On Fri, 12 Dec 1997, John C. Pavao wrote:

> Since one doesn't count carb grams on Neanderthin as opposed to Atkins or
> some of the other weight-loss oriented low-carb plans, it's very easy for
> those of us trying to use Neanderthin to lose weight to shoot ourselves in
> the foot with allowable carbs.  It's important to remember that before we
> can use this diet for maintenance, it's probably necessary for us to use it
> like a low-carb plan to lose the weight and get back to where we belong.

I think this is very likely true, but please note that it is
somewhat inconsistent with one of the premises of Neanderthin,
namely that obesity is an auto-immune disorder.  Although there
is some discussion of ketosis in the book, I don't think Audette
and Gilchrist say that it is necessary for weight loss.  Rather,
they emphasize the elimination of alien proteins from the diet,
in order to cease the immune system triggering.

One could argue that, fruit aside, Neanderthin is "naturally"
low-carb, but it requires a special effort to make it ketogenic.

> As for calories not being important, this is one of the most intriguing
> aspects of this whole diet.  On the whole, I would have to agree with it;
> how much you eat has far less to do with your weight than what you eat.  In
> fact, I'm not sure it's possible to eat enough meat to gain any weight
> except muscle weight (or the weight of your gut being full!).  For
> instance, before I stopped losing weight altogether, I went nuts one day
> and ate about twice what I normally would have (all low-carb stuff).  I
> hadn't lost any weight in about two weeks or so.  The next day, I was down
> two pounds, and those pounds stayed off.  According to calorie theory,
> that's impossible.

Not really.  Calorie theory doesn't require that weight gain and
loss follow *immediately* upon caloric surplus and deficit.  A
2-pound overnight weight loss is almost certainly water.

I know for a fact that it's possible to gain weight on
Neanderthin, even in all-meat mode.  I've done it.  It wasn't
muscle either.  However, I have to say that metabolically it is
less easy to gain weight eating meat than it is by eating other
kinds of food.  There are good metabolic reasons for that,  and
it makes sense to take advantage of them, but ketosis doesn't
make weight (fat) gain impossible any more than it makes weight
loss inevitable.

We know that insulin is a hormone that facilitates the storage of
fat.  A lowcarb diet keeps insulin levels low, but in a
nondiabetic there's always plenty of insulin present, and dietary
protein causes insulin surges comparable to carbohydrates.  So if
there is a caloric surplus, there *is* insulin present to do the
job of storing body fat.  And even though protein stimulates
glucagon as carbs do not, and glucagon tends to liberate the
stored fat, it does so *on demand*.  If you are eating massive
amounts of protein and fat and exercising relatively little, the
demand to liberate fat is going to be less than the demand to
store it, so the net result will be fat gain.

The extra "metabolic advantage" of ketosis, is that at least some
of the liberated fat is eliminated without being
thermodynamically "burned", although it's far from clear how
significant a factor this is.  I think the main thing is that
protein/fat consumption, in the absence of much carbohydrate,
tends to be self-limiting.  That is, most of us simply don't want
to eat so much of the stuff that we gain weight.

Todd Moody
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