Don't be fooled by the bread demons, you CAN be healthy on a low-carb diet

If you’ve been turned on to the low-carb Paleo diet craze, you may have noticed increased energy, better digestion and happier mood, and a shrinking waist line. Good for you. But some folks who’ve taken the Primal leap—particularly those who were previously on a high-carb diet—have been faced with unexpected side effects waving them back to the world of bread, sugary fruits and sweet potato casserole.

Interestingly, these side effects include a wide range of symptoms that are nearly identical to symptoms of severe thyroid hormone deficiency. More interestingly, lab tests often show normal or near normal thyroid function. More interesting still is that these symptoms seem to only be relieved by adding back carbs into the diet, sometimes upward of 300 grams—a level I consider to be very likely to harm.

Why is this happening? Is it that low-carb simply doesn’t work for everyone, or is something else going on?

In an effort to get to the bottom of this, low-carb blogger Jimmy Moore is asking his cadre of low-carb literate practitioners to weigh in on the issue with our opinions. This so happens to be an issue I’ve been pondering since reading about the controversy over safe starches, and a couple pieces of the puzzle recently fell into place that I think I add up to at least one explanation for the debilitating symptoms some people develop on going low-carb, and offer a method for anyone going low-carb to do so without problems.

Here’s what I discovered about those with thyroid problems.

Abrupt Change May Be too Much For the Thyroid

People who run into trouble going low-carb seem to follow a pattern. They follow any number of diets from SAD to vegan before making a relatively abrupt switch to a low carb (often less than 50 gm) diet. At first they lose weight as hoped but then, instead of feeling more energetic from their weight loss, they develop fatigue, sometimes accompanied by symptoms of low thyroid function including cold extremities, hair loss, and digestive problems. Only by consuming more carbs again can they reduce these symptoms.

Because their fatigue and other symptoms are classic for thyroid malfunction, many will get their levels tested, only to come away confused when the tests health practitioners typically order (TSH and T4) come out normal.

Those who get more extensive testing may get a test called reverse T3, or rT3 for short. These are often abnormally high, leaving them to believe they have found the root of the problem. Some are given a prescription for T3 in hopes of regaining energy and the intervention seems to help, at least a little.

Reverse T3 is a kind of chemical opposite of regular T3, a mirror image compound called an enantiomer. Reverse T3 has opposite effects of T3, and has long been associated with a set of symptoms aptly called hibernation syndrome—fatigue, weight gain, and so on. If you have suffered from severe hypothyroidism, you may have gone through times where you felt like you really just want to crawl away to a quiet place and rest for a long, long while. Your body was telling you to hibernate.

In addition to making our energy go dormant, high rT3 is also associated with increased levels of LDL, often in the 200s.

Interestingly, those who have added carbs back into their diet and have gotten retested find that their levels of rT3 have gone down without additional T3 supplementation. What’s more, if their LDL was high, adding carbs back to the diet also solved that problem as well, completely counter to the idea that carbs drive insulin which increases LDL.

I have to admit that though I have cared for thousands of people following low carb diets to my knowledge none ran into this problem so I paid very little attention to the issue with rT3. Only when I started reading about people suffering from thyroid side effects from following low carb did I started seriously thinking about that pesky little molecule. I wondered what it was supposed to be good for: Why would nature program our biology to manufacture a compound that seems to do little other than make people miserable and potentially clog our arteries?

The reason low carbing triggers thyroid changes

In doing research on rT3, I ran into a fascinating article on a group of little-understood compounds called thyronamines (pronounced thigh-row-na-meens). The key to understanding rT3, and unlocking the relationship between carbohydrate consumption and thyroid function, may lie in these newly discovered compounds.

Thyronamines have powerful effects on energy metabolism

Studies performed in 2010 showed that injecting thryronamines into the belly cavity or brain tissues of experimental animals cause the following physiologic and behavior changes:

• Impaired ability to utilize sugar as an energy source
• Insulin resistance
• Lowered basal body temperature
• Weaker than normal heart contractions
• A marked decline in activity (We can’t ask the lab animals, but presumably this would be induced by what we would describe as feelings of extreme fatigue)

Sound familiar?

Upon injection, the effects begin within minutes and last 8-12 hours.

And here’s the punchline: Thyronamines appear to be manufactured from that go-to-sleep hormone reverse T3. We can’t yet test you for high levels of thyronamines, but in testing your rT3, we are testing for the precursor of thyronamines. And I expect that, when studies are done in people, we will discover that high blood levels of rT3 does indeed correlate with high tissue levels of thyronamines.

I think this research is vitally important and that we will be hearing more about thyronamines in the future. But we are still left with a very important question that remains unanswered: What do we do about it?

For an answer, we can look to nature and find what I call The bear in the woods theory.

Changing from carb-burn to fat-burn demands new metabolic machinery

The bear in the woods theory suggests that it is the relatively sudden change from high carb to low that flips the switch.

Bears are omnivores, just like humans. And, of course, bears hibernate. Understanding the variations of a bear’s diet throughout the year helps us to understand why biology has built into our mammalian metabolism a sensitivity to changes in carbohydrate consumption.

