For the record I'm quite the ectomorph, and weight has never been a problem for me. But pain in the guts, that has been. I do know something about the psychology of dieting, of denying oneself things, of conditioning oneself differently, of eating mindfully rather than mindlessly. I can eat a no sugar diet. I've done it for several months at times, when I really thought I needed to fix my situation. But I think I got some results and now I don't feel I need to be anywhere near as careful. Still, I am mindful that if I eat too many bags of cookies, all the pain is going to come back. So I moderate my behavior, lest I suffer consequences.
The video you cited, which talks about Grain Brain, and a "missing" alzheimers study, does not contradict the theories presented in Grain Brain. Their theory is there are no "bad" cholesterols. However, some cholesterols do deform in the presence of sugar. So if you combine that specific cholesterol (I forget my acronyms) from the saturated fat, with a load of sugar, you get the arterial scarring. Get rid of the sugar, you have no problem. The evolutionary sales pitch is that we didn't have access to all this agriculture and all these sources of carbs and sugar. Carbs are just long chain sugars for those who aren't aware.
So, the "missing alzheimer's" study talks about correlation between saturated fat and people who get alzheimer's. Well duh, because they're probably eating as much carbs and sugar to go with that saturated fat, as most people in modern industrial societies do. The "missing alzheimer's" study doesn't disprove anything here.
Two things I've wondered about the Pearlmutter theories though:
- what about people who evolved in tropical environments who had access to pineapples, bananas, mangoes, etc? That's plenty of fructose, and they don't have real winters there.
- just how severe do you have to be with eliminating sugar and reducing carbs, for the theory to be of benefit? I'm not a purist. I've found I'm not willing or strongly motivated to be. If I'm not a purist, how bad is it for me? If the cholesterol is not strictly to blame, but in the real world it combines with sugar and carbs often enough to be the problem... well then the theory becomes academic for a lot of people. Sure you could live this way, but most people won't, especially as a matter of public health policy.
- there's stuff in the book about wheat itself being evil, because its genetic code is different, blah blah. I don't take those claims very seriously, in the sense that I will eat wheat and don't consider it a poison. I was more interested in the general messages about carbs, glycemic loads, insulin, and cholesterol deformation. I'd need to see more evidence to believe that modern wheat is bad because it's modern wheat, not just because it's a carb.
I've delved into a fair amount of nutritional stuff. More than a lot of people. One of my big motivators, was trying to solve my dog's various health problems over the years. Long story short, he's a raw fed dog, no kibble. But I had to learn a bunch of things so as not to be doing something stupid. And what actually worked, didn't entirely agree with what raw feeding proponents said. Particularly regarding what bones are safe and what are not. Anyways, I'm quite aware of how much complexity is involved in observing anything about diet. I had to do 12 week elimination diets with my dog, to see what was bothering him. 12 weeks. How often can you do that in your life, before it gets old? Well I did a fair number of them.
So, nanook, you can rail about the complexities, and all the things you've tried, and that you're at a good point now, etc. And that others are foolish for not heeding you, etc. But the domain is COMPLEX. There's also more than 1 pathway through the various problems. There are many variables in operation at once, and it's difficult, even for someone as aware as yourself, to control all those variables at the same time. You surely haven't subjected yourself to eating "only eggs" or some such, for a long period of time, have you? I've done that to my dog, picking only 1 food, for a long period of time. Even doing such things it's still hard to figure out, because other shit happens to a dog as well. Like fleas. Or fungal infections. Or toxins sprayed around someone's yard. Or the water supply. Awful lot of variables.
So when people aren't willing to take your lead on things, just on your say so, don't assume they're ignorant and misinformed about everything. Some of us have done large amounts of research and experimentation of our own. We may even have different biologies which give us different results.
