The sugar free/carb free Atkins diet of the 90s and its modern versions isn't any better.
Pretty much any diet which is free of anything should be avoided.
Pretty much any diet which is free of anything should be avoided.
> 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.
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?
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).
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.
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...
What about honey?
Edit: don't forget that sugar is in every plant that makes use of photosynthesis.
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.
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.
And there is no real conclusions for long runners either (http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2014/05/26/bjsports-2014-0...)
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.
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.
Zero carb (or if too reduced) is really not sustainable
And you're right, eating an apple is ok.
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.