ExRx.net

I didn't say anitiotics in meat was any more important than any other dietary factor. I just gave it as an example of something than can affect gut health. It's probably up there with bottle feeding in importance. I think over consumption of grains and sugars is a bigger factor.

It will try to get at the energy, but it can't. The rabbit tests are utter bollocks. I can't believe you even mentioned them. The one major glaring, obvious problem, is that RABBITS ARE HERBIVORES! People are entirely different and no such thing was found in studies on people.

Its rabbit starvation-- a diet of only low fat meat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation

That's right. The problem with that is a rabbit is an herbivore.


Now keep in mind I'm not arguing that you don't need either fat or carbs for energy. I'm also not saying that crapping out protein isn't a waste. I'm just saying it's not bad for people.

A cow is a herbivore too but you don't get rabbit starvation from eating cows. The problem with small animals like rabbits and squirrels is that they don't have enough fat on them. A high protein diet with adequate fat is not dangerous, just wasteful as you said.

It sounded like you were criticizing rabbit studies, which are truly bogus, but irrelevant to this discussion.

I was talking about the rabbit being an herbivore because they fed the rabbit meat.

ironman--
I think "rabbit starvation" is when humans eat nothing but very lean rabbit. The wikipedia page discusses it. It sounds like it causes problems when people eat rabbit meat only for a long time and also experience other environmental stress (like trying to survive a very long hard winter out in some cabin somewhere or having been stranded in Northern Canada when your boat can't make it during your attempt to find the Northwest passage or some such.)

I'd heard of this before, but I'm not very familiar with exactly when it's happened or what's required. But it does appear that a diet of 100% rabbit meat isn't functional.

Oh I see. In that case, I'm getting two completely different things mixed up.

Yea, if you eat nothing but protein, that isn't going to cut it. You can't really get much energy from that. You need fat to go with it. Well if that is what he was talking about that supports what I was saying more than it supports him.

I thought he meant that oddball study where meat damaged the kidneys of rabbits. I was wondering why anyone would bring some quackery like that.

Good that it got cleared up while I was sleeping ;-). I think most of the studies are designed with the outcome in mind. Then the researchers, do everything possible to get the expected results, even fudging results. The bright ones will design it so that they don't have to fudge any results. That is a very big problem in science. But that is what the project grant system expects. You need to work on a theory that is already well accepted and add something to it. Going against the stream only makes your hard work get ignored.

The real problem with high protein is that say you eat 300gms of lean protein. Lets say that 100gms are required for body building. The remaining 200gms is going to be converted to glucose. To get 200gms glucose you need to burn 30% of the energy (I am not sure but it seems to me that this energy must come from fat). So you need about 200*4*3/(10*9) = 27gms of fat to go with it, just to be able to use the remaining 200gms of protein. In addition our body requires a lot of fat as a building material. Without this fat you will burn your own fat, and if you don't have enough body fat, you will be in trouble. This kind of leaning out is called Rabbit Starvation.

The other problem is Kleiber's law. Our body has a surface area, with which we discard heat. The metabolic system in our body is very old. It developed even before mammals developed. So all mammals generate heat only proportional to their surface area or approximately relative to their mass. It is a fact that all mammals have an average metabolic rate proportional to their mass to the power of 3/4.

Now for humans our brains are enormous, and they use a whole lot of energy as much as 600calories which would be about 25% of total energy usage of a normal person. That 3 pound organ (<2% of human body) uses up more than 20% of the energy. If you convert 200gms of proteins to glucose you are producing 250kcal of heat during the conversion. This is also part of your metabolic rate.

The effect of the above is that we have a set ideal metabolic rate. There will be a range that is good for us, but the range is not infinitely stretchable. Moderation seems to be an important key.

But that 200gm of protein isn't necessarily converted to glucose-- if there are more efficient ways to fuel the body (ie carbs, fat, alcohol) that excess protein will be excreted.

Most of the civilized world is dramatically overweight - an almost purely protein diet would probably do them no harm for weeks or months as fat stores deplete.

Also just a tip, you wont get rabbit starvation if you eat everything, organs, bone marrow, etc. obviously.

Now you are contradicting yourself. Which is it? You convert it to glucose or you get rabbit starvation? As for bodybuilding with 100 grams of protein, that isn't going to cut it unless you are a tiny little guy.

As for the rest of that, what does it have to do with what we are talking about?

What he said was that if you need to convert protein to glucose but you have insufficient fat resources, you get rabbit starvation. I don't see the contradiction in that.

That's just a side issue, and it depends on the exact cause of rabbit starvation which we are not sure of. The point however was that there is not much conversion to glucose and excess protein is not bad for you.

Then of course there is the point of why did he bring up rabbit starvation when I questioned his silly ideas about gluconeogenesis and claims about excess protein being bad for you. Rabbit starvation is a straw man because I never said that is all you would be eating.