Anyone know what study this comes from?

I'm listening (oh it is torture folks!) to Dayspring & Taubes in the Specialty Health series on YouTube.  In the second video, Fat One, around 10:40 mark for context, Taubes says that a research group from UConn (Volek I presume) did a study that showed that you'll have more saturated fat in your bloodstream if you eat a high carb diet than if you eat saturated fats.  Anyone know what study he's referring to, and if this is indeed true?  Thanks!

Also, so I don't waste an entire post on just this, let me throw out another topic for discussion.  If sat fat is good for you and you need some of it (if you go back to around the 10 min mark you'll get this whole thing for context) ... why is high carb bad?  Your body makes "pure" sat fats out of the excesses it chooses to do so with.  

Our bodies make sat fats, cholesterol and glucose ... why is only the glucose bad in the mind of the low carber, or to be fair, sat fats & cholesterol to the low fatter?

Comments

Unknown said…
Perhaps this is it?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37202414/Volek_ProgLipidRes_2008.pdf

Dietary carbohydrate restriction induces a unique metabolic state positively affecting atherogenic dyslipidemia, fatty acid partitioning, and metabolic syndrome

http://rdfeinman.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/saturated-fat-on-your-plate-or-in-your-blood/
blogblog said…
Dietary carbohydrates and dietary fats affect the gut microbiota totally differently. High intakes of SFA encourage a pro-inflammatory microbiota profile. High carbohydrate intake (as real food) encourage an anti-inflammatory microbiota.

You can't look at diets without considering the gut microbiota. However this concept is largely ignored by the LC crowd.
Unknown said…
Blogblog, I'm curious about your statement that "high intakes" of saturated fatty acids encourage a pro-inflammatory microbiota profile. I'd love to read more about this if you wouldn't mind attaching your sources.

-M Scott
Josh said…
Not what he will be referring to but this study on liver fat used a low fat diet (fat-carb-protein) 16-61-19 and a high fat diet 56-31-13. Saturated fat was 28% of calories in high fat and 5% in low fat. Fasting insulin went down on the low fat diet and up on the high fat. There were no significant changes in fasting plasma glucose, serum FFA, LDL and HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, adiponectin, or liver enzymes. Saturated fatty acid content of serum phospholipids was 44.8 in low fat and 44.9 in high fat so basically the same.
Anonymous said…
I think it was this study. The last line is:

'Our results point to a suitable diet that had an emphasis on low carbohydrate
foods with fat sources emphasizing MUFA and n-3 PUFA (e.g., omega-3 eggs, avocado, salmon, sardines, meat, poultry, olive oil, canola oil, nuts and seeds) although there was little if any detriment in a higher saturated fat approach.'



Anonymous said…
Oh, yeah, the study. It's:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820932
Puddleg said…
In fact, reducing bacterial variety, to restore a better bunch of microbes later, is one of the benefits of LCHF, and one of the reasons that the path to safe starches often needs to run through ketosis.
See Lucas Tafur for the more nuanced version of blog blog's anserine comment.
Puddleg said…
Here: http://www.lucastafur.com/2012/07/nutritional-immunotherapy-dietary-fatty.html
blogblog said…
@George Hendersen,

"In fact, reducing bacterial variety, to restore a better bunch of microbes later, is one of the benefits of LCHF, and one of the reasons that the path to safe starches often needs to run through ketosis."

A LCHF merely changes the ratio of bacterioides and firmuctes present in the gut. A diet cannot eliminate many harmful bacteria such as C. difficle because they form spores which can persist for decades. As soon as simple carbohydrates are reintroduced to the diet the original inflammtory microbiota will re-establish within a few days.

A diet high in fruit and vegetables and low in refined carbohydrates will work far more effectively than a LCHF diet in reducing inflammation. This is because a high fibre diet will simultaneously suppress (inflammatory) firmicutes and promote (anti-inflammatory) bacteroiodes. A LCHF diet simply reduces overall bacteria counts without significantly changing the ratio of pro-inflamatory and anti-inflammatory species.

Starches are not particularly effective in restoring a healthy microbiota because they tend to encourage indiscriminate growth of bacteria.


My qualifications:

BAppSci (Food technology/Biotechnology)

MSc(Hons)Biotechnology (a PhD programme entry qualification).

GCertSci(HMS) [exercise science]
blogblog said…
The paper is absolute junk. It doesn't even properly describe the diets used. I'll hazard a guess that vegetable oil, protein powder and dextrose were used instead of actual food.

