Carb intake as a dietary thermostat: is my friend crazy?

Factual Questions
1

So we had some friends over for dinner tonight, all of whom I’ve known for 30+ years. One (let’s call her C.) has been trying very hard recently to lose weight: she’s always been an active person (horseback riding, etc.), but she eats like crap much of the time (lots of prepared foods, ice cream, etc. and she doesn’t cook AT ALL. When I was last at her house, her parents brought over some brats to grill, and were commenting that the asparagus made it a well-balanced dinner).

So I commend her for trying a lot harder over the past year: she joined a health club and has been working out at least 3 - 4 times a week, on top of her usual horseback riding, taking care of essentially a small farm, and running around after 2 little boys, and has cut out sweets and refined sugar entirely and cut waaaaay back on the carbs, which are her main weakness. She lives 50+ miles away, and I’m not around her all the time to see what she eats all the time, but she says she’s made drastic lifestyle changes, and she knows they must be good for her in the long run, but she just hasn’t been able to lose much weight. She is overweight, but she’s always been a generally large person, maybe 5’9" and stocky in the sense that she has thick legs and thighs (in part because of the exercise) and had them even when we were 15 and skinny. I wish I could get her to cook healthy food, but she detests cooking at all and lives on prepared foods except when her husband makes something simple. To me, that’s the real battle.

So dinner was cucumbers and cherry tomatoes with tzatziki; mixed green salad with homemade walnut oil/shallot/Dijon mustard/balsamic vinaigrette; grilled lamb chops marinated in pomegranate juice, garlic, and mint; basmati rice pilaf with chopped pistachios and herbs; and for dessert, a little tray of baklava and some homemade mango/peach sorbet with raspberries. C. loves rice, and had a bunch of salad, some lamb, and a fairly big pile of rice, but no dressing on her salad (not because she was dieting, but because she has never liked dressing on her salad). When we got to dessert, she said she was avoiding sugar so she’d skip the baklava, but I told her the sorbet was almost entirely pureed fruit, which it was - maybe 1/2 c. sugar for a quart of sorbet, just to balance the lemon juice I used to keep the peaches from browning, and the rest was nothing but fruit. (She had a quite modest portion.)

So dinner was fairly well-balanced, but not insanely low-cal or low-fat: I suppose we could have skipped dessert entirely, eaten brown rice instead of basmati, and with less butter, and grilled a lower-fat meat, but it wasn’t crazy unhealthy either, and everything was made from scratch with no prepared foods (except the baklava, from a local bakery that bakes from scratch daily, unless you consider Dijon mustard or plain unsweetened yogurt to be prepared foods) and no preservatives other than salt (and not a ton of that, either).

That was when another friend, H., piped in that the sorbet was basically like eating sugar because fruit is basically sugar. Huh? Nobody at the table was diabetic or had any specific medical reason to avoid fruit entirely, and H. hadn’t said anything about the rice, which, well, is basically a big pile of carbs with some fat, and some herbs for color. We all started talking about healthy diets, what is a part of one, and such, and I swear you’d think fresh peaches and mangoes were poison from the way she was talking, not better for you than the Haagen-Dazs that C. had given up entirely after eating (by her own estimation - I hope she was exaggerating)! a pint a day of it for years. Anyway, thankfully the subject was changed eventually because that conversation was nuts. And who was the most overweight person at the table? The one going on about how fruit is nothing but sugar!

So tell me, folks, moderation is OK, right? Fruit isn’t poison in moderation, right? I’m not going crazy?

2

Fruit is fine. Fruit juice, on the other hand, is mostly sugar. You want the whole fruit, with all the various fiber and bulk and stuff - it makes it filling, and allows it to digest slowly, so you feel full when you eat it.

3

I’m not a doctor or dietician, but it seems to me that by the time you ate enough fresh fruit for it to be dangerous, you’d have the runs something fierce! Fresh fruit has lots of vitamins and fiber.

Sorbet, of course, is not just fresh fruit; it often has lots of sugar added.

4

Sure, but the sorbet we were discussing didn’t, which I know because I made it.

5

It comes out of the sugar is a toxin and fructose teh evil meme. No question that added sugar is a real problem but pop culture media promotes all kinds of distortions. And of course you are right that her living off of processed prepackaged prepared food is a major issue.

A link FYI.

6

Fruit in moderation is fine, but people following lowcarb diets normally avoid or strongly limit fruits. There’s nothing in them you can’t get from low-sugar vegetables, and many people do sort of fool themselves that the sugars in fruits “don’t count.” They count. Mango is particularly high in sugar and a no-no fruit to low-carb plans (yes-yes fruits are berries, stone fruits, and some types of melon).

Also, OP, I feel it needs to be said, it is really bad manners to pressure anyone to eat anything when they are a guest in your home, you should have accepted her refusal graciously and not tried to persuade her she “should” eat dessert.

7

Huh?

No one forced anyone to eat. One guest commented that the sorbet, made of almost all fruit, was unhealthy because fruit has sugar in it. Sounds like after the fact and after the other trying to be health conscious guest ate it which was pretty damn rude as well as dumb.

And clearly no one was low carbing as no one piped up about not wanting to eat the rice.

8

If they are doing a very low-carb diet such as the Atkins induction diet, then any sugars at all, including just a little fruit or any carbs, will interfere with ketosis.

A dear friend of mine is doing the extreme zero-carb thing right now, along with her husband. It is working for them, but because they are both food addicts, it mainly works because it’s strict and they can follow it. Neither can moderate once faced with carbs, cookies, fries, etc.

