So, a keto diet is fine. Eating bread every now and then is fine. But, something like a fast food meal consumed with a sugary soda may be particularly unhealthy and may cause you to eat more and crave more similar foods.

I don't know all the mechanisms at play, and I don't think even experts have a really good understanding of how our very complex digestive and metabolic systems (and the bacterial colonies that live in our guts) interact. It's clear that caloric reduction works for weight loss, even if you're eating mostly carbs or mostly fats. Some people report better management of cravings and hunger on different kinds of diets, and the research indicates that a low-fat or low-carb diet results in weight loss at about the same rate (contrary to popular belief about low-carb diets lately).

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/low-carb-v...

But, really, if you run a caloric deficit, you'll lose weight. Cutting arbitrary foods can do it for some folks. Some folks like keto or other relatively extreme restrictive diets. Some folks do intermittent fasting (I've been intermittent fasting for several months and have lost a little over 20 pounds). No matter how you do it, if you cut 500 calories off of your diet, you'll lose weight at a healthy clip.

I believe the insulin-centric explanation (I'm a low carb eater and this is the perspective I tend to see) would be something like:

- Low carb and high fat: The fat goes to your fat cells (that is, whatever fat you don't burn for fuel immediately after eating), but since your insulin is low the fat is readily burned off relatively soon.

- Low fat and high carb: The carbs cause an insulin spike, and insulin inhibits fat burning, BUT since you haven't stuffed much fat into your fat cells, there isn't much to burn off when your insulin eventually comes back down. You need to be relatively insulin sensitive, so that your insulin level does come back down. Even if you're insulin resistant, this diet might still work if you eat only a tiny amount of fat.

- High fat and high carb: Fat goes to your fat cells and insulin levels are high, which inhibits fat burning, so you gain fat faster than you burn it.

(Edits: I thought Markdown lists would work but they didn't.)

- The fat you eat does not have to be stored as fat, the raised insulin levels are necessary for the body to store energy as fat.

"Low fat and high carb: The carbs cause an insulin spike, and insulin inhibits fat burning, BUT since you haven't stuffed much fat into your fat cells, there isn't much to burn off when your insulin eventually comes back down. You need to be relatively insulin sensitive, so that your insulin level does come back down. Even if you're insulin resistant, this diet might still work if you eat only a tiny amount of fat."

- Carbs can be converted to fat via lipogenesis.

stored in muscles as glycogen - however, the muscle stores can only store up to 1600 calories so they may be full. Also, once sugar gets into a muscle it can't get out - it can only be used by that particular muscle.

used by the brain - however the brain doesn't need more than 500 kcal per day. (and can live with as little as 120 kcal / 30g of glucose provided that the rest of the energy is supplied by ketones)

So... exercise doesn't help lose weight, but it sure helps prevent weight gain when eating carbs. With the amount of carbs we eat nowadays and the low amounts of physical activity, its no wonder at all we store a lot of fat.

I remember seing a book about that diet 20 years ago by a singer:

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raffaella_Carr%C3%A0

And, the example meal plan on the same first result page is for a 1200 calorie diet! That's a massive caloric deficit for any adult; of course you'll lose weight if you follow it!

I was specifically talking about a study on sugar and fat and how they might trigger cravings and overconsumption, and possibly also cause metabolic effects that can cause weight gain and other problems, and not at all about alkaline/acidic food combining theories.

I think there's a lot of superstition in general, but one could certainly have independently noticed that eating sugar or fat alone (say butter or honey) is somewhat self-regulating. You get sick of it pretty quick. But, put them together in a pie or pastry or donut or something and suddenly it gets really easy to eat hundreds of calories worth of sugar and fat in a few quick bites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fit_for_Life#Controversy

By cutting butter, he's also effectively cut an unnecessary carb-heavy between-meal snack, since he doesn't want the baguette without the butter.

Salt.

Restaurants like salt because customers won't order water (even though tap water is free here in NL it makes one look as too much of a cheapskate); they'll order a drink like wine which they can upsell and already has large profit margins.

Nephrologists won't be happy though (although it does generate them more customers, they probably got more than enough as it is).

My suggestion would be: less salt + umami + herbs.

Herbs is a bit vague, it really depends on the dish (and there's more than herbs; look at things like garlic, ginger, and turmeric you can buy these dried as well, in same tins or glasses as herbs are).

