Unlike The Diabetes/Cancer/Obesity code, a lot of it is anecdotal. Most of the science is in the last third of the book for some reason. You could skip more than half and still get most of the important takeaways from the book! I still found it useful since I've not done any fasts longer than 16 hours before.
Hard to do that when you're hungry. Blaming the victim increases shame/guilt/stress and makes it worse, since that causes hormone production that result in weight gain. Working on a sustainable way to lose weight such as by reducing known obesogens is much more constructive.
a ketogenic diet will reverse hypertension after a few months.
This happened to me. I was glad to see it gone. No thanks needed, I like meta-analysis because it means someone more familiar with the literature than I am has done a lot of the heavy lifting!
An old study of various populations in India is mentioned in 1.1.2.3 of Ketogenic
McCarrison fed rats diets modelled on Punjab in the north part of India and Madras in the south. Many of the rats on the Madras diet became ill, but not the ones on the Punjab diet.
From the chapter:
The experimental rats, he wrote ‘were nervous and apt to bite the attendants; they lived unhappily together and by the sixtieth day of the experiment they began to kill and eat the weaker ones amongst them. When they had disposed of three in this way, I was compelled to segregate the remainder …’. McCarrison’s wished to determine if these different dietary patterns might explain the different body shapes, physical abilities and disease patterns in the different ethnic groupings in India: ‘Indeed, nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the manly, stalwart and resolute races of the north – the Pathans, Baluchis, Sikhs, Punjabis, Rajputs, and Maharattas – and the poorly developed, toneless and supine people of the east and south: Bengalis, Madrassas, Kanarese and Travancorians’, he wrote (p. 268 in Ref. [100]). McCarrison noted that the Pathans are meat-eaters whereas the Bengalis, Madrassas and Kanarese are, for the most part, vegetarian. He found that in humans, as in the rats, there was a strong correlation between diet and health. He found that the Madrassas, who lived mainly on plant foods, were between two and ten times ‘sicker’ in a range of illnesses than were the Punjabis [101].
As a personal observation, I've always thought it unusual that the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) had a lot of visceral fat and was affected by poor health. He was strictly vegetarian. There are pictures of him with his peers on the Wikipedia page, and his story is fascinating to read!
From what I've read part of it has to do with circadian rhythms.
High Caloric intake at breakfast vs. dinner differentially influences weight loss of overweight and obese women This study showed that the group eating breakfast showed greater weight loss and waist circumference reduction.
As I understand it hormone secretion also follows circadian rhythms, influencing the way the body responds to a meal.
From The Complete Guide to Fasting:
Almost all our hormones, including growth hormone, cortisol, and parathyroid hormone, are secreted in a circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms also help govern insulin, which affects weight gain, and ghrelin, which controls hunger—leading to practical implications for eating patterns and weight loss. Insulin and Nighttime Eating Circadian rhythms have evolved to respond to differences predominantly in ambient light, as determined by the season and time of day. It is believed that food was relatively scarce in Paleolithic times and was predominantly available during daylight hours. Humans hunted and ate by day, and once the sun went down, well, you just couldn’t see the food in front of your face. Nocturnal animals may very well have circadian rhythms more suited to eating at night, but not humans. Given that, is there a difference between eating during the day and eating at night? Well, the studies are few, but perhaps revealing. In a 2013 study, two groups of overweight women were randomly assigned to eat a large breakfast or a large dinner. Both ate 1400 calories per day; only the timing of the largest meal was changed. The breakfast group lost far more weight than the dinner group. Why? Despite following similar diets and eating about the same amount, the dinner group had a much larger overall rise in insulin. An earlier 1992 study showed similar results. In response to the same meal given either early or late in the day, the insulin response was 25 to 50 percent greater in the evening.
I also wonder if the time matters when replacing the carbohydrates with eggs? I think our bodies respond differently to meals at different times of day. Is there only a clear benefit at breakfast-time?
Epidemiology is difficult, and it's good to keep in mind that the conclusions we draw from counting things and finding correlations may be confounded by many variables.
Not in this review but it is perhaps worth mentioning that the only statistically significant finding in Women's Health Initiative randomized controlled trial was that women with a history of heart disease faced a 26% increased chance of complications such as heart attack on a low saturated fat diet:
The HR for the 3.4% of women with CVD at baseline was 1.26 (95% CI, 1.03-1.54).
Eggs aren't bad for you in terms of heart disease:
In this study, an increase of one egg per day was not associated with any CVD risk. In fact, in an updated meta-analysis that included multiple cohorts from the US, Europe, and Asia, moderate egg consumption was associated with no risk of developing CVD overall and lower risk in Asian populations
Substituting carbs with eggs for breakfast results in a lowering of blood cholesterol:
Substituting high carbohydrate breakfast with eggs resulted in a similar lowering in plasma LDL cholesterol compared to baseline in 30 subjects following a randomized crossover study in which each breakfast was followed for 4 weeks [45].
Dietary cholesterol increases the size of plasma cholesterol particles. Smaller cholesterol particles are correlated with atherogenic dyslipidemia.
Regarding lipoprotein metabolism, dietary cholesterol leads to the formation of the large LDL particles that are known to be less atherogenic [32] and reduces the concentration of small LDL
The body is able to regulate plasma cholesterol levels:
Therefore, the handling of dietary cholesterol by the body can be explained by decreased absorption and down-regulation of synthesis.
Grats on your Trig/HDL ratio going to 0.92. That's fantastic.
Sugar wasn't that hard for me, but industrially processed oils are in everything when eating out, it's nearly impossible to avoid.
I haven't any idea how they'd work with your hearing, but what about bone conduction headphones? They can be wiped down easily and are often waterproof.
Corporations are run like autocracies, too, so there's some irony in that.
Personal gripe but I've never agreed with the term artificial sweetener, they are genuinely sweet, is it because they aren't sucrose/fructose/glucose?
Either way I remember reading about Erythritol from a study on nature.com a while ago. It's one of the unfortunate low-caloric sweeteners that are still linked to obesity and all the problems related to that condition. Best avoided to be on the safe side.