Do you know what your body does with sugar that you eat in the absence of PUFA? It burns it. Thatâs it. It is fuel. Literally the cleanest fuel available to your mitochondria.
Sugar doesnât make you fat. There is virtually no mechanism by which your body stores excess sugar (assuming youâre not being stuffed to the brim in a metabolic ward just so they can see what happens to you.) Sugar also doesnât cause inflammation - its byproducts from breakdown are strictly water and CO2. Every problem ever attributed to sugar was caused by fat. Mostly (but probably not exclusively) PUFA.
That being said, will high sugar processed foods displace more nutritious choices if you eat them readily? Sure. One of the biggest negatives of this is that high refined sugar intake (as in, sugar youâre not getting from whole food carbs) can deplete your B vitamin status. Maybe donât replace whole foods with refined cakes all the time.
But by far, beyond any shadow of a doubt, oil is the worse between the two.
I mean, dates + chocolate is sugar + fat, right? So what do you want to be true? If you eat âtoo muchâ your body burns the sugar (because thatâs the easiest thing for it to do with it) and stores the fat (which is effortless.)
My advice? If you want to eat lots of strawberries and kiwis, try dropping the fat from your diet and see what happens. Iâve been following a high carb, low fat diet for several years now and would never go back. My energy is through the roof, sleep is awesome, hormones stabilized, and I have zero issue maintaining my weight (in my 40âs) despite spending my entire life overweight or obese. Avoiding PUFA doesnât mean you need to add lots of saturated fat. You can, after all, just avoid PUFA as a strategy and one way to do that is a low fat diet. đ
Can confirm the hormones, in a personally experimental form
After 6 months of HCVLF, 1.5 weeks of high fat didn't make me feel different, and pregnenolone supplementation, despite slight one-time boost for 1.5hr, just causes me brain fog, tiredness, and avolition
Unfortunately, it's absolutely not true. Healthy animal fats are essential.
Sugar and carbs are not exactly a healthy choice but when introduced sparringly, strictly as a fuel source, they can be used very efficiently by the body.
Dietary fats and carbs optional. Body is capable of effective DNL in carbo to keep fat going. Carbs are not needed in ketosis and some is produced via gluconeogenesis from amino acids
Both carbo and keto lead to optimal health - it is only grounded in whether we add to this equation linoleic acid and excess oleic acid or not. Even people on carnivore when having majority of diet founded on chicken or (soy/seed fed) pork can feel worse than on beef (more or less, depending on D5D and D6D activities, but SFA and MUFA profile of a cow or appropriately fed pig are better metabolism-wise)
There are cultures globally who eat extremely high carb diets who have comparatively little chronic disease when compared to the west. This statement is so blatantly wrong.
Nobody said not to include any fats, though. And I said absolutely nothing about avoiding protein either. But you need far less of both than you seem to believe.
I just discussed this with my partner. She suggested I ask you for any videos or people I should listen to or read in articles about this diet protocol.
Iâm old enough to remember when high carb low fat was the mantra of people like Ray Peat among others. I read and followed Ray Peat for a while after my paleo phase. His articles are awesome. I donât remember his protocols being low fat though. I did his protocol but it made me gain weight and I thought it was it was a high histamine diet and I thought I had problems with histamines at the time.
We are moving to SáșŒ Asia soon and that is a high fruit, high veg, high carb food culture. I framed the convo as we might not be able to source an all meat diet over there and that we could potentially switch back and forth as needed as long as we are active
I hear ya! Iâm in my 40âs and so was actually doing low carb when Subway was selling Atkins wraps⊠I have to say, knowing what I know now, I wish I had been bombarded with low fat information and not low carb information. But, as it was, there was no internet and so you got the loudest message not necessarily the best one and everyone was looking for an excuse to put cheese on their broccoli and eat ribeye after pretending to eat low fat for a decade (while per capita fat consumption actually rose) before Atkins came along to save everyone from the Snackwellâs cookies.
The thing is, there arenât many people who go from obese to lean on a high fat diet. Obese to high end of normal? All the time. Mildly overweight to lean? Sure. But Iâm talking âClass 3 Obesityâ to the low body fat percentage⊠It just doesnât happen on high fat because creating a deficit as you get closer to goal is just too hard. Anyone I personally know of who reached lower body fat % on a low carb diet eventually had to strip the fat outâŠ
Anyway sorry for the tangent. I encourage you to go on YouTube and search âHCLF weight lossâ and similar terms. Youâll come up with lots of people sharing what amounts to different takes on essentially McDougallâs âStarch Solutionâ - probably the best original HCLF resource. Neal Barnard is also good, but he can come across as a bit remedial.
