Good Keto vs. Bad Keto

This is what passes for a keto diet in the rodent literature.

From (Li et al., 2021)

It's Envigo's TD.96355, from a paper finding negative effects of a keto diet. 

"Ketogenic diet aggravates colitis, impairs intestinal barrier and alters gut microbiota and metabolism in DSS-induced mice" (Li et al., 2021)

F3666 is another rodent keto diet, (Lecker, 2011). It's also high in seed oils, and it's also commonly used. 

Virta Health explicitly advises patients to limit seed oil consumption (Phinney et al., 2020), based on Phinney's labratory experience and self-experimentation, in which he found seed oils to be acutely, albeit mildly, toxic: 

This post moved to Substack.

[Cordain's] Paleo vs. Keto: What’s the Difference?

Interesting comparison by Phinney and Volek, but not one that I endorse, as they’re using Cordain's Paleo Diet, which I think is silly in some respects.

"There are a lot of similarities between Paleolithic (Paleo) and ketogenic diets (KD), particularly when compared to the now discredited ‘Standard American’ low fat, high carbohydrate diet....

"By definition, a ‘ketogenic diet’ allows your body to be in nutritional ketosis, whereas a Paleo diet seems to be purposefully designed to prevent it."

That version, maybe, but I agree with many of their crticisms, although some are bizarre:

"Nagging stomach and bowel issues go away (a common side effect of a high protein diet)..."

What?

My own view is that a paleo diet should be ketogenic a lot of the time, and that's fine. And likely included whatever dairy they could get their hands on.

OK, so read and judge for yourself.

"The Case For Nutritional Ketosis"

Interesting video of a presentation by Dr. Stephen Phinney.

"Paleo Diet Popular With Endurance Athletes"

Ah, journalists. The fact that three athletes are doing something does not make it "popular". In fact, paleo and low-carb dieting are far from popular in the athletic world, although they are on the increase. Zero is an easy place from which to increase.

Other than that, a neat article from MensJournal.com:

"What do professional cyclist Dave Zabriskie, ultramarathon runner Timothy Olson, and gold-medal triathlete Simon Whitfield have in common? All of these elite endurance athletes have pushed away the time-honored plate of pasta in favor of a "paleo" approach to nutrition. They've dialed down the carbohydrates and replaced them with copious amounts of healthy fat. And as multitudes of paleo converts claim (and anecdotal evidence suggests), this may be the key to optimizing performance and extending careers into the late thirties and beyond...."

Mark Sisson (interviewed in this article) mentioned Simon in a post a few years ago, and I completely forgot about him. Gold medal on a primal diet. Not bad. I've done a couple of posts about Tim Olson.

Zabriskie's an interesting story:

"...The results for Zabriskie were impressive, DeVore says. Over the course of their time together the 6-foot cyclist dropped his body weight from 168 pounds to 154 while improving his dead lift from 150 pounds to 245. This while increasing his power on the bike by about 15 percent."

I really do think that the only way this paleo/low-carb diet is going to make it big is if it turns out to be good for athletes. That does seem to be the case.

Low-Carb vs. Low-Fat At The Western States 100

Fascinating:

What did other racers eat?

STEVE PHINNEY: We really can’t say. We only got data from 25 athletes out of more than 200 athletes in the race. That’s less than one in 10. We were sort of rushed to get this protocol in place and so we did not recruit people months ahead of time. We were recruiting people the day before the race. They were walking in saying, “I want to be in your study,” and so I do know, that it’s fair to say that among the top 20 males, in addition to the winner, Tim Olson, there were at least a couple other well adapted low-carb runners among the men, and among the top 20 women there were at least two of them who were low-carb runners.

Were some top runners high carb?

STEVE PHINNEY: Absolutely So this speaks quite possibly to the issue of individualization. It may well be that all of us don’t come out of the exact same cookie-cutter in terms of what we look like and what our metabolism looks like. It seems that some people’s metabolism tolerates lots of carbs without much in the way of side effects. That is, the people who tolerate carbs remain highly insulin sensitive even when they eat a high carbohydrate diet, so that fuel they eat is rapidly processed and goes to the tissue and gets burned for fuel and doesn’t get stuck in fat storage. But it also seems that if there is even a hint of insulin resistance in a person’s metabolic makeup, you can make it worse with a high carb feeding. Meanwhile, in that same person, you can make that insulin resistance essentially go away with low-carb eating. So some people are probably are well adapted to be high carb runners and some people are much better adapted to be low-carb runners.

Thanks to Mark Sisson, who may be coming around on this whole Chronic Cardio thing...