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Hey, I want to get this writeup out quick, before I lose the excitement about this topic. That would be really bad, because this is the most important nutrient for human biology.
Look at this chart:
The more blood Vitamin D a person has, the lesser their probability of contracting a disease such as cancer or diabetes; suffering from a fracture or a heart attack. Though many nutrients have such associations, there is no other that affects the human body in such a fundamental way. Vitamin D is special for one more reason, too, but we'll come to that later. You're probably now asking yourself the question of why should we care?
I mean, we surely get enough of Vitamin D through our regular lifestyles, right? Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone is deficient! Let's jump right in for the proof:
The 95th percentile
column is the one that interests us the most; it lists the blood amounts of Vitamin D that 95% of people in a certain country do not reach (values will be rounded, to make it easier to read). The reason we're looking at it and not the average is because it allows us to find the best case scenario. If even the "best" is terrible, then the better ones will be even worse. And so - in 15 studies and 16 different countries, the highest "best" result reached was the Netherlands' 104 nmol/L (or about 42 ng/ml). Meaning everyone there fails to maximally prevent various cancers and diabetes. But - since the average in even that "best" study is only 65.3 nmol/L (or 26 ng/ml) - many of the participants fail to even prevent heart attacks or fractures - not just diabetes and cancers. All other countries fare worse - and some much worse. Germany or the UK - for example - don't even pretend to be healthy, getting absolutely ravaged by all the listed diseases, and sometimes even rickets with their sub 20 ng/ml averages.
As the disease incidence chart showed us, the blood level of Vitamin D that prevents all of the listed diseases is 54 ng/ml or 135 nmol/L. Something none of the European countries come even close to reaching. For the 5% of remaining people that have more Vitamin D levels than listed in the 95th percentile
column, it is doubtful they gain the 13 ng/ml required to reach sufficiency. And that's considering only the best case scenario - the Netherlands study. In other countries, those outliers would need like 20 ng/ml more. Therefore, we can safely say that everyone living in Europe is deficient. Note: some evidence actually shows that other diseases might require even higher Vit D levels, but we will stick to these for now - since even they are enough to prove our point. What about other regions? It turns out that it's not just Europe that's deficient, but the entire world. I suspected it all along but I did not have good data proving it at first, but now I found it. Look at the data from North America:
There is one study - Overton and Basu (1999) - with a 122 nmol/L (49 ng/dl) Vit D average, which is really good. Kind of a low sample size and it's in the summer, meaning the level will be falling later. But okay, we'll accept it as a study which shows that at least some people in Canada are almost at the optimal level (though still failing to prevent multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes completely). The rest of the studies fare terribly though, as expected. Looking at the ES (95% CI) column again, we can see that the second best study is Stein et al. (2006) in which 95% of people have a Vitamin D value lesser than 98 nmol/L (39 ng/dl). Notice how there are way more participants there, and it's based on levels from the entire year - so it's more reliable. In addition to the already mentioned, we can add many cancers to the list of diseases it fails to cover. And that's the second best! The third best is Dawson-Hughes et al. (1997) where 95% of people have Vitamin D levels lesser than 82 nmol/L (33 ng/dl). Adding worse performance against fractures and many cancers. After that, we reach into joke territory with most studies showing values of <72 nmol/L (29 ng/dl) and some even under 60 - where we can add, for example, heart attacks to the list of vulnerabilities. The worst cases - those 49 nmol/L average ones - even fail to completely prevent rickets. Clearly the North American region won't be our savior. Let's try Asia+New Zealand then:
You should know how to read these by now. The strongest study is New Zealand's Bolland et al. (2007), where 95% of people have Vitamin D values of less than 102 nmol/L (41 ng/dl). This still isn't optimal (again succumbing to cancers, diabetes, MS, fractures), and it's the best we've got in Asia. The average is higher in Vietnam's Ho-Pham et al. (2011), but the peak is a lot lower. Most of the rest of the studies do terrible, even worse than the USA ones. There are three Indian studies, and all come out lower than 50 nmol/L (20 ng/dl - corpse level!). China doesn't do much better; though one study does have an average of 77 nmol/L (31 ng/dl), the others are 33 and 25 nmol/L (13 and 10 ng/dl - the corpses are barely twitching there). Japan way outclasses China, with one study showing 78 nmol/L average (31 ng/dl), two about 70 (28) and the others about 60 (24). All that means is that it's not ripped apart by rickets - but still dies from a heart attack. Is that all Asia has to offer? A third league competition, where the winner earns the prize of a bunch of diseases; while the follow-ups just die from heart attacks. While USA / Canada has two studies that just barely get affected by rickets, this region has eight and some very heavily so! Hey, maybe we'll find more fighting spirit in Africa, so let's fly there:
One big outlier in Rabbani et al. (2009), Iran; decent sample size - and in winter too! Wow, so it's possible to be not deficient all year after all, with a 116 nmol/L (46 ng/dl, very close to optimal!) average. But, this still doesn't fully cover diabetes or MS. And, as expected all the others fail - even in Iran itself, with one study having 93 nmol/L (37 ng/dl - now succumbing to all cancers and fractures) average, one 75 (30 - adding heart attacks), one 73 (29), one 60 (24 - adding falls), one 41 (16), one 31 (12) and one 29 (12; wow, the zombie apocalypse is approaching!). Other countries are even worse; Lebanon, Jordan - can those zombies even still crawl with values of 10 ng/ml or less?! Out of 16 studies, only five manage to prevent rickets completely. Wow! If Asia was a third league competition, Africa must be the children's one. Keep in mind this analysis divides by sex, so sometimes a single study can get very different results for male and female participants (Rabbani et al. (2009) and Moussavi et al. (2005) - huge differences!). And that happens because they are Muslims, and women cover themselves up, preventing Vitamin D creation from the Sun. But even the males do terribly here, overall.
