Monday, June 13, 2011
Nutrient Intake and Substrate Oxidation part 2
Nutrient Intake and Substrate Oxidation
- the body does not manage 'energy balance', it manages substrate stores and
- high fat diets may not be good for weight loss because they may make it too easy to (paraphrasing the end of the blog post) consume more fat than your body burns daily, (so that) you will increase your body fat day by day.
You might be able to achieve this on a low carbohydrate diet, and you might not. If eating a low carb diet allows you to eat less fat than you burn daily, you will lose fat, and if it doesn’t you will not. On the other hand, regardless of theoretical "energy" intake, if eating a low carbohydrate diet results in your consuming more fat than your body burns daily, you will increase your body fat day by day.
"1-2 d before beginning each experimental feeding period."
"Body composition was determined at the beginning and end of each experimental feeding week..."but this data is not reported.
"For each subject, total caloric intake was identical on all diets and was intended to provide the subject's maintenance energy requirements."
"for a level of activity typically seen during 24 h in the room calorimeter"and pointed out that this
"might have resulted in negative energy balance on other days when activity outside the calorimeter may have been greater."
- the authors note that the values for the mixed diet period are higher and that this is because two subjects, who happened to have the lowest activity levels, were excluded from this part of the experiment
- the mean energy expenditures due to activity during the high carb diet were noticeably (although again presumably not significantly) lower than for the high fat diet.
In the follow-on post, the nutrient balance figures will be discussed.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Latest low carb diets cause atherosclerosis story
But wait, it's not just a low-carb diet, it's an especially high-protein diet and to be fair to the researchers that seems to have been their intention. In the first place to change only one variable - so they held the fat content steady with respect to the western diet and cut the carbs. To keep the diet iso-caloric (to avoid the confounding effect of energy intake differences) they had to increase another macronutrient, so they chose protein. A second reason for this might be that ,in general, low-carb diets for humans (which should really be high fat diets (43% No?! really high-fat - try 68%)) are often camoflauged as high-protein diets to smoothe the sensibilities of the fat-phobes. And to be fair again, the authors do pass comment that the results point out effects of macronutrients other than fat.
So, first reactions:
- the diet is really, really high in protein - 45% - this could be directly bad for the mice, for these particular mice or for any mice. For humans, it's well-known that there is a physiological limit to protein intake - 30-40% is the often quoted figure. This quote is from Loren Cordain's paleo diet faq.
It is physiologically impossible to gain weight when lean protein is the only food consumed because of the body's limited ability to break down protein and excrete the by-product of protein metabolism (urea). This limit is called the physiological protein ceiling and varies between 30-40% of the normal caloric intake in most people, assuming they are consuming their usual (eucaloric) energy intake. Continued consumption of lean protein at or above the physiological protein ceiling without added fat or carbohydrate will elicit symptoms of so-called "rabbit starvation," a malady eliciting lethargy, diarrhea, weight loss, electrolyte imbalances, and eventual death. Hence, all people will lose body weight if limited to consumption of lean protein.
- Most studies of the danger of high protein intake focus on renal consequences and one study on rats found no ill consequences of a 50% protein intake (however, the study was really short-term). It's extremely difficult to establish what other issues there might be with a very high protein intake.
- The protein given to the mice was casein. While not wishing to add to the hysteria over milk and heart disease (and being a cheese lover), it has to be pointed out that milk protein has some form (admittedly in the shape of weak epidemiological evidence) in the causes of CHD stakes. There is an extensive discussion in the comments at Whole Health Source here. And despite all the folklore surrounding mice and cheese, mice aren't really cheese-eaters.
To see this consider the following example: a 2000 calorie western diet with 42% carb/43% fat/15% protein has 210g carbs, 95g fats and 33g protein whereas a 2000 calorie 'low-carb' diet with 12%C/43%F/45%P has 60 g carbs, 95g fat and 100g protein. Let's say 15% protein or 33g matches the body's protein needs, that means in the second diet there are 67g extra. While this doesn't mean that 67g of carbs will be generated, it does mean that the diet does have greater parity in the quantity of carbs and fats presenting for energy provision, which isn't a good thing physiologically.
