Summary of the Diet and Health Ideas of Karl Denninger

A guest post by Joseph Friedlander
Warning: a long article, (3500 words or so) with opinions
(not all of them mine!) . A quick summary is available below if you don’t like controversy.
Summary:  Karl
Denninger’s key finding is that fast to digest carbohydrates can act as an
addictive drug and even slow to digest carbohydrates can hugely boost hunger
while a moderate protein and fat to taste diet with very low carbs kills your
hunger and results in satiation at below maintenance levels for
overweight:  And thus causes reasonably
rapid net weight loss.
 Once detoxed from
carb addiction your body finds a healthy weight and maintains it with almost no
active effort.
Those trying to follow official government recommendations
of a low fat, higher carb diet are torn by hunger for more carbs, usually
overeat (if part of the bell curve of people having trouble controlling carb
hunger) and end up overweight.  
Enough systemic overeating and overweight poisons the
body’s insulin response and can result in diabetes, heart problems and other
such troubles.
By giving inappropriate advice, Denninger believes the
government/medical/industrial complex has caused many many deaths.
Denninger also believes that many substances used heavily
for food additives since World War I (and certainly World War 2) such as
hydrogenated oils, synthetic additives etc are not as safe as the government
and the food industry would have us believe and result in cravings and bodily
damage. He recommends butter over margarine, olive oil over seed oils, etc. 

(end summary)
Karl Denninger’s site market-ticker.org has carried some of
his amateur scientific work (ironically he might not regard it as such) in
redefining what really works and what is probably professionally generated
nonsense in the areas of diet, weight loss and exercise.
 I ran across his
site while searching for other data, but his various articles concerning diet
and health, exercise and fitness are probably worthy of summary here all on
their own.
This Next Big Future blog covers topics related to the
future and of course while it is fun to speculate about the futures that will
happen long after you are dead, it is even more fun to live long enough to
encounter them yourself, in good health (and not perched up like a wheezing
land whale on an electric cart).
So a certain minimum good personal health and fitness are
relevant even to NBF readers.
Given that your body has a certain natural expiration date,
abuse and overweight can easily pull the plug decades early. And as you age you
tend to slow down and pounds (and kilos) crawl on, so sooner or later, even if
you are young now, this will be of interest.
Karl’s articles outlining his experimental process where he
cut through official claims and disregarded apparently very formidable looking
governmental pronouncements are a manifestation of the meaning of the old Royal
Society motto, ‘nullius in verba” (nothing in mere words), or to quote the
Royal Society history page https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
The Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in verba’ roughly
translates as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the
determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify
all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.
Wiki on the Royal Society. A key part of the history of
the first age of science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
The ‘invisible college’ of people trading real health and
exercise experimental data back and forth across the internet around the
gridlocked peer-reviewed mess that may have killed many people through
generations of bad dietary advice is a throwback to an earlier scientific age
and –perhaps—a harbinger of a third debureaucratized age of science.
This might sound like an extreme reaction to one guy’s
before and after diet pictures and a description of the process by which he
figured out what was going on with his body (why weight gain when following
official advice was nearly inevitable, and why something against official
guidelines worked)—but given the vast epidemic of obesity and diabetes which is
probably taking millions of lives a year world wide (because many other
countries follow the US Government lead) —it is literally a life and death issue
of sorts.
 If we had a air
traffic control system that allowed merely a thousand people a year to die
needlessly you would not hear the end of it. Why should a health advice
governmental/scientific structure that results in such mortality rates not be
fair game for modification?
(Dr. Bruce Charlton has documented the sort of peer review
gridlock that may have produced the official pronouncements that Karl Denninger
has (in his own person) operationally disproved—in his mini-book http://thestoryofscience.blogspot.co.il/
Sample quote :

