, and it was essentially the same thing - high PUFA sludge. Pretty tasteless. The obese people RAPIDLY lost weight.
It's a really good question as to why this leads to rapid weight loss. But I would also suspect the rapid bounce back, like your wife experienced, if it was really high PUFA.
There is (was) a whole underground industry around KE (EN) tube feeding for rapid weight loss for getting 'in shape' for a mariage, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KE_diet. This industry has now mostly vanished in favor of GLP-1 agonists. This Wiki article tries to suggest that it is the limited calories that is the cause of the weight loss, but this is not true. When my wife had 4 months of tube feeding, I asked the dokters if she was getting enough calories, they confirmed that this was a maintenance dose and that weight loss was nevertheless a 'known side effect'. My wife never had any hunger nor cravings during these 4 months and lost a LOT of weight.
I'm not convinced about the PUFA being responsible for the rapid weight gain afterwards. If you go off your saturated fat diet, you tend to see the same.
I was very frustrated with Stephan Guyenet's book when it came out, he described the problem in great detail and very convincing but never formulated any practical solutions. In fact he himself mostly let it go and is concentrating now on GLP1's (as do most obesity reseachers). I have nothing against GLP1s agonists but I'm afraid for when the GLP1 resistance kicks in...
So, is it really the PUFA that prevents you from loosing weight if we could even use it for rapid weight loss ? Is it then not something else ?
Maybe it is the partial or complete absence of taste (and variation). Specifically salt and sweet. If it is not mixed into food then it is not so bad, but once mixed, cravings develop. That is maybe why the potato diet works just as good as your cream diet: it is equally bland and repetitieve. And its majority of calories are not mixed with salt or sweet.
I think that my ancestors probably ate boring and bland diets most of the time, intermitted with a feast sometimes. 100 years ago salt was expensive and seldom used by the common people. 95% of people lived on and from the land, but the stories that have been written down about abundance are from the rich people in cities. There is a good chance we are not a descendants from these rich people.
Today, salt and sweet flavouring is basically free and every piece of food is a mix ('processed' if you will), even home cooking.
Wow that's nuts (KE diet) I had never heard of this. It is bizarre to just gloss over some of the caloric inconsistencies there - e.g. if it was possible to subsist on 800kcal if you only did low-carb and ate throughout the day, and that led to easy fat loss while you did it, wouldn't more people do it? I don't think I know anyone who could do this for even a week or 2. That's almost fasting level caloric restriction.
And your wife losing weight on "maintenance" is another interesting side of the coin.
I honestly don't know if it's the PUFA, I just don't have a better idea. What about this sort of diet leads to the weight loss in the first place?! I once had to abandon a 2,000kcal/day diet after 20 days or so due to starvation symptoms... 800 would seem impossible. It was also extremely low-carb.
I do think GLP-1 is like a cheat code for obesity researchers; they don't have to admit that they don't understand jack shit and have failed for their entire careers and that of their mentors. Now they can pretend like everything will be alright if you just chemically starve the carolies off. I think this is most likely going to go very, very wrong.
Peter from Hyperlipid talks about sort of a U-shaped curve with PUFAs. Where say 2% is fine, 8% is bad, but 30% is "good" in the weight loss sense again. I'm not too sure but I think he doesn't think it's actually good, you might lose weight but it'll be very unhealthy in the long run. But I might be wrong about his opinion, his opinions tend to be very complex.
But of course, it could be something else. But what?
I kinda have a hard time buying the absence of taste/variation thing. I don't add salt to my food. It just doesn't really feel like a hedonic thing to me, it feels like a biochemical thing.
I think it could help in the sense that you won't overindulge hedonically if the food is a mono food or bland/unvaried enough. But I doubt this is the original reason for the obesity epidemic? Did we start salting & sweetening our food much more? I think food used to actually be way more delicious/indulgent 50 years ago, when not everybody was trying to diet all the time. People would've laughed at you for eating a salad.
I'll agree on the boring/bland to a degree; depending on which ancestors you mean. Long enough back, yea, most people pre industrialization or even globalization wouldn't have had a super varied diet. Maybe with the seasons, but not at the tip of their fingers like we do, and not throughout their lives. No Vietnamese-Mexican fusion in the stone age :)
But again, can this explain our grandparents and grand-grand-parents being much thinner than us?
Also, I gained a ton of weight eating a pretty repetitive keto diet before I switched to cream. I was basically cooking the same thing every day, or every other day. Not trying out new things all the time. I did carnivore 90 days w/o any salt, and I lost no weight at all.
So while I think that repetitive diets can help if you're metabolically broken, just cause you don't hedonic yourself into overeating when you should feel biochem satiety but it's not working, I don't think it's the root cause of the obesity epidemic.
This diet reminds me of the time my wife was on EN (Enteral nutrition) for 4 months (tube feeding direct into the stomach). She lost weight very rapidly and was never hungry during that time but she gained the lost weight quickly all back when the tube was removed. The EN fat macro is mostly PUFA but rapid weight loss is still very common. There is even a KEN version (Ketogenic Enteral nutrition e.g: see https://nutricia.ca/ketocal-41-lq-unflavoured ) as an epilepsy treatment and also used for rapid weight loss. Again : the fat macro is mostly PUFA. So, I'm wondering, is it the blandness or predictability and continues supply of fat or is it the way fat is sensed in the esophagus or is it really the saturated fats/absence of PUFA in cream ?