Update: this probably isn't the reason the mice on the 'low-carb' diet did worse than the western diet mice. Apart from the simple fact that apoE -/- mice are doomed by their genetic oddity, there seems to be an extra issue with the high protein -specifically the casein which leads to kidney damage and a specific effect on those cells which can regenerate blood vessel damage - see Peter's updates here.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The American Paradox
Not surprisingly this diet is high calorie (3205 kcal) and high-fat (although not as high-fat as my diet!): 40% fat (144g) by energy, 48% (394g) carbohydrate (which is within the average minimum daily recommendation (45-60%) of the 2005 dietary guidelines) and only 13% protein (106g). What is surprising is that, according to Fitday, such a menu contributes only 13% of calories as saturated fat - putting it close to the recommendation (less than 10%); 10% as monounsaturated fat and a whopping 13% fat as polyunsaturated fat. Most of that polyunsaturated fat will likely by omega-6 fatty acids as its source is the vegetable oils which are ubiquitous in processed foods. This indiviudal's body cell membranes will be saturated with omega-6 fats as in Stephan's graph here.
If you eat processed foods, the only way to get your omega-6 polyunsaturates down would seem to be by eating a very low fat diet. Here is my 'extremely health-conscious low-fat eater's' diet. This lady starts the day with oatmeal porridge made with water, followed by multigrain toast with a smear of honey. She always puts skim milk in her tea and coffee and doesn't take sugar. A home-made chicken (breast meat, no skin!) and salad sandwich is followed by an apple. Although she succumbs to an oatmeal cookie with her cup of tea, dinner is a healthy chicken and vegetable affair on wholewheat macaroni, followed by a banana and light ice-cream. Trouble is she's hungry later, so it's a non-fat yoghurt and a small bowl of muesli (skim milk of course) just before bed.
Actually, I had to add those snacks in, not only because our subject might be hungry due to the lack of fat and overload of carbohydrates but just to get the calories up above starvation levels to a respectable 1842 kcal. This diet is 22% fat (46g), 61% carbohydrate (294g) and 17% protein (80g). It has only 5% of total calories as saturated fat, 8% as monounsaturated fat and 6% as polyunsaturated fat. So even with a diet meeting the 2005 dietary guideline recommendation for carbohydrate and fat intake (20-35%), the intake of polyunsaturated fat is above the level which may cause problems if it is predominantly omega-6 as explained here.
What about someone in between those two extremes? Here is someone who is trying to eat 'healthily' but not always succeeding. This person starts the day with 'heart-healthy' Cheerios with 2% fat milk and some toast with jam, but is hungry by mid-morning so succumbs to a muffin with a Latte coffee. H/she also eats a chicken and salad sandwich for lunch - but not necessarily home-made - and an apple. Hungry in the afternoon, a diet brownie is eaten. Dinner is chicken in a cheese sauce with macaroni (white not wholewheat) and a green and tomato salad with a commercial dressing, followed by some tinned fruit and light ice-cream.
This diet is 2176 kcal and still within dietary guidelines: 30% fat (75g) and 55% carbohydrate (302g) and about the same amount of protein (80g) or 15% by energy as in the low-fat diet. Once again, polyunsaturated fat is high - 10% , equal to the proportion of monounsaturated fat, and thanks to all the innovative processed foods eaten, saturated fat consumption is well within the dietary recommendation target at only 8%.
So this is the American paradox. Thanks to the processed foods now available, saturated fat consumption has been reduced towards target. Even the least health conscious can now eat pizzas, snack foods and chocolate bars and be approaching the holy grail of 10% of calories! The public have long been doing their bit to get their carbohydrate consumption up to above 50% - that part is easy since carbohydrates are really quite addictive. So why are there still health problems, why is there still overweight and obesity? That is the American paradox.
Friday, May 29, 2009
The 1 Really Important Thing We Didn't Tell You About Losing Weight
The most obvious difficulty with the notion that a retarded metabolism ... is that it never had any evidence to support it. ... Magnus-Levy had reported that the metabolism of fat patients seemed to run as fast if not faster than anyone else's. .... The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less. When people grow fat, their lean body mass also increases. They put on muscle and connective tissue and fat, and these will increase total metabolism...
For example, from Fitday, I, at 5'4" and 8 stone 3lbs, with a sedentary type of job require 2050 calories per day, whereas if I was 12 stone, I would need 2432 calories. As predicted, the metabolic rate for the subject of this segment came up perfectly normal.
the term doubly-labeled water test refers to a particular type of test of metabolic rate, in which average metabolic rate of an organism is measured over a period of time.and:
Energy expenditure measurements are easier to perform since the development and application of the doubly-labelled water technique.*
The carbohydrate hypothesis of obesity basically says that carbohydrate intake promotes insulin release which promotes fat storage and the conversion of excess glucose (all starch breaks down into glucose) into fat for storage. So a person who eats a 'healthy diet' that would be 50-60% 'healthy' carbohydrates - 6-11 servings a day of cereals anyone? plus lots of fruit but is quite sensitive to this effect of insulin would convert all the excess to fat and store it. If they are unlucky their insulin stays relatively high preventing their body accessing this stored fat. Now they are 'growing' (but outwards) and as long as enough carbohydrates are consumed to keep insulin 'too high' for fat burning, their appetite tells them they need to eat more and so on it goes.
