Sorry J i meant the cells cannot use fats for fuel as easily so demand glucose instead.

the micronutrient requirements to use fats for fuel due to its being more complicated is an interesting idea and was where i was going with my thoughts in fact but i forgot before posting the comment!

The garbage is also why people can eat a whole jar at one sitting. If it were just ground peanuts and MCT oil, they'd stop after two spoonfuls.

Not that pulverized food is necessarily that good for us anyway. But if he had to eat a whole peanut in a spoonful of coconut oil, he'd stop at one.

John:

There is peanut butter and peanut butter.  Sure, Skippy, Jif, and other big brands are usually industrial products -- but as hammock said, there are plenty of peanut butters that are just peanuts and salt.

However, I agree with you that it's very difficult to eat a lot of the peanuts-and-salt kind, whereas it's easy to sock down a boatload of the industrial kind -- because, what with all the added sugar and hydrogenated oils, they're basically peanut-flavored cake frosting. 

Note that peanut protein isn't good quality (like other legumes, it's strongly deficient in lysine, with a PDCAAS of 0.5), and the oil (unless you can find one of the extremely rare high-oleic varieties) is at least half n-6. 

Result: the nutritional argument for being able to overconsume industrial peanut butter stands.

JS

J, I like the new style of answers. Sure if you're frequently peeking at the site and the answers are coming fast this means you might have to scroll back up a bit to find out whether there are new answers. But whenever it takes a while for answers to come you'd need to scroll up either way, trying to find the comment your answer relates to, and I think that's more of a hassle. The only real downside I see is with the RSS feed, based on what was said here, but I don't really know how that works.

On the presentation, I like it, and I like it in it's new form. Sure having read your series on why are we hungry there's not a lot of new info here, but it's pretty concise without oversimplifying.

As an anecdote on "food reward", I find bone marrow to be the absolutely more "palatable" food ever, and by far. If I've eaten enough already though then the mere thought of stuffing some more on my mouth kinda makes me wanna puke.

Fmgd:

Exactly.  Marrow is delicious -- it has high hedonic impact (this is the correct term for "palatability") -- but it's also very nutritious, and it's nutritious in an evolutionarily concordant form.  Therefore, it correctly produces satiation as we eat, causing its incentive salience (how much we "want" it) to decrease until we don't want any more.

In contrast, Wheat Thins don't taste nearly as good as marrow -- they have lower hedonic impact -- but as they're made of wheat flour and seed oil, they're not nutritious.  Therefore, they produce far less satiation as we eat them, so we end up eating more -- even though they have less incentive salience (we don't "want" them nearly as much) as the marrow!

That is why it's important to understand this model of hunger -- it has real-world explanatory power. 

JS

JS:

I didn't mean only the mitochondrial DNA problem, when I said Metabolically broken. Obviously there are many aspects to it.

And yes it does explain both the gain in fat and inability to lose fat, as they are both two aspects of the same damage.

What I am saying is that the 20years is a very important number in this metabolic damage thing.

I read about it first in the Good Calories Bad Calories. It is a very good book, but I guess Taubes got side tracked from the real implications of his research and got into glucose is bad. It only becomes bad when you become metabolically challenged. And yes many people today are metabolically challenged. But its not any where near universal.

anand:

What do you think some of the other aspects to "metabolically broken" are?  I have my own suspicions, but I'm always looking for new facts and ideas I may have missed.

JS

"And CICO is also seductive because IT'S PHYSICS!!!11!!1!, but it's also unhelpful. Telling fat people “All you need to do is eat less and move more, fatty” is like telling a losing sports team “All you need to do is score more points, losers.”

I think I might be in love…

Amy:

Thank you for appreciating my knowledge and wit, and not just my dashing good looks 😉

JS

JS:

I am only a lay person. I have no idea what these could be. I have read about the damaged mitochondria. It is inconceivable to me that there are not similar damages in the nucleus as well. Which get transferred to children.

anand:

There is a plausible argument that humans, due to a combination of a highly mutagenic environment created by industrial toxins and the lack of natural selection, are in the early stages of a mutational meltdown -- and that the increasing prevalence of autism is one manifestation of this.  (See Christopherson 2012.)

JS

i am done my PHD experiment. eating my safe starch with fats, lemon juice, fibrous vegetables, none of that worked to help lower my spikes. this diet is not appropriate for people who have issues processing glucose.

people who have not been diagnosed as diabetic but have a diabetic parent(s), like me, should only experiment with this diet with the knowledge of how to use a glucose meter and what constitutes good bg numbers.

i think the jaminets are arrogant and reckless to recommend their diet to diabetics, let alone not even consider people like me who may have undiagnosed glucose processing problems, but clearly are at risk because of having a diabetic parent (s).

v:

I would have liked to see peak glucose numbers: 120 two hours after a meal isn't unreasonable, and the point of (for instance) eating fat with a meal is that it slows down absorption and therefore blunts the BG spike.  120 for 2-3 hours is much better than 180 for an hour and 100 at 2 hours...

