LCHF Practitioners - Please be aware!

[namaha]

LCHF is a Healthy Diet... LCHF is a healthy way of eating....I was able to control my HBA1C,.... I was able to shed some pounds with LCHF.... I cured my NAFLD with LCHF ..... My HDL went up and TG fell down like a rock when I ate LCHF and then there is a video in you tube on LCHF by a LCHF expert which appears very interesting and all are science based ... Evidence based.. carbs limited to 20% of calories .... StillConcerned is comfortable with 30% Carbs...my carbs are only 5%...

These are the positive aspects of LCHF .. no doubt on this ....

I personally like the concept which I learnt from Suramo and Praveen and thereafter no going back- I practice passionately. But while doing some research work as a part of my curriculums, I find some interesting facts - science based which you may or may not be aware, though these studies is also available independently (not from LCHF articles ) if you search out in google, I thought to put it in one place for the benefit of one and all...

(1) Do you have a sound sleep for 6-8 hours with LCHF with sweet small dreams Or no dreams at all ? or you have disturbed sleep with unpleasant lengthy dreams !

(2) Do you feel active, energetic or you feel tired when you get up in the morning ?

(3) Do you feel depressed, anxiety??

(4) Do you have declining cognitive power, short term frequent memory loss? Not able to recall the recent events ?

(5) Is your hsCRP is higher than normal?

(6) Any other abonormality you observe with LCHF ??

If you are having some of the above undesirable symptoms, you need to make some changes within the frame work of LCHF... Little changes, little flexible here and there !

(1) There is a saying if you eat the "thanks giving Turkey dinner", you feel tired during sleep but if you eat potatoes as a side dish with Turkey, you get a sound sleep. This can be scientifically explained: Turkey is a rich source of Tryptophan - an essential amino acid which is the only amino acid among the 9 essential amino acids which can cross BBB (Blood Brain Barrier) and go to the brain and our brain badly needs this amino acid for preparing Brain hormones Serotinine & Melatonin which are neurotransmitters which helps in a good quality sleep which is very much essential for overall health.

But the main problem is that Tryptophan is not able to make it up to the brain since it has to compete with all other aminoacids for its transportation, when we eat a LCHF dinner which could be some SFA with protein such as meat, fish , cheese .. etc. This would be lacking carbs and so would not trigger any lnsulin. In absence of adequate insulin , the muscles may not be able not take up/ clear off the amino acids from blood. Had we taken some carbs in form of complex carbs along with protein, it would have triggered Insulin response and all other amino acids would have got cleared from blood leaving tryptophan alone which then easily would have got transported to brain. Muscles don't assimilate Tryptophan which are bound to albumin. Tryptophan is the food for brain... It is reserved for brain.

If tryptophan is not available for making Serotinin and melatonin , then you may face the unusual symptoms as listed above ?

Turkey is not the only one to have tryptophan, the other rich sources are pumpkin seeds, éggs, almonds , cheese , yogurt and legumes.

So in the night reduce your fat, take a good source of Tryptophan containing protein and a small portion of complex carbs may be legumes, steel cut oats for getting some insulin. Don't exceed your Calori limit for the day.

(2) the second issue which I think I had posted earlier is the Lysine Argenine ratio..In order to counter the lysine dominance in meat, fish, dairy, add some Argenine dominant nuts and seeds.

Argenine though a non essential amino acid , it may be declared that it is an essential amino acid and we need to get it from food sources. As we age, our body can not prepare Argenine.

Argenine is an anti aging.... growth hormone, Argenine is anti- inflammatory. In absence of Argenine in our body, endothelial health/ nitric oxide production and sustenance in arteries gets badly affected. No wonder as we age, our body lean mass decresses , our skin wrinkles...

(3) I am following LCHF.. i am thin built with 19 BMI.. but I am not putting up lean mass muscles.... Though I am eating a lot of protein supplement .. whey supplement .. Yes it is a challenge if you are not eating some complex carbs.. well you should not go up to 80% carbs , but at least 30-35% complex carbs. The carbs will trigger some insulin which will enable the muscles to take up the protein...

It is still a bigger challenge if I am thin built 19 BMI type 2... To follow LCHF....Maintain blood sugar and at the same time put up some weight...though not impossible!

(4) keep an watch on your Microbiota which you inherited at the time of your birth. It thrives and flourishes on its own. Let us ensure this intestinal flora which is billions and billions in number don't go out of balance. While every person could have a different mucrobiota, there are some strains such as Bifidibacteria & Lactobacillus which are very common in human Gut. A lot of research has gone into Microbiota during last one decade and it is now on an advance stage to isolate many such friendly bacteria in a lab, which could throw some light if any such probiotic strain can be used to prevent metabolic disorder. While jury is still out , whatever has already been discovered is being put into clinical practice.

