Thursday, June 24, 2021

Ossabaw pigs

I notice that Brad Marshall has a great post out on PUFA/insulin sensitivity and especially ALA. Brad is seriously thinking along ROS/Protons lines. He looks at ideas I've toyed with over the years but never found the papers to follow through on, finds the papers and follows through. Enjoy.

Obesity prone pigs go from Normal to Pathological Insulin Sensitivity to Torpor when given enough PUFA



Passthecream said...

It is excitingly good and it seems like those pigs are a great model for this sort of work.

Slightly devil's advocate view: the pigs that seemed the worse off had by far the lowest carb intake! That's a bit of a blow for the low carb part of HFLC, also a blow for the HF part if it's the wrong fats involved.

There is an obvious difficulty with all diet experiments, even one with such a clear cut choice of macronutrients, that you cannot isolate the total calories versus increasing one of the macros without reducing the others so you cannot conclude that eg in this case it was simply the fat type increase rather than the carb reduction which led to those outcomes.

I like Brad's fat ratio metrics.

ctviggen said...

Humans might be different? I've been low carb/keto about 7.5 years now. Kept losing weight, got to 34 inch pants (waist size; no idea what that is in cm), wore a mixture of 34s and 36s, with a lot of my 36s too big.

Tried the Croissant Diet. Benefit: If I ate a TON of saturated fat, I could get an excellent satiety. Detriments: 1) I gained 20-25 pounds, couldn't wear any of my 34s, blew past most of my 36s, had to find some 38s; 2) weight gained seemed to be all in my belly; 3) if I didn't eat enough saturated fat, I got no satiety (for instance, cacao + high percentage dark chocolate + cream or 10% fat yogurt or both caused zero satiety); 4) I could eat as many (real) croissants with butter, or potato fries fried in tallow I made myself from beef suet, as I wanted, and I would do so (dare I Stephan Guyenet's idea of "it tastes too good" is correct?), seemingly with no "off switch"; 5) if I ate sat fat (Brad's ghee + stearic acid) + starch for lunch, I'd not be hungry AT ALL for dinner, but if I ate dinner, I ate a normal meal (to me, this means hormones play a role for me).

I'm back to eating low carb/keto again, and -- after many months (a year?) -- I'm back into almost all my 36s and some of my 34s. Still can't get into a lot of shorts and pants I was able to get into pre-Croissant Diet. But I'm almost there.

I've reached the conclusion that, while the amount of sat fat we eat (or conversely not eating PUFAs) is a factor, for me, it's more complex than that, by a lot.

Peter said...

Hi ctviggen,

Very interesting. A few things come to mind.I wonder what your adipocyte LA levels are like, which might determine how much stearate is needed to offset. I wonder if high stearate might not be effective if background PUFA are still high. Or perhaps satiety can really be over ridden easily. The whole description of increasing abdominal girth is very suggestive of the overfeeding studies from Sweden, being paid to genuinely over eat seems to concentrate storage in the visceral fat.


PS the beauty of animal studies is the controllability. The problem with real life is there are LOTS of uncontrolled/unknown variables. Still interesting to have the information and the certainty that other things must matter.

Passthecream said...

I was thinking about what you could feed a pig (/human) so that there was as much saturated fat in adipocytes as possible. No seeds or grains containing any PUFA for one thing, no soy, no corn and only the white flour parts of cereal grains. Fatty meats perhaps although that sounds a bit risky, depending. Palm oil and other vegetal sources of high sfa, but mostly as many plain starches and sugars, and as many starchy vegetables as possible for the cheapest option. Irc that skim milk used to feature in some pig feeds in the days before that became premium human food and the fats were discarded instead. Mashed potatoes would be good, croissants too I think. I suppose the important question from a pig raising view is whether they would also put on enough weight. High starches should give plenty of insulin, would be very fattening if there was significant amounts of fat in the diet also.

There was one of those 'worse jobs' docs a while back where the job was driving around picking up leftover human foods from restaurants and fast food shops then shovelling them into a huge boiler to render them into swill and feeding that to the pigs. They probably got very fat on that good human diet.

cavenewt said...


Brad Marshall's Firebrand Meats sells high SFA/low PUFA pork. I've been avoiding chicken and pork for the last 18 months, but I ordered a batch of his pork recently to see what it was like. Here in the US, grocery store pork even when refrigerated is kind of floppy. But Brad's, at room temperature, feels as stiff as refrigerated. I interpret this to mean it's got a lot of saturated fat and a low amount of PUFA. The website doesn't have specifics of what they get fed, but I know he's talked about it on his other blog in relation to the croissant diet.

Passthecream said...

Hi Cavenewt, yes I read about Brad's pork products. That's what set me wondering how you could get a very weighty pig which had such high sat fat content. I also read about standard pig finishing processes with a mix of horror and admiration - it takes approx 675lbs of high quality corn and soy based pig feed to finish a SAP (standard American pig :) ) to a weight of 275lbs. Where the other 400lbs ends up doesn't bear thinking about.

So how could you get that massive gain to happen without any PUFA in their diet? Plenty of fruit and starch is my guess plus some source of shorter chain SFA. Milk and honey.

Luckily we can get reasonably 'rigid' pork here by shopping around the boutique free range options but supermarket bacon tends to be limp and the packaged lard is almost as soft as margarine.