Imagine you are a bear living in Yellowstone national park. It’s late summer and the salmon runs are gone, the grazing animals born in spring have now grown too fast for you to catch, the grubs under the rocks are all hatched, and pretty much all that’s left, aside from campground garbage, is nuts and berries. Plucking ripe berries off a bounteous shrub is far easier than cracking nuts, so you gorge on berries. In a few weeks, though, the berries are gone and there’s very little food left. That’s okay, because the abrupt decline in carbohydrate consumption is accompanied by increased reverse T3 and increased production of thyronamines, which makes you feel exhausted. Thanks to all the weight you gained, you are now so well padded with cushy fat that you think you could just crawl into a cave somewhere and sleep for a long, long time.

Research in humans shows that, just like bears, our thyroid hormones are influenced by major changes in the amount of carbohydrate consumed.

For some, an abrupt decline in available glucose may trigger an atavistic hibernation reflex, which will trigger the conversion of a thyroid hormone called T4 into something other than the normal T3, namely into the reverse form, rT3. rT3 then gets converted into thyronamines and causes all the symptoms of low thyroid function without significant deficiencies of thyroid hormone showing up on lab tests, leaving people to worry there is something incredibly wrong with their hormonal function.

 How do you enter fat-burning mode without going into hibernation? The solution is gradual change.

If you have gone low carb successfully, you have accomplished a major change in your metabolism, one that involves turning on scores of enzymes your body has not needed or used for a long time, decades in some cases. Not everyone can accomplish this overhaul in time. Those who can often continue low carb for life with great success. But those who cannot accomplish all the necessary changes flip the hibernation switch, increase production of rT3 and thyronamines, which causes crushing fatigue and may lead to intense carb cravings in order to turn off the hibernation switch again.

For these people, an easy way to avoid flipping the hibernation switch and reduce carb cravings may be to simply make a more gradual reduction in carbs rather than an abrupt one.

Atkins, who advocates an abrupt switch to less than 20 gm per day, seems to have been aware of this problem and in fact in his writing he warns people they may experience fatigue in the first few days or weeks after going very low carb. Unfortunately, for some people, the fatigue never improves and they give up on low-carbing all together.

 Instead of giving up, I believe you can try again but next time don’t go cold turkey on carbs. Cut back gradually.

Incidentally, none of my patients reported feeling worse when they went low carb. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that I introduced them to low carbing one meal at a time beginning with breakfast. I made this recommendation simply because I didn’t have time to go over everything with them in one visit. I only had time to give them ideas for one meal, and had them start by cutting carbs from breakfast because that is the time of day we are most able to switch our dormant fat-burn enzymes from off to on.

Bottom line: If you jump into the Paleo (or any low-carb) program and hit a brick wall because of side effects, instead of giving up on low-carbing for good, add back your carbs until you feel better again and then try cutting down again, but go slow to give your body the time to adapt to the idea. This way, your low metabolism can gear up to give you the fat burning benefits of hibernation without having to take the four month winter snooze.

Come out of the Carb-Cave and into the light of a rejuvenating diet!

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Listen to the conversation with Jimmy Moore here!

If you eat a Standard American Diet, not only are your fat-burn enzymes likely to be totally blocked (the technical term is downregulated), your hormonal systems fail to communicate properly and the effect is like a kind of accellerated aging. To address the blocked fat-burn, many turn to low-carb diets and, lately, the Paleo diet. But some do not stick with these diets strictly enough to rehab their damaged metabolism  and switch non-functioning genes back on, and this leads not only to weight regain, but also to continued progression of the underlying hormonal system problems and continued low energy and fatigue.

Many have resorted to hormone supplementation to treat problems like fatigue and weight gain, as well as hormonal imbalances incluing infertility, thyroid malfunction, andropause, menopause, and so on. But I encourage my patients not to rely on these supplementations programs.

Hormone systems are complex and interrelated, which is why supplemementation does not always lead to the expected results.

With hormone supplementation you can boost levels of the hormone(s) you are taking to feel better–for as long as you continue to take the hormones. But hormones weave a tangled web; there are numerous interconnected relationship and often your body doesn’t respond in the way you hoped. With diet you can enable your body to regulate all of its complex hormone systems more efficiently and, in essence, even rejuvenate your biological clock.

The Standard American Diet (SAD) Can Make Testosterone Levels Drop

Livinlavidalowcarb man Jimmy Moore, who lost 180 pounds following a low-carb diet, recently blogged about his revelation that in spite of his success with weight loss, his reproductive hormone levels were not up to full capacity. Salivary hormone testing had recently picked up a low testosterone level that was not obvious on blood testing done one year before. To treat the newfound problem and hopefully improve his wife’s chances for a successful pregnancy by improving sperm quality, Jimmy’s doctor started him on a very conservative (read “as safe as possible”) course of hormone therapy.

I wrote to Jimmy expressing my belief that, while the hormone therapy may help to improve one of the functions of his glandular system, it will not get to the root of the underlying cause of his complex glandular imbalances. Other factors would need to come into play to get his gonads whipped into shape (ouch! … maybe not the best way to put that, sorry Jimmy!). Always the gracious Southern gent, he invited me to talk about my solution to low testosterone and other hormonal problems live on his show. Click here to listen this thursday, Feb 23 at 7 pm EST to find out:

• If your diet could be blocking hormone systems in ways that lead to weight gain
• Why the solution to overweight is also the solution to many coexisting hormone imbalances

Three Diet Factors Undermine Most People’s Health

Jimmy and I will discuss how the following diet factors damage your metabolism in ways that first cause hormone resistance and then often lead to weight gain:

1. Excess carbohydrate, above about 100-150 gm per day (on the high end for men, low end for women)
2. Unnatural fat, including hydrogenated oils and vegetable oils falsely promoted as “heart healthy”
3. Inadequate fasting, with frequent snacks and grazing preventing the hormones of fasting to do their job

In my twenty-plus years of clinical experience as a Family Medicine physician, I have learned to identify the subtlest, early signs of diet-induced hormonal problems associated with later-in life health problems of easy weight gain, vascular diseases such as heart attack and stroke, and even diseases associated with aging such as osteoporosis, arthritis, and dementia.