Credit is given for the mere act of a ‘peer
reviewed’ publication regardless of whether the stuff is true and useful – or
false and harmful. 
It has been since supplemented by this newer edition:
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
Sample quote:
Hence the vast structures of personnel and resources that
constitute modern ‘science’ are not real science but instead merely a
professional research bureaucracy, thus fake or pseudo-science; regulated by
peer review (that is, committee opinion) rather than the search-for and
service-to reality. Among the consequences are that modern publications in the
research literature must be assumed to be worthless or misleading and
should always be ignored.
Dr. Charlton places the end of the first age of science
around 1950, in the several generations since then the official structures (and
funding) have grown beyond dreams, but we have not reaped comparable gains. See
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
for Dr. Charlton’s feelings why not. )
I have appended the data on Dr. Charlton’s hypothesis here
simply because my first reaction to official governmental dietary
recommendations such as thesehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides
being WRONG was utter disbelief.
When I was a kid (1960s) I heard statements along the line
of, ‘the government knows best’,  ‘the
government knows what is doing’, ‘let government experts handle it and let the
amateurs go home’ and so forth.
 Individuals can make
mistakes, even go bad, but huge incorruptible government organizations?  How could such a thing happen?   (Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture  Better to believe that it was impossible…
The disbelief was akin to the idea that the government would
deliberately misstate true levels of unemployment and inflation in real cost of
living for its own convenience. Release false statistics?
 Perhaps not
intentionally. But with enough twisting of facts (a guy unemployed 5 years
is no longer considered unemployed; soaring prices in what you would eat aren’t
really inflation if you will substitute equivalents)
the official version
no longer matches reality.
Something like that has happened in the official dietary
advice (the old food pyramid etc) and in the peer reviewed publications. 
I hope to follow this article up with a future one detailing
my own diet process. Until I read Denninger I never understood why I could lose
weight (serious amounts about 5 times in my lifetime) yet it always came back.
Now I know the mechanism by which the fat creeps back, (carb generated hunger
spikes) and thanks to Karl for pointing it out.
Now on to a summary of Karl Denninger’s points, often
condensed here to save space and to ease the reader’s task. (And frankly, Karl
sometimes uses impertinent language so don’t follow the links unless prepared
to be sandblasted with rough words sometimes….)
In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)
  • Denninger,
    with pictures, shows his 60 lb loss from 210 to 150, and comments how his
    lifestyle change does not change back after years and no he has not put
    the weight back on. 
  • What
    he is saying is, if you aim to get out of an obesity state, you can’t just
    ‘go on a diet’ and then go off it, you have to change the way you eat.
In this article, Karl makes these
points: (Paraphrased)
  • The
    so-called “food pyramid” was never created by scientific inquiry
    – but with what Karl charges was agribusiness influence and outright
    government corruption.
  • Fat in
    food does not make you fat.   It
    calms body hunger.
  • Easily-digested
    carbohydrates, make you fat because the body can only have so much
    glycogen in reserve at one time. 
    After that, it goes straight to fat to keep you from dying from
    excess blood sugar.
  • The
    consequent insulin response makes you hungry after eating carbs. If the
    bag of pretzels is still there you probably will finish it.
  • People
    who eat low carb all the time have low glycogen reserves and no hunger.
    This shows that it’s the carb spike that leads to hunger response, not the
    hunger response to glycogen reserve level.
  • If you
    eat when glycogen reserves are full, it goes, as stated above, straight to
    fat.
  • The
    low fat version of foods with extra tasty carbs (sugar, corn syrup, grains
    etc) will make you first ravenous and then fat. Counter-intuitive but
    easily testable.
  •  Processed seed and vegetable oils  very high in Omega-6 fatty acids
    are a new thing on a mass scale in the last hundred years or so and can cause
    systemic inflammation in the body.  This
    is very bad if the inflammation is in your coronary arteries.  Many post World War 2 food solutions
    are charged by Mr Denninger  to be
    essentially slow poisons.
  •  (Link to
    outside essay on these oils http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/vegoil.html)
  •  You can’t
    count calories accurately enough to maintain your weight. But your body can and
    will unless you mess it up with chemicals and carb related strike-counterstrike
    phenomenae.
  •   A pound of
    body fat is around 3600 calories. If off counting by 100 calories a day
    (impossible outside a controlled lab setting) you could gain a pound of fat a
    month or so. After 10 years you could gain 100 lbs—or the reverse, you might
    suddenly look alarmingly thin.
  •  This does not happen if you eat a diet that
    does not blow away the body’s ability to regulate your eating through hunger
    and satiety signals.
  •   Mr
    Denninger’s weight has not varied more than 5 pounds in 3 years—and he does not
    count calories. He just has a list of foods he won’t eat, and he eats according
    to his rules whenever he is hungry. 
    This is a net accuracy of 20-50 calories a day, impossible on a
    conscious level essentially proving his point.
  •   A normal
    body has just a teaspoon of sugar in the blood stream at any time.

