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Venturist's avatar

Fascinating as ever.

This is beginning to look a lot like an adaptation system to environmental food availability. Perhaps in our pursuit to avoid experiencing any negative feelings ever, we have optimised unavailability out of our diets - but our biology is built to run on EITHER fuel A or B, not both.

Perhaps crudely speaking we are awkwardly flip-flopping, burning inefficiently all the time as the machine never quite settles into one or the other.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Yea I think that's quite literally what happens. The mitochondria hate context switching.

I'm not sure if this is genetic or "natural" or a consequence of e.g. PUFAs. The French Paradox Diet and other historical/even ancestral anecdotes seem to tell us that people used to be able to swamp pretty heavily with no downside.

But not entirely certain either way.

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Leo Abstract's avatar

I lean towards 'variable consequences of PUFAs' - the most successful weight-loss protocol i've ever tried was 'swamp taters' - 50% potatoes, 50% oil. So clearly the swamp doesn't bother some of us. But what does? Well some of us can't handle fructose or (iso)leucine/casein.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Maybe "0% protein, 50% carbs/fat each" is actually out of the swamp. Open question to me as I haven't tried it, and not many others have either.

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Leo Abstract's avatar

Strange thing is, though, that not only do potatoes have protein in them, I also used a little bone broth in (and cheese on) the au gratin.

Meanwhile I struggled to have any positive effect from the dairy version(s) of ex150. Doing great on butter, tallow, beef, and beef broth so far.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Yea dairy might just be a thing that some people can't do in large quantities :( Anecdotally it sure seems that way.

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Mac's avatar

Yeah I got a selfdecode report recently, and dairy wasn't the greatest thing for me. It would explain some stuff despite my love of cheese and such and no visible allergy issues with cheese or other low carb dairy things.

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Principia Virtutis's avatar

I have some friends who generally struggle with dairy but not butter or most cheeses. I think they are both generally lower in lactose?

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

Butter definitely, low lactose and lose dairy proteins (another source of intolerance). For cheese it depends; hard cheeses tend to be lower in lactose, I think, whereas soft cheeses still have more.

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Scott's avatar

Hash Browns Diet sounds delicious!

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Venturist's avatar

That reminds me - Americans often report rapid effortless weight loss vacationing in Europe (where PUFAs are less abundant) whilst keeping a superficially similar diet and exercise level.

Yet there is still excessive and increasing obesity in Europe and there hasn't been quite the same scope of industrialised diet poisoning, though many of the companies operate in both places.

I wonder if all the stuff we talk about are triggers or exaggerating factors but there may still be more that are unknown.

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Experimental Fat Loss's avatar

It could be because the US defaults to soybean and corn oil, whereas Europe seems to prefer sunflower oil?

I guess we also have canola here, which is rapeseed.

I do also think we put more random shit into our food in general, so if one of the random shits is bad, we'll have more of it, more widely spread.

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M Wang's avatar

Canola is quite mild on the PUFA scale: it's got relatively low total PUFA (~30%, vs sunflower at ~20%, soy at ~55%, corn at ~55%) and a relatively friendly n-6:n-3 ratio at 2:1 (vs sunflower at 128:1, soy at 7:1, corn at 58:1). But Euros also plant their fair share of "rapeseed", so maybe we're just having it at the same level to begin with. (There's also the issue of "high-oleic sunflower" being less bad on the PUFA scale, ugh.)

I do agree on the random shit front though. Mono/diglycerides, which appear to be very boring chemicals on the surface, have been linked to insulin resistance in mice, for example. Which is a shame, because they are pretty useful emulsifiers.

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