Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Having recently made changes to my own eating, which still includes carbs but at a much less extreme amount, I'm amazed at the differences. I don't have diabetes and the doctors say my blood sugar control is very good, but the energy differences I feel before and after eating high carb food is insane.
Diet soda, although technically not containing carbs, prompts a similar insulin response to drinking sugared soda- the result is a blood sugar drop and a loss of energy that makes me want to eat and do nothing; not the best for weight loss.
I would like to see more attention given to what insulin really does: prompt your body to store blood sugar as fat. No wonder filling our bodies with sugar and then using insulin to 'remove' it is a bad idea.
I don't understand what this means for a non-diabetic. Are they measuring your A1c? How are you "controlling" your blood sugar?
Secondly, even if you're not building fat your body still needs insulin.
Is there any scientific basis for this claim?
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/artificial-sweeteners-insulin...
Some interesting links to pubmed there. Seems that aspartame does not affect insulin fwiw.
In other words, drinking diet soda may not by itself cause problems, but it will stimulate your body to absorb even more of the burger and fries you consumed with the soda (or whatever other metabolites you currently have circulating in your bloodstream).
I'm on mobile now with limited connectivity. I'll try to edit later with a link to a source.
The end result seems to be what I expected, just not the underlying cause. Regardless, it was a huge wake up call to not just treat diet soda like it was basically water.
If you think about it, any molecule that isn't sugar but tastes like sugar will have a similar molecular shape to sugar. Hmmmm I wonder if this will fit into receptors in other places in the body, not just on the tongue. Maybe it will affect gut bacteria. Maybe even trigger other events within our bodies.
If we would stop and think with an open mind, many of these arguments would become discussions, and we wouldn't need to play the baby card by asking for proof.
Remember how long it took to finally get enough proof in order to show others how wrong our mainstream religions are? And even with all the evidence we have accumulated, still people say, "show me the proof. I'm a reasonable man." Bullshit.
Let's not fall into this trap again. Many of these questions can be answered without slow, hard science. We don't need to hit everything with the biggest hammer in our toolbox before we can move forward.
But this all assumes there is evidence available. Is there?
I've read "scientific" articles that make use of the most cutting-edge statistical models in order to "prove" that something like "emotional intelligence does not correlate with success."
Ok, poor example, and I made it up. But there are many research articles out there that look impressive because of all the tools they throw at the problem. Under the surface these studies are bunk.
Why does this not surprise me?
Outside of mathematics, there really isn't anything resembling proof. There is the weight of the evidence, and the weight of any substantive critiques of bias in said evidence. That's about it.
> But there are many research articles out there that look impressive because of all the tools they throw at the problem. Under the surface these studies are bunk.
On this we can certainly agree. However, the replacement for a bad study is a well-designed study, not some statistical hocus pocus (1) or "going by your gut".
If your position is sound, there will (at some point) be someone bold and independently-funded enough to torpedo the status quo with a properly designed experiment. It may not happen as fast as you'd like. But there is nothing that academics like better than turning their rivals' sacred cows into hamburger. Of this I can assure you.
(1) I am a statistician, both professionally and by graduate training. I have no qualms about dismissing poorly designed studies regardless of post-hoc jiggery-pokery. A shiny autopsy won't reanimate the corpse of a dead experiment.
I do not care what you think at this point, this has already blossomed into a 1 vs 1, so anything said will just make both sides more justified in their position.
This is about onlookers. Hacker News is flawed in the same way that elections are flawed. Every user is given the same power of opinion. A losing strategy that will eventually begin to conform to the middle of the pack, condemning any opinions falling too far from the centre.
Apathy, I have to ask you. If you are getting all the votes, all the +1's, all the likes, would you ever think that maybe that is not a good sign?
You logic strikes me as specious -- the proximity of an idea to the mushy middle is orthogonal to whether it is correct. Great ideas are often met with violent opposition -- but shitty ideas are, too. If I thought most people on HN were in fact dumbasses, as most of the electorate often seems to be, I would go somewhere else. It's the least worst forum (save perhaps Metafilter) I've found so it's a place where I go to procrastinate.
My job is to write, so my natural impulse when I see something that seems easily dismantled is to get in a bit of practice.
Anyway, we can be lost in a sea of doubt with all our pet theories, or we can look at the available evidence.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and propose that you may not be a professional medicinal chemist.
Many theories conveniently support your position. Of course, many theories conveniently support the other side. How can we objectively determine who is right?
