Diet discussion

I do not have a lab (not even a lab-coat), but in all seriousness I’d like to say that I am a bit worried of any diet that my body needs two months to adapt to so that it can start a process ending with -sis.

Call me weird, but I think that nature and evolution, while not perfect, have designed stuff that work. And a human body works well, so the best diet I’ve found is “eat as much as is needed and not excessively, move around during the day, try to do some activity you like to exercise your body”.

Unless someone has very specific health problems like the type 2 diabetes you mentioned, I think that very specific diets should be postponed/avoided, until someone has at least tried the reasonable/natural approach of “eat well and move your body”.

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The diets we have adapted to for millions of years until the end of the Paleolithic are very different from modern diets. No dairy, no cereals, wild game, wild plants and fruits, no processing, no added salt or sugar, etc.

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People will do anything to get slimmer and that’s not for health reasons.
If it was for health reasons, Greek TV audiences wouldn’t fall for the “frapeliá” magic drink recipe (crushed olive tree leaves, raw, mixed in water) or any other super diet trick marketed by celebrities.

My rule for diets and medicine is: if my doctor says “no” and a TV personality says “yes”, it’s a “no”.

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Who’s to say that humanity stopped evolving after the paleolithic? Our bodies certainly have adapted to agricultural food and even locally these things are clear, like people being lactose tolerant in areas where cow milk was habitually drunken.

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10000 years is really not much compared to millions of years of evolution. Humanity certainly didn’t stop evolving, however lactose tolerance is not for everybody
310px-Worldwide_prevalence_of_lactose_intolerance_in_recent_populations
In addition, milk also contains proteins.

Anyway I’m not saying you shouldn’t drink milk or eat dairy, especially if you are Dutch, but that humanity only has partially adapted to foods that appeared during the Neolithic. But probably processed foods have done more harm to human health than cereals and dairy, and eating mostly whole food would be good enough for the majority of people.

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I am no doctor and I’m very prone to do my own researches.
When my sister-in-law started keto diet with remarkable weight loss and my wife was so interested in it, I did my own research.

My results were:

  • keto diet is dangerous, it tweaks metabolism in a quite drastic way
  • keto diet may cause great weight loss in a short amount of time
  • be very careful and absolutely do that under strict medical control

Since my sister-in-law was doing it under medical control I had nothing to say about that, except for “congrats for your weight loss”.

On the other side, when my wife decided to give it a DIY try, I was very concerned about her health.
It didn’t last long enough to cause issues or significant weight loss, so probably she just didn’t try it hard enough and I was very relieved when she seemed to forget about it.

It’s just my two cents of “my own researches”.

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You are just being mean now. I didn’t make any arg from auth and you know it. I’m working on a project now. I am busy. I’m willing to try to help you but you have to accept help. If not, have a great life. Meeting on Zoom is a good use of my time, trying to have an important discussion by text is not.

  • Keto diets create a drastic change in metabolism from one natural state to another. Glycolysis doesn’t work well in a society that puts enormous amounts of carbs into our diet.

  • Keto diets cause a normalization of weight in a natural way. In my case, I went from about 180 pounds down to 138 pounds in several months–that is not a short amount of time.

  • Yes, it is best to see a doctor familar with keto and get instructions. It is NOT just “eat less carbs and more fats”!

When humans were evolving, average available food sources would change fairly slowly, so adapting to a carb-rich or a fat-rich diet didn’t need to be instantaneous. For example, the Inuit always had whale blubber as a major diet component, so presumably their metabolism was always in ketosis. At the time they were first contacted (and invaded) by European white culture, they were healthy and needed no doctors or dentists. It was not long after that contact that doctors and dentists were very much needed. Today, the Inuit tend to obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks.

As to the “-is” suffix, it just means a condition. It doesn’t imply health or illness.

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True, we still evolve to meet changing challenges of our environment. But some mechanisms don’t evolve as easily as others. Our fundamental metabolism is one such mechanism. The problem is not evolution, the problem is supermarket aisles that are full of carbohydrates, differing only in flavor and texture.

Unfortunately, doctors are generally poorly educated about ketosis. Many confuse it with ketoacidosis, which is a life-threatening condition.

The American Diabetic Association is also stuck in the past, focusing on the variety of medicines for type 2 diabetes that doctors are used to prescribing. The problem is that not one of these medicines prevents insulin resistance, so more and more medicine is needed to treat diabetes. I am now free of that treadmill of more medicines, as I take no medicine and instead enjoy a healthy ketogenic diet of foods that I like.

