Dayrl,
People react differently to the same words.  I want people to know that I recognize this and that I understand that the vigorous way in which I defend my ideas as well as my direct challenges for objective data or personal experience to support ideas that differ from mine can cause some people to feel that their comments are unwelcome.

It is conflict and debate that help us to separate the truth from ideas that are accepted only because they are repeated so often without challenge.  I just want to make sure that people know that I am not personally attacking them, just challenging them to look beyond the pronouncements of the latest gurus, and ask them to draw their own conclusions from their personal experience as well as published research, while keeping a sharp eye out for bias.  Whenever I draw a conclusion, I always try to support that conclusion with information from as many sources as possible as well as my own personal experience.  I hope to encourage others to do the same as I challenge their opposing ideas.

Thanks for your support and for providing me an opportunity to give readers a better understanding of my thought processes.

Lex



 

Hi William,
McCanney is absolutely correct.  Normal distillation would include all contaminants with a boiling point lower than water.  Many years ago I built a fractionating tower as an experiment in distilling alcohol from wine and other fermeted substances.  It was only partially successful but did make very clear the problem of separating volatile substances with close boiling points.

My own system is really a mixed bed de-ionizer.  Minerals dissolved in water are in an "ionic" state which means that they have a weak electrical charge.  A de-ionizer has rosin beads that also have sort of a static electrical charge that attracts and holds onto the mineral ions - thus removing the minerals from the solution.  It works very well as my water starts out with about 900 parts per million of dissolved minerals and after passing through the de-ionizer there is less than 2 parts per million.  We originally got the de-ionizer to create "rain water" to water our orchids.  We started using it for drinking and cooking because it tasted so much better than the stuff straight from the tap.

De-ionization doesn't remove the volatile contaminants either as they don't convert to their ionic form when in solution with water.  After the water leaves the de-ionizer it passes through a carbon filter which through a mechanical surface tension action tends to hold onto the volatile contaminants and lets the water pass though. 

Finally, the water passes a UV lamp which tends to kill bacteria, parasites, and algae that may have made it through all the other stages.

All stages must be monitored and either "recharged" (in the case of the de-ionizer stage) or replaced (in the case of the particle filters and carbon filter stages) on a regular basis.

Using De-Ionization is much more efficient than Reverse Osmosis as all the water that passes through a DI system comes out the other end and is usable.  RO systems require constant back flusing to maintain efficiency and many of the cheaper systems discard 5 gallons of water for every gallon of clean water they produce.  RO systems also suffer from allowing volatile contaminants to pass through so the carbon filter is still necessary, though most biological contaminants (bacteria, algae, etc) can't get through the RO membrane so the UV lamp is unnecessary.

All systems have Plus and minuses.  If all my system was for was drinking water I would have opted for RO, but since we use many gallons for watering and misting delicate plants, DI made more sense.

Lex



 

Not sure I agree with the above statement and the way the sentence is structured it may be that you intended to say the opposite - that since I don't engage in intense muscular activities that the 80g of protein WOULD NOT be needed for repairs or building new muscles.  If this is what you actually meant to say then I concur that this is probably likely.


This is one I struggle with.  It does seem that the rise in BG after a meal tracks loosely with the amount of protein eaten, but I often wonder if any significant BG is produced directly from dietary fat.  Here's what causes me to question this.  The accepted wisdom is that when body fat is broken down for energy the fatty acids must be transported to and from the fat cells in the form of triglycerides.  When the triglyceride is finally broken down, and the three fatty acids are released, there is a glycerol molecule left over which the liver converts to glucose and this raises BG - or so goes the theory.  Now this has me wondering if there is any significant glycerol associated with the fat we eat - especially when we eat it raw, just as it came from the animal.  If so, do we absorb this glycerol and if we do, then I would think that it must also be converted to glucose since glycerol is glycerol regardless of the source.  If the body converts one glycerol molecue to glucose then it should convert all glycerol molecules to glucose unless the glycerol molecule is combined with fatty acids again to form another triglyceride.