Well, let's look at (among many, many other experimental studies) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25786106 which is a recent study of metabolic differences between self-reported aspartame sensitive and non-sensitive individuals. Double-blind, randomised crossover study -- the gold standard. Any differences in metabolic profile between either control/aspartame or sensitive/not? None seen.
However, perhaps all non-nutritive sweeteners are not alike. The same senior author as above ran a separate study in a small sample of athletic males where aspartame in addition to carbohydrates resulted in lower insulin response during exercise: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-9...
Meanwhile, and in a different (grossly obese, NNS-naive) population, sucralose (Stevia) appeared to do the opposite: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc...
> Many of these questions can be answered without slow, hard science
Sure, if we don't care whether the answers are credible.
Proof by analogy is fraud. If we didn't need evidence to make decisions we wouldn't bother accumulating it.
s/Stevia/Splenda/ (stevia is entirely different from sucralose).
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/early/2013/04/30/dc...
Beware of small sample sizes in these sorts of studies. Until you get up into the hundreds or thousands, I personally would expect regression to the mean. Just FYI.
that study used sucralose ("Splenda" et al) -- a completely unrelated, artificial sweetener.
Stevia is a naturally occurring plant extract which has steviol glycosides, having 150x the sweetness of sucrose (according to Wikipedia).
Now I'm a little curious what happens to blood insulin when athletes fire down a stevia-flavored source of short chain carbohydrates prior to exercise vs. unflavored. When I have time I'll look it up. The nice thing about this (stevia vs. sugar or vs. artificial sweeteners) is that it lends itself naturally to a two factor design, "natural" vs. not and "real sugar" vs. not, orthogonally.
Anyways, yes, I was wrong about that and will probably fuck it up again in the future, although at least now I'm aware of the problem.
The actual truth of the matter is that nutrition is far more complex than any simple summary can give you. The data you get from nutritional and dietary studies is generally so poor in quality that you can find evidence for just about any assertion if you look hard enough.
Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now learning the benefits of it because our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).
We are lazy. We don't want to actually meditate to learn if it works or not. We just want to strap somebody into a machine without having to do the hard work ourselves. Our nutritionists are lazy as well. Would rather fund all these ridiculous research studies than experiment on their own bodies. Pathetic example of over measuring. Reminds me of how if all you have is a hammer then everything will start to look like a nail.
Part of the reason for this is that there was no surplus of cheap calories and many people died of trauma or infection prior to becoming susceptible to degenerative disease.
As recently as 1900, the primary cause of death in the United States was infectious diseases. All-cause age-adjusted mortality in the population has halved since then. I suppose we could reduce the role of degenerative and "Western" diseases rather dramatically by discontinuing antibiotics and sanitation, but recent trips to Cambodia and Zimbabwe have me wondering if that's really what you want.
> our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).
fMRI is a false positive generating machine. I've never seen shittier statistical analyses than I see in "neuroscience" (at least the mouse guys use controls).
Given the baseline potential for high statistical noise, biological studies in general tend to have poor rigor. fMRI, which you've cited, is notorious for giving problematic results (see the dead salmon study).
There is also the fact that people in different stages of their health react to the same diet in different ways.
So, the diet that might be healthy at one point in your life, is what will sicken you at another.
As I said in another comment, these organizations have serious problems that need remedying but they have almost no control over the underlying root causes of the US' diabetes epidemic. I wouldn't necessarily argue against a problem with leadership and a focus on fundraising, but there are thousands of people who work under these organizations who often give up promising careers and their own time and money to make a real difference in communities that are outright ravaged by diabetes. Focusing on orgs like JDRF and the ADA as the "bad guy" only exacerbates the obsession with managing the symptoms as opposed to dealing with the underlying causes (mostly socio economic, political, and ecological in my personal opinion).
If you really want to focus on organizations, lets talk about the FDA and the outright corruption and thievery between Medicare/Medicaid and insurance companies. In the medical industry "diabetes" is a codeword for "huge profits from captive, disadvantaged markets" and until we start addressing those issues no amount of reform in 3rd party orgs will do anything.
It also amazes me how people associate some dishes to sodas. For example, at lunch with my colleagues (I'm in France), I observed that when they eat a pizza or a burger, they order a soda. But if they eat a salad, they order a bottle of water!
(I don't like sodas so my opinion is probably oriented)
Used to drink 5 mountain dews a day. Havent had one in 10 years now. Much happier.
