My take on macros...

[Ripped Barbarian]

I have had a massive burst of enthusiasm for health related matters recently and have grown concerned about advice given by both governmental/media bodies and by people on this forum recently, it's almost the two extremes on the problem, a case of 'my hand is freezing cold so i'll put it in the fire'.

I have had this past week booked off as holiday and other than some training in the rain i have basically spent all my waking hours reading prob over 50 studies on the role of foods on: Insulin resistance, metabolism, lipid peroxidation, endocrine system and generally important factors on health and building muscle (they do go hand in hand to a large degree) of course studies are by no means the be all and end all and only serve as a basic starting point for ideas, much of my knowledge i have compounded from all sources of information be it studies, personal and others experience and of course common sense!

I will avoid study references and in depth science of individual metabolic processes to make this an easier read for everyone on the forum, i also think it is important to look at diet as a whole rather than take a tiny piece out and study it, this gets you confused and contradicted.

Basically i wanted to 'get to the bottom' of the macro ratio discussion as far as possible at least, because our genetic variety affects are ability to handle various types of foods of course this isn't a perfect science and there is no finite awnser but i believe there is a 'band' that most people could roughly fit into and thrive on the set diet, at least in a superior fashion to other diets.

Now, we all know which diets are distinctly wrong, you can use common sense to see that eating junk isn't going to do you any favours health or muscle wise, so for a start we all know what to avoid: heavily processed nutrient void rubbish, it's a no brainer.

Creating a healthy diet isn't so easy despite what various nutritionists and health agencies say.
When researching a certain marco (protein, carbs, fat) for it's various properties it is important to study all factors of its involvement in the diet, not just the direct affect it has but in combination with the other macros and micronutrients.

I think is is easy when researching diet to have a strong reaction upon discovering a negative aspect to a food, i.e if you read that excess carbohydrates can cause insulin resistance in fear of this you cut them right down, this of course lowers the ratio within the 3 macros pushing the other two up (presuming calorific intake stays the same, you don't want to starve and you don't want to fat)
The main thing that prompted me to start this thread was the whole 'woohoo fats!!!' mentality on the board of late, high fat diet here, cream and brie coming left right and centre, i think a lot of people have jumped on the band wagon so to speak and even if higher fats are the key to a good diet i think people havn't payed enough attention to not just science but common sense.

I don't believe in any extreme macro diet, for the simple reason it is not natural, to achieve an extreme state you need to use unatural methods.
I of course stick to the golden rule of trusting nature, it hasn't let us down in millions of years of evolution (so to speak) but as soon as we start diddling with various ideas we get nothing but health problems as can be seen today as 'modern/western illness' in 99.99% of our evolution it was a case of you had what nature provided (and generally whatever you could get your hands on) and not what a doctor/scientist/dave down the gym says you should eat in this world of choice.

If you take a natural 'high fat diet' such as inuit traditional diet which they are generally considered highly adapted to (illness establishing itself with a greater dependance on 'modern' agricultural foods, as seen in many ethnic groups coming away from traditional diet) you see that the diet is quite high in fat (inclusive of saturates, poly and mono) the rest of the diet is made up of protein, there is very little carbohydrate in the diet.
On this diet inuit people have shown to have good longevity, low heart disease and generally overall very good health, this however does not mean that you would share the same health on said diet, especially as you are not living in that geographic area (if you're reading this from alaska, ignore) it can be seen that certain populations closer to the equater can be taking a considerably higher level of carbohydrate and much less fat (more fruits, roots in the diet and less animal produce of which most is leaner) there is generally and roughly a latitude/macro available for food, correlation this is of course due to higher levels of sunlight and plant activity in the more equatorial areas and plants generally storing energy as carbohydrate and animals as fats.

Taking the uk as an average population so that you get a base diet from which you can adjust depending on your ancestry then you can see that due to our location macronutrient intake would traditionally be neither high carb nor high fat (presuming protein is of moderate intake)
I personally have come to the conclusion that going on an extreme diet will not be a positive step towards a healthy diet, certainly a high fat /very low carb diet will make you lose weight if you're a porker where it may have its uses but as a continous diet, not so.

