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  #1   ^
Old Tue, Jun-18-19, 08:34
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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Plan: mostly milkfat
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Default Killing keto...

https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/killing-keto

Quote:
The ketogenic diet (keto) has many potential benefits ranging from preventing epileptic seizures to potentially "starving" cancer cells. Unfortunately, when it comes to transforming your body, it's not the magic cure it's made out to be.

Can it help you lose fat? Sure, by satiating your hunger, helping you eat less, and creating a caloric deficit – just like any other diet. But when it comes to building muscle? It fails miserably.


Article by Eric Bach over at TNation.

Satiating hunger, helping you eat less, and creating a caloric deficit. Just like any other diet?

He sort of refutes this here;

Quote:
When it comes to building muscle, carbs and a balanced diet are far superior because they give you adequate (and preferred) fuel for anaerobic performance. And above all else, they make it easier to consume enough calories to trigger muscle growth.


So not just like any other diet, one with higher carbs, at least, makes it "easier to consume enough calories"--which certainly sounds like higher carbs sates hunger at a higher calorie level than keto does.

Quote:
A 2018 study, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, tested how the ketogenic diet affected the body mass index (BMI) of 24 healthy males over the course of eight weeks.

All 24 men performed a resistance training program for the eight-week period. Nine of the men were assigned to the ketogenic diet. Ten were assigned a non-ketogenic diet, and five were told to eat like normal.

The results? The keto group saw a significant reduction in fat mass, while the other two groups didn't see a reduction in fat mass, but did see an increase in muscle gain. The researchers concluded that the keto diet might be an effective way to decrease fat mass without decreasing lean body mass. However, it's probably not useful to increase muscle mass (1).


A few things here. Supposedly calories were controlled in this study. And it was supposed to be hypercaloric, to promote gain of lean mass. It's possible that the keto dieters just ate less than they were supposed to--but we're up against that "just like any other diet" claim again...

The increase in "muscle gain"--water and glycogen count as "muscle." When Jacob Wilson's group includes a carbohydrate refeed at the end of a study comparable to this one, the apparent advantage of carbs versus keto for lean mass goes away--actually reverses. I think that's likely a matter of glycogen supercompensation--I don't think an actual advantage for muscle growth with keto has been shown in Wilson's studies, really I suspect the whole thing's a wash.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6038311/


Quote:
A 2019 study in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness took 16 men and women through a randomized, counterbalanced crossover study analyzing exercise testing under ketogenic diets versus higher-carb diets.

The diets were matched for total caloric intake with carb intake being the difference in the subjects. After analyzing dietary compliance as well as urine pH and ketone levels, testers administrated the brutal Wingate anaerobic cycling test.

Here's what they found: Mean power, peak power, and recovery measurements were all significantly worse for the low-carb dieters. This lead researchers to conclude short-term ketogenic diets reduce exercise performance in activities heavily dependent on anaerobic energy systems (2).


Short-term jumps out at me here.

Quote:
METHODS:
Sixteen men and women (BMI, 23±1 kg/m2, age 23±1 years) participated in a randomized-sequence, counterbalanced crossover study in which they underwent exercise testing after 4 days of either a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet (LC; <50 g/day and <10% of energy from carbohydrates) or a high-carbohydrate diet (HC; 6-10 g/kg/day carbohydrate). Dietary compliance was assessed with nutrient analysis of diet records, and with measures of urine pH and ketones. Anaerobic exercise performance was evaluated with the Wingate anaerobic cycling test and the yo-yo intermittent recovery test.


This particular study doesn't really serve the intended purpose. I think there's liable to be some performance advantage for sprint-type activity for carbs versus keto, this isn't the study to show it. Even then, I'd wonder about individual variation, what works in an elite athlete might not work the same in a person whose metabolism is compromised in some way, but that's not a claim I can make, just I think a reasonable conjecture.

His next point is keto is low protein... his description of low protein is 15 to 20 percent. That first study used 20 percent for keto and higher carb groups. 15 to 20 percent protein might be low protein if calories are particularly low--but he's talking about muscle growth here, and he advocates higher calories for muscle growth. This is not low protein, it's just normal protein, even slightly elevated protein if you're trying to fuel muscle growth by increased calories.