However, I certainly won't talk you out of whatever approach you find sustainable over the long run -- and I stand by my previous statement that people should trust their meter over what anyone tells them, including myself.

JS

eddie said:

"i don’t think all diabetics are the same, you might not be able to handle that diet, but there may be plenty of other diabetics who can."

yes, you are right. i need to edit the title. my point is this: if you ARE diabetic and you try the PHD, your meter will give you feedback. If you are pre diabetic or you have a parent(s) with diabetes, you probably are NOT testing your blood sugar. my simple recommendation is for the pre diabetic and genetically predisposed to diabetes people to buy a cheap wal-mart relion meter and learn how to test their sugar if they try this diet. you might think that these type of people will automatically get fatter if their blood sugars run high, and once they get fatter on the diet, they will stop it with no need for glucose testing. the problem is that there are people who run high blood sugars who don't automatically get fatter when their blood sugar spikes. i was thinner at an A1c of 5.6 (a good number i know), than i was at 5.3. there are thin diabetics.

do you think there is any problem with my suggestion? don't you think it is something that should be included in the PHD book? For example, if you were advocating a very high fat diet, wouldn't you suggest that readers should not skimp on yearly bloodwork to see how they reacted to the diet? i believe certain people genetically cannot handle a high fat diet. that would not be calling the diet dangerous in general, but it would be dangerous to a subset of people. so i recommend that people trying out a new diet need to be aware of their unique genetics. they need to test out if the diet is working, and not just by looking in the mirror.

v:

I agree that anyone with a family history of diabetes, or with any indications that they might themselves be diabetic or so predisposed, should get one of those cheap Relion meters and a box of strips, and test how they react to their customary diet...or any big change in diet.  It's much cheaper than even a single doctor visit.

A T1 relative of mine (by marriage, not blood), for instance, gets monumental BG spikes from beans.  Every source says that beans are low-glycemic, slowly digested, and good for you, and the veg*an doctors all claim great success for bean-based diets...but when the meter reads 300, you can't argue with that.

JS

JS said re my PHD experiment at Paleoexperiments.blogspot.com:

"v:
I would have liked to see peak glucose numbers: 120 two hours after a meal isn't unreasonable, and the point of (for instance) eating fat with a meal is that it slows down absorption and therefore blunts the BG spike. 120 for 2-3 hours is much better than 180 for an hour and 100 at 2 hours…"

On the first day of my PHD diet experiment:
At 3:18 pm I wasn't really that hungry, but I thought it was time to test out a PHD meal. My bg before i ate was 100. I didn't want a half pound of white rice because I wasn't that hungry. I had about 150 grams of white rice with a spoonful of kerrygold butter on top- yum. i could eat that all day. i also had boiled asparagus with butter and salt and 5 hot wings. processed food, i know, but my husband refuses to be the food purist that i am. i will take my bg again at 4:18. I'm also having another cup of coffee with cream and sugar-free sweetener. i am very full- i probably should have eaten a little less. at 4:18 my bg is: 157/160
2nd day of experiment:when i got home at 4:30 my bg was 89- again my normal reading when i was eating lower carb for this time of day. for dinner at 4:45 i had 75 grams of white rice again, with a little butter, a burger with salsa on it, and some broccoli. one hour later my bg was 134/133. this is an improvement from yesterday.
3rd day of experiment:I don't know what happened, but I had the worst sleep i have had in months. very hot and then cold. and my blood sugar was 109/110 this morning. i felt like my throat was getting sore at night, but this morning it's gone. this is my last day to see downward trends in bg. i know i am going to feel like crap all day because of not sleeping well.
(later on on the 3rd day)my bg at 4:45 was 95. not as good as the 89 i had at this time yesterday, but ok. at 4:45 i had ground beef, pepper, celery chile, to which i added the 75 grams of rice. i also had small chunks of cheese and i cup of coffee with cream and artificial sweetener. then I didn't take my bg at 5:45 because my husband and I went out for a leisurely one hour walk. when I got back I took my bg and it was 121. I thought it would have been lower after one hour of walking and two hours after eating.

after the experiment my comment is that having a reading of 121 TWO hours after eating only 75 grams of white rice with an otherwise LC meal plus fat (burger) and acidic elements (such as vinegar in the salsa) AND after ONE hour of walking- 121 is a very problematic number and one much higher than I would normally see under the same circumstance eating the same food minus the rice but with the walking. the PHD recommend 1 pound of safe starches a day. i was only shooting for HALF A POUND a day PLUS i was doing a lot of exercise-way above the norm- and i still put up a number 121 after two hours- that is the BARE minimum for safety. similar to the 140 cut off at one hour.

we are in agreement about who should use the relion meters, so i am not going to mention that.

i think i feel the PHD diet could be problematic for people with glucose processing issues to the point where I think it is advisable to put some kind of caveat and guidance in the actual PHD book about the meters and all we wrote about that.

do you think there should be guidance in any diet book, such as the comments about the relion meter, to help people customize a diet plan? or do you think people need to find out how to customize a diet plan for themselves? they have to seek out the info with no help from the author?