It's still delicious. Water is still disgusting. I don't drink diet soda because it tastes terrible. Stevia sodas taste worse. But I'd be ecstatic if there was a drink which tasted like soda without the negative effects.
So, yeah, I'm confused over what led you to write your first line given your last line. It's because it's utterly delicious to many of us.
Everything other than that and it no longer fits that category.
If you are educated and/or wealthy with diabetes[0], the odds are you have a good endocrinologist and/or are disciplined about diet and exercise. In these cases, given you're not an extreme case, your diet is largely based on consistency. It's not necessarily low or high carb diets (although the extremes obviously create complications), it's about keeping your insulin input consistent. This means you have to keep your "carb" (diabetes isn't all about carbs, but they are the biggest factor in your diet) to exercise ratio relatively consistent, so those that exercise a lot or have high metabolisms often still have high carb diets after diagnosis. The real killer with people who have the wherewithal to manage their diabetes is blood glucose swings, and the swings to the low end are quite a bit more dangerous than those to the high end. You have much less wiggle room for "lows"... using general numbers, a "healthy" blood glucose reading is ~120, a low is <60, and a "high" is >200. While that difference may seem small, a reading of 40 is much more dangerous than a reading of 220, as 40 presents a decent risk of loss of consciousness and other very serious, immediate complications while 220 may cause some long term damage if not controlled but mostly manifests as mental fatigue or irritability. To drive my point home, a reading of 400 is very bad, but quite fixable without professional medical help. A score of 30 or below is serious cause for an itchy 911 trigger finger, and might mean death if the patient has already lost consciousness.
All this is to say: Even in the best case, low carb diets are only for diabetics with a very good A1C and highly controlled and managed diet/exercise/insulin ratios.
Now consider that the vast majority of people with diabetes (see footnote again) are poor, genetically predisposed to obesity, and uneducated. Asking them to manage their diabetes in the first place is hard enough, much less asking them to make substantial lifestyle changes to eat healthily. These people are going to have high carb diets whether they like it or not. Given the dangers of lows on top of this, the responsible thing is to keep them consistent, recommend higher carb diets, and just hope you can help them manage their condition in other ways to the point of maybe not having limbs amputated, losing their sight, or dying at a middle age.
Most of all, though, this is a huge testament to how poorly we're taking care of the diabetes epidemic (yes, it's an epidemic) sweeping our nation. You can point to socio-economic issues, political issues, ecological issues, and so on, but the end result is we are abandoning and failing millions of people with a serious, chronic illness. Organizations like JDRF and the ADA do have serious problems, but at the end of the day they have very few avenues to actually affect change while the root causes still exist. Thus we end up managing symptoms and trying to minimize damage. Sad state all around.
[0] I'm going to blur the line a bit between Type 1 and 2 here. Of course, it's important to note that treatment and management varies wildly between the two but there are good general rules of thumb that apply to both, so i'll stick to those in order to make my point simpler
I've been into fitness, mostly around powerlifting and contact sports, for most of my life. Your body needs carbs; the problem is typically the form in which we consume them.
[1]: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2016/09/06/ajcn.116....
Associating dietary fat with body fat has been one of the worse mistakes in "nutrition" in the past decades.
Now most "low-fat" food has added carbs to deal with the loss of consistency. And even regular foods (especially in the US) have added sugar.
(I think you mean high-glycemic index foods).
The key insight here is that fructose is very different from glucose as it is processed primarily in the liver and converted to triglycerides - which is seen as a more problematic fat in the bloodstream.
Since fructose does not contribute directly to blood sugar levels for a while it was recommended for diabetics to switch from glucose to fructose. Turns out the latter is not so good from an inflammation perspective, liver/body fat perspective, digestive perspective and perversely blood sugar regulation perspective. Sadly even that old fructose is ok for diabetics has not fully vanished.
The medical establishment (like any establishment I guess) is slow to change. Speeding up the publication, curation and dissemination of such information may be IT's main contribution to human health.
Pretty much any diet which is free of anything should be avoided.
There is nothing wrong with carbs, carb free diets work because it's easier to create a caloric deficiency not because you some how can eat 3000 cals of w/e and lose weight.
But in the long run they aren't healthy either try being on a low carb diet and exercise at the same time let me know how it's working for you. Especially endurance run for 10km> even 5km a few times a week after a month without carbs and tell me how you feel.
But nvm I see there is not point of even trying to talk with the folks in this thread everything that is remotely against low carb is being down voted to spam :)
Anyhow enjoy your lives just remember to see a doctor often.