Very often the first symptom to develop will be a need to eat to control ‘hunger’ symptoms like headaches, fatigue, irritability, shakiness and weakness, or nausea. I have also found that many young men and women, often still in their teens, with these symptoms are already on the road to developing diabetes as evidenced by an elevated fasting blood sugar level of 90 mg/dl.

Listen live and call in with your questions this Thursday at 7 pm EST: http://www.askthelowcarbexperts.com/

I hope you can join us for a ground-breaking conversation on sex, drugs, and the rocky road through weight-loss plateaus!

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If you know someone who made a resolution last year to lose weight and now, this year, you can see that they look more fit, then this means you likely have an acquaintance who has become a fat-burning master.

You too can learn to train every cell in your body how to burn stored fat—including omental fat and that cellulite you thought you couldn’t get rid of—for fuel.

When your body burns fat for fuel it is said to be in a “ketogenic state.” That’s the key to healthy, lasting weight loss. Let me tell you how its done.

Ketogenic versus Carbogenic

A low-carb diet switches on dormant fat-burning enzymes that high-carb diets switch off.  That’s why high-carb diets fail in the long term. But even when high-carb diets show some success in the short term, they still promote unhealthy weight loss.

On a high-carb diet you are burning sugar for energy, not fat. That’s why these diets often involve either calorie restriction, excessive exercise, or both. Do enough of that, and you might experience weight loss. But this begs the questions: Where is this weight coming from? The answer might surprise you: Studies show that people who lose weight following low-fat, high-carb diets are also losing muscle and bone mass, and even vital organs can shrink.

Going Ketogenic

We all know that sugar can provide a quick burst of energy. In fact, if your metabolism is carbogenic, you often need that burst of sugar-energy just to get through the day. This isn’t normal. Your body is engineered to run on fat, not sugar, most of the time. We can store roughly 2000 calories in the form of starch. Compare that to the virtually unlimited number of calories in the form of fat. The average 5 foot 5, 120 pound woman with 20% body fat carries about 36,000 calories worth of energy in storage, and bigger people carry much more.

There is a growing number of researchers studying the benefits of ketogenesis, sometimes called nutritional ketosis (not to be confused with diabetic ketoacidosis, which can be dangerous). They’ve discovered that ketosis can boost athletic performance, reduce epileptics’ seizures, and prevent cancer (learn more from the Nutrition and Metabolism Society, see link on right sidebar).

Why You Aren’t Ketogenic Right Now

Your cells would rather burn fat, but they can be trained to depend on sugar. If you’ve been eating a low-fat, high carb diet for years, by now you have down-regulated your fat-burning enzymes for so long, they may have completely shut down. Your cells may now be so dependent on sugar they will make your body produce it any which way it can.

If so required, your cells can convert protein into sugar. Can they also convert fat into sugar? Unfortunately, no. For this reason, sugar-hungry cells go on the hunt in muscle and bone, not your extra fat. I’ve had patients hunched over from premature osteoporotic fractures after following a high-carb (and low-protein) diet for several years.

Perhaps we should be thankful that cells aren’t that proficient in turning these good tissues into sugar. That’s why sugar burners can’t rely on these tissues to sustain them between meals.

Your Ketogenic Year Starts Today

I could go on about how high-carb diets do all kinds of other terrible things to your metabolism, like coating cell membranes, stiffening joints, and blocking hormonal signals. But I don’t want you to have to wait another minute (besides, I discuss all that in my books). Right now, I just want to it as easy as possible for you to come on over and join the ketogenic tribe.

Here are five simple things you can do starting now to make sure your resolution sticks.

Jump start your fat-burning enzymes for the day with a balanced breakfast.

In general, I recommend starting your day with a meal that provides roughly equal parts protein and fat, and no more than about 10gm of carb, and I would stick to real food, not powdered supplements. For example, I drink a cup of raw, whole milk with about two ounces of fresh cream in my coffee and twice a week or so that lasts me all the way to dinner. See recipes tab/breakfast for more ideas.

Keep daily carb totals under 100 gm, and between 30 and 70 gm for faster results.

Because of sugar’s toxic effects in your body, when you eat anything with enough carb to cause a blood sugar bump, the sugar triggers a phalanx of hormones designed to turn off your fat-burning enzymes and turn on sugar-burning and fat-making enzymes. Depending on your activity level and other hormonal factors, the per-meal maximum varies between 10-30 grams, and above that your fat-burning enzymes may be switched of all day.

Eat more fat.

If you’ve been drinking skim milk, eating low fat cheeses and fake-butter spreads, avoiding egg-yolks, and trimming the fat from your cuts of meat, you’ve deprived your body of nutrients your need for tissue regeneration and optimal health.

