What would happen to your body if you only ate 750g of 2% cottage cheese every day for a month? - eviltoast

Picture for nutritional info.

  • hellofriend@lemmy.worldOP
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    5 months ago

    Really? I’ve heard about rabbit starvation. Wouldn’t cottage cheese be lean enough to suffer the same? Or is there more to it than that (e.g. type of protein, lipids, etc.)?

    • jet@hackertalks.com
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      5 months ago

      You would not be getting enough bioavailable nutrients, but one month is not long enough for that to be a serious problem.

      This is not a healthy balanced diet, you could not live on it forever because of bioavailable nutrients and the like. But as emergency food, it’s fine.

      If you did not have excess fat at the start of this diet, you would have trouble. There is not enough fat here to keep you going.

      750 cals per day, assuming you need about 2500 cal a day, your deficit is about 2000kcals a day. 7700 cals per kg of fat. You would lose about 7.7kg of fat… If you maintain your original metabolic rate, but the body is adaptable, and it would reduce your metabolic rate while you went through this emergency diet

      • hellofriend@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        Ah, okay. What do you think might happen due to the comparative lack of carbohydrates? I don’t imagine you could enter ketosis on this diet. Not enough fat. Would the body burn more muscle tissue in spite of the high protein intake?

        • jet@hackertalks.com
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          5 months ago

          Ketosis is a metabolic state. It is the process by which your body converts fat into energy. Anytime you lose weight you have been in ketosis… Every night when you sleep your body goes into ketosis.

          What people commonly refer to as a ketogenic diet, is just a shorthand way of saying, eating food that maintains your fat burning preference.

          So this yogurt diet, will absolutely put you in ketosis, for no other reason than you’re at a caloric deficit per day.

          I am not aware of any reason your body would cannibalize your muscles when you have sufficient protein. People often do month-long fasts, as long as they maintain their metabolic rate/activites, they don’t lose significant muscle mass. But this is a function of your stored energy, so if you don’t have enough fat to make up for your metabolic deficit, that energy will have to come from somewhere as a priority to keep your brain alive. Don’t put your body in that position. The science around fasting, is highly contentious, so you’re going to get wildly different viewpoints on this.

          • Dave@lemmy.nz
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            5 months ago

            But this is a function of your stored energy, so if you don’t have enough fat to make up for your metabolic deficit, that energy will have to come from somewhere as a priority to keep your brain alive. Don’t put your body in that position.

            So what you’re saying is I should keep excess body fat, just in case I need to eat only cottage cheese for a month?

            • jet@hackertalks.com
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              5 months ago

              The vast majority of people are already prepared for the cottage cheese challenge!

              I think the absolute minimum body fat percentage people should have is about 5%men 10%women give or take. Probably much higher. For for 50 kg person, that works out to about 7 kg of body fat minimum.

              However, if you want to be drought and famine resistant, you need to get those numbers up!

          • hellofriend@lemmy.worldOP
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            5 months ago

            Oh okay, thank you for the clarification. I wasn’t aware of that. So I guess while you’re sleeping, as long as you haven’t eaten recently before falling asleep, then you’ll enter ketosis, right?

            • jet@hackertalks.com
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              5 months ago

              Ignoring glucogen reserves in muscles, the body doesn’t really have a way to store glucose, which is the energy you get from eating carbohydrates.

              So all of the glucose except for like 5 g in the blood, get stored as fat. You burn through that 5 g in your blood depending on your metabolic rate and activities in a few hours. This is why a lot of people who are eating carb heavy diets get hungry every few hours, The hangry advertising campaign. They’re just running out of glucose.

              Anyway, unless you’re waking up every few hours at night to snack, your body has to enter ketosis to provide energy while you sleep.

              The liver does have the ability to make glucose from fat, called gluconeogenesis, but it would still be burning fat to do that.

    • BOMBS@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      rabbit starvation

      FYI: For those that have never heard of the term:

      Protein poisoning (also referred to colloquially as rabbit starvation, mal de caribou, or fat starvation) is an acute form of malnutrition caused by a diet deficient in fat and carbohydrates, where almost all bioavailable calories come from the protein in lean meat

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

      • jet@hackertalks.com
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        5 months ago

        Small tangent - I know this is going to probably be an internet fight, but there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate for human health.

        Bioavailable nutrition is in the fat in the meat, and in the organ meat such as liver.

        The Eskimos never died from a lack of carbohydrates.

        • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          The text says deficient in fat and carbohydrates. I’m pretty sure they mean it only happens when you don’t have enough of either, not that carbs are an essential nutrient.