Micronutrient panel and Omega-3 & 6 profile, do sweeteners raise insulin?

Some deficiencies from eating very little red meat, but not that bad overall. Stopped doing ex150monkfruit after only 4 days.

I’ve been doing ex150 for about 5 out of the last 7 months, and some variations, too. It is a pretty extreme and minimalist diet, and that’s a time frame in which micronutrient depletion can become an issue. I hear vegans get into their B12 deficiencies around a year in. So I recently got an extensive micronutrient blood panel, and also an Omega-3 & 6 fatty acid profile.

Estimated Intake Data from Cronometer

First, let’s look at an estimate of what micronutrients I’m getting in a day. I put a typical day of ex150 into Cronometer, and it spit out the macro- and micronutrients.

Macro wise, very low protein, and super low carbs. Plus 262% the amount of fat Cronometer thinks I should eat. No surprise there.

• 3.7g fiber. Just right at about 10% of the daily recommendation. I think fiber is largely useless in the absence of carbs, and it makes me bloated and uncomfortable. Going to zero seems to bring my Non-24 back, plus I like the flavor and texture of some vegetables in my meat.

• I’m getting a decent amount of Omega-3 polyunsaturated fat, 69% of the recommendation.

• I’m getting 5.8g of Omega-6 PUFAs, the one people mean when they say seed oils are unhealthy (largely linoleic acid). That’s relatively low, and mostly comes from the cream. Hard to go much lower. Plus, it’s likely balanced by all the MUFAs and SFAs in the butterfat.

• I’m getting almost all of the amino acids to daily requirement, or close, except Cystine. Given that I’m only getting about 1/3 of the recommended protein total, that’s surprising. I’m not sure what it means to get almost all of the components, but only 1/3 of the total?

• On the vitamin front I’m missing quite a bit. Vitamin C is extremely low at only 7% of the recommendation, and quite a few other vitamins are low, too.

• Minerals are worse, I’m not getting enough of any of them except Zinc, although a few are better than others.

• Frankly, I’m surprised by the high micronutrient density, given that ex150 is almost entirely heavy cream. I guess heavy cream actually has a lot of micronutrients.

Micro nutrient report

On to the actual lab results. It says I am deficient in 3 things:

• Vitamin C: makes sense, I haven’t eaten a lot red meat or green, leafy vegetables most of the last 7 months

• Oleic Acid: This one’s surprising, as heavy cream is 24% oleic acid.

• Biotin: I didn’t even know what this was, but it’s apparently a B vitamin (B7) involved in making skin, hair, and nails.

The report also noted I was close to being deficient in a number of other things, e.g. many other B vitamins. Since I already take a B vitamin complex supplement, and plan on getting retested in 6 months or so, I’m not worried about those quite yet.

Summary

Overall I think these results are decent. ex150 is a pretty extreme fat loss intervention, not a sustainable diet you would do forever. Even so, I am only deficient in 3 things according to this report, largely due to the extremely low amount of red meat I eat, after about 7 months on it.

And the deficiency in oleic acid doesn’t make any sense. I’m taking in ~40g per day. Must be some issue where heavy saturated fat intake changes the ratios, and this test probably isn’t calibrated for people who eat 218g fat per day.

Supplements

My DPC provider recommended I supplement Vitamin C and Biotin, and a reader suggested I add magnesium as well. In addition to the supplements I started after my last blood panel, I’m now up from previously 0, then 2, to now 5 supplements (soon back down to 4):

• Vitamin C

• Vitamin D (I’ve been deficient for years due to lack of sunlight, not ex150)

• Vitamin B complex (with K2)

• Magnesium glycinate (for now)

• Biotin

I got almost all of the supplements from Thorne, which seems like a reputable company putting out quality (if pricey) supplements.

Vitamin C supplement messes up my CGM

Shortly after starting the supplements, I noticed my blood glucose slowly, but surely, rising. No changes in diet! First I thought it was stress, or a bad night’s sleep. But eventually I was hitting 170mg/dL (!) from the regular Starbucks latte that would previously barely get me to 130. Were they putting more sugar into my drinks all of a sudden? I hadn’t noticed the taste change.

Then, on one of my walks, I realized what was happening: the CGM was being influenced by my Vitamin C supplement. When you put on a new CGM, the app actually warns you about that. It had just been a week since I’d done that, and it had never been an issue before, so I had forgotten.

After testing with a finger prick blood test, this theory was confirmed. My blood glucose wasn’t actually that high - in that particular test, I tested 81mg/dL blood (pretty low) vs. 135 (diabetic) on the CGM - a whopping 54mg/dL difference (!).

I’m toning down the Vitamin C dose a little bit and will see if that helps. If not, I guess I’ll just have to live with a increased baseline glucose measurement for a while. I’m thinking of just finishing this one tub of Vitamin C powder, which should take me a month or two, and then re-test. If I’m in a decent range then, I’ll drop the supplement.

Thorne magnesium supplement, sweetened with monk fruit, seems to raise insulin massively; cancelling ex150monkfruit

Upon receiving the Thorne magnesium glycinate, I realized it was sweetened with monk fruit. It’s actually so sweet, it makes almost everything disgusting if you add the daily dose (~3g) to it.

If you recall, my current experiment was going to be 14 days of ex150monkfruit.

I had been taking the sweetened magnesium in the morning, with a glass of water. A disgustingly sweet glass of water wasn’t a big deal, I thought, whereas I was afraid that making my evening cream dessert intolerably sweet might present problems. For ex150monkfruit, I’d put the 3g dose of sweetened magnesium into my heavy cream dinner. A mere shift in timing/combining foods/supplements.

