WalterB:

Excellent points about phytoestrogens.  Dr. BG talks about them often at Animal Pharm.

Fortunately I don't think we'll see millet cereal soon, except as a novelty in the "health food" aisle (a great place to stay away from if you want to stay healthy)...it's not (AFAIK) a subsidized crop in the USA, so it'll be a lot more expensive than corn or soy.

tatertot:

If you had opened with that essay, I'd have been much more cordial and less dismissive!  Yes, I've been following the RS saga on both sides...both yours and Richard's as well as pklopp's. 

My impatience stems from the gigantic amount of mainstream hype resistant starch receives vs. the fact that any whole food contains very little RS compared to straight-up carbohydrate and sugar...so anything but the Bob's Red Mill potato starch hack won't have any interesting effects beyond pushing lots of empty carb calories at people who can ill afford to eat them!

That being said, potato starch is indeed a very good prebiotic, I suspect it is indeed quite helpful for people with gut flora imbalances, and it's a very cheap experiment to try with few downsides (which should be immediately obvious if they hit you).  If it were being presented in this light instead as some "miracle carbohydrate" (it's not even a carbohydrate, really, since gut microbes digest it to SCFA), I'd have been a lot more supportive.

I do take exception to this: "Foods alone, especially a grain and mostly legume-free diet leave a big gap in optimal prebiotic levels"...was Paleolithic man deficient in prebiotics for millions of years?  It seems unlikely.  (It's much more reasonable to say that modern man is deficient in parasite infections...)

My current view is that it's more about the ratio than the absolute amount.  Since refined sugar wasn't on the Paleolithic menu (occasional honey was about it), the problem isn't in eating little soluble fiber: it's in eating lots of sugar and simple carbohydrates in the absence of soluble fiber.  (Possible results: SIBO and other gut dysbiosis.)  So if you're eating mostly meat, that's fine, because the bad bacteria aren't getting fed either...and whole fruit generally has plenty of soluble fiber to balance the sugar, so that's probably fine too.

Note that I'm not trying to chase you away!  My longevity in the community has come, in part, from my unwillingness to sell my readers anything I'm not sure of: instead, I prefer to wait until I understand how to integrate it into the greater framework.  For example, in my time, I've seen more than one guru and ex-guru go from "carbs are mostly evil" straight to "your thyroid will shrivel into a raisin if you don't eat more carbs", neither of which is correct. 

Meanwhile, I've stuck with the original PhD recommendation of 15-20% plus desire for glycolytic activity minus desire to shed fat, which seems to be optimal for most.

JS

(My apologies for missing this: according to my calendar, I was in Vegas with my girl at the time, so at least I had a good reason!)

Lyle:

You'll note that, in the comments to the previous installment, we discuss that very article -- and the equation it contains -- at length! I'll reprint some of what I said here:

"Lyle's article and mine are making the same point, except on different levels. Lyle is enumerating all the “adjustments” one has to make when we treat food as comprised of “calories” (as measured by a bomb calorimeter), which include all those sciency-sounding acronyms like TEF, SPA, NEAT, etc."

Your point that maintenance is not constant is exactly the point of Thomas 2013, which I quote in the article for that very reason.

The sophisticated version of CICO, which I know you understand, boils down to "physics is true." The naive version of CICO, which is continually promulgated and popularly thought to be inviolate (e.g. the "3500-calorie rule") boils down to "weight gain or loss is a direct product of calories ingested, physical exercise, and nothing else."

My intention, in this series, is to show that the type, quality, and consumption pattern of food has a substantial impact on fat and muscle gain and loss -- far more than small perturbations in the number of "calories" consumed, which are not meaningful anyway due to measurement noise greatly exceeding the changes being measured. Here's the index to this series, which is ongoing.

(Every time I hear someone talking about "just eat one fewer slice of bread each day," I remember my physics teacher leaving red marks all over our papers when we incorrectly extended results to far more significant figures than the data contained!)

Asclepius:

That's amongst the many problems -- and why I advocate changing the type, quality, and consumption pattern of food (not to mention one's exercise modalities!) before attempting to count calories. As I see the evidence, calorie-counting is only useful once you've already converged to a particular set of foods (and activity patterns) and are just tweaking the amounts you consume. Otherwise, you're not just comparing apples to oranges -- you're comparing them to broccoli, eggs, and prime rib!

JS