WeightLossBanter - View Single Post

**Doug Freyburger** · April 22nd, 2010, 05:19 PM posted to alt.support.diet.low-carb

wrote:
Orlando Enrique Fiol wrote:
Doug Freyburger wrote:

By the same token, we should not eat meat without first chasing and hunting it.
I love your double standard. When I suggest that fruits are entirely natural
foods meant to be eaten by humans and animals alike, you reply that we no
longer eat fruits under natural conditions. Yet, you have no problem eating
vast quantities of meat that is raised, slaughtered, packaged and sold under
entirely unnatural conditions previously unknown to humanity.

One major factor that you are overlooking here

What's missing to me is the fact that the OP is in the first couple of
weeks but when I took that into account the reason was maintenance or
later in the loss phases. Early on nearly every plan is stricter so my
discussion started based on that fact. The context of the OP matters.

is that in terms of
carbs, today's banana has little resemblence to the banana of 5,000
years ago. The same is true with virtually every other fruit.
Today's fruits have been bred by man to be sweeter, bigger, tastier,
disease resistant, etc and in terms of the evolution clock, that has
essentially just happened. That changes everything. They are higher
in carbs and second, it's far easier to eat a whole lot of them
because they taste good. If you were presented with many of the
fruits from 5,000+ years ago today, you would likely spit most of them
out. Did you ever taste a wild grape versus today's seedless?

Also, how many fruits do you think were readily available to man?
Some were available occasionally, for brief periods, seasonally.
Those were the ones that didn't succumb to insects, disease, getting
eaten by wild animals, etc. Today we have supermarkets stocked with
the sweetest fruits imaginable available year round.

I agree with Orlando Enrique Fiol on the issue of farmed products.
Ranched animals are also farmed products and that needs to be taken into
account. Human evolution is a varied and uncertain story. About 5
million years ago we went from tree dwelling apes with a high percentage
of fruit for calories through a transition to the peak predator on the
planet spread somewhere across that next 5 million years, to a herding
species under 50K years ago who ate a much less varied list of prey
animals to a farming species under 20K years ago who ate far more grain
than was good for us, to an industrial junk food species in the last
couple of centuries. Since it takes around 5 million years of steady
diet to evolve it to optimal and humans have not had that, humans don't
have any optimal diet. But the closest we have to it is hunter gatherer
cultures who eat varied lean hunted meats, who walk several hours per
day and who eat wildly varying plant foods across the year.

Herding across the millenia went from keeping wild herds for food to
breeding herds for docility to breeding herds for fat and only in the
last century to breeding herds for lean. The level of fat in regularly
accessible meats does not match the ancient approximation for the
evolutionary optimal that doesn't exist - That's a lot of levels of
approximation. So is more or less fat better? Probably less, and
definitely grass fed not grain fed. The modern movement for grass fed
leaner meats is a good idea.

So why do I stress high fat percentage then? Because hunter gatherer
society members spend nearly their entire lives hungry and they are
hungry because they have no choice in the matter. They walk several
hours per day because they have no choice in the matter. A modern
person has the option to not be hungry except at specific times, and a
modern person has the option of doing so little exercise they get sick
from lack of it.

Thus I do the arithmetic of estimating total calories to lose without
being hungry, the expected best levels of protein grams, the common
optimal levels of carb grams for loss or maintenance, and then the rest
of the calories come from fat. The result is food with a high
percentage of calories from fat. It doesn't match the evolutionary
argument and it's right to question the point. It is a double standard
and it does have to be explained. Anyone wishing to live the hunter
gatherer life style will be able to do better than the way I describe
low carbing by chosing to be dirt poor, stressed and hungry nearly every
day of their lives.

In fact there are longevity issues that suggest once the weight has been
lost to go back to the lower carb levels of the loss phases and also
taper down the fat intake. How to do that without endless hunger is an
open topic - The monkeys in reduced calorie lifespan studies are clearly
hungry every minute of every day and night. Are their lives really
longer or do they just seem longer for the extra hunger? It looks like
both.

I don't think anyone here is suggesting that you can't have some fruit
on a LC diet. And the better your choices as to which fruits, the more
you can have. But as others have done the math, that one fruit
smoothie contains close to an entire days worth of carbs for many
people on maintenance. A far better choice in terms of carb count
would be a cup of strawberries with some whipped cream on top.

Also early on nearly every plan is lower carb and the OP
is in the first month of a restart. What carb
grams to have during maintenance is not today's topic yet.