I recently did a deep dive on different kinds of fiber, and found that (shockingly) "fiber", like "fat", isn't one thing and there's massive differences between each type. The tl;dr is that soluble non-fermentable fiber like psyllium is great if your stool is softer or harder than you want and probably good for cholesterol for mechanical reasons (but being non-fermentable, it shouldn't have any effect on your gut microbiome), soluble fermentable fiber (like in oats or beans) is probably good for cholesterol but will also probably make you feel bloated, and non-soluble fiber is worthless and terrible.
Interesting. I've also found that fiber is not all one and the same. I do ok on green vegetable fiber (although they're not nearly as high fiber typically as you might think). I do terribly on "added" fibers like in protein bars and others where they're used as "filler." I don't know what would happen it I took pure psyllium husk. I don't to very well on large amounts of fiber from grains or potatoes. Then again maybe I wouldn't do well on 2lbs of spinach, but I never try to eat that much.
Yeah, I think your strategy of not eating much fiber is completely reasonable if you don't have the kinds of problems fiber can solve. Psyllium won't really do anything if your digestion is already fine (sadly mine isn't) and if you're not concerned about cholesterol (which is also much more complicated than just HDL and LDL but that would be a whole post of its own...).
Yeah, I believe soluble might have uses, and insoluble is neutral and sometimes bad ("worthless and terrible" is a great way to phrase that!) but I don't know much more than that. Oh, I knew one more thing, FODMAPS are bad sometimes and the F stands for "fermentable".
Off to look for more foods with only soluble, non-fermentable fibre in. So far the only one I've found (if true) is potatoes ...
I kind of just gave up on finding useful fiber in foods (although I do love potatoes). I just ignore fiber in foods I like even though my digestion is worse when I eat them (fruits) and avoid high-fiber foods that I don't like (beans). Psyllium is helpful for me so I just take it in capsule form.
One of the weird things I do now is take fiber (psyllium) with my high-fiber foods (oats and fruit). Previously I would have assumed this would make things worse, but it actually helps since psyllium is a completely different kind of fiber.
I might have said this before but a few years ago there was a vegan who went carnivore on Twitter. He had his gut microbiome diversity tested before carnivore and six months (?) after starting carnivore. To his surprise his microbiome diversity increased after carnivore.
It's made me wonder since if we have it backwards. Maybe we have a diverse microbiome because we're healthy? In which case trying to "fix" your microbiome with pre/probiotics is a total waste of time.
Wish I'd saved the tweet as I'd be curious if they did any further tests.
Yea I suspect that's the case, at least to a large degree. When he went carnivore he probably cut out whatever was causing his issues, allowing his gut microbiome to adapt and stabilize.
Or maybe carnivore is actually better for the microbiome, haha. I don't know.
seems mostly right, but you're getting into skinny-person-gives-weightloss-advice territory. couple of things:
1) beneficial bacteria can eat a variety of things if permitted. For instance the main bacterial strain in fermented cabbage has the word for 'milk' right in the name: lactobacillus. obviously all the beneficial bacteria that you have thrive on the diet you eat, but these same bacteria could also thrive on another diet. not on a diet of seed oils and emulsifiers, though.
2) many people, once they stop poisoning themselves in various ways, require something to get the culture of their microbiomes started, and those poor sufferers should consume foods that contain probiotics. you don't need that, so you're not the target audience. like how naturally thin people find all this boring and pointless.
a stronger test would be to add specific beneficial strains that work well with your diet and see if you feel even better than you do now, if you enjoy exercise even more than you do now, and if you lose weight even faster than you do now. in the case of ex150, just go to whole foods, buy a little container of Nancy's probiotic sour cream, and mix it with a half gallon o your regular cream. leave it on the counter a few days until it is thick and sour, then refrigerate. when it's mostly gone mix, in another half gallon of cream. whole experiment will set you back like $7 beyond the normal cost of the cream.
Yea maybe I shouldn't be giving any advice other than "don't listen to the microbiome people."
It's probably a good thing to rule out, but doesn't tell you how to get there.
