by Siim Land
The bottom line is this: keep your insulin and blood sugar low most of the time and stimulate mTOR at times you’d benefit from being more anabolic. Then cycle in between periods of being predominantly ketogenic with occasional refeeds and insulin signaling. That’s how you’ll prevent any dysfunctional insulin resistance or inflammation.
The Case Against Fat
Since Atkins’ time, there have been many other low carb proponents trying to make the argument that the key is to avoid all carbohydrates and thus lose weight by entering into ketosis. Insulin and sugar are depicted as the villain because of their nutrient partitioning factors. Whenever you eat carbs insulin goes up and you shut down all fat burning. That may be true to a certain extent but it’s not the whole story. We have to keep the context in mind.
There’s only a certain amount of glycogen the body can store before it converts carbs into fat. With the right timing of foods and nutrient partitioning, you can cause a completely different metabolic response as the Carbohydrate-Insulin Hypothesis tries to depict. When insulin goes up it stores glucose as glycogen in the liver and muscle cells. Once those deposits get full but insulin remains elevated, insulin will also start promoting the creation of new fat cells. This is called hepatic de novo lipogenesis (DNL). Up to that point, the body would benefit from an influx of insulin and carbs. Whether or not it’s advisable is a different story but it illustrates the point that not all carbs and insulin will immediately equal fat gain.
Although insulin is the main driver of fat storage, it’s not the only one causing weight gain. People who are doing resistance training and intermittent fasting don’t have to worry about hyperinsulinemia that much. Despite not eating or being quite glucose tolerant, the body may still end up with a state of insulin resistance or high blood sugar because of cortisol.
Eating any kind of food, whether that be carbs, protein, or fat, will be significantly more obesogenic with high cortisol. Cortisol will inhibit digestion, releases glycogen, raises blood sugar, and spikes insulin. That’s why even a „healthy ketogenic low carb high-fat meal“ can be damaging to you in the long term. What’s more, cholesterol and other dietary fats are more prone to become oxidized if you consume them with high cortisol and insulin. Therefore, the underlying issue isn’t as much carbohydrates or fats but more like stress-induced inflammation and hyperinsulinemia.
Furthermore, insulin does not only rise in response to dietary carbs or cortisol but also by non-caloric sweeteners. Since the 1970s, there’s been a gradual increase in the consumption of sweeteners and added sugars. Partly this may have been due to the low-fat guidelines, which made food companies increase the palatability of foods by adding extra sweetness to them. Unfortunately, there’s evidence to show that artificial sweeteners may promote diabetes, insulin resistance, and obesity. The reason has to do with how the sweet taste stimulates a gut receptor called Glucose-Dependent Insulinotropic Polypeptide (GDIP), which is linked with weight gain[560]. That’s something to keep in mind the next time you grab a „healthy“ low carb meal bar...
Meal timing is as important as choosing what to eat. Of course, keeping blood sugar and insulin elevated throughout the day several times isn’t a good idea. It’ll promote fat gain and diabetes. However, insulin has an important role in storing energy and replenishing glycogen stores. In some cases, like after a resistance training workout, you’d actually benefit from having more carbs and insulin. That’s why you see physically active people being able to get away with eating more food and carbs without getting fat. Of course, they burn a lot more calories throughout the day but they’re also more hormonally optimized to tolerate those carbs. Saying that carbs make you fat to a bodybuilder who has to eat over 4000 calories a day to gain weight is falling upon deaf ears. Eating carbs and spiking insulin may be more detrimental at some times than at others.
A good example comes from the circadian rhythms, which are your body’s natural biological cycles connected to the light cues from the environment. Essentially, daytime favors better glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity because the body’s metabolic processes are supposed to be more active whereas at nighttime the opposite is true. That’s why humans are diurnal creatures, which means we’re active during the day and we sleep at night. More about the circadian rhythms in Chapter XXII. Blue light exposure from artificial light sources at night is shown to promote insulin resistance, weight gain, and diabetes[561]. The reason has to do with increased cortisol induced by the highly stimulating wavelengths of most blue light sources.
Other factors that determine insulin release include dietary fiber, protein, fermentation, the addition of vinegar, the thermic effect from spices, gut receptors, consistency and satiety signaling. It’s more likely that a person who’s overweight already suffers from leptin resistance and insulin resistance. The best treatment I can think of in those situations would be to follow a very low carb ketogenic diet not the low-fat high carb one.
Is Fat Good?
Low carb diets are often depicted as fads in mainstream medicine and the news, promising only short-term weight loss but long-term health consequences. It’s true that keto and Paleo have been shown to make the person lose a lot of weight quite fast as long as they follow a well-structured program. However, the idea that higher dietary fat is going to be more detrimental doesn’t hold much water either. With that being said...
It’s important to remember that studies linking saturated fat and cholesterol with heart disease didn’t come out of thin air. The association is primarily created by the combination of high-carb and high-fat foods ala the processed fast food industry.
