I have been hearing a lot lately about low carb high fat diets.
this is a summary of some of the ideas. Among them are humans did not evolve to eat grains (gluton is bad for everyone) and that high levels of blood cholesterol is not associated with cardiac disease.
Am I justified in thinking this is nonsense?
I’m starting out with the position that humans evolved to eat anything moving slowly enough to catch, and wild grains are pretty easy to sneak up on, although until brewing beer necessitated the invention of agriculture there probably weren’t a lot of grain calories in the paleolithic diet, but I’ll bet there were some.
As far as high levels of blood cholesterol being associated with cardiac disease, that begs the question that high levels of dietary fat causes high cholesterol. Certainly in my case it doesn’t, and I get around 65% of my calories from fat.
Low carb/high fat diets work as well as any diet that you stick to. If you find it easier to stick than a low fat diet, great, but lots of people find it difficult to give up bread for life, and if you eat the way you used to eat, you’ll end up weighing what you used to weigh.
The Atkins High protein/ low carb diet works well for a time. But, IMHO it is because few snak foods qualify. IMHO it’s not meals, it’s snaking that causes fat people. (Dont get me wrong, not eating right certainly helps make you fat).
Gluten is bad only for a tiny minority. However, again, going “gluten free” also means removing many bad snak & fast foods from your diet, thus again you feel better.
There is no real danger from either Low Fat/High carb, Low Carb/high protein or Low Carb/high fat (assuming you stay away from some of the worst processed fats).
I think the simplest, easiest diet would be just stopping fast & snak foods. Dont eat at McDonalds etc, dont buy chips, cookies, candy. Add fiber.
Snack.
I stopped eating wheat and nearly all cane/corn sugar a month ago. Apart from that I’m not doing anything different: not working out, not limiting quantity. If I’m hungry, I eat until I’m not hungry just like before. I’ve dropped 10 pounds already and I feel a lot better.
But I can’t honestly say it’s the absence of wheat that is helping, as much as substitution. Darn near anything I’d prefer to eat has wheat in it, and certainly anything fast & easy is some form of sandwich. So when you can’t have that, you munch on anything else: meat, nuts, veggies, fruit; and that makes ya thirsty so, more water.
Humans did not evolve in an environment where carbs (and calories generally) were as available as they are now.
For most animals and for humans up to about the 19th and 20th century, if you stumbled upon calories, it was a good idea to eat them. Especially if you were a hunter-gatherer whose food supply was irregular. Carbs, especially sugar, fill you very little for the amount of calories which allows you to eat more. If a hunter-gatherer found a field of berries that allowed him to eat 4000 calories that day before feeling too full, it was a good idea to eat above his nutritional requirement and build energy reserves i.e.: fat.
The situation is not at all the same now in terms of calorie availability. Today, if we presume an income of 40 000$, that half is spent on food that maximises calories (as a hunter-gatherer might) and that a 2 liter bottle of Coke is 2$, that gives us 8.4 million calories available to the average guy per year.
Presuming an energy expenditure of 3000 calories per day (a very physically demanding job) requires 1.1 million calories per year.
A 7.4 million calorie surplus is equivalent to about 1 ton of fat.
In other words, our monkey selves and our hunter-gatherer selves lived in much harsher situations than us and their bodies, which are our bodies, are very good at binging on carbs and storing it as fat for a rainy day.
Our cultural evolution is not in synch with our biological evolution on this point. Learning how we evolved only gives us contextual information as to how we should act. Something could have been great to do 100 000 years ago but not so great now or vice versa.
tl;dr: “We evolved for this”=/= “we should do this”
I changed my eating habits to Atkins style 25 years ago. Dr. Atkins evolved in his thinking thru the years and the diet also evolved, before he sold the Atkins name he was very much a proponent of leaner meats, fish, and lots of fresh produce, which is how I eat. The diet was never high fat because once you quit eating sugary breakfast products, fast food, tater chips, and 2 desserts a day you have eliminated the major source of fat in the American diet. I don’t have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heartburn, acid reflux, don’t take any RX drugs and my natural sex drive at 60 is still way to high. But everybody is different, you have to find what makes you feel good, and the most ignored fact of all is that the older you get the less food your body needs, at this point I keep a stable weight on a couple handsful of mixed nuts, a couple beers, and one great home cooked fresh real food meal a day. And don’t nobody talk about the diet we evolved to eat as hunters gatherers w/o recognizing how important insect protein was. Sweet and sour grub clusters, anyone?
