What are Recommendations for Poly Fats and Sugars?

pone

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I am fairly confused by some of Peat's recommendations, chief among those to use sugar to treat diabetes:

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml

In Peat's view:

What percent of calories does he think should come from carbs (and break that down to fructose, sucrose, and starch)?

What percentage should come saturated fats and poly fats?

What percentage should come from protein?
 

kiran

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Well, I think the guideline was 80-120g of quality (animal) protein.

I believe the percentage of fats varies by the physical activity. If you're eating too much fat for your activity level, you may gain some fat. Mostly saturated fat is ideal, stick to ghee and coconut oil is optimal. We get PUFAs from everything we eat pretty much, and it's not clear we need more.

Everything else is carbs. The ideal diet would contain a lot of ripe fruit, but living in the modern world, we don't get the real ripe fruit in the supermarkets (they're bred to transport well without bruising, and picked unripe). Fruit like banana and mango are potential irritants because of the conditions they are grown under. The best starches are white rice and potatoes, but they will trigger more insulin response and that's not ideal. It's not clear that there's a fixed ratio, people implement this in various ways...

Yes, surprisingly enough, eating sugar (or OJ, etc) will reduce blood glucose levels by reducing the stress hormones. The increased blood glucose mainly comes from gluconeogenesis from breaking down tissue, due to stress hormones like cortisol and glucagon, and suppressing those will bring blood glucose down. There are other factors in hyperglycemia like FFAs in the blood, inflammation, and so on, but these are far outside the topic, and there are ways to deal with them.
 
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pone

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kiran said:
Yes, surprisingly enough, eating sugar (or OJ, etc) will reduce blood glucose levels by reducing the stress hormones. The increased blood glucose mainly comes from gluconeogenesis from breaking down tissue, due to stress hormones like cortisol and glucagon, and suppressing those will bring blood glucose down. There are other factors in hyperglycemia like FFAs in the blood, inflammation, and so on, but these are far outside the topic, and there are ways to deal with them.

If I have even 40 grams of starch in the form of yams, my glucose explodes. But that is almost pure glucose.

A small amount of fructose before that meal moderates that result. But eating all of these calories as sugar would give you a huge dose of fructose. Fructose metabolizes in the liver to the worst kind of VLDL small-particle fat, and there are plenty of people now who are starting to view fructose as a toxin in large doses.

The idea on stress hormones seems pretty important to me. I know if I get only four hours of sleep that my carb tolerance diminishes and my body is almost type 2 diabetic during the morning after I get little sleep. That does seem to suggest that my stress hormones are elevated in that situation.

How does glucose or fructose mediate stress hormones?
 
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pone said:
I know if I get only four hours of sleep that my carb tolerance diminishes and my body is almost type 2 diabetic during the morning after I get little sleep.

The idea of type II diabetes as an irreversible progressive illness is really strange. I can make myself clinically type II on an oral glucose (or potato!) tolerance test by getting stressed about something, sleeping poorly, restricting calories, or restricting carbs and can reverse it in just a few days by doing the opposite of those things.

I think stress hormones are mostly about "conserving glucose" and respond primarily to liver glycogen status. "Type II diabetic," "low liver glycogen," and "stressed" might be biologically synonymous states. Fructose and glucose (which supposedly cause diabetes) are effective at refilling liver glycogen, however the glucose doesn't refill glycogen without enough insulin and insulin sensitivity. This can be a self-sustaining state, as stress hormones result in insulin resistance.
 
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pone

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CellularIconoclast said:
pone said:
I know if I get only four hours of sleep that my carb tolerance diminishes and my body is almost type 2 diabetic during the morning after I get little sleep.

The idea of type II diabetes as an irreversible progressive illness is really strange. I can make myself clinically type II on an oral glucose (or potato!) tolerance test by getting stressed about something, sleeping poorly, restricting calories, or restricting carbs and can reverse it in just a few days by doing the opposite of those things.

I think stress hormones are mostly about "conserving glucose" and respond primarily to liver glycogen status. "Type II diabetic," "low liver glycogen," and "stressed" might be biologically synonymous states. Fructose and glucose (which supposedly cause diabetes) are effective at refilling liver glycogen, however the glucose doesn't refill glycogen without enough insulin and insulin sensitivity. This can be a self-sustaining state, as stress hormones result in insulin resistance.

