The Straight Dope on low-carb diets?

Factual Questions
21

All I know is I was 250 pounds and feeling really lousy. My knees felt like they were filled with ground glass and I had to give up walking the hilly trail that my SO and I were walking pretty regularly. I realized that I was just going to keep gaining weight with no exercise to offset the process. I couldn’t take Celebrex because it gave me tremors, and that was a drag because it really kept the pain down to minimal levels. And I couldn’t use the OTC pain relievers because they were bad for my liver after twice being hospitalized with cirrhosis. I realized I would have to go on a diet. (I didn’t much believe in diets.)

At the time everyone, including my SO, was raving about the Atkins diet, so, without any enthusiasm I tried it. Last Saturday I broke the 200 pound barrier! I’m now a (relatively) svelte 198 pounds. Another 30 lbs and I’ll be at my target
weight, which is 170 lbs.

I feel amazingly better and I’m back to walking the trails because somewhere in there the pain in my knees evaporated. So I’m all for good ole’ Atkins.

The second Tuesday in every month I’ve set aside for what I call my SPLURGE DAY. I eat anything I feel like, and tomorrow I feel lie cooking home fries and eggs for breakfast, and later on Barb and I will split a small pizza. I also want a burrito, and I made some potato salad this afternoon. Tomorrow I’m the Carb King, and then it’s back to business. Yum!

22

Of course sugar is good for you. Why would we have a natural urge to consume it in quantity if it didn’t have nutritional value? :confused: Sure, eating too much of it is a problem, but eating too much fat isn’t good for you either, dear. Atkins may be a worthwhile way to lose weight, but long-term medical studies just don’t exist yet to confirm that it’s safe for the body. It’s also, over periods of longer than six months, no more effective than ordinary dieting methods. Some people seem to find it highly effective, but there’s plenty of others who don’t. And you don’t know either what the long term effects of that sort of diet are going to be on your circulatory system. I understand that the diet has been revised to emphasize slightly healthier fats nowadays, which is good, but still people on the diet consume frightening amounts of saturated fats and related baddies.

Carbohydrates are the dietary staple of almost every human group in the world. The only people that come to mind at the moment whose diet isn’t based around carbohydrates are the Inuit. Evolutionarily, at least, we developed using carbohydrates as our main source of dietary calories. I don’t know whether low-carb dieting is good or bad, and I don’t feel that I have any right to concern myself with what others eat, but to claim that one of the three main sources of energy for the human body is just “bad” and “you shouldn’t eat it” is a tad simplistic, dontcha think?

I just don’t follow the sort of logic that says that if you’re suffering health consequences from eating too much of something, it must therefore be better not to eat any at all. Hell, when my aunt was in medical school, she got jaundice from eating too many carrots (she was suffering from some sort of pica caused by iron-deficiency anemia.) Too much vitamin A makes you turn orange. Does that mean you shouldn’t eat any of it at all? That’s the sort of logic you’re using.

23

Who says we don’t eat carbs at all? Did you miss the part where I said I eat fruits and vegetables with every single meal? I keep my carbs at 20-30 grams/day right now, because that’s a comfortable place for me, and I like it there. I know some people who can eat double that and still lose weight. The Atkins book made it clear you can eat up to 100 carbs on maintenence and still maintain goal weight.

I honestly believe that people who don’t lose on Atkins are not doing it correctly, because, well, it’s hard. No pasta, no bread, no rice, no chips, no cookies, no cake, no cereal, no milk…it can take its toll and some people would rather not do what they have to do to avoid those foods.

And cravings do not mean your body needs it. After 12 weeks, I do not crave sugar at all. I don’t even want it. All the parties full of “good” food and “treats” leave me cold. I’m not in the least tempted. I only craved sugar when I was consuming it great quantities, and now that I have a controlled amount of carbs coming exclusively from fruits and vegetables, my body doesn’t desire sugar in the least.

Finally, I disagree strongly with “it’s a staple all over the world…” argument. Every day on this board somebody is bemoaning the obesity epidemic in America. People are eating a shitload of bad, unhealthy food, they are not exercising, and they are all about convienence. Well, if you are out working, doing manual labor every day, eating potatoes or rice or pasta is probably not going to have an adverse affect on you. Eating like a horse and sitting behind a desk probably will. Furthermore, 100 years ago, Americans didn’t eat like this. There was no McDonalds and fast-food nation, there was no bleached, white flour, perservatives wasn’t in everything, etc etc.

Oh, I have a real finally. The “bad fats” are trans-fats and they have never been ok for Atkins, and I can’t imagine they’re acceptable on other LC-diets.

24

It’s this kind of thinking that has given Atkins a bad name.
(JFTR:I did it for about a year, lost nearly 80 pounds and have kept it off. I’m doing a sort of maintenance-type of Atkins now, and haven’t gained any of it back.)
When I started, and started losing weight, a couple of co-workers commented on it and asked what I was doing. When I mentioned Atkins, one co-worker (I’ll call her Sally) gasped, “So you’re not eating any carbs at all?!?”
By this time I was in the Ongoing Weight Loss part, and was eating (I think) around 50 grams of carbs a day. I explained the diet in simple terms, and told her that, yes, I ate carbs, just in limited amounts, and that most of them came from veggies. A few months later, I was chatting with another co-worker who was on Weight Watchers and Sally said, “You’re still on Atkins? How do you survive not eating any carbs at all?” I explained again that I ate carbs, and that Atkins is NOT a no-carb diet. Never has been.
Fast forward again a couple of months. We were again talking about diets again (it’s all women where I work, what do you think we talk about? :wink: ).
Sally mentioned that she read something about how Atkins is so bad for your body because not eating any carbs at all sends your body into some “keto-thingy” (her words) and screws up your metabolism and everyone on it ends up diabetic. I asked where she read that article, trying to fiigure out how cutting carbohydrates and sugar could make you diabetic, but she couldn’t remember. Then it switched to something she heard on the news. Maybe. Or something. No matter how many times I explained it, she’s convinced that Atkins is a no-carb diet and it’s slowly killing me and/or turning me into a diabetic. The fact that I rarely eat candy or white sugar, don’t drink soda, and do eat mostly lean protein and lots of fresh veggies is just lost on her.

