6 ms·

Total layman here and know almost nothing about biology. But I'm skeptical of this comment mainly because your sources are youtube videos. Which of course doesn

Total layman here and know almost nothing about biology. But I'm skeptical of this comment mainly because your sources are youtube videos. Which of course doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but I wanted to go over some of the people behind these. Some of them (e.g. Dr. Steve Phinney) seem like area experts, some I wasn't able to verify credentials of (e.g. Dr. Mary Newport) and some seem to have controversial (and possibly fringe?) opinions regarding nutritional science (i.e. Jordan Peterson, who is a psychologist not a medical expert). So may I please ask experts chime in here, how reliable information in this comment? What are some papers one can read on this issue? [1] [1] Except obviously OP. But OP is from 2016, and if this is understood, I expect there to be more papers on this? Also the relationship between parent comment and OP paper isn't clear to me, so maybe an expert can explain whether the parallel is justifiable.

kfarr 6y ago
good research! I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true!
- hh3k0 6y ago
  > I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true! Yeah, let's all do that and see how many degrees we can tickle out of this whole climate change thing by 2050.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    The science is not all sorted out and I can't find anything that's a nice succinct summary, but locally grown, grass-fed beef is very likely much better for the environment than the way beef is typically produced these days. Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster.
    - hh3k0 6y ago
      > Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster. I disagree. A giant environmental disaster is inherent in man's livestock addiction -- even if you disregard the unsustainable emissions that come with it: > Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories […] If everyone were to adopt the average diet of the United States, we would need to convert all of our [global] habitable land to agriculture, and we’d still be 38 percent short. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        One of my all time favorite books is called "How to lie with statistics." Your source in no way rebuts my comment. First, one of the reasons humans consume beef (as well as certain other kinds of meat) is that cows can convert grass to protein, something humans cannot do. So in savannas, eating animals that convert the grass to protein is one of the ways humans make life work at all. Second, much of the world's beef supply is not grass fed. It is corn fed. This gets done in part because it makes the beef fattier and thus makes it more profitable. It also makes it less healthy to eat and much more land intensive and wastes the thing that historically made cows valuable to humans. In a scenario where we raise products like corn -- that the human body can already use for its protein content -- and feed it to cattle to produce beef, yes, that's hugely, hugely wasteful. It's also problematic that we ship so much beef long distances because of the energy costs involved. If you work on moving towards grass fed beef and local consumption, you begin to dramatically reduce the resources involved in consuming beef. Additionally, I am not advocating for the entire world to move to a 100 percent beef diet. That's crazy talk on the face of it. Most religions advocate for a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet. Religion tends to contain historic wisdom concerning what works well for humans based on firsthand observation. But there is plenty of room for the occasional human "carnivore" as well as for some people continuing to eat beef regularly. We don't need to vilify the consumption of meat in order to pursue environmental goals. If eating beef helps eliminate health issues in some people, then letting those people eat beef is likely to be less resource intensive than insisting they eat a vegetarian diet and take a boatload of drugs. This is a problem space I've thought about a whole lot. I have a serious medical condition that I control with diet and lifestyle. I wanted to be vegetarian and I tend to eat less meat most of the time than most Americans, but I also sometimes eat beef for medicinal purposes and I eat bacon somewhat regularly because bacon fat is one of the fats I tolerate well. My body misprocesses fats and there is a somewhat long list of plant oils I actively avoid. I am supposed to be on thousands of dollars of drugs every month even when I'm not actively sick, just as "maintenance," and more when I'm actually sick. If the dollar value of the drugs I'm supposed to be taking is any measure at all of their environmental impact, then eating some meat is vastly less environmental burden than the drugs I am supposed to be on. No one but you is saying "We should all just eat like carnivores" and you said it sarcastically. That extremist scenario is nothing anyone is genuinely advocating for. I am all for making it easier and "cooler" for most Americans to eat less meat on average than they currently do. I am also for letting a small number of weirdos peaceably coexist with the rest of us who choose to eat nothing but meat because they find it beneficial to stubborn health issues that doctors don't know how to fix. The way you lower our aggregate carbon footprint with regards to diet is you make it easier to find good vegetarian options. I don't eat hamburgers. Finding some source of protein at a fast food joint that isn't a fucking hamburger can be challenging. Fortunately, affordable and convenient vegetarian options are somewhat easier for me to find than they used to be, such as vegetarian pizza and bean burritos. So my life works better than it used to because it's so much easier than it used to be to find something cheap and readily available wherever I go that isn't a fucking hamburger. Hamburgers tend to be pretty goddamned disgusting, in part because we typically use the lowest quality beef to make them on the theory that we can just grind it up and turn it into a patty and la la la not listening on that detail of "garbage in, garbage out."
    - simiones 6y ago
      That's true, but you certainly can't feed 7 billion people on an all-beef diet from locally grown, grass-fed beef. With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        No one in their right mind anywhere in the universe would, in all seriousness, actually advocate for all humans everywhere to eat an all beef diet. That's so ridiculous on the face of it I didn't feel I needed to say that.
        jcims 6y ago
        There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. It's usually done by way of extrapolating to the limit as a counter-example, as if there is anything that is perfectly good or bad. I guess faulty generalization? I've certainly been guilty of it in the past but I do try to catch myself and talk more about where tradeoffs intersect or how one might extrapolate. In this case we're not in a position to adjust our biology, so maybe lab-grown meat has more benefit than to sate the ethics of those that would otherwise avoid it on the same grounds.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. If there isn't a word or phrase for it, we should make one up.
        simiones 6y ago
