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Mice fed a time-restricted, high-fat diet show reduced metabolic disease (2012)
- delhanty 9y agoI'm getting some mileage from this. Never been a morning person - assumed blood sugar must be low. Did the glucose testing strip thing - found that was completely wrong! Now cut carbohydrate intake until after daily brisk swim around 15:00. Suddenly I've shed eight pounds and brain fog problem is much improved. Hypothesis: problem was impaired blood flow to the brain not low blood sugar.
- bitexploder 9y agoPet peeves of little experiments like this of carb cutting. Cutting carbs causes you to shed a lot of water weight. Also if the exercise is new it is quite possible that is the bigger factor in improving perceived cognitive ability. If you changed multiple things and started paying closer attention to diet it is really hard to pin down what actually helped the most. Vigorous exercise helps clear waste along with sleep, not much else really clears things out -- brain seems more and more to be a part of, or similar to, the lymph system. edit: also most people who do 18 hour fasts report feeling energized, better concentration, etc,. especially if they have caffeine on an empty stomach.
- fps 9y agoI've cut carbs and increased my calorie intake (through fat and protein) over the past year and have shed 70 lbs of "water weight". I went from Obese to a healthy weight, from a 42" waist to a 32" waist. And I've actually decreased the amount of exercise I've done, too. Amazing how much "water weight" all those fat cells were holding.
- sridca 9y agoHow can you be sure that it was being low on carbs, as opposed to consuming less calories overall, that was the cause of your sustained weight loss?
- midgetjones 9y ago> increased my calorie intake
- fps 9y agoI switched from a calorie restricted "balanced" diet (1900 kcal/day, 150g carbs/day) with small portions that was going nowhere to an unrestricted (>2500 kcal/day, <30g carbs/day) diet with larger portions and lost weight.
- matwood 9y agoAnd you're measuring everything with a food log? When I do a low carb diet, even unrestricted, I have to focus (eat on a timed schedule) on getting enough calories to maintain my lean mass. Without carbs I simply do not eat enough naturally to maintain a weight I want to keep.
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- sridca 9y agoThis is interesting. I'd like to learn more. Are their studies that demonstrate that consuming more calories (with different composition such as HFLC) leads to weight loss compared to lesser calories (regardless of composition)?
- iplaw 9y agoI think that he is referring to the immediate weight loss effects associated with depleting the glycogen stores in your liver (400 grams) and muscles (100 grams). Each gram of glycogen is bound to 3 - 4 grams of water. Thus, depletion of your glycogen stores results in the loss of 2.0 - 2.5 kilograms (4.4 - 5.5 pounds) of "water (and glycogen) weight" within the first week of a low-carb diet. Larger individuals often retain even more glycogen and water, which can result in immediate losses of 6 kilograms (13.2 pounds) or more. His point is that some studies, particularly short term studies, do not account for this non-fat weight loss.
- danrice 9y agoOut of interest, how many grams of carbs/day did you cut down to?
- bitexploder 9y agoReferring specifically to folks who change diet and report 6-12 lbs of weight loss in 1 or 2 weeks. Can't burn fat that fast. Carbs in excess cause cells to hold more water, this is a fact. Diet changes, especially water loading, macro nutrient ratio changes,and exercise can cause big shifts on a small time frame. Recommend hacker's diet style of weight trending vs scale measurements to measure short term weight loss.
- reese_john 9y agoYou were most likely underestimating your calorie intake at first, it is a common issue. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084 Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric intake and exercise in obese subjects. Also, switching to a diet higher in protein tends to make people eat less calories and consequently lose fat. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16002798 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16002798 An increase in dietary protein from 15% to 30% of energy at a constant carbohydrate intake produces a sustained decrease in ad libitum caloric intake that may be mediated by increased central nervous system leptin sensitivity and results in significant weight loss. This anorexic effect of protein may contribute to the weight loss produced by low-carbohydrate diets. So in reality, the reasonable explanation is that you decreased your calories involuntary by upping your protein intake.
- NoPiece 9y agoNote this study was not about carb cutting, "high fat" in this context means high fat + high sugar, a combo specifically designed and proven to fatten mice. 60% lard, 20% sucrose, 20% casein.
