While local shortages of blood glucose in particular brain regions can cause willpower failures, you can’t fix it by hacking your biochemistry because sustained global excess blood sugar has the opposite effect: crippling lethargy. Some possible workarounds do come to mind, but they all involve either nanotechnology or dangerous brain surgery.
What do you mean? Blood glucose levels can be tested at home (people with diabetes do that already) and if you somehow figure out how to eat sugar at appropriate times only you never get anywhere near sustained global excess, while limiting time spent in low blood sugar state.
Maintaining insulin sensitivity is a whole lot easier, practical and definitely healthier solution than fiddling with sugar intake. After all, in a well-rounded diet your high GI carb intake should be limited to a sane amount of sugar from fruits. Glucose and insulin spikes from consumption of simple carbs would promote insulin resistance on a longer term and render higher blood glucose levels useless from a willpower perspective. To that add hepatic damage and glycation damage from fructose intake.
In healthy individuals blood glucose is regulated extremely strictly; your brain shouldn’t crash even several hours after a meal. The reason why so many people experience blood sugar crashes is that they’re greatly overeating bad carbs and carbs in general. Currently I’m on a roughly 70:15:15 fat:carb:protein calorie ratio diet and my assessment of mental energy is in favor of it compared to my old ~50% carb diet.
In principle blood glucose can maintained in normal ranges even if there is literally zero carb consumption but sufficient protein consumption, as we’re able to turn protein into glucose. This is a reason why carbohydrates are not considered essential nutritients by some people.
Do you have any evidence that willpower problems don’t happen on lower carb diet?
My highly detailed food log says I’ve been eating about 33%:33%:33% calorie-weighed protein/carb/fat 1800kcal/day over the last 17 days, and I have about as many willpower crashes as ever.
Direct research evidence is pretty scarce at the moment. Anecdotal evidence is plenty from Immortality Institute, but we all know that anecdotal evidence amounts to little. On the other hand there is evidence for negative effects on cognitive performance from metabolic syndrome and diabetes, which effects can’t be reversed by taking some sugar.
It’s clear cut that sugar gives a cognitive boost, but we’re not biologically accustomed to a constant limbo of blood sugar. Simple sugar was very scarce in the ancestral environment and in some ways it can be viewed as a psychoactive drug.
My approach is that it’s better to first minimize long-term health risks and then try to find safe solutions for short-term problems. Treating mental fatigue with sugar is a huge long term risk and as a strategy it’ll become unsustainable at some point. I’d note though that there are lots of other things that may affect mental energy/performance, like thyroid hormone levels, magnesium, Omega-3, etc.
33:33:33 is a very peculiar diet and I must say I’ve not yet encountered it before. 33% protein means 120+ grams of it per day, which is only common among heavy athletes and bodybuilders. My own 15 percent is also high-ish as I’m trying to get some muscle via strength training and thus supplementing with some whey. I suspect that 33% carbohydrate is still too much in your configuration (and 33 fat is too low).
33:33:33 seems to arise fairly naturally when I try to eat reasonably limited amounts (for purely cosmetic temporary reasons; and all unrelated to the entire willpower business) of the tastiest food (most of which hits diminishing returns very quickly).
Here’s some data on what people eat based on spreadsheetscripting out FAO data. As you can my current protein intake is indeed highly unusual—but then so are your very high fat and extremely low carb intake. Pretending what you’re doing is the norm when it’s really out of the norm is weird.
33:33:33 is similar to what is recommended for zone diet and paleo diet, so I cannot be the only person doing that. Similarity to zone diet purely accidental. Similarity of my constrained optimization for best taste with paleo diet is quite likely not accidental at all.
Your calorie intake is slightly high for the zone diet. That could be fine. The typical version of the zone diet is meant for weight loss and you need a higher amount of calories to maintain weight. The zone recommendation is to get those extra calories from healthy fats. The zone diet is also very concerned with maintaining the correct ratio for every meal and snack, not just as a long term running average. This makes sense if the goal is controlling insulin spikes after each meal.
