Otis diet fad of the month thread - Potato mania!!1 (1 Viewer)

[culdeus]

@culdeus @Maurile Tremblay

Sorry to tag you guys but running into a buddy who's freaking out saying i'm going to give myself diabetes via rapid hormonal changes, or damage beta cell receptors by trying this tater diet. 

I tried searching this thread for diabetes (no direct hits) and insulin (too many direct hits) so I figures I'd ask you guys for your thoughts on the front end. He's a fairly knowledgeable fella but I'd love it if one or both of you would be willing to spit a little science on the topic? Or perhaps link to a post you recall making on the topic already? 

Thanks in advance fellas. Doing some googling in the meantime.

@culdeus @Maurile Tremblay

Sorry to tag you guys but running into a buddy who's freaking out saying i'm going to give myself diabetes via rapid hormonal changes, or damage beta cell receptors by trying this tater diet. 

I tried searching this thread for diabetes (no direct hits) and insulin (too many direct hits) so I figures I'd ask you guys for your thoughts on the front end. He's a fairly knowledgeable fella but I'd love it if one or both of you would be willing to spit a little science on the topic? Or perhaps link to a post you recall making on the topic already? 

Thanks in advance fellas. Doing some googling in the meantime.

I think in the current Otis thread there is a lot more information on this.  I think Maurile had a lot of good links, I can barely remember this thread but I'd like to know first how he thinks beta cells are damaged (what mechanism) and what hormones you mess up (be specific).  

I'm more inclined to think the potato diet works mostly by simply keeping you mostly full, keeping glycogen always at 100%, and thus sort of holding off hunger to a TDEE that is more in line with your baseline metabolism thus kicking off a big calorie deficit.  It's not rocket surgery.  

I've never been an insulin theory guy, so I'll have any number of things to cherry pick to refute whatever he has I just need to know what's his angle or what his main sources are.

 

[Keerock]

@culdeus @Maurile Tremblay

Sorry to tag you guys but running into a buddy who's freaking out saying i'm going to give myself diabetes via rapid hormonal changes, or damage beta cell receptors by trying this tater diet. 

I tried searching this thread for diabetes (no direct hits) and insulin (too many direct hits) so I figures I'd ask you guys for your thoughts on the front end. He's a fairly knowledgeable fella but I'd love it if one or both of you would be willing to spit a little science on the topic? Or perhaps link to a post you recall making on the topic already? 

Thanks in advance fellas. Doing some googling in the meantime.

Please go back to your old avatar.  TIA

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

@culdeus @Maurile Tremblay

Sorry to tag you guys but running into a buddy who's freaking out saying i'm going to give myself diabetes via rapid hormonal changes, or damage beta cell receptors by trying this tater diet. 

I tried searching this thread for diabetes (no direct hits) and insulin (too many direct hits) so I figures I'd ask you guys for your thoughts on the front end. He's a fairly knowledgeable fella but I'd love it if one or both of you would be willing to spit a little science on the topic? Or perhaps link to a post you recall making on the topic already? 

Thanks in advance fellas. Doing some googling in the meantime.

Anything that's wrong in fact is also wrong in theory.

While there hasn't been a big randomized controlled trial on the potato diet that I'm aware of, a number of people have done the diet for a prolonged period under medical supervision, and the results (so far as I am aware) have always included improved insulin sensitivity. It doesn't cause type-2 diabetes; it protects against (or reverses) type-2 diabetes.

Andrew Taylor was the most recent guy to do it. He ate nothing but potatoes (and flavor enhancers) for a full year. (The first few months were not medically supervised.) I'm not going to go through his entire videolog to find the ones including his test results, but his A1C went down on his diet, indicating better insulin sensitivity.

Before that, Chris Voigt ate only potatoes for 60 days, and his fasting glucose levels decreased, indicating improved insulin sensitivity. This is the article you want to read about that since Stephen Guyenet is about the most reliably accurate and reasonable food scientist I know of who writes for the general public.

The theory that plain baked or boiled potatoes cause type-2 diabetes could stand some revision.

(French fries, on the other hand...)

