It may come down to your goals. If you want to be lean, and don’t have performance in mind, you could get by on a low carb diet, like the T-dawg 2.0.
However, if you’re playing a sport, and you want to hold onto the muscle mass you do have, while trying to get leaner, Don’t Diet and Massive Eating are the ones I would suggest.
Only problem I have with Berardi’s rules, is that my body becomes a furnace when I eat like this, and I have a hard time cooling down, short of jumping in a cold shower.
Zulu, I don’t have the time to find them, but they are on PubMed. A search with keywords like “postprandial,” hyperinsulinemia, “macronutrient,” “oxidation,” etc.
Their results are consistent with Berardi’s recommendations. However, you will find a few strange studies that actually contradict Berardi (for example, I remember one with sunflower oil reducing insulin from dietary carbs). But among these few, there are no shared principles, and scientists do not seem to have followed up on them with similar experiments.
It seems as though someone wants a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich and is trying to jusitfy it.
LOL!
Come on over-analyzers… managing insulin is really the thing to be concerned with.
Come on guys, if you wanna be swole, you gota avoid mixing fats and carbs! All joking aside, I did my own little test to see of this carbs + fat thing really works or if it’s bologna. Everyday I ate 6 - 9 potatoes topped with cheese and filled in the rest of the calories with clean foods. At the end of 3 weeks, I was about 15 pounds heavier; 12 pounds of it was pure blubber. I’m an ectomorph, and as any ectomorph knowns, gaining mass (any kind of mass) isn’t an easy task. This, however, only confirmed that carbs + fats mixed together is the quickest way to enlarge that yummy adipose tissue.
Having 9 (white??) potatoes is a recipe for gaining weight…that has absolutely nothing to do with combining fat and carbs with protein present.
Maybe I should have some mars bar+protein P+C meals and then claim I got fat.
-Zulu
Thunder, isn’t your explanation of ASP an argument for the P+F/P+C combinations? I mean since ASP and insulin together (from a P+F+C meal) inhibits lipolysis more than just one or the other.
My understanding is that ASP promotes re-esterfication of FFA more than diminishing lipolysis, insulin does both, and these effects of insulin and ASP are additive.
Zulu, if you don’t want to believe Brian Smith’s or Thunder’s explanation because they are ‘twisting physiology’ why don’t you simply type into the search engine ‘insulin.’ I guarantee you will wonder why you even asked your question in the first place, if you choose to read a couple of articles.
They are not twisting physiology at all.
If you are an insane ectomorph, then you might want P+F+C because you want to sustain high insulin levels with fats to help your overall weight gain, but anyone else would be wise to avoid that mix. Unless of course, you WANT to get fat…
Read carefully. I said potatoes topped with cheese. Traditionally I’ve eaten that many potatoes a day in the past and gained ZERO weight. Add some cheese and walla, fat.
I’m not accusing them of twisting physiology. What I’m saying is that such terse replies are meaningless to a layman like me. You could have said pretty much anything and there’s no way I know it’s true or not.
I think many people here are taking all this stuff purely on faith.
-Zulu
For Christ’s sake, Zulu, why don’t you just TRY IT?!???
Sheesh.
“The mixed fat and carbohydrate intake of humans allows dietary fat to supply lipid for storage in a more energy efficient process than would be achieved if significant lipogenesis from carbohydrate occurred (i.e. 2 vs. 23% of ingested calories)?”
Brodsky, I. Hormone, cytokine and nutrient interaction. In: Shils, M., et al. (Eds.) Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins. 699-704.
The data of ASP is still relatively new, but there are a number of things that it points to.
of course the control over lipid release makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, as releasing fats while storing them makes little point. And it also makes sense that the body has the ability to store fat in the absence of insulin, or else the human race would have died off years ago 
there is no better way to eat in my opinion if you are eating over 400-500 cals a meal. Your body can handle the smaller loads if you trained it to do so. AKA. getting off your ass and exercising hehe. I ve used this for a bout a year now and i have had great results. My BF% never moves past 10% no matter what i eat. I am now down to about 7% and i am not even dieting and i am actually gaining weight, so i am guessing this diet has quite the effect. Also most ppl dont have a damn clue how to prepare of P + F meal. Milk and Cottage cheese arent necesarrily great choices. If you stick to good fats and prot. I do Salmon and veggies or Tuna and full fat mayo. Seems to work.