- delhanty 9y agoThe exercise (ocean swim) isn't new. I've been doing it for years. And yes - it does help enormously (e.g to get the blood really flowing well) - as long as I get the start time, duration, intensity and intervals about right. I tend to swim only until just after the point that I reach peak performance. Also, (for me) it isn't just about carb cutting - it's about timing. If I eat a medium bowl of white rice at a breakfast, then I tend to feel worse afterwards and I put on (some) weight. If think that the blood gets thicker and stickier as blood sugar rises and so blood flow gets worse. If I eat the same medium bowl of white rice after my swim then I don't seem to put on weight, but it does help avoid a next day energy crash. I also paid it with 5g of Creatine Monohydrate (before the swim) and the combination seems to have reversed my middle-age loss of muscle. What doesn't work for me is vigorous early morning exercise fueled by caffeine. Again for me, that is the route to over -training and a long bout of fatigue. YMMV. Listen to your body.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y agoSimilar for me. I get brain fog from eating sweets. After I cut sweets (including any products with a high amount of added sugar, like yogurts and cereal), the problem decreased. I started going to the gym after I wake up and have the first meal after that. This helped tremendously. My routine is loosely based on intermittent fasting. Most days, I have about a 12 to 14 hour gap of not-eating. So basically it is sleep, exercise, restricted eating. Works for me.
- matwood 9y agoSo you cut sweets first and then started the gym or did you make the changes at the same time? I'm only asking because I would argue the gym is probably where you are getting your biggest change from. I've been working out consistently in some form or another for > 15 years, and if I go 2 days without doing something athletic I notice it physically and mentally.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y agoBrain fog is tied to what I eat, exercise only helps alleviate the symptoms. With exercise I can eat more sweets until brain fog appears and it also disappears more quickly.
- wcummings 9y agoIf you weren't working out before, I bet you the exercise is 9/10ths of it. Its amazing how much of a difference regular exercise makes for your energy and sleep schedule.
- delhanty 9y agoMy exercise schedule is long-standing and unchanged - see other comment.
- matwood 9y ago> Never been a morning person - assumed blood sugar must be low. For healthy people this is usually a mental/learned thing. You're not a morning person? Start getting up at 6am and going to the gym. Eventually you'll adjust after a week or so.
- delhanty 9y agoDid I say I was healthy? What works for you doesn't necessarily work for everyone else. You frankly have absolutely zero clue about what I've tried over 30 years to become that morning person.
- matwood 9y agoNo reason to get defensive. Since you're now implying you have some health issue, my point still stands. Most people will adjust to whatever schedule they start to keep. Just look at the number of people who enter the military to see schedule adjustment on a huge scale. So it does not just work for me or all the other people I've seen turn themselves into 'morning people'.
- delhanty 9y ago>No reason to get defensive. I didn't ask for advice or instruct anyone about what they should do anywhere on this thread. You on the other hand immediately instructed me what I should do. Perhaps you are accustomed to giving people orders? Been in the military perhaps? >Just look at the number of people who enter the military to see schedule adjustment on a huge scale. I call that BS. What data you have that is independent of the military's own data of the percentages that do and don't adjust? Outside of the era of conscription, make sure you correct for the fact that people who enter the military are a self selected sample.
- sjcsjc 9y agoThis is from 2012
- eckza 9y agoAnd?
- sjcsjc 9y agoAnd usually when a submission is old it is marked as such with [year]. I incorrectly assumed that was widely known.
- taneq 9y agoOh right, the great metabolic upgrade of 2014 changed all this.
- turc1656 9y agoHAHAHA! This comment made my day. FWIW, I did have a great metabolic upgrade in 2013 and 2014. And it was done by cutting down on carbs and eating delicious foods like fatty chicken and beef, cheeses, etc, and cooking with lard whenever possible.
- DeusExMachina 9y agoIntermittent fasting has been quite popular in the fitness and lifestyle worlds in the last years. I myself have been practicing it for more than a year now. A good point to start (which I used myself) is this article from James Clear: http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fasting http://jamesclear.com/the-beginners-guide-to-intermittent-fa...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago"In order to adapt to the daily cycles of nutrient availability, energy metabolism in animals has evolved to be cyclical." That sentence makes claims about history and about causality. I wonder if they really have the evidence needed to back them up.
- coldtea 9y agoSeems like a very easy case to make given the available observations, and something that can be easily studied. To me, if they couldn't know this much, it would be like a civil war historian that couldn't really tell who gave the Gettysburg address.
- j7ake 9y agoThe experiment to do is simple. Put mice (or humans) in constant conditions (lights always on, food as much as you want) and track sleep wake and eating behavior. You will see that animals will continue to behave in a cyclical manner even in the absence of an external force.
- latch 9y agoThis almost answers a question I've often wondered. Whenever I see research on calorie restriction, I wonder whether it's directly caused by eating fewer calories, or indirectly caused by eating fewer bad things. For example, methionine, an essential amino acid, is linked to cancer growth. In other words, maybe we don't need to eat less calories, but less of specific nutrients. Anyways, this study seems focused on metabolic diseases and doesn't touch on cancer or longevity in general. So, if anyone has any thoughts, I'd like to know. It's been bugging me for a while.
