Matt Metzgar

Coconut Oil and Alzheimer's Disease

 

This video is from some religous network, but I thought the content was very interesting.  They discuss how the ketones generated from coconut oil can help patients with Alzhemer's.

Fat and Sugar II

I got a hold of that paper I mentioned a few days ago, and it's a dandy. It shows how the increase in added fats and sugars parallels the rise in obesity. The article actually tests three different hypotheses in the article: is the increase in BMI due to:

1) more fat

2) more sugar

3) more sugar and fat in combination

Both fat and sugar separately have high correlations with the increase in BMI, but fat and sugar together take the cake (pun intended!).  Here's the graph:

 

They are getting R-squared's of 0.96, which is very high.  Here's a few highlights from the paper:

"Other foods available for consumption such as dairy products, meat and eggs, vegetables, grains, and fruits were used as covariates along with fat and sugar production in multivariate regression analysis for male (female) BMI. For men, fat and sugar accounted for 96% of total variability in BMI (P < 0.001) with vegetables adding 1.5% (P < 0.001). For women, fat and sugar accounted for 97% of total variability (P < 0.001) with dairy (P = 0.0034), vegetables (P = 0.0145), and grains (P = 0.0191) each adding less than 1% to the total variability. Interestingly, dairy was negatively correlated with BMI (r = −0.86 and r = −0.90 for males and females BMI, respectively)."

In other words, they looked at the different food groups, but it was the added fat and sugar that was the primary determinant (like I mentioned in a previous post).

"The palatability hypothesis therefore predicts that increases in BMI are not due to calories per se in the drive system, but rather the increases are due to high levels of palatability that increase calorie consumption through increased stimulation of the incentive system. This leads to the hypothesis that the increased production of the additives of fat and sugar in combination would be most responsible for increased palatability and would therefore also provide the best mathematical fit for increases in calorie production and BMI over the last 30 years."

Here they are focusing on how fat and sugar in combination can produce palatable, addictive food.

Food Consumption in America

I've been reading through a USDA publication, " Profiling Food Consumption in America(pdf)".  It shows the general increase in food consumption over the past 50 years.

What's amazing is that consumption of almost everything has gone up: meats, fruits, vegetables, added fats, grains, and sugars.  Take meat consumption for example.  Here's the table:

(click to enlarge)

It shows an annual increase of 55 pounds of meat per person.  What's driving this increase?  I find it hard to believe that people were meat-deprived in the 1950s.

Most likely, I think that the increase in meat (particulary chicken) is driven by the processing of chicken - adding breading, fat, dipping sauces, etc.  It may be that these added ingredients are driving the consumption of chicken (or other food groups for that matter) rather than an actual increase in the need for animal protein.

Fat Sensitivity

I thought this looked like an interesting study.  It shows how different people are either hyper or hypo-sensitive to fat intake.  From the abstract:

"Hyposensitive subjects consumed significantly more energy, fat, saturated fat, fatty foods (butter, meat, dairy), had greater BMI and were less perceptive of small changes in the fat content of custard (all P < 0.05), compared to hypersensitive subjects."

"An inability to perceive low concentrations of fatty acids in foods was associated with greater consumption of fatty foods, specifically butter, meat, dairy, and increasing BMI."

My guess is a constant supply of high-fat food (like fast food) may dull the taste receptors for fat in some people.

Fat and Sugar

I'm waiting to get the full-text of this article, "Why Has the BMI Gone Up So Drastically in the Last 35 Years?", that looks promising.  From the abstract:

"The additives of fats and sugars in combination, not separately, best predicted increases in BMI accounting for 97% of the variance in the linear regression analyses."

97% is obviously very high!

"In line with the major physiological theories emphasizing palatability as the addictive stimulus in models of incentives and addiction, fats and sugars in combination rather than calories per se or particular food groups accounted for the increases in BMI."

Carb Intake in Healthy Centenarians

I was looking through an interesting study on Korean centenarians today.  The full-text is here(pdf).

Here is table showing the nutritional intake:

 

Does anyone look at this stuff when they recommend low-carb, high-fat for longevity and health?  Here you have a group of centenarians consuming well over 200 grams of carbs per day, along with a fairly low fat intake, and they seem to be doing just fine.

Also, this study is on a group of 54 centenarians, not just an individual case.  Is there any kind of comparable study showing a large group of low-carb, high-fat centenarians?  Not that I'm aware of. (Note: a newspaper article saying how someone loved bacon and lived to be 105 is not a study.)

Sugar-Free

I read an older article about NBA player Steve Nash going sugar-free.  As expected, he gained energy and other benefits from kicking his habit.

One quote in the article stuck out, "sugar gets sneaked into just about everything, so I have to pack my own food."  I thought, what does this say about our whole food system?  Here you have a professional athlete with plenty of money, and even he has to bring his own food to avoid sugar.  Amazing. 

It makes it seem like the masses of restaurants out there really might not be that much progress after all.

Artificial Sweeteners Don't Work

The title of this post may be common knowledge to some, but I am putting it out there for more notice.  I saw a guy at the grocery store today loading up his cart with six cases of diet soda.  Not coincidentally, he was overweight.

There is research going back 25 years showing that artificial sweeteners do not prevent weight gain.  A newer study from Yale shows that artificial sweeteners may increase weight via food reward.  Whatever the mechanism, they certainly do not contribute to weight loss and with a high probability contribute to weight gain.

Just drink water!

Sugar and Overeating

I came across another interesting open-access study about sugar.  From the abstract:

"We conclude that the chronic rather than acute sucrose intake reduces activity of the anorexigenic oxytocin system. These findings indicate that chronic consumption of sugar blunts activity of pathways that mediate satiety. We speculate that a reduction in central satiety signaling precipitated by regular intake of foods high in sugar may lead to generalized overeating."

Very interesting...

Long-Term Effects of Milk Consumption

There is a new open-access paper that shows the potential long-run negative effects of milk consumption, ranging from accelerated growth to early menarche.  The theory is that the high insulin response from cow's milk increases IGF-1 and accelerates development (which is not a good thing for a normal child).