Incidentally--last I checked on the bodybuilding.com forums, people commonly advocated 3500 calories cut to lose a pound of fat--and an extra 3500 calories consume to gain a pound of muscle. Which always seemed a little suspicious to me.

I've watched my 73 year old Dad put on muscle in the last year and a bit that he's been carnivore. People think they've put on muscle because they've lost fat, and it shows? Me and my Dad put on very little arm fat... and it's fairly obvious there. Obvious enough that we don't need to get out the tape measure, he was really losing lean mass in an obvious way prior to that. He puts it down largely to carnivore, I think the fact that he joined a gym and started working out for the first time in 20 years is hard to ignore.

One more kick at the can here, he goes into hormones;

Quote:
Also, those on the low-carb diet had greater levels of cortisol – your body's stress hormone (4). How much higher would it have been if the men were on a true ketogenic diet with a much lower percentage of their intake coming from carbs?


The question here isn't how much higher would cortisol have been on a more ketogenic diet--the question is whether it would have been higher at all. What is cortisol for?

I don't really know what my stress hormones are up to. But my subjective experience of stress--a big deal for a schizoaffective bipolar with social anxiety--is reduced.
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  #2   ^
Old Tue, Jun-18-19, 09:58
GRB5111's Avatar
GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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So many things wrong with Bach's statements and many flaws in the study result in gross misinformation. Testing keto response in a crossover study is automatically flawed if subjects aren't given the time to be fully fat adapted. Anything less than 4 to 6 weeks is inadequate and prone to skewed information. And . . . there's the nagging thing about what constitutes low carb. Sad that many who aren't able to perform a critical review will report on this touting the distortions as fact.
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  #3   ^
Old Tue, Jun-18-19, 10:29
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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Plan: mostly milkfat
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I don't know that the study is necessarily flawed, so much as measuring something other than what Bach claims it does. There are instances where a sudden macro intake change is advocated just before a meet--maybe the most famous one is that glycogen supercompensation I mentioned, people will go low carb long enough to deplete glycogen, then eat a bunch of carbs leading into an event, this results in higher glycogen levels than if they'd just been eating high carb all along.

But even there, they're doing a study that's sort of been done and repeated, I guess our knowledge of short-term effects is solidified, and I haven't really looked that closely at the study or compared it to others like it, they may have looked at some aspects that previous studies neglected.

Lean mass gain in the work out study--these were experienced lifters. That can make gain of actual muscle, if you want to limit the definition to protein structure of muscle or something like that, less likely. Actual lean mass gain was all of two pounds, that's small enough for glycogen and differences in water balance to explain the difference.

The intermittent sprinting--an interesting question is what the point of the sprinting is. If you're trying hard to not come in second in the Olympics, that's one thing. If you're trying to impose a metabolic stress on your body, that's sort of another, it's entirely possible that ketogenic sprinting is slower but gives some improved metabolic benefit. I'm not saying it does--not saying it doesn't. Seen lots of suggestion that exercising in the fasted or ketogenic state might be better for the mitochondria, again, another area to look into more, I don't have an opinion right at the minute about that.

One thing I do know--I sprint faster at 153 pounds than I did at 170. You wouldn't mistake what I was capable of at 190 for a sprint. Maybe my peak power output is lower.
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  #4   ^
Old Tue, Jun-18-19, 14:58
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GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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Plan: Very LC, Higher Protein
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I get the context of how this was explained from the TNation website. It's in the context of hardcore training. The statement that one size does not fit all is true. However, I couldn't get a link to confirm my first suspicion that the period of fat adaptation may have been short. If that's the case, and I don't know this, that could be the first distortion. However, I don't disagree with some of the comments in the article. My son and I were discussing the other day whether one could rely solely on endogenous fat for a duration event. It's clear even with committed keto athletes in an ultra marathon, that shots of glucose are required to boost energy periodically, and many carry it in these events for that reason. When it comes to lean mass and specifically muscle, this is where my knowledge is limited, as I'm not regularly trying to increase muscle mass, my goal is to stay as fit as one can be in his late 60s. While I'm sure more studies are required to support the findings of the reference study, the findings are plausible as long as the study was well controlled and fat adaptation of the subjects was done long enough to get meaningful results. Interesting stuff and as a body builder, I likely would not be doing strict keto alone, as I would be looking for other advantages to reach my goals.
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  #5   ^
Old Wed, Jun-19-19, 07:23
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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If you look in the dictionary for "opposite of athlete" you will be directed to "bookworm," and there will be a picture of ME.