        Most people who advocate for a healthier diet actually intend for a vast majority of the population to adopt their recommendation - vegetarians and vegans and people who recommend the food pyramid or the balanced plate and so on intend for, ideally, the entire population to follow this recommendation. So if someone comes and recommends an all-meat diet as being healthier for almost everyone than the current plant+meat based diet; and someone else points out that it would be an environmental disaster; and you talk about how local farming can mean that meat eating is not necessarily that bad for the environment - then your argument is only relevant if it is still true when a significant proportion of the population follows this new diet. Hence my extrapolation to ~7B people following said recommendation. To call a diet sustainable or unsustainable, it only makes sense to talk about its impact IF it caught on for a significant proportion of the population for whom it is recommended. There is no unsustainable diet if we're only thinking of a few people following it. I could recommend an all-Saffron diet and you could call it sustainable if only 10 people have to follow it. So again, an all-meat diet, even if it were actually healthy , would be an unsustainable recommendation to make for the general population. It may well be a very good recommendation for people with specific conditions, and it could be made sustainable if those people were a tiny minority of the population. For the general population, the only possible diet that doesn't bleed the earth dry is one that is mostly vegetarian, with some amount of meat maybe once a week or even more rarely.
  - YinglingLight 6y ago
    Good call, let's perpetually starve our evolutionary meat brains with quinoa and soy. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
- PIKAL 6y ago
  This is allegedly the hub for carnivore people. https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/ https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/ I’m still new to it but the concept is fascinating. Advocates point out that most plants are inedible while most animals are edible. Also, all of the nutrients required by the human body are present in animals, if you eat their organs. There is a small amount of vitamin c in animal meats, but it turns out you only need large amounts of vitamin c if you are metabolizing mostly carbohydrates. Compare this to the heavy supplementation required on a vegan diet, it seems a lot more likely that our bodies are designed to eat animals. There are massive holes in the studies that connect meat with colon cancer and other diseases — it turns out there isn’t a single randomized, controlled study that looks at that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
PIKAL 6y ago
Jordan Peterson and his daughter don’t need to be experts in order to offer their anecdotes. Instead of relying on experts, who universally reject everything I’ve said, crack open a biochemistry textbook. But be careful, the most popular biochemistry textbook in the United States, the latest edition from 2017, states plainly that a ketogenic diet always leads to diabetic ketoacidodis. This is false, thousands of people have been in ketosis for months to years at a time without developing diabetic ketoacidosis. If the textbooks that the doctors read don’t get all the details right then how are you supposed to trust doctors to get the details right? And why should you trust them when they have nothing at stake? Meanwhile your life is at stake. Guess who is going to sweat all the details and consider every possibility, doctor or patient? Here’s a clue, when is the last time a doctor cracked open a textbook for your sake? I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently. I forgot to mention, the links are for YouTube because more people prefer that. You can find the relevant papers in their descriptions or by googling the relevant names.
- gnulinux 6y ago
  > I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently. Ok but how do you know your anecdote is merely coincidental? How do you know there is a strong causation without data?
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    When it's your own body, it's fairly easy to gather a lot of data.* Most people eat multiple times per day. If you are on the diet and symptom free and then off the diet and your symptoms come back, it gets to pretty quickly be hard to pretend this is merely "wild coincidence." Yes, you need more rigorous documentation to get it into the medical literature and prescribed by doctors and yadda. But experimenting on yourself? It's totally possible to draw a firm and reasonable conclusion that "X diet is helpful for managing my symptoms and making my life more functional." * Observed data, not necessarily documented.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Ketogenic diet as something beneficial for certain disorders -- including brain disorders, like epilepsy -- is extremely well established science and readily googled up: https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epilepsy/dietary-therapies/ketogenic-diet https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps... And here is a scientific paper specifically about schizophrenia and ketogenic diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30037619/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30037619/ I've also heard that some people experience "miracle cures" eating an all beef diet. Or a vegetarian diet. Or a vegan diet. Or a ketogenic diet. Or from fasting. The gut biome is barely understood and 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body can be found in the gut. So it shouldn't exactly shock people that messing with diet can have dramatic health effects. The problem is we aren't at a point of being able to reliably say which weirdo diet to apply to which conditions in some kind of completely reliable fashion and our understanding of why and how those things help is in its infancy. (I am not a doctor. I don't play one TV. Verifying that what the GP is saying is not straight up crazy talk is not hard at all, though the comment is a hair overenthusiastic as if this is absolutely some kind of solved problem when it probably isn't.)
- notabee 6y ago
  I think you're right on the money here. We just don't understand anything like a direct cause and effect between all the variables of personal gut biomes and genetics that create the metabolome. My n=1 experience has been that a fasting-mimicking diet where I emphasize low protein (especially BCAAs) for several days functions as a great reset after I refeed. I think if nothing else people may benefit from "jiggling the handle" metabolic fixes from temporary diet alterations, and various diets may push the microbiome, metabolism, and immune system to a more beneficial state, but that will look different for each person. I also think that starving out various gut bugs of certain nutrients like starches, protein, (yes, we know fat and carbs can be bad in excess. But too much protein isn't often talked about!) sugars, etc. will exert selective pressure on them. The ones that can cooperate with the body will gain over the ones that just extract easy nutrients. And of course, many things like antibiotics just blow away the whole ecology, like burning down a rainforest. It takes a long time to recover. I like to think of diet as a supply chain: if there's an excess of something, it's going to take cellular work to use it or put it somewhere else for later (e.g. fat, waste). If there's an overabundance of building blocks, the body will not be pushed to scavenge for those from old, broken down cell materials and they'll pile up. So changing the inputs up can give some pathways time to catch up. Fasting in general can also function in that way. The only problem is that it's kind of miserable to do, just like exercise.
omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these cases were different forms of GLUT1 deficiency, or similar, which have shown improvement with a ketogenic diets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23801573/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23801573/
- treeman79 6y ago
  Getting Sugar out of diet is a big deal for a lot of people.