And that is why all nutritionists and dieticians and doctors should read Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories - published as The Diet Delusion in many countries.
*from Invited Commentary, Energy requirements assessed using the doubly-labelled water method, Klaas R. Westerterp, British Journal of Nutrition (1998), 80, 217–218. Available here.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Review of 10 Things You Need to Know About Losing Weight
Here are the 10 things:
- Not sure what they called this, seemed to be a variation on: Don't go shopping when you're hungry. The presenter had his brain MRI scanned, firstly on a full stomach, on a second occasion on an empty stomach, and while being shown pictures of food. His brain 'lit up' more in response to 'high calorie' food (chocolate eclairs) than 'low calorie' food (cucumber slices) when he was hungry; whereas when he wasn't hungry the response was the same.
- Use plate size to trick the brain about portion size, i.e. use a smaller plate - less food will look like more.
- Count calories - save a few here and a few there e.g. have black coffee instead of cappuccino, and it will add up to fewer calories over the day/month/year, leading to you magically losing weight.
- Fat people eat more than they think they do.
- Eat protein because it leads to greater satiety.
- Liquid food (as opposed to drinks with food) fill you up for longer. This was also demonstrated with an actual experiment.
- Choice causes overeating.
- Calcium in dairy binds fat which you then excrete: over a month this can save you calories.
- Exercise - another interesting one. An experiment with the presenter on a treadmill showed that 90 minutes of fairly fast-paced walking (he was quite breathless after it) only burned about 19g of fat (171 calories).
- Small amounts of extra movement during the day e.g. take the stairs instead of the lift, will boost your calorie burning.
Use of an expensive machine to discover the bleeding obvious: when you are hungry, you are more interested in food and, more than that, more interested in food that your brain knows (from prior experience) is more likely to provide you with calories. Actually, I suppose this kind of research is necessary - we should investigate 'what everybody knows' - and try and disprove it - that is the scientific method. It also raises another interesting point - which wasn't mentioned in the program (although to be fair it isn't strictly relevant). Why doesn't the hungry brain respond to pictures of fruit and vegetables? Perhaps it's because humans didn't evolve chewing their way through bucketloads of plant matter for hours?
Personally, I think this works, I've used it with children the other way round - i.e. put the food on a larger plate and it looks like less so they eat it up. However, if you don't eat 'enough', you may end up hungry later on and snack!
Or maybe you'll just be hungrier? Has there ever been a controlled trial of this idea to see if it actually works?
Actually this was the most interesting point and worth a separate post of its own.
This was demonstrated with a small-scale experiment during the programme. It has been shown by studies.
This point is different from the preceding one: the mechanism here is one of the physical constraints on digestion, whereas the fullness from protein comes from the release of a hormone (PPY) which interacts with other appetite regulating hormones (leptin, ghrelin). If you use soup to 'trick' your body into eating fewer calories than usual, you will likely eat more at the next meal, once the soup has been digested.
I thought the 'experiment' conducted to show this was quite poor. Two bowls of equal quantities of sweets were left out in an office canteen with a sign Free Sweets: one bowl was obviously smarties, the other bowl held purple smarties only. The smarties all disappeared, the purple ones didn't. A better comparison would have been smarties vs. chocolate buttons (they're all the same). The purple smarties looked vaguely medicinal - how do we know that didn't put people off?
In fact, it saved the guinea pig in this experiment slightly more than 5g of fat per day or about 160g per month. (Sounds like a lot? - I eat that much fat every day! I'm not going to quibble about the loss of one day's consumption per month.) Interesting - bad for dairy's image as a source of calcium - how much of the dairy calcium is lost this way? Also, the presenter felt constrained to recommend 'low-fat' dairy for this strategy. Noteworthy that this was the only vestige of 'low-fat' dogma in the programme. On the other hand, if it truly is 'low-fat' dairy then there isn't much point is there - where's it gonna find the fat to bind?
Given that after 90 minutes of fast-paced walking you've probably built up a bit of an appetite, it isn't going to do much for weight loss is it?
However there is a punchline - an 'afterburn' effect where exercise boosts 'fat-burning' into the next day. So this could work - but there is still that question: why will the greater amount of calorie burning going on, not prompt your body to ask you for more food?