  • In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)
  •   Denninger’s diet cuts back most
    carbohydrates and grains,  (0 to 100
    grams of carbs a day usually under 50—and never fast carbs like bread and
    sugar.
  •    Results included drastically reduced
    hunger. Especially when Karl ate more saturated fats, which he regards as
    perfectly healthy despite official pronouncements and gives evidence in his
    writings.
  •    He eliminated vegetable and hydrogenated
    fats except olive oil.
  •   In his belief fast carbs are an addictive
    drug.
  •   This addiction leads to obesity, which
    can in extreme forms cause damage to the insulin response system, possible
    diabetes, amputation, blindness and death in extreme cases.  Drugs can slow this (at vast expense) but
    not shield against it. 
  •   Eating right can stop new damage slowly
    cumulative damage may be partially healed. 
    But you will be in much better health as age sets in and benefit
    accordingly.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229286

  •        Denninger
    (paraphrased):          “The lipid
    hypothesis, that cardiovascular disease was caused by high serum (that is,
    blood) cholesterol levels and that was caused by eating a high-fat diet which
    is the predicate upon which all “cholesterol modification” therapies
    rest is at best questionable.”
  •         Quote:
    “Since there are only three forms of food — carbohydrate, protein and fat, if
    you eat less fat you must eat more of either protein or carbohydrate.  Very large amounts of protein are both
    extremely expensive and known to be tough on the kidneys, so the shift was
    obvious — toward carbohydrates.  The
    agricultural lobby pressed for and furthered this and then added on to it
    extremely cheap sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup.  You see, when you remove fat from food it
    tends to taste like cardboard, so sugar in its various forms was substituted.”

In this article, Karl makes these points:
(Paraphrased)

  •   Type 2
    diabetes has a strong correlation with obesity which appears to be triggered by
    consuming more than a very minimal amount of fast carbs like grains sugars etc.
  •   The US
    Government has promoted consumption of these very carbs,  including high-fructose corn syrup, which
    functionally is like an addictive drug for a considerable percentage of
    the  population.
  •    Indeed the
    very suggestion of going to a near zero carb diet causes panic, people
    literally say they ‘can’t give up their carbs’.  But not, its’s not addictive, why would you say that?
  •     Some near
    diabetic people who have gotten carbs out of their diets have entirely
    stabilized their blood sugar without drugs.
  • In the comments here:
  •   Reader
    Toujourpret volunteers it takes about 2 weeks for the carb to no-carb
    transition to occur. You go through hell those first 2 weeks but it is worth it
    once you break through. The hunger goes away and the pounds drop off.
  •   Karl:  ”White rice has a glycemic index of
    approximately 90, which is damn close to table sugar and worse (materially so)
    than a waffle, white bread or soda crackers! Indeed, it’s HIGHER in glycemic
    index than a cheese pizza and roughly the same in this regard as mashed
    potatoes.”
  •   The
    classical Asian peasant diet of rice (just enough to keep hunger at bay but not
    away) with near zero fat –is commented on. Not having more they didn’t overeat,
    despite the addictive nature of carbs. 
    In the prosperity of the last decades, with much more rice (and fat to
    fry it in) being available even to the less well off Asian, obesity and
    diabetes has exploded.
  •  A high fat
    diet is self regulating (you get satiated) a high carb diet is addictive and
    essentially a gateway to overeating, obesity and health problems.
  •  Reader Jackl
    comments that in the ancient feast and famine economy, the availability of
    carbs and the carb hunger spike were the signal to store food for the next
    starvation season—but now we carb feast 12/365 and wonder why we get weight
    problems.
  •   Outside link
    to a couple that rowed across the Pacific on a high fat diet and were almost
    never hungry –amazingly their hunger went away because of the ‘fat hunger off
    switch’ of satiation.
    http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/excursions/post/husband-wife-row-pacific-ocean-high-fat-diet/

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229092

In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)
  • If
    those with Type 2 diabetes dropped carbs from their diet except for 100
    grams a day with less than 10 of that being sugar starch and grains (ie
    fast carbohydrates) and 90 grams or more in green vegetables most would
    stop being obese and would have sugar levels drop to near or (actual
    normal) and most literally would not require much if any medication.
  