This cannot be the complete picture. If I ate carbs round the clock my blood glucose would stay above 140 all day long. I measure my glucose all the time. It tends to stay 95 to 125 without carbs, and after carb meals will climb to 140 sometimes hovering there for a while. If I push my carb meals above 50 grams in a single sitting, I can get above 150 easily. I can't believe that by eating 50 grams of carbs more often during the day that this somehow would lower your glucose.

Stress definitely makes my glucose metabolism worse, so I grant the value of keeping stress low.
 
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pone said:
This cannot be the complete picture.

It's not, I am way over-simplifying it but I was mentioning an aspect I thought was important. I didn't mention that people who have been diabetic for a while seem to actually accumulate excessive liver glycogen but it doesn't seem to get used properly.

pone said:
If I ate carbs round the clock my blood glucose would stay above 140 all day long. I measure my glucose all the time.

I think that is a normal post meal glucose level for a healthy insulin sensitive person eating a high carb meal. Many diabetics have levels much higher than that even while fasting. I've had post meal levels of 235 mg/dL when eating a high carb meal after low carbing for weeks, but these are around 140-150 mg/dL after a similar meal when I eat high carb for a while.

I also measure my glucose all the time, it's pretty interesting to watch.
 
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pone said:
I can't believe that by eating 50 grams of carbs more often during the day that this somehow would lower your glucose.

Eating high carb consistently for several days will result in lower blood glucose in response to an identical stimulus. Your fasting glucose will be lower, and postprandial glucose will be lower after the same high carb meal. Glucose will still be much higher after a high carb meal than after a low carb meal. Eating carbs all day long will maintain higher blood glucose, but the average levels may still be lower because you will have lower average glucose levels while sleeping.
 
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pone

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Does any vendor make an over the counter strip that measures cortisol levels without having to send that into a test lab? It would be wonderful to have some way to track cortisol status over the course of a day.
 
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pone

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CellularIconoclast said:
pone said:
I can't believe that by eating 50 grams of carbs more often during the day that this somehow would lower your glucose.

Eating high carb consistently for several days will result in lower blood glucose in response to an identical stimulus. Your fasting glucose will be lower, and postprandial glucose will be lower after the same high carb meal. Glucose will still be much higher after a high carb meal than after a low carb meal. Eating carbs all day long will maintain higher blood glucose, but the average levels may still be lower because you will have lower average glucose levels while sleeping.

I have not seen this. My experience has been that at some level of glucose each day I start to completely lose control of my glucose metabolism and then have to back off on the carb levels to get the post meal glucose at or under 140 mg/dL.

Low-carb dieting was a catastrophe for me, and I came out the other side of that experience with something similar to chronic fatigue syndrome. My body accumulates acid in muscle after exercise and it then becomes some kind of systemic acidosis. Just horrible, and I'm still fighting my way out of this.

With low-carb, I think my body was simply not able to switch over to ketosis reliably and that part of my aerobic metabolism was broken. That then put me under huge physiological stress with the cortisol and other stress hormones probably getting out of control. Finding the right level of carbs that avoids the stress response while still keeping post-pandrial glucose readings normal has been very very tricky.
 
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pone said:
I have not seen this. My experience has been that at some level of glucose each day I start to completely lose control of my glucose metabolism and then have to back off on the carb levels to get the post meal glucose at or under 140 mg/dL.

What kind of levels are you talking about?

I was unclear, I may have warped my terminology by being low carb too long. When I said "higher carb" I'm talking about compared to ketogenic diets, but still only 150-250 grams/day or so. Everyone has some upper limit that their metabolism can handle safely. Some active healthy people seem to handle well over 1,000 grams/day without problems but I couldn't do that.
 

kiran

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pone said:
If I have even 40 grams of starch in the form of yams, my glucose explodes. But that is almost pure glucose.

A small amount of fructose before that meal moderates that result. But eating all of these calories as sugar would give you a huge dose of fructose. Fructose metabolizes in the liver to the worst kind of VLDL small-particle fat, and there are plenty of people now who are starting to view fructose as a toxin in large doses.

