Posts made by Benjo

@evan-hinkle you might be right regarding the rice diet. Rice does have protein, of course. But if the diet included plenty of fruit and sugar, and maybe coconut oil or butter, the percent of methionine could be low enough. Cronometer is reasonably helpful crunching those ratios.

Brad Marshall of fireinabottle and the old croissant diet of a couple years ago has been doing something similar, except he's focusing on the branch chain amino acids (valine, leucine, and isoleucine) instead of methionine. He's also more into starch, so he's doing casava pancakes and sweet potato rice noodles (which have zero protein and virtually no nutrients.)

OJ is an easy base for the diet because of the nutrient values (considerable in a whole gallon) but that much liquid could be a turn-off.

I've been dabbling with this idea for a couple days. It's hard for me to drink morning coffee without milk. I may go back to using cream or even coconut cream and see how it feels.

I'd love to hear anyone's experience/success trying this.

@Kasper do you know of anyone successfully implementing methionine restriction? It seems Ray was lowering protein overall, perhaps for this purpose, the last year of his life. One study in rats reduced total methionine intake to 0.12% of calories and saw a 40% increase of lifespan, if I remember correctly. It also prevented insulin resistance and obesity even on a high fat diet. Additionally, the researchers found that the MR could be done intermittently, 3 days a week, with similar results.

The only way I've been able to construct a reasonably nutritious diet that brings down methionine to these levels is through a more fruitarian base, e.g. a gallon of OJ plus ad libitum fruit daily plus a can of oysters and a serving of beef liver once a week covers most nutrients. Maybe add some calcium, vit d, K2, e. Just the OJ alone provides about 30 grams of protein. And if the diet only needs to be on point 3 out of 7 days, the protein could be bumped up every few days.

Does anyone have any experience trying something like this or have a more sensible model to experiment with?

P.S. the diet doesn't have to be this low in fat, I don't think. The above diet with some added cream or coconut oil might work as well if successful MR really comes down to percentage of calories.

@Jayvee I was a member on the Ray Peat Forum for a few months but never posted. For two years prior I had tried to sub to the forum, but registration was blocked due to some lame excuse(something about malicious signups, maybe?). I learned a lot reading old threads but could never engage. Once I was allowed to register, the forum had started to go downhill.

Anyway, Mike's video is how I found this forum. Hoping for the best here.