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1. Why I didn’t go into a coma
Here’s an interesting observation while on a keto diet of mostly eggs, steak and butter. I have a continuous glucose monitor stuck to my arm and one night it showed that my blood glucose dropped down to 39 mg/dL while I was sleeping. I woke up in the morning feeling totally fine. However…
According to Hypoglycemia, functional brain failure, and brain death:
"Coma can occur at glucose levels in the range of 2.3–2.7 mmol/l (41–49 mg/dl) (9) as well as at lower glucose levels."
Of course the reason I didn’t have any issues was because I was in deep ketosis so my brain was happily fueled on ketone bodies. In fact some crazy scientists in the 1980’s took guys who were fasting (and in deep ketosis) and injected them with insulin to purposely drive their blood sugar down. One guy’s blood sugar went down to 9mg/dL. If you look at the graphic above, that should be when brain death occurs. They reported that he was completely fine relying solely on ketone bodies - no changes to his mentation.
2. Hitting a deadlift PR on day 3 of a fast?
As mentioned in my post Is Fasting destroying your muscle?, a 2021 study found people to have higher leg strength on day 5 of a fast compared to baseline.
I figured I would test this out and do a 3 day fast. My last one rep max on deadlift was 2 weeks prior at 150kg (330lbs). 1 week prior, I tried to hit 150kg again but only got up to 140kg. Then, about 65 hours into my fast I was able to do 160kg (353lbs).
Now, the only other evidence I know of suggesting strength goes up on a fast is from a 1900 textbook where they found one man’s grip strength to be significantly higher than baseline on day 7.
To be honest, If fasting for 3 days was really the secret to get another 20 pounds on your deadlift, all strength athletes would be fasting for a couple days before an event by now. Now people get really excited about autophagy during a fast but there are a lot of unknowns. We can speculate that, thanks to autophagy, damaged junk proteins in the body are being broken down and reincorporated into the muscles, or the old junk proteins in the muscle are being broken down so your muscle is more efficient. However there’s no actual data to support that. One thing that might be helping is the reduction in inflammation.
In Upton Sinclair’s 1911 book The Fasting Cure, he claims that 5 cases of arthritis were cured. Arthritis is an inflammatory condition where the joints become inflamed and painful. A 1991 paper and a 2021 paper suggest that fasting can indeed improve arthritis symptoms. Further, inflammatory proteins have been associated with decreased strength in adults. The reason your muscles hurt so much when you have the flu is due to all the inflammation it provokes. So, if there actually is a strength boost during a 5 or 10 day fast, one reason may be decreased inflammation. Even then, I think I would only go as far as to say that strength doesn’t necessarily decline from a couple days of fasting.
3. Another vegan-promoting Netflix show: The vegan twin experiment
On January 1st, another Netflix program evangelizing veganism will be available. Basically, the program will center around a Stanford Study that randomized twins to a vegan diet or an omnivorous diet for 8 weeks. Plenty of news outlets picked up the study and reported that the vegan twins were better off.
Already, there are plenty of criticisms of the study. Here’s one from Dr. Georgia Ede.
Another is that there is this myopic focus on LDL cholesterol. Their main conclusion is that the vegan dieters’ results were better due to a greater decrease in LDL so-called “bad” cholesterol. However, raising HDL “good” cholesterol and lower triglycerides are well known to reduce your heart disease risk. (I’ve argued before that these are in much more important.) If you look at Figure 2, you’ll see that HDL decreased and triglycerides increased thanks to the vegan diet.
The lead investigator of the study also had a significant conflict of interest. He receives funding from the plant-based meat company, Beyond Meat.
4. Taurine Supplementation for Testosterone?
According to The role of taurine in male reproduction: Physiology, pathology and toxicology
“taurine can promote the endocrine function of the hypothalamus-pituitary-testis (HPT) axis, testicular tissue development, spermatogenesis and maturation, delay the aging of testicular structure and function, maintain the homeostasis of the testicular environment, and enhance sexual ability. In pathology, taurine supplement may be beneficial to alleviate pathological damage of male reproductive system, including oxidative damage of sperm preservation in vitro, testicular reperfusion injury and diabetes -induced reproductive complications. In addition, taurine acts as a protective agent against toxic damage to the male reproductive system by exogenous substances (e.g., therapeutic drugs, environmental pollutants, radiation).”
It promotes testosterone secretion by regulating the secretion of FSH and LH. A 2010 rodent study found taurine supplementation to stimulate testosterone secretion in vivo.
There’s also plenty of taurine in meat and shellfish. You lose some of the taurine as you cook it, though.
5. Meat and dairy have anti-cancer effects
A new study found that a fatty acid in beef, lamb and dairy called TVA strengthens our immune system’s ability to fight tumors. Higher TVA levels in the blood correlate with better responses to immunotherapy as well. The study showed that a TVA-enriched diet in mice significantly reduced tumor growth in melanoma and colon cancer.
The research team began by creating a “blood nutrient” library from approximately 700 known food-derived metabolites. They screened these for their effects on anti-tumor immunity, identifying TVA as the most effective among the top six candidates in both human and mouse cells.
“After millions of years of evolution, there are only a couple hundred metabolites derived from food that end up circulating in the blood, so that means they could have some importance in our biology,” Prof. Chen continues.
-uchicago.edu
If that’s confusing because you’ve heard that red meat and particularly processed meat cause colon cancer, take a look at this old video of mine laying out just how crappy the research supporting this notion is:
I don't know how much you want to get into the data, or how easy this would be to implement, but what if instead of "Poll for Favorite" there was "Rank Each Topic", that way if we find two topics really interesting we can give them both 5s, then maybe yet another is a 4, and then two are really not interesting and get 1s. Some weeks I feel like everything is totally on and others not so much, and I don't know how to express that with a choose-one option so I usually just avoid voting as a result.
That being said, on the whole I generally enjoy reading your work (especially the long-form articles).
I don't know if you would be interested but I'm type 1 diabetic and follow a very strict low carb / keto diet <30g of carbs per day. Based on Dr. Bernstein diabetes solution. I can send you a couple of screenshots from my glucose monitor showing a full night under 40 mg/dl. For some reason I never die, don't even feel it and wake up very refreshed. Cheers... love your work...