Please come back to the disease incidence chart and check what all those results mean. Cancers e.g need 40+ ng/dl (100 nmol/L) to be prevented, and only those two massive Canada and Iran outliers even reach that level! And that's not even the end of the chart! Yes, even our best result - the Canada one - fails to beat the final boss of multiple sclerosis, which requires 54 ng/ml or 135 nmol/L. How sad is that we have to be happy about those still suboptimal results? And those are extreme outliers, remember; most others are barely hanging on there, being ripped apart by cancers and fractures (even the "second best" results!). And we even have a bunch of corpses with <20 ng/ml that must have surely had their bones devoured already.
By the way, I did not re-analyze Europe, though this study does have data on it, too. Because I did it already and nothing has changed, they're just as deficient in here. Also, for transparency's sake, there are more studies that weren't included in the images, because the authors decided to avoid those that lacked the 95% CI or separation by sex. Some of those Thailand ones, with their 120+ averages, are impressive indeed; but they have two values listed there - and the second ones are a lot lower, so I don't know what to think. If we take the first ones at face value, one of the Thailand ones wins the game with a 168 nmol/L average. Hooray! But the additional studies also add way more <30 ng/ml corpses into the mix, so the overall situation becomes even worse. And we have no idea those values are even reliable; at least, the study doesn't say why there are two listed for those particular studies.
So let's recap. Piece of the puzzle #1: the blood Vit D amounts Earth residents are having. Piece of the puzzle #2: the blood Vit D amounts necessary to prevent disease. #2 is (much) higher than #1, therefore people do not have enough Vitamin D in their bloods to prevent disease.
If we accept we don't have enough, how much do we actually need to ingest to reach the necessary blood amounts? Fortunately, we have a study that tested just that:
For Figure 2 we restricted our analyses to those subjects that had both their baseline visit and a follow up visit between January 2009 and June 2013 and had reported not to supplement with vitamin D at their baseline visit (1205 subjects, 2410 assessments). This analysis mimics a pre-post comparison of an intervention: a comparison of observations prior to introduction to vitamin D supplementation with observations, on average, 0.98 years after the baseline visit. As such, the blue bubbles in figure 2 represent the expected 25(OH)D level of participants who have been taken oral doses of vitamin D for an average of 0.98 year since baseline.
So they took 1205 people that haven't been taking a Vitamin D supplement before, and checked their blood levels of Vitamin D after a year of supplementation. Simple and beautiful; and it tells us that if you want the optimal (50 ng/ml or 125 nmol/L in this graph) level of Vit D, then you need to take at least 8000 IU per day for a year. Going higher than 10000 doesn't appear to make much difference. The full study tested many more people and there, some weaker results start appearing:
But, maybe those weaker results just didn't take it for long enough, since there is no duration mentioned here - unlike the earlier graph, where it was specifically one year. Either way, 10000 IU per day reaches optimal (50 ng/ml or 125 nmol/L in this graph) levels in the vast majority of cases even here. There's also this caveat: These recommendations appeared 2 to 3 times higher for obese participants relative to
normal weight subjects, depending on the 25(OH)D target level
. So, maybe those weaker results were just obese. You need to take into account your weight before undertaking a supplement regimen; you might be easily not getting the results you think you should be getting if you are taking an amount meant for someone with lesser "baggage". E.g your ingested 6000 might effectively become 2000 - a puny dosage. Anyway, let's try to confirm these results with another study:
A little weaker results, it seems. Keep in mind that this study was different in a few ways, such as:
There were no exclusion criteria, and participants included both genders and a wide range of ages, nationalities and levels of health status.
The previous study recruited only healthy adult volunteers
. And so, the slightly weaker results here might simply be explained by lesser response to Vitamin D3 because of bad health (chronic disease, maybe digestive, etc) of some of the participants. However, even in this study, 10000 IU per day achieved great results:
The supplemental dose ensuring that 97.5% of this population achieved a serum 25(OH)D of at least 40 ng/ml was 9,600 IU/d.
12-13000 appears to hit 50 ng/ml (125 nmol/L) more reliably, but note the lesser sample size. Maybe we should consider 10k to be the right dose for healthy volunteers
, and 12-13k for the more unhealthy ones. Either way, we do have a pretty tight range, so I consider both studies to work in concert. And so, we have just added puzzle piece #3: the amount of Vitamin D we need to ingest per day for optimal blood levels.
But is that amount safe? Briefly: yes, absolutely zero danger. Quoting from the studies cited above:
Participants reported vitamin D supplementation ranging from 0 to 55,000 IU per day and had serum 25(OH)D levels ranging from 10.1 to 394 nmol/L.
We did not observe any increase in the risk for hypercalcemia with increasing vitamin D supplementation.
Universal intake of up to 40,000 IU vitamin D per day is unlikely to result in vitamin D toxicity.
