Most of what you believe about a healthy diet is probably not true.

[andybird123]

Some things I learned recently due to new and updated research;
Salt intake has almost no effect on heart disease (low salt intake can actually increase your risk).
Dietary Cholesterol has no effect on risk of heart disease - vegetable oils actually increases risk of heart disease, saturated fats are more healthy (virgin olive oil and coconut oil are the best non-animal oils).
High sugar/carbohydrate intake also factor quite highly in heart disease risk.

I've also discovered that fasting (even just skipping breakfast) can have big health benefits.

Any other interesting titbits people want to share?

 

[andybird123]

Fast as much as possible...
This is new on any fads or "proper" diets that I've noticed in the past.

Who's agenda is pushing that one?? People that can't afford to eat? The poor? Is it a drive to make the population skinnier? Probably worth it lol.

Or is fasting the time between my breakfast and lunch, if I have it, dinner..?
I'm not eating, therefore I'm fasting.

Last time I spoke to a dietary professional at work, ( i seriously can't remember the English words for it, help)
They say people should eat little but often.....

Oh well.

The one I've been following suggests either a 4 hour eating window or omad (one meal a day)

I've lost 6kg in 3 months basically doing keto with a 4 hour which is better than I lost last time I did a calorie controlled diet and the major difference is that this is really easy so it's become an actual lifestyle change rather than "a diet" that I would stick to for a bit and then give up on once I got my target weight - I'm not hungry all the time and I don't worry about having a slice of cake or whatever as long as it's not every day

Now that I've realised that I was cutting the wrong thing by cutting fat when what I should be cutting is sugar, as I kept worrying about "cholesterol" and "salt" as being the bad thing when probably the worst thing in my diet was probably vegetable oil, my blood pressure has dropped about 10 points

 

[andybird123]

I'm not convinced skipping a meal entirely is what is intended behind "fasting" but it is pretty much researched that you shouldn't eat past a certain point at night. Calories took in too close to bedtime literally go straight to your ass. A ex-Royal Marine I used to work with would rather miss dinner than eat past 7pm for example.

The other issue is that protein wakes you up, so eating a full meal late at night will also probably mess up your sleep patterns

 

[andybird123]

This isn't new right?

Eat vegies and meat. Don't eat sugar. Fast as much as possible. Lift heavy ****.

The bit that was new to me was that for literal decades I've had doctors telling me to cut down saturated fat and salt intake - reading actual studies and following doctors who stay up to date on research I've now realised that veg/nut oils are actually bad for your heart, not saturated fat or salt, so sugar is easy to give up if you can eat food that actually tastes good

 

[andybird123]

So would something like Flora margarine be bad for you or worse off than butter?

Yes really bad for you, vegetable oils that use heat to extract them are extremely unstable and then force combining them with water turns them in to trans fats

 

[andybird123]

Yeah, most modern diet stuff is crap. As a general rule, anything which would have been available to us naturally before everything became processed is probably not bad for you (in moderation), because it's what our bodies were designed to live on. Of course, you can't make money telling people that so they come up with all sorts of crazy new fads to sell to people who are unable to see through it. I used to read a lot of nutritional advice but stopped because at some point you realise that they're always just trying to sell you something new, and after a while everything you read contradicts something else you read.
Regarding animal vs veg fat, I watched a YT vid a while ago which said that the ones which are bad for you are the ones which oxidise easily. IIRC certain seed oils are the main offenders. They're also the ones which involve the most intensive extraction processes, which ties in with what I said about stuff that occurs naturally.

Its actually people making money from youtube that highlighted this all to me ^
similarly another youtuber showed a graph overlaid by year of the increase in vegetable oil consumption (as you say most of which are extracted at extreme temps) vs. incidence of heart disease in the US, and they track basically directly

 

[andybird123]

Thats interesting because the accepted wisdom in cycling is that you basically cannot over consume carbs / sugar while you are refuelling on a ride. You will make yourself sick before you can overload yourself into a danger situation.

Post ride its a different story. I assume that you don't eat quite like a cyclist when you are running however.

yeah this is the big problem, a lot of what doctors or nutritionists will tell you about diet is not true as they are working from out of date information

 

[andybird123]

Seed oils are the latest food bogeyman and the cause for every ailment known to man (including sunburn… really).

okay, so digging in to this claim a bit more I can see where the daily mail headline has come from - oils extracted under high temperature (e.g. most vegetable/seed oils - also the cheapest type of veg oil so used in the vast majority of pre-packaged foods) are highly unstable and oxidise very quickly - as you may have heard there is quite a lot of evidence that oxidative stress causes skin damage and that anti oxidants are good for your skin... so veg oil contains a lot of oxidised lipids which will build up in your body, not only causing damage to your circulatory system, but also your skin, and if you are already having skin problems you are more likely to suffer sun burn, so its not as simple as saying "veg oil causes sunburn" as obviously that's false, staying in the sun too long causes sun burn, but if you consume high volumes of veg oil it could mean you are getting sun burn sooner than if you were not consuming it

 

[andybird123]

When they say veg oil, what do they mean? I use rapeseed and extra virgin olive oil. Am I safe to go into the sun?

