When low fat wins

I think I’ve said before, I’m a calories-in, calories-out sort of person. Nothing as simple as losing a kilo of stored fat for every 9000kcal deficit in dietary consumption (or increase in exercise) of course. This is, as we all know, incorrect and of absolutely no use whatsoever in planning an attempt to generate a normal bodyweight.

I am also very aware that, outside a metabolic ward, it is very difficult to even approximately assess a given person’s level of energy output, assuming they are fully compliant with a fixed composition, fixed caloric input. Which they probably aren’t, much of the time. But calories out will be reflected in many more outputs than can achieved by the limited exercise opportunities afforded during the restrictions of an in-patient metabolic ward study.

As Hall commented, the repeated superiority of weight loss by carbohydrate restriction has always been achieved in outpatient studies, never in tightly controlled metabolic ward studies. He didn’t mention that the advantages from carbohydrate restriction were always achieved under calorically unrestricted circumstances in comparison to calorically restricted alternative diets. I’ll just mention that now.

We can also say, with some degree of certainly, that under very tightly controlled in-patient conditions, extreme dietary fat restriction (less than 8% of calories) produced more stored fat loss than a modest reduction in carbohydrate restriction, provided both groups are rigidly forced to cut calories and to limit their exercise to a specified level, for six days. My own feeling is that this is probably true under the circumstances of the study. It provides a very small piece of data of very limited application to the real world. As Hall writes:

"Translation of our results to real-world weight-loss diets for treatment of obesity is limited since the experimental design [and model simulations] relied on strict control of food intake, which is unrealistic in free-living individuals".

I am very lucky.

I don’t live in a metabolic ward. If the weather is cool outside and I feel warm enough to not need my jacket when I let the chickens out in the morning, so be it. If both the air and water temp are 4degC but there is a four foot swell with clean waves shaping up in First Bay I’m going to be thinking about the roof rack, my playboating kayak and my drysuit. I’m guessing that there are few near freezing surf opportunities in a metabolic ward.

People might also be aware that I rather like fatty acids, especially free fatty acids. These uncouple respiration. Uncoupled respiration, at the mitochondrial level, generates heat and so increases metabolic rate. For people with a heathy interest in cold water kayaking, this has its advantages. Sitting in a metabolic ward eating 140g of carbohydrate per day is not going to increase my free fatty acids to a level were uncoupling is going to feature in my metabolism.

The average person with a BMI of 35 is probably going to be running their metabolism under the Crabtree effect. Increased dependence on glycolysis at the expense of reduced utilisation of mitochondrial beta oxidation. While it is quite possible to immediately and markedly increase fatty acid oxidation, there are limits set by how many mitochondria a given cell possesses. The moderate carbohydrate group did increase their fatty acid oxidation, but not enough to compensate for the loss of carbohydrate available from the diet. This is perhaps most clearly seen in Table 3 where a significant drop in sleeping metabolic rate occurred in the moderate carb group and an actual increase was seen in the very fat restricted group. It's probably why the moderate carbohydrate group had a suggestion of increased protein degradation compared to the very low fat group.

Even thought it was nearly 15 years ago, I can still recall Atkins Flu™ as I switched to deeply ketogenic eating from a fairly reasonable modern diet. The "flu" lasted about 6 days (apologies for exactifying my recall to fit with the study duration!) with further acclimatisation over the next few months. There should be no such problem with increasing glycolysis in the very low fat group if you are already running your metabolism on starch combined with HFCS. It is no major problem to up regulate carbohydrate metabolism when it is your normal metabolic fuel source.

So for the first six days of an enforced, calorically restricted, non-ketogenic diet, cutting fat rules provided the restriction is very, very extreme. Do this long term and you will, of course, fail.

Peter