Update: the effect of exercise to promote 'fat burning' is disputed by research - see article here.
Can't argue with this really, but the effect will be small (90 minutes on a treadmill = 171 calories) and once again it ignores the hormonal elephant in the room - which will be tackled in the next post about point 4.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Atherogenesis in Mice
Lead researcher Dr Ira Tabas said that previous research had suggested that this mechanism might be involvedin plaque rupture, but the magnitude of the effect uncovered in the latest study was a surprise.
He said: "The fact that we were able to isolate one gene encoding one protein with such a profound effect on plaque necrosis (death) was a big surprise."
Dr Tabas said the finding raised hopes of new drugs which could act on the key gene, or the associated mechanism, to cut the risk of dangerous plaques.
"Just about everybody in our society has atherosclerosis (thickening of the arteries) by the time we reach 20," he said.
"So the wave of the future in treating atherosclerosis will be in preventing harmless lesions in young people from becoming dangerous ones, or soothing dangerous plaques so they don't rupture as we age."
Never mind what effect such a treatment might have on necessary cell death (e.g. to deal with emerging cancers) in other parts of the body.
Anyway, what does this have to do with diet and the heart? Well, again from the BBC article:
Scientists have identified a genetic mechanism which appears to determine which fatty deposits in the arteries have the potential to kill us. Most of these plaques pose no risk to health, but a minority burst, forming blood clots, which can cause heart attacks or strokes. .....
Fatty deposits begin to form in the arteries of most people in their teens, but the vast majority are harmless.
But, ah you say, just read on ...
The researchers bred mice prone to develop plaques, and fed them a high-fat diet for 10 weeks.
So what was this high-fat diet? It was the TD.88137 Western Diet (Teklad Lab Animal Diets, Harlan Laboratories, Madison, WI) which consists of:
g/kg | |
---|---|
Casein | 195.0 |
DL-Methionine | 3.0 |
Sucrose | 341.46 |
Corn Starch | 150.0 |
Anhydrous Milkfat | 210.0 |
Cholesterol | 1.5 |
Cellulose | 50.0 |
Mineral Mix, AIN-76 (170915) | 35.0 |
Calcium Carbonate | 4.0 |
Vitamin Mix, Teklad (40060) | 10.0 |
Ethoxyquin, antioxidant | 0.04 |
(Data from this pdf.)
How does this compare to a mouse's real diet?
In short, the typical composition of a diet of invertebrates is high in fat and protein e.g. from p.41 in Marsupial nutrition, (Ian D. Hume, Cambridge University Press, 1999) it can range from 20-60% fat and 10-75% protein (by weight of dry matter) for typical things that a mouse might eat (insects and insect larvae). Cereals are typically 68-79% carbohydrate, around 10-15% protein and 2-7% fat, legumes are as much as 25% protein, typically 50-60% carbohydrate and only 1-2% fat whereas nuts (e.g. hazelnut) and oilseeds (e.g. sunflower) are typically about 15-25% protein, 50-60% fat and 15-20% carbohydrate (from various tables in On Food and Cooking, H. McGee, 1st ed. Unwin Hyman, 1984).
From this we can conclude that a typical wild mouse would for part of the year eat a diet that was mainly protein and fat and for another part of the year eat a diet that was high in carbohydrate - at least if it ate cereals, but not so much if it ate other types of seeds - but low in fat. It would not however be eating a lot of sucrose. The carbohydrate in grains and seeds is starch which is a polymer of glucose and does not contain fructose. As further support of this analysis here Peter of Hyperlipid considered data on what wild-type mice eat when given free choice: about 12% protein, 6% carbohydrate and 82% fat (all as proportions of energy).
A final note about the mice. The mice used in the experiment were either apoe or ldlr mice. Apoe mice lack a particular lipoprotein (apolipoprotein E) which is important in both the HDL and vLDL cholesterol transporters, in particular:
ApoE mediates high affinity binding of chylomicrons and vLDL particles to the LDL receptor, allowing for specific uptake of these particles by the liver, preventing the accumulation of cholesterol rich particles in the plasma
.....
Mice develop normally, but exhibit five times normal serum plasma cholesterol and spontaneous atherosclerotic lesions
Does this not indicate that fat is the root cause? Well not necessarily.
So which is more likely to contribute to the problem - the 21.2% of food (by weight) that comes as fat (most of which doesn't go straight to the liver anyway) or the 48.5% of food (by weight) that comes as carbohydrate - three-quarters of which is sucrose and half of that is fructose (i.e. 17% by weight of the total food intake) which goes straight to the liver and comes out as triglycerides.