That’s a critical error you must avoid – DON’T COMBINE CARBS WITH FAT! It’s going to result in much higher insulin response and AGE formation than if you were to eat that fat or protein in a low carb meal. This is something you mustn’t take for granted even if you think you’re eating a healthy ketogenic diet. If you end up consuming rancid fats, oxidized cholesterol, glycated proteins, or excessively large amounts of extra calories, then, rest assured, you’re not doing your health any favours.
The combination of carbs and fat is also the most appealing yet least satiating one. There’s a reason you can’t seem to feel satisfied with just eating a single donut. After you take the first bite, you have to eat the god damn box.
As a kid, I sometimes ate white bread sandwiches with butter and table sugar. Not the best thing for children but nevertheless…If I only ate the bread with sugar it didn’t taste that good. Once I spread some butter below and then added the sugar my tastebuds were stimulated in a completely different way. The bread combined with butter and sugar just melted in my mouth whereas just the bread with sugar tasted like cardboard.
When you eat either fat or carbs from a whole food source, then this overdrive of insulin and cravings doesn’t happen. Not a lot of people find pure lard or syrup appealing by themselves. Only after they get cooked with other ingredients do they become tastier.
Although saturated fat from animals has been recently shown to be not that big of a deal, it’s still not something you’d want to make the staple of your diet. Saturated fat is just a source of energy that doesn’t have that significant benefit either. It does help with cell membranes and neuronal functioning but you’d gain a whole lot more of that from other healthier fat sources like fish or eggs. There are plenty of populations who get just as much animal fats they need while still thriving and living long. It’s only in the Western countries where people tend to fall into the extremes – high carbs all the way, high fat or go home, or even worse, the combination of both.
Some people are also less suited to be consuming saturated fat. This is determined by a specific gene called APOE, which has 3 types (APOE2, APOE3, APOE4). The specific APOE gene we have instructs our body on how to make apolipoprotein E, which combines fatty acids to create lipoproteins. Lipoproteins are used to transport triglycerides and cholesterol around the blood.
If you have pre-dominantly APOE
4 genes, then you’re going to do worse with increased saturated fat and cholesterol intake. Instead, you’d want to be consuming more monounsaturated fats then. APOE4 carriers are said to be at a 20% increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease as well. Having APOE2 makes you more suited for a low carb high-fat diet and APOE3 is suitable for both types of diets. That’s why you’d want to get tested before going all in on a single way of eating.
Figure 73 The APOE gene and Alzheimer's risk
I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be consuming any more fat than my body needs. Any excess can’t be good for you in the long-term. Also, we don’t know what the future implications might be. It’s a much wiser and more evolutionary viable strategy to not be placing all your bets on a single food group or one macronutrient. You can get away with a moderate intake of fat as well as carbs as long as you practice the other habits of Metabolic Autophagy. The context matters a whole lot more.
That’s why I’m not advocating a fully high-fat diet. First of all, it’s not metabolically suitable for some people. Secondly, it still sustains the potentiality of causing some cardiovascular errors. Thirdly, it’s not necessary to be consumed in copious amounts. Fourth, you would benefit your body composition as well as longevity much more by lowering your fat intake slightly. And fifth, the evolutionary trade-off favours the process of deduction. Here are some additional factors to consider that make the case against too much fat:
Don’t Combine Fats and Carbs – The single most important thing for your nutrition. Both a low carb as well as a high carb diet can be equally good and bad, depending on the situation. You can be healthy and live long on both diets if you keep the macronutrients separate.
Don’t Be Stressed Out – Cortisol will still make you gain weight and raise insulin. In fact, eating a keto diet with chronic stress can be as detrimental as eating fast food because you’ll oxidize the fats and cholesterol with elevated blood sugar. I don’t have any evidence to prove this but it makes mechanistic sense.
Avoid Inflammation – Whether that be from processed food, charred meat, oxidized oils, trans fats, or the AGE formation of eating carbs and fats together. This will set the entire thing on fire...
Eat Whole Foods – Processed food promotes obesity for a reason – it’s easier to overconsume and it’s less satiating. You may accidentally end up with eating more calories than you need, which is another driver of insulin resistance and fat storage. More on this in the next chapter.
This book may come off as promoting a low carb high fat ketogenic diet. However, I’m not trying to enforce any food choices on anyone and am just sharing certain principles of best practice when it comes to meal timing, food combinations and such. There are also many ways to do a high carb low-fat plant-based diet the right way with this program. You just have to adjust the food groups to your preference and take into other considerations when it comes to fasting.
A high carb low-fat plant-based diet can be effectively used to treat atherogenesis and prevent against coronary heart disease[562]. The reason has to do with lower LDL cholesterol, increased polyphenols from certain plants, and activation of macrophages. Unnecessary cholesterol isn’t something to yearn for and you definitely want to avoid it in the context of hyperinsulinemia and inflammation. Fat, cholesterol, and meat aren’t going to kill you but it doesn’t mean you can eat them in unlimited amounts. There’s always some potential trade-offs we don’t see right away and usually the body functions best when in homeostasis.
