Nate5678's Journal, 23 Apr 21

Grass jelly is my usual drink at the hawker centre during childhood days. There’s a version of this drink in Singapore called ‘Michael Jackson’ 😄 

Grass jelly has as low calories as vegetables, but I add sugar in it. In the end I used fork to eat the jelly. In Thailand grass jelly (both drink and desert) has a lot of added sugar, but it’s one of few things that have no fat. So I often have it 

It seems like you're okay with sugars (fruits, desserts etc) and not okay with fats. Interesting especially since you had lost weight fast through speed keto :) 

We Asian have been surprisingly lean for thousands of years with carbs, so I think it’s safer to try the surely successful method. 🤔 Keto is great for fat lost, but only in short term. For longer period of time keto will harm our health. I see human as herbivore, human tends to animal foods only when there is no plants around, that’s why branch chained amino acids in animal foods trigger more insulin than carbs, it tells the body we are out of food, so the body needs to store more fat because starvation period is coming. But if we eat a lot of carbs from plants, we are telling our cells that there are a lot of foods, so the body doesn’t have to cut the energy consumption short, and doesn’t have to store energy as well. I think that theory makes most sense from evolutionary perspective. And I don’t like keto but that doesn’t mean the keto’s mechanism is bad for losing fat, because it’s fasting mechanism. 

Yes, same thoughts here. Thus I go for plant-based low-carbs instead of the standard keto diet. It's not just about losing & maintaining weight but to be at best possible physical condition and live beyond 100 years old. As for "we Asian have been surprisingly lean for thousands of years with carbs", I can't say the same for Singapore. In line with the statistics found online, at least 40% of the local population are overweight and at least 10% are obese.... 

I only that wether from plant or animal, excess fat is still bad for health. But for plant fat, like nut and seeds, there are a lot of fibre too. Fibre will bind with fat and those fat won’t be absorbed into blood stream, so you eat that fat, but not absorb all of it. So in the end I think that wouldn’t it be better to eat less fat, because the body seems to have mechanism to get rid of fat before it goes into blood. 

Have you heard about T Collin Campbell before? He’s the author of the book The China Study. He did research in China before. In his research the Chinese half century ago consumed 85% of calories from carbohydrates, and they ate around 1.5lbs of rice per day, and those people weren’t labour workers, they were middle class office workers. But surprisingly that only 1-3% of Chinese at that time were classified overweight. But after their diet was westernised, calories from carbohydrates decreased from 85-90% to 40-50%, and calories from protein and fat increased from 5-10% to 30-40%, their average health and overweight rates became the same as western countries. I don’t really know about Singapore, but in Thailand the situations is similar to China. And I think that Singapore should be the same. 

Hey Nate, thank you so much for recommending this book. I had benefited greatly from your earlier suggestions: Lifespan by David Sinclair and Dry Fasting by Dr. Sergey Filonov. I downloaded and read through The China Study. I searched but can't find any mentions of 1.5lbs of rice nor 85% calories from carbs. Anyways, I'm a rice-eater for around 40 years and consumed around 1.5lbs of rice over lunch and dinner for most days until November 2020. I was overweight most of my life. Before COVID I had visited China and Thailand around once a year. What I observed were very close to the attached articles: Overweight percentage in China and Thailand are more than 50% and 30% respectively. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55428530 https://www.thailand-business-news.com/featured/49065-thailand-ranks-second-asean-prevalence-obesity-mcot-net.html 

For me, I think Thailand is different from other Asian countries. We accept western cultures since hundred years ago unlike our neighbours that didn’t accept it at first. So our diet had been westernised since long time ago. “Traditional foods” here are already greasy, but not from butter and animal fat like western countries, but from coconut milk. As you can see in my old photos that almost every traditional deserts have coconut milk in it. So I think that the rate of overweight in Thailand should be more than 30% Officially they say that 30% of population is overweight (~20 millions), and 7% have diabetes (~5 millions) 

About the Chinese diet, their diet was low fat low protein high carb plant based diet, so they consumed rice with fruits, beans, and vegetables, rarely ate grease and meat. He mentioned about this in videos on YouTube, but, sorry, that I forgot the source. I don’t know the caloric ratio in your diet, so I don’t really know how you got fat. But statistically vegans who follow whole food plant based diet have lowest rate of overweight. But for vegans (such as in UK) who consume a lot of junk foods are as overweight as those who are not vegans. 

Rarely ate grease and meat?? Just like many of the 1 & 2 stars reviews given to T Collin Campbell's The China Study in Amazon website, the reviewers deemed that it is very narrow in scope and does not truly/ fully represent the wider China demographics. Having lived in Hunan, Guizhou and Chaozhou for a few weeks each, the amount of grease, oil and meat they eat on a daily basis is too damn high that I drown myself with Chinese tea every meal to digest and breakdown the fats.... Anyways, Collin Campbell did said in the book that his China research was done in the 1980s in the rural/ countryside area. We need to keep up with the times ;) 

How I gotten fat is exactly how most people gotten fat in Singapore: 1. Having high-carb food like bread, roti prata, sugar-coated cereals, fried fritters etc for breakfast. 2. Having the high-carb staple food of rice, noodles or other refined grains stuff for lunch and dinner. 3. Oversaturation of bakeries located at strategic points eg train stations, neighbourhood corners selling bread & pastries at hard-to-resist prices. 4. The prevalence of fast food, delivery food and convenient snacks that induce people to eat unnecessarily between meals and after meals. 5. All that constant brainwashing by the so-called influencers and online/ TV advertisements promoting food/ snacks that you must eat before you die etc 

I missed many points about diet 😓 About your diet, wasn’t that you lack of fibre in your carb source? And things like bakery and snacks have a lot of oil in them too. So it’s typically western diet, isn’t it? 

Basically I was eating high-carbs in terms of refined grains and processed sugar in the form of white bread, pastries, noodles, white rice, biscuits, potato chips, French fries, soft drinks, package fruit juice etc. I didn't eat much fibre or fruits because I could shit easily everyday. The issue is in the carbs, not oil.