Based on what I've observed, I have to believe that some portion of all protein eaten is converted to glucose.  Now my speculation is that only certain amino acids are converted and others are not - and then, only if they are not removed from the bloodstream by some other tissue to be used for building or repair, before finally making it to the liver where the conversion would take place.  If this is the case it would account for the remarkable consistency of the amount converted, be it 58% or whatever.  Of course I have no way of really testing this, but it makes sense to me.  A corollary to this would be that the overall percentage of protein converted to glucose would be highly dependent on the source of the protein.  The amino acid makeup of meat may be such that 58% of the amino acids are the type that the body can convert to glucose, however, protein from plant sources have wildly varying amino acid profiles and often some of the amino acids are missing altogether so the conversion rate would be completely different for each plant source.  Again this is just speculation and I don't have a way to prove this.


I have spread smaller meals through out the day in the past and there is still a rise in BG after eating, only it is smaller.  It does not track as an even division such as you suggest (eat three meals for a rise of 8 per meal for a total of 24, instead of single meal with a rise of 24).  The rise is smaller but widely variable even though the 3 meals are all the same size and spaced 6 hours apart.  One meal may show a rise of 8, another of 3, and the last of 18.  And the middle meal is not always the lowest, nor is the last always the highest.  As I've said before, I often get a 10 point rise in BG a couple of hours after getting up in the morning and I haven't eaten anything at all.  Bottom line here is that I've tried this and didn't have anything useful or consistent that I could report other than there is a general rise in BG after eating a meal consisting of protein and fat and the BG rise is loosely correlated with the amount of protein in the meal.  You will find this observation is several of my previous posts.

May I suggest an alternative to your test of maintaining normal food composition but divided into smaller portions and eaten throughout the day which I've already done - though not with any real rigor, and maybe try something a bit more radical like a day or two consisting of meals of fat only.  I would expect BG to rise and fall since it does so even when no food is eaten, but with no protein to provide the raw material for GNG, it would be interesting to see if there is any significant correlation between the fluctuations in BG with meals consisting of only fat.  This might shed some light on whether any portion of dietary fat is converted to glucose or is it only protein.

What do you think?

Lex

And I also believe that metabolizing fatty acids do create some glucose. Not all the fatty acids you consume will become ketone bodies but glycerol and such. To be honest, I'm not too much of an expert on this matter, however. You and Steffanson both consumed about 80-100g of protein a day which could translate to maxiumum of about 58g of glucose created although I'm not sure if this much will be created given that some of the dietary protein must have been used for bodily maintainance and both of you didn't wasn't constantly wasting away your LM. Brain needs about 40g of glucose when adapted to burning ketones, and there are few parts of the body that needs little bit of glucose as well. Maybe that 58g (possibly lower) of glucose was enough to take care of all that, but if Mary's theory is correct and that we need some higher amount of glucose to have fatty acids completely metabolized for energy, obviously we need little more than that and some that could be derived from breakdown of TG could certainly help out. Don't you think so?

Not sure exactly what to think.  The best that I can do is observe and then comment on my observations.  

There really is no way for me to know if 58% of meat protein is converted into glucose.  My observations tell me that some is converted, but exactly how much is impossible to tell.  I've done some mathmatical gymnastics and included these in some of my posts.  They are interesting but hardly conclusive.  The systems that control things like BG are designed to meet the body's needs at any given moment and it is impossible to tell if the current reading is more influenced by external inputs like food and exercise, an internal breakdown of body fat or lean muscle mass, or a combination of both.

It's also not possible for me to know how much glucose the brain or other glucose dependent systems need -keto adapted or not.  And here I don't really have any way to observe what's going on at all.  Any comment would just be a wild guess and serve no real purpose.

My only tools are a digital bathroom scale, glucose meter, and Ketostix.  Even if these provided laboratory precision measurements, I still can't tell exactly what any tissue in the body is doing.  The best I can do is try to correlate food intake over time with general changes in body mass, blood glucose, and ketones in the urine.

I've got a couple of projects going that will take me most of the week to complete.  Once these are done I'll put together an experiment where I spend a day or two eating just fat.  I really don't look forward to this because a change like this means I have to measure BG every hour to get anything useful so my fingers really take a beating.  But I'm interested in what will happen, so I'll sacrifice my fingers in the interest of science.....

Lex