Adding An Epicycle

In which I add an epicycle

Nov 17, 2023

When the ancients had a theory that seemed to work, but which was maybe a little inaccurate in certain cases, they would add an epicycle to that theory.

And until, one day, great Newton, standing on the shoulders of giants, and shining the light of reason more brightly than ever it had shone before, revealed to us the System of the World, that was good enough.

As every schoolboy knows, with enough epicycles a theory can explain any data.

As every student of machine learning knows, epicycles are not just to be stuffed in willy-nilly. In the eyes of Bayes they are unsightly.

A man must be confident that his theory is less complicated than the data it explains.

To go close to that limit is to model noise. To risk false predictions. To exceed it is madness.

I do not have a great deal of data. But my Old Theory

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/i/138920437/old-pufa-theory

which otherwise seems to have a lot going for it and explains a lot of my data, is already making false predictions.

Permit me, in this emergency, to add an epicycle.

Protein seems important here.

The two times I gained weight recently were both times of high protein intake.

Heart-attack-keto involved replacing the pure calories of double cream with an awful lot of beef and cheese. The Mom Test involved literally swimming in a gigantic bath of favourite foods, with protein coming out my ears.

The initial six months of the Heart Attack Diet, in which I felt better, but gained weight at something like the same rate as previously, doubtless involved considerable protein too.

One's very first instinct, when first one sees the faint glimmer of the truth, and seeks to shun the polyunsaturated abomination, is to eat lots of nice things. Cheese, beef, yoghurt, tuna, eggs, cottage cheese, greek yoghurt, peanut butter. All these made their appearances in my cupboards. Lentils and quinoa not so much.

The alert will notice that peanut butter stands high in the ranks of polyunsaturated corruption. A most unnatural food. A literal seed oil.

My brethren, what can I say? It took me a while to notice. I am weak and foolish, and I really like peanut butter on toast. I was Blind.

I do not think that I ate enough peanut butter to make up for all the other polyunsaturated horrors that I suddenly wasn't eating. It might have been close.

Lots of protein and some reduction in PUFA, let us say, for that first six months.

Less PUFA should have had effects. It maybe did. I felt better. But I gained weight just like I had before.

And maybe that feeling better was just from getting rid of all the processed crap and its myriad unnatural chemicals, all of which are totally not short-term poisons in rats. Maybe the reduction in sulphites alone explained it.

I notice slightly paradoxically that my first bout of unexpected overheating, my very first surprising experience of being forced to reduce my thyroid dose, happened right at the end of that six month period.

Sulphites? Finally getting rid of peanut butter (damn it I did not record when I finally noticed that!!)?

Right at the end of that period, but just before ex150ish.

So I can't blame my purported metabolic recovery on ex150ish alone. It must be something to do with no-PUFAs/no processed food.

Weight loss doesn't happen at all before ex150ish.

ex150ish looks strongly causal. But it is not all of the cause.

I notice also that my friend u/exfatloss consistently loses weight when he is following ex150 or any of its spectacular array of variants, and that the weight regain which frustrates him happens consistently during his non-ex150 periods.

Very strange. I get no such effect. Quite the reverse, I think.

And u/exfatloss is deeply wedded for various reasons to the idea of a carbohydrate-free diet.

What, I think to myself, might a man eat if he were avoiding both PUFA and carbohydrates?

It's pure animal fat or it's protein, isn't it? Calories gotta come from somewhere.

So my epicycle is going to have to be something like:

Protein disrupts the effect of no-PUFAs in some way.

I wonder why?

I am hypothesising that the whole problem with PUFAs is that their path into the citric acid cycle is rate-limited.

Protein is not just fuel. Protein is what you are made of. It is needed for repairs and maintenance. It is needed to build new structures. It is a most natural food. Perhaps the most natural food of all.

But excess protein, beyond what you need for reasons, that is fuel.

And it gets chopped up and fed into the citric acid cycle too.

So I am thinking:

What if that rate-limited pathway that you use to chop up PUFAs is somehow shared with the pathway that you use to chop up excess proteins?

Protein cannot be bad for you. Take it to the bank. Protein is the most essential of the three macronutrients. The only thing you need to eat in large quantities to live.

Your metabolism must function perfectly in the presence of large quantities of protein as part of a traditional diet.

But there is nothing whatsoever guaranteeing that protein and PUFAs must coexist happily in all possible proportions.

Because we were not meant to eat PUFAs in large quantities. No ancestor of mine ever did. Not the apes, not the hunters and gatherers, not the farmers.

Southern Europeans maybe, for the last two thousand years, ate Olive Oil, in their wickedness. That’s enough time to adapt a bit, if there was significant pressure.

But I have no significant ancestry outside of Northern Europe. Or so 23andme tells me.

Behold, the mountains labour, and is born a ridiculous little mouse:

An Epicycle

If you eat protein over the amount that you need for repair and maintenance and start burning the excess as fuel, that will interfere with your already rather limited ability to burn PUFAs for fuel.

In the absence of excess protein, you can probably deal quite well with some limited amount of PUFA. There are, after all, small amounts of PUFA in your natural diet, and without them you will die.

In the presence of excess protein, your ability to deal with more PUFA than usual is reduced, likely proportionately to the amount of excess protein.

I would like to make the point very strongly that this epicycle is:

completely unsupported by theory

completely unsupported by data

pulled out of thin air on the basis of my own obsessive introspection and distant, unclear observation of the adventures of u/exfatloss.

and also that it does not even completely explain my own experiences or those of my friends.

And thus it is:

Very, Very Unlikely to be the Truth

But I think that it is a good epicycle. Some but not all of the problems with the Old Theory are alleviated by it.

Old Theory plus Epicycle does better than Old Theory alone in terms of explaining what we have already seen.

It will serve for a bit. Until it makes false predictions.

An immediate prediction of this Epicycle:

There is some interaction between PUFA-chopping and protein-chopping in human biochemistry. Some common enzyme, some common substrate, some source of backpressure. The two get on each other’s tits.

The Lord knows I am no biochemist.

I believe, help my unbelief

I do not believe, help my belief

As appropriate, ye wiser than I.