The Fat Paradox

“That’s exactly right,” Dr. Volek told me. “The main connection is with insulin. You can’t ignore the carbohydrate-insulin axis. It’s basic metabolism. You are taught in your elementary biochemistry that insulin is an anabolic hormone and it stimulates anabolic factors. So it promotes lipogenesis through a variety of transcription factors and at the same time inhibits lipid oxidation too, the lipase. No one argues that.”

But that’s as far as people have gone with it. Until now.

“Where people don’t make the connection is that diet can actually impact that hormone, and that affects some of these outcomes that we are looking at,” Dr. Volek continued. “It is really showing carbohydrate as a control element of metabolism and its effects on insulin.”

They found that the very low-carb diet had a greater anti-inflammatory effect. It significantly reduced a couple of markers, particularly palmitoleic acid (16:1n-7), which is a well accepted surrogate for lipogenesis. That and the increased fat activation are the mechanisms, Dr. Volek says.

It must be hard for the establishment to swallow the saturated fat story. But it is probably throwing up on the new arachadonic acid research.

The arachadonic acid results of the new research that Dr. Volek led are just as surprising as what they learned about saturated fat. People on the very low-carb diet showed substantially greater increase in arachidonic acid that scientists have commonly viewed as contributing to inflammation. But at the same time many of the inflammatory markers significantly decreased.

How is this possible?

“There has been this negative view of arachadonic acid, primarily because people have focused on its products rather than the intact fatty acid itself,” Dr. Volek told me. “It is indeed the source of a lot of proinflammatory ecosanoids that promote inflammation and thrombosis and so forth, but that is only if it is acted upon by the oxygenators or if it comes in contact with molecular oxygen.”

On a low-carb diet the difference is that we have less oxidative stress. So the arachadonic acid doesn’t degrade. Its proportion in the membranes actually increases. In fact, the higher the arachadonic acid went up the less the inflammation, Dr. Volek told me.

 “That is a totally new concept,” he says. “There are a lot of misunderstandings and over-generalizations about arachadonic acid. We actually need to view arachadonic acid as a positive thing. It contributes to fluidity in membranes.”

I couldn’t resist asking Dr. Volek a personal question. “Do you follow a low-carb diet yourself?” I asked.

“I do,” he replied. “I am happy to say that I am not a hypocrite.”

He says that he has followed this diet for about 20 years because on it he feels better. His diet is 10 to 15 percent carbohydrate, probably around 50 grams a day. It’s a bit more grams than the very low-carb diet in his recent study, because he doesn’t have a weight problem.