I wonder about the emulsifier part, some people really hate carageenan. In 2 years of heavy cream diet, I've had about 1 glass of cream with carageenan. Didn't like the taste.
from what i remember about your food history, you don't appear to love emulsifiers. some people seem unable to consume food that isn't heavily emulsified - think of the thick soybean oil dressings instead of the ones that separate if you let them sit. they need everything creamy or crunchy, and their favorite food is fried chicken tenders dipped in emulsified soybean oil.
after a decade of this, these poor souls need more than just to not eat seed oils anymore. microbiome may be permafucked.
Yea I'd say apart from what came in salad dressings/sauces, I am not big on emulsifiers. Mostly use cream that only had gums instead of carrageenan. So maybe got lucky?
Yea not sure what I'd do in that scenario :( I tried super pricey raw cream once and it didn't whip well. According to my CGM it was very high in lactose too, lol. Probably closer to half n half..
I might kinda splurge for $10/qt though, I think mine was twice that :)
So you don't get any digestion symptoms if you eat various steamed or raw vegetables or raw fruit for example? Steamed/raw so we separate out the effects of other ingredients.
In my quest to understand this stuff, for certain people with certain issues, this can be 'the problem'. But for many it is not so it comes up as a negative test, and other things are the cause of their issues.
Keto & carnivore diets often improve digestion issues because it gets rid of a lot of things that cause aggravation in the FODMAP category of foods. I'm starting to believe a lot of people have low grade SIBO also which is where a lot of these digestion issues come from. You eat something that the SIBO bacteria like and they go to town in an area of the body they shouldn't be in and you get the resulting digestion issues. So even if your microbiome is the 'good set', it can be in the wrong place for example.
There are other causes of issues such inflammatory responses to various substances that your body specifically doesn't work with well, issues with processing various plant based substances that other people don't have issues with, issues with histamine, lack of or reduced amounts of specific enyzmes (lactase is the classic one, but there are many others) and so on.
Keto / carnivore diets can also make digestion worse for other people too.
I haven't eaten various steamed/raw vegetables or raw fruit in years. Most I've done is slightly more than my normal 60g of vegetables (e.g. spinach) in one sitting, but cooked in butter and often tallow.
I actually didn't have great digestion on carnivore. Not sure if it was all that beef fat, or too high protein. I do fine on near infinite amounts of cream, but the cream is already emulsified.
Agreed that this is probably a better test to "rule things out" kinda like RMR. Most people probably aren't running around with a destroyed metabolism, but if you are, you should really know. So it's valuable to rule it out.
Yea, I was really having a hard time with the fat ratio, and my (later) success on ex150 kind of explains why.
If I really need close to 90% fat, that is EXTREMELY difficult with carnivore. I was eating 80/20 ground beef and ribeyes with slices of butter on them, but even that is like 62/38 kcals from fat/protein - in a sense, by far the highest protein diet I'd ever eaten.
I'd have to do Keto AF and eat spoonfuls of beef tallow, or mostly eat butter/cream, to get anywhere close to my current macros on carnivore.
I tried avoiding the rendered fat and even put my steaks in the fridge after cooking (tastes surprisingly good, I actually enjoyed them!) but no dice. Dairy fat is magic to me, I can eat near infinite amounts of it. Pre-emulsified?
I was also eating hard cheeses, which are again very high in protein. I do ok digestion wise on cheese, but it's super addictive and it's typically high in protein, at least hard cheeses.
If I was to do carnivore again I'd probably have to just do 150g beef and ad-lib tallow with a spoon lol :) And pure tallow makes me gag... that is unless dairy is allowed, in which case it'd be 90% cream like now :)
Kinda jealous, I had the opposite problem, took me months to be able to tolerate enough fat to have good energy. Even after four years I think 90% fat would wreck me for days (but I haven't tried for a while).
I wonder how you'd do on a normal fatty carnivore diet, plus as much cream as you need to feel good?
What do you mean by "normal fatty carnivore" diet, like eat a steak a day + the cream?
Take into account that I've been eating high dairy fat my entire life. In retrospect, any diet that didn't contain high dairy has failed for me, including veganism and pure carnivore. When I did vegetarianism for a few months in college, I was eating 70% dairy.
There's a theory out there that some people genetically overadapted to dairy and require it, and I might just be one of those people. It doesn't work for other types of fats nearly as well.
Have you done (or do you know of anyone else who has done) any analysis about the second-order effects of "indirect PUFA" through chicken and pork? I would label myself "seed oil avoider" but I still eat chicken or pork probably 1x/week. I don't notice it making me feel bad (except grocery store rotisserie chickens).