Anyway… people don’t always know what Atkins is about. It’s not a no-carb diet. Yes, I was suffering health consequences from too many carbs and too much sugar in my diet. I cut sugar out, and cut the carbs way, way down.
I do eat carbs, but in limited amounts. I hate being with people who knew I was doing Atkins, and having them scrutinze everything on my plate.
“Oooh, that’s bread! You can’t eat that on Atkins! It’s full of carbs! You can’t have carbs on Atkins!”
:rolleyes:
There was a point when I quit telling people exactly what diet I was on, and just said I was watching what I ate and exercising more.

Like I said, I lost about 80 pounds, and I feel a lot better. I’ve gotten my once-nearly crippling migraines under control, I’m healthier, I feel great, I can exercise and not be gasping for breath after 5 minutes - and I still keep the carb level down.

25

Damn, did I kill it?

26

I know it’s not one-hundred-percent free of carbohydrates. Far as I’ve heard, though, it is supposed to be free of simple starches and the like. And I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad, but the research just does not exist to confirm the notion that “carbs” are addictive, or that this whole notion of insulin spikes is really relevant, and like I said, the research also shows that Atkins is on average no more beneficial over the long term. Even the short-term average difference between Atkins and more traditional diet methods is small.

There was no white flour? Really, now? You sure about that? Might wanna look that up. And is it preservatives that cause people to get fat? Is it the potassium benzoate in my ice cream that’s making my ass so big, not the fat and sugar?

Sorry, but you haven’t refuted my point that even in the “healthy” parts of the world, people eat starchy, carbohydrate-rich foods as their dietary staples. Indeed, most of them probably get more exercise than Americans. If that’s the case, then the problem is our lack of exercise, and the solution to that is not to eat some bizarre diet that doesn’t in any way resemble what humans naturally eat.

27

The research doesn’t exist to show that insulin spikes are relevant? Are you not reading anything?

Take a look at this article for a decent overview of the topic.

28

Come on, that’s an article from a fitness magazine. I don’t doubt the authors’ hearts are in the right place, but I also don’t see any reason to believe they know enough to really address the issue properly. The fact that the “cult of low carb” is popular among fitness buffs is nothing new, but it doesn’t exactly prove anything.

29

I think you’re guilty of the genetic fallacy, but if you’re going to be picky, how about a study?

30

What do humans “naturally” eat?

I might agree with you about exercise. But the rest of it is unsupported by facts.

Are you familiar with the rise of diabetes in what used to be called the “healthy eating” parts of the world.

Surely more research is in order. Not sure where condescending attitude fits in.

31

Humans naturally eat practically anything they can find, from berries and fruit to meat, and they’re good at making edible things that can’t be eaten in their native state (such as grains, which have to be soaked or milled before eating, though I don’t know when those were added to our diet historically). We have a biological drive to eat, and to store surplus energy in the event that food supplies run out. Unfortunately, many people still take in much more energy than they use, and very few people will ever find themselves in a situation where they depend on their stored energy. This is compounded further by the fact that high-energy foods taste better than low-energy ones (again, a biological drive that encourages us to seek out and eat the most valuable foods).

But obesity isn’t caused by processed foods, by preservatives, or by trans fats (which are not substantially more dangerous than saturated fats; it’s just that they can be avoided, and they used to appear as unsaturated fats on the label). Obesity is caused by an energy intake that is higher than energy expenditure. Processing and additives aren’t at fault, except that highly processed foods are correlated with high calories.

What frustrates me most about the low-carb thing is people who ‘cut carbs’ without following a strict procedure for doing so. There’s no benefit in reducing carbohydrates explicitly compared to reducing caloric intake in general, and it may even be that there is no benefit in following a strict low-carb diet compared to a diet that includes the same amount of calories from mixed sources. Low-carb diets may work for some people, particularly those who experience cravings for high-carbohydrate foods (though these people may be the most susceptible to gaining back the weight they lost once they stop the diet). Of course, low-carb diets are not effective at all for people who use them as an excuse to eat high-fat, high-calorie foods.

It’s not accurate, though, to use broad generalizations, such as the notion that everyone craves carbohydrates and will magically lose weight if they reduce their intake. Low-carb diets may work very well for some, but others may find a low-fat diet works best, and others may lose weight simply by removing a major calorie source (such as soda or beer) from their diets. In the end, what matters the most is whether you can stick to the diet – and, even more importantly, whether you can make lasting changes to the types of food you eat. If you hate following a low-carb diet, it probably won’t work for you in the long term.

32

Possibly, but saturated fats raise your HDL while trans fats do not. In addition, trans fats have been implicated in diabetes type II: