Slow Carb Diet
In the 4-Hour Body, your friend Tim Ferriss recommends the slow-carb diet, a diet that is very restrictive six days a week and allows for a cheat day once a week, where you can eat any food in any quantity. During the restrictive period, most carbohydrates except for beans and lentils are not allowed, and many fats, including milk, cheese and yogurt, are banned as well. Could you talk about this diet - the benefits, the drawbacks, etc.?
Muscle preservation during weight loss
Hi Peter, have heard you talk about the importance of preserving muscle. I am working on reducing body fat and was wondering if you would be an advocate of supplementing with Hydroxymethylbutyrate (HMB) to reduce muscle loss while in a calorie deficit ?
Grewal + Shulman: combo question about fat and insulin resistance
Hi Peter, thanks so much for your work! I'm a longtime listener, and I look forward to new episodes so much. In episode #88 with Paul Grewal, you mentioned that you were interested in experimenting with a super low-fat diet -- at 2:00:40, per your team's excellent show notes. Did you ever do that experiment? What did you learn? I ask because Gerald Shulman described the role of fat inside cells in driving insulin resistance. Your interview with Dr. Shulman reminded me of the book Mastering Diabetes, which describes the same mechanism for insulin resistance and advocates a very very low fat, high-starch diet to reverse insulin resistance and manage blood glucose. (Anecdotally, after listening to the Shulman episode, I reread Mastering Diabetes and decided to try eating truly low fat for a few days. My fasting glucose dropped from 93 to 80 in a single day, and my glucose response to potatoes disappeared. I don't have diabetes, but I was diagnosed with PCOS in my teens, so I'm always trying to figure out how to sensitize my body to insulin.) In both conversations, you discuss the Hellerstein study on de novo lipogenesis and its limitations. In particular, you note the limitation that the participants were insulin-sensitive. The Shulman show notes say, "De novo lipogenesis becomes more important in the context of insulin resistance and can contribute to the development of fatty liver disease." However, if an oversized lipid droplet is the reason that cells are insulin-resistant (I know this is a gross oversimplification of Dr. Shulman's research), it seems like DNL is only an issue if there's already too much fat in the system? By eating high-fat, am I continuously stoking insulin resistance and therefore a DNL response to the few carbs I do eat? I'd love to hear your distillation of that interview on an AMA because it was so technical. And I'd also love to know your thoughts on super low-fat, plant-based diets (i.e., the Mastering Diabetes protocol) in light of the Grewal and Shulman conversations. Is the issue that this kind of lifestyle wouldn't be healthy long term?