speculative cures and the ketogenic diet weight loss anxiety blues: calcium

We might imagine lipolysis as a matter of supply. Your adipocytes should be liberating fatty acids to support direct use and to support ketogenesis in ketosis, unless insulin tells them otherwise. Thinking about this in terms of how we keep the supply flowing leads one to realizing that a hypoinsulinemic state is probably required in order to be losing weight; you need at least periods of low insulin so that fat can continue to be liberated for use. This leads to thinking that you have to be ketotic to lead weight, which isn't true; fat oxidation occurs outside of ketosis, too, and use of fat for energy doesn't require conversion into ketone bodies. Ketones, perhaps, just make the fat more available to more cells. Assuming there's enough of it.

Thinking about insulin as a lever makes it seem like the system is either on or off: you're either in energy-storing mode or you're in energy-liberating mode. The wrinkles that emerge there include those of insulin sensitivity. You can have adipocytes which are locally overfat, or in a globally overfat system, which basically stop responding to the anabolic signal, and make fat available at all times. Moving from that state to ketosis, maybe even to fasting, would clearly be useful. The energy refuses to be stored, so you need to make sure it can be burned.

The body, too, has levers to make more fat available when there isn't enough. Just as glucagon can tell the liver that it should make glucose in a demand-driven way, the body has signalling molecules to make more fat flow, chiefly catecholamines. Now, I'm obviously a pretty lousy biochemist, but broadly, catecholamines are stimulating and drive adaptation to stress. That's not a bad thing, but, for instance, those who break them down slowly (slow COMT) or those who already have a background level of elevated stress hormones (chronic stress), extra catecholamines can mean moving more readily from stress to distress. In insufficiency, we are lethargic, depressed, and unable to meet the demands of living, and in excess, we might well be anxious, the bad kind of restless, and maybe even sleepless. Hypoarousal at one extreme, hyperarousal at the other.

The leaky fat cells of the overfat and insulin resistant individual don't require catecholamines to feed the fat needs of a ketogenic diet: fat is already abundant. This may be one of the reasons for the effect whereby people say that keto works "the first time" and not afterwards. Whether because of adipogenesis or because of becoming more insulin sensitive, they might have to actually get much fatter to see ketosis as easy and as deep as they do on the first go 'round.

Different individuals may have different degrees of difficulty, but we can imagine a state in which an individual's fat cells aren't really engaged in that much lipolysis, and where it takes more signalling in order to get them to give up some fatty acids to support ketosis. It's easy to imagine that state as multiply distressing. You might be hypoketotic hypoglycemic, and experiencing total energy shortage. You might find that you have to find a way to eat a lot of fat in order to support ketosis. You might end up swimming in catecholamines. Add in the rise of cortisol with the dawn effect and the concomitant rise in gluconeogenesis and insulin, and you might begin your day feeling miserable, and gradually move towards anxiety.

We aren't quite so helplessly subject to the whims of our endocrinology, we can participate in the hormonal dialogue through the foods we consume. Food is full of signalling molecules that tell our bodies about the kinds of energy available to us and how we should probably use them. This may be a time of plenty or a time of starvation. This may be a time where we need energy, or a time where we need to hibernate. We may need the capacity to eat more, or the ability to fast.

It seems like one such signal might be calcium consumption. Much as the hypothetical process by which potassium intake seems to promote satiety, calcium seems to be active in fuel partitioning and in particular in promoting lipolysis. This is, in fact, fairly settled science, and has been for a long time. That paper is from twenty years ago. Calcium activates pathways to lipolysis that do not involve the release and global effects of catecholamines. Increased lipolysis, fatty acids available for direct oxidation and for building ketones, without the body needing to signal that more fat liberation is needed in a way that might create distress for the overall organism.

A lot of folks take calcium and magnesium supplements together for the anxiolytic effects of magnesium by supporting COMT function to break down catecholamines, but especially if they're healthy (or getting healthier) on a ketogenic diet, they may also be getting an indirect effect from the calcium they consume. Intake of calcium may not directly have an anxiolytic effect, but by promoting lipolysis, it may prevent the need for the body to swim in catecholamines like norepinephrine due to inadequate fatty acid availability, particularly in fasted states.