Personally, I'm a fan of the Italian spices as well as mixes like baharat and ras el hanout even though I don't have a background in any related culture (I'm Dutch).

You can achieve umami in various ways: yeast extract, Vetsin, E621, MSG, etc. In the end its all the same, but I put the one consumers fear the least first in the list wink

https://olumialife.com/knowledge/how-does-insulin-affect-lep...

For cooking, I understand olive oil is unhealthy (I think you create carcinogens as a side-effect), as are many other oils, but that coconut oil doesn't do this because of its different melting temperature.

I believe the situation with oil is a bit more complicated than that, and you're generally fine with olive oil unless you make it smoke, which is fairly non-trivial to do, despite its low smoking point. There seems to be some debate on the topic: http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/03/cooking-with-olive-oil-fa...

Coconut oil in particular actually has a low smoking point. If you want to be safe, you want Avocado oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_point

I initially felt the same way as you wrt tastiness, but had a friend bring me back a tin of oil from Italy recently and whoooo boy it's just the most phenomenal thing. Add a bit of salt & pepper to a shallow bowl of oil for dipping bread.

Olive oil with herbs is amazing. Give it a whirl.

Reposting the question from the comment:

> Doesn't fat make food more satisfying, making you feel fulfilled sooner?

Needs a citation I guess.

For most people high fiber foods are better.

It literally says in the text that he ate less overall.

Ketogenic diets might increase your metabolism and reduce your appetite and hunger, which makes weight loss easier, but you'll still gain weight if you eat too many fat calories each day. Even if you cut out carbs entirely.

This is the exact point the article is proving wrong.

This has been thoroughly disproven for ages -- starting with the naive assumption that you can just eat X amounts of anything and it doesn't affect anything else in your health/apetite/metabolism.

Calories matter. If you eat too many, you get fat. Some calories might be "better" than others, but they are a standard of unit of energy for a reason. A calorie is a calorie.

Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

That's quite irrelevant though (besides tautological), as we don't just eat calories, we eat food that has calories and tons of other stuff in different arrangements.

A calorie being a calorie doesn't cover whether the food you got the calorie from makes you satiated, or conversely makes you eat more, or makes you feel more energetic, or makes you store it as fat, or brings hormonal changes, etc.

A "milligram is a milligram" too, a standard unit of weight, but 1mg of cyanide can kill a person, and 1mg of water won't do anything to them.

>Would you like to try the butter diet? I can guarantee you you'll get fat.

Again this presumes that people can just eat, regardless of what they eat -- and continue to eat it without that affecting anything else. I guarantee you if I ate just butter, I'd threw up after several hundred grams, and feel quite bad and stop the diet after some days.

2 sticks of butter is almost 1800 calories, that would be a weird diet with lots of hunger. There probably are a lot of sources of fat that work better than that.

There is a difference between fat metabolism and sugar metabolism. They use different metabolic pathways, in other words the process by which a fatty acid molecule becomes ATP (the ultimate source of cellular energy) is very different from how fructose (which has to first be converted to glucose in the liver) becomes ATP.

This is the exact point the article is... arguing against in a very convincing fashion

Its further pointing out that there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight. I didn't disagree there either.

The article never claims that you can eat any amount of calories as long as you leave carbs from the table. And thats the only thing i pointed out. Because thats just plain wrong. If you eat too many calories, you will gain weight. And if you're predisposed to obesity, you will eat more calories when you're flavouring stuff with sugar. This will, as the author pointed out, cause you to get even more obese and eventually get diabetes.

there are calories ("sugars") which make it much easier to gain weight.

Then a calorie isn't a calorie.

Does our body digest things by acting like a furnace? No. There are different ways to extract energy from food and our body does things that aren't accounted for by the nutrtional facts blurb on the box. In some cases the food will just go straight through you, such as when you eat loads of fat. All those "calories" don't necessarily translate into x pounds on your body in new fat.

But I'd still agree with your second assessment: the biggest contributor is the decreased hunger/appetite after the first few weeks.

Could you share how much butter you bought per month and what the package size was?

My whole family has reduced our butter intake quite drastically, so I don't have a good estimate of how much I was personally consuming.

Now I'm riding single speed, so who knows.

No, it was a reduction in calories, quite simply. If anything, butter is very heavy on fats and low on carbs...

Sounds like in his particular case, reducing fat (butter) also reduced carbs (toast).