A lot of natural fermented food have this kind bacteria such as Yoghurt, kefir, Pickles, tempeh, Natoo, hard aged Cheese, miso... Etc. They don't add much calories. They don't have much sugar. Some of these fermented food like hard aged cheese such as parmesan cheese, Natto contain Vitamin K2 which is very much essential for your CV health and to avoid osteoporosis.

At last, let us ensure that we feed our Microbiota. What do they eat?

They eat some kind of soluble fiber such as inulin, FOS, XOS, GOS, Pectin , resistance starch. Fortunately, these kind of soluble fiber found naturally in many plant food such as onion, Garlic, asparagus, leek and many more. These are LCHF friendly. The bacteria in our gut ferment these fiber and produce SCFA such as Butyrate and GABA..which serves as food for our body cells inside colon. The Microbiota serves as your security guards for defending us against harmful ones such as H.Pylori and E.coli....

Take care of your Microbiota !

[namaha]

I have added one more point as 4th point. Hope you have seen !

[namaha]

Well articulated my Dear StillConcerned ! I am sure TheAwfulToad will also have similar views!

Yes, I do agree importance of Macro's and we can not totally ignore one in favour of the other. Every macro needs to be taken in the right proportion as your body needs.

Carbs as a Macro has really created the issue when people went overboard with it ignoring the fat & Protein.

First it gives us instant energy boost by getting us blood glucose and then in excess our liver did store the excess glucose as Glycogen through "Glycogenesis". Then people ate still more than that, then Liver did DNL "De Novo Lipogenesis " for storage as body fat adipose and visceral. Then comes Obesity, NAFDL....Metabolic syndromes.. then pancreas got tired by giving insulin .. then type 2.

You need it but in limit.

Similarly , protein has all Amino acids and every amino acid has a very critical role to play, which can not be ignored. But then more than the required is definitely not going to help..The poor liver comes in to play and converts it Into sugar through "Gluconeogenesis" creating a lot of nitrogenous waste and the poor kidney gets overloaded for clearing the waste. Also excess protein ....... to growth rather than repair ....could lead to possible cancer could also be a risk factor.

So the ideal is Fat. But then I just can not have 100% Fat by ignoring the other two Macro's. Excess fat can also get converted in to sugar by "Gluconeogenesis" by liver 😀

One can not go on eating fat calories and trying to go ketosis and finally don't shed a pound.....and/ or lose few pounds only to gain back... Because you are not burning body Fat.. but burning fat calories...

At the same time a low BMI can not afford to to eat Carbs and protein in excess in order to put up some body weight , but then lands in an issue of metabolic syndrome.

Physical exercise, remaining active under any circumstances and a good 6 hour sound sleep is something very important to ensure physical health which can not be ignored.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador in reply to namaha]

I have a slightly different take on this. I'm not a great believer in the idea that we have to tweak our macros towards some putative ideal, because the implication of that idea is that our bodies don't work properly. If we were not able to correctly self-fuel, humans would have died out long ago; or more accurately, those who were not able to self-fuel would have died out, and those with better biological machinery would have survived to breed. We would, by now, have evolved into very sophisticated machines. And I believe that is indeed the case.

Pretty much everything that goes on inside our bodies is subject to a homeostatis loop, and most of those loops are adaptive - that is, they can adjust their parameters to work optimally across a wide range of dietary inputs. The master control lever is appetite: if anything is genuinely lacking, our bodies are (usually) driven to seek it out. People on low-salt diets tend to have a persistent, nagging desire for salt. People who eat low-fat diets tend to crave fatty snacks. People who (by choice or circumstance) eat nothing but carbs may fantasize about meat. And so on.

It's only when we persistently eat foods that lie outside the range of adaptation that things go horribly wrong.

I don't see any point in eating carbs on the basis that your body needs a certain amount of glucose (about 400-450kCal/day). Carbs are not the only source of glucose - the metabolism of each triglyceride molecule inevitably delivers one molecule of glucose, so if you're eating enough fat, you are by definition getting enough glucose. Some amino acids (either recycled ones, or from the diet) will also be converted to glucose. All things considered, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to eat carbs other than the mundane one: (a) most things have some carbs in them and (b) they taste nice.

