• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Is there any science behind the claim that fat is the enemy (not carbs)?

Cocosilk

Well-Known Member
Messages
818
Location
Australia
Type of diabetes
Gestational
Treatment type
Insulin
I get sick of the contradictions when it comes to the LCHF vs LF/vegan diets that claim to help prevent or reverse diabetes. I guess either diet must help certain people but is there any science behind the claim that fat is the enemy because it gets into cells and stops insulin from working properly (the say animal fats)?
https://www.forksoverknives.com/suc...pped-all-medications-with-a-plant-based-diet/

Personally I've been eating LCHF but am pulling back on the fat to make sure I burn the fat stored in my body. It's been great so far but I do go back to the odd small serving of carbs because ketosis affects my sleep (gives me insomnia despite taking magnesium supplements - possibly because I don't get enough exercise, despite chasing 3 small children around all day). So I still find myself eating some carbs here and there. Grain carbs are the ones I enjoy the taste of (they are rather addictive, aren't they?) but they give me heartburn and bloating). Vegetables carbs are great (if more time consuming to prepare) but I've noticed bloating, constipation or diarrhea from large amounts of certain vegetables. Nuts too though give me constipation. Fats do the opposite.

One thing us for sure, while eating low carb, blood sugar remains stable.

I read another claim that when first switching from low carb to vegan, blood sugar readings increase at first but drop in the long run. Has anyone found any scientific evidence of this?

I guess in another 50 years we'll have some proper long-term evidence of how the Low Carb High Fat (with its cholesterol raising tendencies) vs Low Fat & / or Vegetarian diets really affect us but will the quality of our mass produced food have changed again as much as it has in the last 50 years? Are we better off eating grain-fed hormone-filled animals or pesticide-laden vegetables if they are our only affordable choices?
 
Last edited:
No, there is no science behind the demonisation of fat. It is all money driven, by the processed food industry. e don't need more time to establish if fat is safe. All the evidence is there already. As long as there is money to be made from processed food, the fat phobia myth will be perpetuated.
 
We've been eating fat for millions of years, all of a sudden we are told that fat is the cause of modern chronic disease. It's a great steaming heap of agenda driven rubbish much as @MarkMunday has stated, it's about money.
 
You have your own personal experience for a way of eating that works for you, so why change? If you are in doubt, then read through the testimonials section of this forum (or the DUK one as well) and see how many posters report success using a High Carb low fat diet. If it really was a runaway success then it would be trumpeted from the roof tops, instead of being argued endlessly with emotive rhetoric. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

If you look for the science that supports the alternative diets you mention, then I have found that all paths lead back to a study called ADVENT 2 which was conducted and paid for by the Seventh Day Adventists to prove once and for all that their way of life led to salvation. Unfortunately that study (and even more so ADVENT 1 before it) have been demonstrated to be severely biassed and very poor quality.

Reading the main Guru's for those diets in their lucratively published bibles, then they all reference ADVENT 2 as their source of their studies. Other science being claimed is The China Study, and the anecdotal Esselstyn study. Most of these studies are epidemiological studies that can be used to see if things are related, but cannot be used as proof or cause. It is similar to fortune cookies in that respect.
 



I rest my case.
 
It just shows how long an urban myth perpetuates. I think it was in the 50's when Ancel Keys said that fat was the problem and his "research" has long since been debunked. In fact, if he had chosen another six countries on the graph instead of the six he did it could have shown that fat was good for you.
 
The topic of whether there was or is any evidence against saturated fat was the topic of Dr Zoe Harcombe's PhD (a former vegetarian). It is a much cited paper from which I presume it was robust work so worth a look (see here presentation on You Tube Should Dietary Fat Guidelines Have Been Introduced?
I think the more we study the more difficult it becomes to blame a single macronutrient e.g. fat or carbs for our chronic health problems. Perhaps its is the unnatural combo of factory made fat and sugar that we get in processed foods rather that is the root and is something for the vegans and the carnivores to unite over.
I am type 1 so in theory I could inject adequate insulin to cover carbs but instead have been able to choose to eat more meat, fish and eggs than plant based foods because I believe they are just a lot more nutrtious and tasty than plants.
I am also just about to listen to Nina Tellcholz's take on the 2020 US guidelines. She is a campaigning journalist who has debunked the demonisation of sat fat and has been campaigning for a science based approach to the 5 yearly guidelines process. So she has a carnivorous dog in the fight but the campaign was simply asking for a better quality of scientific evaluation of the evidence for and against saturated fat.
 
