Living Low Carb (2 page)

While Jonny was intrigued, he still remained skeptical. Jonny was also trained as an academic with a background in psychology and statistics, which guaranteed that any references I gave him on lower-carbohydrate diets (there wasn’t much) as well as the science behind them (of which there was a lot) would be read and analyzed to the
n
th degree. As a result, he has not only become exceptionally adept on the nutritional science behind lower-carbohydrate diets, but he has also become my friend.

It’s been many years since that first meeting with Jonny. The science dealing with the molecular biology of obesity has become more complex, but the basic concept remains: if you lower the carbohydrate content of the diet, you get better weight loss and better health. The trick is doing it for a lifetime.

I have always considered Jonny to be one of the better science writers I have ever met. That’s why this book is so important for the general public. He lays out the history of lower-carbohydrate diets, explaining in clear and concise language the underlying hormonal principles of such diets, and addresses the common misunderstandings of such diets, all in an entertaining and lively style.

As Jonny correctly points out, there is no one correct diet for everyone, since we are all genetically different. However, the hormonal principles are unvarying for choosing an appropriate diet for your genetics. Once you understand the hormonal rules that govern lower-carbohydrate diets, you are in a position to become the master of your future. This book should be considered the starting point of that journey.

—Barry Sears, PhD
Author of
The Zone
March 2009

Acknowledgments

Two sets of thanks here.

First … to my personal “brain trust” who gave so generously of their time. If this book is good, it’s largely because of their stunning knowledge base.

Stacey J Bell, PhD, Suzanne Bennett, DC, C. Leigh Broadhurst, PhD, Colette Heimowitz, MSc, Mary Enig, PhD, Joseph Evans, PhD, Oz Garcia, PhD, John Hernandez, MD, Malcolm Kendrick, MD, Ann Louise Gittleman, PhD, CNS, Mark Houston, MD, MS, Susan Lark, MD, David Leonardi, MD, Shari Lieberman, PhD, CNS, Linda Lizotte, RD, Lyle McDonald, Joe Mercola, DO, Liz Neporent, MS, Harry Preuss, MD, Uffe Rasvnskov, MD, PhD, Donald S Robertson, MD, MSc, Ron Rosedale, MD, Alan Schwartz, MD, Diana Schwarzbein, MD, Barry Sears, PhD, Stephen Sinatra, MD, Allan Spreen, MD, Anton Steiner, MD, Jeff S Volek, PhD, RD

Very Special Thanks:

•  To Dr. Anton Steiner for sharing his wealth of knowledge about the neurochemistry of pharmaceuticals and his invaluable help with the section on weight loss medications

•  To my dear friend Dr. Dave Leonardi, who put up with my endless medical questions at all hours of the day and night and served as my personal Merck Manual of Diabetes

•  To the brilliant Dr. C. Leigh Broadhurst, a walking encylopedia of biochemistry and nutrition, who generously read and tweaked entire sections

•  To Dr. Mary Enig, for making sure I knew my fats

•  To Dr. Mary Vernon, a great pioneer and generous dispenser of knowledge and compassion who is a living example of “speaking truth to power”

•  To Dr. Jay Wortman, whose terrific work served as the basis for the “Big Fat Diet” chapter and who generously contributed to this book

•  To Dr. Jeff Volek, who is always ready with an answer and response to even the most inane questions, and whose meticulous research contributes so much to all of us concerned with diet and health

•  To Dr. Eric Westman, a great researcher and wonderful human being

•  To Dr. Eric Kossoff, who was kind enough to detail his pioneering work in using the ketogenic diet with children and to patiently answer all my questions

•  To Dr. Larry McCleary, my “go-to” neurosurgeon whose generosity and availability is matched only by his stunning intellect and encyclopedic knowledge

•  To Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, who continue to dazzle me with their brilliance as well as their generosity and patience and whom I am blessed to say I can always count on

And a really special “general principles” thanks to Robert Crayhon, MS and Jeffrey Bland, PhD, who have spent their professional lives making a difference by educating physicians, nutritionists, chiropractors and other health practitioners, challenging their boundaries and expanding their horizons.

They certainly did mine.

