I’ve recently had several run-ins with people who believe strictly in the calories-in, calories-out hypothesis of obesity. I just read Herman Pontzer’s book Burn, so I’ll continue to pick on him for the moment. In Pontzer’s estimation, humans are just calorie-burning machines. Slightly complicated machines, but machines nonetheless. We have a more or less fixed …
Happy New Year! Fire In A Bottle (FIAB) is back! I’m excited for the new year, I’ve got a great slate of upcoming posts, I’m planning a new “overview of FIAB concepts intended for newcomers and those who are less scientifically oriented. I’m going to continue working on the podcast and launch a TikTok channel! …
Loss of Mitochondrial ROS Production Causes Obesity Read More »
Oxidants are electron takers. Anti-oxidants are the opposite: electron donors. OILRIG: Oxidation Is Losing, Reduction Is Gaining. Oxidative stress can be defined as having too high of a percentage of intracellular “redox couples” in the oxidized state. Glutathione, for instance, is the body’s “master antioxidant”. It can live as either the reduced version (GSH) or …
I’m using the word global to mean “in all tissues of the body” but I’d forgive you if you thought that I meant “in all countries where they eat vegetable oil”. Either way, really. As I explained in part 1, the production of mitochondrial ROS is a thermogenic loop that wastes calories as heat. If …
On this blog I have argued that: The traditional French diet combining starch and saturated fat results in leanness The richest, least active American men stayed lean on 4500 calories per day in the 1930s Metabolic rate is correlated to saturation level Obese humans have very unsaturated body fat The metabolic rates of Americans dropped …
AMPK is a key regulator of metabolic rate and fat burning. The mainline thinking on AMPK often follows the puritanical view of classic obesity research: AMPK senses LOW cellular energy levels by monitoring the ratio of ATP to ADP and AMP.1 This suggests that the best way to stimulate AMPK is by reducing caloric intake. …
AMPK is activated by HIGH cellular energy after a starchy meal Read More »
It’s rare to find a scientific paper whose RESULTS are hilarious. Sometimes the authors conclusions are hilarious. If you’ve lived through the last 30 years of articles about the best sources of antioxidants and how to avoid oxidative stress, though, the actual findings of this study1 will certainly seem ironic, if not hilarious. I’ve written …
Speed Your Metabolism With Oxidative Stress! Slow It With Antioxidants! Read More »
I gave a lecture on The ROS Theory Of Obesity at Interbrook Farm in Sept of 2019. I made hand drawn slides with a Sharpie. Unfortunately my sense of humor is on full display in these. Maybe they’ll be useful to someone. Also, u/leerylizard posted an annotated guide to the ROS Theory Of Obesity on …
The Illustrated Guide And Annotated Guide to The ROS Theory of Obesity Read More »
After publication of The Croissant Diet, which promotes a diet combining highly saturated fat and starch for weight loss, I got a lot of questions along the lines of whether it mattered if fat was eaten before starch. Or maybe protein should be consumed first? The proposed mechanism of the croissant diet is that saturated …
Fat From The Previous Meal Sets The Metabolic Table Read More »
At the beginning of this series I stated that any theory of obesity should be able to explain why a Chinese peasant eating a very low fat diet with the bulk of calories furnished by white rice – a refined carbohydrate – is lean, a French person eating a mixed fuel diet of starch, sugar, …
Satiation is a feeling that is actually triggered in the brain by specific neurons in the hypothalamus. These neurons respond to a number of factors, including circulating levels of blood glucose, free fatty acids (ie energy availability) and hormones such as leptin. In this paper, the authors show that ROS is necessary for satiation. The …
This paper measured the level of Stearoyl-CoA desaturase in morbidly obese adults compared to adults with a normal BMI. The obese adults produce 2-3 times as much of the enzyme as do lean adults, resulting in fat that is significantly more unsaturated. In addition, the obese adults also had much higher levels of polyunsaturated fats. …
The Body Fat of Obese Adults is Highly Unsaturated Read More »
A “knockout mouse” is a strain of mice in which a section of their DNA has been deleted. Therefore, they do not have a particular gene. Sometimes, this has disastrous consequences, certain genes they cannot live without and thus they are never born. But when a knockout mouse lives, it can teach us interesting lessons …
When fat cells respond to insulin they take several actions in switching from fat burning mode to glucose burning and fat storing mode. These actions include: Turning off lipolysis – the process of releasing fats into the bloodstream as Free Fatty Acids which other cells can use energy Absorbing Glucose and beginning de no lipogenesis …
Butter Causes a High Level of Available Energy 8 Hours After a Meal Read More »
If you’ve been reading along you know that by this point we’ve shown that long chain saturated fat consumption causes ROS production in the mitochondria which causes short term physiological insulin resistance. The ROS theory of obesity suggests that physiological insulin resistance should prevent fat storage in peripheral fat cells (adipocytes). I’ve been dancing around …
Long Chain Saturated Fat Causes Fat Loss in Mice Read More »