Although this data set provides no information with respect to serum or urine calcium values in these individuals, at the same time it is clear that there were no clinical evidences of toxicity
No toxicity detected for 40000 or even 55000 (!) IU per day - while we're taking only 10000 or a little more. We can include safety as our puzzle piece #4. I've also explored the topic of Vitamin D safety in much more depth in my Wikipedia report (start reading from The entire "Excess" section is a sham.
).
Where do we get that amount from, though? Surely, we've all heard our beloved governments pretend food is a source. Well, it just isn't:
Try to get 10000 from that! You can't - even if you formulate your entire diet out of those things. Hell, I bet you can't even get 2000 in realistic circumstances. Imagine shoving all that fish (600g sardines just for 2000 IU) down your mouth and not getting tired of it... And you'd need to do that every day! Therefore, you would just keep degrading health-wise if you relied on food as your source of Vitamin D - since 2000 IU per day (generous assumption) can only keep up a low blood level.
Fortunately, there is another source - the Sun - which is where Vitamin D3 originally comes from, anyway. Getting enough from it is trickier than it seems, though. For a start, there is a concept called the Vitamin D winter (archive), meaning the part of the year during which the Sun doesn't generate any Vitamin D:
And so, if you just happen to be deficient during the Vitamin D winter (half a year or more for some regions), the only option remains supplements. But what if it's summer? Well, you still need to actually get outside, and today's office or homebound people might have a problem doing that every day during the proper hours (from 10 to 15, usually). Even if you do end up doing so, you need the proper clothing to generate enough Vitamin D:
Though you can theoretically generate Vitamin D in autumn or spring, people already cover themselves up too much during those seasons. So, if you want to rely on the Sun for becoming Vitamin D replete, the short (for most regions in Europe or Asia e.g) period of summer is when you need to store enough for you to survive the Vitamin D winter, during which your levels will be dropping every day. This is doable in principle, but not with modern lifestyles (try telling the hikikomori he has to be naked in the Sun for an hour every day). And again - if you're reading this during the other seasons - you can't afford to wait since the lack of Vitamin D makes you susceptible to pretty much every health problem that exists.
It would be great if we could rely on the Sun as our only Vitamin D source (hey, it's free; and cannot be affected by false advertising, or laced with who knows what additives) - and probably healthier for various reasons - but the vast majority of us will not be able to manage it in this day and age. Hell, if you look at the disease incidence chart - even Outdoor workers in late summer
and Tribal East Africans
do not reach 50 ng/ml. Do you think you can, with the Sun alone?
And so, tablets remain the only viable option for the average civilization dweller. They are very cheap these days - 1 EUR/USD buys you 250 000 IU (or 25 days of supplementation), if I calculated right. Try to find one without many additives. Okay, so we've got our fifth and last beautiful puzzle piece - supplements are essential. Hey, can we put them together and make a syllogism?
In my opinion, the only possibly attackable part of this argument is point 7, about the Sun. Again, certain regions and lifestyles will be able to thrive with the Sun alone - but this can't be more than 5% of people; and tablets are just a lot easier. Anyway, this is the third time I write about Vit D. But now I know more, and this time it's without getting diverted into refutations or conspiracy theories. As a nutrition article deserves.
We are all likely deficient in selenium. Beneficial effects from eating 200 mcg per day have been found:
Data from the Nutritional Prevention of Cancer randomized trial have shown a significant protective effect of supplementation with 200 μg Se/d, as high-Se yeast, on cancer incidence and mortality with the most notable effect being on prostate cancer, with lesser effects on colorectal and lung cancers.
And yet, the average is a lot lower (archive):
The level of selenium intake in Poland ranges from 30 to 40 µg/day [70]. In Spain, the intake of selenium is 44–50 µg/day, in Austria it is 48 μg/day, while in Great Britain it is 34 µg/day [30,78]
The best food source are brazil nuts, with 100mcg per nut.
Scaled to weight, a wild howler monkey ingests 57 times more calcium and 38 times more magnesium (archive) per day than what is recommended for us:
In that case, even massively increased amounts compared to what we ingest today shouldn't be harmful (they aren't for those monkeys) - and might be beneficial. Even if we assumed that we metabolize magnesium 10 times better, that still leaves us with a 4 times increase that we probably should be getting. The commonly ingested averages (archive) are very close to the recommended amounts, which seem inadequate:
This could explain why heart disease is the most common ailment of today's people, since magnesium is involved in a lot of heart functions.
Probably the most deficient nutrient in the usual diet, since the vast majority of common products (white bread, meats, oils, eggs etc) have very little of it. I'll let Jane Karlsson (an expert on this topic) speak:
The western diet looks almost as if it was designed to be Mn deficient. Lots of animal foods which have hardly any and can be very high in iron; lots of saturated fat which inhibits Mn absorption and increases iron absorption https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11697763 and lots of refined carbs whose Mn has been removed and replaced with … iron.
The importance of Mn in cell biology can hardly be overstated. MnSOD actually prevents aging.
I find this astonishing. It means Mn deficiency is arguably the most important cause of all the age-related diseases we see today.
And from another thread (archive):
The average manganese intake in the US is 2 mg/day. Surprisingly, the RDA is also 2 mg/day. According to the Linus Pauling Institute, it was decided on the basis of no evidence that the average intake was enough. It might be enough in a low-iron diet, but the western diet is very high in iron.
Manganese deficiency is implicated in diabetes, and the Ma Pi diet which apparently cures diabetes has 16 mg/day of manganese. This is 8 times more than the RDA. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22247543
In some old studies, manganese containing items have been shown to manage diabetes better than insulin in some cases:
He was treated with soluble insulin and long-acting insulin intramuscularly in large doses (100-200 units daily), but he responded poorly.
With an interest born of despair, we allowed him to prepare in the ward an extract by boiling the green leaves of alfalfa in water, and to drink the infusion. By this time his blood-sugar level had reached 648 mg. per 100 ml. Two hours later, he had clinical signs of hypoglycaemia and his blood-sugar was 68 mg. per 100 ml. The test was repeated thereafter on twelve occasions, the alfalfa extract being administered when his blood-sugar varied between 190 mg. and 580 mg. per 100 ml. The infusion was also given at different intervals after food and at varying times of the day. On each occasion there was the same predictable hypoglycaemic response
With 10 mg. of manganese chloride orally three times a day, fairly satisfactory diabetic control was obtained and it was possible to discharge the patient on this regimen.
There wasn't a cure (but neither is insulin). Either way, a promising area of research that still hasn't been taken up, I think. Lots of unanswered questions in that paper, and overall. The authors thought that the patient wasn't deficient in manganese:
It followed, therefore, that the patient was absolutely or relatively deficient in manganese. As there was no dietary deficiency, and as the daily requirement of manganese is very small, an absolute deficiency seemed unlikely, although this possibility could not be entirely excluded, because of the observation of an increased loss of manganese in the patient’s urine.
But again, this is assuming that the official requirements have been correctly set (they haven't).
The single best source of manganese is pineapple juice, and if you drink that, there is no need to worry about being deficient. Otherwise, whole grains.
This is definitely the best oil to use, and the others cannot even lick its boots. If I had to rate the oils in terms of healthfulness, the list would look like this:
Coconut oil has proven to have benefits against pretty much everything you can think of (archive) (and even what you cannot think of). This probably means it is affecting some fundamental processes inside the body - Ray Peat has some ideas about that (archive). On the other hand, you can barely find even one benefit for those other fats aside from providing a lot of calories. Olive oil does have some antioxidants but no proven beneficial effects in scientific studies as far as I can see (yes, I actually looked a while back), and the significant amount of PUFA might still be dangerous when fried. Butter is probably harmless but doesn't do much other than loading you up with calories and an irrelevant amount of a few vitamins. The reason other animal fats are worse is because they have more PUFA and it is actually the fat in an animal that is the storage organ for toxins. The only reason coconut oil isn't recognized as the elixir of Gods is because of the cholesterol scare (even though CO won't raise cholesterol by a relevant amount, or at all) that somehow can't die yet.
It doesn't happen because of overeating. This should be obvious - after all, everyone of us knows someone who eats however much they want and doesn't gain weight, as well as the opposite: the person who eats little but stays fat. Matt Stone's The Calorie Myth series should put that idea to rest. Here is a more direct disproof:
Going back to this natural diet has changed gorilla behavior. Before, gorillas only ate during a quarter of their day because the food was so packed with nutrients. Now at Cleveland, they spend 50-60 percent of their day eating which is the same amount as in the wild. With all this extra eating, the gorillas have doubled their caloric intake, yet at the same time have dropped 65 pounds each. This brings their weight more in line with their wild relatives.
The currently accepted model of obesity (archive) is based on the idea that the more food you put inside your mouth (and the less that is "burned" through exercise), the more will end up inside your fat cells and increase your fat mass (we could call it the "gas tank" model of obesity). If you read that link carefully, you will see that even when they admit some factor other than overeating is responsible for obesity (e.g medications), they still try to spin it as it "making you eat more". So, the current theories cannot look beyond gluttony and laziness as explanations. They, of course, need to assume that the only function of bodyfat is energy storage - which is totally wrong (for example, toxins are stored in the fat tissue (archive)). If we realize this, then isn't it rational to assume that the body increases the fat size because it wants to have a place to stick the toxins, instead of the person getting fat because the "energy balance" of their fat tissue became positive?
The mainstream theories also assume that energy storage (or "burning") is the only route food can go through. Bowel movements alone completely destroy that idea, when you realize that fats can come out in the toilet (I mean, do you really think that if you drank a tub of olive oil, you'd absorb everything from it?). I cannot find science to directly test that, but I have found (archive) a study that shows a herbal formulation increasing the amount of fats that go down the toilet. Another example is how a high fiber diet more than doubles (archive) the amount of fats and carbohydrates dumped through the bowel route. Therefore, it is obvious that the amount of ingested food doesn't directly determine the amount of fat gained (as in the previously mentioned "gas tank"). Now, this doesn't mean that those ways will necessarily make you lean - but they do give the body a way to dump energy through a route other than "burning", changing the focus from obesity being caused by an influx of food to the conditions of the body.
It is universally accepted that every other tissue (muscle, bone, brain, tumor, etc) has many mechanisms in the body regulating its size. Why - then - think that the body somehow loses its regulation capabilities for only the fat tissue, and the problem is suddenly about human behavior? Saying that someone became fat because food went there is like saying that someone grew hair or a tumor because food went there, instead of being the result of complex biological mechanisms. Yet that is what everyone (including scientists, fitness trainers, nutritionists, or other experts in the field who should really know better) is doing today.
It annoys me greatly how the caloric theory has consumed obesity thinking for the past century when there hasn't been any real evidence to show that it's valid. Even though every other disease is rightly recognized as a result of a multitude of different factors, obesity has been reduced to gluttony and laziness. I wonder if this isn't just a hidden desire to play the blame game against fat people, finally having a chance to surface. Either way, as long as that attitude persists, obesity research won't progress and the people suffering from it won't get the help they need and deserve. By the way, journalist Gary Taubes (archive) has made many of the same points as me here - but fumbled right at the finish line by blaming obesity on the increased carbohydrate intake. However, his overall influence is very positive - unlike the "energy balance" dimwits who have imprisoned obesity research for the past century. After all, how can you figure out the factors making people fat when you have already decided it all boils down to their mental failings that make them eat too much and sit on their asses?
What to do if you're fat, then? Well, ensure you are eating a nutritious diet, for one. Vitamins, minerals, etc. are all involved in countless biological functions in your body, including body fat regulation. All other diseases are affected by low nutrition levels, so why expect obesity to be different? Again, don't try to starve obesity; it makes as much sense as trying to remove your chest hair by not eating - while ignoring the hundreds of hormonal, etc factors behind chest hair. Actually, Matt Stone has had success (archive) with the overeating approach to weight loss! Yes, you read that right. When you accept that the body is able to regulate its own weight when you give it what it needs, this is expected. I mean, how can anyone think that long term starvation (the Minnesota starvation experiment (archive) tested this, by the way - with the predictably abysmal results) is a good idea? Yet that is what all the world's authorities recommend to lose weight.
Obviously avoid ingesting too much of anything toxic like seed oils (archive) or SSRIs which increase the amount of fat tissue in your body (which in those cases is seemingly trying to protect you by stashing away the toxins). Add coconut oil which seems to send the body into overdrive in terms of using instead of storing energy. But I think it's because of the overall good effects it has on hormones etc, and thinking that it's simply "speeding up metabolism" is just falling yet again into the caloric trap we've tried hard to avoid (because, if we stopped using coconut oil, then surely "energy expenditure" would decrease, and we'd get fat again? But no, that's not necessarily so if you take bodily regulation into account). Of course, I don't claim to have all the answers for obesity, but it's a start. There are surely more factors other than eating, like good sleep, lessening needless stress, etc. Coming up with anything more substantial will first require removing the grip that the caloric theory has on all things obesity.
They are unsustainable, pointless, and dangerous. You are required to remove from your diet food groups that are not only harmless but very beneficial. Whole grains, fruit, beans, potatoes and honey - for example. Certainly anything close to a "normal" life will not be possible anymore. You are pretty much left with just meat, eggs, butter, cheese, nuts and some vegetables. But even the nuts and vegetables have to be curtailed (archive)
Be more careful with slightly higher-carb vegetables like bell peppers (especially red and yellow ones), brussels sprouts and green beans to stay under 20 grams of carbs a day. The carbs can add up. For instance, a medium-size pepper has 4-7 grams of carbs.
You really need to autistically count the carbohydrates (and protein) in everything that passes your lips, every second of every day. Even that, seemingly, isn't enough (archive) to bring about ketosis. Wow, that link is really gold. Someone was eating all the right keto foods, yet still wasn't in ketosis when he measured his ketones. So he had to drop the keto angel broccoli. Hahahaha...oh wait, it's not funny. You're denying yourself everything and yet still can't reach your prized ketotic state. And of course, if you dare to put a few slices of bread in your mouth, it's back to square one...for a week (archive). Do you know why it works like this? Because ketosis is fucking unnatural! If you look at hunter-gatherer groups (current or extinct), not a single one of them is in ketosis - not even the Inuit. Yet the keto cultists will try everything to reach that state for no reason, including butter guzzling (archive) or eating these keto delicacies:
The reason you crave those abominations is because your body wants the real thing! It is begging to have a truck of carbs delivered down its throat. Don't you see how keto is just an eating disorder? Drop it and eat all the carbs you want, they won't kill you. In fact they are an essential nutrient (archive); here we have a keto talking point refuted over a decade ago that the cultists still haven't picked up on. And of course, if carbohydrates were an essential nutrient, you'd expect there to be many side effects from not ingesting them. And that is exactly what we see; hey, the cult leaders have even graciously collected them for us:
Fucking induction flu
? Have you ever heard of a "high carb induction flu" or a "vegan induction flu" or maybe a "grain eater induction flu"? Why are we eating a diet that gives us a flu? Or for that matter any of those other listed side effects? Because I haven't heard of constipation or performance decreases for any other diet (aside from long term malnutrition). Anyway, let's check out what the physical performance (archive) page from the keto cult leaders says:
The second cause of reduced early performance isn’t as quickly fixed. It simply takes time for your body – including your muscles – to shift from burning sugar to burning primarily fat for energy. It can take weeks or even months. After the adaptation period, some may see significant benefits (see below).
So they know very well that keto destroys physical performance, but they pretend that magical metabolic changes will happen months down the road that will reverse all the bad effects (but even they admit that it's only some
that will see significant benefits
). Of course, those metabolic changes don't exist. Intense exercise relies on glycogen, which a ketogenic diet doesn't provide in enough quantity - because biochemically, it is created from carbohydrates:
How do you expect to do intense exercise with almost 3 times less glycogen stores than usual?
