Originally Posted by Matt51

A distinction between cheap fat from vegetable oils, and healthy saturated animal fat needs to be made. Not all fats should be lumped together. Soybean oil, corn oil, are the unhealthy fats.
On carbs - M Levac is exactly correct.

Originally Posted by dmkorn

I am simply trying to put together all the various studies that show a wide variety of different features cause obesity. Some examples: sugar causes obesity, fat causes obesity, refined carbohydrates cause obesity, food additives cause obesity, prescription drugs cause obesity, caffeine, the list goes on. I am trying to find a theory that can explain all this.

Originally Posted by dmkorn

M Levac,

We seem to have done very well on grains for at least 6,000 years. How can you explain that obesity has only occurred in more than 1% of the population only in the last 120 years if all grains are toxic?

Originally Posted by tiredangel

Hmmm, for breakfast today I had an omelet made with a green onion, bacon, cheese, and a half of an avocado -- I can't give exact proportions of the omelet because I shared it with two of my kids.

For a morning snack I had a couple poblano pepper halves stuffed with cream cheese and chorizo and topped with cheddar.

For lunch I had leftovers -- grilled chicken breast with skin and a half of a grilled zucchini, yellow squash, and about a 1/2 thick slice of eggplant (all grilled). All had been marinaded in a coconut oil (woops, I won't make that mistake again), chili powder, garlic blend (chili powder just various chilis dehydrated and pulverized). Despite the fact that most of the time of the marinading the oil was SOLID, it turned out fairly well. But grilling was like sending up smoke signals.

For dinner I'm making steak bulgogi with London broil -- the marinade I made with wheat free tamari soy sauce, a shallot, some garlic, some liquid sucralose. I'm also making steamed broccoli. I'll probably set a salad out with oil/lemon juice/ginger dressing, but in truth, I'm not a big salad eater so I probably won't have any.

After dinner I may have 3/4 cup berries and a couple tablespoons of whipped cream with real vanilla and liquid sucralose.

This is quite a dairy heavy day for me -- the stuffed peppers were leftovers, but I usually try to have dairy for just one meal a day.

Oh, I forgot. I do supplement with virgin coconut oil 2 -3 tablespoons a day. I also don't eat between 7pm and 7am.

I am thinking of giving up cheese since I still do break out soon, but I think butter and cream will still be ok.

Edit to add: I forgot that I drink lemon/ginger herbal tea, I cook using lard, bacon grease, or butter, and the broccoli will most definitely have butter on it. AND I'll eat the other half avocado with dinner.

Second edit: The vegetables are organic since my garden isn't producing yet (Michigan) but the meat is feedlot stuff. We're a family of six -- we can't afford the grassfed stuff, unfortunately.

LAST edit: Everyone is free to critique this. I'm generally losing 1-2 pounds a week, but not always. I also am not worried about losing quickly; I want to maintain as much muscle mass as possible since I'm a 40 year old woman.

Originally Posted by M Levac

Dietary fat does not have the capacity to cause us to grow fat. Nor does protein. Only carbohydrate has this capacity. Having said that, you can count on lowering the fat content of the diet as a contributing factor to obesity. Why is this so? Because if we don't eat enough fat, the liver will manufacture it outright.

Originally Posted by tiredangel

You're making the assumption that we've done very well. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that after we developed agriculture, obesity, diseases of deficiencies started appearing, as did autoimmune diseases such as arthritis. We also became shorter and our lifespan decreased.

Originally Posted by dmkorn

M Levac,

We seem to have done very well on grains for at least 6,000 years. How can you explain that obesity has only occurred in more than 1% of the population only in the last 120 years if all grains are toxic?

Originally Posted by dmkorn

Then why have we gotten fatter from 1909 - 1996 as carbohydrate consumption has declined, and fat consumption has increased?

Originally Posted by M Levac

Because the comparison, 1% versus 33% is impossible to test. Obesity exists in both populations, thus it's impossible to say what causes it. The real comparison is one population without obesity versus one with obesity. It so happens that we know of such populations. We learn about this in Stefansson's book yet again. We can resume this to that sentence: There are no fat carnivores.

