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Comment by berrypicker | Hacker News Reader

I think a bigger war to end is that against carbs. The paleo diet trend has gotten out of hand, everybody's afraid to touch bread now. There's evidence both on a large scale (population wide - there are countries like Italy where carbs are abundant in the diet, and others where fats are more common) and in controlled studies, that your carb-calorie to fat-calorie intake ratio makes little difference to your overall health as long as you're getting both, along with protein.

Yet we have a group of people focusing religiously on minimizing carb intake and preaching to everyone about it. Am I seriously going to live an extra 20 years of youth if I don't eat delicious sandwiches for lunch?

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Paleo is a bit different from normal low carb considering you are eating fruit. Maybe you are talking about LCHF or Keto?

(Layperson understanding of the issue follows here, proceed with care) Carbs are not bad per se. Sure, big amounts of sugar are and a diet mainly consisting of carbs is probably as well. Italy is a nice example of a country where olive oil is abundant in their diet as well. What I think is the #1 advantage of Keto etc. is that you have no choice but to have a better look at what you eat (same with Paleo) as all the unhealthy, heavily processed stuff is simply not allowed anymore.

I actually started with Keto because I thought it was a cool diet hack that tricked you into not eating the stuff everyone with knowledge of diets was already telling you not to eat (the whole "fat is bad" for you has already been on a decline for some time now).

But Keto is not telling you bread is bad. It's telling you for the purpose of this diet it's bad. And the purpose is calorie intake reduction by eating bigger than normal amounts of fat which are supposedly more filling. And at least for me I can second that. I counted calories a bit before starting Keto and a week while doing Keto. My intake was severly reduced while eating as much as I wanted.

Also; moderation.

You might, because two slices of white bread spikes your blood sugar higher than a can of full sugar coke http://quittingsugar.com/2012/07/11/bread-and-coke-smackdown...

Since you're nitpicking, a sandwich isn't just two slices of white bread.

I don't think that a documented, reproducible very high blood sugar spike is nitpicking. I personally think it is reason for concern.

But you are absolutely correct, a sandwich is more than that. The author acknowledges this as well. It would be a fun thing to measure your blood glucose against (as I intend to). From an armchair perspective, the other ingredients in the sandwich may slow down the glucose dump into your bloodstream, but it will likely still dump the same amount, because the bread is still present. Along with the fat storage mechanism that glucose > insulin turns on, the extra ingredients may be more likely to be stored as fat.

I'll respond to this as soon as I complete the experiment!

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