All animal fat from pastured animals is chock-full of nutrients including phospholipids, choline, and biotin, all of which have been used as weight-loss supplements. Dairy from pastured cows contains Conjugated Linoleic acid, another fatty acid that is sold for both weight-loss and cancer prevention. All such fats are generally not used for fuel but rather for constructing cell membranes, especially in your skin and nervous system. So as you put that pastured butter in the pan before frying up a couple free-range eggs, don’t think of what you’re doing as burdening your body with calories you’ll be carrying around or fuel you’ll need to burn. Instead, realize you are about to enjoy a meal that your DNA will use to create a stronger, healthier, thinner you.

Another reason you need fat is that your digestive system is incapable of absorbing fat-soluble antioxidants and vitamins A, D, E, and K without fat to facilitate the process. This means if you’ve been eating low-fat dressings on low-fat salads for lunch, most of the vitamins in those veggies have been passing right through you.

Get plenty of protein.

Now that you’re not tied to low-fat versions of protein rich foods, you can go ahead and enjoy truly nourishing, protein-rich foods like eggs, cheese, hamburger, and shellfish. Gauge the amount of protein you need in this protein matrix, below.

Stop snacking. Seriously.

If you want to lose weight, there is no such thing as a healthy snack. Why? Because snacking provides you with sugar and/or protein to burn for fuel, the body never had to dip into its fat reserves to keep you going. A few other reasons to quit snacking:

Isn’t it hard enough to plan 3 healthy meals a day? Do you really want to plan for a healthy snack on top of all that? After all, when you’re really in a rush, foods that might seem like a snack could serve as a meal, and seem more like a real, planned out meal if you don’t ever snack. For instance, sometimes I just have a couple of handfuls of nuts and a slice of cheese, or small pile of sauerkraut. For me, that’s a light lunch.

If you avoid snacks then by the time you finally get to eat you are more likely to actually be hungry. The hungrier you are, the better food tastes. Enjoying the taste of REAL food (carb-y and sweet foods don’t count as real food for reasons described elsewhere) is key to health and lasting weight loss success.

Your GI tract needs to rest. If you are eating every three to four hours, your intestinal system is always working and it’s just not designed for that. For one thing, when you eat, your GI tract is forced to draw several liters of fluid from your bloodstream, and interstitial tissues. This drops your blood pressure and can also make you feel tired, cold, or both. If you snack and then have to be up and rushing around, your body now has to route blood to your legs that your GI tract could really use. This is a set up for all sorts of digestive misfortune from GERD to irritable bowel and inflammatory conditions.

For best results, find an ally.

If you’ve been programmed by the government, high-school health class, and college nutrition courses to fear fat and find the opposite information presented here confusing, join the club.

We all heard low fat is healthy growing up and only the wisest among us could consciously reject it. I was programmed too, and spend many years in Hawaii trying to sort through conflicting technical science before I could, with confidence, give my patients this kind of new advice. The real boost to my confidence only came when I joined the Nutrition and Metabolism Society and met other like-minded health professionals all using a ketogenic diet to produce the similar amazing results. My point is, I know how hard it is to go against the mainstream idea on your own. So to that end, I encourage you to find an ally, ideally in your family or among friends, but if not, there are tons of online meeting places to help you.

One of my favorite resources is plain-talking, down-to-earth exercise-kinesiologist and weight-loss expert Sean Croxton. His Undergroundwellness website and podcasts will introduce you to lots of people who are using low-carb, high fat, high protein diets to help their patients see amazing health transformations, and his book is a fun read and offers lots of delicious recipes with links to detailed video instructions.

A few more great support-education sites:

http://Paleohacks.com/

http://jackkruse.com/

http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/

http://RobbWolf.com/

and for delicious recipes:

http://www.foodrenegade.com/

http://www.cavegirleats.com/

So if you’ve resolved to lose weight in the past and failed, 2012 is a fresh year. If you get serious about traditional food and healthy sources, 2012 could be the best year of your life.

If you have questions like What kinds of fats are good? or What kind of meat should I eat? I have answered most such questions elsewhere, and encourage further reading around the website.

If you would like to read one of my books and are not sure which one to read first, here’s what I usually advise. For those who have not read many nutrition books and don’t really enjoy knowing the full story but just want to cut to the instructions, I recommend you read Food Rules. For those of you who have a good background in nutrition or love science, I recommend Deep Nutrition first. Of course, many people end up reading both because the information in each is meant to complement, not replace, the other.

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What is the Paleo Diet

When Martians attack, carbo-loading could spell your doom!

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If you are getting into nutrition and are looking for diet books on Amazon.com, you’ll notice that the current best selling diet books tend to fall into two distinct groups: Vegan diet books and Paleo. Chances are you already know what a vegan diet is: No animal products of any kind. You may not be so familiar with Paleo. So let me introduce it to you.

The Paleo diet, also known as the Primal diet or the Ancestral diet, is a low-carb, high-protein diet that’s helping people all over the modernized world rid themselves of excess pounds and prescription medications. If you don’t have friends or relatives following a Paleo diet now, chances are you will very soon.

Unlike other popular diets that have come and gone, the Paleo diet is an attempt to recreate the diet of our ancestors living in the Paleolithic era ten or twenty thousand plus years ago, when people were still largely nomadic and didn’t need agriculture to support their needs for food. Leaders of the Paleo movement hope to move people away from the Standard American Diet and closer toward those foods of our human evolutionary past. You could call it an “anti-fad” diet.

