Summary of the Diet and Health Ideas of Karl Denninger

• 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.

• 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.”

• http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229296#discuss

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

• 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.”