Eat Spinach, It's High Fat Food

April 30, 2018

Eat Spinach, it's High Fat Food

 

 References: WikipediaBMJHarvard HealthJ Clin GastroScience Based Medicine


 I've learned that sugar and white flour is bad for my brain, my weight and just about everything else. Everyone around me is on a Keto Kick trying to lose weight with the Ketogenic diet. And it doesn't work for me. How can I eat a high-fat diet? And what I'm most worried about is my brain. How can I prevent Alzheimer's? 


Well, step one and two of Bredesen's RECODE program are to eat a low carb high fat diet, and to not eat each night for 12 hours. This is how you teach your brain to run on ketones. The conundrum comes when I try to eat low carb by having steak, bacon, eggs and cheese. And then my weight doesn't budge. 


What gives? Turns out that animal protein and fat are not so good for us. Animal protein turns on the mTOR gene, that makes me age faster. I don't want to do that. In the last few years, two studies about eating more animal and heart disease have bothered me. A BMJ article from Sweden shows that men who eat animal protein have a 5% increase for heart disease for every 5 gram increase in animal protein. And the Harvard Professional Men's Study showed that men in the top quartile of meat consumption had 70% more heart disease. 


 What's a person to do? Well, eat more vegetables. Guess what happens to vegetables and resistant starches? Where are they digested? Turns out not in your stomach, and not in your small bowel but in your colon by the biome of bacteria in your colon. Resistant starches are carb rich foods prepared in a certain way or eaten before fully ripe. Green bananas, for example are quite resistant and get digested in your colon into short chain fatty acids (called beta-hydroxybutyrate). Ditto for Peruvian potatoes, cooked and then cooled. The amylose molecule changes its shape with heating, and then again with cooling, making it indigestible in your upper gut which delivers it to your colon, where the bacteria break it down to short chain fatty acids. Propionate and butyrate are amazing super foods. They are the short chain fatty acids that nourish you and your whole body. They are actually fats. Eating spinach makes for fat. Green beans, ditto. Asparagus, broccoli, cabbage- if it's above ground, its probably going to go the same route. 


 Enter the Kitavans. A small island off New Guinea where 80% of folks smoke, but they eat no sugar or western food, and have 70% of their diet from resistant starch and coconut. They are all slender, have no vascular disease or AD. One could properly conclude that their diet is high fat: a combination of coconut and resistant starches from yams and taro. Hence, a vegetable based diet can be ketogenic. Get it? Eating salads with lots of olive oil, is more fat-based than you thought. Do you see the path forward? 


www.What will work for me. I went to a Mexican restaurant last night. We had guacamole for hors-d'oerves and I had a shrimp and avacodo/lettuce salad. I felt quite smug navigating a typically high carb, high animal fat environment and escaping feeling good about my meal. This morning, a spinach omelet. I've finished 3 cycles of the Fast Mimicking Diet and I'm done another 4 pounds.   


 Pop Quiz

  1. Eating leafy green vegetables turns your fibrous foods into?                  Answer: Fat in so many words, short chain fatty acids
  2. What other foods turn into beneficial fats?                      Answer: Resistant starches like cold potatoes and cold rice (emphatically NOT fresh not rice or potatoes), green banana, kasava,
  3. What small group of people smoke like chimneys but have no heart disease and live into their nineties?                                                                                             Answer: The Kitavans
  4. Bredesen calls for a diet composed of?                     Answer: Healthy green vegetables, olive oils and very low carbs, low animal fats and low animal protein
  5. What are we trying to teach your brain to do with this strategy?                 Answer: stop running on glucose and learn to use ketones as fuel (small fatty acid molecules) obtained from eating coconut oil, olive oil, and ironically, green vegetables.
 

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