The issue is not with grain per se. If we had a diet of heirloom wheat from the 1950’s then low-carb would not even be talked about. It is the modifications to the wheat, corn, oats and other grains that put it out of sync with what our bodies have evolved to eat.
A warning:
A number of years ago, I put myself on the Atkins diet. All my meals consisted of lean protein (chicken, turkey, fish) or eggs. Yes, I lost weight, and my blood sugar normalized (I have type 2 diabetes). Then my endocrinologist, after seeing the results of my blood test, told me to see a nephrologist. I did, and she told me I had stage 3 kidney disease, a result of too much protein in my diet.
I’m not saying the Atkins diet causes kidney damage. Just be aware that too much protein in your diet might have negative repurcussions.
If we are not supposed to eat starches, then why does our saliva contain the enzyme amylase, the stuff we all experienced in Biology class and which starts breaking down starches into simpler sugars, in our very mouths?
On 10/16 I had a fasting blood test drawn. Glucose was at 101 and my A1C was at 6.5.
On 11/18 I had another fasting blood test drawn. Glucose was at 95 and my A1C was at 5.1.
I’ve severely cut back on my carbohydrates bud did not eliminate them. I have cut out all fast food except for the occasional Chilli at Wendy’s. Many of my dinners are still eaten out mostly steak and fish at chain restaurants.
This is anecdote, not data, but I lost a fairly significant amount of weight about 12 years ago during the second “Atkins” boom of the early 2000s. I don’t think it was food or body chemistry though - with very low starches/carbs eating got boring very quickly and I ended up just eating less. Once I stopped the diet I slowly drifted back to my old weight (and then some.) I will say - blood-sugar-wise - my body tends to be pretty good at this, at least as I can tell. I don’t spike in appetite, and even when I’m eating less I don’t get the dramatic hunger/mood swings that some of my friends do. But my natural inclination is to eat somewhat too much (I enjoy it, what can I say) so after years of this I hit my highest weight ever this summer.
Since August, I’ve been slowly shedding. The tools? Pretty simple. A decent bathroom scale (I weigh myself every morning), a pocket sized notebook and pen in which I record every morning’s weight, an excel spreadsheet with some basic data analysis (read The Hacker’s Diet to get a simple easy way to track trend weight that smooths out day-to-day variance) and myfitnesspal, a free smartphone app that allows you to easily enter and track calorie consumption and burn as you eat and excercise.
Funny thing, just basic calorie monitoring and control - through eating and exercise - and my weight is going down slowly and predictably. No huge swings, no crazy diets. Just math. I’m down about 20 lbs since August and mean to keep this up for at least through June 2015.
At least for me - a low carb / high fat (and protein, in my case) was sort of a gimmick that worked short term, but wasn’t sustainable in the long run. I’m finding simple calorie control through monitoring and exercise to be slower but effective.
For a really fascinating take on the issue of low carb vs. low fat diets, I recommend the book The Hundred Year Diet. It’s not a diet book, it’s a history book about dieting in America. The bottom line is that the different diet approaches have been battling for popularity for the past century, and while each has its proponents, in spite of advances in scientific knowledge, there is no definitive consensus yet.
Summarizing the link:
Don’t eat grains because “grains are bad.” Gluten causes issues for “many people.” “Cereals and grains are really bad for us because many of them contain wheat and wheat is the real problem.” Oh and the rest of the diet is based on the concept of “co-evolving” with foods.
Is a gluten free diet wrapped in an untested package of other foods. Poking around the site he tends to over claim what science he even tries to reference. I’d call it nonsense.
