Which isn't to say that gut flora aren't involved--and that ojoj hasn't improved them with her diet.

I do have to wonder--if resistant starch have a beneficial effect on gut-flora, does it depend on the rest of the diet? Does a healthy gut biome look the same on low- as it does on high-carb?

Our higher protein/fat intake might mean that we're encouraging an entirely different assortment of micro-organisms when we take in resistant starch.

Just so you don't misunderstand me--I'm not just being difficult, I really am this dense. It's hard to know where prudence lies. There's a lot of unknowns.

The link still wouldnt work lol! My gut flora isnt something I spend a lot of time thinking about - these fad diets tend to focus on one thing and bang on about them like they matter. I'm happy with the way I eat, but thanks for any concern you may have for my intestines lol!

Jo xxx

I never really feel comfortable talking RS with low carbers, even though I am a low carber myself.

I will come right out and say it; It is very possible that eating a VLC, LC, or ketogenic diet produces gut flora that are perfect for the host.

No studies that I know of have been done to confirm or deny this.

Another reason I was hesitant to discuss this here at ALC, is that I know most here are trying to turn around their health and lose weight. Many (most) are having great success with LC. I don't want to throw a wrench in their progress and make claims about RS that I can't prove--and many of the claims are not proven.

That being said, the literature from 30 years of studying RS points towards RS being extremely beneficial for everyone, and not contraindicated for anyone, except people with SIBO. People with SIBO has a specific dysbiosis of the gut in that RS and low GI foods in general can cause them problems because they have beneficial large intestine bacteria where it shouldn't be.

I swore I wasn't going to drown you guys in studies, but sometimes it's easier to read for yourself. This is a good full-text study done on humans. It examines the fat storage hormones in response to RS at meals.

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/3/559.full

This study is typical of all studies: RS is different than your run-of-the-mill plant fibers in that it exhibits big changes in metabolism.

But, the bottom line is: If what you are doing is working for you--keep doing it! If you get to a point where you think some fine tuning of your diet is in order to correct glucose regulation, cholesterol, or fat metabolism--then maybe look into adding some RS to your diet.

Thanks for posting this for those whom it might help.

As for me, I guess I'm of the opinion of: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. For me, all the markers you mention (glucose reg, cholesterol and fat metabolism) have improved dramatically by simply eating LCHF. No way I'm trying resistant starch and messing up my improved glucose readings.

I have 60 lbs of resistant starch around my midsection.

Someone mentioned eating potato starch - that is why I got fat.

Here's an idea derived from natural selection. For all species, when a global catastrophe happens, only those who can survive the new environment will survive. This is equally true within a closed system like our body, and most especially within the gut where gut flora lives. If we assume gut flora is made up of a multitude of different species of bacteria, and if we assume that not all species can survive a global catastrophe, but also assume that we can systematically destroy all species at once (or reduce their numbers to a minimum), then we have a way to restore gut flora very quickly without resorting to RS.

Antibiotics + low-carb.

Richard Feinman did a lecture where he explained how a ketogenic diet as therapy for cancer could fight glucose-dependent cancer, but also allow ketone-able cancer to survive the ketotic environment. He mentioned this only as a possibility, but a possibility nonetheless. Just as with KD and cancer, so it is with AB + KD and gut flora.

If we assume that the only thing wrong with somebody who doesn't respond well to a ketogenic diet is gut flora dysbiosis, then AB + KD is one viable possibility to restore gut flora back to normal, and ultimately extract the benefits from KD as it should be.

Then there's the assumption that gut flora is somewhat essential to our good health. I can't be sure either way. We do have gut flora when we're healthy, and when we're sick. This is basically the only hitch in my idea. But I believe it's a very small hitch. After all, we have HG groups who live all across the globe, and it would be very unlikely that all these groups have the same gut flora profile. If they all have different gut flora profiles, then we can infer that our good health is not dependent on any specific gut flora profile. And from this we can infer that instead of the gut flora being essential to our good health, it's our good health that is adapted to handle the different gut flora profiles. And from this we can infer that we'd still have our good health in spite of no or little gut flora.

AB + KD is just an idea. I don't know if it's ever been tried in an experiment, but I'm pretty some of us have had experience with that whether we were monitoring the effects or not. And so I have another - much safer - idea that could achieve similar results.

Long-term fasting.

The principle is the same. Though now we starve our gut flora instead of directly shooting them dead with antibiotics. After a time, we introduce low-carb, and whatever gut flora survived famine, from those, the LC-adapted bacteria will now thrive in the new environment.

If we believe RS gives us health benefits, we could do the above with RS as well and see what gives.

This gives me another idea, but not directly related to RS or gut flora.

Long-term fasting can be used as diagnostic tool to discover anything that prevent LC from working as it should, on top of gut flora dysbiosis as the case may be. Bear in mind I don't actually know how long it takes for gut flora to starve to death with long-term fasting, cuz I didn't search for experiments on that. I do know fasting is beneficial and even therapeutic, but that could just be due to its effect on metabolism, i.e. ketosis and things like that. However, with long-term fasting, there's no food coming in to feed gut flora, so I believe the idea is very plausible, and I rely on this plausibility as the mechanism for diagnosis of other conditions.

If long-term fasting restores gut flora, then we expect LC to finally work as it should. If LC doesn't work as it should after that, then we have evidence that there is something else - besides diet and gut flora - that prevents LC from working as it should, and we should then look for that. That's the diagnostic tool.

