Great read. Why is it that middle-aged Englismen can essentially write about anything and it turns out fascinating and you wish you were there?! I truly believe this was the foundation of the British empire. (Is the E in empire capitalized?)
PUFA theory sure lets us draw quite a good line through all the points in our history. But, of course, it's easy enough to find an infinite number of lines to fit. The true test will be if It All Goes Away after X years of dePUFAcation. Hopefully we'll find some sort of useful proxy, like OmegaQuant or whatever, so we don't have to tell people "just keep going down this path for 7 years, trust me."
And in the meantime, it sure seems that PUFA acts as a sort of background radiation/catalyst for all sorts of more specific problems and puzzles that can be solved in the short-term: keto seems to circumvent certain ailments, protein restriction others.
Would these just work on their own, in absence of PUFA? Maybe. What makes me suspect this is that not everybody who's clearly metabolically messed up needs to restrict protein, or carbs. But of course that could also just mean it's genetic.
I could probably tell an equally convincing story linking my ill-health to the rise of 4G telecoms, or the Greek debt crisis. I have an evil power of being able to convince thinking men of almost anything. I love bringing right-wingers to the light of Communism, and showing Socialist Workers the impossible clarity and inevitable truth of classical economics.
What I'm actually looking for here is the details that *don't* fit my story. e.g. Why didn't I lose weight during the pandemic? I probably wasn't eating much PUFA. Why did the new tiredness seem to come on after the second COVID vaccine? Why not the first? etc. etc.
It looks kinda right. I can believe it. But I want to be able to see the places where it fails.
Especially since not eating PUFAS means restricting processed food as well as resteraunt food. Both of which are widely considered bad for you.
Both for the same reasons. The maker has no incentive to worry about health outcomes. For example when you buy a fruit smoothie they always replace parts of the fruit with ice and sugar. They add far more fat, sugar, and salt than home cooked food. They also remove as much fiber as possible and make the food as digestible as possible. They also modify the texture of the food to make it more addictive.
Macaroni is technically a processed food. But the processing does the opposite. It makes it harder to digest. Has basically zero salt, fat and sugar. It does lower fiber though.
I personally suspect salt plays a bigger role then you think. Commercial food has an absurdly high amount of salt (since they use it as a preservative and flavour mask). Since I’ve cut it out whenever I go back I taste it and it’s way way way to salty for me. And this doesn’t account for the sodium without chloride that is added (which you can’t even taste). I’ve lost around 2 kilo in water weight just from that.
My theory is modern food replaces flavour with taste and texture because flavour is inherently more expensive. You can either age your cheese for 3 years or you can add more fat, sugar and emulsifiers.
> Especially since not eating PUFAS means restricting processed food as well as resteraunt food. Both of which are widely considered bad for you.
>Both for the same reasons. The maker has no incentive to worry about health outcomes. For example when you buy a fruit smoothie they always replace parts of the fruit with ice and sugar. They add far more fat, sugar, and salt than home cooked food. They also remove as much fiber as possible and make the food as digestible as possible. They also modify the texture of the food to make it more addictive.
So I couldn't agree more about this bit. Capitalism gives us what we want for cheap. We are not very careful about what we want.
Everyone thinks processed foods are bad, but no one can agree why, or which foods count as processed.
And giving up PUFAs means giving up almost all processed foods, so whether or not PUFAs are bad news, giving them up should bring great benefits.
Unless you replace them with your own versions by making them at home (or your mom’s cooking). Though notably I doubt you’re adding nearly as much sugar or salt. And probably not nearly as much fat as well since they add fat to stuff you wouldn’t even expect far to be there.
Notably home cooked food tastes better because the ingredients are more expensive. Instead of buying garbage meat and drowning it in oil and sugar. You can just buy a quality steak and barbecue it.
My pure fruit smoothie at home tastes way better than the ice and sugar smoothie from real fruit bubble tea. Despite my fruit smoothie being like a quarter the calories. Though it’s almost as expensive.
My macaroni sauce made from expensive cheese has zero sugar and butter and much less fat per flavour.
Totally. I also don't buy the various explanations around hyper-palatability, because home-made food just tastes way way better than processed crap.
You wouldn't believe how much fat and salt I add to home-cooked food! I love both. I usually find that processed crap needs *more* salt to taste right. And everything is better with extra butter and cheese.