Questions remain regarding if the adaptation period was long enough, but suffice it to say that this is still an area of debate without a clear answer.
We do have a clear answer - athletes need lots of carbohydrate because nothing else supports the glycogen-depleting activities of sports:
After 7 weeks of "fat adaptation", the performance of the "fat adapted" subjects was still a lot worse than the carbohydrate-ingesting ones. Many similar studies exist (here is the one where that figure comes from, by the way). There is a reason why world-class athletes are not using low carb / ketogenic diets (and when they try, their performance inevitably tanks). You could say you need even more months of adaptation, but there is no evidence (or even a biological mechanism) anywhere, that such a prolongation has a point. And many athletes have already tried (archive) those long-term ketogenic diets with no magical metabolic improvements. If they happened, we'd have realized it long ago! Now let's check out what the keto cultists have to say about constipation (archive):
The prevalence of constipation on a low-carb or keto diet can be as high as 50% according to some studies. Clinicians familiar with low-carb diets, however, feel it is closer to 25%.
Yeah, that 25% figure surely saves keto when you realize that the regular prevalence of constipation is 12%. And keto is supposed to be a health diet, so it should score better than the average!
Anyway, one of the ways the cult leaders recommend to cure constipation is to eat more fiber
- but hey, wasn't eating broccoli kicking people out of ketosis? There are some additional ways, but why deal with all of that when you don't have to? You can just eat fruit, vegetables, grains...and all the stuff will get pushed out. There's no way constipation is going to persist on a diet full of plants (unless you're lacking nutrition). By the way, herbalists recommend having a bowel movement at least twice a day; so the real prevalence of constipation in keto dieters (or anyone) is a lot higher than it seems.
There are a lot more (archive) side effects of keto (that the cultists won't admit to), like the very well evidenced destruction of thyroid function. But covering all of that in depth seems like a waste (as is keto itself). EDIT: okay, I couldn't resist. Look at the IQ-sucking, health-destroying (if you follow it) nonsense the keto cultists have spat out (archive):
6. Can low carb damage your thyroid? Not likely. If you eat a well-formulated low-carb diet, it’s very unlikely it will affect your thyroid negatively.
Although some studies of low-carb, high-fat diets have shown a decrease in the active thyroid hormone T3, it seems unlikely that this represents a clinical problem.
How the FUCK is it not a clinical problem
when people are getting (archive) clinical symptoms (archive) over (archive) and over (archive) and over (archive)? Guess what the fuck is high cholesterol a symptom of? Low fucking thyroid!
For instance, some hypothesize that our bodies become more sensitive to thyroid hormone and therefore have a different “normal” range. Others suggest fat is more metabolically efficient, and therefore less thyroid hormone is required to metabolize it.
There is not a shred of evidence - or even a plausible biological mechanism - for this imagination. With everything else, if a result is seriously out of range, you assume that there is something wrong. For example, the usual amount of hemoglobin for a man is 14+, and if you have 12 that could suggest iron deficiency anemia or kidney disease or whatever. But the keto cultists would instead come up with some unphysiological bullshit theory about how on keto you need less blood or some other wild dream. Even when symptoms like tiredness or pale skin were staring them in the face. It is irresponsible to say something like this - and possibly harm the health of your readers - when there is no reason at all to do keto.
While these are just hypotheses at this point, they highlight how a change in a single lab value does not automatically signify a problem or deleterious change.
It's not a single lab value, but many - and they are accompanied by side effects that happen over and over. Effects consistent exactly with low thyroid function or diabetes.
Anyway, earlier - 5. Can you get nutrient deficiencies on low carb?
- the cultists assume that the keto diet is nutritionally complete. Guess what? The nutrient that's missing in the keto diet are the fucking carbs! And as has been already shown by the multitude of keto side effects, they are very important. Another one is manganese, which is almost completely missing from a diet heavy in meat, eggs, fats and some vegetables - but is plentiful in grains and some fruit. And fiber (the amount in your usual meat+fat ketogenic diet is ZERO, the puny amount of vegetables adds only a little - remember that more than 500g or so of plant matter will kick you out of ketosis already), and vitamin C (same as fiber), and potassium (in keto you need supplements, plant eaters will reach sufficiency easily from their bean meals, bananas, juice or potatoes). Hell, did you know the that keto diet is literally the only one that's deficient in sodium of all things? The cult leaders even admit (archive) that In addition, on a low-carb or keto diet, your sodium needs may actually increase, due to increased losses via the kidneys
. Why eat a diet that pisses away all your precious minerals? By the way, this fits right in with fructose increasing mineral retention (archive) - Fructose affects the body's ability to retain other nutrients, including magnesium, copper, calcium, and other minerals. Comparing diets with 20% of the calories from fructose or from cornstarch, Holbrook, et al. (1989) concluded "The results indicate that dietary fructose enhances mineral balance."
. However, the rats on the sucrose diet, also vitamin D deficient, had normal levels of calcium in their blood. The sucrose, unlike the starch, maintained calcium homeostasis
. And a ketogenic diet will have zero (or effectively zero) fructose.
