Skip to main content

Magical Research Shows Fat Makes you Sleepy

The Daily Mail has a story(1) about research(2) showing that a high-fat diet makes you sleepy. (See abstract 0977 in the research link.) This flies in the face of my experience and a whole lot of anecdotal experience, too (see the comments to the article). Since starting a low-carb, high fat diet, I haven't needed four-hour naps on the weekend. (See this, this, this, and this.)  I'm not exhausted come 7 p.m. on a Friday night. I have the energy at 44 that I should have had in my twenties. Are we low-carbers violating some law of physics or biology? No--the research and Mail article are magic tricks.

The article is called "Why the Atkins Diet will make you sleepy but a packet of crisps will wake you up." Atkins is a specific diet: 20 grams of carbohydrate per day during induction with adequate protein and fat; most of Dr. Atkins' patients couldn't go over 40 grams of carbohydrate per day without gaining weight. Yet the research article that it refers to doesn't mention the Atkins diet. It also doesn't mention what the participants were fed or how much carbohydrate their meals contained.

One magic trick that low-carb scare studies use is calling a medium-carb diet a low-carb diet. The journal article calls the meals "high fat"; it doesn't say whether the meals were also high-carb or high protein or something in between.

Another magic trick is studying a low-carb diet for less than two weeks, about the amount of time it takes to adapt to such a diet. The study in the journal was conducted over four days. It's not unusual to be a little tired for the first couple of weeks on a low-carb diet.

1. "Why the Atkins Diet will make you sleepy but a packet of crisps will wake you up"  by Emma Innes. Daily Mail, May 8, 2013.
2. "High Fat Intake is Associated with Physiological Sleepiness in Healthy Non-Obese Adults" by Kritikou I, Pejovic S, Vgontzas AN, Fernandez-Mendoza J, Bata M, and Bixler EO. Journal of Sleep and Sleep Disorders Research, Volume 36, 2013, Abstract Supplement, article 0977.
Labels:

Comments

horfilmania said…
When I came across that article I snorted out loud and didn't even read it because my experience is the direct opposite.

But, hold on a sec, don't crisps also contain a lot of fat?
May 09, 2013
Lori Miller said…
According to nutritiondata.self.com, 100g of potato chips has 49g carb (net) and 38g fat.

If you're on a 2k cal per day diet, and your macronutrient ratio is 10% carb, 35% protein & 55% fat, that's around 50g carb & 122g fat. From that point of view, it's a high-carb snack.

If you're on a low-fat diet (10% fat on 2k cal per day), you're allowed 22g of fat. At 55% carb, you'd be allowed 275g of carb. The fat would blow your diet for the day.

Personally, I think of potato chips as a high-carb food, but it's relative to what your plan is.
May 09, 2013
Lowcarb team member said…
Speaking personally, my carb intake over the past few years is reduced and my fat in-take higher than it used to be and NO I am not falling asleep all over the place. Interestingly friends I sometimes go out with who have no regard to what they eat, or the blow out type meal they've just consumed, will often be asleep in their chairs for a couple of hours, and alcohol not necessarily the reason for this!
Lots more still needs to be done to cast out the LCHF myths, and re-enforce the good news.

All the best Jan.
May 09, 2013
Lori Miller said…
My mom used to go into "carb comas" that we couldn't rouse her from. We didn't know what was wrong with her. On a LC diet, she doesn't have those anymore.
May 09, 2013
Anonymous said…
If your brain is running on ketones (due to starvation or keto diet) it makes you mentally sharper.
If in the past our ancestors had run out of food, then their brains would be running on ketones (which provide more ATP to the brain per unit of oxygen used according to my monster book of metabolism). It is the ones whose brains worked well on ketones and could function well enough to hunt that would have survived.
It makes no evolutionary sense at all that a keto (ie high fat) diet makes you sleepy! Anyone who had that problem would have died out eons ago.
A high carb, high fat diet however is another thing entirely. Researchers don't usually know the difference between a high fat diet and a keto diet.

Carole AKA CarbsaneR
May 10, 2013
Lori Miller said…
That makes sense. It reminds me of a chapter in the book The Richest Man in Babylon: A man had ended up in slavery due to debt, ran away, and was crossing the desert back to Babylon. On the third day after his food ran out, he said he woke up with sudden mental clarity, hollered at his stolen camels to get up, and made it back home to tell the tale. Ketones FTW!
May 10, 2013
Galina L. said…
I am just seek and tired to encounter all that crap in the media. It doesn't harm me, of course, but makes it harder to try to give a saving advise to a struggling health-wise friend.
May 10, 2013
Lori Miller said…
If the comments are any indication, it looks like a lot of people know that LC scare studies are a load of crap.
May 10, 2013
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."
23 comments
Read more

Paleo Diet: Eating Differently from Everyone Else is Fine!

I've been seeing more and more articles by women (it's always women) whose heads have exploded trying to figure out life without yogurt and cupcakes. Oh, the shenanigans they get up to: bathroom problems from stuffing themselves with vegetables, paleo baked goods that don't taste the same as ones from the bakery, and especially the irresistible urge to eat "normally." The technical problems aren't hard to sort out: substitutes like baked goods will taste different because they are different, but an adjustment period of a few months will make those foods taste normal. And whatever you eat, don't stuff yourself. First, though, read a book by Loren Cordain or Mark Sisson to learn about the paleo diet before diving in. The articles I keep reading, though, have more to do with attitude: the urge to be exactly like everybody else or the urge to be helpless. If you're in the second category, I can't, by definition, help you. If you'd rather be Lu
19 comments
Read more

Robert F. Kennedy shows up at the FDA

 
Post a Comment
Read more

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder .
18 comments
Read more

A Reason to Eat Red Meat, Fat, Eggs and Salt

It looks like Reason magazine has been reading about my diet...or maybe just studies showing no associations between red meat and mortality, saturated fat and heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease, or salt consumption and disease. Summarizing published research from the past few years, the article calls the government's dietary advice of the past forty years a fiasco of misinformation,  even noting there's a positive association between a low-sodium diet and death. It adds that the US government's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has dropped their long crusade against cholesterol. The article explains, Observational studies [which the government relied on] may be good at developing hypotheses, but they are mostly not a good basis for making behavioral recommendations and imposing regulations. It's refreshing for the mainstream media to recognize that mainstream dietary advice hasn't been working instead of parroting the same misinformation. T
17 comments
Read more