Sugar I am not so keen on and I only have it around in case guests want sugar in their tea or coffee. I almost never touch it myself and it tends to form hard cakes in its pot which need to be broken up if someone does want it.
I agree with you, but I think the "hyper-palatability" people mean that in a more technical sense. Nobody's arguing that deep-fried chicken tenders taste better than fancy Italian home-cooked meals.
It's "hyper-palatable" in the technical sense that it makes you hyperphagic, it makes you "overeat."
Of course the definition is usually somewhat circular, because HPFs are defined as foods that make you overeat, overeating is defined as eating that causes weight gain, and weight is gained by overeating.. let me store this argument in my graph database before my stack overflows.
That said, I have definitely experienced foods that make me hyperphagic. We talked about it just the other day - ah, sour cream, ye old ultra-processed junk food!
I don’t think hyper palatable is directly related to how good it feels to eat it.
My smoothies taste amazing but because they are loaded with fiber. You get satisfied.
Hyper palatable foods mess with your bodies ability to decide that’s it’s full. The way it does this is by increasing salt amounts. Lowering fibre. Increasing texture cues. They overload your taste buds in a way your body isn’t prepared for.
For example all dressed chips (the most addictive chip I’ve ever had) works by triggering every taste bud at once. The first chip tastes rancid. But by the tenth chip you can’t stop. Though when I had a fibre supplement alongside it. It suddenly became much much less addictive. Even though the taste was the same.
The point where I disagree with almost everyone, is that I just point blank don't believe that salt, animal fat, carbohydrates, protein, and so on can possibly be the cause of modern problems. Because for about three thousand years we've eaten all these things in almost any imaginable combinations, and people seem to have been fine on almost any traditional diet.
Honey is a very traditional food. Some people eat lots of it.
Sugar (sucrose) is relatively recent. It could be potentially be bad. I think it *is* bad for teeth, due to its clever use by the s.mutans bacteria in your mouth. I don't eat much of it myself.
But my own ancestors ate enough of it to wreck their teeth without it wrecking their metabolism. And it's not too different from honey once it gets into your system. So I think I give it a pass too.
Salt isn’t bad per se. The problem is that your body craves it way beyond what it needs because of how little there is of it in the wild. You can get as much salt in a day that our ancestors got in a month.
Processed foods have ten to fifteen times as much salt as their home made counterparts.
> You can get as much salt in a day that our ancestors got in a month.
And? Animals do fine with free access to salt. Like most essential things, we can get rid of the excess if we need to. And it's really weird to crave something you don't need. Why would evolution do that?
These systems are old. They shouldn't have stupid bugs in them that will kill you if you e.g. live near the sea, or near a salt deposit.
And again, which ancestors? The Victorians had plenty of salt.
Fair point. Though humans do you a much higher lifespan and salt only becomes a problem later on in life. Though likley contributes to hyper palatability.
My very conventional theory of obesity is as follows.
Your body is very very good at regulating itself. In order to fail a lot needs to go wrong.
You need to be completely sedentary.
You need to be eating zero fiber.
You need to eat fatty foods mixed with digestible carbs/sugars.
You need to be eating addictive foods that cater directly to the palate. Like foods loaded with emulsifiers, fats, sugars, salt and certain textures. Food that caters to flavour isn’t bad at all.
The rub is that once you do violate all of the above for long enough periods of time. Your just fucked.
Well I'm not completely sedentary even now. And I certainly wasn't at the time all this started. And yet I've been pretty fucked and gaining weight for most of the last decade it seems.
I used to do the only macaroni diet. And was perfectly fine. Then covid happened and I started to eat out. I gained a lot of weight during covid(zero exercise) then stalled out post covid. Now I’m losing weight on my all macaroni diet again.
Anecdotally, both when I first lost 100lbs and this time (50-60lbs so far) I was completely sedentary for almost the entire time, and I ate very little fiber, if any.
Keto is weird. It makes zero sense. It doesn't follow any of the rules. Somehow going from 60 percent fat too 80 percent magically changes a diet from weight gaining too weight loss. My suspiction that Ex150 works in part because it's stronger ketosis.