Just wondering if anyone has rigorously tested the PUFA content of chicken or pork, as well as by "organic/free range/pasture raised" vs. "full-fledged factory farm hell" source, etc.
To me the hierarchy of seed oils (from "worst for you" to "not as bad for you" is):
1. foods deep fried in seed oils
2. sauces made primarily with seed oils
3. snack foods / convenience foods with liberal amounts of seed oils
4. seed-oil-derived emulsifiers like lecithins and mono- and diglycerides
5. indirect seed oils in animal fats
But this is all entirely subjective and my "gut" feeling (pun intended). Would love to see any other analysis on this question.
I haven't seen an analysis, it's hard enough to analyze direct seed oils cause they're hidden in everything. So you usually have to tease it out if the study happens to provide that data: like yea, Kevin Hall's "keto diet" was 25% polyunsaterated fat by calories. Which is just as bad as the SAD.
Anecdotally, I think chicken and pork are underrated in their danger. Tons of people "don't eat seed oils" and still have pretty much all the downsides. I have a bunch of OQ tests from people who "haven't eaten seed oils in years" and their LA is sky high. Turns out they snack on pork rinds or eat whole roast chicken. Whole food/paleo/carnivore types usually.
Another thing is that lard is a commonly used fat in mouse/rat studies, usually labeled as the "saturated fat" even though it is majority-unsaturated even nominally.
But I think lard is somehow extra cursed. Grant Genereux has a theory why: lard is apparently extracted from pig carcasses by basically boiling/steaming at extreme temperatures for hours.
This could mean that the lard is basically hyper-peroxidized before you eat it. Like it was in a deep fryer for days.
I've also seen some studies on the peroxidation endproducts of different cooking oils, and lard did surprisingly badly. Tallow usually wins everything, to the point that they often don't bother graphing it because it's so far out of the range (near 0%) of the other oils. But lard often does worse than actual, literal seed oils!
Nobody seems to cook/fry in chicken fat, so I haven't seen any data on it, but I assume it's the same.
Also, anecdotally, the majority of PUFAs during my 100lbs SAK stint would've come from pork and chicken. I ate out at restaurants quite rarely, less than every other week I'd say. But I ate a pack of bacon a week easy, a carton of eggs, and I bought a lot of whole roast chicken from Costco.
There are of course many tests of PUFA content of chicken/pork. The USDA data tends to say 10% LA, but that's really old. Brad has dug up that it's more like 20% LA. He even found one that was 30% LA, but he has industry insider knowledge and says that corresponded to a period when they had a huge surplus of a certain corn husk thing or similar and dumped that into the feed market basically for free, and that he thinks it's back down to 20%. There is one experimental study where they tried to maximize the PUFA content and got the pigs up to 50% LA. So if there's a limit, it's sky high - 50% is soybean oil. You'd have to switch from a 100% soybean oil to a 100% corn oil diet to get to 60%.
I think Brad's own heirloom pigs he got down to 5-6% or so LA? That's probably where they're "supposed" to be in nature, and maybe where EU and Asian pigs are.
That's not as rigorous as I'd like, I'd love to see the LA% on every single thing I eat haha. But that doesn't seem super reasonable :(
I largely agree with your valuation, except I'd put 5 above 4 and maybe even over 3. It really depends at that level. I never ate shitty gas station food. I ate TONS of bacon and fatty chicken.
So to me, clearly 5 was more important than 3 or 4, unless you count nuts in 3 haha.
I actually think 4 (emulsifiers) is probably far, far down the list. It's like #50 haha.
Just from what I see anecdotally, I'd say chicken and pork is surprisingly bad and sneaky, for some carnivores it might even be worse than sauces.
I don't really know about the LA content in EU pigs, the problem is that food labels only contain total fat and saturated fat amounts with saturated usually being less than 50% of total, polyunsaturated isn't listed separately. Especially the more expensive pork products (Iberico, Pata Negra etc.) seem to be highly poly-unsaturated. There probably isn't a lot of difference to US pork although I believe depending on the country less soy is used. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on ham I want a hog purely fed on beef.