  • Before
    insulin, people would  consume less
    than 8% of total caloric load from carbs and most of the rest from
    fat.  The alternative was to die.Eat
    zero or near-zero carbohydrates and instead do eat high fat,
    moderate-protein with the balance being green vegetables such that you
    consume 8% of your total dietary caloric load from carbohydrate and most
    of the rest from fat.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=225953

      In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)

        • The
          human state in nature 5,000 years ago influences our relationship between
          body and food today
        • There
          were seasons for food, vegetables and fruits were varying and unreliable,
          protein and fats were constant (hunting)
        • Synthetic
          chemicals were obviously unknown, 
          Quote:” no transfats, no vegetable oils, no hydrogenated anything
          and no processed grains of any sort.  In
          other words all of the things that spike your insulin response today did not
          exist — all of the so-called “fast carbohydrates” are modern
          inventions. In other words the insulin spike caused by modern eating is
          biologically abnormal. Want to fight God? 
          Go right ahead….”
        • Karl
          was losing athletic ability a few years ago, body mass and waistline
          increasing etc.  A clear path to
          overweight and dysfunction in old age.
        • He had
          a long history of heel striking when running, a spare tire while eating
          normally, and all the ‘professional’ and ‘official advice was useless. He
          could govern himself with diligence and force a temporary diet and burst
          of exercise and go down 10 lbs but when he followed the experts’ advice he
          regained whatever he lost.
        • He
          came to the conclusion that 210 pounds had to become 150 pounds or he weas
          going to be 300 pounds by the time he was 70.
        • He
          knew that the human body does not react to the kind of standard advice
          being given out by professionals who assert they know what they are doing
          and are using governmental regulations.
        • What
          they are trying to recommend simply does not work. It fights the way the
          body reacts.  Most diets fail
          because of this.  You are fighting
          the way the body is wired.
        • When
          you eat items with a high glycemic index (grains, sugars, other fast
          carbs) your body spikes insulin production and the system is stressed,
          being forced to stockpile fat to lower blood sugar.
        • Your
          hunger response is not abated by this stockpile of fat: You don’t receive
          a hunger off signal. 
          It amplifies the amounts of things you eat that you were not designed to
          eat.
        • Quote
          from Karl:
        • “How
          did I figure this out?  I started
          thinking for myself and integrating what we all learn and in fact know to
          be true and when that conflicted with the so-called “conventional
          wisdom” I decided to err on the side of that which we had
          scientifically proved instead of what someone with a lot of letters after
          their name was pontificating on.”
        • In
          other words, ‘Nullius in verba’ –an actual scientific attitude (see
          top of article).
        • Not
          only did Karl recast the dietary advice he got but also the shoe selection
          advice he got from experts— the so-called “running shoes” were
          trying to prevent the very heel striking 
          that gave him signal feedback to avoid the true cause of the hurt
          to his legs, the shock loads hitting the joints instead of the calf
          muscles.  He got (modified quote)
          “”Five Fingers” shoes (that avoided this problem—JF) and
          began the “Couch to 5k” program” …I got rid of all processed
          foods and began eating a high-fat, low-carbohydrate (vegetables and a few
          fruits only), moderate-protein diet. 
          No hydrogenated anything, no sugars, no processed grains.  The simple filter before it went down
          the pie hole was this: if it didn’t exist 5,000 years ago don’t eat it.”
        The results picture at http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229072
        speaks for itself.
        In summary, most people try to lose weight by making a
        high-maintenance strainful diet 
        according to the advice of the experts which reaps quick weight loss
        gains but is almost certainly too much effort to maintain especially once the
        weight goal has been attained (or when work stress hits, etc).  When the ‘thin behavior’ faking goes away,
        the fat reforms onto the body.
           By constrast, what
        Karl Denninger did was make a true low maintenance lifestyle change– he
        altered his fat-causing behavior and the resultant fat melted away in less than
        a year and it has kept off from years since—and he literally does not count
        calories but eats when hungry and stops when full. 
            The test of a
        theory is the power to predict.  Someone
        who follows the official advice is a very poor prospect to lose weight and keep
        it off. Someone who follows Denninger’s dietary advice and makes a lifestyle
        change in terms of eating habits will tend to keep thin effortlessly.
             What would be
        fun would be an official governmental study with a third of the participants
        following official governmental dietary advice, a third for a control group,
        and a third following Karl’s prescription. If honestly run, it would probably
        prove that the perfect diet (by government standards) that you don’t or can’t
        stick to is the enemy of the good diet that gets you where you want to go.