The potato diet gestures towards the potential utility of potassium as a tool to support weight loss, and these mechanistic insights suggest that calcium may also have an important place. Particularly in people who are doing a ketogenic diet whose fat cells aren't dysregulated, it may be important to be able to support access to fatty acids without stress and distress. It's ironic that dairy is such a barrier to weight loss for so many, and yet dairy is balanced in both elements supporting anabolism (particularly the carbohydrate-like insulinotropic effects of whey protein) and catabolism (with saturated fats and calcium.) For as much as it is hyperphagic, cheese might actually be a useful source of catabolic signals through the removal of whey, although it seems likely that direct calcium supplementation could be even more effective.

While the mechanisms and effects of calcium influencing lipolysis from adipocytes are well known, there are a lot of potential links, from hypoketotic states to anxiety during weight loss on ketogenic diets, which seem currently to be under-explored.

(Could this mean high-calcium dairy is a more helpful addition to the potato diet than low-calcium dairy? How much does vitamin D deficiency play into the broad impacts of calcium flux here? Indeed, high vitamin D in the presence of inadequate calcium can be anxiogenic itself as the need for calcium is signalled, which also seems to inhibit lipolysis in adipocytes. Will the body ever drive the parathyroid to liberate calcium from bones to support lipolysis? That would be pretty extreme. It seems worth noting that some who shun dairy also extol bone broth, which if cooked for sufficiently long, also could be a valuable calcium source.

Note, too, that there are drugs which specifically target beta-3 adrenergic receptors and seem to promote lipolysis in a similar way, while also exhibiting anxiolytic effects. Mirabegron, for instance, can be used in combination with metformin (which promotes fat oxidation) to drive weight loss. Amibegron is sometimes prescribed as an anxiolytic. Are the levers we can pull to promote lipolysis without catecholamines themselves anxiolytic, or is it just preventing the anxiogenesis of catecholamines used to signal the need for lipolysis?)

canadian nutrient file potato monodiet substitutes

When you're trying to find a suitable monodiet, you're looking to meet certain nutritional needs, but there are few foods that can meet all nutritional needs. Maybe there's some you can draw down reserves of for a time. Maybe there's some that your body can make alternatives for, or synthesize through a costly path, or even just sort of blunder along without. Maybe you even reject the idea of certain nutrients being essential from diet as a matter of principle, or want to find an island of stability outside of mainstream nutrition.

We know that people do surprisingly well on potatoes, and I've written about trying to find potato diet monodiet (and duodiet) alternatives before, but how do you know whether something is functionally equivalent to potatoes in terms of its suitability for a monodiet? Potatoes are quite high in some things (potassium) and quite low in some things; one doesn't expect to get EPA/DHA from potatoes, say.

There are worse things to consider. What if you can find a diet which could provide the same essential nutrient profile, but only if a vastly larger quantity of energy were to be consumed? What if the diet meets all your needs, except that it comes in the form of 45kg of clam juice?

So you have to approximate at some point, and you are limited to the things you can measure, the things you choose to care about, and so on.

I want to find monodiets that approximately match the nutrient profile of a potato when eaten to around 2000 kilocalories. Why? Because you have to start somewhere. I'll talk about potatoes from here on in terms of 2000 kilocalories of potato. Because it's the dataset I know best, I'll be working consistently with the Canadian Nutrient File, which is a wonderful and wonderfully inadequate resource. It keeps me humble about my conclusions.

So, what nutrients shall we care about? We don't want to find things that are exactly the same as a potato, because that's just a potato. We probably want to treat some characteristics of potato as minimums, some as maximums, and just ignore others despite allowing for the possibility that they are consequential.

Let's say part of what makes potatoes work is something about their macronutrient profile. They have something like 50g of protein, 2g of fat, and 454g of carbohydrate (a pound, one might notice.) So I'd say that when we're looking for something comparable to potatoes, we want something with at least 40g of protein, but not more than 75g, less than 5g of fat, and no limit on carbohydrates. Seem like a reasonable start? Let's assume that the breakdown of the carbohydrate content isn't significant, too.

Potatoes have reasonable amounts of calcium (311mg), iron (20mg), magnesium (600mg), phosphorus (1500mg), sodium (155mg), zinc (8mg), copper (2.81mg), manganese (4mg), and selenium (60mg). We know they have heroic quantities of potassium (11g, as in 11000mg!)

