The Body Fat Setpoint

One pound of human fat contains about 3,500 calories. That represents roughly 40 slices of toast. So if you were to eat one extra slice of toast every day, you would gain just under a pound of fat per month. Conversely, if you were to eat one fewer slice per day, you'd lose a pound a month. Right? Not quite.How is it that most peoples' body fat mass stays relatively stable over long periods of time, when an imbalance of as little...

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Rabbits on a High-Saturated Fat Diet Without Added Cholesterol

I just saw another study that supports my previous post Animal Models of Atherosclerosis: LDL. The hypothesis is that in the absence of excessive added dietary cholesterol, saturated fat does not influence LDL or atherosclerosis in animal models, relative to other fats (although omega-6 polyunsaturated oils do lower LDL in some animal models). This appears to be consistent with what we see in humans.In this study, they fed four groups...

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What's the Ideal Fasting Insulin Level?

[2013 update.  I'm leaving this post up for informational purposes, but I think it's difficult to determine the "ideal" insulin level because it depends on a variety of factors including diet composition.  Also, insulin assays are not always comparable to one another, particularly the older assays, so it's difficult to compare between studies]Insulin is an important hormone. Its canonical function is to signal cells to absorb glucose from the bloodstream, but it has many other effects. Chronically elevated insulin...

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The Dirty Little Secret of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis

The diet-heart hypothesis is the idea that saturated fat, and in some versions cholesterol, raises blood cholesterol and contributes to the risk of having a heart attack. To test this hypothesis, scientists have been studying the relationship between saturated fat consumption and heart attack risk for more than half a century. What have these studies found?The large majority of observational studies have found no connection between habitualsaturated fat consumption and heart attack risk. The scientific literature contains...

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Butyric Acid: an Ancient Controller of Metabolism, Inflammation and Stress Resistance?

An Interesting FindingSusceptible strains of rodents fed high-fat diets overeat, gain fat and become profoundly insulin resistant. Dr. Jianping Ye's group recently published a paper showing that the harmful metabolic effects of a high-fat diet (lard and soybean oil) on mice can be prevented, and even reversed, using a short-chain saturated fatty acid called butyric acid (hereafter, butyrate). Here's a graph of the percent body fat over...

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Malocclusion: Disease of Civilization, Part IX

A SummaryFor those who didn't want to wade through the entire nerd safari, I offer a simple summary.Our ancestors had straight teeth, and their wisdom teeth came in without any problem. The same continues to be true of a few non-industrial cultures today, but it's becoming rare. Wild animals also rarely suffer from orthodontic problems.Today, the majority of people in the US and other affluent nations have some type of malocclusion,...

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