        If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks

        Summary of the Diet and Health Ideas of Karl Denninger

        A guest post by Joseph Friedlander
        Warning: a long article, (3500 words or so) with opinions
        (not all of them mine!) . A quick summary is available below if you don’t like controversy.
        Summary:  Karl
        Denninger’s key finding is that fast to digest carbohydrates can act as an
        addictive drug and even slow to digest carbohydrates can hugely boost hunger
        while a moderate protein and fat to taste diet with very low carbs kills your
        hunger and results in satiation at below maintenance levels for
        overweight:  And thus causes reasonably
        rapid net weight loss.
         Once detoxed from
        carb addiction your body finds a healthy weight and maintains it with almost no
        active effort.
        Those trying to follow official government recommendations
        of a low fat, higher carb diet are torn by hunger for more carbs, usually
        overeat (if part of the bell curve of people having trouble controlling carb
        hunger) and end up overweight.  
        Enough systemic overeating and overweight poisons the
        body’s insulin response and can result in diabetes, heart problems and other
        such troubles.
        By giving inappropriate advice, Denninger believes the
        government/medical/industrial complex has caused many many deaths.
        Denninger also believes that many substances used heavily
        for food additives since World War I (and certainly World War 2) such as
        hydrogenated oils, synthetic additives etc are not as safe as the government
        and the food industry would have us believe and result in cravings and bodily
        damage. He recommends butter over margarine, olive oil over seed oils, etc. 

        (end summary)
        Karl Denninger’s site market-ticker.org has carried some of
        his amateur scientific work (ironically he might not regard it as such) in
        redefining what really works and what is probably professionally generated
        nonsense in the areas of diet, weight loss and exercise.
         I ran across his
        site while searching for other data, but his various articles concerning diet
        and health, exercise and fitness are probably worthy of summary here all on
        their own.
        This Next Big Future blog covers topics related to the
        future and of course while it is fun to speculate about the futures that will
        happen long after you are dead, it is even more fun to live long enough to
        encounter them yourself, in good health (and not perched up like a wheezing
        land whale on an electric cart).
        So a certain minimum good personal health and fitness are
        relevant even to NBF readers.
        Given that your body has a certain natural expiration date,
        abuse and overweight can easily pull the plug decades early. And as you age you
        tend to slow down and pounds (and kilos) crawl on, so sooner or later, even if
        you are young now, this will be of interest.
        Karl’s articles outlining his experimental process where he
        cut through official claims and disregarded apparently very formidable looking
        governmental pronouncements are a manifestation of the meaning of the old Royal
        Society motto, ‘nullius in verba” (nothing in mere words), or to quote the
        Royal Society history page https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
        The Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in verba’ roughly
        translates as ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the
        determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify
        all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.
        Wiki on the Royal Society. A key part of the history of
        the first age of science.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
        The ‘invisible college’ of people trading real health and
        exercise experimental data back and forth across the internet around the
        gridlocked peer-reviewed mess that may have killed many people through
        generations of bad dietary advice is a throwback to an earlier scientific age
        and –perhaps—a harbinger of a third debureaucratized age of science.
        This might sound like an extreme reaction to one guy’s
        before and after diet pictures and a description of the process by which he
        figured out what was going on with his body (why weight gain when following
        official advice was nearly inevitable, and why something against official
        guidelines worked)—but given the vast epidemic of obesity and diabetes which is
        probably taking millions of lives a year world wide (because many other
        countries follow the US Government lead) —it is literally a life and death issue
        of sorts.
         If we had a air
        traffic control system that allowed merely a thousand people a year to die
        needlessly you would not hear the end of it. Why should a health advice
        governmental/scientific structure that results in such mortality rates not be
        fair game for modification?
        (Dr. Bruce Charlton has documented the sort of peer review
        gridlock that may have produced the official pronouncements that Karl Denninger
        has (in his own person) operationally disproved—in his mini-book http://thestoryofscience.blogspot.co.il/
        Sample quote :

