I didn't post yesterday as it was a very busy day with a lot of commitments. I didn't even jog. Just no time. I had an early dental appointment at 7am for the dentist to replace a 40 year old 3-tooth bridge and the day just went down hill from there. I knocked out a tooth when I was 12 years old when a dog chased me on my bicycle and in trying to fend him off I ran right smack dab into the back of a parked pick-up truck. This was in the 1963. I had a bridge put in 1969 when I turned 18. I guess the glue finally gave up and I had to get a new one.
I want to thank everyone who posted in my absence and especially those that were able to answer some of the questions in my absence. I do see a couple still hanging in the wind so to speak so forgive me as I attempt to address those.
could you please elaborate on muscle fuel? what are the conditions leading to & the results of the muscles using glucose, ketones, fatty acids?
On this one I'm a bit like Will Rodgers - "all I know is what I read in the newspapers" - and the truth is that you can probably get a much more detailed answer from Wikipedia or some of the better muscle building sites. Speaking from the 20,000 foot view, the muscles can use glucose, fatty acids (FFA's) or ketones as fuel. As we generally eat a high carb diet, our muscles have adapted to using glucose as their primary fuel source. FFAs are just fat molecules as they've been broken down by digestion or from body fat. This is the second easiest fuel for our muscles to use if glucose becomes scarce. I think I read somewhere that people who run marathons quickly run out of glucose (stored as glycogen in the muscle tissue and liver) and for about 2/3s of the race their muscles switch over to burning FFAs. The belief is that the switchover happens when they "hit the wall" and if they persist (and have trained long enough to teach their body to do this which can take months) and push through the wall the body switches to FFAs for the duration of the race - using FFAs released from the breakdown of body fat while they are running. Finally the muscle cells can burn ketones which are a form of carbohydrate formed from FFA's in the liver. It takes a good bit of doing to get the muscle cells to switch to ketones as their primary fuel as it takes both a significant increase in mitochondria in the cells as well as the manufacture of a specific enzyme to assist in the metabolism of the ketone bodies. Since our normal modern diet is very high in carbs, the cells don't develop the extra mitochondria and the ability to make the enzyme goes dormant. It can take several months to get everything back in production and when that happens, the muscles cells can no longer efficiently utilize glucose or FFA's. At this point if we suddenly switch back to a high carb diet we will go through the same issues we faced converting to ketones as the body tears everything down and restructures to use Glucose and FFA's again - the whole thing is sort of a round robin catch-22.
The switch from a glucose/FFA based muscle fuel to ketones (or visa versa) is a rather expensive proposition as far as the body is concerned and it will do everything possible to avoid the switch. Even though we may eat no visible carbs, about 58% of all the protein we eat is converted to glucose and as long as we are eating enough protein to provide the minimum amount of glucose and FFA's the muscles won't switch to ketones even though they may be plentiful in our blood and/or urine. Hope this helps.
There are a few things I recommend that you do before committing to your experiment long-term. ....First, I would read McDougall's Medicine: A Challenging Second Opinion
Hi Chery, I've actually called and talked with both Dr.John & Mary McDougall as well as Dr. Barry Sears one-on-one about their theories and how they came to their conclusions. These are very intelligent individuals. The problem is that their theories are just their interpretation of the data they've collected under the conditions that they've engineered. This journal is loaded with my theories based on the data I've collected under conditions that I've engineered. Most all of this is just our best guess as to what we think is happening based on what little we know or can accurately measure. My own experience does not support either McDougall’s or Sear’s findings. One major problem is that none of them has done a long term study of what happens when your remove carbohydrates from the diet. They all play it safe with making sure to recommend x% of fresh fruits and vegetables to meet the vitamin and mineral needs of the body. None of them has done a study where they eliminated all foods other than meat and fat. I did this starting about 3 years ago. My doctor warned me about all the deficiencies I'd face as well as the kidney issues, the acidic blood issue and on and on. None of this has materialized in 3 years and my blood tests get better and better each year as do my vital signs.
Second, I recommend that you investigate the following items to see how your regimen is affecting them:
1. blood PH... amino acids and fatty acids, when consumed in excess, make the blood PH go down, and the body may dump calcium from the bones into the blood stream to compensate. Since leafy greens are rich in calcium, it might be vital to add them to help buffer your PH and spare your bones. Basically, by eating grass-fed meat, you are eating animals that did in fact have alkaline diet, bur you are inverting your PH by eating the animals rather than the leafy greens. I recommend a bone scan periodically too, to make sure you are not dissolving your vertebra and setting yourself up for crippling injuries or fractures.
