Living Low Carb (19 page)

So grains and grain products are here to stay. But the fact that they are essential to the survival of a planet that is on track to hold 9.3 billion people by the year 2050
³
shouldn’t blind us to the fact that—for some of us, anyway—they oughtn’t be the primary source of calories in our diet.

For some of us, they ought to occupy much less space on the dinner plate (and breakfast plate, and lunch plate) than they currently do.

And for still others of us—not all, mind you, but many—they don’t belong in our diet at all.

High-Carb Diets and Economics

If you think the collapse of major financial institutions like Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and Lehman Brothers was a seismic event, just imagine what would happen if the agribusinesses and Big Food companies collapsed because the demand for bread, grains, pasta, wheat, and sugar suddenly plummeted. It’s not going to happen. The point here is for us to separate the
economic
reasons we’ve come to rely on (and justify) high-carb diets from the supposed
health
reasons. And no wonder we believe they’re so good for us! There would be a huge disconnect if most of the world was sustained on calories from processed carbohydrates, and at the same time everyone believed they were bad for us.

So it’s almost inevitable that we
have
to believe these things are good for us. Otherwise the mental dissonance would be too great. Imagine living and working in an economy based wholly on tobacco—your job and livelihood depend on it, your family’s well-being depends on it, your traditions are based on it, your kid’s college education is paid for by it—while at the same time you’re told on a daily basis that this product that your life is based around—cigarettes—is killing you and everyone you love. You’d be in constant mental conflict.
⁴

So it’s unlikely that we’re going to have big government agencies telling us how bad sugar is any time soon. Case in point: in 2003, the pretty conservative and mainstream World Health Organization issued a report titled
Diet Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases
(TRS916), which made the very gentle and—one would think—noncontroversial recommendation that people “limit their daily consumption of free (added) sugars to less than 10% of calories.” If you think no one could possibly argue with that, think again. One of the loudest protests came from the American government, at the urging of the sugar industry and their well-financed lobbyists.

So don’t expect government agencies to tell you to cut back on Cocoa Krispies any time soon. But the fact that industries producing sugared cereals and white bread, snack cakes and crackers are a huge part of the global economy—and will fight tooth and nail against any recommendations to consume less of their crap—shouldn’t blind us to the fact that they may not necessarily be producing products that are good for our health. We can certainly understand why they’ll fight for their market share. But we don’t have to drink the (sugared) Kool-Aid.

The Social Basis for High-Carb Diets

That said, there are many reasons besides effective marketing that we like to eat carbs, starting with this one: sugar
tastes
good. It’s also associated with a lot of good things—celebrations, feasts—and frequently with love and family—grandma’s homemade cookies, bake sales, Mom’s apple pie, birthday cake; the list is endless. And let’s face it, our sweet tooth is voracious, as anyone who’s spent any time fighting a craving for a box of Lorna Doones while watching late-night television knows all too well.

As it happens, nature gave us a sweet tooth for a very good reason—survival of the species. We humans don’t make our own vitamin C, and most of the foods that contain vitamin C—like fruits—are indeed naturally sweet. Also, when our cavemen ancestors wandered the earth trying to figure out what to eat, sweetness and bitterness were good guides as to whether a food was safe. Many foods that are poisonous are also very bitter, so your ancestors’ ability to distinguish between sweet and bitter—and their strong preference for the former—helped ensure that you are here today to read these words.

The problem is that we no longer get our sugar from the occasional sweet fruit or by shimmying up a tree in the jungle to get a rare taste of bee’s honey. High-sugar foods now line the shelves of every grocery store in town. We get sugar from virtually every processed food we eat, and even those that don’t contain a lot of sugar are so highly processed that they convert to sugar in the body so quickly that you might as well be pouring the contents of a sugar bowl straight into your gut. And sugar creates its own cravings. The more we eat, the more we crave, adding to our increasing health problems and our expanding waistlines.

Again, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for recreational food, and I’m certainly not arguing that we should outlaw Ben and Jerry’s. My only point here is for us to start to decouple the social and economic justifications for high-carb diets (which are numerous and powerful) from the health justifications (which are flimsy).

Unfortunately, just as we’re not going to wean the world off of oil any time soon, we’re also not going to wean the world off of carbs or junk food. That’s not my purpose in this book (plus it would be impossible anyway). My purpose instead is simply to help you educate yourself about what carbs do and don’t do, what you “need” in your diet and what you
don’t
need, and to ultimately empower you to do your best to lower your overall sugar (and processed-carb) intake, no matter what eating plan you ultimately choose.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at some of the prevailing beliefs and common myths about low-carb diets. We may not be able to put them to rest forever—beliefs are stubbornly resistant to change—but maybe we can make a dent in the arguments they’re based on.

At least that’s a start.

CHAPTER 5

Is There Such a
Thing as the
“Metabolic
Advantage” of
Low-Carb Diets?

H
ere’s a riddle for you: Two groups of people go on a weightloss program. Group one eats high-carb, low-fat. Group two eats low-carb. They eat the exact same number of calories. Who loses more weight?

If you guessed the low-carb group, you’d be right most of the time. But if it’s true, as so many say, that “a calorie is a calorie,” then two groups eating the same amount of food should lose the same amount of weight. If it’s all about the calories, everyone should come out even. Right?

Maybe not. Ever since the publication of the first commercial low-carb diet in 1862 (William Banting’s
Letter on Corpulence
), people have been noticing that the
kind
of food they eat—not just the amount—seems to make a profound difference in terms of whether or not they gain or lose weight.