And second… to my family—chosen and otherwise—the special people in my life without whom I might have still written books, but without whom I would not be who I am:

Aleta St. James, A. Waxman, Allegra Bowden, Anja Christy, Ann Knight, Cadence Bowden, Cassandra Creech, Christopher Duncan, Danny Troob, Elliott Bowden, Emily Christy Bowden, Glen Depke, Jeanine Tesori, Jeffrey Bowden, Kelly Wixted, Kimberly Wright, Lauree Dash, Lee Knapp, Liz Neporent, Lynn Pentz, Max Creech-Bowden, Molly Fox, Nancy Fiedler, Oliver and Jennifer, Oz Garcia, Pace Bowden, Peter Breger, Randy Graff, Richard Lewis, Scott Ellis, Sky London, Susan Wood Duncan, Tigerlily Creech-Bowden, Vivienne Bowden, Woodstock Bowden

As always, to Howard, Robin, Fred, Gary and Artie for putting a smile on my face every day for nearly fourteen years.

To Werner Erhard—wherever you are, I love you and can never begin to repay you for what you’ve contributed to my life.

To the writers who taught me everything I know about writing, especially William Goldman (who could make the tax code interesting), and Robert Sapolsky, the greatest living science writer in America.

And a warm thanks to my first agent, Linda Konner, who put me on the map.

And to my current (and future) agent, Colleen O’Shea, who keeps me there.

And to the first editor of this book, Susan Lauzau, who had the patience to allow me to rant and rave about every comma change, most of which she was right about anyway And to the editor of the new expanded edition, Kate Zimmermann—ditto!

And especially to Michael Fragnito, who had the vision to imagine this book, the editorial skills to shape it, and an unfettered belief in me that allowed me to do the best work I’ve ever done

And to the superstar of publicists, who does more on an off-day than most people do on their best, Heidi Krupp of Krupp Kommunications, and her entire staff, especially Chris Capra

Also to the support team at Barnes and Noble, especially Lindsay Herman And to my mother, Vivienne Simon Bowden.

And… a very special thanks to Dr. Ann Knight … who knows why.

Introduction

Sometimes the universe does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.

As I was putting the finishing touches on the new revised edition of
Living Low Carb
, the following e-mail arrived in my inbox. As I read it, I realized that there was no better way to write an intro to this new edition than to reprint the letter along with my answer.

Here’s the letter:

Dear Jonny,

I recently purchased Living the Low Carb Life (2005) and am a bit confused.

Have you moved away or revised your thinking about low carbs since writing it? There doesn’t seem to be a huge emphasis on low-carbs on your Web site (
http://www.jonnybowden.com
) and some of the recipes in your subsequent books seem to be “at variance” with the “low-carb” theory.

Most of the info in your book supports low-carb eating, but, unless I’m misreading it, some of your subsequent writing seems to contradict that. Your 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth has plenty of fruits and even a few grains, and your Healthiest Meals on Earth book contains recipes that have foods like oats and berries in them. What’s the poor consumer to make of all this—especially when something as important as health is at stake?

Sincerely,
Doug

Those are great questions. And I can think of no better way to introduce the third edition of this book than to answer them.

So here goes.

I have not moved away from my thinking about low-carb since writing the original book in 2004, but I
have
broadened my perspective.

I think one of the biggest problems with the “low-carb movement” was that it led people to treat “low-carb” as something of a religion. Folks became more focused on carb content and less focused on the importance of good food. And many people forgot about the overarching, important message of controlled-carb eating—controlling blood sugar and eating whole foods—and instead replaced that message with a simple (and inaccurate) sound bite:
“carbs are bad.”

That’s not the valuable message of controlled-carb eating.

For one thing, it led to the increasingly common idea among some members of the low-carb community that
“As long as it has no carbs, I can eat it”
and to an explosion of junk-food products that had the carbs engineered out of them, but were still junk food nonetheless (echoes of the low-fat movement of the ’80s—remember Snackwell cookies?). It also led to the mistaken notion that as long as your carb intake was low, you would always lose weight and be healthy.