In Taubes' GCBC, we learn that people in the US increased their caloric intake by about 500 calories/day over the period from '70s to today. We also learn that all of this comes from carbohydrate but we must listen to a lecture from Taubes at Dartmouth to learn that most of this comes from HFCS. Whether replacing butter with margarine or meat protein with soy and gluten had any effect is irrelevant at this point since we know that carbohydrate causes us to grow fat, and how fat we grow merely depends on how much carbohydrate we eat.

500 calories from carbohydrate is 125 grams. I promise that nobody on this forum is able to maintain his weight by eating this much carbohydrate. Also, consider that this 125g of carbohydrate is in surplus to whatever carbohydrate we are already eating.

Originally Posted by dmkorn

You are 100% correct, although their are some healthy inexpensive oils such as olive oil.

The main debate is what makes a fat healthy? Is it the omega-6/3 ratio? Is it a different category scheme? Is it the nutrient content? If it is only omega-6/3 ratio, olive oil would be unhealthy (though it is mostly omega-9).

Originally Posted by M Levac

The knowledge about carbohydrate/insulin comes from clinical observation. The knowledge about the decline in carbohydrate consumption comes from statistical analysis. Clinical observation trumps statistical data every time. Indeed, statistical data is used to formulate hypotheses which are then tested in clinical trials. Since we know that carbohydrate causes us to grow fat from clinical observation, then it follows that the statistical data that says we reduced our consumption of carbohydrate from 1909-1996 is incorrect.

Originally Posted by M Levac

That's an interesting subject. Olive oil is mostly monounsaturated fat (70%). It so happens that beef fat is also mostly monounsaturated fat (45%). We say that olive oil is "healthy" because it contains little saturated fat. If saturated fat was so bad for humans, why would humans store fuel as mostly saturated fat? Further, since we've only been eating oils for about 100 years but we've been eating animal fat for a couple of million years, we'd have heard that it was bad for us a long time ago. The diseases of civilization, things like cancer and diabetes, have only been around for a while. Indeed, we learn from Weston Price that they only develop once a population adds carbohydrate to its diet, regardless of whether it retains its traditional diet or not.

Originally Posted by dmkorn

Hi Tiredangel,

You mentioned "I still do break out," I assume you mean acne, which has been linked to vitamin E deficiency. See citation bellow. Acne has gotten worse in modern times, and vitamin E is a possible culprit. Commercial meats and dairy are much lower in vitamin E and other nutrients that grass fed products. If you don't want to pay for these, theory is it is because of lower vitamin content, which is a risk factor for acne.

If you want to test if your problem is related to vitamin E deficiency, rice bran oil is a more effective way to get vitamin E than pills since it is a fat soluble vitamin. Rice bran oil has been used in Japan for thousands of years for skin health, both externally and internally. You can cook with it, and it has a good light taste.

Other vitamins can affect skin health as well, in addition to vitamin E, the B-Complex vitamins, vitamin C, and certain minerals are less present in the modern diet. Unlike vitamin E, these can be absorbed easily in supplement form. They are can be purchased in multivitamins or separately. Rice bran oil has also been shown to have a very good effect on cholesterol and insulin sensitivity.



El-Akawi Z, Abdel-Latif N, Abdul-Razzak K (2006). "Does the plasma level of vitamins A and E affect acne condition?". Clin. Exp. Dermatol. 31 (3): 430–4. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2230.2006.02106.x. PMID 16681594.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1365-2230.2006.02106.x

Originally Posted by dmkorn

Ok, we can do that. In 1900 obesity was prevalent in less than 1 in 150 people, this is less than 1%. In 1860 it was essentially non-existent, it is your zero rate of obesity. We were eating much larger quantities of grains, and fewer meats and fats. We were able to maintain our weight without trying, dieting was only invented in the early 20th century.

You are correct that obesity is associated with increased hunger. This is refereed to as the Hunger-Obesity paradox. Raised cortisol causes hunger, as does nutrient deficiency. Yet, if carbohydrates were the cause of obesity, there would not have been a 0% rate of obesity in 1860.