Which begs the question, why would anyone want to “go Paleo” when, back then, a person would be expected to live something like 25 years?

The answer to ‘Why go Paleo’ depends on who you ask

If you ask Dr Oz, Oprah’s former weight-loss coach and America’s most widely recognized media MD, he’ll tell you that even though hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic era died on average much younger than we do, they did not have an obesity problem. To those of you who do not follow Dr Oz, a common theme on his show is that obesity is the root of all evil in terms of chronic disease and so any diet that avoids obesity is a good thing in his book.

If you ask the leaders of the Paleo diet movement—Robb Wolf and Mark Sisson are prominent figures—they’ll tell you that, thanks to a new branch of genetics called epigenetics, we know that the foods we eat program our genes. If our genes are still programmed the way they were during Paleolithic times, the argument goes, then they will function better when we eat the way our distant ancestors ate.

As a student of epigenetics, I agree with the general line of reasoning proposed by the Paleo diet movement’s leaders; we should eat what our genes ‘expect’ us to eat. And it seems clear, to me, that following a Paleo diet offers a number of benefits, beginning with these:

• It gets us away from processed foods
• It makes us pay attention to healthy animal practices which is good for human and environmental health. The movement also emphasizes eating pastured meats, fowl, and eggs instead of what Luke and I call ‘torture meat’ (animals fed grain in feedlots). This emphasis is good for the planet, the animals, and us
• Envisioning what our ancestors could and could not have eaten gets us thinking about food in a more holistic, common-sense way than we typically do
• Cutting high-carb/empty calorie grain-based breads and pastas reliably promotes fat loss
• Paleo diet programs include other behaviors that foster health, including (weight bearing) exercise and adequate sleep

A good way to understand the Paleo diet is by checking out a few of the most popular recipes, so here you go:

Paleo breakfast: Mushroom and green pepper three-egg omelette, or berry pancake souffle

Paleo lunch: Ham and swiss deli slices wrapped into a roll, or shrimp, cantaloupe, and mint salad

Paleo dinner: Stuffed pork chops or pasture-raised burgers with coconut oil

Paleo isn’t big on snacking between meals. And it’s definitely not designed to feed a sweet tooth. So if you happen upon a “Paleo-compatible” appetizer or desert, don’t think that the labels “appetizer” or “desert” are meant to encourage anyone to eat when they’re not really hungry. What’s good for you is good for you. And so there’s no reason not to enjoy a healthy Paleo-friendly appetizer or desert as a breakfast or lunch.

Authors of Paleo-diet recipe books accept the fact that these days we don’t have many wooly mammoths free ranging in our neighborhoods. And good quality meat has gotten a little harder to come by. Therefore, the movement includes plenty of vegetables, acknowledging the reality that we have a rainbow of tasty veggies, and we should enjoy them.

What’s not on the Paleo menu?

The Paleolithic era ended with the introduction of farming. This is why wheat, corn, and soy, staples of the Standard American Diet, are kapu—forbidden—in the world of Paleo.

It may seem a little arbitrary to exclude corn while including broccoli. This choice is based largely on macronutrient content. Broccoli, lettuce, and kale—even in modern form—more closely mimic the macronutrient content of the kind of vegetables our ancient ancestors encountered in the wild. While corn, wheat, and soy existed in Paleolithic times, only with the advent of agriculture have these seeds been specifically engineered into their current high-starch, high-calorie and low-nutrient form.

Starch turns to sugar in the bloodstream, harming your health by a process called glycation. You can experience the effects of sugar-protein glycation by putting a little jelly or syrup on your fingertips. During a few seconds of contact, the sugars in these sweet foods chemically bond to protein in your skin. Pulling your fingertips apart requires breaking those bonds, and you feel the resistance in the form of stickiness.

Getting high-starch foods like wheat, corn, and soy out of your diet helps you become a better fat burner.

Because sugar randomly bonding to proteins inside your body can have toxic effects, your metabolic machinery is designed to burn off excess sugar first before it can start burning fat. I need my patients to realize that that until they’re burning fat for energy, whatever exercise they may be doing to trim down is not going to get them very far because trying to burn fat for energy while your body is flooded with sugar is a loosing game. That’s one reason why low-carb diets succeed where others fail.

Burning fat is where its at: Why the key to Primal health is Ketogenesis

Ketones are the breakdown products of fat our cells burn for to produce energy when they are not burning sugar for energy. One of the consistent findings emerging over and over during the past forty years of weight loss research is that mammalian metabolisms, including ours, appear to work better when burning ketones (i.e. fat) for energy than when burning sugar. By work better, I mean on a ketogenic diet you can expect to benefit from things like this: your heart will pump more strongly, your lungs will keep carbon dioxide under better control, your brain is less likely to suffer inflammation that triggers things like migraines and seizures, and your mitochondria can keep their free-radicals under control, which helps to prevent cancer.

Who decides what’s paleo?

The Paleo movement, you’ll notice, hasn’t been named after a single physician or researcher or health guru. That’s because no one person in the Paleo movement claims to have the definitive last-word answer to everything. What all contributors to the movement seem to have in common is a genuine interest in discovering the best answers to some of the most pressing health issues of our time, like Why are so many of us fat? and What can our evolutionary past tell us about the particulars of an optimum diet? The Paleo movement changes and adapts to new information because science changes and adapts to new information. And that humble, questioning approach may be why millions worldwide are finding this new movement inspiring and appealing.