So how did everyone get lean before the idea of separating the C from the F? Obviously, not everyone went on keto diets. There is a lot out there about the effectiveness of P+C+F meals, where the carbs are low glycemic.
Separating the C from the F may be the most effective option, but I wonder why everyone writes off the P+C+F meals (which are much easier to do.)
Macaijah,
Stored where?
If insulin “shuttles” protein to muscles for USE, is it possible insulin “shuttles” fat for use (instead of being burned as fuel), such as for use in cell walls?
Insulin is an the indiscriminate storage hormone. Calories are consumed, insulin is released, nutrients are stored. As Berardi has mentioned a gazillion times, insulin sensitivity will determine where the majority of the nutrients will be shuttled. Poor sensitivity = adipose, good sensitivity = LBM. Also, nutrients that are not used are stored. Since protein isn’t stored in the same manner as carbs or lipids, two things can happen. It can convert to glucose and be stored as glycogen in the muscle cells or the liver, or, it can convert to glucose and then further be converted to fat and stored as such in adipose tissue. If the body cannot store any more glucose, take a wild guess in what happens. Yep, the body converts the excess energy into fat and stores it in those beloved adipocytes. Now keep in mind, gluconeogenesis and lipogenesis are energy costly processes (burning energy to store energy), so the effects of fat storage will be less aparent. However, if you truely want to store fat in an energy efficient manner: mix large ammounts of fats and carbs in the same meal. This is already demonstarted in the study I listed above (thanks Lonnie).
“However, if you truely want to store fat in an energy efficient manner: mix large ammounts of fats and carbs in the same meal.”
But that is assuming that either the individual has poor insulin sensitivity, or there is more fat ingested than needed for the cells, or a combination of the two.
What if none of the above is the case?
If the fat is needed in the cells, then it would seem to make sense to eat fat (how much I have no clue) with your protein AND carbs.
2 very crucial points to consider:
Any ingestion of food will cause an insulin response (1) and the amount of insulin necessary to blunt lipolysis is absoultely minisicule, particularly in adipose regions with a higher affinity for insulin moderated activity.
Given this, the notion of separating these macro’s (controlling for overall clean eating which i am assuming) does not seem to be that big of deal.
Also, for those that suggest they have seen body comp changes, particularly in regards to body fat, I would make a plea for methodological rigor and ask what device you used to obtain the reading, what time of day, and so forth. If you are being more anecdotal based on “cosmetic/mirror” appearance, then the results can be construed very differently.
[i]2 very crucial points to consider:
Any ingestion of food will cause an insulin response (1) and the amount of insulin necessary to blunt lipolysis is absoultely minisicule, particularly in adipose regions with a higher affinity for insulin moderated activity.
Given this, the notion of separating these macro’s (controlling for overall clean eating which i am assuming) does not seem to be that big of deal.[/i]
-I’m no expert, and I don’t want to come over as if I think I am…
But has anybody said (besides some supplement company selling a thermogenic pill) that it’s possible for our bodies to stay in lipolysis all day, everyday? I’m pretty sure I’ve read a Berardi article in which he’s stated that there are going to be times in a day in which our bodies’ balance will be more in favor of fat storage than lipolysis and vice versa. Our goal is to manipulate that balance in favor of lipolysis (more lipolysis than storage.) I think I’ve even read that fat storage occurs simultaneously with lipolysis - we can’t get 100% of one or the other…best case scenario is more total lipolysis than fat storage by the end of the day, week, month, etc.
Insulin is a storage hormone. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that a smaller insulin release would cause a smaller amount of storage in adipose tissue.
And I think you are ignoring how insulin sensitivity plays into this whole scenario.
Macaijah,
I am kind of wary about that statement of Berardi’s. He was implying that insulin sensitivity is THE determinant of the ratio of muscle:fat gain during a hypercaloric period. That’s probably not true because the difference in insulin sensitivity would have to be EXACTLY proportional to the difference in rates of de novo lipogenesis. And I haven’t seen a study that indicates this. I believe that the situation is more complex than this. But of course, the more insulin sensitive you are, the better your muscle:fat gains should be, all else equal.
In fact, if you’re ONLY eating carbs post-workout (or in targeted re-feeds) insulin sensitivity shouldn’t matter at all. How often is it so severely impaired that protein elicits lasting hyperinsulemia?