kfarr 6y ago

good research! I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true!

hh3k0 6y ago
> I'm intrigued by the concept of an all beef diet, sounds too good to be true! Yeah, let's all do that and see how many degrees we can tickle out of this whole climate change thing by 2050.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  The science is not all sorted out and I can't find anything that's a nice succinct summary, but locally grown, grass-fed beef is very likely much better for the environment than the way beef is typically produced these days. Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster.
  - hh3k0 6y ago
    > Beef does not have to be some giant environmental disaster. I disagree. A giant environmental disaster is inherent in man's livestock addiction -- even if you disregard the unsustainable emissions that come with it: > Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories […] If everyone were to adopt the average diet of the United States, we would need to convert all of our [global] habitable land to agriculture, and we’d still be 38 percent short. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      One of my all time favorite books is called "How to lie with statistics." Your source in no way rebuts my comment. First, one of the reasons humans consume beef (as well as certain other kinds of meat) is that cows can convert grass to protein, something humans cannot do. So in savannas, eating animals that convert the grass to protein is one of the ways humans make life work at all. Second, much of the world's beef supply is not grass fed. It is corn fed. This gets done in part because it makes the beef fattier and thus makes it more profitable. It also makes it less healthy to eat and much more land intensive and wastes the thing that historically made cows valuable to humans. In a scenario where we raise products like corn -- that the human body can already use for its protein content -- and feed it to cattle to produce beef, yes, that's hugely, hugely wasteful. It's also problematic that we ship so much beef long distances because of the energy costs involved. If you work on moving towards grass fed beef and local consumption, you begin to dramatically reduce the resources involved in consuming beef. Additionally, I am not advocating for the entire world to move to a 100 percent beef diet. That's crazy talk on the face of it. Most religions advocate for a vegetarian or semi-vegetarian diet. Religion tends to contain historic wisdom concerning what works well for humans based on firsthand observation. But there is plenty of room for the occasional human "carnivore" as well as for some people continuing to eat beef regularly. We don't need to vilify the consumption of meat in order to pursue environmental goals. If eating beef helps eliminate health issues in some people, then letting those people eat beef is likely to be less resource intensive than insisting they eat a vegetarian diet and take a boatload of drugs. This is a problem space I've thought about a whole lot. I have a serious medical condition that I control with diet and lifestyle. I wanted to be vegetarian and I tend to eat less meat most of the time than most Americans, but I also sometimes eat beef for medicinal purposes and I eat bacon somewhat regularly because bacon fat is one of the fats I tolerate well. My body misprocesses fats and there is a somewhat long list of plant oils I actively avoid. I am supposed to be on thousands of dollars of drugs every month even when I'm not actively sick, just as "maintenance," and more when I'm actually sick. If the dollar value of the drugs I'm supposed to be taking is any measure at all of their environmental impact, then eating some meat is vastly less environmental burden than the drugs I am supposed to be on. No one but you is saying "We should all just eat like carnivores" and you said it sarcastically. That extremist scenario is nothing anyone is genuinely advocating for. I am all for making it easier and "cooler" for most Americans to eat less meat on average than they currently do. I am also for letting a small number of weirdos peaceably coexist with the rest of us who choose to eat nothing but meat because they find it beneficial to stubborn health issues that doctors don't know how to fix. The way you lower our aggregate carbon footprint with regards to diet is you make it easier to find good vegetarian options. I don't eat hamburgers. Finding some source of protein at a fast food joint that isn't a fucking hamburger can be challenging. Fortunately, affordable and convenient vegetarian options are somewhat easier for me to find than they used to be, such as vegetarian pizza and bean burritos. So my life works better than it used to because it's so much easier than it used to be to find something cheap and readily available wherever I go that isn't a fucking hamburger. Hamburgers tend to be pretty goddamned disgusting, in part because we typically use the lowest quality beef to make them on the theory that we can just grind it up and turn it into a patty and la la la not listening on that detail of "garbage in, garbage out."