Is this diet of the distant past also the diet of the future?

Remember how I said said the Paleo movement is willing to accept change? The question of dairy consumption is a perfect example. At first, the Paleo movement categorically eschewed dairy. But more and more Paleo practitioners are taking a closer look at dairy. It’s a big topic, which is why I’ll be getting into it in more detail in my next post. (Click the subscribe link to receive notification via email.)

In the next post on Paleo dieting I'll consider how herding ancient herbivores may have initiated the demise of Homo neanderthalis.

Some great Paleo blogs to follow include:

Sean Croxton’s UndergroundWellness.com

Robb Wolf’s RobbWolf.com

Mark Sisson’s MarksDailyApple.com

Patrick Vlastovicks’s PaleoHacks.com

Kurt Harris’ Archevore.com

Liz Wolfe’s cavegirleats.com

And for all-around health info with lots of amazing recipes I like Kristen Michaelis’ FoodRenegade.com

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Unlike pills, coconut oil offers real nutrition and therefore has the potential to help your metabolism operate in a healthier way, thereby assisting with weight loss. But whether you can actually lose fat faster by adding coconut oil to your diet depends entirely on whether or not you are already getting equivalent nutrients from other foods.

Breakfast Smoothie: 1 Hass avocado, diced 1/2 cup plain yogurt 1/2 cup whole milk 1/4 cup cream of coconut 8 ice cubes Directions Combine avocado, yogurt, milk, cream of coconut, and ice cubes in a blender; blend until smooth. Effective Carb: 6

For the duration of my ten years in Hawaii, I think I only managed to consume the equivalent of a coconut or two. I DO love the rich, nutty-sweet flavor of coconut in all its forms (fresh, toasted, etc.). But since my personal chef, Luke, was more into using butter and olive oil, coconuts just didn’t make their way into many of our meals. If you’ve read Deep Nutrition, you already know that while in Hawaii I shed about 20 lbs without even trying and that this minor miracle was accomplished not with coconut oil but rather by balancing my diet.

Does coconut oil have special fatty acids that help with weight loss?

The key nutrient relatively unique to coconut oil is the medium chain fatty acids. Since we ate lots of other tropical fruits and nuts (macadamia, avocado), and butter from pastured cows, we had other sources of medium chain fatty acids. It’s not that these fatty acids will help with weight loss per se; they can help other aspects of health and thereby indirectly improve your weight. For example, medium chain fatty acids do have the ability to help kill viruses that hide behind a coating of fatty acids, specifically flu, hepatitis, and herpes-viruses. They also bind to albumen and other blood proteins that bind thyroid hormone and consuming more of them may help to optimize your thyroid hormone function by kicking the hormones off these carrier proteins and releasing them back into solution.

So if you don’t like coconut, you can seek these alternative sources of medium chain fatty acids and take heart in the fact that anyone can get healthy and lose weight (or more correctly, lose fat) by cutting carbs, avoiding MegaTrans fats, and getting all four of the Four Pillars into their diets, which essentially guarantees a balanced, nutrient rich, genetically optimal diet. No coconuts needed.

Are coconuts really good for you?

As with ANY food, the health-giving properties of coconut depend ENTIRELY on source and tradition.

Source refers to the plot of land that the coconut came from. Was it polluted? Was the soil depleted? Was the tree’s health fortified or destabilized by a climate in balance or in stress?

In general, the land coconut groves sit on tends to be relatively fit because coconuts grow in sand, the trees live for over 100 years, and coconut crops typically do not need artificial fertilizer inputs. These hardy trees are also fairly resistant to insect infestation and tend to produce well even without pesticide applications. Still, I would look for organic on the label. Though its no guarantee of purity, at least its a good start.

Tradition refers to the sum total of all human-activity that transported the coconut from the tree to your table. How was it harvested? Was it heated or pasteurized? Were chemical preservatives added? How long did it sit?

In general, the harvesting and handling of coconuts remains relatively non-industrialized because coconut oil resists deterioration through enzymatic decay (which could create rancid flavors), and so coconut milk and cream do not require the bleaching and harsh refining involved in the processing of vegetable oil. Additionally, because coconut oil it mostly composed of saturated fatty acids that resist heat-induced deterioration, coconut oil does not contain harmful MegaTrans fats.

My personal affinity for coconuts derives mainly from the simple fact that they’re yummy, healthy, and  they store well, so you can make a FAST super-healthy breakfast smoothie (see above) using inexpensive ingredients that keep for a while.

Confused by a cornucopia of coconut creams? Got coconut-milk conundrums?

Here’s a fantastic video from my friends at Rouxbe.com about buying coconut milk products.

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By GEORGE PELLETIER

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We’ve all grown up equating sugar to energy, but new research suggests our bodies are engineered to run on fat…

I recently attended a fascinating series of meetings in Baltimore, MD accompanied by the top physiology and weight loss specialists in the country. Although I’d long known sugar was dangerous and advised limiting all carbs to 50-100gm per day, going into the meeting I’d assumed we needed some. Specifically, I thought our brain cells required glucose because that’s what I learned from biochemistry books, physiology books, and other medical texts.