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Doctors aren’t omniscient or 100% diligent, but they surely have 8+ years of formal training on medicine more than I do.

Doctors are not medical researchers so may not be aware of recent scientific literature on a given subject.
A warning however: if you want to review research papers by yourself, be aware that some experiments are poorly controlled, that in vitro experiments don’t allow to draw conclusions in vivo, and that many facts are controversial with 60% papers supporting a point of view and 40% the opposite.

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That may be true, but most doctors don’t even know there is a normal metabolic state called ketosis. This is truth. Poll some doctors yourself; you’ll be surprised. My own doctor, before he retired, told me he had heard of the ketogenic diet, and had other patients who were on it successfully, but could offer me no advice since he had never studied ketosis and didn’t know the details.

He was happy that I could get off of his medications, but I doubt that it created in him enough curiosity to research it. Doctors stay with what they think works. They are not gods, just human beings.

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Chicken with Paprika Cream

1 to 2 lb cubed, uncooked, chicken breast meat.
1/3 to 1/2 onion, chopped.
1 Garlic clove chopped, or 1 tablespoon of dried garlic chips.
2 Tablespoons of Paprika (Can use 3 or 4 for stronger taste)
5 Tablespoons of butter, divided
1 Teaspoon of Garlic Salt
1 to 2 Teaspoons white pepper
3 cups of heavy cream

Melt a tablespoon of butter in a large frying pan and add a tablespoon of olive oil. Fry the chicken over medium heat, then turn down and cook 4 to 5 minutes covered. Remove chicken from the pan.

Add 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of oil. When the butter is melted add the garlic and onion and fry until tender. Add 3 tablespoons of butter, and when melted add the paprika, salt, and pepper.

Blend over heat, then slowly add the heavy cream (remember to shake the containers well before pouring). Stir and cook the cream sauce over low-medium heat until just showing signs of beginning to boil, then add the cooked chicken. When it again shows signs of beginning to boil, reduce heat to low, stirring frequently.

Simultaneously with the sauce, prepare noodles. When preparing the noodles add chicken boullion to the water and use garlic salt instead of regular salt. Add olive oil to the water just before it begins to boil.

Serve paprika cream sauce over noodles with shredded Parmesan or Romano cheese and garlic bread.

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I can certainly appreciate that point.

The amount of time one can spend trying to type out, copy and paste things, find things to share (which ultimately might not be read) to the other person etc isn’t necessarily small, and could be significantly more than in a conversation. (Even just this sentence took time to write and format and typo check)

I’ve no comments on diets at this moment however as I have not looked into them.

Quite so and this is why humans are omnivores. You can find us almost everywhere on the planet eating almost anything on the planet. From seals and fish and rotten shark, to honey and actual insects and fermented fruit juice with snakes in it we can metabolise all that stuff and survive.

Your Inuit example is good, but, alas, I am not Inuit and was not born with that diet and environment, ergo I would have to switch from my diet - and the environment I am adapted to - to a diet that belongs to a different environment and different people, which frankly does not sound very healthy to me, at least not as long as I have not tried to do more reasonable, appropriate and lighter diets yet. The Pandas and them switching to eating bamboo comes to mind. They survive, they are healthy, but that’s about it. Their metabolism is now totally different than it was before they got into that eating habit.

Since this is a Go forum, allow me a Go analogy.
I do not pay nor take any lessons at Go to get better, not because I do not need those lessons or those would not be beneficial, but because I have not yet done everything in my power to get better at Go on my own
Since I have not done my best and hit my limit, any tutor would probably waste their time on me

Same logic applies to diets. Since I have not yet managed to apply myself to easier diets and see if they work, I find it unlikely that I would manage a harder and stricter one or that it would really be beneficial to try one.

Just like Go lessons are good and useful, under some conditions, Keto can be good and useful, again, under some conditions and I am very happy to hear that this diet helped you so much with your health. :slight_smile:
It is just not for me yet, but I always keep my options and my ears open for new knowledge.

I know. :slight_smile: I just like to avoid getting any conditions.

Like homeostasis?

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hey, I already got that. I do not want to get any new ones :stuck_out_tongue:

So what you want is the condition of not changing: homeostasis. Literally, “same-state-always”.

However, more seriously, I’ll point out that both glycolysis and ketosis are normal states of metabolism. Evolution created both so we could tolerate differing lifestyles and diets. However, too much sugar and starch while in glycolysis results in diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. It is your choice as a human whether it is worth your while to learn about the advantages of a ketogenic diet. Nobody is forcing you to learn.

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