Excellent podcast. I enjoyed Charles except for his or anyone’s belief that you can ignore calories while doing low carb. While many and maybe even most people may be able to ignore calories, for some people the feeling of satiety brought on by fats in the absence of Insulin can get overridden by other hormonal imbalances in the body.

Granted, the most important variable in hormonal response is insulin which is directly affected by carbs. However, stress and other factors can trigger hormonal responses that can cause people to over eat on any plan even plans that control Insulin release.

It is important to understand that the body will store any macro nutrient if given too much of it. And while the argument that you simply will get full before you overate might work for a disciplined marathoner, this may not work for the average severely obese person. I work with people that can bing and take in upwards of 5 – 7k calories in a day. If you assume that the lack of an exaggerated insulin response can cut this in half then your still looking at taking in more calories than a 5’2” female needs per day. (Yes that is a legitimate real world example).

Commenter Charles gives a very good summary of how the body stores fats and other macro nutrients as detailed by the work of Lyle McDonald. I have personally communicated with Lyle McDonald and he breaks apart research studies like you would not believe. His specialty is nutrition and achieving ultra-leanness.

In conclusion, there is always more to learn. If going la vida lo carb allows you to return your body back to a state of hormonal balance and your not controlled by food or hunger anymore and you drop to a normal weight then that is wonderful. If however, you find that your weight loss hits a plateau or you cannot lose weight via lo-carb then you had better dig deeper.

Good discussion starter Jimmy!

Pete Thomas

http://Winningman.com

Our carbohydrate addictions make us think meat is boring. — If we cook it beautifully it tastes great every time.

Chris
What kind of fat did they feed these mice? I did not see or missed it in the Pub Med study.
Thanks
Low Carb Scott

Peter at Hyperlipid - who is very high fat, low carb - has thoughtful post on this topic.

Charles asks what the mechanism is for getting fat by eating too much fat. It is an enzyme called ASP. Insulin is important, but it is not the only thing.

The standard low carb dogma is that carbs (and to a lesser extent protein) stimulate insulin secretion which activates LPL (lipoprotein lipase) and LPL stores fat. That is true as far as it goes, but there is more to it that this.

LPL is not the only - or the most important - enzyme associated with fat storage. Acylation Stimulating Protein (ASP) appears to be even more critical for fat storage than LPL. It is worth doing a pubmed search on ASP (e.g. here)