Health Tips

Weird News : By definition LC is about dietary carbohydrate restriction. If you are reducing carbohydrates, your proportional intake of protein or fat, or both, will go up. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with a high fat diet, it seems to me that the true advantage of LC may be in how protein is allocated, which seems to contribute to a better body composition.

LC with more animal protein and less fat makes particularly good sense to me. Eating a variety of unprocessed animal foods, as opposed to only muscle meat from grain-fed cattle, will get you that. In simple terms, LC with more protein, achieved in a natural way with unprocessed foods, means more of the following in one's diet: lean meats, seafood and vegetables. Possibly with lean meats and seafood making up more than half of one’s protein intake. Generally speaking, large predatory fish species (e.g., various shark species, including dogfish) are better avoided to reduce exposure to toxic metals.

Organ meats such as beef liver are also high in protein and low in fat, but should be consumed in moderation due to the risk of hypervitaminosis; particularly hypervitaminosis A. Our ancestors ate the animal whole, and organ mass makes up about 10-20 percent of total mass in ruminants. Eating organ meats once a week places you approximately within that range.

In LC liver glycogen is regularly depleted, so the amino acids resulting from the digestion of protein will be primarily used to replenish liver glycogen, to replenish the albumin pool, for oxidation, and various other processes (e.g., tissue repair, hormone production). If you do some moderate weight training, some of those amino acids will be used for muscle growth.

In this sense, the true “metabolic advantage” of LC, so to speak, comes from protein and not fat. “Calories in” still counts, but you get better allocation of nutrients. Moreover, in LC, the calorie value of protein goes down a bit, because your body is using it as a “jack of all trades”, and thus in a less efficient way. This renders protein the least calorie-dense macronutrient, yielding fewer calories per gram than carbohydrates; and significantly fewer calories per gram when compared with dietary fat and