My best guess is that once you damage your system. You need to do something weird to fix it. I'm not even sure it's possible to fix. Maybe diet's like Ex150 only work while your doing the diet. And the second you stop all the weight will come back. (I'm going to register that as a prediction)
Fiber plus exercise will cause you too be weight stable but not to lose weight.
The reason I'm skeptical of "processed food" is that I've cooked 95% of my meals since I moved out of my parents' home. The period where I first lost 100lbs was actually the period I ate most at restaurants - but mostly in Asia.
Then I gained 100lbs back cooking 95%+ of my own meals again, back in the U.S.
So "processed food" and "restaurant food" just doesn't jive well with me. Yea, at some points later when I had given up on weight loss and was just pigging out, I'd eat at restaurants and eat more processed food.
But I legit gained 100lbs back cooking my own food from whole ingredients every day.
Until a little over a year ago, I literally thought there was "something in the water" since I had lost 100lbs effortlessly doing keto in Asia, and then gained it back no matter what (incl. insane fasting regimes and working out) back in America.
That's why I was so open to the SM TM lithium idea - it's literally in the water.
But then I only consumed distilled water for 30 days, and my weight didn't budge one bit. Of course it could be buildup, but...
The obvious differences are PUFA content and protein content. US keto is very heavy on bacon, and I certainly ate my fair share of it. My diet also turned from "2 portions of stir fry sans rice" to "1lb of steak/ground beef" per meal when I moved back. Plus I added copious amounts of delicious yogurt, cheese, cream cheese, sour cream... all the stuff I see now, in isolation, making me hyperphagic as fuck. (Btw, I've been hyperphagic af from nothing but beef, too, in sufficient quantities. So it's not just the dairy.)
Asians eat very little protein, especially from meat/dairy. They also seem to traditionally cook with palm oil or palm kernel oil, not soybean oil, so the restaurants there aren't as PUFA'd. Though that's apparently changing, too.
Maybe there are variables, and maybe it's just one of these 2 or both or neither. But they're my best suspects right now.
Great read. Why is it that middle-aged Englismen can essentially write about anything and it turns out fascinating and you wish you were there?! I truly believe this was the foundation of the British empire. (Is the E in empire capitalized?)
PUFA theory sure lets us draw quite a good line through all the points in our history. But, of course, it's easy enough to find an infinite number of lines to fit. The true test will be if It All Goes Away after X years of dePUFAcation. Hopefully we'll find some sort of useful proxy, like OmegaQuant or whatever, so we don't have to tell people "just keep going down this path for 7 years, trust me."
And in the meantime, it sure seems that PUFA acts as a sort of background radiation/catalyst for all sorts of more specific problems and puzzles that can be solved in the short-term: keto seems to circumvent certain ailments, protein restriction others.
Would these just work on their own, in absence of PUFA? Maybe. What makes me suspect this is that not everybody who's clearly metabolically messed up needs to restrict protein, or carbs. But of course that could also just mean it's genetic.
Aww, that's so kind! Thank you.
I could probably tell an equally convincing story linking my ill-health to the rise of 4G telecoms, or the Greek debt crisis. I have an evil power of being able to convince thinking men of almost anything. I love bringing right-wingers to the light of Communism, and showing Socialist Workers the impossible clarity and inevitable truth of classical economics.
What I'm actually looking for here is the details that *don't* fit my story. e.g. Why didn't I lose weight during the pandemic? I probably wasn't eating much PUFA. Why did the new tiredness seem to come on after the second COVID vaccine? Why not the first? etc. etc.
It looks kinda right. I can believe it. But I want to be able to see the places where it fails.
Especially since not eating PUFAS means restricting processed food as well as resteraunt food. Both of which are widely considered bad for you.
Both for the same reasons. The maker has no incentive to worry about health outcomes. For example when you buy a fruit smoothie they always replace parts of the fruit with ice and sugar. They add far more fat, sugar, and salt than home cooked food. They also remove as much fiber as possible and make the food as digestible as possible. They also modify the texture of the food to make it more addictive.
Macaroni is technically a processed food. But the processing does the opposite. It makes it harder to digest. Has basically zero salt, fat and sugar. It does lower fiber though.
I personally suspect salt plays a bigger role then you think. Commercial food has an absurdly high amount of salt (since they use it as a preservative and flavour mask). Since I’ve cut it out whenever I go back I taste it and it’s way way way to salty for me. And this doesn’t account for the sodium without chloride that is added (which you can’t even taste). I’ve lost around 2 kilo in water weight just from that.
