I glanced through a couple recent papers and they seemed reasonable.  Of course, how they're represented, and how the government uses them to justify policy, are probably another matter entirely!

JS

Well good luck, JS. Slavin is apparently the expert on the gov't food guidelines who dictated the fiber, grain & veggie parts. If you wanna attack those, wrestling with Slavin's research will be inevitable.

1. If you've been avoiding starches, you're probably VLC.  Some people do better with some starches in their diet. To avoid the ones that give you trouble, try taking a tbsp of vinegar here and there, and follow the info from Norm Robillard's "Fast Tract Digestion" series (GERD/acid reflux, IBS/SIBO), which ranks foods according to their fermentation potential.  I know people having success with this protocol.

2. As greensleeves said, the longer you've been paleo, the more your gut heals and the more tolerant you'll be towards gluten.  When I had only been paleo for a couple months, I cheated on pizza once and felt like I had been drugged: I walked around for an hour or so instead of driving straight home, because I didn't feel safe to drive!  Now I suffer only constipation and a bit of the non-specific blahs.

That doesn't mean gluten is suddenly better for you...if you start cheating on a regular basis, you'll probably lose your tolerance again!  Again, check out Robillard's book for a guide to carbohydrates that should play nice with your gut.

JS

I'm not familar with Dr. Slavin's work, but I found and read her CV at your recommendation, and there's a lot there for me to investigate once I've covered my current subjects.  (That will take a while!)

Remember, I said all the way back in mid-2012 that "Insulin, leptin, “food reward”, and the hypothalamus have all taken their turns: I predict gut flora will be the Next Big Thing."  And here it is! 

I further predict that most of the effects of RS will be due to its increase of serotonin production -- which may be a good thing in the short term if you're dealing with insulin resistance and MetS, but which also explains many problems of the non-responders and negative-responders...and whose long-term effects may or may not be desirable, again depending on your individual metabolic history.

JS

I suggest that, like Melissa McEwen, you restricted yourself long enough to let yourself heal, and now you can perhaps experiment with a more WAPF-style diet in a careful way, if that interests you.

I am struggling with high cholesterol and digestive issues and have been following a basically paleo / predator diet, with no grains or starches. (Rice and potatoes crash my digestion.) I gave up wheat a long time ago, too. BUT ...

I recently caught a virus and felt really sick. The only thing I wanted to eat in the world was saltine crackers and digestive biscuits. So I ate saltine crackers and digestive biscuits. And I felt great. My digestion handled these processed, gluten-loaded, trans-fatty (?) morsels of wheat like a dream. My energy rebounded, and right now I'm feeling tons better. What do you think is going on here???

Ty for that JS. The core issue here is that the world's expert on fibers of all kinds, Dr. J Slavin of Minnesota, is happy to remark that different people digest different amounts of various fibers. There are people who do digest supposed "insoluble" fiber, depending on their microbiome, just as there are apparently people who can digest a large amount of that "resistant" starch.

Notice that altho' Slavin is the recognized expert, the starch proponents never cite her work at all. They just avoid the tower that is her research. Wonder why?

Regarding your question, Romestaing 2007, from Part II, shows that coconut oil is indeed far less fattening per calorie than butter -- but butter causes greater satiation and satiety, causing the rats to eat less of it.  (Butter is still less fattening per calorie than standard chow.) 

The RS stuff is very interesting, but it's being oversold so hard (I've already encountered several straight-up misrepresentations of the scientific literature) that I don't take any of the hype at face value.  And vinegar has many of the same properties (e.g. improvements in blood glucose control -- documented by scientific studies, not just uncontrolled n=1), plus it's an amazing topical AND internal antibacterial (SIBO? Drink vinegar, it'll be gone soon).  The main difference I see is that no one's driving the hype train for vinegar.  (PROTIP: acetic acid is the shortest SCFA.)

JS

Cool article. I just note that the study uses coconut oil, which is quite full of MCTs that are converted into ketone bodies. It would be nice to have a study as this one but using butter as well (far less MCT amount), and another rat group using say olive oil or something very low in PUFA anyway but very high in MUFA. I think that using coconut oil is a little biased towards ketone production. But on the other hand, just adding 10% of sucrose totally reverses the results. That's amazing.

For those who are LC dieters, just add resistant starch (30-40g / day) as described in details at freetheanimal.com

D.

That's a very interesting case of equal total weight and fat gain causing dramatically different metabolic effects...

...and I'm sure similar situations contribute to the dramatic inter-individual variation in weight loss outcomes at the same "caloric deficit".  Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

JS

Look at the difference in adipocyte number!
I think I would write a different conclusion to the paper authors based on the data: "A diet low in polyunsaturated fat vs saturated and monounsaturated fat protects against adipocyte hyperplasia under conditions of overfeeding!"