I'm happy to say that we need round numbers of those as minimums, and no upper limits for the moment. I'll just round them all down to nice numbers, and not bother rehearsing all of them here. We want to find things roughly like potatoes, we're not looking for things that are better than potatoes, nor to experiment with potential alternative islands of stability. I don't think we need to treat any of those as limits, but there's a few where that could be sensible.

Let's assume we don't care about fatty acid composition because we're mostly limiting fats in looking for potato analogues. More problematically, I'd prefer to ignore amino acid profile for two reasons: (1) the ranges are hard to pin down; and (2) the data are especially unhelpful in missing these for a lot of foods.

We then have the problem of Vitamin A, retinol, carotenes, etc. I'm slightly reluctant to give them consideration, probably more out of laziness than anything else, so let's allow my laziness to flourish and ignore them. (I'm tempted to set upper limits, but, again, laziness.) I don't know any betaine stans, but it's a little tempting to include it as a carnitine precursor, but let's not. Choline, on the other hand, is relatively available in potatoes (315mg), so let's set a really modest need (200mg).

Folate is a really important one that I'm going to completely neglect again because of data problems. There are a lot of different ways folate can be computed and tracked, and their use is inconsistent, and so we would really need to have a more complex set of rules. This is a major problem. Luckily, none of this is nutritional advice, this is not dietary advice, this is definitely not medical advice. Data problems alone should be sufficient to be off-putting.

I will let us entertain the need for Vitamin C, though, because potatoes come in surprisingly strong (510mg), and we'll look for at least 400mg. We'll ignore the modest amount of Vitamin E, as it's not enough to be sufficient.

That leaves the B vitamins, and I am constantly at war with the B vitamins. Potatoes hit with 35mg of total niacin equivalent (we'll look for 30mg), 7mg of pantothenic acid (we'll look for 5mg), and 7mg of B6 (we'll look for 5mg).

With that, we've attended to or roundly ignored all of the nutrients in the Canadian Nutrient File for "Potato, flesh and skin, raw". Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

Clam juice comes in hard, with a mere 12.5kg being deficient only in Vitamin C and Vitamin B6, and not very deficient at that. Of course, that gets you all of 250 kilocalories, and I think we can do better. Honestly, I am starting to wonder if anyone sells dehydrated clam juice, because it seems like a great way to get a lot of things without having to think too hard.

Let's take a firm pragmatic turn and say that 3kg is the upper limit of mass for a monodiet in a day. It's tough to eat even that much, and we're not leaving ourselves a lot of room on the low end of our requirements, so if someone can't eat up to these levels, we have a problem.

This gives us two real contenders which are not just more potatoes, one of which I'm not even sure what it is. The first is "Balsam-pear (bitter gourd, bitter melon), leafy tips, boiled, drained" (and also a variant with salt), and while I like bitter melon a lot, I'm not actually sure what the leafy tips are. If that's the leaves, that's very interesting, but outside of when I grew bitter melon myself, and when I used to have access to a really fantastic small produce store, I haven't seen bitter melon leaves very often, so this is probably not viable. Still, at 600 kilocalories and a mere 1.8kg of drained leaves, this only comes up short on selenium (16mg, less than 40mg) and pantothenic acid (1mg, less than 5mg.)

Pantothenic acid, so-named because it's found in everything, is consistently slightly elusive when I go trying to craft monodiets. Go figure.

The other real contender is okra, which at 800 kilocalories and about 2.5kg of raw mass (the same as potatoes for 2000 kilocalories), comes up short on potassium (7g, less than 10g) and selenium (17mg, less than 40mg). Potatoes are really amazing in their potassium content, and selenium is another annoyingly scarce nutrient in sufficient quantity.

Something you may notice is that these are both fairly low energy monodiets. This is what nudges me more and more towards duodiets, so that you can have some food you eat for micronutrient needs, and another food you eat for energy needs. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to go, but given that potatoes provide both nutrients and energy in levels we find appealing, and with a density that more-or-less works, this is a bit daunting. It would be tough to eat 2.5kg of okra and then to have to top it off with many more calories, although a large quantity of okra fried in ghee, or cooked in a curry with a lot of fat, doesn't sound so bad to me.

Let's take one last crack at the thing, and knock out pantothenic acid and selenium. Can we do better?

