Here's an Experiment I'd Like to See

Ahh, well Jimmy Moore has posted his 90 day update on his nutritional ketosis experiment.  While he's refusing to divulge his menus until the 180 day experiment is complete (wanna bet he writes a book about the experience and stupid people will buy it?) he did finally post a typical meal complete with "recipe" and pictures. Why anyone is even interested in mimicking his foods is beyond me, but that's besides the point.

Here's a "meal", I've added Charles' calorie estimates from nutritiondata.com

direct image link

JIMMY MOORE’S KETO EGGS
4-5 pastured eggs (large eggs = 284-355 calories)
2-3 oz grass-fed butter and/or coconut oil (2-3 oz butter = 402-603 calories, 2-3 oz coconut oil = 482-723 calories) )
Sea salt,  Parsley (or your favorite spice)
2 oz full-fat cheese (optional) (2-3 oz cheddar cheese = 226-339 calories)
2 Tbs Trinity Hill Farms Sweet Chili Sauce
3 Tbs sour cream (3 tbs sour cream = 69 calories)
1 whole avocado (1 whole avocado = appx 322 calories)

This meal contains  roughly 1800 to 2500 calories, and using Jimmy's 85% fat estimate, contains roughly 170 to 235g fat -- in one meal.   Now rather than his blood ketones and sugars and whatnot ... I want to know what his plasma looks like 2 hrs after a meal!  And I have just the person to help:  Dr. Mike Eades!   I blogged a while back on one of Eades more ridiculous claims trashing other "stupid" doctors.  Short summary:  The subject of Eades' post was an ABC report where they had two people consume an enormous fatty carby meal and looked at their blood 2 hours after the pigout.  The plasma was cloudy.  Eades wrote:

There is a lot of fat swimming in the serum, that’s for sure. What the producers of this piece (and, sadly, the doctors commenting although they should know better) want you to take away from all this by the way they set it up is that all that saturated fat went directly into the blood. And how can you argue with them? It’s there for all to see.

Problem is, that’s what blood samples look like after almost any meal, especially one that contains carbohydrates. The fat you see isn’t the fat the two reporters ate; it is the fat the liver has made from the carbohydrate. It’s the same picture a tube of blood would show after either of the two doctors had eaten a high-carb, low-fat lunch.

I find it disturbing that a medical doctor can write such nonsense, but he did.  So I think this would be a learning experiment for both the Dr. and Jimmy.  Really, even before I heard what chylomicrons were, I knew that cloudy plasma is from fat in the blood.   It's even in one of their buddy Taubes' favorite book!  From Frayn's Metabolic Regulation: 

Figure 7.10   The milky appearance of blood plasma (right) after a fatty meal, compared with its clear appearance in the fasted state (left). The turbidity is caused by the presence of the large chylomicron particles.

So here's what I think would be both a worthwhile learning experience for Eades and Moore, but also worthwhile information to share with readers as to the impact of such a diet.  Have Dr. Eades draw the blood (or order it), centrifuge it and see how cloudy it is.  Then let it sit for a couple of hours and see if fat separates out.  Share THAT with your readers.

I'm sure many will rely on that study where Volek showed better postprandial trig clearance with VLC.  But the cloudy plasma above is probably following a "normal" fatty meal.  I've dealt with countless samples from clinical trials often collected following a meal, and I could always tell which ones had a big fatty meal.  Such samples were dreaded because the solvents used to extract the drug for analysis tended to extract fat as well which made for a dirty sample that could mess up not only the analysis but the equipment.  They were also pesky when it came to mixing them and the solvent and plasma layers not separating but forming an emulsion (think mayo).

It is unclear if turbid blood is dangerous per se, but just as folks consider glucose toxic because the body works very hard to clear it from circulation, one has to be blinded by agenda not to recognize the "work" done to transport and remove fatty acids from circulation.  Normal FFA's in circulation amount to around 0.5g.  Dietary fat is packaged in chylo as triglycerides.  These trigs must be hydrolyzed to fatty acids before they can be taken up by adipose or other tissues.  If you've got 100g of triglyceride in chylo floating around?  Lots of NEFA are bound to escape the trapping process (especially in the presence of low postprandial insulin) .  Nothing good comes of that, perhaps nothing happens at all.  But there's a better than good chance, bad things happen.   Recall from above, Eades doesn't dispute that all that fat swimming about is undesirable, he just pointed the finger of blame at the carbohydrates in the diet.

Show me the plasma!!