        Credit is given for the mere act of a ‘peer
        reviewed’ publication regardless of whether the stuff is true and useful – or
        false and harmful. 
        It has been since supplemented by this newer edition:
        http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
        Sample quote:
        Hence the vast structures of personnel and resources that
        constitute modern ‘science’ are not real science but instead merely a
        professional research bureaucracy, thus fake or pseudo-science; regulated by
        peer review (that is, committee opinion) rather than the search-for and
        service-to reality. Among the consequences are that modern publications in the
        research literature must be assumed to be worthless or misleading and
        should always be ignored.
        Dr. Charlton places the end of the first age of science
        around 1950, in the several generations since then the official structures (and
        funding) have grown beyond dreams, but we have not reaped comparable gains. See
        http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/
        for Dr. Charlton’s feelings why not. )
        I have appended the data on Dr. Charlton’s hypothesis here
        simply because my first reaction to official governmental dietary
        recommendations such as thesehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_USDA_nutrition_guides
        being WRONG was utter disbelief.
        When I was a kid (1960s) I heard statements along the line
        of, ‘the government knows best’,  ‘the
        government knows what is doing’, ‘let government experts handle it and let the
        amateurs go home’ and so forth.
         Individuals can make
        mistakes, even go bad, but huge incorruptible government organizations?  How could such a thing happen?   (Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture  Better to believe that it was impossible…
        The disbelief was akin to the idea that the government would
        deliberately misstate true levels of unemployment and inflation in real cost of
        living for its own convenience. Release false statistics?
         Perhaps not
        intentionally. But with enough twisting of facts (a guy unemployed 5 years
        is no longer considered unemployed; soaring prices in what you would eat aren’t
        really inflation if you will substitute equivalents)
        the official version
        no longer matches reality.
        Something like that has happened in the official dietary
        advice (the old food pyramid etc) and in the peer reviewed publications. 
        I hope to follow this article up with a future one detailing
        my own diet process. Until I read Denninger I never understood why I could lose
        weight (serious amounts about 5 times in my lifetime) yet it always came back.
        Now I know the mechanism by which the fat creeps back, (carb generated hunger
        spikes) and thanks to Karl for pointing it out.
        Now on to a summary of Karl Denninger’s points, often
        condensed here to save space and to ease the reader’s task. (And frankly, Karl
        sometimes uses impertinent language so don’t follow the links unless prepared
        to be sandblasted with rough words sometimes….)
        In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)
        • Denninger,
          with pictures, shows his 60 lb loss from 210 to 150, and comments how his
          lifestyle change does not change back after years and no he has not put
          the weight back on. 
        • What
          he is saying is, if you aim to get out of an obesity state, you can’t just
          ‘go on a diet’ and then go off it, you have to change the way you eat.
        In this article, Karl makes these
        points: (Paraphrased)
        • The
          so-called “food pyramid” was never created by scientific inquiry
          – but with what Karl charges was agribusiness influence and outright
          government corruption.
        • Fat in
          food does not make you fat.   It
          calms body hunger.
        • Easily-digested
          carbohydrates, make you fat because the body can only have so much
          glycogen in reserve at one time. 
          After that, it goes straight to fat to keep you from dying from
          excess blood sugar.
        • The
          consequent insulin response makes you hungry after eating carbs. If the
          bag of pretzels is still there you probably will finish it.
        • People
          who eat low carb all the time have low glycogen reserves and no hunger.
          This shows that it’s the carb spike that leads to hunger response, not the
          hunger response to glycogen reserve level.
        • If you
          eat when glycogen reserves are full, it goes, as stated above, straight to
          fat.
        • The
          low fat version of foods with extra tasty carbs (sugar, corn syrup, grains
          etc) will make you first ravenous and then fat. Counter-intuitive but
          easily testable.
        •  Processed seed and vegetable oils  very high in Omega-6 fatty acids
          are a new thing on a mass scale in the last hundred years or so and can cause
          systemic inflammation in the body.  This
          is very bad if the inflammation is in your coronary arteries.  Many post World War 2 food solutions
          are charged by Mr Denninger  to be
          essentially slow poisons.
        •  (Link to
          outside essay on these oils http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/vegoil.html)
        •  You can’t
          count calories accurately enough to maintain your weight. But your body can and
          will unless you mess it up with chemicals and carb related strike-counterstrike
          phenomenae.
        •   A pound of
          body fat is around 3600 calories. If off counting by 100 calories a day
          (impossible outside a controlled lab setting) you could gain a pound of fat a
          month or so. After 10 years you could gain 100 lbs—or the reverse, you might
          suddenly look alarmingly thin.
        •  This does not happen if you eat a diet that
          does not blow away the body’s ability to regulate your eating through hunger
          and satiety signals.
        •   Mr
          Denninger’s weight has not varied more than 5 pounds in 3 years—and he does not
          count calories. He just has a list of foods he won’t eat, and he eats according
          to his rules whenever he is hungry. 
          This is a net accuracy of 20-50 calories a day, impossible on a
          conscious level essentially proving his point.
        •   A normal
          body has just a teaspoon of sugar in the blood stream at any time.