I do agree that this thread is very monoculture-y though, which makes me uncomfortable.
A few months with "light exercise" doesn't mean anything, your personal feeling is also not a quantifiable metric, if you were actually setting yourself a specific physical goal like to run say 10KM under 40min, or deadlift X lbs you would not be feeling very well without carbs.
Overall what low carb diets excel at is to cut people away from "bad foods" which means it's very easy for them to be in caloric deficiency (sometimes considerably higher than what they should, you do not want to have a dietary caloric deficiency higher than 200 of your BMR (not the BRM part not total caloric expenditure), and 500 is the max for even extreme diets) but if you are already willing to not eat processed food cutting good carbs like rice, full grain, and many fruits and vegetables out of your diet is simply silly.
And there is no real conclusions for long runners either (http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2014/05/26/bjsports-2014-0...)
Zero carb (or if too reduced) is really not sustainable
And you're right, eating an apple is ok.
There is much missing / wrong with your logic and assertions - but this one is particularly telling.
Are you genuinely asserting that low-carb diets work because ultimately they involve less calorie consumption than a 'conventional' (carb-heavy) diet?
If so, this seems entirely wrong to me - low-carb diets typically involve the consumption of a greater volume of energy (calories) compared to what your BMR would suggest you need to not gain weight.
This is, as noted elsewhere, also ignoring the benefit of low-carb diets to your GL/GI rollercoaster.
Eh no, now you are getting into the realm of physics, what happens often are 2 things. Some foods have overstated caloric values this is quite common.
Your body doesn't metabolizes some foods at the same rate, especially true when you adjust your diet considerably and your body isn't used to produce enzymes in the required amounts, as well as other environmental factors like fiber content (lower fiber count would mean lower caloric value while higher fiber count would increase the caloric value even tho fibers themselves have no intrinsic caloric value on their own) and gut biome.
If you think you can eat say 500-1000 cals over your daily allowance with any diet and not gain weight, man you have really really been sold hard on this.
For example:
> If you think you can eat say 500-1000 cals over your daily allowance with any diet and not gain weight, man you have really really been sold hard on this.
No one's saying this - at least, the article isn't, and nor am I.
I will say that you can easily eat 500-1000 cals over your daily allowance with a particular diet (notably low-carb) and not gain weight - and that's what you seemed to be arguing against earlier.
I've got 3 years of carefully recorded data that demonstrates this is the case -- but I'm just one of a huge number of people who have proven this out over the years.
So I'm not clear what point you're trying to make.
1) The low-carb hypothesis is that there is a fundamental physiological reason that highly refined carbs cause weight gain. It goes something like this: highly refined carbs get stored by your body as fat. Because they get stored as far, they are unavailable to be used for energy. Because they are unavailable to be used as energy, you get hungry (this is your body signaling that it needs energy). So you eat more carbs. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Do you have a specific claim as to how this hypothesis is incorrect?
2) It is a complete non-issue that it's hard to compete in long distance running races while on a low-carb diet, especially for people who are obese.
Running has an incredibly high injury rate (on the order of 20-90% of runners get injured per year, Google "running injury rate"). It's about the worst way imaginable for an obese person to be active.
The downvotes come because you are making assertions that have no medical support.
> Pretty much any diet which is free of anything should be avoided.
For the couple of years, I've been trying various elimination diets so that I can see what effects particular foods and food groups have on me. Even if I had ended up with exactly the same diet, it would have been worth doing, as I learned a lot about my body and my relationship with food.
As it happens, though, I want to keep some pretty big changes. After doing my 3rd Whole30 [1], a paleo-esque 30-day elimination diet, I'm just finishing a week where I returned to eating refined carbohydrates. My conclusion: as much as I enjoy those foods, they make me feel terrible. My mood and energy were much less even. They put big demands on my self control, and make me prone to binging. I sleep less well. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to spend a few months without refined carbohydrates again (sugar, flour, juices). I'll probably drop dairy again too.
I don't know that I'd recommend my particular choices for anybody else, but I strongly encourage curious people to experiment with elimination diets. If nothing else you get the sort of exercise in self-control that religious people get from Lent, which I think is valuable on its own. But I learned a ton along the way, and wish I had done this years ago.
Dietary recommendations are population level tools for improving health.
Individuals can benefit from taking an engineering approach and figuring out what improves problems they are having.
Which is not to say follow every faddy diet, but just get used to experimenting gradually with your meal planning.
And whatever you find, does not invalidate population studies, any more than snow in your city invalidates global temperature rises.
