This post is geared to an elite group of readers: Men on LC (low carb) or VLCK (very low carb/ketogenic) diets who engage in moderate to heavy weightlifting on a regular basis. I’ll go a step further and assume they are concerned about boosting their testosterone levels. Testosterone after all, is a pretty important factor [Read more…]
Butyrate and Low Carb Diets
In my posts thus far, there is a character lurking in the wings. This mysterious character comes in the form of a rather simple, nondescript molecule consisting of only four carbons, eight hydrogens and two oxygen atoms. It belongs to a class of chemicals called short chain fatty acids or SCFAs. Oh, and it gives [Read more…]
Gut Microbiome Link To Obesity
The topic of “gut bacteria” has hit the mainstream media like an outbreak of the Norwalk virus on a Paleo cruise ship. The headlines are screaming that bad gut bacteria are making us fat, insulin resistant and the cause behind metabolic syndrome. Likewise, we are hearing the panacea claims for cultivating good gut bacteria: weight [Read more…]
Does Eating Right Require a Biology Degree?
The evolution of the Internet is perhaps one of the greatest achievements during the past twenty years. Finding information on even the most basic topics once required a trip to the public library and possibly an hour or more to flip through a card catalog followed by wandering down endless shelves of books to find [Read more…]
Creating Resistant Starch in the Kitchen
Resistant starches (RS) seem to have appeared out of nowhere in the popular press along with a lot of fanfare about their health benefits. Resistant starches are nothing new, as they’re found to some degree in all plants. Starch is the plant kingdom’s storage form of glucose and is analogous to glycogen in the animal [Read more…]
Dietary Guidelines For 2015 Released
The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently issued their 2015 dietary guidelines to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture. These agencies will then jointly compile these guidelines into a document entitled: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which will then be promptly overlooked, ignored, and scoffed at by a lot of [Read more…]
Tips For Avoiding Overeating
Every one of us has experienced the feeling that we ate way more then we really should have. It’s really pretty clear when this has happened. You have that “overstuffed” feeling. Your stomach feels like it’s going to burst. You may even begin belching and you have that bloated feeling where you need to loosen [Read more…]
Does Late Night Snacking Make You Fat?
An enduring belief that many people and unfortunately also many health professionals hold as gospel is that eating after a certain hour will lead directly to weight gain. It seems that the precise hour for the cutoff has been set at the magical time of 8pm. Finish whatever you’re eating by 7.59pm and you’re fine, [Read more…]
Not All Calories are Created Equal
Common wisdom with regards to weight loss and weight maintenance is that as long as our activity level in terms of calories burned either equals or exceeds the amount of calories that we take in from food and drink, then either we maintain our current body weight or we gradually lose weight as in the [Read more…]