"Bad" veg oil is the heat extracted stuff - extra virgin is cold pressed, rapeseed can be cold pressed if you buy one that expressly states it, coconut oil and avacado oil are another couple of cold pressed alternatives too

Almost all ready made foods use the cheapest oils available and in large quantities so that's the stuff to really avoid

 

[andybird123]

Correlation is not causation.

Correlation is not causation | Nathan Green's S word

Repeat after me, correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation, correlation is not causation …

www.theguardian.com

Yes I realise this, however multiple studies have shown that vegetable oil increases risk of heart disease, some of these were conducted by veg oil companies and when they publish the data they focus people on to the fact that veg oil is low in cholesterol and does help lower cholesterol ignoring the fact that this actually led to a higher incidence of heart disease and high blood pressure, not lower

 

[andybird123]

So does (one example from many) USA spending on science, space and technology and suicide by hanging in the USA. 0.99789 correlation, which is an extremely strong correlation. Almost certainly a stronger correlation than the graph you refer to.

And no, that's not a joke. That's from the official stats for the USA, from the CDC for suicides and from the USA government for spending on science, space and tech.

Spurious Correlations

Correlation is not causation: thousands of charts of real data showing actual correlations between ridiculous variables.

www.tylervigen.com

If you have enough data, it's very easy to find many correlations. The vast majority of them will be spurious.

Correlation is sometimes a useful potential possible indication of something that might possibly be worth looking at. Sometimes. It's far weaker than most people think it is and it's a very long way from causation.

I already responded to this from someone else, I'm not just referring to correlation, there are actual studies showing that people who eat large amounts of vegetable oil suffer much higher incidence of heart disease, where people who mostly consume saturated fats do not, even where the same study showed that eating veg oil does lower cholesterol - it was found that having lower cholesterol does not prevent heart disease.

 

[andybird123]

IMO The biggest issue with so many of these claims is the way they mis-represent what is happening to make it sound like doom and gloom.

99% of the time, those "increased risks" are in the order of 1% to 2% more likely THAN YOU WERE BEFORE to develop said illness.

So if you had 1% chance of heart disease, you now have 1.01 - 1.02% chance of developing heart disease. It is intentionally misleading to make big headlines and most people fall for it...

Heart disease kills around 25% of people in the UK, so no your chance of dying from it is not 1%. No one has given an actual percentage figure for the difference it might make but the research I've read states they believe it's a significant factor. In fact most newspaper articles continue to plug this idea that veg oils lower cholesterol=less heart disease.
There have been very few headlines about this. Vegetable oil also represents 30% of all agricultural land use.

 

[andybird123]

Notice the use of "So IF" in my statement..

It was a hypothetical, not a factual percentage, used to illustrate a point.

The point I was making is that "increases your risk of" is a very often miss-represented and miss-interpreted statistic.

I mention heart disease 5 times in the opening post, hence why I thought it worth pointing out that heart disease isn't a 1% thing, so it's not a fair comparison to whatever you were talking about.

7% of the population have diabetes, 63% are overweight or obese, again driven by our current over reliance on carbs because we've been led to believe carbs are healthier than animal fat.

 

[andybird123]

This is not new? It's been known for a while that dietary cholesterol has little impact. Hence why eggs were demonised for so long but now considered a vital food for healthy diet for example.

Saturated fats from MCT is great.

Sugar has been known to be a toxic chemical for a while.

Fasting is well researched and very beneficial.

Good to see that this knowledge is starting to spread though.

It's been known yes, as in most of the research I'm referring to is at least 10 years old, but not by the majority of people - I've even had my doctor as recently as 6 months ago tell me I need to eat less salt and animal fat if I want to get my blood pressure down, but I've managed to do that doing the complete opposite of what he suggested, which hadn't been working for me for 10 plus years prior.

 

[andybird123]

But it's whatever works for the individual. I lost 40kg in 7 months just doing calorie control and exercising. Bottom line is - calories in, calories out. I eat quite late in the day too (last snacks literally before I go to bed, otherwise my stomach wakes me during the night) and quite early in the morning. Worked great for me.