 

[[icon]]

Thanks @Maurile Tremblay! His response: 

"This holds zero credibility for me and it makes no sense logically or nutritionally (the full year). Until I se exercise scientists and nutritionists adopt this (and it's peer reviewed and accepted). I'm sorry I'm trying to keep an open mind but it's just so inherently flawed in it's logic that I can't see the other side" 

I kinda knew he'd take the "those sites arent credible so there's no science there approach, which i get given his general approach to these things. 

 

[NutterButter]

Thanks GB and thanks for the encouragement on MFP.

A tough stretch ahead.  I'm traveling for work for about the next 3 weeks, but doing my best.  On the flight over to Asia I usually get hammered; yesterday I had a light beer, skipped the bread and cookies and just ate the meat and veggies.  Last night at the hotel had a steak and exactly one glass of red wine; skipped the warm bread, good as it looked.  Got up at like 2am and went down to the hotel gym.  Basically doing the best I can under the circumstances.

I find this much harder than being at home.  I'm very much a creature of habit.  I find it so easy on a typical workday to have my coffee, have a salad or protein bar or apple for lunch, and come home and eat a normal healthy meal.  Routine makes it easy.  But when I'm out of that routine, and you're stuck in hotels and airports and wandering and grabbing whatever you can, or eating out big work meals and drinking, man, it's so easy to go off the wagon.  I'm going to try like hell the next couple weeks to start correcting and building some good habits in that area; I have realized that those things are never going to go away, and I'm never going to have the consistent daily routine, so my best bet, maybe my only bet, is to figure out how to do this on the road and with work stuff, because otherwise those things just become easy excuses.

-FATOATS

Do you really expect any of us to believe the bolded?

 

[culdeus]

Thanks @Maurile Tremblay! His response: 

"This holds zero credibility for me and it makes no sense logically or nutritionally (the full year). Until I se exercise scientists and nutritionists adopt this (and it's peer reviewed and accepted). I'm sorry I'm trying to keep an open mind but it's just so inherently flawed in it's logic that I can't see the other side" 

I kinda knew he'd take the "those sites arent credible so there's no science there approach, which i get given his general approach to these things. 

Here's the thing about potatoes.  They should make your blood sugar rise based on all the metrics associated with them, but they don't.  Ask any Type 1 Diabetic.  It's a extremely widely known fact that a plain baked potato has minimal impact on T1D sugars.  

Someday it will be figured out why this is true, nobody really knows right now though.  My guess is the actual glycemic index of potatoes is greatly exaggerated and really falls under the guidelines stating <70 is ideal.  

The entire GI is really based around the ratio of different sugars, and assigning mostly arbitrary values to those.  Would it be that big a shock if they got the ratios on one particular food wrong?  

 

[Otis]

Do you really expect any of us to believe the bolded?

It's actually true.  The weekends are the hard part.  My daily schedule is such that weekdays, when I'm home and not traveling, are actually pretty easy.

 

[NutterButter]

It's actually true.  The weekends are the hard part.  My daily schedule is such that weekdays, when I'm home and not traveling, are actually pretty easy.

I think you're forgetting to include the vats of alcohol you consume during the week.  If that was all you ate monday through friday, you could go off the rails on the weekend and not gain a pound.   You'd literally have a 5k calorie surplus heading into the weekend.   

ETA: Since I'm playing along tonight, I'll add that if the traveling is the problem, then just hit the gym hard while you're on the road the few weeks here and there.  You're probably staying at a really nice place that has a really nice gym.  You're not commuting and no kids to worry about so you should have the time.   Skip breakfast or have something light like blueberries, lunch, dinner and some light snacks in between like an apple or even a turkey sandwich.  You're probably eating at nice places so there should be some tasty options that aren't going to involve a bunch of fried crap.  This isn't rocket science baby.   

 

[NutterButter]

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B008GG9ZS8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This stuff is awesome with potatoes.   You're welcome.  

 

[Nugget]

This seems like it should be true, but it may not be. Getting a large fraction of your calories from a single food source can actually increase the diversity of bacteria in your microbiome. (Note: the n=1 experiment described in that link was done with potatoes. You probably wouldn't get the same result with, say, hot dogs.)

Anyone have experience adding potato starch to their diet and any positive or negative effects of their gut health?  Seems like resistant starch is somewhat beneficial but their is some debate between RS2 or RS3 being the main driver for feeding healthy gut bugs.  Interested in trying to get the benefits of RS and fiber while staying relatively low carb.