- wayn3 9y agosome math: 1 gram of carbs equals 4 calories. 1 gram of protein equals 4 calories. When metabolized, however, carbohydrates yield 5x the ATP proteins do. 1 gram of carbs is 5x as "rich in energy" as 1 gram of proteins. In spite of them being billed as equal. A tablespoon of sugar yields about as much energy as a pound of chicken breast. Then we go into fat. People think fat makes them fat. The truth is, ingested fat can not be turned into bodyfat directly. It is way easier for the body to turn carbs into fat than it is to turn fat into fat. "Diet" products that extract fat from milk products, like yoghurt, and replace them with sugar, which makes the product less calorically dense, nominally, literally makes people more fat - AND is billed as a diet alternative. Everything. the. media. says. is. wrong. Everything. And this isn't arcane knowledge acquired from some hermit. Its literally on wikipedia. One click away. Google ATP, or adenosinetriphosphate, and read the whole page. you will know more about diet than most dieticians. When I talked to my physician about these things, initially, they didnt know those basic facts either. All the knowledge we've got about how to lose weight is buried and ignored by bullshit. Simple facts that, if applied, make people lose weight. Caloric restriction is bs. Carb restriction is key. You can literally eat until your stomach hurts all day long and lose weight. Its what Ive done.
- nailer 9y ago> People think fat makes them fat. The truth is, ingested fat can not be turned into bodyfat directly. It's funny to think people ever took this literally, although many still do. Broccoli, for example, doesn't directly end up as broccoli lining your veins. Humans have digestive systems.
- BareNakedCoder 9y agoRead The Obesity Code by Jason Fung. A real doctor using real medical studies but with a different view to explain in common language why diets fail and why old practices work.
- cynicalbastard 9y agohis youtube lectures and interviews are also good. i wouldn't advise sharing his findings with most other people though, especially those who are prone to get swept up with the prevailing beliefs on things like low-fat eating and/or fasting. the great thing about modern society with regards to diet is you can eat whatever you want and get your blood and weight/fat% tested as often as you want without anyone else's input or permission.
- dpratt71 9y agoI know that mice have been used very successfully to study many diseases and conditions that can also affect people. But are mice a good human analogue when it comes to diet? I don't have time to find citations at the moment, but I seem to recall that the original studies linking consumption of saturated fat with...bad things (high cholesterol, etc.) were originally done with mice and more recent studies involving actual humans have failed to find a connection between consumption of saturated fat and the aforementioned bad things.
- bluGill 9y agoIt is about compromise. The ideal would be to use real humans for all studies. There are many reasons we cannot do this, about half of them are obvious. (try to come up with the non-obvious ones as an exercise) Mice are cheap, have a short lifespan, and have less ethical concerns so we use them. They are an okay model of humans, which is good enough to say if something fails on mice don't try it on humans. It is an open question of what treatments would work on humans that fail in mice - but this is impossible to study so we will never know how often this happens. (the fringe "coconut oil" groups put it at 5% from what I can tell)
- alextheparrot 9y agoYou've defined above why we use model organisms, but the original question wasn't questioning model organisms in general. I think we should work towards the original posters challenge to validate our models are efficacious, not just normal and cheap. After spending a semester seminar reading rodent dietary studies, I am equally sceptical that mice are a good general model for diet.
- ccrush 9y agoI know this doesn't answer your question as much as it introduces more questions, but I recall there being a propensity to use mice for these studies because gene expression based on lineage is more reliable in mice, the effects of metabolic modification are easier to study in mice, and a lot of existing studies are done on mice so it is easier to advance research. I may have read this in a biologists AMA on Reddit, so take it with a grain of salt. I also very much agree that study reproducibility is a major problem. Everyone wants to do the original research, and few want to validate existing work.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoI don't know if they specifically apply to this study, but Stephan Guyenet has pointed out some of the potential problems with what are typically called "high-fat" diets for mice.* For example one research diet that is called high-fat, D12492 - is extremely high in fat (60%) - does not contain what are generally considered to be particularly healthy forms of fat - is extremely processed overall - is typically used with genetically obesogenic mice - typically causes obsesity and neuron damage (and often diabetes) at a young age. I would think there are quite a few studies on Intermittent Fasting (IF) that more easily generalize to humans. * http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/01/high-fat-diets-obesity-and-brain-damage.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/01/high-fat-diets... ADDENDUM: Here is the diet used in the actual study. http://www.labdiet.com/cs/groups/lolweb/@labdiet/documents/web_content/mdrf/mdi4/~edisp/ducm04_028003.pdf http://www.labdiet.com/cs/groups/lolweb/@labdiet/documents/w... Some of the top ingredients are soy products (which in high enough doses will render most animal species infertile).
