pass the tallow, please

I found the information i've been wondering about for a few days....

Wooo and Lifextension have been discussing, on a social-media site, their observations and experiences in weight loss as their intake has contained more or less fat and protein.  Now, Wooo needs to carefully tailor her diet for the sake of brain-function and mood, so i tend to follow her discussions carefully but not emulate her diet wholesale -- my problems are different from hers, and her omega-6-heavier regimen wouldn't suit MY body well at all.  LE has an iffy thyroid like me, and her ideal diet would better match mine, but she's also more than 30 years younger*!

They found that going lower in protein and too high in fat has not been effective for them, as it has been for Petro (of Hyperlipid) and Jimmy Moore.  Cutting back on dairy fats, particularly, has been beneficial for the body composition and overall wellness of them both.

My husband, who loses weight easily when following a strict low-carb protocol, also found that avoiding dairy is a very good idea.  The last stall he struggled with was resolved when he stopped drinking his coffee with cream.  I too do better avoiding dairy products -- my digestion, weight-loss, AND skin quality are much better without cream, particularly.

Is it a form of dairy intolerance, or perhaps an insulin response?  As we know, milk, yogurt and fresh cheeses invoke a hefty insulin surge, but cream and butter are considered pretty innocent ... but they BOTH contain small amounts of lactose and casein, and it seems to be the latter that is most damaging to our weight-loss efforts.  Well, i was meandering around Hyperlipid's archives yesterday when i found something that looked promising:  http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/search/label/Butter%20insulin%20and%20Dr%20Davis

Petro was reacting to a post by the WheatBelly guy which pointed out Davis' perceptions of the weaknesses in the Atkins program and how butter is one of the problems ( http://blog.trackyourplaque.com/2010/03/butter-and-insulin.html ).  Now, bearing in mind that a "GLUCOSE and triglyceride test meal" has nothing in common with the way a VLCarber actually eats, it does point up an interesting idea -- that butter actually does something different from other fats.  Not that i think that there's a problem with having one moderate insulin spike after each of two to three meals every day....  In fact, a mixed meal NEEDS a goodly spike just to get that damned BG down in the presence of FFAs in the bloodstream.  ...In a more sensitive population, though, are dairy fats causing a bigger insulin response than in those Spanish test subjects, who are probably young and metabolically healthy?  After all -- most studies DO try to find the least "complicated" subjects possible!

To load up on butter and/or cream in order to artificially raise the blood ketone level, which seems to be the fashion in LC circles these days, strikes me as questionable -- kinda like artificially lowering cholesterol by using a lot of polyunsaturates.  YES you're getting a lab number that correlates with a good health situation, but is that your actual goal?  If HDL, for example, is raised through drugs one doesn't see the health benefits that go along with higher HDL in a proper diet.  Surely, sheer numbers representing ketone levels in the blood don't actually mean we're burning more body fat -- it just means we have ketones AVAILABLE to burn.

If the composition of the diet necessitates that we ARE primarily using fats and ketones for fuel, i can't see that we need to worry about blood or urine levels AT ALL.  Urine ketones indicate that we're managing to "waste" energy, and those strips are a wonderful thing when first starting a low-carb diet, as a tool demonstrating that our body's processes are changing.  Eventually, however, our bodies become more adept at burning the ketones we produce, and our levels can reduce significantly.  Does that mean we're not getting the brain and body benefits of ketones?  Hell, no.

To get back to the butter-and-cream question, it seems that there might just be a little problem with residual quantities of lactose and casein exacerbating insulin response.  If YOU find good results IN YOUR BODY (not mere ketone levels in your blood and urine) when you add plenty of supplementary dairy fat, good for you ... BUT i wouldn't assume that everyone can benefit from it. For myself, the best type and quantity of fat seems to be what occurs naturally in ruminant meats such as ribeye steaks, lamb racks, and shoulders of grass-eating animals with cloven hooves.

[Sigh]  If only margarine were STILL made out of tallow....  (i wonder what they added to make it taste like anything?)

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*  on the LCcruise last spring, Jackie Eberstein (Dr. Atkins' long-time amanuensis) stressed how time changes our dietary tolerances, and brother ain't it the truth....