Discussing the 3 macros is mearly touching the surface and what constitutes a healthy diet and the macros and when they are eaten is just as if not more important for health, i could design a high fat diet based upon rancid sunflower oil that would be appalling for example but of course this is common sense, however i think that people designing a high(er) fat diet have made the mistake of thinking that because fats may have been 'justified' you can throw fats in willy nilly and expect it to be healthy, especially 'refined' and seperated fats such as coconut oil, butter, olive oil and cream, it's not the way to do it.

As i was saying earlier it is important to trust nature, we have evolved eating what nature provided and therefore it would make sense that to be healthy today, with very little time for our genetics to have changed (for the most part at least) we should eat naturally.
If you look at naturally available foods, wild plants, berries, game and all food sources available pre agriculture you get an idea of what you should be eating and it's not what a lot of people are eating on suposed healthy diets (be it grains, dairy (you guys drinking cream), selectively bred foods that are nothing like what our ancestors ate)

As a north western european white i can say that combined with a basic knowledge of human evolution, the glacial retreat etc a lot of my recent ancestral evolution was done in europe after movement of earlier ancestors out of african plains, there has been a large ice age impact on our evolution as well as the post warming and the previous warmer conditions (when migration occured) combined with a slight hint of recent agricultural selection.

Much more of the land was forested either in the warmer periods or as tundra so looking at the palelithic environment and fossil evidence (there is suprisingly little to our diets however) and using some common sense and basic knowledge of hunter gatherer techniques you will see that a large variety of foods would have been taken:
Large beasts rarely, smaller game such as birds, reptiles in warmer areas fish and crayfish in rivers and lakes, costal 'rockpool' foods around the sea and a massive array of plant and fungi based foods, berries, nuts and seeds.

My ancestors did not drink cream or have a drip feed of beef steak every 3 hours.

Suprisingly saturated fat intake would not have been particularly high, a lot of people trying to emulate a paleo diet rely on the agricultural animals, Beef, pork, lamb chicken, all have been selectively bred and fed much away from any of their ancestors for our purposes.
You can still observe relatively 'wil'd animal types on african safari and generally these are much leaner than something raised for the supermarket, deer is the traditional large game in europe and is much lower in saturated fat than beef or lamb, i also think it is important to note that early cooking methods of meat would have most likely been suspended over fire, much of the fat dripping off rather than being collected and eaten with a dish like today.
You might wonder why i'm banging on about saturated fat, well, i have come to the conclusion that whilst it is not the absolute killer that many people make out that having a high percentage, at least of a daily basis is not good for health, it does appear to have an insulin sensetivity stunting effect on numerous studies and personal experience (which is most important for me)
I think that if you go 'all the way' with a 0 carb diet then this hardly matters because of the lack of carbohydrate but eating saturated fat alongside carbs (even moreso WITH carbs, as people have been raving about recently is particularly bad for insulin sensetivity) will have a negative effect on health as compared to a more natural diet.
Studies have been shown that too little fat is bad and this is also common sense, you do need fat in your diet for a variety of purposes this includes all types.
So a little natural intake (as with cholesterol) is fine but i find stacking up on cheese, dairy and very fatty meat is misguided and dangerous, I think it is safe to say too much of anything is bad.

[Ripped Barbarian]

cont:


So, if we know that processed high GI carbs and grains are not the best choice but some lower gi roots/fruits are good and that fats are not the killer people think they are and are vital in your diet to a certain degree this leaves protein.

Protein of course plays a large part in a bodybuilders diet, used for repair and growth of muscle fibre and general anabolic effects that we can see in everyday use from personal experience and also the studies.
Natural protein intake would be reasonable, especially considering our ancestors reliance upon animal foods for at least a large part of our evolution (fossil record of hunting tools, meat prepartion tools, bones etc) but catching an animal isn't always easy as they tend to run from danger so it's not as if our ancestors could have an instant supply of protein, very often they would have to work hard physically to obtain a kill.
There are metabolic disadvantages from eating protein too often, acidification, severe muscle breakdown upon fasting, activation of stress hormones (same as continous saturated fat supply) so like the others too much is not needed and also potentially bad.

Protein is generally the most 'insulin friendly' macro however and it has been shown that reduced protein diets are one of the leading factors in insulin resistance/type 2 diabetes, lean protein sources such as white fish have shown to have beneficial effects on insulin resistance.

