Living Low Carb (18 page)

Folks, low-carb living is not dangerous.

And it works.

Maybe not for everybody. Maybe not in every situation. (Remember, I’m the guy who has been preaching for the last fifteen years that everybody’s different and that no one diet works for everyone.) But a low-carb diet works for many, many people. And a large percentage of the people who are consciously controlling their carbs report that they find the diet easy to stay with.

Fad Diet? Or Time-Old Tradition?

Low-carb isn’t a fad. In fact, when I hear people claim that it is, I’m always amused; because when you think about it, controlled- (or lower-) carb eating is what we humans have done for the vast majority of our time on the planet. For goodness’ sake, agriculture was only “invented” ten thousand years ago (the human genus has been around for 2.4 million years!). Our Paleolithic ancestors didn’t eat low-fat woolly mammoths or low-fat caribou. The artificially low-fat, high-carb diet, from the point of view of anthropology and history, is the true “fad” diet, and it’s been less than a rousing success.

The point is this: low-carb eating is not a fad; it is here to stay, and none too soon. Obesity is quickly catching up to smoking as the number one preventable cause of death in America. Diabetes is approaching epidemic proportions. Nearly two thirds of Americans are overweight and a third of them are obese.

Low-carb living can help.

So, why is there such entrenched resistance to the idea of low-carb diets, particularly among what I like to call the “Diet Dictocrats” and the conventional medical profession?

To fully answer that question intelligently, I think the first place to start is with some definitions.

What Is a Low-Carb Diet, Anyway?

Talk to ten different “experts” about low-carb diets and you’re likely to find at least nine different meanings of the term “low.” Much like the terms “hot” and “cold,” “low” and “high” don’t have any real objective definitions and tend to be defined in the way the person speaking about them tends to define them. In weather, one person’s “hot” is another person’s “warm.” It’s the same thing when talking about diets.

Which reminds me of a story.

Actually, it’s not a story, but a scene from a movie—
Annie Hall
, my favorite film of all time—and it has a lot to tell us about the whole “low-carb diet” thing. (It also has a lot to tell us about “high-protein” or “low-fat” or any other diet that has “low” or “high” in front of it. Stay with me for a moment and I’ll show you why.)

In this classic 1977 Woody Allen movie, Alvie Singer (played by Woody) and his girlfriend Annie (played by Diane Keaton) are both in therapy with different therapists, and are both complaining about their sex life. In the scene I’m talking about, the movie shows a split screen, and you see both characters each talking to their respective shrinks. On the left side, Alvie is saying to his therapist, “We hardly ever have sex!!” Over on the right side of the screen, Annie is complaining to
her
therapist, “He wants to have sex all the time!!”

Annie’s therapist asks her, “Well, how often do you actually
have
sex?”

“All the time!,” she wails. “
Three times a week!
”

Alvie’s therapist asks him, “Well, how often do you actually
have
sex?”

“Hardly ever,” he moans. “
Only three times a week!
”

Which brings me to the meaning of “a lot.” Or of “high” (as in protein). Or of “low” (as in carbs).

I’m frequently struck by how discussions about high-protein/lowcarbohydrate diets sound a lot like that scene from
Annie Hall
.

Definitions, Please!

So one of the biggest problems we have in discussing low-carb diets rationally is agreeing on some definitions. What constitutes a “low-carb” program really depends on your reference point. Sure, we can probably all agree that the first stage of the Atkins Diet 1972 edition (20 grams of carbs or less a day) is clearly a low-carb plan; but beyond that the definitions are up for grabs, and they tend to range all over the map.