  - simiones 6y ago
    That's true, but you certainly can't feed 7 billion people on an all-beef diet from locally grown, grass-fed beef. With some simple math, assuming people could eat 500g of meat a day, each person would eat an entire adult cow every ~3 years. So you would need a population of ~2.5 billion cows every year to support this - and that's assuming that there is no waste, that we could consume the entire weight of an adult cow (including bones), and that 500g of meat per day is enough.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      No one in their right mind anywhere in the universe would, in all seriousness, actually advocate for all humans everywhere to eat an all beef diet. That's so ridiculous on the face of it I didn't feel I needed to say that.
      - jcims 6y ago
        There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. It's usually done by way of extrapolating to the limit as a counter-example, as if there is anything that is perfectly good or bad. I guess faulty generalization? I've certainly been guilty of it in the past but I do try to catch myself and talk more about where tradeoffs intersect or how one might extrapolate. In this case we're not in a position to adjust our biology, so maybe lab-grown meat has more benefit than to sate the ethics of those that would otherwise avoid it on the same grounds.
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        There has to be a word for this kind of nit-picking. If there isn't a word or phrase for it, we should make one up.
      - simiones 6y ago
        Most people who advocate for a healthier diet actually intend for a vast majority of the population to adopt their recommendation - vegetarians and vegans and people who recommend the food pyramid or the balanced plate and so on intend for, ideally, the entire population to follow this recommendation. So if someone comes and recommends an all-meat diet as being healthier for almost everyone than the current plant+meat based diet; and someone else points out that it would be an environmental disaster; and you talk about how local farming can mean that meat eating is not necessarily that bad for the environment - then your argument is only relevant if it is still true when a significant proportion of the population follows this new diet. Hence my extrapolation to ~7B people following said recommendation. To call a diet sustainable or unsustainable, it only makes sense to talk about its impact IF it caught on for a significant proportion of the population for whom it is recommended. There is no unsustainable diet if we're only thinking of a few people following it. I could recommend an all-Saffron diet and you could call it sustainable if only 10 people have to follow it. So again, an all-meat diet, even if it were actually healthy , would be an unsustainable recommendation to make for the general population. It may well be a very good recommendation for people with specific conditions, and it could be made sustainable if those people were a tiny minority of the population. For the general population, the only possible diet that doesn't bleed the earth dry is one that is mostly vegetarian, with some amount of meat maybe once a week or even more rarely.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  Good call, let's perpetually starve our evolutionary meat brains with quinoa and soy. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
PIKAL 6y ago
This is allegedly the hub for carnivore people. https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/ https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/ I’m still new to it but the concept is fascinating. Advocates point out that most plants are inedible while most animals are edible. Also, all of the nutrients required by the human body are present in animals, if you eat their organs. There is a small amount of vitamin c in animal meats, but it turns out you only need large amounts of vitamin c if you are metabolizing mostly carbohydrates. Compare this to the heavy supplementation required on a vegan diet, it seems a lot more likely that our bodies are designed to eat animals. There are massive holes in the studies that connect meat with colon cancer and other diseases — it turns out there isn’t a single randomized, controlled study that looks at that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