You're going to hate me.

This only gives us one good potato alternative, which has no failures with those constraints. At 2000 kilocalories, you can eat around 2.2kg of cooked sweet potato flesh. Yep, you could maybe substitute sweet potatoes for potatoes.

It's kind of amazing what a singular thing the potato is in this particular island of stability, being high carbohydrate, overall energy-dense, low in fat, and low-moderate in protein, while providing useful amounts of some pretty desirable nutrients, even if you leave out whatever's going on with the very high potassium.

There are a lot of other good ways to formulate monodiets, especially if you're willing to make choices about meeting some needs entirely from supplements. There are a lot of things that all of our diets are deficient in, and other things that I know we just don't have great data on in this one dataset. I've played with a few others, and I dream of building a multi-source suite of tools that can aggregate all of this data in meaningful ways, but the Canadian Nutrient File represents an easily digested starting point, and prepares you for the kinds of problems you have with drawing conclusions from the data available to you.

I suppose, too, it helps one to appreciate the wonder of the humble potato.

ketogenic ratio calculations, canadian nutrient file

The Canadian Nutrient File is a handy and only slightly error-ridden source of food nutrition information. Many of the world's governments publish similar resources, and the United States publishes so many that I can't actually keep track of which is used for what. These resources are convenient especially for macronutrient composition, but are also sort of inconsistently convenient for lots of micronutrient information, including vitamins, minerals, lipid profile, caffeine content, and water mass.

Using one of these that includes most of the foods one has access to is a great way to start toying with the parameters you care about in formulating a food pool that you're willing to eat from, or even monodiets and duodiets that will meet the nutritional needs you care about. Want to try to hit potato diet levels of potassium with a duodiet you're willing to eat? Great, just add up pairs of foods in whatever ratios and amounts you like (calorie-matching all pairs with a range of ratios is a great way to start), and make sure to use potassium as predicate for the combined diet.

I'll save you the trouble of having to work out for yourself that you want to be able to clamp the total mass of the food you're considering, and maybe also the mass of certain ingredients, or the mass of certain kinds of ingredients. (These days, my preference is to think in terms of elements which are sources of rare nutrients, elements which serve as tolerable staples, and side items, and then to clamp the maximum mass of each of those in turn.) If you don't do that, you'll quickly find yourself wondering about consuming 45kg of clam juice per day. I checked with my local grocery store, because that seems like a hilarious high-effort shitpost to fail to achieve, but they can't actually supply that much.

Because of shoddy coverage of things like amino acid breakdown, the Canadian Nutrient File isn't actually a great resource if you want to, say, reduce your intake of isoleucine, and perhaps also leucine and valine, but macronutrients tend to be pretty solid.

In the interest of encouraging folks to do some of their own experimentation, I present a copy of all of the foods in the Canadian Nutrient File annotated with two ketogenic ratio calculations.

The first, Shaffer's method, is the näive approximation that you can do in your head, and it's just ketogenic factors (fats) divided by antiketogenic factors (carbohydrates and protein) by mass, and if the ratio is 1 or lower, antiketogenic factors dominate, while ratios of 2 or higher are dominated by ketogenic factors. The range of values between 1 and 2 can be roughly thought about as allowing ketogenesis and ketone use, but not especially promoting that state.

Shaffer's method is just: F / (C + P)

The second, Withrow's method, is pretty dated at this point, but seems to have some clinical and research utility. It uses a more complex equation with various coefficients to reflect the relative ketogenicity and antiketogenicity of the various macronutrients, so that fat is strongly ketogenic but only very weakly antiketogenic, and protein is appropriately somewhere more in the middle. With this scale, significant clinical effects are observed around the 1.7 mark, I believe in terms of both keto-adaptation and in terms of the neurological effects of ketones.

Withrow's method is: (0.9 F + 0.46 P) / (C + 0.58 P + 0.1 F)

I prefer Withrow's method, particularly because it captures some of the moderated effect of protein intake a bit better. I've included both because there's a lot of published literature that uses each one, and it can also be interesting simply to see the difference. You might imagine that the points where they are the most different might also represent foods for which individual variations and environmental factors may be likely to dominate.