Your body requires ZERO grams of dietary carb. What little glucose your body requires (30gm) you can generate yourself from an ounce of protein

During the meeting, however, I became convinced by the abundance of newer lab and clinical data showing that brain cells, and the vast majority of other cells in the body, actually prefer a product of fat metabolism, called ketone bodies. The power plants of the cell that burn oxygen to produce energy in the form of ATP, called mitochondria, function poorly in the presence of another chemical, called malonyl-coA, which comes from the breakdown of glucose. Forcing mitochondria to deal with malonyl-coA overwhelmes their ability to control the high-energy electrons used in the making of ATP, and the result is a release of free radicals. Free radicals can cause DNA mutations as well as enzymatic destruction.

A minority of cell types actually do require glucose, specifically a few types of cells in the liver and cells without mitochondria (e.g., red blood cells). All other cells work perfectly well burning fat and special kinds of fat-breakdown molecules called ketone bodies. According to world-renowned metabolism expert Dr. Mary Vernon, we need 30 gm (2 Tbsp) of glucose per day to keep those cells that prefer glucose running properly. That small amount can readily be supplied by the conversion of protein to glucose in a metabolic process carried out through a cooperation between the liver and kidney, called gluconeogenesis.

What about Adrenal “Burn-Out”?

Somebody got the idea circulating that low-carb diets might cause adrenal “burn out,” and a few readers have asked about this. I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find any data supporting the theory. I do find a physiologically plausible mechanism by which carb consumption may cause adrenal gland problems. Take a look at the diagram I’ve adapted here (below) from a lecture presented by Dr. Jeff Volek. It illustrates the mechanism by which high carb diets produce energy swings.

High blood sugar causes excessive insulin release which leads to low blood sugar and a 'panic' reaction from the adrenal gland

It’s important to consider that, if you have a metabolism that’s been running on glucose for decades, your metabolism is not in a healthy state and therefore will need some time to realign itself with the input of proper nutrition. You’ll need to give your body some time to adapt to the new fat-burning state. A whole new set of enzymes will need to be re-manufactured, which can take a few weeks to accomplish. For those with metabolisms in serious trouble, I typically advise going low-carb one meal at a time (see http://TRIMProgram.com for more information)

Bottom line: All the latest science contradicts the assertion that we need carbs—any carbs—in our diets. This isn’t to suggest that everyone needs to remove carbohydrates entirely from their diets. Indeed, there may be some as-yet undiscovered benefit to dietary sugar. Today’s article is not meant to suggest that we’d all be better off with zero carbs in our diet. It is, however, meant to point out that very few of our cells need dietary sugars for energy, and therefore the old idea that we need to include carbs in our diets or we’ll feel tired all the time, is running on empty.

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Does coconut oil promote weight loss?

After I posted my last piece about burning off omental fat, I got a simple question from a reader named Rosemary that got me going over the hype about coconut oil. So rather than just give her my one liner:

“If you are asking whether coconut oil can help you lose weight, I can only say: Try it it might. It depends on what else is going on in your body.”

I realized the topic deserves a fuller discussion.

If Rosemary’s Fat Cells Could Talk, Here’s What They’d Tell Her

“We fat cells are often depicted as balloons of lard, and our internal lipids visualized as a bland white paste. In reality, we are complex and biologically active warehouses for thousands of different kinds of molecules, each of which serves a valuable function in your body. Love us! Why won’t you love us??! [this is a Star Trek Next Generation reference, and it's paraphrased...the first person who emails the episode and character name, and has posted a positive review of Deep Nutrition on Amazon or started a discussion about it on another pertinent web site, will get a coupon for a free Food Rules or Deep Nutrition on Kindle]

All fats and oils you eat are important to us. Naturally occurring (ie before any processing) fats and oils that lie (lay?) under the skin of healthy animals or ooze from gently squeezed seeds contain dozens of different chain lengths and, depending on their source, potentially hundreds of other different kinds of nutrients, all of which we’d be pleased to see from time to time. Have a nice day!”

If you have belly flab from eating trans fat, lauric acid MIGHT unblock certain metabolic pathways

Coconut Oil–Healing Miracle or Hype?

So your question, Rosemary, which is an important one because people are talking about coconut like its some sort of miracle, is in my opinion inspired by distorted information and sensationalism–so no wonder health consumers are confused. It’s a little like asking: Which is better vitamin A or vitamin E. Both are not only good, but you also need them both. And a similarly mis-oriented question might be: Which is better for you broccoli or walnuts? Of course that is a silly one too, right? Both are good for you, and your cells must have access to the kinds of information contained in both.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

If your diet already contains something like the kind of chemical information in coconut oil, then coconut oil is of less value to you than if your body has been deprived. I personally don’t eat much coconut oil because I don’t happen to have easy access to it or recipes that require it.

Now if you have stubborn belly flab, that’s a different story. Here’s why:

Can coconut oil help you lose omental fat? MAYBE!

If you are experiencing trouble losing belly flab or a weight loss plateau, or other obvious health problem, a high dose of lauric acid just may be the key that unblocks certain metabolic pathways often blocked by trans fat or excessive carb consumption. (Notice the words might and maybe.) The only way to find out is to try it for a while. It’s food, after all, it is not going to hurt you. Then if you don’t see any results after a few weeks, it’s not a healing miracle for you. If you do see impressive weight loss or your belly starts getting thinner, then you had a blocked pathway and now it’s fixed. And, here’s another bit of good news, you probably don’t need to continue buying coconut oil. (Unless you like it.)