        • In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)
        •   Denninger’s diet cuts back most
          carbohydrates and grains,  (0 to 100
          grams of carbs a day usually under 50—and never fast carbs like bread and
          sugar.
        •    Results included drastically reduced
          hunger. Especially when Karl ate more saturated fats, which he regards as
          perfectly healthy despite official pronouncements and gives evidence in his
          writings.
        •    He eliminated vegetable and hydrogenated
          fats except olive oil.
        •   In his belief fast carbs are an addictive
          drug.
        •   This addiction leads to obesity, which
          can in extreme forms cause damage to the insulin response system, possible
          diabetes, amputation, blindness and death in extreme cases.  Drugs can slow this (at vast expense) but
          not shield against it. 
        •   Eating right can stop new damage slowly
          cumulative damage may be partially healed. 
          But you will be in much better health as age sets in and benefit
          accordingly.

        http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229286

        •        Denninger
          (paraphrased):          “The lipid
          hypothesis, that cardiovascular disease was caused by high serum (that is,
          blood) cholesterol levels and that was caused by eating a high-fat diet which
          is the predicate upon which all “cholesterol modification” therapies
          rest is at best questionable.”
        •         Quote:
          “Since there are only three forms of food — carbohydrate, protein and fat, if
          you eat less fat you must eat more of either protein or carbohydrate.  Very large amounts of protein are both
          extremely expensive and known to be tough on the kidneys, so the shift was
          obvious — toward carbohydrates.  The
          agricultural lobby pressed for and furthered this and then added on to it
          extremely cheap sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup.  You see, when you remove fat from food it
          tends to taste like cardboard, so sugar in its various forms was substituted.”

        In this article, Karl makes these points:
        (Paraphrased)

        •   Type 2
          diabetes has a strong correlation with obesity which appears to be triggered by
          consuming more than a very minimal amount of fast carbs like grains sugars etc.
        •   The US
          Government has promoted consumption of these very carbs,  including high-fructose corn syrup, which
          functionally is like an addictive drug for a considerable percentage of
          the  population.
        •    Indeed the
          very suggestion of going to a near zero carb diet causes panic, people
          literally say they ‘can’t give up their carbs’.  But not, its’s not addictive, why would you say that?
        •     Some near
          diabetic people who have gotten carbs out of their diets have entirely
          stabilized their blood sugar without drugs.
        • In the comments here:
        •   Reader
          Toujourpret volunteers it takes about 2 weeks for the carb to no-carb
          transition to occur. You go through hell those first 2 weeks but it is worth it
          once you break through. The hunger goes away and the pounds drop off.
        •   Karl:  ”White rice has a glycemic index of
          approximately 90, which is damn close to table sugar and worse (materially so)
          than a waffle, white bread or soda crackers! Indeed, it’s HIGHER in glycemic
          index than a cheese pizza and roughly the same in this regard as mashed
          potatoes.”
        •   The
          classical Asian peasant diet of rice (just enough to keep hunger at bay but not
          away) with near zero fat –is commented on. Not having more they didn’t overeat,
          despite the addictive nature of carbs. 
          In the prosperity of the last decades, with much more rice (and fat to
          fry it in) being available even to the less well off Asian, obesity and
          diabetes has exploded.
        •  A high fat
          diet is self regulating (you get satiated) a high carb diet is addictive and
          essentially a gateway to overeating, obesity and health problems.
        •  Reader Jackl
          comments that in the ancient feast and famine economy, the availability of
          carbs and the carb hunger spike were the signal to store food for the next
          starvation season—but now we carb feast 12/365 and wonder why we get weight
          problems.
        •   Outside link
          to a couple that rowed across the Pacific on a high fat diet and were almost
          never hungry –amazingly their hunger went away because of the ‘fat hunger off
          switch’ of satiation.
          http://www.grindtv.com/outdoor/excursions/post/husband-wife-row-pacific-ocean-high-fat-diet/

        http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229092

        In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)
        • If
          those with Type 2 diabetes dropped carbs from their diet except for 100
          grams a day with less than 10 of that being sugar starch and grains (ie
          fast carbohydrates) and 90 grams or more in green vegetables most would
          stop being obese and would have sugar levels drop to near or (actual
          normal) and most literally would not require much if any medication.
          