Incidentally, we can consider long-term fasting as evidence that gut flora is not essential to good health, since gut flora is most likely to be reduced (if not outright destroyed) by famine. I mean, how do they get their food if not the same way we get ours - through the gut?

Another idea is that some gut bacteria eat other gut bacteria, and this is one way some bacteria can survive famine. For a time. From this, we can infer that those bacteria-eating bacteria are still alive after a period of famine, and are in fact LC-adapted. I mean, other bacteria are made of fatty acids, cholesterol, protein, etc. But they are not made of glucose or other carbs. So those carb-adapted bacteria, they have no food, they're the first ones to die off, and the first ones to get eaten. Basically, through long-term fasting, we transform the gut environment in one where only carnivores can live.

It seems to me you are trying to convince yourself that an omnivorous human can thrive on a carnivorous diet. You can for a short while, but not indefinitely. Our guts have evolved into what they are because we can, and do, eat omnivorously. A carnivores gut is short and mostly sterile, extracting the nutrients it needs in the small intestine. An omnivorous gut is long and lined with colonocytes that require energy from butyrate produced by gut flora. Any long-term disruption in energy flow to colonocytes causes them to die and become diseased. The mucosal lining of the omnivores gut is what prevents leaky gut. A long term carnivorous diet will eventually kill an omnivore. Try feeding your dog or cat a vegan diet for a year and watch what happens.

You are falling into the trap many LC'ers do--trying to make up an argument which has no basis in reality. Do a little bit of Googling on colonocytes, gut flora, and the differences in carnivore and omnivore guts. You might be amazed.

LC may be useful in losing weight over a couple months, but eventually you will need to include ample plant fiber and starch. Atkins had it right in adding back carbs, but many try to skip that part with endless induction. Most of the successful diets include some kind of cheat days designed to get fermentable substrate into the gut.

good luck!

Please do go away now.

A senior member askes me to leave...I leave. Good luck ya'all! Don't drown in your dogma!

Not drowning. Your approach with Martin was incredibly rude, it's hard to believe you can't see that.

Of course he doesn't. His buddy Nikoley does the same thing, he's only doing what he's been taught.

If I fell into a trap, it's not because my arguments have no basis in reality. You probably know about the Bellevue all-meat trial. As far as dietary experiments go, this is the only one of its kind. It has no equivalent for any other diet. No other diet was tested to such an extent for such a long period of time. Dietary experiments today are done out-of-clinic, mostly relying on the subjects' own observation for the facts reported in the study papers. The only other kind of dietary experiments that even come close to the Bellevue all-meat trial is starvation experiments, and the famous Minnesota semi-starvation experiment. While I freely admit that my ideas are just ideas (as you can see for yourself in my posts already), I promise that I rely on hard reality to imagine those ideas. The Bellevue all-meat trial is one example of this hard reality on which I rely for my ideas. I welcome your criticism of my ideas, because that's how I progress. But if you truly want to attack the reality on which my ideas are based, you're going to have to do better than "I fell into a trap", you're going to have to give me an equally hard reality.

With that said, I'd like to address one of your points. Specifically the one that says "cheat days useful to get fermentable substrate in the gut". At face value, it sounds good. But once we dig a bit, we find an obvious problem. The implication of that point is that there is some time threshold when the lack of fermentable substrate allows the bacteria to die off, which then brings about a decline in health. So my question is when is this threshold reached? This is an important question because the Bellevue all-meat trial went on for 1 year, and showed no indication of decline in health during the experiment, nor prediction of decline in health after that period. And so, if the lack of fermentable substrate does eventually cause a decline in health, it would do so after 1 year, meaning that no other claim or implication of such claim can be true. Since the Bellevue all-meat trial is the longest dietary trial of its kind ever done, then this question of time threshold can never be answered here today. But it is clear that your point about the usefulness of introducing fermentable substrate on cheat days is obviously false.

The A-TO-Z study. My favorite study, because of its obvious flaws, but also because in my opinion it's the best modern dietary experiment to date that I'm aware of. If RS gives us such great health benefits, could RS alone overshadow the benefits of carb restriction, or increased fat consumption? I doubt it. Of the four diets tested, Atkins came out on top. Ornish was 3rd. Right away we have a problem. We can't possibly praise RS unless we make unlikely claims. For example, Ornish is the diet which contains the most veggies, and fermentable substrate comes from veggies. So the unlikely claim is that the diet with the most veggies also contained the least RS, or in this case the second least RS (because ZONE was last in that trial). The experiment didn't look at RS specifically, but it does give us a pretty good idea of just how significant RS really is. Not very significant, apparently.

See, this is my problem. There aren't any studies to show that adding resistant starch to a low-carb diet will improve anything. And you've allowed this. If we don't know what happens when adding resistant starch--we can't know if there will be a benefit, some sort of disadvantage, or no real difference. The suggestion that people try it--measure what they can, see if it gives them improvements in any way, is fine. But the insistence that a diet deficient in resistant starch is, well, deficient, is still a bit of a leap.




And then you bring in this "need" for ample plant fiber and starch. You need support for this.

I'm not saying I find it implausible that resistant starch might help some.

The gut length thing.



Gut length and diet don't always track. Personally, I think we are in fact omnivores. Meaning we can eat plants as well as animals. That isn't to say that we're obligate omnivores, and have to.