Probably no statement so energized and polarized the weight-loss community than this early statement by Robert Atkins, MD: “
You can lose more weight and more fat, calorie-for-calorie, on the Atkins diet than on any other diet you’ve ever tried
.” Hyperbole? Maybe a little. But it made—still makes—conventional dietitians crazy, and here’s why: Atkins was saying that weight loss is not just a matter of how
many
calories you consumed—it’s also influenced by what
kind
of calories you ate.

That’s nutritional heresy. Still is.

So why does the simple statement “the kind of calories matters” continue to meet with a passionate resistance that borders on the religious?

Let’s go to the videotape.

For years, many scientists have argued that losing weight is all about the calories. According to them, a calorie is a calorie, and to argue otherwise is to violate the first law of thermodynamics, which can be summed up as follows: a calorie is a calorie. If you take in more calories than you burn up, guess where it winds up? Exactly. On the storage sites in your body: namely, the stomach, hips, thighs, and butt. If, on the other hand, you “burn up” more calories than you take in, the excess energy will come out of those very same stores.

I call that the “checkbook” theory of the human body, one that treats calories exactly like money. When you put more money in your checking account than you spend, you have an
excess
(exactly what you
want
with money, exactly what you
don’t
want with food). When you
spend
more than you
take in
, you have a deficit (exactly what you
don’t
want with money, but what you want
very badly
when you’re trying to lose weight).

The problem is, the human body doesn’t really behave like a checking account. It behaves more like a chemistry set. What you put in mixes and bubbles and interacts and creates different results depending not
just
on the amount you put in, but also the
ingredients.

“The metabolic advantage” is simply the theory that food has a hormonal effect on the body, and that certain foods are more likely to trigger hormonal and enzymatic responses that lead to fat gain than others. Certain kinds of foods simply take more energy to deal with than others, and “waste” a bunch of calories in the process.

“There are numerous examples of low-carbohydrate diets being more effective than low-fat diets with the same number of calories,” says Dr. Richard D. Feinman, PhD, professor of biochemistry at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center. “Everyone with good sense believes there’s a metabolic advantage,” adds my friend Mike Eades, MD.

The question—and the debate—is on how
much
of an advantage. And therein lies the rub.

In the beginning of the low-carb “movement,” people were so excited to learn that calories weren’t the whole picture that they went overboard. Like many of the patients Atkins originally treated, they knew from personal experience that even on very low-calorie (usually low-fat) diets, they had a hell of a time losing weight. They were delighted to learn that it wasn’t all about calories. They felt vindicated. And—perhaps understandably—they went a little overboard in the message they took away from the whole brouhaha. From “calories aren’t the whole picture” they went to “calories don’t count at all.”

This was a big mistake.

The truth lies somewhere in between. Calories are
not
the whole picture, but they are still a major player in the weight-loss game.

One of the best studies I know of to demonstrate this is an ingenious one done by Penelope Greene at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2003. Here’s what she did.

Dr. Greene studied three groups of dieters. The first group went on a 1,500-calorie-per-day low-fat diet (1,800 for men). The second group went on an 1,800-calorie low-carb diet (2,100 calories for men). If all calories are created equal, the second group—which consumed more calories—should have weighed a bit more at the end of the study than the first group.

They didn’t. Though both groups lost weight, the low-carb (highercalorie) group actually lost a little more, despite the fact that over the 12-week study they ate an average of 25,000 calories
more
than the lowfat group.

But, you say, what about the third group?

Glad you asked, because here is where it gets interesting. Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that the two groups discussed above actually differed in
two
variables, not just one. They ate different amounts of calories (1,500–1,800 for group one, 1,800–2,100 for group two), but they
also
ate different
food
—low-fat for group one, low-carb for group two.

What would happen, Dr. Greene wondered, if there was a third group that ate the
same type
of food as group two (low-carb) but the same number of calories as group one (1,500–1,800)?

And that, indeed, was the third group in the study. Low-calorie
and
low-carb.

That group lost the most weight of all.

Moral of the story: calories
do
count—but they’re not the whole story. Low-carb diets may have a metabolic advantage, but it’s not unlimited. In fact, it’s probably pretty small (200–400 calories, suggests Mike Eades). You can’t eat 12,000 calories a day of fat and protein and think you’re going to lose weight just because you’re on a low-carb diet. You still need to pay attention to calories. But you do have a bit—and I do mean a
bit
—of wiggle room on low-carb.

Mike Eades actually has a terrific analogy to explain the whole metabolic advantage thing. He points out that lots of people like to use the car as an analogy for the human body—put in the gas and you can predict the mileage. Which is true, all things being equal. But to really be a fair analogy to what happens with fuel in the human body, you have to include one important missing piece of the pie: the driver.

Here’s Dr. Eades talking about a personal driving experience and using it as a splendid analogy for the metabolic advantage:

A few years back MD (Dr. Mary Dan Eades) and I were driving through the Ozarks in southwest Missouri where I grew up. We were riding in an SUV, and as we motored along, I suddenly noticed that the gas gauge was banging on empty. Then it dawned on me that it was a Sunday, and it was likely that in rural America there weren’t going to be a lot of service stations opened. Especially out where we were. And I didn’t even know exactly where we were relative to any towns because I hadn’t been paying close attention. I went into gas conserve mode. As we approached hills, I timed my speed so that we would barely make it to the top, then be able to coast down and halfway up the next hill before I had to hit the gas pedal. I let my coast speed build up to way more than I felt comfortable with given the winding roads and blind curves, all the while trying to ignore MD’s sharp intakes of breath, her legs and feet pushed against the floorboard braced for collision, and her death grip on the handhold. Even though I was driving a gas-guzzling SUV, I’ll bet I milked 40 miles to the gallon out of that sucker until we finally found an open service station, and the day was saved. Once we were filled up, and I was back at the wheel driving normally, we probably dropped back down to the 18 mpg range.