I’ve seen published studies of “low-carb” diets where people were eating 120 grams of carbs a day. Sure, that’s a lot lower than the average American consumes, but “low-carb”? Another example: time and again, I’ve heard people who should know better refer to dietary plans like Barry Sears’s “The Zone” as a low-carb plan, when in fact on “The Zone,” 40% of calories come from carbohydrates! On what planet is a diet in which
almost half of the calories come from carbohydrates
considered a “low-carb” diet?
¹

Well, if you’re a government agency or a conventionally trained dietitian whose belief system is that 65% of your calories should be coming from carbohydrates and only 10% from protein, then, yes, “The Zone” with its 30% protein and 40% carbohydrates is a “low-carb, high-protein” diet—just like if you’re Annie Hall and you think you should be having sex
once
a month, then three times a week is “
all the time
.”

So, sure: if your basic belief system is that carbohydrates should make up at least 50% or more of daily intake (the position clearly taken by most conventional health organizations, the USDA, and the moribund American Dietetic Association, which never had an original thought in its collective head), then anything
less
than that 50% (or 60%) is going to look like a “lowcarb” diet and be very suspect. If you believe that fat causes heart disease (it does not), then any diet that allows more than a modest amount of fat is going to be equally suspect and likely to be labeled “high-fat.” And if you believe that any amount of protein over 10% of the diet is going to cause your kidneys to immediately fail and you to die an early death, then any diet that provides more than 10% to 15% of calories from protein is going to be demonized.

The problem is that these beliefs are in need of a reexamination—because if they turn out to be untrue, then the whole rationale for being against low-carb diets unravels.

Understand again—I’m not saying that all low-carb diets are created equal, or that everyone in the world belongs on a low-carb regimen. All fat isn’t created equal, all protein is far from equal, and all carbs certainly aren’t. But we’ve spent far too much time worrying about the
percentage of calories
that comes from each of the three macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbs) and far too little worrying about the
overall quality of the food
we eat. If we want to be healthy (and slim), we really need to be more concerned with where our calories
come from
, not just what
category
they belong in.

Take two “high-protein” diets: let’s call them “High-Protein Diet A” and “High-Protein Diet B.” And let’s agree, just for fun, that both really are high in protein by anyone’s standards. But in Diet A, all that protein comes from ballpark franks and deli meat and is generally eaten with a side of white bread and some ketchup. In Diet B, the protein comes from wild caribou and grass-fed lamb and is invariably served with a hearty side of green veggies. These two diets are
not
comparable, though they may well share the same
percentage of calories from protein
, a fact that is probably irrelevant compared to the quality of the food eaten. This little detail tends to get lost in the shouting about “high-protein,” “low-carb,” and the rest of it.

The question always needs to be asked: what’s the actual
quality
of the food that’s being eaten?

It’s simply not enough to celebrate—or demonize—a diet based solely on the percentages of calories from protein, fat, or carbs.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

This book isn’t designed to rebut all the arguments against low-carb diet strategies; rather, it’s simply intended to make you think about why those arguments exist and to suggest some areas where they might be lacking. There’s a ton of research and consumer writing available if you’d like to explore this more for yourself, starting with Gary Taubes’s magnificent 500-page treatise
Good Calories, Bad Calories
and followed with a visit to the THINCS Web site (The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics,
http://www.thincs.org
).

But here’s the bottom line: we humans are omnivores, quite elegantly engineered to survive well on a range of diets and macronutrient (protein, fat, and carb) percentages. Healthy people have survived quite nicely on high-fat diets (the Trobriand Islanders), high-carb diets (the Bantu of South Africa), and high-protein diets (the Inuit of Greenland). In the 1920s, a researcher named Weston Price investigated about 15 of the surviving hunter–gatherer societies still eating their native diet, and found robust good health among
all
of them. They ate a wide variety of foods and got varying percentages of their calories from protein, fat, and carbohydrate. Some existed mainly on fresh cream. Others on seafood. Still others on plants. Some on meat.

But all these people had two things in common—
they didn’t eat processed food, and they didn’t eat sugar
.

What we humans are not designed to do is thrive on a diet that’s high in both.