There are other methods out there in rarer use, and you can imagine how alcohol might be incorporated, but at some point you want to actually start having a more nuanced model of metabolism either in your head or in your codebase. A good starting point is to do what one does in modelling heat that is available for the production and ripening of fruit, which is to look at how much of each day is spent being how much hotter than some threshold. You might think about ketogenic factor hours as the sum of these, and to increase either the time under the influence of a given ketogenic factor, or to increase the ketogenic factor over a shorter period of time. You might also wonder about those with the lowest ketogenic ratios, and whether there are meaningful thresholds there in terms of maintaining carbohydrate burning and glucose dominance without fuel-switching problems.

The great thing about these ratios is that you can compute them both for ingredients (as provided here) and for whole diets. The even greater thing is that you can then also think about what might need to be added. This is pretty standard fare for developing well-formulated ketogenic diets for epilepsy, where one thinks in terms of units of ketogenic and antiketogenic food and ensures that the balance is maintained. You gotta drink your cream even if you don't want to finish your other food, and all that.

You can use a little light algebra (thanks to someone who helped me get the math right on this, which I was going to need like five tries to do on my own) to figure out how much fat you'd need to add, for instance, to take a given food or diet up to 1.7 with Withrow's method.

Given T as the target ketogenic ratio: ((T C) + (((0.58 T) - 0.46) T)  + ((0.1 T) - .9) F)  / (0.9 - (0.1 T))

For instance, given a diet or a food which contains 84.1g of protein, 49.3g of carbohydrates, and 159.9g of fat, Withrow's method gives a ketogenic ratio of around 1.6, which with around 15.5g of extra fat becomes 1.7. I keep meaning to throw together a friendly little calculator that someone could use to obtain this number, but I'm not much of a web person. I'd love to see Cronometer show the ketogenic ratio for foods and diets, and ideally let you set a target and show your fat need from that. It's an easy enough tool to build, but we shouldn't be proliferating food trackers. One of the big ones should decide they care about ketogenic diets and help people make these decisions. It's simple algorithmic additions in exchange for potentially major benefits for health.

If you want to start thinking about ketogenic ratios, my annotated list of foods from the Canadian Nutrient File is available as a Google Sheet. I would not stake someone else's life on the data in the CNF, which has structural, typographic, and content errors that show up pretty obviously if you look at it even a little bit. This is not medical advice, and you should do your own calculations if you want to make medical decisions based on the ketogenic ratios of food.

Remember to drink your clam juice (Mollusks, clam, mixed species, canned, liquid; 0.60) and eat your aged walrus blubber (Game meat, native, walrus, blubber, aged; 6.4). Get in touch if you'd like to explore nutrition and dietary tooling to support the formulation of ketogenic diets programmatically.

not playing the satiety game

Everyone gets satiety wrong in two key ways. It's understandable; we are still being haunted with the 20th Century idea of thinking about eating as a behaviour, and specifically a behaviour to be managed. We have lost any grasp of eating as intuition guided by drives, except when those drives are recognizably broken. We certainly don't think about eating as a dialogue with endocrinology, but it is.

I was listening to the fairly excellent (let's just assume I put all the relevant asterisks on that) Chris van Tulleken talk about the softness of ultra-processed food. His point about softness is that it makes it easier to eat too many calories, with studies showing around 500 kilocalories more energy consumed in meals of food that is soft in the style of ultra-processed food, compared to macronutrient matched controls. Huh.

I went through a period several years ago where I was eating large amounts of heavy cream, butter, and ghee, and wanted to start playing with what it was like to eat saturated fats to excess alongside eating modest amounts of starch, in the form of parsnips in particular, but other slightly starchy vegetables as well.

Now, I have a history with parsnips, and I think there are some ways in which it's hard to eat too much of them, but that was my first real experience of truly overwhelming satiety. I could not eat anything else. The idea of eating felt terrifying. Actually, the idea of existing felt lowkey terrifying. I realized within a single mouthful that I was slightly overeating, and I stopped mid-bite. I had so much energy afterwards that it was vaguely unsettling, and I think I went out and walked like 5km just to stop vibrating out of my body. The kind of thing people who play at being Ray Peat devotees on the Internet talk about.

