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Agreed. Gary Taubes has written three high quality books on the subject. The most technical and heavily referenced are Why We Get Fat and The Case For Keto. The
by wrycoder 6y ago
Agreed. Gary Taubes has written three high quality books on the subject. The most technical and heavily referenced are Why We Get Fat and The Case For Keto. The latter was just published.
I’ve been following a low glycemic diet for decades, but Taubes explains technically why it minimizes fat deposition.
If I start eating snacks like candy or corn chips, the weight gain is immediate and obvious. Not all calories are the same - some foods just “go to your hips”.
- Pinguinsan 6y agoEating low carb and switching to high carb will cause significant water weight increase due to increased muscle glycogen. On the order of 5-10lbs. It's not fat.
- wrycoder 6y agoThat’s correct. For me, the effect is about four pounds. It comes off as fast as it went on. But if I continue to eat high carb, there is a weight gain that is much harder to shed.
- Pinguinsan 6y agoAre you saying that a diet from higher carbs will produce more fat gain than an equicaloric low carb diet?
- david-gpu 6y agoNot the person you addressed, but people are not lab rats whose daily caloric amount is controlled by a lab technician. We humans in rich countries eat ad libitum. Any dietary intervention that helps us feel less hungry will lead to a reduction in the calories we consume.
- Pinguinsan 6y agoI never said they didn't. I said that a diet, when controlled for calorie levels, will yield identical fat gain/loss.
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- TheCoelacanth 6y agoOf course not. The type of foods you eat affects how many calories you eat so the diets won't be equicaloric.
- Pinguinsan 6y agoWell the person I responded to is claiming equicaloric diets lead to different levels of fat gain.
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- wrycoder 6y agoYes, I am saying just that. The body uses 100 calories of corn chips and Coke differently than 100 calories of bacon eaten by itself. Read Taubes for references to the scientific literature.
- Pinguinsan 6y agoThe first law of thermodynamics takes issue with this. A calorie is a unit of measure for energy.
- wrycoder 6y agoExcess calories can be stored as fat. Carbs that drive high insulin levels end up being converted to fat, and the subsequent low blood sugar level promotes more carb consumption. This does not happen with protein and fat consumption. If you force yourself to overeat those foods in the absence of carbs, which is not easy, they will be simply eliminated.
- Pinguinsan 6y agoYou're saying that eating excess calories in the form of fat won't be stored as fat? That's the most efficient pathway and was critical to our survival. What you're referring to (excess carbohydrates converted to fat) is denovo lipogenesis which is exceedingly inefficient and rare in humans.
- wrycoder 6y agoMy personal experience over several decades aligns with what Taubes explains in the first book I cited. If you want the technical details, you could read it. You can't get fat on a diet that is strongly deficient in carbs, while it's easy to get fat on a diet containing high proportions of fat and carbs. The Eskimo subsist on meat and blubber alone. Roald Amundsen ran the experiment on himself and confirmed it.
- 6y ago