Nutritional Bipartisanship

In the spirit of bipartisanship, it’s worth pointing out that the negative effects of a diet high in sugar is one concept just about everyone agrees on, from Dean Ornish to Robert Atkins. As my friend Mike Eades, MD says,
“There are diets that allow you to eat all the fat you want. And there are diets that allow you to eat all the protein you want. But I’ve not yet seen one—ever—that allows you to feast on all the sugar you could possibly consume.”

That’s a take-home point worth noting.

Fat is
not
the enemy in the American (or Western) diet: sugar is. I don’t care how high your diet is in fat: as long as that fat isn’t damaged fats or trans-fats, and as long as your diet is very very low in sugar, the
percentage of fat in your diet
is going to make
absolutely no difference
to any major health outcome.

But the amount of sugar and processed carbs is most
definitely
going to make a difference. And this is the beauty of controlled-carb eating.

Once you get all of the sugar and most of the processed carbs out of your diet, what you’re left with is what I call the “Jonny Bowden Four Food Groups”: food you could hunt, fish, gather, or pluck. And whatever you want to call that, that’s a diet that’s lower in carbs than the typical American diet. And a whole lot better.

So, If Low-Carb Diets Are So Great, Why Isn’t Everyone in the World Eating Low-Carb?

Well, aside from the fact—which can’t be stated too many times for my taste—that everybody is different and no one diet strategy suits all people, the answer can be broken down into three factors:

•  Economic factors

•  Social factors

•  Pervasive myths

Some of the most common and pervasive myths about low-carb diets will be covered in the next chapter, so let’s tackle economic and social factors here. Since people following a low-carb lifestyle often feel that they are “running upstream”—or at least going against the prevailing social grain and dietary “wisdom,” I hope this discussion may help provide some perspective for you.

Economic Factors

As of this writing—September 16, 2008—the world’s population is a staggering 6,843,985,355. (In the time it took me to type this sentence, it just went up by 84 people—you can watch the numbers yourself at
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop
.) There is no way we can feed 7 billion people on grass-fed meat, wild fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fruit. Without cereal grains, humanity wouldn’t survive.

This is the thesis put forth by Professor Loren Cordain, PhD, in a seminal paper called “Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword.” Cordain basically says that without agriculture and cereal grains, we wouldn’t have civilization as we know it. Grains (and agriculture) allowed people to form towns and not be dependent on hunting. Grains allowed populations to grow because they made it possible to feed much larger numbers of people than could be fed by hunting a finite stock of wild animals. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be honest about the health costs of a diet that’s very high in grains. In over 100 pages of carefully argued and copiously footnoted research, Cordain links diets very high in cereal grains with nutrient imbalances, vitamin D deficiencies, autoimmune disorders, and even psychological and neurological problems.

“Cereal grains obviously can be included in moderate amounts in the diets of most people without any noticeable, deleterious health effects,” says Dr. Cordain, “and herein lies their strength. When combined with a variety of both animal- and plant-based foods, they provide a cheap and plentiful caloric source, capable of sustaining and promoting life. The ecologic, energetic efficiency wrought by the widespread cultivation and domestication of cereal grains allowed for the dramatic expansion of worldwide human populations, which in turn, ultimately led to humanity’s enormous cultural and technological accomplishments.
The downside of cereal grain consumption is their ability to disrupt health and well being in virtually all people when consumed in excessive quantity
. This information has only been empirically known since the discovery of vitamins, minerals and certain antinutrients in the early part of this century.” (Emphasis mine.)

Cereal grains now provide 56% of the world’s food calories and about half of its protein.
²
And therein lies the rub and the “double-edged sword.” They’re
not
universally good for us, despite overwhelming marketing efforts to make us believe they are. But without them, we wouldn’t have a planet. Without them, as Dr. Cordain notes, “our species would likely have never evolved the complex cultural and technological innovations which allowed our departure from the hunter–gatherer niche. However, because of the dissonance between human evolutionary nutritional requirements and the nutrient content of these domesticated grasses, many of the world’s people suffer disease and dysfunction directly attributable to the consumption of these foods.”