The starch wasn't necessary for that experience, but it was a good vehicle for the fat. I've repeated that experience with heavy cream or butter any number of times since. I actually don't quite like it. Once I even ate a spoonful of sugar to make some insulin available and to store some of the energy, rather than feeling its incessant availability. I had to find something to take the edge off, and the energy wasn't going away on its own. I can get there with MCT oils, too, but they are hard on my stomach in a way I don't quite get.

Those were some pretty intense experiences of excess energy availability, and they play out the way that it seems like it's supposed to. Massively satiated, restlessly energetic, spontaneous movement, and so on.

As long as I'm in ketosis, aren't I always eating in energy excess, though? I mean, my liver just loves to create new glucose, and I have more than enough stored fat on hand that adequate lipolysis should mean endless energy available in the form of ketones. Would that it were so, but sometimes it's not far off.

Those experiments of eating excess fat gesture at the first real way that our thinking about satiety is wrong, in the sense that van Tulleken is wrong.

You see, van Tulleken thinks that the problem with softness is that chewing drives some satiety mechanisms in the brain, and there is absolutely no chewing involved in my intake of ghee. So it would be for marrow and all other kinds of highly fatty food we evolved with as food. Yet I get disgustingly, upsettingly satiated feeling if I eat one spoonful too much of MCT oil or ghee or fish oil. There are lots of things that converge to give rise to satiety. The most annoying kind of wrongness about this are those family members who have been eating low-fat yoghurt since the 1980s and insist that satiety is about being physically full, and who say that protein reduces food intake. Yikes.

Even there, though, I am playing the satiety game, I am thinking about what changes my behaviour so that I stop eating, and that is so entirely the wrong thing to be thinking about. Whether you feel sated or not doesn't actually matter, and that's where we go so badly wrong.

If I eat 500 extra kilocalories, then I have an excess of energy available. There are a lot of things you can do with an excess, you can be restless, you can move, you can feel like shit because you are inhibited in your ability to move. That energy wants to go somewhere.

If the energy stays available until it can be used, then it doesn't matter that I ate 500 more kilocalories than someone eating some standardized meal would have eaten. I've taken friends to Brazilian steakhouses who wallow with me in the wonders of fatty meat and who then will actually not feel like eating the entire next day. If you start eating meals that are higher in energy, then you should notice either that your level of activity changes, or that your spacing of meals changes. That's not, however, what we see.

I suspect that a small part of that effect is that a lot of people have actually been trained to view and experience eating as a behaviour to be managed, and so they dutifully eat at appointed times. This can emerge more organically, too, in people who are eating for stimulation, entertainment, and self-soothing.

The larger part of the effect, as far as I am concerned, is that we eat energy which is then partitioned off where it cannot be used. Eating 500 more kilocalories does not mean that you have access to that energy continuously during and after digestion. For a lot of us it seems to take a detour into adipose, even into visceral fat.

This happens for probably very many reasons, but we have some inklings that some types of fat, even, might signal the body that they need to be stored, possibly urgently, possibly in the viscera, and are inflammatory if left circulating (and inflammatory when stored.) That's kind of awful, and it's hard not to think of those sorts of things as poisons that should be consumed only if they can be burned right away, and only in the amounts that can be burned right away, much like alcohol. (Alcohol is burned preferentially when present, because it's poisonous to us, and disrupts processing of other energy until it's gone.)

Then there's the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity, which suggests that like my self-rescue from an overdose on saturated fat with sugar, it's food maintaining a hyperinsulinemic state that keeps us hungry. If you think about a fed-state ketogenic diet as being similar to the fasted state in a good way, then it seems like there are awful diets of ultra-processed food that keep us in the fasted state in a bad way, in the hungry state, in the food-seeking state. This is obviously very profitable if you can sell people food that is mentally satisfying but hormonally hungering, and this is where van Tulleken is right in the big picture, but missing the mark somewhat on signalling.

Eating is a dance with the endocrine system, with dopamine, with all kinds of parts of ourselves that are always going on simultaneously, and that pull various levers, some of which we might call satiety. It is not, though, simply the behaviour we can observe, and the dance does not end when the eating stops. You can overeat at any given point, and if the energy stays available, then there is no reason you should have stopped eating sooner. So, too, you can do pretty well eating energy that cannot be stored very effectively, and just eat all the time, like some sort of hummingbird. The honey diet is very much not for me.