The Plop Not Heard ‘Round The World

So if now I’ve got you worrying over whether or not your diet contains something like the nutrients in coconut oil, before you invest time in tabulating each and every nutrient in everything you eat, I’d like to point something out. Coconuts fall from the trees in abundance in the tropics. New England? Not so much. The Bedford cemetery out here in New Hampshire has headstones showing people lived into their 80s and 90s in the 1600s and I’m pretty sure they did it without coconut oil.

So is coconut oil an essential part of a healthy diet? NO! Not essential at all because we can get the same kinds of nutrients from a diet rich a wide variety of other healthy foods. (Healthy meaning considering source and tradition…see my response to a question reader Matt posted here.)

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Dr Oz Shows Oprah Where the Omental Fat Builds Up

If you have a big ‘ol belly, or even a smallish one but you are apple shaped (that was me), then you have two layers of stored fat around your middle instead of the normal single layer. You’ve got some normal under-the-skin fat, called subcutaneous fat, and then you’ve got some abnormal fat built up around your intestines, called omental fat. Healthy people have a thin layer of fat under their skin. But having fat around your intestines is not normal.

To learn how to get rid of it, it helps to know how it got there. This is my understanding of the process, in a short summary:

When you eat unhealthy foods, your body can’t manufacture normal fat carrying particles called lipoproteins. Without normally functioning lipoproteins, your body has a hard time transporting fat from place to place, so it tends to stay in the first place it ends up after a meal: Within the tissue that supply all of your intestines with blood, called the omentum. If your triglycerides are high and your HDL (“good” cholesterol) is low, that’s a sign that you have abnormal fat-carrying particles and are likely to be lugging around more omental fat than someone with the same size waistline who has low triglycerides and high HDL.

So if you want to get rid of omental fat, and trim your waistline, you have to do these two things:

1) Get your lipoproteins back to normal, and
2) Burn fat for energy.

If being healthy had the equivalent of a first rule of thermodynamics it would be this: What’s good for one part of your body is good for all other parts. So the same foods and activities that fix your lipoproteins will enable you to burn fat for energy and get rid of belly fat for good.

Isabel De Los Rios follows Deep Nutrition's principles

And you can read more about the T.R.I.M. program weight-loss approach, which burns belly flab and builds muscle, bone, and brain power, at www.TrimProgram.com.

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Toxic health advice.

…so say some researchers who suggest that if you are overweight it might be better to just let excess fat hang around.

Toxins can concentrate in your fat cells. And if you lose weight, this particular group of scientists says, toxins that have already concentrated in your fat cells are likely to be released back into your bloodstream. So the risks and balances might not pan out and, here’s their big sound bite: Weight loss might be dangerous.

This screwball perspective comes from a team of researchers lead by Dr. Duk-Hee Lee at the Kyungpook National University in Daegu in South Korea. Her team studies Persistent Organic Pollutants (affectionately named POPs), which may have a variety of detrimental health effects.

PCP’s? So Last Century. POPs Are the New Hot Eco-Threat

POPs come from pesticides and a range of modern-lifestyle necessities such as solvents, polyvinyl chloride, and pharmaceuticals. They get into the air, water, and food and are currently impossible to fully avoid, even if you eat organic.

We don’t know exactly what POPs do because, like all such research in our increasingly polluted world, drawing a connection between any single type of toxin and any single disease is impossible. But potential health effects include abnormal sexual and brain development in children, and cancer and atherosclerosis in adults.

Toxic Talking Points

In her statements, Dr. Duk-Hee seems to make the absurd suggestion to any public health officials who might be listening that, rather than do anything along the lines of cleaning up our environment, time is better spent scaring people about this postulated theoretical harm of making positive lifestyle changes to lose weight.

“We are living under the strong dogma that weight loss is always beneficial, but weight gain is always harmful…but we think that increased (pollutant) levels (in the blood) due to weight loss can affect human health in a variety of ways.”

What to Do? Don’t Trust Your Government to Help. Trust Your Liver

In the Duk-Hee study, people who had recently lost weight had higher POPs in their blood. But they are unlikely to have those higher levels for long. A healthy liver can flush these kinds of molecules down the body’s drainpipe: the bile ducts. And since the study subjects had recently lost weight, one might imagine that their livers are busy with the process of flushing, and are likely to eventually drop those POP blood levels back to previous levels.

Our liver and bile systems are evolutionarily designed to excrete the fat-soluble toxins our body produces as a by product of everyday metabolic processing.

I can, however, see this research being used next to justify all sorts of colonic exorcisms. Washing out your guts to remove the toxins might seem a necessity if you don’t understand how the body works. But inserting fluids up your rear end or swallowing pills that make you produce prodigious plasticized poo is only going to disrupt normal bowel function.

My advice on detoxing is this:

1. Don’t eat toxins. (See my posts on vegetable oils and sugars, and even more information in my books)
2. Make saturated fat from healthy plant and animal sources a part of your regular diet.

Healthy fats can help you detox bad fats. Saturated fat and cholesterol trigger bile production and release, and bile fluids are the escape vehicle for POPs and all kinds of bad chemical players.

So skip the colon cleanse and sit down to a healthy egg and cheese omelette, if you can find a good supply of animal products. And if you can’t, well then we’re all in trouble, aren’t we?

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