This Is MS Multiple Sclerosis Knowledge & Support Community

Perhaps we have been misled about diet once again; maybe the no-fat/low-fat diets recommended by many, from Swank on, are not the best for fighting MS – according to this article by Dr. Joseph Mercola, dietary fat, not glucose, is the preferred fuel of human metabolism: http://fitness.mercola.com/sites/fitnes ... ucose.aspx

Conventional advice has focused on low-fat diets for weight loss and heart disease prevention, but again and again, studies demonstrate that this advice is diametrically opposed to reality... In one such study, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's Heart and Vascular Institute compared the effects of two diets on vascular health; one low in fat, the other low in carbs. The study in question was presented at this year's meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in Denver, on June 33.
The study included a total of 46 men and women weighing on average 218 pounds. The six-month long weight loss program consisted of moderate aerobic exercise and strength training, and one of two diets, either:
Low-carb, high-fat: Less than 30 percent of calories from carbs (pastas, breads and sugary fruits), and up to 40 percent from fats (meat, dairy products, and nuts)
Low-fat, high-carb diet: Less than 30 percent of calories from fat, and 55 percent from carbs
The low-carb group on average shed 10 pounds in 45 days, while the low-fat group took 70 days to lose the same amount of weight. In terms of vascular health, the low-carb, high-fat dieters showed no harmful vascular changes, which is the primary reason for why so many are afraid of high-fat diets.
According to the lead investigator, professor of medicine and director of clinical and research exercise physiology, Kerry Stewart, Ed.D:
"Our study should help allay the concerns that many people who need to lose weight have about choosing a low-carb diet instead of a low-fat one, and provide re-assurance that both types of diet are effective at weight loss and that a low-carb approach does not seem to pose any immediate risk to vascular health. More people should be considering a low-carb diet as a good option."
Stewart also believes that the emphasis on low-fat diets has likely contributed to the obesity epidemic in the US by promoting overconsumption of sugars and grains. I couldn't agree more. The simple reason for this is that grains and sugars raise your insulin levels, which causes insulin resistance and, ultimately, weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease.

As I stated once before, FATTY fish, fish OIL, essential FATTY acids, avocado, nuts with their OILS, even olive OIL, and other monounsaturated FATS may be beneficial to us because, as the above article says, the fats are the preferred fuel in our cells. Cod liver OIL may offer us more benefits than just the vitamin D. We simply have not been getting enough dietary fat. The Western diet has too many carbohydrates, sugar and starch.

The question here is how do you define "Healthy Fats"?

Before you can approach this you first need to look at Ancel Keys, the father of the "Lipid Hypothesis" who brought us the association of heart disease and Saturated Fats, this is based on the 6 country study which showed a lineal relationship between the intake of saturated fats and heart disease, very neat, except that he omitted the data of 16 other countries that he also looked at and when all the data is plotted there is no relationship at all, just a bunch of dots on a piece of paper.
The USDA pryamid was based on this information and for the last 50 years there have been numerous studies trying to conclusively prove a causal relationship and the best of these could only be described as inconclusive, I won't bore you with all the links.

All cell (bi lipid) membranes in the human body are composed primarily of Saturated Fats, the reason for this is Saturated Fatty acids are long molecules with all the carbons linked by double bonds which makes them nice and straight so they can pack in nice and tight and stop cell walls leaking. There are also some monounsaturated and a small amount of polyunsaturated (PUFA's) (O3 & 06) oils in the cell walls as well, now the mono's are bent, they have a kink, the poly's are bent more than once, because of this they do not pack tightly. We obviously need some in the cell walls, but it appears that excessive consumption of "Healthy" polyunsaturated plant oils may well be causing our cell membranes to leak which is expressed as systemic inflamation, the cut off point seems to be the ratio of O6:O3 at around 10:1, any higher and we get an increase of O6's in our cell membranes and the expression of inflamatory Cytokines.