I learned the hard and rather painful way that I should avoid eating things that caused me problems when as a chronic migraine sufferer I ate certain trigger foods. Carbohydrates raise my glucose levels, T2 diabetes is generally caused by an intolerance to carbohydrates, so for me it's quite logical to avoid eating them - at least in large quantities. If we're lactose or gluten intolerant or allergic to peanuts, etc, we exclude such things from our diets, so why should carbohydrates be any different?

And as @Tophat1900 mentioned, we've eaten fat forever, so why in the least 50 you so year has it suddenly become bad for us?
I've always eaten at least moderate quantities of normal full fat food, and have not seen any significant changes in my choleresterol levels since I started eating a bit more on LCHF.
 

Only anecdotal but I became diabetic when following a vegetarian/almost vegan diet. I know from old blood tests that were recently discovered, I had an ok Hba1c three years before diagnosis. With hindsight my diet was very high carb due to the grains, pulses and fruit I was eating. I didn’t eat much added sugar, but there was a lot of whole food carbs involved. It was probably very low fat too.

Fast forward to diagnosis and I went low carb, startered back on meat and dairy, dropped all grains and pulses immediately. Hba1c dropped from 112 to 36 within 3 months. Just a thought...

We are all very different with different genes. I know for me, vegetarian diet was not good for ME
 
Zoe Harcombe June 2018

"If the public health message were revised to advise citizens to eat natural food and not processed food, saturated fat intake would fall accordingly although the health benefit would likely be the concomitant reduction in sucrose, trans fats, refined carbohydrates and other processed ingredients deleterious to human health. Human beings evolved to eat foods available from the natural environment.5 It does not seem logical to advise populations away from carcass meat, dairy produce, eggs, nuts and seeds, in the name of saturated fat, when the modern processed foods, biscuits, cakes, pizza, desserts and ready meals, are more sensibly related to modern illness."

https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2139/rr-3
 
bulkbiker said:
View attachment 42219

I rest my case.
Click to expand...

It's hard to know what Vegans are eating though, like with the LCHF crowd. I once met a vegan who was eating mostly peanut butter and jam sandwiches... no joke.

But from that study, it shows that if you are already diabetic, then eating Vegan isn't going to fix things in the long run - you might have to eat LCHF vegan (imagine!).
 
And you just have to look at the number of newly diagnosed vegans and vegetarians that join up here to see that it doesn't provide the advertised health benefits.
 

It's amazing that things can change that fast for the better too, isn't it?
 
Jim Lahey said:
Fructose, grains and seed oils are the main drivers of disease.
Click to expand...

If you are going to make bald claims like that, please also provide an explanation, or some references.

The original post on this thread asked for evidence to support a claim.
Simply stating a different view does nothing to further the discussion, or inform anyone as to why you hold that view,
 
@Cocosilk Yes and No. Cleverly those that wish to ensure there is confusion lump ancestral fats, butter, lard, ghee, coconut etc, in with margarine, soy bean, sunflower, corn etc. What should have happpened is that the over processed man-made fats should have been called something else for clarity. "They" then say the man made fat is better as it lowers LDL.

The yes part of the answer I have some referenaces to in a previous post https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/why-seed-oils-are-not-good.174939/page-2#post-2274026

The no part of the answer is also in the same link above, as it shows the outcomes of real humans who unarguably eat high saturated fat diets. Ultimately we have a choice to believe real historical data (realtime in non-western diet hunter gather existing societies) or theoretical, ideological, tortured statistical data and profit driven entities.