[namaha in reply to TheAwfulToad]

Thanks for your response! I don't think we disagree on LCHF as a concept and I said I personally follow it passionately, as it has helped me.

Yes , there could be a different view on LCHF with regards to Carbs % - even the literature and experts talk about varying proportions from 5% -30% and people follow as per their comfort level. It should be ok as long as they benefit without any unusual symptoms like I mentioned in my post, which could be a possibility with some people going by the basic fundamentals of science, though again it may vary from person to person depending upon his metabolic conditions. This kind of healthy discussion, I believe , makes us to learn more in the process! 😊

To respond to some of your inputs as per my understanding goes:

(1) It is only blood glucose which could trigger insulin, but not amino acid. But if the protein food contains some carbs, yes to that extent it will trigger insulin. Nothing more.

(2) We agree that Insulin is a master anabolic hormone that promotes Glucose uptake, Glycogenesis, Lipogenesis, and Protein synthesis of skeletal muscles and fat tissue.

(3) Not undermining the role of Glucagon which is a catabolic Hormone, it plays a major role in signalling liver for Gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis for preparing sugar if the blood sugar level goes down.

(It does not seem to help in clearing the amino acids i.e ensuring protein synthesis by skeletal muscles though it may get secreted by a high protein diet)

(4) After getting signal from Glucagon, Liver to process protein/ fat to convert sugar through Gluconeogenesis is a complex metabolic process that involves multiple enzymatic steps regulated by myriad factors and it would take 3-4 hours to get only 50% of the protein/fat get converted in to sugar and come to the blood stream, though I would never like to utilise the valuable protein ( which has got a unique job of growth and repair of body cells) to produce sugar.

(5) it is insulin which which promotes the uptake of BCAA such as Valine, Leucine & Isoleucine by muscles.

(6) it is insulin which ensures entry of glucose in to muscle and adipose tissue.

(7) No wonder a type-1Diabete can not survive without insulin.

Yet we hate Insulin! It is because we go overboard and eat Carbs and demand more and more insulin ... the pancreas beta cells gets tired and stop producing insulin... Then we blame insulin.. Another reason why we blame insulin is by eating more carbs we demand more insulin in circulation all the time which could lead to Lipogenesis and obesity.

(8) Carbs standalone never builds muscle mass. It enhances body fat. it is the protein which builds musclemass for which insulin has a role to play.

Insulin also indirectly helps in clearing fast all amino acids from blood leaving alone Tryptophan, which is required for the brain.

During my curriculum research, I find many articles , research papers on the subject- not from critics of LCHF- but from neutral agencies. There is no mention of LCHF diet at all anywhere.

One of them being from another "TheAwfulToad". 😀

It is not for you but for others written in simple language !

theglobeandmail.com/life/he...

psychologytoday.com/us/blog...

[Praveen55 in reply to namaha]

Blood glucose and insulin response to protein rich food: wrt your statement (1).

BG and insulin do rise on protein rich food with zero carb. See the reference below. Both BG and insulin rise significantly on Beef ( carb = 0), Fish ( carb = 0), Eggs (carb = 0.5 gm), Cheese ( carb = 0.1 gm). All test samples 240 kcal. I have monitored my BG on protein rich foods ( near zero carb ) with peak reaching at three hour mark.

academic.oup.com/ajcn/artic...

It is very much possible to gain muscles with zero carb, only on protein + fat diet. Dr Shawn Baker who follows carnivore diet is a perfect example. There are many presentations by him on YOUTUBE, if you are interested.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador in reply to Praveen55]

IIRC there was an experiment done in the 1960s to determine the insulin response of different amino acids (administered intravenously to avoid any possible confounding factors). I'll see if I can root it out. I wonder if what's happening here is that the protein stimulates glucagon first, and the glucose response that follows causes an insulin response?

Frank Zane was pretty low-carb. He deliberately avoided the usual (at the time) heaps of rice and pasta. He wasn't keto, or anything close to it, but his basic diet involved lots of protein and a modest amount of fat.

I suppose you might argue that by doing that he would improve his insulin sensitivity, so fewer carbs were needed to get the desired result. The key point here is not precisely the presence of insulin that's required for muscle growth, but the cellular response to it. An individual who eats a very low-carb diet will have a very different insulin response to someone on a high-carb diet.

[namaha in reply to Praveen55]

Praveen

Thanks! A good study in deed on insulin response to various food groups...

However, the limitation of the study as it appears to me (1) the group size was too small (2) the subjects were University students from only one location, they were young and Healthy. So much so, students were excluded who had family history of obesity, Diabetes, metabolic syndrome.. .etc. even students who were dieting, irregular eating habits .. were also excluded from the study.