And it seems I was right to worry.

After only 3 days of ex150monkfruit, I gained 1lb! And that despite the scale actually flirting with another pound loss right before I started it. For the record: it is extremely uncommon for me to gain even a single pound on strict ex150. I also thought I looked visibly bloated.

In addition to the weight gain, I felt extremely thirsty the entire 3 days, which seems like a common thing when I’m gaining weight. On the contrary, when I’m losing weight, I barely seem to be thirsty at all. Could be that I’m getting much of my water requirements from body fat. After all, the triglycerides in our body fat contain a lot of H and O.

You know what 2 H and 1 O make? That’s right. They make love.

I didn’t even eat more, so it’s not a satiety issue. I do get satiated with the absurdly sweet cream. It actually tastes worse this sweet. And on my diet it’s very easy to measure food intake. I was eating exactly the same amount of cream as before. There’s probably a nutrient partitioning issue at play.

The idea for this trial came from the Hateful Eight talk by Robert Lustig, in which he mentions (towards the end, I think), that non-caloric sweeteners are almost as bad as just eating sugar, because the insulin response is the same. It seems he’s onto something.

So please, don’t add ANY sweeteners or sweet tasting things to your cream if you do ex150.

Just the sweet taste could mess it up, it seems. I wonder if the addition of 100g of berries every time could’ve made a difference after all for Subject 1, who didn’t lose (much, if any) weight on ex150berries? What if he’d eaten the berries separately, in the morning? To the contrary, adding (non-sweet) instant coffee powder seems to work just fine for me.

The interesting part is that this seems to strengthen the insulin hypothesis. But besides just the total amount of insulinogenic food consumed during a day, does the meal composition and timing matter? What if you ate a ton of carbs at 8am, and then a ton of fat at 8pm? Would they still interact, insulin-wise? Probably not.

Is the secret to ex150 that I spike my insulin at lunch, with very little calories around, and by the time I eat my big heavy cream dinner, it’s already back down to baseline?

If only there was such a thing as a CGM for insulin, darn it.

So I’m cancelling ex150monkfruit after only 4 days. I still have a bowl of disgustingly sweet cream sitting in the fridge, so I’ll eat that today. But starting tomorrow, I’ll go on ex150sardines, which replaces the ex150 lunch meal of meat/vegetables/sauce with 150g of canned sardines. Omega 3 and such.

I’ll also stop taking the sweetened magnesium altogether. The Vitamin C I use contains some magnesium as well, and is unsweetened, so I hope that’ll be enough. Plus, I wasn’t actually deficient in magnesium according to the blood panel.

It seems really bizarre how I accidentally hit on ex150, and there are so many weird coincidences at play. I never planned to eat a non-insulinogenic 1,000kcal meal totally separate from all my carbs/protein, it was just a random pick. Would it have even worked if I’d eaten the meat right before the heavy cream?

Omega 3 & 6 fatty acid profile

In addition to the micronutrient panel, I also ordered a fatty acid profile. These focus mostly on Omega 3 & 6, but I was more interested in linoleic acid and arachidonic acid specifically, the “bad” PUFAs.

This test measures the cell membranes of red blood cells, and reports what fatty acids they consist of. It’s interesting in light of the PUFA hypothesis of obesity: if you gain body fat eating a lot of PUFAs, those would be stored as more body fat.

When you subsequently lose fat, these PUFAs will be released into your bloodstream, where they will (according to the theory) wreak havoc once again.

The fascinating part about this theory is that it is path-dependent, which almost no diet theories seem to be. Simply, path-dependency means your results in something (e.g. fat loss) don’t just depend on your current inputs (e.g. eating low-carb), but also on what happened in the past (e.g. you accumulated a lot of PUFA in your body fat).

This elegantly explains a) the rebound effect, where many people who lose a large amount of weight gain it back, and b) the differences between individuals in how easy/hard a time they have metabolizing their body fat.

The rebound effect (also called yoyo-dieting) is a very common observation, and many people talk about how restricting calories can “lower the metabolism,” but very few have a mechanism that explains how. Maybe stored PUFA is that mechanism?

And how come certain very obese people seem to be able to water fast for hundreds of days, shedding pounds like crazy? I can’t even do 10 days. My record is 7 on water, and 10 on a coffee fast. Was the cream in that coffee blocking the PUFAs released from my body fat, allowing me to go longer? This suddenly makes the idea of fat-fasting seem extremely reasonable.

Anyway, here are the results:

• I’m doing ok in the Omega-3 fatty acids, if not stellar. This makes sense since Cronometer says I’m getting about 2/3 of recommended Omega-3 intake.

• My Omega-6 PUFAs are absurdly high, making up 61% of my red blood cell membranes, nearly 2x the maximum reference range. Both my arachidonic and linoleic acid are 50% over the reference range.

• As a result, my AA/EPA ratio is over 10x the reference range.

• This fits neatly with PUFA theory. It seems my body is completely saturated (ha) with Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Note: Most people who test for this use OmegaQuant, a different company that has different reference ranges. I’ll try to get an OmegaQuant next time to compare.

What to make of this?

The best strategy for depleting Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids from the body is presumably to lose a lot of fat. So that’s the plan. I’m already minimizing Omega-6 intake and doing pretty good on Omega-3. Plus, ex150sardines is coming up. Lots of Omega 3 in those.

I will take both the Omega-3 & 6 plus the micronutrient test again in 6 months.