Interesting, this reminds me of an old study from the 60s or 70s that was mentioned in The Hungry Brain by Stephan Guyenet. They gave obese people this "drink machine" that they could suck EN type nutrient sludge out of, and it was essentially the same thing - high PUFA sludge. Pretty tasteless. The obese people RAPIDLY lost weight.
It's a really good question as to why this leads to rapid weight loss. But I would also suspect the rapid bounce back, like your wife experienced, if it was really high PUFA.
There is (was) a whole underground industry around KE (EN) tube feeding for rapid weight loss for getting 'in shape' for a mariage, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KE_diet. This industry has now mostly vanished in favor of GLP-1 agonists. This Wiki article tries to suggest that it is the limited calories that is the cause of the weight loss, but this is not true. When my wife had 4 months of tube feeding, I asked the dokters if she was getting enough calories, they confirmed that this was a maintenance dose and that weight loss was nevertheless a 'known side effect'. My wife never had any hunger nor cravings during these 4 months and lost a LOT of weight.
I'm not convinced about the PUFA being responsible for the rapid weight gain afterwards. If you go off your saturated fat diet, you tend to see the same.
I was very frustrated with Stephan Guyenet's book when it came out, he described the problem in great detail and very convincing but never formulated any practical solutions. In fact he himself mostly let it go and is concentrating now on GLP1's (as do most obesity reseachers). I have nothing against GLP1s agonists but I'm afraid for when the GLP1 resistance kicks in...
So, is it really the PUFA that prevents you from loosing weight if we could even use it for rapid weight loss ? Is it then not something else ?
Maybe it is the partial or complete absence of taste (and variation). Specifically salt and sweet. If it is not mixed into food then it is not so bad, but once mixed, cravings develop. That is maybe why the potato diet works just as good as your cream diet: it is equally bland and repetitieve. And its majority of calories are not mixed with salt or sweet.
I think that my ancestors probably ate boring and bland diets most of the time, intermitted with a feast sometimes. 100 years ago salt was expensive and seldom used by the common people. 95% of people lived on and from the land, but the stories that have been written down about abundance are from the rich people in cities. There is a good chance we are not a descendants from these rich people.
Today, salt and sweet flavouring is basically free and every piece of food is a mix ('processed' if you will), even home cooking.
Wow that's nuts (KE diet) I had never heard of this. It is bizarre to just gloss over some of the caloric inconsistencies there - e.g. if it was possible to subsist on 800kcal if you only did low-carb and ate throughout the day, and that led to easy fat loss while you did it, wouldn't more people do it? I don't think I know anyone who could do this for even a week or 2. That's almost fasting level caloric restriction.
And your wife losing weight on "maintenance" is another interesting side of the coin.
I honestly don't know if it's the PUFA, I just don't have a better idea. What about this sort of diet leads to the weight loss in the first place?! I once had to abandon a 2,000kcal/day diet after 20 days or so due to starvation symptoms... 800 would seem impossible. It was also extremely low-carb.
I do think GLP-1 is like a cheat code for obesity researchers; they don't have to admit that they don't understand jack shit and have failed for their entire careers and that of their mentors. Now they can pretend like everything will be alright if you just chemically starve the carolies off. I think this is most likely going to go very, very wrong.
Peter from Hyperlipid talks about sort of a U-shaped curve with PUFAs. Where say 2% is fine, 8% is bad, but 30% is "good" in the weight loss sense again. I'm not too sure but I think he doesn't think it's actually good, you might lose weight but it'll be very unhealthy in the long run. But I might be wrong about his opinion, his opinions tend to be very complex.
But of course, it could be something else. But what?
I kinda have a hard time buying the absence of taste/variation thing. I don't add salt to my food. It just doesn't really feel like a hedonic thing to me, it feels like a biochemical thing.
I think it could help in the sense that you won't overindulge hedonically if the food is a mono food or bland/unvaried enough. But I doubt this is the original reason for the obesity epidemic? Did we start salting & sweetening our food much more? I think food used to actually be way more delicious/indulgent 50 years ago, when not everybody was trying to diet all the time. People would've laughed at you for eating a salad.
I'll agree on the boring/bland to a degree; depending on which ancestors you mean. Long enough back, yea, most people pre industrialization or even globalization wouldn't have had a super varied diet. Maybe with the seasons, but not at the tip of their fingers like we do, and not throughout their lives. No Vietnamese-Mexican fusion in the stone age :)
But again, can this explain our grandparents and grand-grand-parents being much thinner than us?
Also, I gained a ton of weight eating a pretty repetitive keto diet before I switched to cream. I was basically cooking the same thing every day, or every other day. Not trying out new things all the time. I did carnivore 90 days w/o any salt, and I lost no weight at all.
So while I think that repetitive diets can help if you're metabolically broken, just cause you don't hedonic yourself into overeating when you should feel biochem satiety but it's not working, I don't think it's the root cause of the obesity epidemic.