I agree with Kutta that your protein consumption is much higher than is necessary. I am less clear on what the health consequences of that are.
As a 188cm tall somewhat more physically active than average male, my daily calorie expenditure is somewhere in 2500-2800kcal/day territory, so this is a decent calorie deficit to run for a few weeks.
And I wasn’t aiming at any particular ratio. I just find many high protein foods like meat, cheese, eggs, and beans very tasty when cooked right. The log says nutrient ratio varies quite drastically day to day, 33:33:33 seems to be emergent longer term average.
You’re missing the distinction between local and global blood glucose. A local low is when one particular area of the brain has used up its supply and has to wait for blood to circulate to replenish it. To prevent that from happening, you’d have to either increase the rate of circulation (ie, exercise in a way that increases heart rate), or increase the global blood glucose concentration to a level that’s too high for the idle portions of the brain. A global low is something most people never experience, since the body stores and releases sugar to keep it from happening.
(I am a type 1 diabetic with various fancy equipment for tracking my blood sugar. I have personal experience as to what various blood sugar concentrations feel like, but they may not be representative of more typical biochemistries.)
If only there was some sort of fluid circulating in the body and providing nutrition to every cells which needs it… oh wait...
If you look at the experiments, like the one with the dogs linked above, a plain sugar drink at the right time improves willpower. These tests were all done on people and animals without diabetes, I can easily believe it won’t work for you.
I didn’t mean to imply that you can’t increase willpower by managing blood sugar, but rather that the effect I described sets a limit on the total amount of benefit you can achieve this way. That is to say, while increasing your blood glucose from 80 to 100mg/dL is benefical for willpower, increasing it from 100 to 200mg/dL is disastrous. And most peoples’ metabolism already maintains it at about the right point.
While local shortages of blood glucose in particular brain regions can cause willpower failures, you can’t fix it by hacking your biochemistry because sustained global excess blood sugar has the opposite effect: crippling lethargy. Some possible workarounds do come to mind, but they all involve either nanotechnology or dangerous brain surgery.
What do you mean? Blood glucose levels can be tested at home (people with diabetes do that already) and if you somehow figure out how to eat sugar at appropriate times only you never get anywhere near sustained global excess, while limiting time spent in low blood sugar state.
Maintaining insulin sensitivity is a whole lot easier, practical and definitely healthier solution than fiddling with sugar intake. After all, in a well-rounded diet your high GI carb intake should be limited to a sane amount of sugar from fruits. Glucose and insulin spikes from consumption of simple carbs would promote insulin resistance on a longer term and render higher blood glucose levels useless from a willpower perspective. To that add hepatic damage and glycation damage from fructose intake.
In healthy individuals blood glucose is regulated extremely strictly; your brain shouldn’t crash even several hours after a meal. The reason why so many people experience blood sugar crashes is that they’re greatly overeating bad carbs and carbs in general. Currently I’m on a roughly 70:15:15 fat:carb:protein calorie ratio diet and my assessment of mental energy is in favor of it compared to my old ~50% carb diet.
In principle blood glucose can maintained in normal ranges even if there is literally zero carb consumption but sufficient protein consumption, as we’re able to turn protein into glucose. This is a reason why carbohydrates are not considered essential nutritients by some people.
Do you have any evidence that willpower problems don’t happen on lower carb diet?
My highly detailed food log says I’ve been eating about 33%:33%:33% calorie-weighed protein/carb/fat 1800kcal/day over the last 17 days, and I have about as many willpower crashes as ever.
Direct research evidence is pretty scarce at the moment. Anecdotal evidence is plenty from Immortality Institute, but we all know that anecdotal evidence amounts to little. On the other hand there is evidence for negative effects on cognitive performance from metabolic syndrome and diabetes, which effects can’t be reversed by taking some sugar.