Lipids is a low impact factor journal.
rodeo said…
I think its this one from the same authors:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11745-007-3132-7/fulltext.html

"Total saturated fatty acids and 16:1n-7 were consistently decreased following the VLCKD."

And the whole study is pointless since the low carb group lost more weight. Silly.
rodeo said…
Blogblog, they did mention the composition of the diet in the study you are referring to:

"Composition of the experimental diets was developed using nutrient analysis software consisting of normal foods that differed only in the relative amount of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, but were matched for food type, energy, total fat, dietary fiber, trans fat, and cholesterol"
rodeo said…
And this as well:
"Predominant foods in the CRD-SFA were high-fat dairy (cream, butter, cheese, and low-carbohydrate milk), eggs, meat, poultry, and white fish, and a few low omega-3 nuts and seeds (such as almonds). In the CRD-UFA, predominant foods were liquid omega-3 PUFA eggs (Egg Creations, Burnbrae Farms Ltd, ON, Canada. Containing EPA, DPA and DHA), hard shell omega-3 eggs (high in ALA and DHA), salmon, sardines, meat, poultry, olive oil, canola oil, low-fat low-carbohydrate dairy, walnuts, and seeds. "
Unknown said…
Blogblog, your qualifications are dandy, but I would still like to see the citations supporting some of your statements, particularly the one about SFA promoting an inflammatory microbiota.

Substantiate your claims, brother!
blogblog said…
@rodeo,

'Predominant foods in the CRD-SFA were high-fat dairy (cream, butter, cheese, and low-carbohydrate milk), eggs, meat, poultry, and white fish, and a few low omega-3 nuts and seeds (such as almonds)..."

If you read the paper you will find the diets are ad lib and uncontrolled. The participants were merely counselled on what to eat. They were not provifded with food.
blogblog said…
@morgan,
"extraordinary claims require exttraordinary evidence". The LFHC people are making the extraordinary claims that contradict a vast body of evidence dating back over 60 years.

It is very apparent that most of the studies supporting LCHF are poor quality papers that been cherry-picked from relatively obscure journals. A balanced review of the literature doesn't provide the same results.

rodeo said…
I think you're mixing the studies up:

"Limited effect of dietary saturated fat on plasma saturated fat in the context of a low carbohydrate diet."

This is the one you called junk and where you claimed that the participants weren't given any actual food. My correction of you is regarding that study. These people were given actual food and asked not to eat anything else.

"Comparison of Low Fat and Low Carbohydrate Diets on Circulating Fatty Acid Composition and Markers of Inflammation"

In this study they were only counselled what to eat and, as I already stated, the low carbers lost more weight.
CarbSane said…
Thanks folks! I think Charles and rodeo have identified the study Taubes referred to in the video. Euler's study is, however, quite interesting, and the results somewhat more pertinent. As has been pointed out, the first study was a free-living weight loss study where the LC'ers lost more weight. The second study compared isocaloric high fat diets and is a feeding study.

Blogblog -- I very much enjoy a "clean" comment section without lots of deleted posts. Everyone double posts or changes their mind from time to time, but I've had to put far more of your deletions to spam in the past few days than I've had to over the past year! I even have word recognition off at the moment as Google has become increasingly difficult with their challenges so there should not be issues of duplicates and such. Also, while I enjoy tangential discussions, from which new blogging often flows, I don't see how your injection of gut microflora is in any way relevant here. Please folks (and this goes out to both bb & those challenging him) don't turn my comments section into a platform for arguments that have originated elsewhere.
Anonymous said…
Taubes said: '...did a study that showed that you'll have more saturated fat in your bloodstream if you eat a high carb diet than if you eat saturated fats. '

You have two UConn studies. Did either of those show that you have more saturated fat in your bloodstream eating high-carb than if you eat saturated fats?

What did I miss, reading the studies? Did the people who ate low-fat (I'm guessing that equates to 'high carb' here) end up having more saturated fatty acids in serum?
CarbSane said…
I plan to address this further, but in a nutshell, NO. This claim is not supported by either study. The weight loss study seemed to indicate that the sat fat content of fasting trigs (mostly VLDL) was lower in the fat eaters than the carb eaters with some implications that DNL from carbs played a role in this. There was no effort to evaluate circulating sat fats over a 24 hr period, however. I'm not sure that's relevant, but if you're going to hang your hat on this stuff, you betchyer butt it is!
Anonymous said…
I didn't think so but I thought - must be me!