They can be quite pricey but it's more time to market and labor (including paperwork) that drives the cost. The expensive Spanish hams go for over 100€/kg (without bone), although it can go up into the thousands for some but that's entering the same territory as some Wine or Kobe Beef, 10 times more expensive doesn't mean 10 times as good. I think it's actually desired that the fat is less saturated for the texture and mouthfeel.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole but so far only read about hogs fed e.g. beef for research studies. I'm not even sure it's strictly legal.
Interesting ... thanks for sharing! I will need to get an OQ test one of these days and see where I'm at given my regular chicken and pork consumption.
Cate Shanahan persuaded me that "whole food PUFAs" are good if they come packaged alongside antioxidants. This is why I don't worry too much about nuts like almonds or pistachios. Or eggs. But the OQ will reveal all...
In any case, pork lard has always grossed me out and I much prefer tallow, butter and cream to all other fats (animal or plant).
I discussed this with Shanahan on Twitter and came to the conclusion there is no there there. She cannot articulate what about "muh whole foods" makes the PUFAs safe. Tucker and I really pressed her and she always came back to "We're all trying to find the guy who did this" nonsense.
I think she's simply wrong. Almost the entirety of my lifetime PUFA intake has been "whole foods" like bacon, chicken, and nuts.
I wish the 2 of them would just sit down in a room for 3h Joe Rogan/Lex Fridman style and hash this out. I do wonder if it's "just" LA% or if there are other factors. Everything is marginal, so maybe it IS way worse if you get 20% preoxidized vs. 30% less oxidized LA, or maybe ALA is also bad, or maybe the antioxidants to reduce the damage to a point, or...
But it seems this conversation is not happening.
The reason I'm curious is that we do see some results that can't be fully explained by LA%. E.g. why lard is so bad, in many studies it's worse than even literal seed oils. Canola oil also seems worse than its ~20% LA content would suggest, but it has another 10% or so of ALA.
Or is it the "peak LA bad for some effects" issue, where 8% LA causes peak obesity but 30% LA is actually better in terms of obesity, but maybe even worse long-term for other health conditions?
Or is it all an effect of badly controlled natural products that fluctuate a lot between seasons, harvests, locations, feed (in case of lard)..
Or is it the vitamin A in canola oil, like Grant Genereux suspects?
Yep! It would really be nice if we could zero in on causes by running experiments, but the fact that we can't feasibly/ethically run these experiments (due to insanely long fat cell half-life) means we'll never know for sure. Or we'll know for sure in mice.
Thanks for always engaging with me; I've learned tons from you!
I can believe it, at least in people who are genetically adapted to it. Maybe less so if you're lactose intolerant and your ancestors never herded cattle.
The surprising effectiveness of fecal transplants for some people seems, to me, to be a pretty strong confirmation that the gut biome really does matter for some.
Do you know anyone for whom it worked? I remember Tim Ferriss talking about it years ago, but I haven't heard any miraculous stories about it, so I kinda assumed it didn't work for many people. I think his use case was if you'd been on antibiotics for so long it actually nuked your microbiome and you couldn't digest nearly anything, I could see that.
Yeah, I assume that most of the research is trash. My basic assumption is that if you change your diet, then your microbiome is bound to change, but that doesn't mean that the microbiome change has anything to do with whatever a study might be watching (weight loss, some disease process, etc).
Also, it seems the microbiome is complicated. I mean *insanely complicated*. I doubt we're anywhere near understanding it yet except in the most trivial of ways.
Your synopsis about just eating ancestrally appropriate is where I'm at after a few years of studying this stuff. There is a lot of information to learn to scientifically justify ditching Standard American eating, and there is science to show how you can kind of finagle the levers if you want to still eat processed foods, perhaps with probiotics and perhaps not, but in the end...just eat real food and things work out.
I recently did a deep dive on different kinds of fiber, and found that (shockingly) "fiber", like "fat", isn't one thing and there's massive differences between each type. The tl;dr is that soluble non-fermentable fiber like psyllium is great if your stool is softer or harder than you want and probably good for cholesterol for mechanical reasons (but being non-fermentable, it shouldn't have any effect on your gut microbiome), soluble fermentable fiber (like in oats or beans) is probably good for cholesterol but will also probably make you feel bloated, and non-soluble fiber is worthless and terrible.