My theory is modern food replaces flavour with taste and texture because flavour is inherently more expensive. You can either age your cheese for 3 years or you can add more fat, sugar and emulsifiers.
> Especially since not eating PUFAS means restricting processed food as well as resteraunt food. Both of which are widely considered bad for you.
>Both for the same reasons. The maker has no incentive to worry about health outcomes. For example when you buy a fruit smoothie they always replace parts of the fruit with ice and sugar. They add far more fat, sugar, and salt than home cooked food. They also remove as much fiber as possible and make the food as digestible as possible. They also modify the texture of the food to make it more addictive.
So I couldn't agree more about this bit. Capitalism gives us what we want for cheap. We are not very careful about what we want.
Everyone thinks processed foods are bad, but no one can agree why, or which foods count as processed.
And giving up PUFAs means giving up almost all processed foods, so whether or not PUFAs are bad news, giving them up should bring great benefits.
Unless you replace them with your own versions by making them at home (or your mom’s cooking). Though notably I doubt you’re adding nearly as much sugar or salt. And probably not nearly as much fat as well since they add fat to stuff you wouldn’t even expect far to be there.
Notably home cooked food tastes better because the ingredients are more expensive. Instead of buying garbage meat and drowning it in oil and sugar. You can just buy a quality steak and barbecue it.
My pure fruit smoothie at home tastes way better than the ice and sugar smoothie from real fruit bubble tea. Despite my fruit smoothie being like a quarter the calories. Though it’s almost as expensive.
My macaroni sauce made from expensive cheese has zero sugar and butter and much less fat per flavour.
Totally. I also don't buy the various explanations around hyper-palatability, because home-made food just tastes way way better than processed crap.
You wouldn't believe how much fat and salt I add to home-cooked food! I love both. I usually find that processed crap needs *more* salt to taste right. And everything is better with extra butter and cheese.
Sugar I am not so keen on and I only have it around in case guests want sugar in their tea or coffee. I almost never touch it myself and it tends to form hard cakes in its pot which need to be broken up if someone does want it.
I agree with you, but I think the "hyper-palatability" people mean that in a more technical sense. Nobody's arguing that deep-fried chicken tenders taste better than fancy Italian home-cooked meals.
It's "hyper-palatable" in the technical sense that it makes you hyperphagic, it makes you "overeat."
Of course the definition is usually somewhat circular, because HPFs are defined as foods that make you overeat, overeating is defined as eating that causes weight gain, and weight is gained by overeating.. let me store this argument in my graph database before my stack overflows.
That said, I have definitely experienced foods that make me hyperphagic. We talked about it just the other day - ah, sour cream, ye old ultra-processed junk food!
I don’t think hyper palatable is directly related to how good it feels to eat it.
My smoothies taste amazing but because they are loaded with fiber. You get satisfied.
Hyper palatable foods mess with your bodies ability to decide that’s it’s full. The way it does this is by increasing salt amounts. Lowering fibre. Increasing texture cues. They overload your taste buds in a way your body isn’t prepared for.
For example all dressed chips (the most addictive chip I’ve ever had) works by triggering every taste bud at once. The first chip tastes rancid. But by the tenth chip you can’t stop. Though when I had a fibre supplement alongside it. It suddenly became much much less addictive. Even though the taste was the same.
The point where I disagree with almost everyone, is that I just point blank don't believe that salt, animal fat, carbohydrates, protein, and so on can possibly be the cause of modern problems. Because for about three thousand years we've eaten all these things in almost any imaginable combinations, and people seem to have been fine on almost any traditional diet.
Honey is a very traditional food. Some people eat lots of it.
Sugar (sucrose) is relatively recent. It could be potentially be bad. I think it *is* bad for teeth, due to its clever use by the s.mutans bacteria in your mouth. I don't eat much of it myself.
But my own ancestors ate enough of it to wreck their teeth without it wrecking their metabolism. And it's not too different from honey once it gets into your system. So I think I give it a pass too.
Salt isn’t bad per se. The problem is that your body craves it way beyond what it needs because of how little there is of it in the wild. You can get as much salt in a day that our ancestors got in a month.