I read a study, done on rats, but that's all there is at the moment, basically alterations in saturated fat in the diet were pretty much benign, monos had some effect, poly's a bit more, but the biggest effect was seen when the ratio between O6:O3 went over 10, that's when the composition of the cell wall changed for the worse. Ancestral estimates for humans were between 5:1-1:1 where as modern Human diets sit at between 10:1-16:1 which puts the bulk of the population in the danger zone.

Regarding the Carbs, basically we were never designed to process those volumes on a daily basis, yes occassionally, but not constantly, if you look at the human digestive process, all excess carbs have to be processed by the liver to fatty acids for storage, we only have limited glycogen stores for glucose, so constant carbs, spike the insulin, then overload the liver. In contrast to this Fatty acids are absorbed by the intestine and go directly into the blood stream bypassing the liver, and then are either metabolised or go straight into storage.

So in the 70's we were told to eat more carbs, causing inflamation through high blood sugar and insulin levels repeatedly, then told Saturated Fat and Cholesterol were bad, even though they are benign building blocks of our cells, then told to increase our consumption of PUFA's, even though we could only have ever got these in trace quantities before industrialisation, now we have multiple sources of systemic inflamation, add to this, Vitamin D, circadian rhythms, environmental toxins etc, etc, then just wait for the final trigger and ask why did we get sick?

CaveMan wrote:All cell (bi lipid) membranes in the human body are composed primarily of Saturated Fats, the reason for this is Saturated Fatty acids are long molecules with all the carbons linked by double bonds which makes them nice and straight so they can pack in nice and tight and stop cell walls leaking. There are also some monounsaturated and a small amount of polyunsaturated (PUFA's) (O3 & 06) oils in the cell walls as well, now the mono's are bent, they have a kink, the poly's are bent more than once, because of this they do not pack tightly. We obviously need some in the cell walls, but it appears that excessive consumption of "Healthy" polyunsaturated plant oils may well be causing our cell membranes to leak which is expressed as systemic inflamation, the cut off point seems to be the ratio of O6:O3 at around 10:1, any higher and we get an increase of O6's in our cell membranes and the expression of inflamatory Cytokines.

Animals don't have cell walls. Plants and bacteria do. If we had cell walls, we would be so stiff we couldn't move. Phospholipids are typically composed of one saturated fatty acid and one unsaturated fatty acid. Having mostly saturated fatty acids packed nice and tight would be counter to the fluid mosiac model of the plasma membrane. When cells need patchy, non-fluid areas of the plasma membrane, they do it by enriching part of the membrane with cholesterol and sphingomyelin. These areas are known as membrane lipid rafts. They're vitally important for cellular signal transduction. Cell membranes maintain their selective permeability through the hydrophobic/hydrophylic interactions of the plasma membrane bilayer while using tightly regulated ion channels and other transporters for moving molecules in and out of the cells. Other pathways include recepter mediated endo and exocytosis such as clathrin and coatomer coated pits and vessicles for example.

NHE

NHE wrote:Animals don't have cell walls. Plants and bacteria do. If we had cell walls, we would be so stiff we couldn't move. Phospholipids are typically composed of one saturated fatty acid and one unsaturated fatty acid. Having mostly saturated fatty acids packed nice and tight would be counter to the fluid mosiac model of the plasma membrane. When cells need patchy, non-fluid areas of the plasma membrane, they do it by enriching part of the membrane with cholesterol and sphingomyelin. These areas are known as membrane lipid rafts. They're vitally important for cellular signal transduction. Cell membranes maintain their selective permeability through the hydrophobic/hydrophylic interactions of the plasma membrane bilayer while using tightly regulated ion channels and other transporters for moving molecules in and out of the cells. Other pathways include recepter mediated endo and exocytosis such as clathrin and coatomer coated pits and vessicles for example.