At this point, I take psyllium supplements because they help me a lot, but I avoid other kinds of fiber and don't feel bad about it. Not sure if we're allowed to shill our own posts here but I wrote about it on LessWrong a few weeks ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXk9Rwy4oFaex7bdd/benefits-of-psyllium-dietary-fiber-in-particular
Interesting. I've also found that fiber is not all one and the same. I do ok on green vegetable fiber (although they're not nearly as high fiber typically as you might think). I do terribly on "added" fibers like in protein bars and others where they're used as "filler." I don't know what would happen it I took pure psyllium husk. I don't to very well on large amounts of fiber from grains or potatoes. Then again maybe I wouldn't do well on 2lbs of spinach, but I never try to eat that much.
Yeah, I think your strategy of not eating much fiber is completely reasonable if you don't have the kinds of problems fiber can solve. Psyllium won't really do anything if your digestion is already fine (sadly mine isn't) and if you're not concerned about cholesterol (which is also much more complicated than just HDL and LDL but that would be a whole post of its own...).
Yeah, I believe soluble might have uses, and insoluble is neutral and sometimes bad ("worthless and terrible" is a great way to phrase that!) but I don't know much more than that. Oh, I knew one more thing, FODMAPS are bad sometimes and the F stands for "fermentable".
Off to look for more foods with only soluble, non-fermentable fibre in. So far the only one I've found (if true) is potatoes ...
I kind of just gave up on finding useful fiber in foods (although I do love potatoes). I just ignore fiber in foods I like even though my digestion is worse when I eat them (fruits) and avoid high-fiber foods that I don't like (beans). Psyllium is helpful for me so I just take it in capsule form.
One of the weird things I do now is take fiber (psyllium) with my high-fiber foods (oats and fruit). Previously I would have assumed this would make things worse, but it actually helps since psyllium is a completely different kind of fiber.
I might have said this before but a few years ago there was a vegan who went carnivore on Twitter. He had his gut microbiome diversity tested before carnivore and six months (?) after starting carnivore. To his surprise his microbiome diversity increased after carnivore.
It's made me wonder since if we have it backwards. Maybe we have a diverse microbiome because we're healthy? In which case trying to "fix" your microbiome with pre/probiotics is a total waste of time.
Wish I'd saved the tweet as I'd be curious if they did any further tests.
Yea I suspect that's the case, at least to a large degree. When he went carnivore he probably cut out whatever was causing his issues, allowing his gut microbiome to adapt and stabilize.
Or maybe carnivore is actually better for the microbiome, haha. I don't know.
seems mostly right, but you're getting into skinny-person-gives-weightloss-advice territory. couple of things:
1) beneficial bacteria can eat a variety of things if permitted. For instance the main bacterial strain in fermented cabbage has the word for 'milk' right in the name: lactobacillus. obviously all the beneficial bacteria that you have thrive on the diet you eat, but these same bacteria could also thrive on another diet. not on a diet of seed oils and emulsifiers, though.
2) many people, once they stop poisoning themselves in various ways, require something to get the culture of their microbiomes started, and those poor sufferers should consume foods that contain probiotics. you don't need that, so you're not the target audience. like how naturally thin people find all this boring and pointless.
a stronger test would be to add specific beneficial strains that work well with your diet and see if you feel even better than you do now, if you enjoy exercise even more than you do now, and if you lose weight even faster than you do now. in the case of ex150, just go to whole foods, buy a little container of Nancy's probiotic sour cream, and mix it with a half gallon o your regular cream. leave it on the counter a few days until it is thick and sour, then refrigerate. when it's mostly gone mix, in another half gallon of cream. whole experiment will set you back like $7 beyond the normal cost of the cream.
Yea maybe I shouldn't be giving any advice other than "don't listen to the microbiome people."
It's probably a good thing to rule out, but doesn't tell you how to get there.
I wonder about the emulsifier part, some people really hate carageenan. In 2 years of heavy cream diet, I've had about 1 glass of cream with carageenan. Didn't like the taste.
from what i remember about your food history, you don't appear to love emulsifiers. some people seem unable to consume food that isn't heavily emulsified - think of the thick soybean oil dressings instead of the ones that separate if you let them sit. they need everything creamy or crunchy, and their favorite food is fried chicken tenders dipped in emulsified soybean oil.
after a decade of this, these poor souls need more than just to not eat seed oils anymore. microbiome may be permafucked.
a wild poo transplant appears
Yea I'd say apart from what came in salad dressings/sauces, I am not big on emulsifiers. Mostly use cream that only had gums instead of carrageenan. So maybe got lucky?
