Why does Danny Roddy recommend sugar to reduce stress/estrogen? page 49

[ChocoTaco369]

I'm certainly not advocating drinking cream straight, though I do use it occasionally. I sometimes pour it over strawberries or sliced bananas (I do that with coconut milk also), or use it in mashed potatoes or sauces. I use Kalona cream, which is indeed grass-fed, vat pasteurized at 155 degrees, and no carrageenan. Excellent stuff. A nearby store (Natural Grocers) carries it in 8 oz bottles for about $1.50 I think.

Like I said, I was just looking for clarification. I find your posts interesting, but every once in a while I see something that seems a bit too rigid - or maybe I just interpret it that way. For example, I had also seen you criticize coconut oil previously (which I use instead of butter sometimes), which obviously has the same MCTs as coconut milk. But maybe you only meant that in reference to people eating spoonfuls of it straight, as opposed to using it on a sweet potato instead of butter, or to add some moisture to a very lean piece of meat like a chicken breast. I would agree that the former is a bit strange, but see no problem with the latter. In fact, I think one would be better off eating a lean piece of chicken with a bit of coconut oil than they would be eating a fatty piece of chicken with its higher PUFA content.

Yes, your latter assessment is correct. Coconut oil is a useful cooking tool, but it's not "food" in the sense that you should be consuming hundreds of calories worth of it. Cooking your eggs in coconut oil or adding a pat of butter to your sweet potato is a great idea. Taking a tablespoon to your tub of coconut oil or blending 80 grams of butter in your coffee is a terrible idea unless you have a major gut candida issue, you're on a ketogenic diet to suppress seizures, you're an advanced mountain climber or you have some other really, really good reason. Normal people with office jobs should not be doing these things!!! It's all about context. If you're not going to eat sugar by the bagful, you probably shouldn't eat oil by the tubful. It's a similar principle. Empty calories are empty calories.

[cori93437]

I'm certainly not advocating drinking cream straight, though I do use it occasionally. I sometimes pour it over strawberries or sliced bananas (I do that with coconut milk also), or use it in mashed potatoes or sauces. I use Kalona cream, which is indeed grass-fed, vat pasteurized at 155 degrees, and no carrageenan. Excellent stuff. A nearby store (Natural Grocers) carries it in 8 oz bottles for about $1.50 I think.

Like I said, I was just looking for clarification. I find your posts interesting, but every once in a while I see something that seems a bit too rigid - or maybe I just interpret it that way. For example, I had also seen you criticize coconut oil previously (which I use instead of butter sometimes), which obviously has the same MCTs as coconut milk. But maybe you only meant that in reference to people eating spoonfuls of it straight, as opposed to using it on a sweet potato instead of butter, or to add some moisture to a very lean piece of meat like a chicken breast. I would agree that the former is a bit strange, but see no problem with the latter. In fact, I think one would be better off eating a lean piece of chicken with a bit of coconut oil than they would be eating a fatty piece of chicken with its higher PUFA content.

I sometimes add cream to my own daily intake. I put a 1/4-1/3 cup in my iced coffee to displace some of the milk precisely because it offers more calories. Depending on how my day goes I might need more later.

I have medical issues and have problems with not eating enough calories on a regular basis due to lack of hunger and nausea. Forcing myself to eat more food makes me sick to the point where I'm completely miserable and will skip food later or I will actually vomit it up.
The cream I get is raw, grass fed/pastured, and local... the same as my milk.
Having the whole milk and cream in my coffee is as good as it gets for me as 'breakfast'. I can't chew or it causes me to have worse nausea. I've tried some whey protein in there too... but it tastes weird and makes the nausea worse as well.

Sometimes I also use coconut milk... with the white separated, lightly sweetened, and whipped to get calories as well.
But for me the coconut milk will not be added to coffee, or drunk by itself... as I think it tastes pretty gross on it's own.

