New Theory: PUFAs vs Protein
A Summary of My Current Best Guess
Someone on reddit asked me what my theory actually was, and that’s a fair question. None of this is new, it’s just a summary of what I’m currently thinking all in one place.
Polyunsaturated fats are the root cause of all the bad things. They are for sure essential, but only in very low quantities. Any extra gets burned for fuel or stored.
But we can only burn them for fuel at a low rate, because we weren't designed to burn them in large quantities.
Protein-burning and PUFA-burning are competing for some metabolic resource. Maybe they share a pathway or a substrate or something.
If you're trying to use excess protein for fuel at the same time that you’re trying to use excess PUFA for fuel, the protein gets priority and you can't burn PUFAs at all.
The excess of unburnable fat clogs up our metabolism, works its way into things like cell membranes, and also affects the mechanism by which the brain assesses our fat stores.
So if we eat a lot of PUFAs and a lot of protein, we get ill and also fat as the body tries to get its fat stores where they should be even though the fat-level sensor is broken.
Just giving up PUFAs does probably work eventually, but really slowly.
In order to get rid of your stored PUFAs at a reasonable rate, you have to both give up the PUFAs and restrict your protein intake to the point where you're not burning much protein for fuel.
Once you do both, then you can slowly burn off the stored PUFAs, and everything will just put itself right as they go.
During this process, you’ve actually got *two* weight-set-points. One for ‘when protein is interfering and PUFA can’t be burned’, and one for ‘not trying to burn protein, so some PUFA is getting burned’.
A fairly small change in how much protein you’re consuming (over the basic requirements of body maintenance) can change your set point quite a lot between the two limits, and your appetite and thus weight will respond quite rapidly to that.
So restrict protein down to maintenance levels, appetite collapses. Weight drops. Stored PUFA reserves fall.
Start eating lots of protein, appetite goes through the roof. Weight gain. Stored PUFA reserves stay constant or only decline a little.
I’ve actually got very little idea why I believe this, or how I might go about persuading anyone that it’s true. It’s just intuition mainly.
But it does seem to explain a lot of stuff.
If you can see any prediction that it makes that isn’t true then I’d love to hear about it.
You know what this sounds a lot like? Diabetes for protein.