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

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...
17 comments
Read more

Decongestant Ineffective; Vibration Plate Works

A common ingredient in many cold medicines has been shown so ineffective that the FDA recently proposed taking it off the market. The ingredient, phenylephrine, "failed to outperform placebo pills in patients with cold and allergy congestion," say researchers from the University of Florida. "The same researchers also challenged the drug's effectiveness in 2007, but the FDA allowed the products to remain on the market pending additional research," according to CNBC .  Mostly placebos. Photo from Pixabay . I can attest that phenylephrine doesn't work. Before I stopped eating wheat, I constantly had nasal and sinus congestion. I helped keep Sudafed in business when the active ingredient was pseudoephedrine, but I noticed the PE (phenylephrine) variety didn't work at all. The only other decongestants I've found helpful are guaifenesin (Mucinex) and spicy food. Mucinex is expensive because it works! (The cheaper store brands work just as well, though.) Su...
Post a Comment
Read more