re: Keto Is Stupid: Here's Why You Should Shut The frick Up And Just Eat Healthy

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This is just not true...unless you are arguing that Americans in the 1800s were somehow unhealthy as a whole. The American diet of that time period consisted of mostly meat and dairy. Vegetables, fruit and sugars in general were pretty scarce. Heart disease as an epidemic didn't start until ~1915...just after the introduction of margarine and other seed oils into the mainstream. American consumption of butter up until that time can only be described as "copious".

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People grew their own vegetables and actually meat was much more scarce back then than most people realize. Go read old cookbooks, journals, diaries, etc and you will know that. My grandparents who would have been around in the early 1900s have even mentioned that, they'd eat meat once or twice a week and that was the norm.

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Irrelevant.

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Just b/c you and some posters on here say your cholesterol being high is ok doesn't actually make it ok. It's not irrelevant, and you forgot to discuss the part about him feeling like shite.

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Cop out

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No it isn't

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It's been somewhat proven

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What?

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I think I need to repeat: heart disease simply was not a big thing in the US until the early 1900s...when sugar and seed oils were foisted on the population.

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I have a great great grandfather who was a doctor back in the "old days" His books are still in the family. People had heart attacks back in the old days. "Clinching his chest" "pounding in his chest" etc are common throughout the book, most likely from heart attacks. People didn't understand atherosclerosis and such, but people just died and it was listed under natural causes. Basically doctors didn't understand why they died, but in today's time it's understood from heart attacks are probably a good reason. There have been old graves discovered from even thousands of years ago where scientists figured some of the people died from an actual heart attack.

ETA: When I say old "graves" I just mean archaeologists digging people up.

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I mean, the average life expectancy in 1900 was 46 years old.

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Right, but millions still lived into their 70s, 80s and 90s. It wasn't like the average person died at 46.

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People grew their own vegetables and actually meat was much more scarce back then than most people realize. Go read old cookbooks, journals, diaries, etc and you will know that. My grandparents who would have been around in the early 1900s have even mentioned that, they'd eat meat once or twice a week and that was the norm.

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Americans in the 1800s ate a lot of meat. They had some seasonal vegetables and some seasonal fruit. Way less than we have now and way less sugary than we have now.

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Just b/c you and some posters on here say your cholesterol being high is ok doesn't actually make it ok. It's not irrelevant

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"Cholesterol going up" is nearly a completely meaningless thing to say. What happened to his triglycerides? His fasting insulin? His particle size? etc. Increasing LDL is almost literally an irrelevant stat.

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you forgot to discuss the part about him feeling like shite.

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If he felt like shite, he felt like shite. I don't dismiss or discount that. Hell, some people are actually allergic to meat. Those are outliers, though.

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I have a great great grandfather who was a doctor back in the "old days" His books are still in the family. People had heart attacks back in the old days. "Clinching his chest" "pounding in his chest" etc are common throughout the book, most likely from heart attacks. People didn't understand atherosclerosis and such, but people just died and it was listed under natural causes. Basically doctors didn't understand why they died, but in today's time it's understood from heart attacks are probably a good reason. There have been old graves discovered from even thousands of years ago where scientists figured some of the people died from an actual heart attack.

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Again, the medical literature does not support your anecdote.

ETA: Here's a post I made a few weeks ago with supporting evidence for my claim on the topic:

LINK

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Infant mortality and communicable disease we're the primary factors of low average life expectancy. Vaccines changed that. Not diet.

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yep. it is universally accepted that there have been three step-function changes in longevity--the two you cite + sanitation (which is part of the communicable disease category: sanitation + germ theory/vaccines)

we are also much better able to keep people alive with modern medicine. a) but what is the quality of life? and b) imagine the possibilities if we applied equal scientific effort to prevention.

There are obviously environmental factors at play in modern techno-industrial society. granted, we wouldn't have the aforementioned modern medicine without that, but maybe we'll figure out a balance.

We have the resources to figure out the optimal (which is still not perfect) wayS to eat. there's just a lot of noise between those resources and the general public.

And that same modern techno-industrial society/economy has taken us farther away from the process of growing and killing our food, but closer to all sorts of food and non-food products that we eat in mass quantities, whenever we want--our society doesn't run of scarcity or time-restriction the way our bodies want to.

what is troubling to me about life-expectancy going forward is, metabolic disease (including T2DM, Alzheimer's, certain CVD, NAFLD, and certain cancers) is just getting cranking.

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Human Performance Outliers

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I've not heard of it. I don't see a very good explanation of what they are doing other than interviewing people of great physical (and by association, mental) accomplishments. Could you offer a overview of what they are aiming for with their podcast?