Processed foods have ten to fifteen times as much salt as their home made counterparts.
> You can get as much salt in a day that our ancestors got in a month.
And? Animals do fine with free access to salt. Like most essential things, we can get rid of the excess if we need to. And it's really weird to crave something you don't need. Why would evolution do that?
These systems are old. They shouldn't have stupid bugs in them that will kill you if you e.g. live near the sea, or near a salt deposit.
And again, which ancestors? The Victorians had plenty of salt.
Fair point. Though humans do you a much higher lifespan and salt only becomes a problem later on in life. Though likley contributes to hyper palatability.
My very conventional theory of obesity is as follows.
Your body is very very good at regulating itself. In order to fail a lot needs to go wrong.
You need to be completely sedentary.
You need to be eating zero fiber.
You need to eat fatty foods mixed with digestible carbs/sugars.
You need to be eating addictive foods that cater directly to the palate. Like foods loaded with emulsifiers, fats, sugars, salt and certain textures. Food that caters to flavour isn’t bad at all.
The rub is that once you do violate all of the above for long enough periods of time. Your just fucked.
Well I'm not completely sedentary even now. And I certainly wasn't at the time all this started. And yet I've been pretty fucked and gaining weight for most of the last decade it seems.
You’re a mystery to me. Your body fell apart in more ways than one. I’m fascinated by your journey. I’ve read the entire substack.
I eagerly await your updates. I don’t know why your gaining weight and that’s why I want to see your experiments
Also if you want to experiment with an all macaroni diet that would be cool.
I used to do the only macaroni diet. And was perfectly fine. Then covid happened and I started to eat out. I gained a lot of weight during covid(zero exercise) then stalled out post covid. Now I’m losing weight on my all macaroni diet again.
Anecdotally, both when I first lost 100lbs and this time (50-60lbs so far) I was completely sedentary for almost the entire time, and I ate very little fiber, if any.
Keto is weird. It makes zero sense. It doesn't follow any of the rules. Somehow going from 60 percent fat too 80 percent magically changes a diet from weight gaining too weight loss. My suspiction that Ex150 works in part because it's stronger ketosis.
My best guess is that once you damage your system. You need to do something weird to fix it. I'm not even sure it's possible to fix. Maybe diet's like Ex150 only work while your doing the diet. And the second you stop all the weight will come back. (I'm going to register that as a prediction)
Fiber plus exercise will cause you too be weight stable but not to lose weight.
The reason I'm skeptical of "processed food" is that I've cooked 95% of my meals since I moved out of my parents' home. The period where I first lost 100lbs was actually the period I ate most at restaurants - but mostly in Asia.
Then I gained 100lbs back cooking 95%+ of my own meals again, back in the U.S.
So "processed food" and "restaurant food" just doesn't jive well with me. Yea, at some points later when I had given up on weight loss and was just pigging out, I'd eat at restaurants and eat more processed food.
But I legit gained 100lbs back cooking my own food from whole ingredients every day.
Tell me more. The PUFAs? The protein?
Until a little over a year ago, I literally thought there was "something in the water" since I had lost 100lbs effortlessly doing keto in Asia, and then gained it back no matter what (incl. insane fasting regimes and working out) back in America.
That's why I was so open to the SM TM lithium idea - it's literally in the water.
But then I only consumed distilled water for 30 days, and my weight didn't budge one bit. Of course it could be buildup, but...
The obvious differences are PUFA content and protein content. US keto is very heavy on bacon, and I certainly ate my fair share of it. My diet also turned from "2 portions of stir fry sans rice" to "1lb of steak/ground beef" per meal when I moved back. Plus I added copious amounts of delicious yogurt, cheese, cream cheese, sour cream... all the stuff I see now, in isolation, making me hyperphagic as fuck. (Btw, I've been hyperphagic af from nothing but beef, too, in sufficient quantities. So it's not just the dairy.)
Asians eat very little protein, especially from meat/dairy. They also seem to traditionally cook with palm oil or palm kernel oil, not soybean oil, so the restaurants there aren't as PUFA'd. Though that's apparently changing, too.
Maybe there are variables, and maybe it's just one of these 2 or both or neither. But they're my best suspects right now.
Hmm...., so lots of protein in your US keto then, but where are the PUFAs? Not from bacon alone, surely?