Humans have evolved eating sugar just fine, fruits and fermentation were used before we learned to walk, and other sources of sugar including honey were also commonly consumed.
You can easily look at the diets of "modern" hunter gatherers and see just how "low carb" it is.
Don't get me wrong eating too much sugar (glucose/fructose/sucrose) isn't good for you, but sugar isn't the only carb out there.
Until the 1900's starch fed the world, it still does, some how what is succesfully feeding the 5.5-6bln poor people of the world is no longer good for you.
What are you even talking about? We have a public health epidemic of obesity, especially among the "poor people of the world." They are literally the most affected group by low-cost availability of processed foods. This is undisputed and self-evident.
Of course it is worth it to revisit our recommendations and practices given what it looks like when we look out the damned window. You think someone just decided well, starch has had a good run, time to move on based on no scientific basis?
Your commentary in this thread is actively harmful in its complete substitution of science and understanding for your own personal gut feeling. You sure are saying a lot and ignoring the requests for citations.
The only thing that harmfull in this thread is the viral groupthink, you are more than capable of doing your own research.
The Journal of Human Evolution is a good place to start, PMC also has some good sources on dietary and nutritional habits throughout human evolution.
Reading the works of evolutionary and molecular biologists like Hillard Kaplan, Marlene Zuk and Jennie Miller would also do you good.
But sure keep spreading your "scientific" fact, just ignore the studies and research and cherry pick your evidence like that initial NHS study that was disavowed by the NHS itself because it was utterly flawed as the data about the greatness of the low carb and paleo diets eventually came out of 6 people since everyone else dropped the study which also lacked a control group. Or the 2nd UK study that again had issues with high dropout rates and still somehow managed to get published even tho the dropout rate effectively attached a huge selection bias to the study.
But hey you and your gang are more than welcomed to downvote actual evidence even statements like the fact that our ancestors processed plants ;) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2973873/
Overall if you actually care about GI and carbs the research authored and coauthored by Jennie Miller is a great source of information, unlike people like Loren Cordain she's actually accredited to making the claims she makes, and it's ironic that one of the biggest proponents of the low GI diet is for the most part against low carb diets in general. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Brand-Miller%20J%5...
Secondly, eating fruit and eating sugar are two very different things. Fruit has things like nutrients and fiber that is lost in processing, which is likely the root of the disorder. The fiber, for example, slows down the absorption of sugars. The modern world is full of highly refined sugars that are missing the goodness found in nature (that our bodies adapted to).
And even so how starch and simpler sugars played in our diets for the past 150,000 years.
The fruits that primates eat are "processed" they let them ferment this is one of the reasons why like alcohol so much because amongst other things we used it to tell us when the fruit is ready to eat and it's at it's highest caloric value.
We have been refining sugar for about 10,000 years if not longer, we have been using fermentation and other processes to process complex carbs into sugars for even longer.
1) Throughout most of the world, fruit is generally only available during an extremely limited window in any given year. And it spoils in a matter of days.
2) The big agricultural revolution was the domestication of grains. Grains are important because they keep for a long time and can therefore provide a stable year-round supply of calories even if they can only be harvested once per year. According to this wikipedia page[1], grains weren't domesticated until 11,000 years ago.
Do you have a link that provides documentation for the importance of carbohydrates in the pre-agricultural human diet?
Fiber, fiber, fiber. Sugar seems to be okay when it is packaged together with its copartner, fiber.
You can get a 5 pound yam out of the ground with a stick. Given a few thousand years, fire using apes are going to look at what is under most plants that they see day to day.
Cooking also breaks down starches into sugars. And we are the cooking species. It helped drive our evolution forward.
It all seems to be about balance.
Starch and sugars are a staple of the primate diet to the point where it is and was our main source of calories for ever.
Grain has been domesticated for over 12,000 years ago, wild grain has been as early as around 30,000 BCE.
Grain isn't the only source of starch, in fact for most of our history including our recent one it never was, starchy tubers and roots were.
Fermentation is still practiced today by primates and other species and not only passive one some animals actively collect fruits and ferment them.
We have been fermenting food since before we even speciated.
Sugar from fruits and honey has been distilled as early as humans have been able to create tools, early pottery was used for 2 things fermentation and sugar distillation which is basically the same thing.
You also have some skewed views on hunting vs gathering, hunting is just as seasonal as picking fruit and it's even more, it's also considerably more dangerous and calorie intensive and overall only been massively practiced when humans started to form large communities.