So overall we can see that the 3 macros are consumed in our ancestors diet and all 3 factor in the diet of people who are healthy and long lived, there is no real extreme diet awnser to a healthy lifestyle and i think the following advice are important factors to take note:

-Eat all 3 macronutrients in moderate amounts, some carbs, some fat, some protein, you can adjust these on a seasonal basis to help cut or bulk (more carbs in summer, less carbs in winter)
The ratio might be 30/25/45 cpf or 35/30/35 but not anything extreme such as 0/20/80 or 70/20/10 (low carb, v high carb respectively)

-Don't eat masses of any one type of fat, including PUFA's, saturates, monounsaturates of all types and cholesterol.

-Do not eat masses of carbohydrate in one go.

-Do not continously eat protein meals, instead eat it within one or 2 larger meal but it is ok to have a tick over of protein during the day.

-Eat only natural paleolithic foods (or at least a large proportion of your diet where possible) this is: Game/lean meats, fish, shellfish, berries, vegetables, nuts, seeds, low sugar fruits (berries ideal) roots etc.

-Eat these in a natural ratio, i.e don't go eating 4 kilos of berries and nothing else but have a variety that is roughly what our ancestors ate say
60/40 animal/plant and within plant 1/3 greens 1/3 fruit 1/3 nuts by calories obviously this varies on a seasonal basis.

-Do not eat unatural extracted foods in large quantities, cream, olive oil, butter are all concentrated source of a particular type of fat without many micronutrients.

-Do not combine carb sources with fats to a large degree, you will prob not be doing this anyway if you are obtaining fats from whole source only (it's the cooking of carbs in extracted oil that is the problem today such as chips)

-Do not eat continously large meals, many people now believe in lean bulking so you don't really need to 'eat big' anymore (those who are chemically assisted the rules don't really apply but then again the fact they are using prob shows muscle is of more importance to overall health anyway)

-Tick over on various foods through the day, nuts berries, vegetables and have a larger amount of animal source food post workout when it is needed for recovery, this should be nutritious game meat.

Sorry for the monotony of my post of and any aggressiveness in it, i wanted to get my opinion on the issue across as i have seen what i would call a 'runaway fad' on the forum recently.

[Gareth83]

good post RC

From what I've been reading no more than 45% of calories should come from Protein as the body is unable to process this over a longer period of time.

I believe in the research shows that any more than 2g protein per kg yields no further benefit in terms of both strength and size gains.

However for me on my bulk of circa 3700cals that would mean consuming no more than 200g of Protein, so I would need to make up the rest of my calories through fats. By my calculations I would need to be eating 275g of fat as I'll be consuming no more than 100g carbs.

I know from nature that's just too much fat and not really practical unless I consumed lots of butter, cheese, cream, olive oil etc. to make up the numbers.

So although I would advocate no more than 2g/kg Protein in general, I am going to be sticking to the range of 200-400g Protein, to obviously reduce the need for tonnes of fats.

Meat, in the past was also alot leaner so I think for me a diet of 200-400g Protein, 180-275g Fat, 100g carbs is the best option for my calorie requirements without going overkill on the whole "fat is great" that seems to be the mainstream on this forum of late.

[NU_nutrition_TS]

Good post RC. However I would like to correct a couple of things, if I may...

With regard to the fat make up of wild game animals, this is an often repeated misrepresentation, possibly due to the work of a Dr S. Boyd Eaton who claimed the fat ratios in wild game were 38% saturated, 32% monounsaturated and 30% polyunsaturated. If you check the charts below for the fat make-up of individual game animals [as would have been hunted by the north American Indians] you will see they are vastly different from Eaton's figures.

If you check the fat breakdowns for farmed animal meat you will find, for beef rib [untrimmed] for example, that the ratios are closer to Eaton's claims for wild game meat!

Also, the ancestry or geographical location of a subject does not necessarily lock in the type of diet that you can prosper on. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson [and members of his expedition team] regularly lived for many months with both the Inuit and north American Indians eating their respective diets exclusively and prospered health-wise, something he later proved to doubting western doctors in America by duplicating this dietary protocol under clinical conditions in hospital.

You can read the whole article here: http://www.westonaprice.org/traditio...americans.html

[Ripped Barbarian]

What about overall fat content as a percentage of calories?