If I don't do these things I tend to chronically under eat because I simply cannot eat a normal volume of food most days, and when I do eat I usually want a good amount of vegetables which lowers the amount of fat, and I don't always want very fatty meats.
I found that under eating was actually causing me to stall and not lose weight in addition to making me very tired. Adding the easily consumable calories from cream, and sometimes whipped coconut fat has actually helped me a lot.
I don't do it every single day. But I can tell when I've been eating too low and it's time to add the liquid fat in to give me a boost. The BEST thing about the cream is that it takes so little to help get my calories up to a suitable level. The small volume is key for me, while still being palatable. I can't eat pure butter or coconut oil off a spoon like some around here do... it also makes me feel more nauseous.

So, there can be reasons for other people to consume products that you don't find optimum for yourself...

[Gilleh]

So I tried eating lots of fruits today.
I don't feel inflammed at all (no burning face/lips) but my head did hurt a bit, which doesn't happen normally.
What does it mean?

[Paleobird]

I miss a few days and come back to find that PaleoBird is now a Page 1 celebrity...enjoyed your success story. Congrats. (From Cancer Back to Health | Mark's Daily Apple).

Concerning Ray Peat's ideas on sugar, thyroid, 03:06, and dietary induced/cold thermogenesis. There was talk earlier in the blogosphere about diabetes being an evolutionary adaptation for early man to withstand cold northern winters. It came about through changes in cell membrane permeability due to the 03:06 changes which followed seasonal eating of sugar/carbs in summer and ketogenic meat/fat in winter. It is also well established that thyroid function changes with daylight hours and exposure to cold temps. While this has been a very interesting discussion, I don't see myself changing anything I'm doing, except a more strict adherence to seasonal eating patterns and exposure to cold temperatures in winter.

To say one should eat tons of sugar year-round is surely wrong and to say one should avoid sugar year round is also surely wrong.

Wow, I just saw that. Awesome!

Thanks, guys.
That is an interesting theory about diabetes, Otzi.

[Apex Predator]

Congrats on both the success and the write up, Paleobird.

[Paleobird]

Thanks, Apex.

[dannyroddy]

I disagree with your assessment completely. Running on fat is not stressful in the physiological or metabolic sense either. This is utter bull.

If you wanna run on sugar go ahead, but don't attempt to spread such nonsense.

This is a seriously compelling argument @neckhammer. I would love for you or anyone in this thread who agrees to explain it without relying on opinion.

You and @paleobird disagree (strongly) about supporting our unique capacity for oxidative energy, but provide no physiological explanation besides wild guesses about our evolutionary adaptation and terms that you will find in no physiology text.

[Neckhammer]

This is a seriously compelling argument @neckhammer. I would love for you or anyone in this thread who agrees to explain it without relying on opinion.

You and @paleobird disagree (strongly) about supporting our unique capacity for oxidative energy, but provide no physiological explanation besides wild guesses about our evolutionary adaptation and terms that you will find in no physiology text.

You musta missed the previous links..... so back to you, please tell me where Lucas Tafur: Bioenergetics this is incorrect?

Or this by ambiomorph at paleohacks

"There is definitely a widespread view that gluconeogenesis necessarily raises cortisol beyond what is needed without gluconeogenesis. I think the evidence is softer than it appears.

It is undisputed that cortisol stimulates gluconeogenesis. See, e.g. The Physiology of Stress: Cortisol and the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis. This leads to the claim that continual gluconeogenesis requires continually raised levels of cortisol. That's not logically implied and I'm not sure it's true. For example, Dr. Eades says, in response to a related question:

[M]ost of the time during fasting, the hormone glucagon,which is the counter-regulatory hormone to insulin, drives gluconeogenesis, not the stress hormone cortisol.

This seems consistent with this primer on glucagon physiology, which says:

When hypoglycemia is produced in humans by injection of insulin, release of glucagon is stimulated along with that of other counterregulatory hormones when the plasma glucose decreases below 3.8 mM (~68 mg/dl) (Figure 11). Restoration of euglycemia is due to a compensatory increase in hepatic glucose production. Although secretion of catecholamines, growth hormone, and cortisol are stimulated along with that of glucagon, only the increases in plasma glucagon and catecholamines coincide with or precede the compensatory increase in the glucose production rate (66,67). That glucagon is the major acute glucose counterregulatory hormone is suggested by the fact that inhibition of the plasma glucagon responses by somatostatin markedly attenuates the compensatory increase in the glucose production rate and impairs restoration of euglycemia following insulin administration (Figure 12). Prevention of cortisol secretion (68), adrenergic blockade (66), adrenalectomy (65), or acute growth hormone deficiency (66) does not appreciably affect immediate glucose counterregulation. The effects of glucagon during restoration of euglycemia involves both glycogenolysis and gluconeogenesis, predominantly the former (69).