I’m in the moderation camp, but then I’ve never battled weight issues. I think you should respect and accommodate (when possible) your friend’s dietary wishes. What works for you might not work for her, and what harm would it do to go along with her wishes anyway? Seems to me that would be like encouraging an alcoholic to just have one leetle drink, or a recovering smoker to have a cigarette just this one time.

9

I didn’t pressure anyone to eat anything. She just mentioned she shouldn’t eat it because she was cutting down drastically on sugar, to which I replied that it actually barely had any sugar at all in it, which was in fact true. (She also had a piece of baklava, which I didn’t mention to her at all, I just put it on the table.)

10

Yep, the sorbet had no added sugar, it was just sugar and fruit–no added sugar whatsoever.

For all practical purposes, fruit juice is just sugar water, and whole fruit is not much better. Fruit is good in moderation in the same way cookies and donuts are good in moderation.

11

Fruit is better than pure sugar in that it also has vitamins and (depending on the fruit) some fiber. It’s still mostly sugar and water, though. Which is, of course, fine, in moderation.

And the title of the thread is about carbs as a dietary thermostat, but the post doesn’t seem to mention that at all. Was there something else you intended to ask?

12

I meant the idea that the level of one’s carb intake seems to be, for some people, the barometer of how healthy your diet is. But more so if the carbs are added sugars, or to a lesser extent, fruit or processed grains. My major health battle these days is insomnia, so sometimes I don’t make as much sense as I would like because I’m sleep-deprived :slight_smile:

13

Anecdote: In keeping with my low-carb lifestyle*, I normally avoid traditional fruits. Obviously, rice, breads, potatoes, grains, pasta and hundreds of other delicious things are out, too.

However, it does often seem to be the least in-shape who loudly declare that the teaspoon of nondairy coffee creamer or the sugar in the bell pepper are proof that my ‘diet’ can’t work and I should just give it up. Extra points when this is accompanied by a spray of sweet, sweet Coke and/or gas station roller taquito from their gobs.

*ironytalics in place of rolleyes

14

(Italics mine.)

Gawd what crap people spout off.

Here’s the NYT article that the other article linked to. Let’s make this very very clear:

And it not just the fiber. Or the vitamins or the minerals. Or even the other phytochemicals. It is the complete package more than just the sum of the parts.

A sample of a more academic detail…

It is completely possible to have a healthy diet without fruit. You want to low carb, g’head. But what we know is that groups thateat lots ofvegetables and fruits (both and whole grains too!) tend to stay healthier and live longer.

15

Forgot to put in the NYT link. Here.

16

Please. If there was a problem with that post, it was not sufficiently vilifying juice.

Both the NY Times article and the BMJ.com study that you cite state that fruit juice increases the odds of type 2 diabetes and is not generally recommended.

The study on BMJ.com study notes that “Total whole fruit consumption was weakly associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes”. And, when factoring in other dietary factors, the association is reduced. At the end they note other studies on specific fruit groups that have shown both higher and lower risks of type 2 diabetes; that the link is inconclusive. This is reinforced in the post-conclusion section, stating: “Total fruit consumption is not consistently associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.”

The study hardly a ringing endorsement for whole fruit. Whole fruit over fruit juice–yes. Whole fruit over no fruit–not really. I hear that there is a simple way to lower the risk of obesity-associated diseases, but that method is not popular on this board.

17

[QUOTE=DSeid;17504711
It is completely possible to have a healthy diet without fruit. You want to low carb, g’head. But what we know is that groups that[eat lots of]
(http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/98/2/454.abstract)vegetables and fruits (both and whole grains too!) tend to stay healthier and live longer.
[/QUOTE]

Works for my family, anyway - we mostly live into our 90s, and diabetes-free, even when somewhat overweight. My grandmother is apparently slightly diabetic, but hey, she just turned 97 - her pancreas have basically worn out. And she has always had a terrible sweet tooth.

18

Science doesn’t care about your family. It cares about a million, or ten million, or a hundred million families. Any other direction is madness.

19

To someone following a low-carb lifestyle, fruit is very high in carbs. Each fruit has a different carb count. Low carbers will happily eat berries but a peach or a banana is right out. If you’re trying to get in to ketosis, you can blow a whole day’s worth of very careful eating by eating a high sugar fruit. Let alone a dessert of pureed fruit with 1/2c of sugar in it.

If you follow a low-fat or low-cal lifestyle, fruit is very low in fat and calories, and very high in fiber and vitamins. If you are trying to eat low calories and you eat a piece of fruit at the end of the day and go over your goal by 20 calories then that’s a pretty good day.

As for why no one passed on the rice, everyone needs to make choices to get by in life. Following low-carb is annoyingly full of choices that other people like to pick apart. You can choose to eat rice and deal with the fallout tomorrow, or you can choose not to eat it and deal with the hostess tonight. Or you can just be following your own thing that allows rice and disallows sugar in any form including fruit. Because fruit is full of sugar.

Also don’t dismiss the fattest person in the room as not knowing anything about nutrition. We’re often the ones who spend the most time considering it.

20

So true or false then:

  1. Insulin acts as a key that keeps fat cells locked (body is forced to burn glucose)
  2. Fruit elicits an insulin response

Let’s leave the strawman of whether fruit & veg affects longevity eh :wink: This discussion is based around sugar in fruit affecting fat loss.

[QUOTE=ZipperJJ]

Also don’t dismiss the fattest person in the room as not knowing anything about nutrition. We’re often the ones who spend the most time considering it.
[/QUOTE]

I’d agree that comment was out of line. Obviously the woman made wrong dietary choices or was ignorant previously, but to assume she’s still living and eating under those misguided notions is, well, misguided. I suppose as always time will tell in her case whether her approach is the best way. Low carb is not a one-size-fits-all solution to fat loss.