[Azure]

Oh, and a little more information about the 'carbs matter more than calories' theory I've been reading up on lately. The more I read, the more I'm convinced that carbs are the breaking point as far as weight loss is concerned.

Seconded on the 'they're both right'. ATZ should pretty much stop talking until he's wrapped his head around the effect of different foods on hormones and metabolic rate, and the non-directionality of the dE = Ein - Eout equation.


It has been demonstrated in isocaloric studies that fructose makes you gain more weight than glucose, vegetable oil makes you gain more weight than butter or lard, etc (http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/abstract/123/3/512). Omega-6 fats downregulate the effect of thyroid hormone in the body (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.co...uppresses.html). If you eat a bunch of carbs and low fat, whenever you're not eating carbs, your still-elevated insulin is starving your cells by keeping fat trapped. This induces a starvation response of lowering basal metabolic rate. Likewise, if you eat fat all the time, and keep insulin low, your cells are going to always have plenty of energy available, which will raise your metabolic rate.


So, sure, calories do matter. But you're leaving your your implicit assumption that your metabolic rate is an immutable number, like..2378 calories per day or some such. That number is highly elastic, and within certain bounds (around 30-50% down, depending on how bad you want to starve someone, and several hundred percent on the upside).

The thing is that on a high carbohydrate diet it will tend to modulate your BMR to be less than the calories you take in, and on a high fat diet your BMR will be modulated to be higher than the calories you take in, both to within asymptotic limits (high fat may take you down to an ideal weight range, but not waste you away to death, and high carb may take you up to obese, but not everyone on a high carb diet ends up at 1000+lbs..it can probably be fairly well modeled by a first order differential equation, like Newton's law of cooling).


And Tarlach, I think you're leaving out the implicit assumption that you're talking about normal/obese individuals when you say if you don't eat carbs, you won't gain fat. If you take someone at 2.5% body fat who just competed in a bodybuilding competition, and feed him 30% protein, 70% fat, zero carbs, he's still going to float back up to a normal body fat percentage. Protein still releases insulin, ASP has an effect, we know this. Prehistoric man would have otherwise had a tough time maintaining a reserve of fat. I'll also posit that an 80% protein, 20% fat diet is going to result in a higher body fat set point than a 20% protein, 80% fat diet, due to the insulin effect of protein. If you're going to do a hypercaloric experiment, you're probably better off just feeding someone 100-150g of protein, and then fat for all the other calories.


But I'll agree that for obese people, their weight/body fat set point (as determined by food intake) is going to be below their current weight for most normal combinations of just protein and fat.


I'm sorry if that was a little rambling, but reading the rhetoric thread has been like watching two blind guys duel with pistols so far.

From here.