I suspect at such a young age and ideal situtation, glycogen stores remain full at any Point time....their liver is able to process protein/ fat faster through Gluconeogenesis & also get sugar through Glycogenolysis from liver and muscle cells faster @100% efficiency and get required blood sugar to have a quick insulin response! 😬

I would be more interested if such a study is available with a larger group covering people from all ages and diversity and covers people with Type-2, obesity & metabolic syndorme etc!

In any case , it is not a rocket science to study one's own insulin response to different food groups- one needs to give his blood sample to a lab before & after eating a dinner with Protein-fat rich food- may be after 2-3 hours. Also the insulin response may depend upon the last meal/ snacks content and what time he ate and his current metabolic conditions.

For example if somebody had a snack at say 7 PM and dinner at 11 PM and another person with lunch at 1 PM and dinner at 11 PM without any snacks in between. 😀

You said you had a good insulin response post Protein- fat meal and your insulin peaked at 3 hours, though 3 hours also seems longer. Anyway, You seem to be still luckier than me!

I had poor insulin response post protein-fat dinner ! 😀

No wonder, our metabolic conditions are different!

In any case, it is Interesting and I would keep it for my future reference!

Thanks

[Praveen55 in reply to namaha]

Yes, the subjects in the study are young healthy people. T2D who are insulin resistant or not making enough insulin will respond differently.

I found another paper on the subject of muscle gain on ketogenic diet:

jissn.biomedcentral.com/tra...

Again, the subjects are healthy non-diabetic individuals.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador in reply to namaha]

>> Yet we hate Insulin!

I've never understood this attitude. I think people misunderstand what insulin is, and they brand it as "the enemy". It's just a control signal. Nothing more, nothing less. In and of itself, insulin isn't "bad". As you said, it's only when we overload on carbs that it all goes wrong.

After getting signal from Glucagon, Liver to process protein/ fat to convert sugar through Gluconeogenesis is a complex metabolic process that involves multiple enzymatic steps regulated by myriad factors and it would take 3-4 hours to get only 50% of the protein/fat get converted in to sugar and come to the blood stream

The response is very fast. It has to be, or your blood sugar would be all over the place. There is a hard constraint on blood sugar - 1g/L - that cannot be violated for more than short periods, or bad things happen.

The substrate for gluconeogenesis after a high-protein meal is not the dietary protein being delivered from digestion, but whatever is available under the circumstances - generally local glycogen, lactate, circulating glycerol, or (to a limited extent) fatty acids. Yes, there are time delays involved in all of these reactions, but you body is tuned to account for that.

Control system dynamics are very hard to understand intuitively - in particular, if you look at the time-magnitude graph of a control variable (insulin, in this case) and the same graph of the controlled output (blood glucose), it's unusual to see any obvious relationship between the two except in first-order systems. This is even more true of multiple-input, multiple-output, nonlinear systems like human energy management.

if you haven't read up on this topic, I can thoroughly recommend it as part of your research. It will put everything else that you know into context. I suggest you start with the state-space approach, which describes things in terms of differential equations in the time domain, rather than the "classical" approach which relies heavily on frequency-domain descriptions and complex numbers.

[TheAwfulToad Ambassador]

I'm not sure if this is strictly accurate, namaha; protein/amino acids will provoke a fairly large insulin response, precisely for the reason you mentioned.

Remember also that insulin is only one half of a complex-valued control signal. The other half is glucagon, and protein also produces a large glucagon response. It's these two hormones acting together that determines cellular response to the macronutrients dispatched into the bloodstream. The problem here is that glucagon gets far less research attention than insulin, which means the body of knowledge about how it works (and how it works with insulin) is rather poor. However we can surmise that the glucagon pulse that accompanies protein ingestion is a signal to the liver to upregulate gluconeogenesis, thus providing the energy necessary to make use of the protein being delivered from digestion.

Are carbs necessary for muscle growth? I don't know. While insulin is often described as the "master anabolic hormone", I suspect it's a bit more complicated than that.

I've been strength-training for 30 years, and 10+ of those years were on low-carb. I've not noticed any real difference in my ability to maintain or add muscle mass, although my endurance is much better on low-carb (despite the fact that I'm approaching my dead-by date). As an experiment, I did attempt to go very-high-fat and high-protein a couple of months back, with a more intense workout routine, and I recorded a transient weight gain which seemed to be mostly muscle. However I couldn't maintain that diet because it was just uncomfortable to do so.