This does, suggest, however, that whenever blood sugar goes sufficiently low, cortisol rises. Note that this is no more likely to occur in a ketogenic state than a non-ketogenic state. In fact, most people report much more stable blood sugar levels on a ketogenic diet than otherwise. It may be relevant for fasting, though. If there is a regular stream of dietary protein available for conversion to glucose, blood sugar will probably not drop so low as to raise the cortisol alarm. This is consistent with Chris Kresser's post on [i]ntermittent fasting, cortisol and blood sugar, in which he says that some of his patients, already on a low carb, paleo diet, cannot successfully do intermittent fasting because of cortisol dysregulation. In these cases, he has them eat every 2-3 hours, and they improve. He never suggests, though, that they should abandon carbohydrate restriction.

Based on this information, I believe the notion that ketosis is stressful is simply a pervasive myth. Gluconeogenesis is mediated by glucagon, not cortisol. Cortisol will only be raised if there is hypoglycemia from fasting or from excess insulin. In fact, since the best way to control insulin is to lower carbs, ketogenic diets probably reduce the need for cortisol by providing better blood sugar control.

Why do people consider ketosis "stressful" to the body? - PaleoHacks.com

[Paleobird]

I don't know if this is the best place to post this, but Mark's recent post of blogs got me to this guy. Seems a good spot given the current discussion. He's got some great stuff for us science minded folks.....I'd start with this one Lucas Tafur: Bioenergetics. He seems to present good data without an agenda (well I'm sure he does have his biases)....but fairly balanced, especially when you consider the crux of this post is mathematically based.

Hey Danny. This a good read. Get back to us when you have finished it.

Don't go saying that we are only offering up unsubstantiated opinion.

ETA: Crossposted with Neckhammer. No harm in reinforcing a valid point.

[otzi]

Thanks, guys.
That is an interesting theory about diabetes, Otzi.

And, it makes perfect sense. More can be read here: Elsevier

And here: Elsevier

"The reasons for the uneven worldwide distribution of Type 1 diabetes mellitus have yet to be fully explained. Epidemiological studies have shown a higher prevalence of Type 1 diabetes in northern Europe, particularly in Scandinavian countries, and Sardinia. Recent animal research has uncovered the importance of the generation of elevated levels of glucose, glycerol and other sugar derivatives as a physiological means for cold adaptation. High concentrations of these substances depress the freezing point of body fluids and prevent the formation of ice crystals in cells through supercooling, thus acting as a cryoprotectant or antifreeze for vital organs as well as in their muscle tissue. In this paper, we hypothesize that factors predisposing to elevated levels of glucose, glycerol and other sugar derivatives may have been selected for, in part, as adaptive measures in exceedingly cold climates. This cryoprotective adaptation would have protected ancestral northern Europeans from the effects of suddenly increasingly colder climates, such as those believed to have arisen around 14,000 years ago and culminating in the Younger Dryas. When life expectancy was short, factors predisposing to Type 1 diabetes provided a survival advantage. However, deleterious consequences of this condition have become significant only in more modern times, as life expectancy has increased, thus outweighing their protective value. Examples of evolutionary adaptations conferring selection advantages against human pathogens that result in deleterious effects have been previously reported as epidemic pathogenic selection (EPS). Such proposed examples include the cystic fibrosis mutations in the CFTR gene bestowing resistance to Salmonella typhi and hemochromatosis mutations conferring protection against iron-seeking intracellular pathogens. This paper is one of the first accounts of a metabolic disorder providing a selection advantage not against a pathogenic stressor alone, but rather against a climatic change. We thus believe that the concept of EPS should now include environmental factors that may be nonorganismal in nature. In so doing we propose that factors resulting in Type 1 diabetes be considered a result of environmental pathogenic selection (EnPS)."