So overall your paleo diet would have looked considerably different in reality, replace the jerky with trail mix, sugary syrup and some fermented goop mainly wild grains, nuts, and various berries we cannot digest otherwise and you get your paleo diet, meat was a luxury.
The low-carb diets are about staying away from highly refined carbs. They're fine with eating most fruit and vegetables (though they may recommend abstaining from all carbs for an introductory period or for people who are extremely overweight). You seem to be dismissing these diets by pointing out that primates and humans have always eaten fruit and that it was often "processed" into, essentially, refined sugar by virtue of being fermented.
Here are the issues with your argument:
1) The low-carb diets don't have any issue with eating whole fruit.
2) The highly refined sugars that hunter-gatherers could obtain by fermenting fruit during the extremely limited window when fruit is available in the wild is not really the same thing as having an unlimited, near zero cost ($0.76 for 2500 calories) supply of refined sugar available 365 days a year at your local grocery store. To say nothing of candy and sugar water being the predominant form of snack food, available in most of the spaces in which people spend their lives (work, home, stores, etc.). The scale of this difference makes these two fundamentally different things.
"Fruit/Sugar" and carbs in general weren't seasonal, there are different sources of carbs through the entire year it's not like you just ate wild apples.
Starchy tubers, starchy nuts / seeds (the ones that you have to crush rinse to draw off nasty stuff and then cook), wild grain, berries, fruits etc. are for the most part available all year round in one form or another. Not all fruits ripen during the same period this is why we have seasonal fruits from early spring to late summer and autumn, infact the only period when food was "scarce" is dec-feb and then hunting was out of the question also what did not hibernate migrated, what didn't do either you wouldn't want to mess with.
Additionally we became quite good at preserving food, fermentation, and sun drying fruits and other sources of carbs was commonly practiced both to preserve them as well as to break complex carbs into more simple one for high caloric value, fire cooking also changed the game because it gave us near immediate access to "refined carbs" through the process of cooking there is a reason why a cooked potato tastes sweet while a raw potato doesn't. The ability to efficiently process starch and the ability to cook it actually precedes the large explosion in tool making especially for hunting purposes, so rich caloric carbohydrates actually what gave early humans the caloric allowance to be able to hunt.
In fact I would go out on a limb and predict that you are "white" if so you owe your whiteness to the balance of vitamin d and folic acid and specifically the added folate from the daily consumption of grains, this is why your ancestors from the baltic area could keep their skin white (infact they had too) while other populations in the same parallel like inuits, eskimos and chukchi are fairly dark skinned (they need to protect the little folate they gain from their diet with darker skin while they gain more vitamin d from animal sources).
Overall we have a pretty good idea of how our ancestors ate (and this picture becomes clearer every day) not directly but through prehistoric dumps and more importantly the tools, we can know the ratio of tools that were made to process flora vs tools made to process and gather meat. Throughout history there is no evidence whatsoever that meat made a large portion of the human diet, even during paleolithic times, meat isn't easy to gather, it's time consuming, it's dangerous and overall the energy expenditure associated with it is quite high.
The "paleo" diet in general is for the most part a bunch of horse shit, sorry folks read what evolutionary biologists actually think about it (and him, read Hillard Kaplan, Marlene Zuk, Jennie Miller and many others) , it's pretty much a commercialization of a fantasy by one man - loren cordain, which while it has some benefits it's really not a unilateral case.
Now don't get me wrong "low carb" diets can be "beneficial" on "rare" case by case basis' however the wide adoption of them isn't back to basic/nature/old way in any way shape or form, and oddly enough this is one of the most immoral diets out there.
Low carb diets are unsustainable and the vast majority of the population cannot afford them and it's good that they can't. Meat, fish, dairy and animal based fats come at a huge expense of the environment, the beef industry alone is responsible for a huge part of our energy consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p.... Fishing isn't good either, we overfish the oceans, inland fish farms are an environmental disaster and "open ocean" fish farms aren't much better. While I am not a vegetarian nor do i wish to be the world would be a much better place if we all were, and one of the best thing you can do for the environment is to do 1 day without meat or any animal products ironically this would have more impact than recycling and other "feel good" activities people tend to do.
And don't get me wrong, no one says that you should eat twinkies and drink soda all day, but using pretty silly terms like "super refined sugars" and other nonsense that sounds scary and somewhat scientific is just absurd, there is very little reason for people to drop their daily carb consumption below 40-50%, but you don't need keep it at 80% either. But somehow people have been brainwashed that one of the comments in this thread to myself equated rice to eating dry leaves, rice is one of the most nutritious foods out there, with decent carbs, fiber, some protein, and more importantly nutrients like iron, magnesium, niacin, B1, B6 etc.