How do you know this? Is it because a guru in current fashion declares so in his latest book? How does he know? The reason I'm so skeptical is that based on x-rays my bone density has increased over the last 5 years and more than 3 of those years have been meat and fat only. Milk is supposed to be loaded with calcium, however, most of the people that I know with bone density issues are heavy consumers of dairy products - at their doctor’s insistence - yet their bones continue to deteriorate. Greens measure rich in calcium when tested with reagents in the laboratory, the question becomes, is this calcium available to the body - or are there anti-nutrients that block its absorption. What role does blood glucose and insulin play in the proper absorption of nutrients? By the way, my bone integrity was confirmed by an orthopedist. I broke my finger a little over a year ago (compound fracture). It healed in record time and after 8 weeks when he normally puts people with my injury in therapy, he was amazed to find that I already had 90% movement back and the break was completely healed.
free radicals... long chain fatty acids of the saturated variety are not as bad as unsaturated in this respect, but basically any fat that is heated to cook it is damaged and will end up with dangling bonds. The dangles represent spare or missing electrons that can cause the cooked (broken-down) fatty acids to react with (glom on to) other molecules, causing them to also become reactive, resulting in long tangled chains or bursts of additional dangling bonds, and cross-linked proteins. Cross-linking causes connective tissue to become less flexible (hydrogenated oils are worst in this respect) and also can cross-link right into DNA, potentially activating growth genes that might start the cell reproducing uncontrollably in a tumor. This is basically a process of 'oxidation' or burning when these burnt fats get into your system and start reacting with your own cells, and anti-oxidants serve to terminate the long chains of free radicals by donating or accepting an electron without damaging a cell in the process. Again, leafy greens are rich in anti-oxidants. The animals you are eating had the benefit of the leafy green to protect them from cancer and connective tissue damage, but you do not.
Again I must ask how you can be so sure about what happens in the body related to the various fatty acids. I eat my fats raw for the most part so what does that mean and how do you know? The cross linking I've researched only happens in the presence of blood glucose and high insulin levels and again this is only a theory - no one really knows. What makes you think that leafy greens will protect you from cancer and connective tissue damage. I've seen this stated many times but I've found no research that supports it - and worse, books that reference studies that supposedly support it, when you actually read the study itself, you find that any link is tenuous at best and often missing altogether.
I just hope that your experiment is not causing you too much damage.
I assure you that some of the worst damage I've ever done to myself was to blindly follow the writings teachings of the latest diet gurus, and I've followed many of them. I no longer do this. I now do my own research, my own experiments, and when things aren't working I'm not afraid to take the exit and try another path. I get an annual physical and to be honest, at age 57, I'm in better shape than the 30 something doctor that performed my last physical. Blood tests, vital signs, energy all have improved dramatically since early 2005 when I started this paleo adventure.
These extreme diets may produce all sorts of interesting effects, but just because some test results get 'better' does not necessarily mean that you are healthier. I encourage you to try reading many different sources and getting a more wholistic view of what you are doing to your body, just in case you are robbing Peter to pay Paul with your dietary changes rather than actually building equity in your health.
Who could I possibly read that would know anything about a totally zero carb diet? I read constantly and this Journal is an effort to document the findings in Gary Taubes book Good Calories/Bad Calories. Taubes admits he doesn't know but his research lead him to his conclusions. I'm doing my best to test some of his insights and theories. There is really no one else in the popular press doing stuff like this. Stephen Phinney has done some work with athletes on Zero Carb diets and he disproved most of the myths you've repeated in your post. Unfortunately, Phinney's work isn't in the best selling diet guru section of the local book store.
Skepticism is a rare quality to have, just remember to be skeptical of everything in equal measure so that your mind stays open to the possibility that you too are in error, and that there may be more to the picture than just doing the opposite of conventional wisdom to maximize health.
Believe me when I say that there is no one more skeptical than me. I question everything and everyone. I take nothing at face value and if I find something is not working I won't hesitate to change it.
Hmmm.. I remember reading something about futile cycles. It has something to do with the body getting rid of energy and increased heat is a result or side-effect. I can't recall the details or how it works though.
Dr Eades discussed futile cycles in his response to an e-mail asking about where all the calories consumed in a high fat diet go. I read through this work and again it is just a theory. It started as a possible theory to explain homeostasis - that the body will do useless work to create heat to keep our body temperatures at 98.6 deg. Eades just extrapolated this idea and suggested that the body might be doing this same thing to use up all those extra calories we eat as fat. It makes no sense to me. Start with the original premise of the theory - that the body does useless work to keep body temperature constant. Now take a simple observation (near and dear to my heart of late) that jogging a mile will raise my body temperature and cause me to break out into a sweat and yet all I've consumed is about 100 extra calories. Many of us consume several thousand extra calories per day as part of our high fat diet. Now if the body was burning 1,000s of extra calories per day in futile cycles (remember futile cycles keep the body warm) I figure I should be shriveled up, burned to a crisp, and glowing so hot you'd need sunglasses to look at my remains.