The keto diet is based on the absolutely retarded assumption that carbohydrates are bad. Yet there has never been a shred of evidence for this idea. Carbohydrates have been exonerated from everything they have been accused of. They do not cause obesity, diabetes, heart issues or anything else (except proper functioning of the human body :D). Many populations eat moderate or high carb diets and enjoy very good health (such as the historical Hunza). Keto should have never become prominent (not even diabetes (archive) is a reason to do keto) but it has - all while helping cult leaders like Jimmy Moore make lots of money from selling their stupid books to unhealthy, desperate people.
What should we eat, then? Anything that isn't actively toxic (like the seed oils - but even using those every so often is better than an eating disorder such as keto), as long as the full diet contains enough nutrition. Do not let cultists convince you that a particular food group is the devil and needs to be exorcised. And do not get bogged down in the details unless you are genuinely fascinated by nutrition. That's it - but those simple instructions won't sell too many books, will they?
These posts have engraved themselves in my mind since I read them:
Recently Per Wikholm’s old friend and co-author came out with a book about beans and resistant starch in Sweden. He wrote it with a guy who suffers from T1D. The guy simply started eating 1/2 cup of beans with every meal, and this caused ridiculously stable blood sugars, which he didn’t have even on low carb.
I’m reading the book now. The T1D guy was on 100 units of insulin a day doing low carb. After adding the beans to each meal he’s down to 20 units a day (the authors comments that this is counterintuitive, adding carbs gives less insulin). Some days he can go completely without “food insulin”, only taking the baseline insulin. He also lost lots of weight.
An insulin dependent diabetic being able to drop 80% of his insulin dosage is just insane. This is in comparison to a low carb diet, remember - proving that the latter is not the best approach for diabetes. Modern medicine cannot touch those results, either.
Speaks for itself. Please remember that all junk food, white bread and white rice is refined.
From an interview with Ray Peat (archive):
The high cholesterol that develops in most people as they age is another thing that, in the '30s and '40s, many researchers recognized that high cholesterol was nothing but an indicator of low thyroid, the same way low blood sugar was mostly an indicator of low thyroid. There were published studies in the middle 1930’s which showed that when you took out someone’s thyroid gland, immediately the cholesterol went up, and when you gave them a thyroid supplement, immediately the cholesterol goes down.
So, high cholesterol really exists because your body isn't converting it to the steroid hormones, etc - which biochemically are all made from cholesterol. And guess what makes someone low thyroid? A keto diet (among other things). In contrast, a high carb diet with lots of nutrition would likely be curative. Statins are very harmful (archive), and should probably never be taken.
The idea behind it is that we're adapted to a completely different environment than the one we're currently living in, and this disconnection is making us sick. Sounds great, and following this basic rule would mean that you:
But the execution of this movement could barely have been worse. Look, they fell right at the first hurdle. Here is a recommendation from Loren Cordain's (the person who invented the Paleo diet) website:
Healthy oils (olive, walnut, flaxseed, macadamia, avocado, coconut)
Remind me when did those oils get invented? They can't exist without heavy technological processing that is very recent (less than 200 years) - exactly what the Paleo diet was supposed to protect us from.
I totally believe that - if people moved their diet and lifestyle in the direction of actual Paleolithic people - they'd be a lot more healthy than average. But that isn't what happened in the Paleo movement, and it seems that it was destined to fail. It is unfortunate that early on, it got taken over by the low carb / keto cultists (such as Mark Sisson, who still had lots of good lifestyle advice but pointlessly restricted carbs). Do you really think your ancestors would have dropped that juicy pineapple to the ground just because they thought carbohydrates were the devil? Lol (archive):
There’s evidence that several of the fruits we enjoy eating today have been around for millennia in much the same form. For example, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of 780,000-year-old figs at a site in Northern Israel, as well as olives, plums, and pears from the paleolithic era.
Paleolithic people also ate grains and tubers (archive):
Survival may have hinged on oats some 33,000 years ago at the Italian cave called Grotta Paglicci. Inside the cave, archaeologists have uncovered paintings and what must have been a cherished tool: a sandstone pestle about 5 inches (11.8 cm) long. Analysis reveals the pestle was studded with starch granules from a cornucopia of plant materials, including grasses similar to millet and what might be acorns, the researchers report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the most common starch was from oats.
Pre-agricultural people also carbo-loaded on the tubers of the purple nut sedge, a noxious weed; underground stems of the cattail, which may have been ground into flour; and the seeds of wild wheat.
Which were one of the factors (archive) that enabled the human brain size to increase (and create civilization as we know it):
Dr Hardy explained that after cooking became widespread and the salivary amylase genes multiplied, this increased the availability of dietary glucose to the brain and foetus which, in turn, allowed the acceleration in brain size which occurred from around 800,000 years ago onwards.
And so, the real Paleolithic diet does not provide the rationale for rejecting fruit, potatoes, or grains. And yet the Paleo website even claims that keto or carnivore are diets similar to Paleo
! Lolwut? Not a single traditional culture ever ate either keto or carnivore. Actually, the Paleolithic principles should prevent disordered eating like keto since the ancient man ate everything he could find. The Paleo movement should have distanced themselves from the keto cultists immediately; this might have been the factor that would have kept it alive and relevant. But the supporters didn't manage to figure that out, which spelled their doom.