I think basing how ancient humans ate on how we should eat now is most definitely BS, apparently we have the ability to survive healthily on a very wide range of diets. So all that “your ancestors ate like this” bullshit is definitely inconsequential.
I do think that there are merits to a LCHF diet though outside of that. It’s been proven to improve brain function and is much more efficient at metabolizing energy. If keeping body fat low and increasing brain performance are a priority to you it definitely seems like it would be the most superior diet.
I was ready to subscribe to your newsletter, but you lost me at “Sweet and sour grub clusters” :dubious:
Anyway, I thought that low-carb, Atkins-style diets work because it’s basically a “body hack”-- the lack of carbs causes your body to use up glycogen stored in the liver, and doesn’t trigger insulin production, which sends your body into a state of ketosis, “fat burning mode”. Whether this is harmful or not in the long term I don’t think is fully understood, but I’ve been thinking about trying it as I see the scale creep up every year.
I’m not following any specific diet per se - but I have changed my eating habits on the advice of my gym instructor and have to say it is working for me.
I’ve just turned 50 and had been steadily gaining weight since I got married seven years ago. Weighted (gets calculator out to express this in lbs rather than stone) 195 lbs then and it gradually crept up to 230 lbs by the end of 2012 when I tore all four tendons off my right ankle and went into months of physio etc. Ended up at gym to rebuild ankle strength and mobility and got myself this personal trainer. Previously hated gyms but did quite a bit of hillwalking and backpacking, albeit slower and slower as I gained weight.
Anyway, in the year it took for the ankle to fully recover I lost weight as well and felt better for it so kept going as part of generally doing more. Stalled at 215 lbs whereupon he had a look at what I was eating - which was healthy I thought but mostly carbs (cereal, bread, pasta and lots of vegetables with some meat and fish and relatively little sugar). Never been a snacker or a soft drink consumer so no change there.
He suggested a simple change - one meal with carbs a day otherwise no change. So tend to still have porage in the mornings with nuts and seeds and berries (or full fat Greek yogurt with likewise additions) but after that meat or fish with salad or vegetables and fruit. Still drink beer and wine, and when eating out eat what I want (including bread - now a treat). Sometimes I have carbs twice a day but don’t beat myself up about it. Don’t bother avoiding beetroot, turnip, swede, carrots or parsnip although I know they contain carbs too. I suspect the very slow rate of weight loss (average over the two years is less than a pound a month) but steady loss is making what I am doing more sustainable and more healthy.
Simple rule - no bread, pasta, potato or rice unless I have not had porage that morning. Now just around 203 lbs and still losing about a pound or two a month. Hope to get back to 195 lbs or maybe 5 lbs lower than that but generally feeling the benefits of carrying less around and being more active as a result which of course is a virtuous cycle.
Personally not being on a “diet”, being able to eat anything but sticking (mostly) to one simple rule works for me. For sure it is not Aikens or anything else but I like the idea of it just being a change rather than a diet per se. Suspect the very slow (about a pound a month over the whole period) makes it easier to be sustainable and healthier.
It’s certainly worked for me (30kg lost over a two year period, maintained for one year). I kind of understand the science behind it, in terms of ketosis, but for me it’s about appetite control.
If I eat a high carb diet, I am constantly hungry. I can eat A LOT of carbs in one sitting. I’ll then feel groggy and full for about 30 minutes. Then I start to feel hungry again.
If I eat a high fat diet, I’m rarely hungry. The food I eat is tasty and satisfies me before I’m full.
So to lose weight, one needs to restrict calorie intake. Guess which diet makes it easier for me to do that?
A diet of all protein is in no way shape or form reflective of the Atkins diet/eating plan. The actual Atkins plan, if you ever read it, requires a minimum of 3-4 cups high fiber veggies a day. And Extreme carb restriction (20g/day not counting fiber) should only last 2 weeks, then you follow stages to introduce low glycemic root veggies and fruits.
Sorry you followed some crazy ass plan and got sick. Atkins never advocated an all- protein diet.
I have to question how “high fat” the paleo diet was. Outside of seeds where would the fat have come from? Wild game does not have much fat.