[NU_nutrition_TS]

Well, for the ribs [untrimmed] per 100g the total fat content was 14.74g, so that's 133 kcals and the total calorific value was 247 kcals, so fat was 53%. However, there are a half dozen different cuts listed all with differing quantities of total fat, so this may be higher or lower dependant on the cut, cooking method, etc. Without similar figures for wild game I can't make any meaningful comparisons for total fat only for the composition of that fat. So far it seems modern farmed meats have a much more even ratio of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats than some of the wild sources listed in the chart.

But as the article goes on to specify, the north American Indians would preferentially hunt older game animals because they had built up more fat on their bodies. Also, as you yourself have often observed, hunter-gatherers will preferentially eat the organs of their kills, which are covered in protective fat that is even higher in saturates than fat elsewhere on the carcass.

[Ripped Barbarian]

I think there is more to game meats in comparison to modern agricultural meats than first meets the eye, you can't take it on a total macro basis.

How about the fatty acid make up of total saturated fat?

The same goes for dairy sat fats, we didn't evolve having cream...

[NU_nutrition_TS]

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I think there is more to game meats in comparison to modern agricultural meats than first meets the eye, you can't take it on a total macro basis.

How about the fatty acid make up of total saturated fat?

The same goes for dairy sat fats, we didn't evolve having cream...

You could argue the intricacies of fatty acid make-up of various fat sources 'til the cows come home for milking! I doubt there is much data on the fatty acid makeup of the saturated fat portion of wild game animals still left in the world now let alone in prehistoric hunter-gatherer times, so it is probably a moot point.

But to use some modern day examples, let's look at cream vs buffalo meat for the fatty acid make-up of their respective saturated fat content:

Cream, heavy whipping, 100g
Fatty acids, total saturated g 23.032
4:0 g 1.200 5.4%
6:0 g 0.710 3.2%
8:0 g 0.413 1.9%
10:0 g 0.928 4.2%
12:0 g 1.039 4.7%
14:0 g 3.721 16.7%
16:0 g 9.732 43.8%
18:0 g 4.484 20.2%

Buffalo, free range, top round steak, raw (Shoshone Bannock), 100g
Fatty acids, total saturated g 0.418
8:0 g 0.000
10:0 g 0.000
12:0 g 0.001 0.2%
14:0 g 0.013 3.1%
15:0 g 0.006 1.4%
16:0 g 0.187 44.7%
17:0 g 0.016 3.8%
18:0 g 0.192 45.9%
20:0 g 0.003 0.7%
22:0 g 0.000

On quick inspection there appears to be a greater preponderance of short-chain fatty acids in the cream [which increases leptin sensitivity, according to one study I've quickly perused!]. So not a bad 'modern' saturated fat source!

The buffalo seem to contain more long-chain fatty acids which another study links to increased risk of developing gallstones in men!

So I would say it is not as simple as saying a natural fat source like cream, which is relatively modern, is unhealthy while a fat source that was available to our ancestors has got to be healthier.

EDIT: I should have said that the short chain fatty acids are represented in the cream and not in the buffalo meat. The way I put it makes it sound as if there is a greater weight of short chain to long chain in the cream than the buffalo meat, which is not the case. I should have worked them out in percentage terms - but I was being lazy! Sorry for the mix-up!

I've done it now. Makes it a bit clearer. Cream and buffalo have almost the same quantity - in percentage terms - of C16:0 long chain fatty acids. But buffalo has more than twice the C18:0 of cream while cream has no C22:0. Buffalo has no short/medium chain fatty acids C4:0 to C10:0

[sendos]

Interesting read, have you ever thought about specialising in this kind of area, i mean going to uni and then going on to research? Your obviously extremely interested in it... at least you could get paid for it instead of having to skip off work to do it lol

[Ripped Barbarian]

Quote

Interesting read, have you ever thought about specialising in this kind of area, i mean going to uni and then going on to research? Your obviously extremely interested in it... at least you could get paid for it instead of having to skip off work to do it lol

Yeah, i intend to study nutrition of some type, i'm yet to find a course that interests me and isn't the usual 'food pyramid' shab a lot of people study.

For now i'm saving money for studying so i don't have a big debt and whilst i do that i do personal study.