Tuesday, March 8, 2016

RDAs, revisited

I think we all know that the Recommended Daily Allowances of nutrients don't even TRY to be in the "optimal" range -- they're there to indicate the bare minimum necessary to keep us out of frank deficiency.  Even then, there are times in our lives when ingesting the suggested amounts isn't enough to keep us out of trouble;  anyone who has difficulty absorbing nutrients, for example, is totally screwed if they take their multivitamin and eat their 50 grams/day of protein and expect to keep their health.

That quantity of protein especially:  I reflect on how ravenous i'd feel if i tried to get along on so little!  Eighty grams is my lower threshold, when if i don't have some solid MEEEEAT, i start pacing my cage restlessly and eye passing dogs for muscle-mass....

Eggs and cheese just don't cut it for me, either.  It HAS to be animal flesh (or at very least a goodly quantity of fish/seafood plus fat).  And as a lover of detective fiction, I am forced to conclude that it's about the right kinds of amino-acids, in the right quantity/proportion.

Which brings me to this month!  In about thirty days, we'll be heading to Texas again, to drop off the dog and bird with our daughter, and to head out on another seagoing adventure.  Last spring, immediately upon getting off our LC cruise, we were jonesing for a deeper-sea experience, and started looking at smaller ships and longer trips (the big ships don't offer the intimate charm that we fell so hard for almost twenty years ago when we "crossed" on the QE2).  Lo and behold, we saw a "sale" at Seabourn for a trip across the pond on a ship carrying an EIGHTH the passenger-load of the behemoths which usually haul tourists around.  We booked.

Next month.  Yes, i'm VERY excited.  I also put on enough weight this last half-year, so that my favorite evening dress is too tight for comfort.  I MUST dump some avoirdupois.  MUST.

It's not going well.  Every time i try to "be good" something comes up, like special events and visitors.  In desperation, i pulled out a book i bought several years ago -- the Eadeses' "6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle."  I read it only once, and it seemed ... quirky.  I read it again the other day, and the peculiar characteristics of the regimen made a bit more sense, in that i'm a few years older now and harder to reduce than i was when i first read it.  These are the fail-safe tweaks which the weight-loss-resistant people of my cohort HAVE to employ to get results.  I put the plan on the back burner while i waited for my order to arrive, comprising the nutrients i needed to add to what i use already.

Yesterday, they did, and i took my first leucine dose before bedtime, and started googling other "authorities" on BCAAs.  Interestingly enough, the proteinpower.com blog mentions them minimally, and most of the sites which are more discursive are more into bodybuilding than ... ahem ... body-trimming.  But an interesting exchange in the comment-section of a PP blog-post made me start thinking....  The discussion was on serum albumin, and how low-protein diets don't translate into a sufficient quantity of this important blood-component taxi.  Albumin, specifically, is what is needed in the blood to bind THYROID hormone and move it around to the cells in which it's needed.  AHA.  A reader asked Mike how much protein he eats on a daily basis, and i was surprised to see that it was in excess of 200 grams.  The reader was obviously surprised, too -- was that 200 grams of MEAT or of protein?  Protein.

In addition, the discussion entered the realm of leaky blood-vessels, and how adequate albumin can keep one's fluids on the correct side of the wall.  To one like me, who has the tendency to wake up a little on the waterlogged side, this was another lightbulb moment.  One of the causes of that is the histamine issue, but where does albumin (and ultimately, dietary protein) enter the equation?

The regimen started to make a lot more sense to me.  One starts out the first weeks on three protein  shakes plus one real meal per day.  I naively thought that was to neutrally fill up a person who is always hungry, and i could not see myself drinking that much whey powder with its extra load of added BCAA.  But if these super-shakes were really designed to get the older fatty to ingest superior quantities of protein, the logic jumps out at you.

Other associations began springing to mind.  I opened Fitday and entered the pound-and-a-half of  (ground) beef that the Strong Medicine recommended per day -- over 170 grams.  I reflected on the quantity of meat that some of the ZCers eat, way more than MY appetite will allow me to consume.  More:  perhaps the magic of the SM regimen is getting one's protein intake up to the albumin-adequate range, not just into the calorie-adequate, low-carb, low-allergen sweet-spot i assumed?  Donaldson CERTAINLY stressed how important the protein itself is.

I've ALWAYS craved protein, from early childhood.  Looks like my body was wiser than i ever gave it credit for.  Perhaps the modern LCer's caution against "too much" is STILL excessively austere -- perhaps "adequate protein" is even more than the "moderate protein" which is the LCHF ideal?

I'll be tweaking my usual diet to include more protein, and not really worry about the fat-content.  The red meats i prefer come with a healthy amount of their own fat, and heaven knows i can contribute plenty from storage.

13 comments:

  1. Yes, albumin is our major blood carrying protein and it does keep our fluids inside the blood vessels not out into the interstitium. I have been ZC for several years but don't advertise it due to somebody losing their mind over what I eat. Best of luck!