And I wouldn't bang the obesity drum too hard, it's a really big unknown atm there seem to be generational changes and even with the same caloric intake some people become obese while the previous generations haven't and no this has nothing to do with "refined sugars" or "industrial food", while that food isn't especially healthy it doesn't explain the shifts in metabolic factors, the over representation of the insulin receptor genes and other epigenetic differences.
Overall reducing your caloric intake is the main thing you should be concerned about, some of the "healthiest" (based on life expectancy in various regions) diets in the world are a far cry from being low carb without showing signs of obesity.
So eat what you want, but take everything with a grain of salt, but more importantly don't base your arguments on "we need to eat less carbs because cavemen" or "we are obese because of gluten and starch" your grandparents, and great grandparents, and likely even parents ate much more carbs than you and they weren't obese.
Overall the human caloric intake has remained "flat" this includes even modern hunter gatherers (one of the more surprising discoveries of modern nutrition science) that although are considerably more active than their western / industrialized world counterparts consume the same amount and even less calories each day (this was adjusted for body mass and condition), our brains consume quite a bit of energy ;) (sometimes actually wonder if we aren't getting fatter because we are getting dumber).
What about honey?
Edit: don't forget that sugar is in every plant that makes use of photosynthesis.
What everyone should do, is instead of searching for weight loss tips to go at google and find his daily caloric maintenance, then start eating 500 calories below that with a Paleo Diet and combine all that with a respectable workout program. The fat WILL melt off.
My glucose went from 134 mg/do to 96 in 2 months. A1C from 6.5% to 5.5%. Now normal again.
If you've been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes you should try a very low carb diet before anything else. It really seems to work.
It has been remarkable how consistent the weight loss has been. I can more or less predict exactly how much I'll weigh this Thanksgiving; it's really incredible.
However, I've become quite pissed that corporations in concert with the Gubment have been allowed to poison our food supply over the past 40-50 years.
My theory is the high carb/corn syrup food supply has masked the affects of inflation and the fact the real wages have stagnated or even declined over that same period of time. And that most average Joe's just can't afford to eat the way their parents and grand parents did.
What do you mean by "very low"?
One year ago I lowered carbs, with a target of a maximum of 40% of daily calories from carbs. Results: 120 pounds lost, A1C from 8.1% (on Metformin and Actos) to 5.2% (no Actos, Metformin dose cut in half, and would not be surprised if my doctor suggests cutting it further when I see him next week).
Averages for this year so far: 2050 calories/day, 174g carbs/day (45g of which is added sugars), 112g protein/day. So that's an average of about 34% of calories from carbs (9% from added sugars), 22% from protein, and so 44% from fat.
Does this count as low carb?
On Keto, for example, low carb is < 40g, but ideally < 20g per day. The macros, while different for everyone, are more like 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% carbs.
Your personal macros will be dependent on your exercise levels, BMI, and calorie intake though.
I do ketogenic diet once in a while for a month or two at a time. I eat 1200kcal and try to keep the carbs around 30g (10%). It is recommended to keep it below 25g per day in the diet. I have read somewhere that <100g of carbs per day qualifies as "low carb".
I am not obese nor am I diabetic. I do it just to go from higher end of the normal BMI range to the lower end and this diet is the most effective and easiest way to do it.
I go back to "normal" diet (i.e. don't care about how much of what I am eating) after I am done getting lean and gradually gain the weight back in around a year... and repeat the cycle.
Have done 5 cycles so far. Works pretty well for me.
https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/videos/free-ele...
For the supporters, this list all the headlines of the science involved if you want to dig it further.
http://bjjcaveman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/How-Low-Car...
It is incredible when you have the right knowledge to make your own right decisions (i.e., know that low fat diets are BS).
Remember the saying "abs are made in the kitchen". Working out is fine and good, but if you don't control your diet first you won't get anywhere.
I don't have anything against any diet, just saying that ketosis isn't necessarily an easy alternative, it is an extreme practice. Most folks can do just fine with a bit of moderation in eating and regular exercise over the long-term (by long-term, I mean forever).
instead uses ketones for energy
Some organs require glucose, which can be made from protein via gluconeogenesis.