        • Before
          insulin, people would  consume less
          than 8% of total caloric load from carbs and most of the rest from
          fat.  The alternative was to die.Eat
          zero or near-zero carbohydrates and instead do eat high fat,
          moderate-protein with the balance being green vegetables such that you
          consume 8% of your total dietary caloric load from carbohydrate and most
          of the rest from fat.

        http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=225953

            In this article, Karl makes these points: (Paraphrased)

              • The
                human state in nature 5,000 years ago influences our relationship between
                body and food today
              • There
                were seasons for food, vegetables and fruits were varying and unreliable,
                protein and fats were constant (hunting)
              • Synthetic
                chemicals were obviously unknown, 
                Quote:” no transfats, no vegetable oils, no hydrogenated anything
                and no processed grains of any sort.  In
                other words all of the things that spike your insulin response today did not
                exist — all of the so-called “fast carbohydrates” are modern
                inventions. In other words the insulin spike caused by modern eating is
                biologically abnormal. Want to fight God? 
                Go right ahead….”
              • Karl
                was losing athletic ability a few years ago, body mass and waistline
                increasing etc.  A clear path to
                overweight and dysfunction in old age.
              • He had
                a long history of heel striking when running, a spare tire while eating
                normally, and all the ‘professional’ and ‘official advice was useless. He
                could govern himself with diligence and force a temporary diet and burst
                of exercise and go down 10 lbs but when he followed the experts’ advice he
                regained whatever he lost.
              • He
                came to the conclusion that 210 pounds had to become 150 pounds or he weas
                going to be 300 pounds by the time he was 70.
              • He
                knew that the human body does not react to the kind of standard advice
                being given out by professionals who assert they know what they are doing
                and are using governmental regulations.
              • What
                they are trying to recommend simply does not work. It fights the way the
                body reacts.  Most diets fail
                because of this.  You are fighting
                the way the body is wired.
              • When
                you eat items with a high glycemic index (grains, sugars, other fast
                carbs) your body spikes insulin production and the system is stressed,
                being forced to stockpile fat to lower blood sugar.
              • Your
                hunger response is not abated by this stockpile of fat: You don’t receive
                a hunger off signal. 
                It amplifies the amounts of things you eat that you were not designed to
                eat.
              • Quote
                from Karl:
              • “How
                did I figure this out?  I started
                thinking for myself and integrating what we all learn and in fact know to
                be true and when that conflicted with the so-called “conventional
                wisdom” I decided to err on the side of that which we had
                scientifically proved instead of what someone with a lot of letters after
                their name was pontificating on.”
              • In
                other words, ‘Nullius in verba’ –an actual scientific attitude (see
                top of article).
              • Not
                only did Karl recast the dietary advice he got but also the shoe selection
                advice he got from experts— the so-called “running shoes” were
                trying to prevent the very heel striking 
                that gave him signal feedback to avoid the true cause of the hurt
                to his legs, the shock loads hitting the joints instead of the calf
                muscles.  He got (modified quote)
                “”Five Fingers” shoes (that avoided this problem—JF) and
                began the “Couch to 5k” program” …I got rid of all processed
                foods and began eating a high-fat, low-carbohydrate (vegetables and a few
                fruits only), moderate-protein diet. 
                No hydrogenated anything, no sugars, no processed grains.  The simple filter before it went down
                the pie hole was this: if it didn’t exist 5,000 years ago don’t eat it.”
              The results picture at http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229072
              speaks for itself.
              In summary, most people try to lose weight by making a
              high-maintenance strainful diet 
              according to the advice of the experts which reaps quick weight loss
              gains but is almost certainly too much effort to maintain especially once the
              weight goal has been attained (or when work stress hits, etc).  When the ‘thin behavior’ faking goes away,
              the fat reforms onto the body.
                 By constrast, what
              Karl Denninger did was make a true low maintenance lifestyle change– he
              altered his fat-causing behavior and the resultant fat melted away in less than
              a year and it has kept off from years since—and he literally does not count
              calories but eats when hungry and stops when full. 
                  The test of a
              theory is the power to predict.  Someone
              who follows the official advice is a very poor prospect to lose weight and keep
              it off. Someone who follows Denninger’s dietary advice and makes a lifestyle
              change in terms of eating habits will tend to keep thin effortlessly.
                   What would be
              fun would be an official governmental study with a third of the participants
              following official governmental dietary advice, a third for a control group,
              and a third following Karl’s prescription. If honestly run, it would probably
              prove that the perfect diet (by government standards) that you don’t or can’t
              stick to is the enemy of the good diet that gets you where you want to go.

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