- agentgt 9y agoSome of the top ingredients are soy products (which in high enough doses will render most animal species infertile) Can you show legitimate repeatable recent research that shows this. I'm starting to think that the Soy raising estrogen (to unhealthy levels) thing may not be as true and is perpetuated in some cases as broscience.
- threepipeproblm 9y agoI'm sorry, the research I reviewed on animal infertility was a long time ago. The studies that were from the first half of the 20th century in which this result was demonstrated on just about every domestic farmed species. I don't have time at the moment to track those down. But I don't believe this is 'broscience'. The first place I'd look if you're searching for studies, esp. more modern ones, is actually the Weston A. Price Foundation. While they have an agenda for sure (e.g. they are currently suing the US prison system for malnourishing inmates, just to name one example of activism/ideology) I think they are generally good folks. They have sponsored some top-notch researchers, such as Chris Masterjohn, in the past. Here is their scary soy page, which starts with a few citations. I think you'd find more in some of the linked articles. https://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/ https://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/ Price was a fascinating bro, BTW. Please feel free to post here anything that you may find to be of particular interest. I should add that most of these results probably don't apply to traditionally fermented soy (like natto or traditionally made soy sauce -- but not the mass produced stuff nowadays); as I understand it there is no traditional culture which ate soy in an unfermented form.)
- pizza 9y agoThere's a theory called the protein leverage hypothesis: as the percentage of food protein decreases, hunger is increased to the point that you eat more calories of food that have a higher fat % + carbohydrates %, to compensate for the need to accumulate the remainder of your daily protein. This tweet explains it w/ a graphic from a study: https://twitter.com/tednaiman/status/868597859037216768 https://twitter.com/tednaiman/status/868597859037216768
- dghughes 9y agoHumanity is going to argue over what is the best diet (regular not reducing) until the end of time.
- emptybits 9y agoAnd reasonably so. Partly, this is because the "best diet" at any given time depends on practical factors like availability and affordability. Both of those have been rapidly improving, I think, for much of the world. I can buy food today that, to my grandparents or even parents, was unheard-of or only-eaten-by-kings. e.g. the value of quinoa or blue-green algae in a diet probably makes sense to study now, but it probably didn't 50 years ago
- emptybits 9y agoI suspect a lot of HN probably listens to Sam Harris' podcast, but just in case ... there was a relevant episode last month where he and Gary Taubes discuss the whole "good calories vs bad calories" idea and popular fat/protein misunderstandings over the last few decades. https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-should-we-eat https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-should-we-eat
- OldSchoolJohnny 9y agoJesus, the debate is long over. All that are left are people who can't seem to reset their brains to realize the food pyramid was wrong all along. This is like some slow moving comedic parade of ignorance or something. Do your research people and move on, the debate is over, fat doesn't make you fat and all the truly controlled scientific studies show the way forward. It's been painful over the years watching the big brains here snail their way slowly slowly slowly crawling towards what is long proven reality on the subject.
- yza 9y agoFrom personal experience (IANAD), cutting carbs to below 50g/day has greatly improved my life. This "diet" naturally leads to increased fat and protein intake, and for me resulted in weight loss, better concentration and reduction of inflammation (mild psoriasis improvement). Also, I recently got a pack of (urine) testing sticks which confirm a high level of ketones, and plan to experiment with increasing the daily carb limit.
- kirykl 9y agoJust be careful with increased urine acidity that accompanies ketones. It can cause kidney stones, and can be prevented by supplementing with potassium citrate
- spraak 9y agoYou can probably use mice to validate and invalidate any diet.
- rsync 9y agoWhat's depressing about all of this is that it's not really that interesting. We know that exercise and activity improve all metabolic measures, increase happiness, longevity and outputs. But very few people pursue that strategy. You can barely get post-injury patients to do their rehab exercises. Similarly, we seem to have very good evidence of the benefits of fasting/restriction/etc. in addition to the very good historical evidence of these behaviors being so well preserved by culture and religion, across the world. But people aren't going to do it. It's not going to change anything for (almost everyone).
- e40 9y agoAgreed. I've been doing IF (intermittent fasting) for the last 3 months. It's changed completely how I feel, in addition to losing some weight that was bothering me. It's like a weight has been taken off my metabolic system, that was working way too hard to process the amount of food I was throwing at it. And, the monkey on my back which was my sugar addiction is mostly gone--I still occasionally have sweets, but far less often than I used to.