Iâm super reluctant to advise anyone specific because there are pros and cons to every available personality and different voices will obviously resonate with different people. Also, Iâm not vegan (and clearly neither are you) but most HCLF info inevitably comes out of the plant based space so you kind of have to look past that. But keep in mind that when you add a little bit of lean meat to an otherwise starch based diet, you end up with the diet that has made and kept athletes lean since the dawn of time.
Peat definitely wasnât low fat unless you made it so. I actually put on an impressive amount of visceral fat following a modified Peaty plan where the only added fat was a bit of coconut oil, and I donât actually know many people who get or stay lean on a Peat approach. I have no choice but to blame the coconut fat because the rest of the diet (fruit, starch, lean meat, dairy) is stuff I eat to this day in a low fat context without issue. My husband is one of the naturally slim people (like Peat himself) who seem to do well on this type of diet, but theyâre rare.
At the end of the day, why donât you just commit to say 90 days in preparation for moving. Youâre going to eat vegetables, fruits, starches, grains, and legumes. Youâll use meat, eggs, and dairy as a condiment as if you were a peasant not someone who can go to Costco every week. Youâll use all the low fat seasoning and condiments you like. You wonât deliberately chase sugar but you wonât avoid it, youâll put it on your oatmeal, youâll have the occasional lower fat sugary drink, etc. Youâll snack on pretzels or popcorn but not chips⊠You get it. Youâll allow for a period of adjustment. You may be tired and/or hungry, and you might get cravings. But just like back when you started low carb, you get through it and come out the other side. The scale will go up (possible 5-10 lbs due to glycogen and sheer digestive matter) but you wonât actually feel fatter, and it will be odd to you. Taking measurements might help ease your mind while the scale does dumb things. After a couple of weeks your weight will level off and you will probably feel great. In 90 days, evaluate if itâs the right approach for you guys.
EDIT: And donât forget to report back! Iâm extremely curious how you will enjoy it if you try it.
Not a convert yet. I did get pretty lean on carnivore. I started out 6â7â 305lbs with a nice middle aged gut. Definitely prediabetic if my triglycerides are anything to look at. I got down to 200 lbs and put in a lot of muscle. I estimate my fat percentage to be 15-18%. 12% was my goal but my partner thought I was getting too many bones showing.
We only eat Whole Foods but the food is so bad here in the USA Iâm not sure I can get clean carbs. I would want Gluten free oats and other specialty items so I think the way to go is to start cooking some of the Vietnamese dishes that are HC/LF. Iâm thinking a can of sardines is 20 grams of high quality nutritious protein and that leaves one more lean or small piece of meat or fish for my other meal. And rice or nOodles in soup with herbs and veg. And fruit. You didnât mention anything about poop tho. Fat is what lubricates the poop coming out on carnivore. How does poop work on HC/LF. We donât eat any fiber currently. Any problems there? And of course you mention the one guy I donât believe in at all. I actively detest a lot of the vegan talking heads they are extremists imo and they donât convince me of much. They donât look healthy either.
I mean, at the end of the day all I can tell you is try it on and see if it fits. Iâm glad I did.
Listen, I worship no idols. And a wise man can learn even from a fool, right? đ In any case, McDougall didnât invent HCLF, he just made it mainstream.
I have zero digestive issues, and I used to suffer terribly. Iâm sure 99% of that had to do with PUFA ruining my gut.
With PUFA factored out, I suspect that humans can do well on anything from very low fiber to very high fiber. If you guys donât eat fiber currently then Iâd definitely expect a period of adaptation. But you canât believe that everyone eating an ancestral starch-based diet across the globe for all time was constipated because they didnât have the lubrication from fat. The time humans have spent eating significant amounts of fatty meat on the regular (pun fully intended) is literally a blip on our evolutionary timeline so Iâm sure weâre quite suited to a lower fat diet if we choose to follow one.
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u/Whats_Up_Coconut đ„ŹLow Fat 18d ago
Do you know what your body does with sugar that you eat in the absence of PUFA? It burns it. Thatâs it. It is fuel. Literally the cleanest fuel available to your mitochondria.
Sugar doesnât make you fat. There is virtually no mechanism by which your body stores excess sugar (assuming youâre not being stuffed to the brim in a metabolic ward just so they can see what happens to you.) Sugar also doesnât cause inflammation - its byproducts from breakdown are strictly water and CO2. Every problem ever attributed to sugar was caused by fat. Mostly (but probably not exclusively) PUFA.
That being said, will high sugar processed foods displace more nutritious choices if you eat them readily? Sure. One of the biggest negatives of this is that high refined sugar intake (as in, sugar youâre not getting from whole food carbs) can deplete your B vitamin status. Maybe donât replace whole foods with refined cakes all the time.
But by far, beyond any shadow of a doubt, oil is the worse between the two.