Which brand of cream do you use?
Mostly various store brands, with gellan gum but no carrageenan. I think Horizon brand is also a common good one.
Thanks. All the store brands I've seen here have carrageenan. Only one dairy near me that occasionally has some raw cream for sale at $10.00/qtr.
Yea not sure what I'd do in that scenario :( I tried super pricey raw cream once and it didn't whip well. According to my CGM it was very high in lactose too, lol. Probably closer to half n half..
I might kinda splurge for $10/qt though, I think mine was twice that :)
So you don't get any digestion symptoms if you eat various steamed or raw vegetables or raw fruit for example? Steamed/raw so we separate out the effects of other ingredients.
In my quest to understand this stuff, for certain people with certain issues, this can be 'the problem'. But for many it is not so it comes up as a negative test, and other things are the cause of their issues.
Keto & carnivore diets often improve digestion issues because it gets rid of a lot of things that cause aggravation in the FODMAP category of foods. I'm starting to believe a lot of people have low grade SIBO also which is where a lot of these digestion issues come from. You eat something that the SIBO bacteria like and they go to town in an area of the body they shouldn't be in and you get the resulting digestion issues. So even if your microbiome is the 'good set', it can be in the wrong place for example.
There are other causes of issues such inflammatory responses to various substances that your body specifically doesn't work with well, issues with processing various plant based substances that other people don't have issues with, issues with histamine, lack of or reduced amounts of specific enyzmes (lactase is the classic one, but there are many others) and so on.
Keto / carnivore diets can also make digestion worse for other people too.
I haven't eaten various steamed/raw vegetables or raw fruit in years. Most I've done is slightly more than my normal 60g of vegetables (e.g. spinach) in one sitting, but cooked in butter and often tallow.
I actually didn't have great digestion on carnivore. Not sure if it was all that beef fat, or too high protein. I do fine on near infinite amounts of cream, but the cream is already emulsified.
Agreed that this is probably a better test to "rule things out" kinda like RMR. Most people probably aren't running around with a destroyed metabolism, but if you are, you should really know. So it's valuable to rule it out.
Digestion on carnivore is normally about:
- getting the fat ratio right (which tends to be a moving target for the first few months)
- avoiding certain types of fat (usually rendered fat but sometimes dairy fat)
- avoiding hard cheese (if constipation is a problem)
Yea, I was really having a hard time with the fat ratio, and my (later) success on ex150 kind of explains why.
If I really need close to 90% fat, that is EXTREMELY difficult with carnivore. I was eating 80/20 ground beef and ribeyes with slices of butter on them, but even that is like 62/38 kcals from fat/protein - in a sense, by far the highest protein diet I'd ever eaten.
I'd have to do Keto AF and eat spoonfuls of beef tallow, or mostly eat butter/cream, to get anywhere close to my current macros on carnivore.
I tried avoiding the rendered fat and even put my steaks in the fridge after cooking (tastes surprisingly good, I actually enjoyed them!) but no dice. Dairy fat is magic to me, I can eat near infinite amounts of it. Pre-emulsified?
I was also eating hard cheeses, which are again very high in protein. I do ok digestion wise on cheese, but it's super addictive and it's typically high in protein, at least hard cheeses.
If I was to do carnivore again I'd probably have to just do 150g beef and ad-lib tallow with a spoon lol :) And pure tallow makes me gag... that is unless dairy is allowed, in which case it'd be 90% cream like now :)
Kinda jealous, I had the opposite problem, took me months to be able to tolerate enough fat to have good energy. Even after four years I think 90% fat would wreck me for days (but I haven't tried for a while).
I wonder how you'd do on a normal fatty carnivore diet, plus as much cream as you need to feel good?
What do you mean by "normal fatty carnivore" diet, like eat a steak a day + the cream?
Take into account that I've been eating high dairy fat my entire life. In retrospect, any diet that didn't contain high dairy has failed for me, including veganism and pure carnivore. When I did vegetarianism for a few months in college, I was eating 70% dairy.
There's a theory out there that some people genetically overadapted to dairy and require it, and I might just be one of those people. It doesn't work for other types of fats nearly as well.
I love the title. It's so literal.