NHE

Thanks for the clarification,
I did say membranes a couple of times, but just started interchanging with "walls" by mistake.
I will look into it a bit deeper, I'm not fully up to speed with all the chemistry, but more looking at the bigger picture, from what I have read our cell membranes are predominantly saturated, with an intermingling of both poly & monounsaturated as well as cholesterol and a variety of receptors, all of which control the degree of flexability and permeability.
The question is, is our unnatural intake of Omega 6 fatty acids from plant sources and subsequent reduction of Omega 3 and saturated fatty acids having a detrimental effect on the integrity of our cell membranes?

It is only in the last 50 years that we have had access to and been consuming vast quantities of these vegetable oils, with the one exception of "Olive Oil" which has been around for thousands of years, but it is a mono and does not seem to be as detrimental as the polyunsaturated oils. Even a large number of the olive oils available today are not pure and are often heated to extract more oil and then are often blended with other oils to increase yield.

Here's a couple of the studies I looked at,
basically, they indicate, at least in rats, the composition of fatty acids in the diet does have a direct bearing on the composition of serum fatty acids, adipose tissue and cell membranes.
To me that suggests that if the diet is sufficiently different there may be altered functionality in individual cell membranes, also potentially hormonal controls as adipose tissue is an active endochrine organ and possibly a number of other unidentified factors as well.
The biggest influence appears to come from the 06:03 ratio and keeping that well below 10:1 and the easiest way to do that is to reduce the consumption of 06 oils and increase consumption of 03 oils.

Links:

http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3260/

The balance between diet n-3 and n-6 PUFA (PUFA balance), however, showed the greatest effect on membrane composition for all tissues measured. The response to diet PUFA balance was biphasic for most tissues (skeletal muscle, heart, liver, brain and RBC), indicating that a diet PUFA balance of ~10% is the critical level required to maintain membrane PUFA balance. At diet PUFA balances < 10% the membrane PUFA balance of these tissues was highly responsive (slopes of 0.65 – 1.47), indicating that the membranes are essentially completely conforming to diet PUFA balance atthese low levels. Furthermore, reduced membrane PUFA balance was associated with a significantly reduced mass-specific minimum metabolic rate.

One of the major findings of this thesis was the strong influence of diet PUFA balance on membrane arachidonic acid (20:4n-6) content for all tissues. Low diet PUFA balance was associated with significantly increased membrane 20:4n-6 levels. This has potential implications for human health due to the central role membrane 20:4n-6 playsin many parts of metabolic syndrome and chronic inflammation.

If the results from this study in rats also apply to humans, an average PUFA balance of 9.5% in the modern human diet is of considerable concern, as it indicates there are huge numbers of people consuming a diet with a very low and likely inadequate PUFA balance without knowing it.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22489205

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to study the effects of varying dietary levels of n-6 : n-3 fatty acid ratio on plasma and tissue fatty acid composition in rat. The treatment groups included control rats fed chow diet only, rats fed 50% soybean oil (SBO): 50% cod liver oil (CLO) (1 : 1), 84% SBO: 16% CLO (6 : 1), 96% SBO: 4% CLO (30 : 1). Blood samples were taken at day 15 of pregnancy, and the plasma and tissue were analyzed for fatty acid profile. The n-3 PUFA in plasma of Diet 1 : 1 group was significantly higher than the other diet groups, while the total n-6 PUFA in plasma was significantly higher in Diet 30 : 1 group as compared to the control and Diet 1 : 1 groups. The Diet 1 : 1 group showed significantly greater percentages of total n-3 PUFA and docosahexaenoic acid in adipose and liver tissue, and this clearly reflected the contribution of n-3 fatty acids from CLO. The total n-6 PUFA, linoleic acid, and arachidonic acid were significantly difference in Diet 30 : 1 as compared to Diet 1 : 1 and control group. These results demonstrated that the dietary ratio of n-6 : n-3 fatty acid ratio significantly affected plasma and tissue fatty acids profile in pregnant rat.