I think a more “twenty-first century” controlled-carb approach requires more nuance. And I think an enlightened low-carb philosophy—which is what I hope this book presents—needs to create, as they say in politics, “a bigger tent.”

Let me explain.

In America, we have long had a huge debate about guns. Many people like me have no particular personal interest in—or use for—guns; many of us have never handled a gun in our lives; and many of us will probably live out our lives without ever going hunting. However, that being said, many Americans do
not
feel that way. And they are not bad people. For those of us who feel as I do to attack gun owners as if they were the devil’s spawn not only alienates them and creates an “us versus them” mentality, but also accomplishes absolutely nothing. So, although I personally don’t like guns, I recognize that not all gun owners are mass murderers, that not all hunters are “bad people,” and that many people feel differently about their guns. Far better, it seems to me, to find the things we—non-gun owners and gun owners alike—can agree on.

So I would prefer to unite with my gun-owning friends around the principle of making sure guns are used responsibly, that they don’t fall into the hands of psychopaths and disturbed people, and that we get rid of the worst of them—like assault weapons—for which there is no good need anywhere in civilized society. That seems to me to be a more responsible position that people across a spectrum of beliefs and feelings about guns can get behind.

In the same way, I think it’s foolhardy to assume that no one should ever eat carbs and that they’re across-the-board “bad.” Rather, I think that carbs should be eaten responsibly. I think it’s good that we arm ourselves with the knowledge of what they can do to our blood sugar and weight and their potential for damage—particularly in the “wrong hands” (e.g., those who are very insulin-resistant or carb-sensitive). And I think we should fight more to rid our diet of the worst of them—high-fructose corn syrup, processed cereals, and the like—rather than to try to “eliminate” all of them.

I’ve also come to feel that the
quality
of our food is just as important as which category of macronutrient it falls into. A high-protein, high-fat diet in which all the protein comes from bologna and all the fat comes from trans-fats and fried foods is far more damaging than a high-carb diet in which all the carbs come from vegetables. That quality distinction tends to get lost in the arguments about “carbs” versus “protein.” I believe that a better—and far more useful—distinction would be between “whole food” and “junk food,” regardless of which side of the macronutrient diet distribution it falls on.

When I wrote my later books,
The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth
and
The Healthiest Meals on Earth,
there wasn’t a conscious attempt to eliminate carbs or to do exclusively low-carb recipes, but there
was
a conscious attempt to eliminate junk and sugar (except in a couple of cases where a small amount of sweetener was absolutely essential to the recipe). And there was a definite attempt to put all this in
context,
the context being this:
we should all strive for a diet high in healthful whole foods with a minimum of processing, a maximum of nutrients, and an elimination of trans-fats.

As it happens, such a diet mimics that of our Paleolithic ancestors and is naturally low in carbs, or at least significantly
lower
than the average Western diet. And that’s the diet I support wholeheartedly—one that stresses foods from what I call the Jonny Bowden Four Food Groups—foods you could have
hunted
,
fished
,
gathered
, or
plucked
.

As I point out in this edition, it’s possible to achieve this kind of wholefood diet with a pretty wide range of carb intake. For some people, the “induction” phase of Atkins—which is pretty rigorous—is the way to go, but others can easily consume five or more times that amount of carbohydrates and still be robustly healthy depending on many factors (activity level, metabolism, insulin sensitivity, weight issues, sex, age, etc.). Even our hunter-gatherer forefathers managed quite nicely on an assortment of diets that ranged from very low-carb to moderately high-carb. What they did
not
manage on were diets that were high in sugar.

So yes, my emphasis has shifted from “don’t eat carbs” to a more inclusionary, non-partisan philosophy: “don’t eat junk.” Sadly, those statements are often the same thing—but
not
always.

I still believe that the cornerstones of a healthful diet remain quality protein; a mix of fats; fiber (from vegetables and nuts); seeds; berries; and low-sugar fruit—all wrapped together in a package of
modest calories
(this last component is another critical element of a healthful diet that tended to get lost in all the shouting over “low-carb” versus “high-carb”). I still believe that grains are optional in the diet, and that some grains—like oats—are better than others. And I believe—as I always have—that people are metabolically and hormonally and biologically unique and respond differently to different eating strategies.