Yes I've done calorie control too, lost loads of weight, 3 years later I put at least half of it back on
with what I now know about diet and health I'm actually eating more food that I prefer so I'm far less likely to back slide to just eating crap (which in hindsight doing calorie control I was still eating crap, but just less of it)

with calorie counting I was constantly hungry but just fighting the urge to eat, with keto I get hungry near lunch time, eat and the don't feel hungry again till the next morning but tend to have a light evening meal with the family more out of habit than anything else

and its not just about weight loss, sugar and vegetable oils are now linked to heart disease, cancer, insulin resistance / diabetes

 

[andybird123]

Ok, I can replace veg oil with coconut oil, I can swap certain products for plant based alternatives... but ain't no way I can find a viable substitute for the sugar in my tea! Help me senpaiii

I now have no sugar in my coffee, just (full fat) milk, giving up sugar in almost everything I eat has actually recalibrated my taste buds to a certain extent and I find just milk is enough now

you don't need to swap anything for plant based alternatives though, meats are the best source for protein and a whole bunch of macronutrients, and veg oil uses up 30% of agricultural land, most land used for farming animals wouldn't be able to grow crops, ruminents actually upcycle food humans can't eat in to a form that we can eat (meat), animals in UK/US are also fed the waste from vegetable growing - there are a lot of countries that are less efficient about farming animals so really the concentration of effort should be on education rather than false claims that we should stop eating meat.

 

[andybird123]

Tbf, that's not an issue with the system... 3½ years on and I'm still doing fine.


I won't lie, if I'm trying to drop a pound or two, after perhaps a big weekend where I've not controlled things so much, I do spend most of my day hungry, but I don't see that being different when I eat different things. I don't know if it's a metabolism thing, I can eat until stuffed and will still feel hungry 2 or 3 hours later...


Thanks for the shout-out. One thing that really made me feel good, I worked in a shop while I was losing weight and quite a few people came up to me saying I'd inspired them to do better. Brought a tear to my eye on occasion.

If you still eat quite a lot of carbs daily then it's an insulin thing, when you eat carbs it spikes insulin which triggers your body to turn glucose in to fat to reduce your blood sugar level, so after 2-3 hours of not eating your blood sugar level starts to drop but it takes time for the insulin to drop in which time your body tells you your blood sugar is too low so you get hungry and the whole process starts again.

After a couple of days of not eating carbs (they suggest less than 50g of net carbs but I generally do ok on less than 100g), your not in that cycle of constantly pumping insulin and the hunger subsides. Eating fat and to a lesser extent protein makes me feel satiated and I can go 20 hours without food without any negatives (on calorie control I would feel hungry like all the time and dizzy if I tried to walk up stairs - i get none of that with keto)

calorie control also did nothing for my blood pressure where as keto has dropped it 10 points in a few months

 

[andybird123]

Does that mean my unhealthy addiction to pork scratchings is actually healthy!?

Packaged ones are likely to contain a bunch of crap you don't need and be cooked in cheap veg oil, but make them fresh in good oil and they are much less unhealthy than would have been made out, yes.

I now eat bacon multiple times a week (usually on salad) and my blood pressure has dropped.

 

[andybird123]

I only source straight from the local butcher. I can't stand the processed ones!

even so, check what oil they are cooked in as that could make all the difference

 

[andybird123]

I eat a sugar rich diet and have a very strong body & immune system, until I started eating meat more than usual and I started getting ill more.
Also I eat a lot of cheese and eggs also, so protein was never an issue but eating the likes of steaks and very fatty patty burgers I have felt the difference.

Sugar is not as bad as made to believe, it is if you are never active, luckily I have a pretty intense job, muscles need glucoze.

I gain muscle and strength better on this diet.

I do eat balanced.
I eat veg.
I eat fish.
I eat nuts.
I eat pasta / rice.
I eat anything just that I have a higher preference for the aforementioned and have witnessed changes in eating way more meat than usual.

It's different for everyone.

Doing lots of excercise to use up the extra carbs will keep weight off, but the daily cycle of insulin spikes could still be causing long term damage, see how you go through 40's and in to your 50's and you could find you start to develop problems, luckily even hard core insulin resistance can be fixed by just swapping out the carbs - it doesn't have to be red meat if you don't tolerate red meat - olive oil and avocados are also good - to your benefit if you are eating cheese, eggs and nuts then chances are you are also consuming the right nutrients that will be protective for you.

Low carb diet doesn't mean high protein diet - healthy keto mostly recommends a piece of meat no bigger than the palm of your hand.

Modern low carb isn't atkins, on the atkins diet you would eat so much meat that your body just turns it in to glucose anyway.