Not many people talk about how the brain and endocrine system works with these diets or how fasting gives the body time to heal since it isn't spending resources digesting food. Like how the brain requires a lot of energy and the most efficient route is derived from fat because it takes so little energy to digest. That's why mother's milk is ketogenic and babies are in ketosis. It could explain advantages gained by breast fed babies compared to formula babies given everything else is the same. I always like this kind of talk too but this board is mainly driven for the visual elements of health.

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I don't see a very good explanation of what they are doing other than interviewing people of great physical (and by association, mental) accomplishments. Could you offer a overview of what they are aiming for with their podcast?

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it's funny that that is their description, as the name of the podcast would suggest, but their guests are mostly researchers, doctors, and scientists in the nutrition field.

The hosts are a secondary interest at best: Shawn Baker is an orthopedic surgeon who started going beyond the perceived bounds of his surgical practice by spending allegedly inordinate amounts of time coaching his patients on diet and often noticing healing without the need for surgery. he got into a tiff with hospital admin that may have involved some beef (if you will) with competitors, and he was ultimately suspended. Who knows what the whole story is, but he'll be back doing surgery soon. He's a bit all over the place, but likable. He's a carnivore diet guy now.

The cohost is Zach Bitter who holds ultra marathon records of various sorts. He is cycling/targeted keto guy.

But here's a list of the guests they've had, which is pretty incredible for a little fledgling indie podcast:

Dr. Peter Ballerstedt
Dave Feldman
Vinnie Tortorich
Dr. Ben Bikman
Dr. Gary Fettke
Dr. Ted Naiman
Dr. Georgia Ede
Nina Teicholz
Dr. Stuart Phillips
Dr. Tim Noakes
Amy Berger
Dr. Paul Mason
Dr. Frank Mitloehner

This thread is everything I thought it would be

Just dropped in to point out the delicious hypocrisy in the OP.

"Diets are stupid and girly and pointless and stupid....anybody that follows a diet is a sheep. All you have to do is follow MY diet, laid out below."

Y'all crack me up.

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I disagree with saying getting off keto created heart disease's rise in the 1900's.

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perhaps I missed something, but I literally know no one who says this, much less any of the scientists, doctors and other researchers I follow.

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perhaps I missed something, but I literally know no one who says this, much less any of the scientists, doctors and other researchers I follow.

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From Big Scrub's post on the previous page, which I was addressing:

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Heart disease as an epidemic didn't start until ~1915

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I was responding to him. He goes on to blame the dietary changes away from keto-ish principles for the rise in heart disease. I was pointing out that his start point is also when the average life expectancy started to get to the age where heart disease most frequently presents.

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In 1900, when the average life expectancy was 46, a much smaller percentage of the population was making it to an age where heart disease presents.

Per the point I was responding to, I disagree with saying getting off keto created heart disease's rise in the 1900's. Major factors like many more people living to ages where heart disease presents drive that too.

The increase in life expectancy came from many factors. It's the person arguing heart disease came from a single factor I have an issue with.

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I find this unconvincing. In 1900, roughly 1/5 of the American population was over the age of 50. Put another way, about 10 million Americans were at prime heart attack age, and yet there is almost literally no mention of heart attacks in the medical literature to date at that time.

-- Austin Flint was THE heart expert of his era (mid-18th Century). He ran a thriving practice in NYC. He scoured the literature countrywide for reports of "heart abnormalities", and essentially found none.

-- Diseases of the Arteries including Angina Pectoris (1915) a massive textbook of the era, makes literally no mention of coronary thrombosis

-- Paul Dudley White - Eisenhower's (in)famous heart doctor who took over after the heart attack wrote in 1918 that, of his 700 male patients at Mass Gen, only FOUR reported chest pain.


Heart attacks started showing up en masse AFTER meat-eating plummeted, sugar-eating skyrocketed AND nut/seed oil-eating skyrocketed. The Jungle was published in 1906 - and meat consumption fell by half that very same year, not getting back to its previous level until 20 years later.

Putting Meat on the American Table is a book which attempts to put numbers on American meat consumption over time. The author's best estimate is that Americans in the 19th century ate 175 lbs of meat per year (this is compared with ~100 lbs/capita today.) Of that 100, it's worth pointing out that more than half is poultry, which was considered a luxury meat until the early 20th. If you adjust for poultry, red meat per capita today is no more than 40-70 lbs/capita...radically less than it was in the 1800s.


TL;DR version: copious evidence supports the claim that the early American diet was characterized by very high levels of meat and butter consumption and near zero levels of heart disease/attacks. When the American diet shifted to much lower meat consumption, much less butter consumption, and much more nut/seed oil consumption, heart disease took off like wildfire.