Vegetables, on the other hand, are also incredibly nutritious and healthy. They’re probably one of the more safer things you can eat on a daily basis without running into serious health problems. That’s why, although a lot of the calories you eat come from animal-based foods, most of what you eat in bulk may still end up coming from plants and veggies. How much and what to actually eat will be covered in Chapter XV but the general idea is that make the majority of your foods come from low carb veggies and leafy greens.
One thing for sure, you shouldn’t fall into the extremes on any diet you follow, whether that be paleo, keto, carnivore, or vegan. For optimal health, we have to take the best of everything and apply them in the right context, which more often than not doesn’t include consuming an excess of any macronutrient.
The general principles of metabolic autophagy will still apply to any nutrition plan – eat a lot of plants and vegetables for the polyphenols and antioxidants, don’t eat too much meat and protein because of the mTOR stimulation, practice daily fasting with minimal eating frequency, stay low carb most of the time and then cycle with carb refeeds.
The simple idea of carbs making you fat is equally as alarming as the one of fat giving you heart disease. Whenever you hear people making bold statements like that without delving deeper into the context you should run. I mean...be very careful with all-encompassing claims about how certain things work in regards to nutrition and physiology.
The human body is such a complex thing that explaining it away with a simple calories in VS calories out model or a black and white idea of mTOR discredits the complexity of reality. Large epidemiological studies are also incomplete in giving you as an individual a lot of practical value. You have to understand the principles of how the body works and then make your adjustments based on the context of the situation.
Chapter XII
WTF Should I Eat
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf
There are so many misconceptions and opinions about nutrition that it’s overwhelming. Even though we have a lot of data and different concepts of dieting at our fingertips, most people still find themselves baffled as to WTF should I eat then?
Truth be told, there is no one-size fits all answer because everyone's metabolic conditions and energy requirements are different. You won’t find a plan you could stick to for the rest of your life because change is inevitable. What you can do instead is teach yourself the core principles of human metabolism and physiology. You’d want to become a true alchemist of anabolism and catabolism, which can then be used according to the situation.
This chapter will give you the main ideas and tenets of what foods you should eat and what not to. It’ll give you the 80/20 of diet.
What Humans Evolved to Eat
The first humans, the Australopithecines and Homo habilis[563], appeared around 4 million years ago and their diets included primarily plants but also a lot of meat[564]. Basically, they were scavengers who ate fruit, tubers, and small game with occasional remains of large animals.
According to the Expansive Tissue Hypothesis posed by the anthropologists Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler, the metabolic requirements of large human brains were offset by a corresponding reduction of the gut[565]. As our stomachs got smaller, our neocortices got larger. This was made possible by getting more calories from less food and not having to spend that much time searching for it. See Figure 74.
Figure 74 The Expansive Tissue Hypothesis - Smaller Guts Lead to Larger Brains
Before the advent of cooking, it was quite difficult for early hominids to extract that many calories from just tubers and plants. The occasional carcass here and there enabled them to get more of the essential fat-soluble nutrients from bone marrow and ligaments. After we started using fire, we were able to get more nutrition from both cooked starches and meats. The Expansive Tissue Hypothesis doesn’t directly indicate that humans got smarter because of hunting per se. We were foragers and scavengers before we could hunt.
Around one million years ago, Homo Erectus appeared on the scene and learned the ability to hunt big game. His life was primarily centered around hunting[566], which led to the development of anatomically modern humans about 200 000 years ago. Cro-Magnon man, as he was called, was compelled to inhabit many unpopulated regions of the world thanks to a meat-based diet. The disappearance of most large animals such as the mammoth, wild ox etc. wasn’t because of climate change but due to pe
ople hunting them to extinction[567][568]. That’s why you have people like the Inuit living in such barren regions – they followed the animals and survived.
Homo Sapiens has been around for hundreds and thousands of years. Over 90% of that time has been spent hunting and gathering. The agricultural revolution happened about 10 000 years ago and is such a new introduction to our evolutionary lineage.
Before modern agriculture and industrially processed food, we ate primarily a moderate-to-low carb, high fat, high protein diet with a very high nutrient density and plenty of fiber. Even when humans turned to agriculture, a large proportion of the crops was fed to the cattle for rearing their meat, as is today. There hasn’t been any 100% vegan aboriginal or even agricultural society because animal foods are much more nutrient dense than just plants. They provide all the essential amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and fats needed for sustaining life. Even vegetarian societies incorporate some dairy or animal fats to cover their essential nutrients.
This would also fluctuate between the seasons and faunal mobility. In the summer and early autumn, foragers would’ve been exposed to more carbohydrates from fruit, berries, and vegetables. During winter they’d be eating more animal foods like meat, fish, fats, and very little plants. These cycles would replicate the cycling of anabolism and catabolism as seen in nature.
A 2000 publication found that on average the macronutrient ratios of hunting and gathering tribes fall somewhere between 19-35% protein, 22-40% carbs, and 28-58% fat[569]. These numbers may vary hugely because certain populations have access to different types of wild game and vegetables. Naturally, an equatorial society is going to be consuming a lot more fruit and tubers, whereas an arctic one has to primarily focus on fats and meat.