PIKAL 6y ago

Jordan Peterson and his daughter don’t need to be experts in order to offer their anecdotes. Instead of relying on experts, who universally reject everything I’ve said, crack open a biochemistry textbook. But be careful, the most popular biochemistry textbook in the United States, the latest edition from 2017, states plainly that a ketogenic diet always leads to diabetic ketoacidodis. This is false, thousands of people have been in ketosis for months to years at a time without developing diabetic ketoacidosis. If the textbooks that the doctors read don’t get all the details right then how are you supposed to trust doctors to get the details right? And why should you trust them when they have nothing at stake? Meanwhile your life is at stake. Guess who is going to sweat all the details and consider every possibility, doctor or patient? Here’s a clue, when is the last time a doctor cracked open a textbook for your sake? I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently. I forgot to mention, the links are for YouTube because more people prefer that. You can find the relevant papers in their descriptions or by googling the relevant names.

gnulinux 6y ago
> I had schizophrenia and the doctors told me I was peckish. They didn’t listen to me. And they certainly didn’t listen to me when I told them ketosis was curing my symptoms. Just wait until it’s your turn to have a medical problem that the doctors don’t believe is real. Then you’ll look back on this comment very differently. Ok but how do you know your anecdote is merely coincidental? How do you know there is a strong causation without data?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  When it's your own body, it's fairly easy to gather a lot of data.* Most people eat multiple times per day. If you are on the diet and symptom free and then off the diet and your symptoms come back, it gets to pretty quickly be hard to pretend this is merely "wild coincidence." Yes, you need more rigorous documentation to get it into the medical literature and prescribed by doctors and yadda. But experimenting on yourself? It's totally possible to draw a firm and reasonable conclusion that "X diet is helpful for managing my symptoms and making my life more functional." * Observed data, not necessarily documented.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Ketogenic diet as something beneficial for certain disorders -- including brain disorders, like epilepsy -- is extremely well established science and readily googled up: https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epilepsy/dietary-therapies/ketogenic-diet https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps... And here is a scientific paper specifically about schizophrenia and ketogenic diet: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30037619/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30037619/ I've also heard that some people experience "miracle cures" eating an all beef diet. Or a vegetarian diet. Or a vegan diet. Or a ketogenic diet. Or from fasting. The gut biome is barely understood and 70 to 80 percent of the immune cells in the body can be found in the gut. So it shouldn't exactly shock people that messing with diet can have dramatic health effects. The problem is we aren't at a point of being able to reliably say which weirdo diet to apply to which conditions in some kind of completely reliable fashion and our understanding of why and how those things help is in its infancy. (I am not a doctor. I don't play one TV. Verifying that what the GP is saying is not straight up crazy talk is not hard at all, though the comment is a hair overenthusiastic as if this is absolutely some kind of solved problem when it probably isn't.)

notabee 6y ago
I think you're right on the money here. We just don't understand anything like a direct cause and effect between all the variables of personal gut biomes and genetics that create the metabolome. My n=1 experience has been that a fasting-mimicking diet where I emphasize low protein (especially BCAAs) for several days functions as a great reset after I refeed. I think if nothing else people may benefit from "jiggling the handle" metabolic fixes from temporary diet alterations, and various diets may push the microbiome, metabolism, and immune system to a more beneficial state, but that will look different for each person. I also think that starving out various gut bugs of certain nutrients like starches, protein, (yes, we know fat and carbs can be bad in excess. But too much protein isn't often talked about!) sugars, etc. will exert selective pressure on them. The ones that can cooperate with the body will gain over the ones that just extract easy nutrients. And of course, many things like antibiotics just blow away the whole ecology, like burning down a rainforest. It takes a long time to recover. I like to think of diet as a supply chain: if there's an excess of something, it's going to take cellular work to use it or put it somewhere else for later (e.g. fat, waste). If there's an overabundance of building blocks, the body will not be pushed to scavenge for those from old, broken down cell materials and they'll pile up. So changing the inputs up can give some pathways time to catch up. Fasting in general can also function in that way. The only problem is that it's kind of miserable to do, just like exercise.

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago

I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these cases were different forms of GLUT1 deficiency, or similar, which have shown improvement with a ketogenic diets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23801573/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23801573/

treeman79 6y ago
Getting Sugar out of diet is a big deal for a lot of people.