(cardio) Exercise alone generally doesn't work unless your genetic predisposition makes you a good responder to cardio; see the University of Bath study or Michael Mosley's "The Truth About Exercise".
I've tired no-carb days, lifting on fasts, lifting on protein heavy mornings, etc... and it comes down to carbs being mental energy for me wanting to lift heavy. If I don't have carbs, I feel less energetic, and less willing to continue my lifting regimen for that day.
Eat a lot of carbs when you want to accomplish a lot of shit... physically.
I think the religion of food would be much better understood if food was approached as workloads. CPU bound, memory bound, IO bound, etc. But in general, carbs for physical activity and fats for mental activity.
It's been fun watching the sea change towards acceptance of it. When I first started, most people I encountered were weirdly confrontational about it, but now it's pretty pedestrian. Granted, I had a now-embarrassing proselytizing phase at the beginning and quickly learned to keep my mouth shut unless asked.
My bodyfat drastically reduced, my belly disappeared and I am feeling a lot healthier. Problem are the more expensive meat-heavy meals that go so far that I just don't enjoy or want to eat anymore - and of course very easy degeneration of muscle mass if you're not careful.
Nevertheless, I'm loving it. I wish I tried this earlier instead of a half-assed diet. I won't be doing it forever but to fast chop down on some body fat, it's amazing.
I recently eliminated a number of things from my diet: Butter, my daily cheese sandwiches with mayo, processed meats, and pretty much all restaurant and vending machine food. I went from 175 to 150 pounds in six months, and have felt no urge to put it back on. I eat more lean meat, and have found alternatives for my lunches that are good enough.
The change in fat intake doesn't explain my weight loss. I simply eat less food overall because those ingredients were what made it tasty. I won't pretend that I enjoy eating as much as I did. On the other hand, I'm a good cook, and I like vegetables, so I'm far from miserable.
All these things support the fact that diet is not just a biochemical problem, but a psychological and social one. Doctors know that sending someone home with a diet is going to kill them, because the diet won't happen. The people whose conditions improve on a diet are only the people who manage to follow the diet. So instead they load us up with statins, or prescribe surgery.
There are plenty of nourishing high-fat foods that you can eat, and that are good for you. This includes eggs, avocados, salmon and mackerel, macadamia nuts etc [1]
> All these things support the fact that diet is not just a biochemical problem, but a psychological and social one.
Yes. Decades of experience has shown that "dieting" doesn't work, and it often results in people gaining weight (after losing weight temporarily). [2]
It's better to make permanent lifestyle changes that result in long-term weight loss and increased fitness, even if it takes a few years. I assume this is what you've actually done.
If you change what you eat, and the way you eat it, then you don't have to "cut down" on food -- which is how most people understand dieting. It's really easy to over-eat doughnuts but quite hard to over-eat on salad and veggies....
[1] https://authoritynutrition.com/10-super-healthy-high-fat-foo...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weigh...
Dieting is usually bad because people have a goal (they want to weigh X pounds).
The key thing is to change the system, not to have a goal.
Scott Adams has written a whole book (which I haven't read) and some blog posts about this, but there's a potted summary:
Why you should focus on habits and systems, not goals
If Clickbait helps, why not?
Newspaper clickbait has some common traits: National story, sensational, dull. It's either lazy pop science or a shock story about what somebody did three time zones away. So it's always safe to ignore.
[1] http://medicaltravelsite.com/blog/gastric-banding-at-yanhee-...
Just Eat Less! Worked for me*
Shameless plug
My Weight Loss Story 40kg in 40 Weeks (90lb in 9 months) Without Exercise
The book is more for motivational reading of my story.
*DISCLAIMER: The information and opinions set out in this publication are provided only to convey the author’s personal experiences and opinions for information purposes only and are not intended to constitute medical advice, guidance or recommendations as to the reader’s actions or omissions. Disclaimer truncated for brevity of comment. The rest of the disclaimer is available here: http://40in40book.com/disclaimer
The high-fat aspect just helps people stick with it by making them feel full and also allowing them to indulge.
I just think it's a bit more nuanced than that :-)
1. https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/videos/free-ele...
2. http://spectrum.diabetesjournals.org/content/25/1/38
3. http://nutritionfacts.org/video/plant-based-diets-and-artery...
4. https://www.pritikin.com/your-health/health-benefits/reverse...
5. http://www.forksoverknives.com/what-to-eat/
6. http://nutritionfacts.org/2013/02/21/the-real-paleo-diet/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism#Animal_pain_and_suff...