When they talk about fat in the cells, they conveniently miss out that over consumption of carbs also leads to saturated fat in the cells and fat in the form of triglycerides in the blood stream. They never explain why those who follow Keto with high saturated fat, tend to have low trigs. There is a clear distinction between ingested saturated fat and saturated fat made from high carbs. Of course if you are fat adapted you can pull the fat out of your cells to use for energy, whereas a carb burner may not leave enough time between meals to get to fat burning.

If it were generally possible to eat high carb and reverse Type 2 on diet alone more would do it, and have proof of this. Personally I am not interested in trials to prove this (I have only seen Dr Neal Barnard's that do not hit the spot), I would be satisfied with long term scren shots of pre and post meal blood glucose. Fasting insulin, hs-crp, hdl and trigs would be nice to know also. The Randle cycle appears to be a mechanism whereby higher carbs and low fat could work, perhaps combined with low calorie - a bit like the Direct protocol A few weeks ago someone posted about Dr Barnard's protocol working for them...strangely silent since, I often think these accounts are fake.

No need to wait 50 years for evidence. There are over 50 low carb and by implication high fat trials out there - the PHC list quite a few listed. There is also alot of non rct trial evidence, Virta Health being probably the best known. Dr's Westman, Fung, Halberg, Naimen and Unwin have referenced "real human" case studies, often changing patients medical records. Now these may not meet the gold standard of testing, but do you think it matters to the patient that they didn't "control" for their reversals (what I have noticed is not one of these Doctors talks about reversing someone on a Vegetarian or Vegan protocol). There are loads more coaches such as Craig and Maria Emmerich who have literally thousands of anecdotes of low carb, animal fat eating clients, and countless facebook groups. Again these don't meet the "standard", but for example here's my last weeks Libre trace:



I could show similar from a couple of years back. I would not meet the scientific standard, yet I have not seen in 5 years of studying and looking, someone on the other protocol (s), even close; i;m on loads of saturated fat as demonstrated by my 2 meals today (brunch nuts, fruit, celery and beetroot with bacon, quail, chicken and duck eggs). Dinner: take out Nandos, 8 thighs, 10 wings, followed by coconut flakes with full fat local dairy farm milk, Blood sugar right now 4.4):


This video shows the evolution of what grains have done in societies via evidence:
 
Cocosilk said:
It's amazing that things can change that fast for the better too, isn't it?
Click to expand...

I would say you are in the 80 of the 80 / 20 rule. According to US data only around 12% of their population can handle the mtabolic load a higher carb diet places on the body.
 

How long again have you been eating low carb to get your numbers down like that?

Is your fasting in the 4s now too?

I had the highest fasting reading ever this morning.. it was 5.8 mmol. (I tested again in the same minute and it was the same). I notice the day after I reintroduce some carbs it always hits me in the fasting. I didn't eat that many carbs yesterday though. I just never get enough sleep and I know that's not helping. I'd probably had only 5 hours sleep when I took that test at 8am this morning.

I tried steel cut oats again this morning but I had one egg just before it. I calculated that the 200g of cooked oats amounted to around 30 grams of carbs (I think). Before was 5.7mmol. 30 mins was 7.9mmol. 1 hour was 5.6mmol and 2 hours was 5.6mmol. That seems okay, doesn't it? Not that I want to eat oats anymore because they take so much longer to make than eggs and they give me heartburn. I just wondered if my body can take it at all more than a year after going low carb. It has definitely improved.

I love how you show your meals. I'm looking at the plate of nuts though and wondering if that affects your bowel movement after working out that the macadamia nuts I was eating (probably a few too many off) seemed to be blocking me up... That was often on top of eating almond or hazelnut meal in some sort of low carb pancake.

Today we are eating Sarma that my Serbian husband made

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13FRRzLppesywkhohvvlZ2WvW26CUlB7h/view?usp=sharing

(Is there a trick to getting your images to show on the page? It works when I post video links but never when I try with photos.. I've put my photo on Google Drive so I can use the link but it still doesn't work. And the link only comes up as a link.)



 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn More.…