The specification of The Croissant Diet is a living document. I plan to update it regularly as we learn. The central tenet of the croissant diet is that a primary regulator of whole body energy flux is the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat. The secondary tenet is that starch is a great delivery vehicle …
OR: How I eliminated my spare tire by eating croissants using the six scariest words in the english language: saturated fat, insulin resistance and free radicals. While researching for the series “The ROS Theory of Obesity“, I came across Valerie Reeves thesis via a post from Hyperlipid. She fed a group of mice a diet …
Most people seem surprised when I mention that America isn’t actually the fattest place on earth. Don’t get me wrong, we are close. Ignoring for the moment a handful of small island nations, that dubious distinction goes to Kuwait. Hot on our tail are Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Qatar. The basis of the Middle …
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provides “Food Disappearance” data that lets us see how much food any given nation uses per person per year. This is not an exact dietary record because of course we have no idea how much is wasted. It also doesn’t count home produced foods that …
In my previous post I defined The French Diet as a diet where the staples are starch and dairy fat. Cornell Cooperative Extension produced a series of informational pamphlets in the thirties and forties with topics such as “The Clovers in New York” and “Simplifying Home Sewing”. You can peruse them in the Cornell Digital …
In The ROS Theory of Obesity, I mentioned that the french remained lean in 1970 on a diet of white flour, butter (think croissants), sugar and red wine. Although I can’t find specific weight or obesity records from France at that time, it seems largely agreed upon in the oral history that the French were …
Another interesting finding of “Diet, Life-style and Mortality in China” is that there was a huge variation in caloric consumption in different regions of China without a corresponding difference in body weights. This is the most notable in two neighboring areas – Nanan and Huian – two places on the Southeast coast of China with …
In The ROS Theory Of Obesity I stated without providing evidence that Chinese people in the 1980s were lean while eating a high starch diet. In the comments thread, it was suggested that perhaps the Chinese were thin due to lack of available calories. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around. When I wrote …
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 »
In this series we’ve discussed the fact that saturated fat oxidation leads to ROS production in the mitochondria which makes peripheral fat cells “physiologically insulin resistant” which prevents them from switching from fat burning to fat storage. We’ve shown that saturated fat reversibly induces insulin resistance in people in the short term and that a …