I have my moments :)
Have you done (or do you know of anyone else who has done) any analysis about the second-order effects of "indirect PUFA" through chicken and pork? I would label myself "seed oil avoider" but I still eat chicken or pork probably 1x/week. I don't notice it making me feel bad (except grocery store rotisserie chickens).
Just wondering if anyone has rigorously tested the PUFA content of chicken or pork, as well as by "organic/free range/pasture raised" vs. "full-fledged factory farm hell" source, etc.
To me the hierarchy of seed oils (from "worst for you" to "not as bad for you" is):
1. foods deep fried in seed oils
2. sauces made primarily with seed oils
3. snack foods / convenience foods with liberal amounts of seed oils
4. seed-oil-derived emulsifiers like lecithins and mono- and diglycerides
5. indirect seed oils in animal fats
But this is all entirely subjective and my "gut" feeling (pun intended). Would love to see any other analysis on this question.
I haven't seen an analysis, it's hard enough to analyze direct seed oils cause they're hidden in everything. So you usually have to tease it out if the study happens to provide that data: like yea, Kevin Hall's "keto diet" was 25% polyunsaterated fat by calories. Which is just as bad as the SAD.
Anecdotally, I think chicken and pork are underrated in their danger. Tons of people "don't eat seed oils" and still have pretty much all the downsides. I have a bunch of OQ tests from people who "haven't eaten seed oils in years" and their LA is sky high. Turns out they snack on pork rinds or eat whole roast chicken. Whole food/paleo/carnivore types usually.
Another thing is that lard is a commonly used fat in mouse/rat studies, usually labeled as the "saturated fat" even though it is majority-unsaturated even nominally.
But I think lard is somehow extra cursed. Grant Genereux has a theory why: lard is apparently extracted from pig carcasses by basically boiling/steaming at extreme temperatures for hours.
This could mean that the lard is basically hyper-peroxidized before you eat it. Like it was in a deep fryer for days.
I've also seen some studies on the peroxidation endproducts of different cooking oils, and lard did surprisingly badly. Tallow usually wins everything, to the point that they often don't bother graphing it because it's so far out of the range (near 0%) of the other oils. But lard often does worse than actual, literal seed oils!
Nobody seems to cook/fry in chicken fat, so I haven't seen any data on it, but I assume it's the same.
Also, anecdotally, the majority of PUFAs during my 100lbs SAK stint would've come from pork and chicken. I ate out at restaurants quite rarely, less than every other week I'd say. But I ate a pack of bacon a week easy, a carton of eggs, and I bought a lot of whole roast chicken from Costco.
There are of course many tests of PUFA content of chicken/pork. The USDA data tends to say 10% LA, but that's really old. Brad has dug up that it's more like 20% LA. He even found one that was 30% LA, but he has industry insider knowledge and says that corresponded to a period when they had a huge surplus of a certain corn husk thing or similar and dumped that into the feed market basically for free, and that he thinks it's back down to 20%. There is one experimental study where they tried to maximize the PUFA content and got the pigs up to 50% LA. So if there's a limit, it's sky high - 50% is soybean oil. You'd have to switch from a 100% soybean oil to a 100% corn oil diet to get to 60%.
I think Brad's own heirloom pigs he got down to 5-6% or so LA? That's probably where they're "supposed" to be in nature, and maybe where EU and Asian pigs are.
That's not as rigorous as I'd like, I'd love to see the LA% on every single thing I eat haha. But that doesn't seem super reasonable :(
I largely agree with your valuation, except I'd put 5 above 4 and maybe even over 3. It really depends at that level. I never ate shitty gas station food. I ate TONS of bacon and fatty chicken.
So to me, clearly 5 was more important than 3 or 4, unless you count nuts in 3 haha.
I actually think 4 (emulsifiers) is probably far, far down the list. It's like #50 haha.
Just from what I see anecdotally, I'd say chicken and pork is surprisingly bad and sneaky, for some carnivores it might even be worse than sauces.
I don't really know about the LA content in EU pigs, the problem is that food labels only contain total fat and saturated fat amounts with saturated usually being less than 50% of total, polyunsaturated isn't listed separately. Especially the more expensive pork products (Iberico, Pata Negra etc.) seem to be highly poly-unsaturated. There probably isn't a lot of difference to US pork although I believe depending on the country less soy is used. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on ham I want a hog purely fed on beef.