I think we need to stop playing the satiety game, and start wondering more about what happens in the postprandial state. Where does the energy go, and why? Is it usable? Is the body content with the energy that is available to it, or does it need more? Does it, in fact, even have the ability to use that energy? Maybe fat oxidation is broken or inhibited, or maybe the Randle cycle means that only a small portion of it is available for the moment, and it's not the kind of energy we needed. Maybe what we've eaten is even poison, and is not going to feel good or be good when used as a habitual source of energy.

Whatever goes on when the energy starts to be stored and we find ourselves wanting more food at once, and we feel like shit and know that something is missing, it has nothing to do with the movement of our jaw, and nothing to do with whether we achieved satiety in the first place.

monodiet, duodiet, signal and noise.

Someone asked me to help them with finding a monodiet that would work for them, and of course I thought of potatoes for all the obvious reasons. They tried that, and quickly decided to try a duodiet instead: potatoes and butter. This is all well and good, and they were able to stick to it for six weeks. Trivial weight loss, no weight gain, no fatigue, regular satiety, and undying love of potatoes, as expected. You know the drill.

I talked their head off about my work on developing n-diet food pools. Figure out some core items you're willing to eat and use nutrition data in large quantities to try to develop a pool of foods you're willing to eat from on an ongoing basis that will more or less hit all of the nutritional points you care about. I stick to ketogenic diets, so mine end up being more-or-less unsurprising. I should eat a pound and a half of meat and a kilogram of greens, and top it all off with a spoonful of cod liver oil or caviar. Nothing shocking.

I can do a meat monodiet, but I tend to fuck it up eventually, and I have this nagging sense that it's because there's some other knob I'm neglecting, and finding the signal and the noise of that is kind of brutal. You can tweak electrolytes and easily end up puking and hiding from the world for an afternoon if you guess wrong about what to tweak. So I'm grinding away at piles and piles of code to go with lots and lots of notes to try to at least not make the same mistakes over and over again.

When you develop a pool of foods you want to eat as diet staples, you're basically doing the work of inventing a food culture, and hoping it lands you in some worthy island of stability. There are no doubt a huge number of dietary islands of stability represented by all of the cultures of the world, but they don't suit all of us equally, either because of our microbiome, our genetics, our palates, or how we want or need to feel and function. It's good when you can do this in a way that lets you tell when you've fucked up.

I haven't tried potatoes, myself, but I have tried rice a few times, as well as some other simple carbohydrate mixes, and I always just end up with a headache, a mood crash, and a loss of 300 points of Elo in bullet chess on my phone. I don't care for that.

So someone wants to explore the diet space a bit more, having found potatoes enjoyable but having some niggling cravings around the edges. They ask about peas, and, yeah, that makes sense to me. Cheap, quick, fairly nutritionally complete, neither terribly boring nor terribly unenjoyable. Peas.

They made it about a week of constant complaining and regular cheating, and are finding peas just don't work. Even moving to peas-and-butter, to match the delight of potatoes-and-butter, was an immediate and clear failure. This is very exciting for me.

You see, by mass, peas and potatoes are about the same in terms of the amount of total energy, so this is an opportunity to try to amplify the signal and drown out some of the noise.

Now, how do you evaluate a monodiet or a duodiet? Rather, how do you compare two of them? Ideally, I suppose you'd eat both to satiety, and compare the sating amounts, but if satiety is elusive, then you've got to either compare them by straight mass, or matched by some nutrient or by total energy.

In the case of potatoes and peas, they're luckily pretty close in energy density overall, so maybe you don't have to think about it too hard. Er, except that they look close at 100g of mass, but eating more like 2.5kg, those differences start to add up.

At 2.5kg, potatoes will give you around 1900kcal, while peas are closer to 1500kcal. That's a pretty nontrivial difference, but again, it should be possible to eat to satiety, right? But peas don't give satiety, nor satisfaction, and along the way they produce something that feels like total energy shortage. Now, someone is probably generally pretty keto-adapted, so we could wonder about carbohydrate tolerance, but we already know potato was effective, and they've been adding butter to both, anyway. There should be plenty of energy available.