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    1. Thank you! :-) ...i realize how lucky i am that it makes NO DIFFERENCE what other people think of my lifestyle!

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  2. Interesting experiment. Please, keep us updated. While I always wanted to eat more meat than I was given when I was growing, naturally I eat now less than 100 gram of protein a day, and it looks like it is not enough for me.

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    1. It's a little harder to do than i predicted, as we're pretty busy these days, again. Our daughter and family are coming up for Spring Break today, and we have a million things to do concerning that, as well as lots of planting and other yard-work, now it's getting warmer! :-) we'll see if just taking the BCAA capsules helps...

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    2. I know you are a busy person.
      From my perspective, I think with a low level of thyroid hormones avoiding weight gain is almost a loosing battle. There are rumors Dr. Eades gave his patients thyroid hormones to counter their body reaction on a weight loss.

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    3. The doctors Eades seem to be very much into supplementing all kinds of hormones they perceive to be particularly low.

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  3. I'm getting over 9 weeks of post-infectious IBS-D (either stomach virus or food poisoning related)...and on Day 3 of ZC, and already starting to see the benefits/healing starting to finally take place. I am going slow on the intake though; about 1.5 lb. of beef a day right now; much gut healing still to do.

    I wish you much success! And I'm excited about your upcoming trip!

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    1. Nine weeks -- ouch! Hope you get to feeling 100% soon! Yes, going slow is always easier on the body, i think, though it's sometimes hard to be patient. :-) Thanks for the good wishes!

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  4. What a timely post for me, I've just had a little internet dust-up in what I'm now terming the LC Protein Wars. I ran full-tilt into some Rosedalers who gasped and huffed and puffed at a woman (!) not a body builder (!!) who eats 100 g protein / day (me).
    Funny enough these Rosedalers seem to really pull only one thing from his way of eating and that's the protein level. I shudder to think what it will do to them long-term. To be fair they are diabetic and seem to have blood issues resulting from protein, so I really don't know how one navigates that, and I do wish them the best because, for me, going from 60-ish g/day to 100ish g/day made a huge positive difference, with no blood glucose impact. I guess those of us who can eat this much protein without blood glucose excursions are just lucky? IE we caught our IR early enough (or were never IR in some cases)? All best.

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    1. to clarify , when I said diabetic I meant T2. fwiw.

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    2. There does seem to be quite a range of "ideal" protein amounts, and it MAY be that doctors-in-practice are dealing more with the kind of damaged patients who do better on less...? I seem to remember that Kwazniewsky (sp?) advocated lower amounts, like Rosedale. Wooo seems to get symptoms of neurotoxicity if she eats too much of some kinds of meat. Me, i seem to thrive at the high end of "normal."

      One thing we know for sure is that protein is REQUIRED for strong bones and many other "repair" functions, especially in aging bodies like mine. I'm under the impression, from Amber and Zooko's reports, that gluconeogenesis as a result of protein input, is a demand-driven step, not a supply-driven one. The fact that "protein knocks people out of ketosis" is a red-herring to me -- protein DOES trigger insulin release, but that insulin is essential to driving amino acids into our cells where they can do their magic. Normal postprandial levels of insulin, as well as the glucolysis prompted by glucagon release, WILL lower ketones, certainly, but that's only until all those levels drop again, a couple hours after the protein consumption. Then, if we have metabolic flexibility, our bodies seamlessly switch to fat and ketone burning, and our muscles become more IR once more, just as they should.

      Perhaps ethnicity and our genetic origins can help predict who gets along better on high or moderate protein intake? Wooo has a prominent strain in her family from the Mediterranean area, where people have been using agricultural products longer; my ancestry is strongly northern-european, where they were hunter-gatherers much later, and i also am in the 99th percentile for Neanderthal genes. All this is speculation on my part, of course, but not only does it seem logical, my experience is that i do SIGNIFICANTLY better to eat large quantities of ruminant-meat, and very small quantities of plant foods.

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  5. Ok I'll try again (yesterday's comment vanished into cyberspace)...
    Just skimmed my ol' copy of 6-Wk Cure - dropping a few more lbs will be wonderful for my morale as well as gearing up for my next attempt at MS150 bike ride which is coming up in, whaddaya know, 6 wks!!!
    & thanks for the cruise-line recommendation - my folks would like to take another cruise, but the extravagance/waste of the behemoth ships really put me off.

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    1. Keeping fingers crossed for your 6WC results! :-)

      I'm not recommending Seabourn (or Oceania) YET, but i certainly will report on their performance! So far, Cunard-before-they-were-bought-by-Carnival was our best experience, but afterward they were definitely decent. The Windstar trip we took last fall (non-sail version) was ... DIFFERENT, having some pro and some con aspects. The small ships will certainly have fewer entertainment options, but if one's goals are to relax more than to be passively amused, i certainly can't fault them in that respect.

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