Haha luckiest hog alive! Interesting idea but probably too expensive ;) Then again I think some of these hams are already very pricey?
They can be quite pricey but it's more time to market and labor (including paperwork) that drives the cost. The expensive Spanish hams go for over 100€/kg (without bone), although it can go up into the thousands for some but that's entering the same territory as some Wine or Kobe Beef, 10 times more expensive doesn't mean 10 times as good. I think it's actually desired that the fat is less saturated for the texture and mouthfeel.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole but so far only read about hogs fed e.g. beef for research studies. I'm not even sure it's strictly legal.
Interesting ... thanks for sharing! I will need to get an OQ test one of these days and see where I'm at given my regular chicken and pork consumption.
Cate Shanahan persuaded me that "whole food PUFAs" are good if they come packaged alongside antioxidants. This is why I don't worry too much about nuts like almonds or pistachios. Or eggs. But the OQ will reveal all...
In any case, pork lard has always grossed me out and I much prefer tallow, butter and cream to all other fats (animal or plant).
I discussed this with Shanahan on Twitter and came to the conclusion there is no there there. She cannot articulate what about "muh whole foods" makes the PUFAs safe. Tucker and I really pressed her and she always came back to "We're all trying to find the guy who did this" nonsense.
I think she's simply wrong. Almost the entirety of my lifetime PUFA intake has been "whole foods" like bacon, chicken, and nuts.
Thanks to you and Tucker for doing that! I am now sad. 😔
I wish the 2 of them would just sit down in a room for 3h Joe Rogan/Lex Fridman style and hash this out. I do wonder if it's "just" LA% or if there are other factors. Everything is marginal, so maybe it IS way worse if you get 20% preoxidized vs. 30% less oxidized LA, or maybe ALA is also bad, or maybe the antioxidants to reduce the damage to a point, or...
But it seems this conversation is not happening.
The reason I'm curious is that we do see some results that can't be fully explained by LA%. E.g. why lard is so bad, in many studies it's worse than even literal seed oils. Canola oil also seems worse than its ~20% LA content would suggest, but it has another 10% or so of ALA.
Or is it the "peak LA bad for some effects" issue, where 8% LA causes peak obesity but 30% LA is actually better in terms of obesity, but maybe even worse long-term for other health conditions?
Or is it all an effect of badly controlled natural products that fluctuate a lot between seasons, harvests, locations, feed (in case of lard)..
Or is it the vitamin A in canola oil, like Grant Genereux suspects?
Not sure...
Yep! It would really be nice if we could zero in on causes by running experiments, but the fact that we can't feasibly/ethically run these experiments (due to insanely long fat cell half-life) means we'll never know for sure. Or we'll know for sure in mice.
Thanks for always engaging with me; I've learned tons from you!
Dr Bikman of Metabolic Classroom fame podcast has mentioned numerous times that dairy supports a good microbiome.
I can believe it, at least in people who are genetically adapted to it. Maybe less so if you're lactose intolerant and your ancestors never herded cattle.
As PM Disraeli of UK said.... "my ancestors were priests in the temple of Solomon" they served up quite a few cows.
And sheep, goats.. they knew what was up! No pigs!
CORRECT!
The surprising effectiveness of fecal transplants for some people seems, to me, to be a pretty strong confirmation that the gut biome really does matter for some.
Do you know anyone for whom it worked? I remember Tim Ferriss talking about it years ago, but I haven't heard any miraculous stories about it, so I kinda assumed it didn't work for many people. I think his use case was if you'd been on antibiotics for so long it actually nuked your microbiome and you couldn't digest nearly anything, I could see that.
I don't know anyone personally, no.
Yeah, I assume that most of the research is trash. My basic assumption is that if you change your diet, then your microbiome is bound to change, but that doesn't mean that the microbiome change has anything to do with whatever a study might be watching (weight loss, some disease process, etc).
Also, it seems the microbiome is complicated. I mean *insanely complicated*. I doubt we're anywhere near understanding it yet except in the most trivial of ways.
Your synopsis about just eating ancestrally appropriate is where I'm at after a few years of studying this stuff. There is a lot of information to learn to scientifically justify ditching Standard American eating, and there is science to show how you can kind of finagle the levers if you want to still eat processed foods, perhaps with probiotics and perhaps not, but in the end...just eat real food and things work out.