There was zero impact to my work focus, positive or negative, from cutting nearly all carbohydrates out for several months.

I am curious were you heard or learned that "sugar is really important for focus". Just a vibe, perhaps?

remember your brain can run on ketones which provides a more stable energy than glucose spikes. the brain is metabolically flexible, can run on glucose, ketones or lactate

Cutting off sugar will help you have more focus, not just during coding but the whole day. However, if you were on high amount of sugar before, at initial stage, your body will scream.

For me, it takes a few weeks to get settled in. After that, I don't miss sugar at all. Can focus just fine.

I would be willing to bet that things like the siesta, large amounts of sunlight exposure, a more laid back culture, and lots of vacation days are much more important parts of what keeps people living around the Mediterranean healthier - much more so than the actual diet.

Diets high in saturated fat are correlated with high standard of living. High standard of living is correlated with high consumption of processed foods. So... yeah.

The Mediterranean diet is like a Californian wellness type of person's idea of what the actual Mediterranean diet is.

The vegetarian aisle used to be healthier but now it's been invaded by ultraprocessed food too.

I find a meat heavy diet works with keeping weight off. The opposite of what we've been told.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6414510/

Fat does not get converted into glucose in normal conditions in appreciable quantities. It's used as-is, most of the body can directly utilize fatty acids as a fuel source.

Also, body has a lot of mechanisms to deal with sugar. It is normally stored in the liver and then released slowly.

> Carbohydrate overfeeding produced progressive increases in carbohydrate oxidation and total energy expenditure resulting in 75-85% of excess energy being stored. Alternatively, fat overfeeding had minimal effects on fat oxidation and total energy expenditure, leading to storage of 90-95% of excess energy.

Also, it's just not true that consumed fat must be turned into sugar before entering the bloodstream. See https://med.libretexts.org/Courses/American_Public_Universit...

Yes sugar enters your blood stream almost immediately which isn't a bad thing, but not all of it. A large amount of that sugar gets stored in the liver as glycogen and any of that not used becomes body fat.

But also

Yes when you consume fat, it is converted to be used by the body as energy however the excess of that similar to sugar is also converted into body fat.

Importantly, 1kg of fats and carbs have wildy different energy levels with 1kg of fat representing 7,700 calories and 1kg of carbs being around 4,000 calories. So yes it burns energy to convert fat into energy, but you have a lot more energy to burn for the same amount eaten.

This is why carbs and fats have different recommended daily intake levels. Therefore, most of what causes CVD is actually due to overconsumption rather than a balanced meal that doesn't take you into constant excess of either carbs or fats.

1. High blood pressure damages walls of arteries and veins

2. LDL Cholesterol gets into the damaged walls

3. LDL gets oxidized

4. White blood cells engulf oxidized LDL and form plaques

5. Hardened plaques chill, they are bad but not deadly, if a plaque breaks off you are probably dead.

Sugar is gonna contributes to 1 - 3, especially 3 it seems way more guilty of than fat. The one big thing that opened my eyes was that most of the LDL you get is going to be produced by your own liver. Regulating how the liver produces it is going to have a bigger impact than directly eating less/more of it.

It is kind of a luck thing though, you could eat like shit and never have all the events occur just due to dumb luck, or you could be a fit 45 year old and for whatever reason you get a plaque that breaks off and you aneurysm and die.