That metabolic syndrome perspective on chronic disease definitely holds water in practice. I've been eating almost zero starch and sugar and high-fat with good food quality since early 2011 and I've never felt healthier ever. I started out because historically I knew I definitely felt better cutting carbs, but I never really understood embracing the right kinds of fat before (I'd messed around prior to this with cutting carbs, but since I had that one-two punch from the mainstream health and wellness media that fat was bad, I was going skinless chicken breasts and cans of tuna fish and giving myself the miserable fatigue of straight-up rabbit starvation), and one day for the first time ever I had an episode of something briefly that felt like what I hear folks describe panic attacks as feeling like. I stumbled across some article linking panic attack type episodes to a failure to clear lactic acid in the brain, and put two and two together and decided to go hard cutting carbs just to see what happens.
During the first six months or so I slipped up once, and it taught me a valuable lesson: I caved and had, of all things a Choco-Taco, and I was amazed that after all that time having essentially no sugar, it wasn't that great, which lead me to believe that sugar definitely has this addiction / psychological fetishization angle similar to how that British dude Carr characterizes smoking in his self-help books. I felt amazing just keeping it real simple for a while, and then during Hurricane Sandy with nothing else to do (upwards of 10 days of power outage), I read Gary Taubes Good Calories, Bad Calories cover to cover by candlelight and he basically convinced me that the general direction I was going in was the right way to go.
Only downside in going down that rabbit hole imo is keep it simple and don't get too caught up in crackpot ideas about perfection. If you eat some bread or some cake at a party, you're fine, it's just your habits that matter.
Also it's too tempting to mess yourself up in the head by following online podcasts/bloggers/personalities who overwhelm you with unsubstantiated conjectural detail, to the point where you develop an orthorexia similar to the most inveterate vegans out there. Everyone and their grandmother is out there trying to convince you that you're a failure if you don't follow x, y, and z, which have no evidence. For me personally the worst guys like this were Dave Asprey and Chris Kresser. Not that they don't have interesting analysis to bring to the table, but for me online personalities like that drill down into too much speculative minutiae that is highly demotivating if you're not willing to develop some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I came to the conclusion that for the purposes of practical results, I don't really care whether Stephen Guyenet is right and Taubes is wrong about the insulin hypothesis, whether dietary fat really is fattening at some level via the ASP pathway, or whatever knowshitism Jaminet wants to propose about the value of starches that I'm not going to eat anyway.
In terms of panels, my LDL went up a little bit, my HDL went up a lot, and my trigs fell through the floor. From the modern perspective in interpreting these things, I'm lead to believe that's desirable. I did a little low-level biohacking co-opting my mother's home testing equipment (she got put on metformin and instructed to test to try to avoid type II kicking in, diagnosed pre-diabetic), and right at the start I was reading low 100's fasting (which I'm to understand is definitely a warning sign of going pre-diabetic?), within like 3 months I was coming up usually high 80's - low 90's, and long-term after about a year until this day I tend to read high-70's to low-80's.