Essential fatty acids indeed but only in tiny quantities.

Drug responses are strongly individual.  Some people, like yourself, find alcohol uninteresting, while others center their lives around obtaining it.  Others find cocaine uninteresting, while you find it strongly addictive.

I'm sure this is because different drugs tickle different receptors and boost (or inhibit) different hormones and neurotransmitters -- as do different dietary compositions.  I'll explore metabolic individuality in future installments.

As far as "that last 50 pounds", that's going to be very difficult, because you're strongly fighting leptin dynamics at that point -- you don't get to 150# of extra fat without some adipocyte hyperplasia (more fat cells, not just bigger fat cells).  ItsTheWooo has posted at length about her usually-successful strategies for dealing with this.  Others find that reintroducing some amount of carb cycling helps...but at some point you may have to kill off some of those tiny shrunken non-leptin-producing fat cells, whether invasively (lipo) or non-invasively (cryolipolysis, lasers). 

The good news is that none of this is necessary to be in good health: it's purely a cosmetic problem.

JS

I had to read that twice before I noticed the comma. 😉

Back in college, I had plenty of opportunity to observe people who considered it fun to get drunk. I tried it. Exactly once. The experience was excruciatingly bad. To this day, I'm utterly bewildered as to why anyone would do that more than once. I conclude that enjoyability of life without drinking may depend heavily on both genetics and epigenetics, since my experience with that differed substantially from that of most of the others I have observed.

BTW, I have also experienced morphine (legally, routinely used as a pre-op sedative in Navy hospitals back when I was in the Navy). I also wonder why anybody would want a second hit of that stuff, too. It was awful.

There is one drug that I have experienced about which I completely understand the addiction potential. A Navy doctor sprayed some mist up my nose before examining my sinuses, and within a few seconds, I could tell it was the most powerful decongestant I had ever experienced. I also felt 10 feet tall and bulletproof. *Everything* was suddenly better. I asked him what the hell that was, and he replied that it was 0.5% cocaine in distilled water. Which really scared me. I know for certain sure that I really need to avoid that stuff, because if I ever got started, it would kill me. I would not be able to stop.

======

@JS: "Congratulations on losing 95# and keeping it off! Statistically, almost no one does that without gastric bypass."

I lost a little over 100 lbs, and have kept it off for 13 years now (no gastric bypass) using a grain-free low-carb diet, with about a 15 lb fluctuation. Only problem is that I needed to lose 150 lbs, and that last 50 lbs is proving to be truly stubborn. I may need to try Jimmy's nutritional ketosis experiment. Or, since those keto strips are prohibitively expensive, I may need to just go below 10% carb (I generally stay around 35-40g/day), and cut the protein back a bit (which I started a couple of weeks ago, but haven't since any huge results yet).

I've heard that you can actually make a living bragging about a 100 lb weight loss, but I think that folks looking at me would definitely notice that I'm still chubby, so I lack the credibility needed to pull that off. However, 50 lbs overweight beats 150+ lbs overweight.

You are correct that fat uses less oxygen per ATP generated -- but glucose contains much more oxygen than fat does (remember: C6-H12-O6 vs. long chains of carbon and hydrogen attached to one glycerol), so the net result is that more exogenous oxygen is required to oxidize fat.

This short letter neatly sums up the situation: "...Each gram of palmitate produces significantly more high-energy bonds than a gram of glucose, and the caloric value of the stored high-energy phosphate bonds derived from the oxidation of a gram of palmitate is 2.4 times greater than that derived from a gram of glucose, albeit at a greater relative cost in oxygen. Hence, when oxygen is abundant and food is scarce, there is an advantage in utilizing fatty acids for fuel as opposed to using glucose. The reverse, however, would occur when food is plentiful and oxygen is scarce."

Result: fat should be the preferred and most efficient fuel any time we are not pushing the limits of our aerobic capacity ("oxygen is scarce"). 

And, in fact, this is how animal bodies work.

JS

re: efficiency

Per carbon atom, fatty acids supplies more ATP, and RER is lower. This would indicate fat uses less oxygen. Also from Cahill's Fuel Metabolism in Starvation:

β-HYDROXYBUTYRATE: THE MOST EFFICIENT FUEL Veech and colleagues discovered that administering β-hydroxybutyrate to the perfused rat heart in place of glucose increased work output but decreased oxygen consumption (35).

(35) Control of glucose utilization in working perfused rat heart.

re: CICO

The other fundamental problem with CICO is it incorrectly treats CI and CO independently. In the reality of the coupled system that is metabolism, CI and CO affects each other.