In other words, I'm an ordinary person with no pretense of athleticism, and a solid decade of trying to lose weight with exercise in back of me.

Since the beginning of this year, I have lost 25 pounds without being hungry ONCE. And very low exercise, because I was sick.

When they explain how this will kill me, I will take them more seriously.

And for all we know, cortisol increased higher and then decreased lower because maybe the hormones are more responsive. It's tricky to measure, and I don't see any elaboration on it.

But I will tell you this: since going keto, I have stopped taking exogenous biological hormone supplementation. And I've never felt better. Something has started my hormone production up again.
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  #6   ^
Old Wed, Jun-19-19, 16:25
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rightnow rightnow is offline
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I never understand why any study that claims to be researching a ketogenic state, or ketogenic fat loss, or ketogenic muscle gain, would begin the measuring point sooner than minimum 3 weeks in, preferably six. Obviously the body is in an adaptation cycle during that, this is hardly rocket science, and measuring something four days into starving yourself of carbs while not yet being fat adapted seems like intentionally trying to set something up to provide much lesser results. When I see this in research I feel like that tells me up front that they didn't actually really want to know the objectively-so answer; they wanted to try and bias it against lowcarb in whatever way they could.

I realize that's just my opinion but this has been going on since the 1970s when they were poorly, NOT-replicating Atkin's work, then not getting the results (they were pointedly using like 55 carbs, not <35), then made massive media promotion headlines on how his lowcarb didn't work at all and it was a scam and just a popular fad, and so on. The carb count is one thing. The protein count is one thing (since too much "for them" will keep people out of keto). The period of time allowed for adaptation FIRST before a study is one thing. All those things need to be reasonable up front or I see no point in taking a study seriously.


HALF A CENTURY PEOPLE! They've been using 'research' as a 'marketing' tool to jerk the public's chain for that long!



PJ
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  #7   ^
Old Thu, Jun-20-19, 04:51
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rightnow
HALF A CENTURY PEOPLE! They've been using 'research' as a 'marketing' tool to jerk the public's chain for that long!



PJ


It is what they do.

Fortunately we have been running so many n = 1 experiments the sheer force of our successes are silent, grassroots, opposition to continued "stuff sold as food" plans.
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  #8   ^
Old Thu, Jun-20-19, 06:49
GRB5111's Avatar
GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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Plan: Very LC, Higher Protein
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WereBear
It is what they do.

Fortunately we have been running so many n = 1 experiments the sheer force of our successes are silent, grassroots, opposition to continued "stuff sold as food" plans.

This is the primary benefit of this forum as the shared n=1 experiences enable all to try, evaluate, adjust, adopt or move on. Yes, half a century of misinformation starting with the erroneous diet-heart hypothesis where the recommendation to eliminate fat started the wheels in motion with food manufacturers creating concoctions in support of these flawed recommendations. The media drumbeat followed despite being as uninformed as the rest. The population is starting to get smarter and recovery for some has occurred, but misinformation is rampant while health issues increase in real and social costs. As mentioned before and the cited study in the article is a good example, we must learn how to discriminate when we read claims or supposed conclusions, and it's hard for most to do that. People rely on experts to sort through this, and that's not a bad thing, but we must choose our experts wisely. I would submit that expert advice coming from a magazine or other media source where a specific type of audience and related advertising supports their business should be examined closely.
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  #9   ^
Old Thu, Jun-20-19, 07:27
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GRB5111
I would submit that expert advice coming from a magazine or other media source where a specific type of audience and related advertising supports their business should be examined closely.


I would like us to eliminate the advertising support of communication, and substitute something less biased. I think Diet Doctor has just the right combination.