It’s clear cut that sugar gives a cognitive boost, but we’re not biologically accustomed to a constant limbo of blood sugar. Simple sugar was very scarce in the ancestral environment and in some ways it can be viewed as a psychoactive drug.
My approach is that it’s better to first minimize long-term health risks and then try to find safe solutions for short-term problems. Treating mental fatigue with sugar is a huge long term risk and as a strategy it’ll become unsustainable at some point. I’d note though that there are lots of other things that may affect mental energy/performance, like thyroid hormone levels, magnesium, Omega-3, etc.
33:33:33 is a very peculiar diet and I must say I’ve not yet encountered it before. 33% protein means 120+ grams of it per day, which is only common among heavy athletes and bodybuilders. My own 15 percent is also high-ish as I’m trying to get some muscle via strength training and thus supplementing with some whey. I suspect that 33% carbohydrate is still too much in your configuration (and 33 fat is too low).
Note that the whole idea is about taking very small amount of sugar at the right time. It’s completely unrelated to levels that cause metabolic syndrome.
33:33:33 seems to arise fairly naturally when I try to eat reasonably limited amounts (for purely cosmetic temporary reasons; and all unrelated to the entire willpower business) of the tastiest food (most of which hits diminishing returns very quickly).
Here’s some data on what people eat based on spreadsheetscripting out FAO data. As you can my current protein intake is indeed highly unusual—but then so are your very high fat and extremely low carb intake. Pretending what you’re doing is the norm when it’s really out of the norm is weird.
33:33:33 is similar to what is recommended for zone diet and paleo diet, so I cannot be the only person doing that. Similarity to zone diet purely accidental. Similarity of my constrained optimization for best taste with paleo diet is quite likely not accidental at all.
Your calorie intake is slightly high for the zone diet. That could be fine. The typical version of the zone diet is meant for weight loss and you need a higher amount of calories to maintain weight. The zone recommendation is to get those extra calories from healthy fats. The zone diet is also very concerned with maintaining the correct ratio for every meal and snack, not just as a long term running average. This makes sense if the goal is controlling insulin spikes after each meal.
I agree with Kutta that your protein consumption is much higher than is necessary. I am less clear on what the health consequences of that are.
As a 188cm tall somewhat more physically active than average male, my daily calorie expenditure is somewhere in 2500-2800kcal/day territory, so this is a decent calorie deficit to run for a few weeks.
And I wasn’t aiming at any particular ratio. I just find many high protein foods like meat, cheese, eggs, and beans very tasty when cooked right. The log says nutrient ratio varies quite drastically day to day, 33:33:33 seems to be emergent longer term average.
You’re missing the distinction between local and global blood glucose. A local low is when one particular area of the brain has used up its supply and has to wait for blood to circulate to replenish it. To prevent that from happening, you’d have to either increase the rate of circulation (ie, exercise in a way that increases heart rate), or increase the global blood glucose concentration to a level that’s too high for the idle portions of the brain. A global low is something most people never experience, since the body stores and releases sugar to keep it from happening.
(I am a type 1 diabetic with various fancy equipment for tracking my blood sugar. I have personal experience as to what various blood sugar concentrations feel like, but they may not be representative of more typical biochemistries.)
If only there was some sort of fluid circulating in the body and providing nutrition to every cells which needs it… oh wait...
If you look at the experiments, like the one with the dogs linked above, a plain sugar drink at the right time improves willpower. These tests were all done on people and animals without diabetes, I can easily believe it won’t work for you.
I didn’t mean to imply that you can’t increase willpower by managing blood sugar, but rather that the effect I described sets a limit on the total amount of benefit you can achieve this way. That is to say, while increasing your blood glucose from 80 to 100mg/dL is benefical for willpower, increasing it from 100 to 200mg/dL is disastrous. And most peoples’ metabolism already maintains it at about the right point.
I haven’t seen anything in research suggesting that above-normal sugar level is beneficial, just that below-normal sugar level harms willpower a lot.
If we could be near our best performance all the time, that would be enough.