Well, let's calorie match them, then. Potatoes and peas, both to around 1900kcal. You start by looking at the biggest differences, and so I look at them in terms of order of magnitude. Energy-matched, peas have a log10 difference of 0.75, which is pretty substantial, nearly an order of magnitude more fat. It's still not very much fat, though. It's around 11g, which is nothing compared to the fat from butter, and while a fair bit of it is PUFA, it's a pretty modest bolus, especially since someone finds it impossible to eat peas in this quantity, feeling fatigued and sick of them well beforehand.

Nearly an order of magnitude and a half more sodium in the peas, but I know someone is using salted butter, so I don't know that that's significant. If potassium is the key in potatoes, then the fact that peas have about half as much potassium might be significant, and it's hard not to wonder about the ratio of sodium to potassium as well as potassium overall. Does potassium fuel catabolism and sodium fuel anabolism? I swore by adding lots of salt to my ketogenic diet for many years, but now I find that adding none is more effective than adding lots, and adding a little salt is worse than either adding a lot or adding none. I don't know what's going on with sodium.

The carbohydrate-insulin model of metabolic dysregulation wants me to say that it's sugars. Peas are an order of magnitude more sugary when energy-matched to potatoes. The sugar could be stimulating insulin, while the fibre (more in peas than in potatoes!) is making everything else digest nice and slow. That's a great way to feel like shit, right? Tell your body to utilize glucose, to store it if necessary, and then don't provide it very much glucose to work with. I don't know, though.

The only other thing that stands out is protein: half an order of magnitude more in peas than in potatoes. Around 50g in the potatoes to 150g+ in energy-matched peas. You start thinking about food as part of a hormonal system, you start thinking about macronutrients and their metabolites as signalling molecules, you start coming up with little shorthands. Carbohydrate metabolism signals that energy is available to be used right now. Fat signals that energy is plentiful and costly metabolic processes can occur (either storage for later, or more complex adaptations.) Both of these can promote anabolic processes, but protein promotes anabolism above all else.

I used to get dreadfully tired from the crashes after a large carbohydrate meal, and it's still the case that I'm never as depressed as when I spike sequester energy with a large bolus of rapid-availability carbohydrates and then come down hard. Fatigue, though, is profoundly present for me with protein.

Bullshit little stories build up in my head about this, like that protein says: this is a time to build, and this energy cannot be stored in a way that we can build later, so now we should rest, and grow. This anabolic switch makes me want to sleep, and all my catabolic processes seem to stop. Ketosis certainly does, and total energy availability seems to go down. Fair enough, protein is kinda use it or lose it. The body takes its chances.

Do peas, then, promote anabolic processes at the cost of energy availability? Sugar, sodium, and protein seems like a pretty strong signal in the noise of what, superficially, seem like pretty simple and complete diets. If potatoes and butter is steady energy and good satiety and a feeling of satisfaction, then shouldn't peas and butter be, too? Peas are delicious and versatile and seem superficially desirable, and yet in this extremely small and ill-fated trial, they do not seem to cut it.

I am so terribly on the fence about protein restriction. I have been raised in the environment that has waffled a lot about fat and carbohydrates, but has been steadfast in viewing protein as always good, always desirable, and always the macronutrient to be most optimized for. From the far-right gym bros to the vegan cognoscenti, protein is always the most reasonable thing to focus on. Recovering from a restrictive eating disorder? Protein. Trying to lose weight? Protein. The UK are developing a simple little macronutrient and mineral formula to decide how to classify junk food, because ultra-processed food is too subjective, and they're focusing on eliminating fat, sugar, and sodium. Good bogeymen, but that's about it, I suppose. Protein shall be optimized. Well, we want everyone fit for fighting tomorrow, even if they feel like shit today, so protein it shall be.

I am not a growing child, and I do not need to be fit to fight tomorrow. I need to be able to think and move and act today. I am not trying to build mass, if anything my lean mass becomes something of a burden to be fed. It is a dangerous thing to start to wonder about how much protein one might really need, more forbidden even than admitting that carbohydrates are nonessential.

Maybe it is comparing peas and potatoes that will finally convince me to not eat macronutrients that bulk when what I really need is simply to thrive, to function here-and-now, not to prepare for hibernation, neither for unknown future physical demands. I am as tall as I am ever going to get, and as strong as I could ever hope to be. Potatoes or peas? I still mostly live on meat, but if I had to choose, I think I'd choose potatoes.

And I'll have to tune my diet parameters to be even more conservative in my imagined protein needs.