Even in an alternate reality where Paleo did not become symbiotic with low carb and accepted fruit, grains and tubers as healthy parts of the diet - a true Paleo diet is actually impossible to do, and probably suboptimal anyway. Look, most of the stuff available in grocery stores (which Paleo man did not have, of course) has been selectively bred over centuries - and I don't see many Paleo authors recommending to base your diet on wild foods (which do have more nutrition according to some studies). In a wild situation the big problem for people (or any creature) is finding enough energy to sustain themselves. If you listen to this interview, for example - you will see how a hunter-gatherer's major focus is on getting food and not becoming food himself; agriculture bypasses this problem. It is also important to realize we've already broken nature hundreds of thousands of years ago (archive) when we started using fire, which has allowed us to extract more value out of things like nutsedges (archive) or eggs (archive). No other animal is able to do that, which necessitates relying on their in-built digestive capabilities to break down their foods, wasting resources that could have been used to develop a bigger brain (see for example the expensive tissue hypothesis (archive)). Juicers, by the way, could be considered fire++; literally take 15 carrots that you'd never be able to eat in one sitting, throw them in there and just gulp down the result. I wonder if juicing will create Ubermensch :D. Either way, the nature break allowed us to improve, and using cooked foods for your Paleo diet is an admission that nature does not have all the answers (some people did seemingly realize this and came up with the Raw Paleo Diet). This doesn't mean nature is now useless; we're still dependent on biological stuff as long as we're biological organisms - so Paleo does have a point here. Basing your diet on mostly industrial products, ignoring exercise, sleep cycles etc. will never be good for us. But the effectiveness of fire - at least - does mean nature supremacy is not absolute.
Again, I don't even want to be overly critical here. Paleo could really have been great (if its supporters stuck to what it actually means), so consider this section more like mourning a good friend that died instead of an attack. And this is all because of the LC / keto cultists as well as the businessmen that came in down the road to shill their worthless supplements (I'm sure archeologists are going to find the magical disappearing supplement factories from the Paleolithic era soon).
...if they have been grown in pooped-on soil:
Addition of cow dung at the rate of 10 g kg-1 increased the B12 content in barley kernels by more than threefold (from 2.6 to 9.1 ng g_1 DW) and in spinach leaves by close to twofold (from 6.9 to 17.8 ng g_1 DW)
This means that vegans don't necessarily need to be deficient in B12. The problem is with our modern farming practices, and not something inherent. And so, if you ate wild plants (which grow on ground that is pooped on all the time by birds, etc) even in a city, there shouldn't be a problem with getting enough B12. Hooray for Paleo :D. You could also eat poop directly for even better results:
A relatively large portion of the B12 produced in the gastrointestinal tract is, however, excreted through feces or urine. In sheep, for example, 95% of the B 12 produced in the gastric tract is not absorbed and is excreted by the feces (Friedrich, 1975), which in most cases lands on soil.
This is why dogs, rabbits, etc. eat their own poop, I guess. And we could do the same for our own fully natural B12 supplement, if we could hold the disgust. The animal poops can contain even 100 times more B12 than something like milk or meat, according to the table in this study.
Almost every diet out there (whether that's low carb, paleo, ketogenic, carnivore, fruitarian, starchivore, raw, gluten-free, OMAD / warrior diet, GAPS, Peatarian, food combining) focuses on what food groups to restrict, or when. And yet we're sick at seemingly unprecedented rates, and our restrictive diets don't seem to be helping. Yes, I understand that the common diet is not necessarily a healthy one, but it still restricts many things. After all, do people on the civilized diet eat enough fruit, beans, or whole grains? And well, the proposed solutions just move the restrictions elsewhere. Maybe it's time to rethink the entire approach?
The human body has requirements for nutrients, and those are often seriously understated by the mainstream charts. By loading up on everything - whole grains, fruit, honey, leaves, nuts, underground storage organs, beans, eggs, cheese and coconut oil - you ensure all those are satisfied (mild quantities of meat are fine in terms of health, though come with the obvious ethical problems). All the listed restrictive diets will be lacking in one nutrient or another, leading to one deficiency disease or another (and they won't always have a diagnosis / medical name). Please remember that our physiological knowledge is not complete and might never be. Many things that are often considered "nonessential" by certain groups have proven benefits (carbohydrates, increased amounts of manganese / selenium / magnesium / calcium, vitamin C, short chain fats, fiber, spice ingredients...). There are also nutrients still being discovered, thousands of phyochemicals in plants etc. With this approach, you also prevent possible toxicities, since you are eating a little of everything instead of a lot of one or two things. And a lot of antioxidant nutrients might buffer the possible harms of anything bad you might be ingesting in excess.
People often start a restrictive diet, seemingly get results (because they removed an offending item or just added nutrients to their previously deficient diet), but eventually encounter problems. By eating a variety of food, you ensure that you ingest everything that exists, instead of relying on a diet theory to tell you exactly what you need or don't need and in what quantities (does anyone really think they are gods when they make such pronouncements?). This is pretty uncharted territory since most people seem to like their puritanism of avoiding animal products, grains, etc. But Matt Stone has had success (archive) with this approach in his High Everything Diet
/ Rehabilitative Rest and Agressive Re-Feeding
/ Diet Recovery
. He seemed to like significant quantities of processed food, though, which might still be fine in an otherwise adequate diet. Optimally I might move the approach towards more natural products without becoming obsessive about it. This strategy might not be viable if you already have some disease that would necessitate restricting things; but at that point, you probably already know what you have to limit. But also don't assume that something necessarily has to be restricted, like sugar in diabetes (see the beans results). Find a way to get in as much nutrition as possible considering the ailments you have.