The idea on stress hormones seems pretty important to me. I know if I get only four hours of sleep that my carb tolerance diminishes and my body is almost type 2 diabetic during the morning after I get little sleep. That does seem to suggest that my stress hormones are elevated in that situation.

How does glucose or fructose mediate stress hormones?

Yams (sweet potato?) also have anti-thyroid substances. I wonder if that might be part of the problem. http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/G ... eport.html

People blame fructose for all sorts of problems, and Lustig is just flat out wrong on this. NAFLD is mainly a problem when you're gaining fat.
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v68/ ... 0148a.html
Fructose, especially in fruit or as sucrose is not really a toxin at all, at least in reasonable doses.

I don't know how it works, but that it does. Here's a bunch of studies.
http://www.functionalps.com/blog/2011/0 ... ne-system/
 
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pone

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CellularIconoclast said:
pone said:
I have not seen this. My experience has been that at some level of glucose each day I start to completely lose control of my glucose metabolism and then have to back off on the carb levels to get the post meal glucose at or under 140 mg/dL.

What kind of levels are you talking about?

I was unclear, I may have warped my terminology by being low carb too long. When I said "higher carb" I'm talking about compared to ketogenic diets, but still only 150-250 grams/day or so. Everyone has some upper limit that their metabolism can handle safely. Some active healthy people seem to handle well over 1,000 grams/day without problems but I couldn't do that.

If I take 50 grams of starch with no fructose I can push 170 to 200 mg/dL, and it doesn't drop all that quickly.
 
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pone

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kiran said:
People blame fructose for all sorts of problems, and Lustig is just flat out wrong on this. NAFLD is mainly a problem when you're gaining fat.
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v68/ ... 0148a.html
Fructose, especially in fruit or as sucrose is not really a toxin at all, at least in reasonable doses.

I don't know how it works, but that it does. Here's a bunch of studies.
http://www.functionalps.com/blog/2011/0 ... ne-system/

I pretty much accept that small amounts of fruit are healthy. I am eating a fistful of blueberries at breakfast and dinner.

Rather than telling us "sucrose is good" it would be much more interesting if they tried different levels of fructose and starch together, and then saw the percentage combinations that gave best response.
 

kiran

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pone said:
Rather than telling us "sucrose is good" it would be much more interesting if they tried different levels of fructose and starch together, and then saw the percentage combinations that gave best response.

Here's some links about post-exercise glycogen replenishment, generally some fructose improves the rate at which liver glycogen is replenished. They talk about 1:1 and 2:1 G:F ratios.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3316904
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18799989

This one talks about ingestion during exercise.
"the average exogenous carbohydrate oxidation rates over the 60- to 120-min exercise period were higher (P < 0.001) in Fruc+Glu [1] compared with Med-Glu and High-Glu (1.16 ± 0.06, 0.75 ± 0.04, and 0.75 ± 0.04 g/min, respectively). "
http://jap.physiology.org/content/96/4/1277
 

pboy

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fructose takes longer to absorb, 4-6 hours, glucose is more 15 min to 2 hours, but once absorbed fructose is rapidly converted and cleared almost all in the first pass through the liver, where as glucose can take longer. Theres really not much difference in the two other than that...fructose becomes glucose rapidly upon absorption. Not only is sugar not a toxin, its the main thing keeping people like lustig alive whether or not he realizes it...though he does seem like he could fall into
zombie mode in the near future. The calorie theory in my opinion is messing people up so bad its not even funny. Fat supposedly has calories but most of the time, outside a few instances (like preemulsified fat, milk, egg yolk, and also short and medium chain fatty acid, to some extent palmitic acid as well), its not actually absorbed and utilized for calories. People on high fat low carb diets are still on a starvation diet. If the average American eats 2600 calories a day but 40% is fat, its more like a 2000 or just under. Not only that, but indigestible material (or unabsorbable, non utilizable) actually takes mucus (produced from sugar) to remove from the body. Most people are eating too much, too many 'calories', but in reality they aren't eating enough, and are stuffing themselves with too much non food substances.

eat as little poly fat on purpose as possible. Any digestible easy carbohydrate source, eat as much as you are comfortable doing...in many cases the more the better, of course without burdening
 
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pone

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pboy said:
fructose becomes glucose rapidly upon absorption.

Is that right? I thought fructose is metabolized in the liver to VLDL (the small particle type at that).
 

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