And they wouldn't stay afloat if their advice didn't work.
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  #10   ^
Old Thu, Jun-20-19, 07:32
GRB5111's Avatar
GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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Plan: Very LC, Higher Protein
Stats: 227/186/185 Male 6' 0"
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WereBear
I think Diet Doctor has just the right combination.

And they wouldn't stay afloat if their advice didn't work.

Diet Doctor has proven to me that they do it the right way and are the first to report conflicting information. No ads and objective handling of information makes a world of difference. DD serves as a credible expert for me.
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  #11   ^
Old Thu, Jun-20-19, 07:58
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Calianna Calianna is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rightnow


HALF A CENTURY PEOPLE! They've been using 'research' as a 'marketing' tool to jerk the public's chain for that long!



PJ


Until the sometime in the 90's, at least most people didn't have internet access, so the poorly conducted studies were only seen in newspapers, the evening news shows, and magazines, so they weren't as readily seen by nearly everyone - miss the newspaper or evening news one day, you'd miss out on the study. Skip buying a magazine one month, you'd miss seeing anything about the study.

Now, as soon as a study is completed, all the news outlets (and every self-appointed nutrition expert on the planet) are splashing the twisted study information all over the internet. If you're looking at nutrition and diet stories at all, you're hit with it everywhere you turn. Most people would automatically believe whatever they claim (not realizing that the data may show something entirely different) when every news outlet on the planet makes it one of their top stories.

As Were-bear said, we have loads of n=1 experiences. Some n=1 experiences are better examples of the efficacy of LC than others. For instance, I never lost down to a normal weight, so I'm still very overweight. However, due to eating LC for 15+ years, I have kept off the majority of the initial weight loss, and despite some other age related changes (as well as aches and pains due to standing on concrete for hours and hours at a time at work) over those 15+ years, I don't suffer nearly as many physical problems as prior to LC.

It's still very much a YMMV situation though, and in all honesty, for some people, they may not ever see the problems some of us did from eating SAD, or LC may not help them enough for them to make it their permanent way of eating. Switching to a more whole food WOE with a somewhat lower percentage of fat than LC might work better for some people.

For instance, my naturally thin friend is still doing fine on her usual diet of one tiny frozen diet meal (I don't know how she can eat those things, but that's her taste buds), or green salad each day, with minimal protein, and some fruit and/or juice each day... oh and a tiny bit of chocolate on a fairly regular basis. But she also avoids grains most of the time, just doesn't see any need to fill up on breads or cereals in her day to day eating patterns, and her portions of the carby fruit, juice and chocolate are so tiny that in the end, she's still eating relatively few carbs - far less than the minimum 120 g/day that nutritionists insist we need. So for all intents and purposes, she's always eaten a diet lower in carbs - it's just low in most everything else too. I'd feel like I was starving to death on such a dietary plan, but it works for her. *shrug*

The real problem (as I see it) is the gov't setting up this cookie-cutter diet based on bushels of hearthealthywholegrains, fruits and veggies, minimal (or no) animal products, very low saturated fat and cholesterol, and low sodium dietary advice for every single person on the planet, insisting it's THE ONLY WAY to health and longevity, no matter how much the n=1 experience may vary. (And that's without getting into what's really better for the planet)
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  #12   ^
Old Fri, Jun-21-19, 07:23
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bkloots bkloots is offline
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Quote:
For instance, I never lost down to a normal weight
Which of course raises the question: What's normal...for whom? Those ancient life insurance tables, not to mention old medical school curricula, leave out a great many members of the human race when pegging "normal."

I believe "healthy weight" is a better description. And determining what that weight is for each person is a collaboration among self, soul, scale, and scientific evidence (such as personal test results).

We furnish plenty of anecdotal support and inspiration around here, and I'm for that.
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  #13   ^
Old Fri, Jun-21-19, 14:39
GRB5111's Avatar
GRB5111 GRB5111 is offline
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Plan: Very LC, Higher Protein
Stats: 227/186/185 Male 6' 0"
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Location: Herndon, VA
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Regarding the original article in teaser's post, Steve Phinney provides confirmation that endurance after fat adaptation takes anywhere from 6-12 weeks to attain the performance levels experienced before fat adaptation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IEuhp8RFMU
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