Living Low Carb (43 page)

But this new lifestyle came with a price. Early farmers were shorter in stature than their forebears had been. Examination of their bones and teeth shows more infectious diseases and shorter lifespans. Egyptian mummies frequently reveal obese bodies. There were more cases of osteoporosis, rickets, and vitamin- and mineral-deficiency diseases, in large measure because of cereal-based diets (whole grains and legumes contain “antinutrients,” pyridoxine glucosides and phytates, that respectively block absorption of B vitamins in the intestines and chemically bind iron, zinc, copper, and calcium and block their absorption). And the skulls of those living on modern foods revealed teeth filled with cavities and jaws that were misshapen and too small for the teeth (Dr. Weston Price’s seminal 1939 book,
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration
, contains many pictures that dramatically illustrate this phenomenon).

Then came fermentation and salting. Grains were fed to livestock, making them fatter but also changing the quality of their meat and their fat. (Interesting, isn’t it, that grains are the food of choice for fattening livestock and yet are still recommended by the dietary establishment as the foundation food of a weight-loss program!) Meat was preserved by pickling, salting, and smoking. Two hundred years ago, things got even worse. We now had ways to refine sugar and flour and to can foods, almost always with the addition or creation of trans-fats, sugar, refined oils high in omega-6’s, and high-fructose corn syrup, not to mention additives, preservatives, emulsifiers, and other toxins.

As Cordain says, imagine Paleo man with a Twinkie or a pizza. He wouldn’t even recognize them as food.

Cordain is one of the few writers to talk about something called the acid–base balance, a very hot subject in nutrition these days. Briefly, it goes like this: everything reports to the kidneys as either an acid or an alkaline (base). When there is too much acid, the body needs to neutralize it with alkaline substances like calcium. Meats are one of the top five acid-producing foods; but the other four—grains, legumes, cheese, and salt—were rarely or never eaten by our Paleo ancestors, who buffered the acid load of their meat with plenty of fruits and vegetables. The main “buffering” compound in the body is calcium, and the main storehouse for calcium is the bones; this is how high-protein diets got their (false) reputation for causing bone loss. Cordain correctly points out that loss of calcium does not happen when there are plenty of fruits and vegetables in the diet, and especially when other acid-producing foods (like cereal grains and dairy) are absent.

The Paleo Diet as a Lifestyle: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere

The straightforward simplicity of the Paleo Diet—all you want of
these
foods, none at all of
those
—makes it pretty easy to follow and a good choice for those who are put off by counting grams, calories, and carbohydrates, figuring out protein allowances, or computing food blocks. But that same lack of rigidity makes it a poor choice for those who need more structure. And although it restricts nearly all of the usual problem foods for carbohydrate addicts, the unlimited fruit could easily be a problem for those who are insulin-resistant. In addition, since it is not primarily a weight-loss diet, it may be frustrating for those whose main focus for the immediate future is on losing fat.

JONNY’S LOWDOWN
  
½

The Paleo Diet is a frustrating program to rate. On one hand, you have to give tremendous credit to a no-grain diet that eliminates sugar, dairy, and transfats and recommends tons of vegetables. How bad can that be? Most people—especially those who eat the typical American diet—are going to reap such enormous benefits from this program that I want to give it five stars just for that alone.

On the other hand, there are some major problems. For one thing, Cordain completely buys into the cholesterol–heart disease hypothesis; I believe that this hypothesis, in its current form, is less than a decade away from being dumped on the pile of scientific flotsam and jetsam. He also accepts the dogma that all saturated fats are bad, largely because they raise cholesterol (some do; many don’t; and ultimately it may not matter much). Cordain puts eggs on the “avoid” list for their cholesterol content (something we now know is completely irrelevant, since dietary cholesterol has virtually no impact on serum cholesterol) and warns against such natural traditional fats as butter and cream, which he puts in the same category as such trans-fat nightmares as nonfat dairy creamer and frozen yogurt. He recommends canola oil (I don’t agree; see pages 63 and 64). He puts sweet potatoes—a “good” starch by almost anyone’s standards—in the same class as french fries and tapioca pudding. He makes the somewhat problematic statement that “fruit won’t make you fat on this diet even in unlimited amounts.” And he completely misrepresents other low-carb diets, saying that they call for complete restriction of all carbohydrates to “between 30 and 100 grams a day,” which, though basically true, does not mean—as Cordain says it does—that “fruits and vegetables are largely off-limits.” In fact, this statement is not only demonstrably false but inconsistent; 100 grams of usable carbs a day buys you an awful lot of broccoli!

That said, he’s a good guy and a sincere and responsible scholar, and his overall recommendations will propel a person eating the average American diet light-years ahead in his quest for good health. Done with care, Cordain’s diet may also make you lose weight.

20. P
ROTEIN
P
OWER

M
ICHAEL
R. E
ADES
, MD
AND
M
ARY
D
AN
E
ADES
, MD

WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL

A three-phase plan in which you:

•  Eat no less than a minimum calculated amount of protein per day (you are free to eat more but not less)

•  Eat no more than a maximum amount of carbohydrates per day (you are free to eat less but not more)

The maximum amount of carbohydrates depends on which phase of the diet you are in. Phase one is intervention and allows up to 30 grams of carbohydrate a day; phase two is transition and allows up to 55 grams; phase three is the maintenance phase, and the amount of carbs will vary according to the individual.

About Protein Power

In the Eades plan, you first determine your protein needs through an easy-to-follow series of steps:

1.  Measure your wrist, then your waist.

2.  Refer to a chart to estimate your body fat from these measurements.

3.  Now you calculate your total number of fat pounds. For example, if you’re 200 pounds with 20% body fat, you would have 40 fat pounds.

4.  Subtract the number of fat pounds from your total weight to get the number of lean body-weight pounds (muscle, bone, and the like). Using the above example, you would subtract 40 pounds from 200 and wind up with a lean body weight of 160 pounds.

5.  Multiply your lean body weight by an “activity factor” to get your minimum daily protein needs (in grams). The activity factor ranges from 0.5 for someone who is completely sedentary to 0.9 for a competitive athlete. For example, if the 200-pound guy with 40 fat pounds and 160 lean pounds were sedentary, he’d multiply 160 by 0.5 for a total of 80 grams of protein per day minimum.

Knowing your lean body weight also allows you to calculate a realistic weight goal, which is done using the worksheets and very easy formulas.

Note: In
The Protein Power Lifeplan
, the authors have simplified the process even more. You don’t even have to take your wrist or waist measurements, compute your lean body mass, or multiply by an activity factor. There’s a simple table in which you look for your height and weight, and the table tells you immediately what your minimum protein requirement is. It couldn’t be easier. It’s not as refined and accurate as the method in the original
Protein Power
, but it will give you a decent estimate of your minimum requirement and is good for people who just don’t want to do the calculations. (My personal opinion: the calculations are easy.)

Once you know your minimum daily protein needs, you simply decide what phase of the diet you’re going to be on. Phase one, intervention, is for those who have a lot of fat to lose and/or who want to correct a health problem. In phase one, you take in 30 grams or less of carbohydrate a day (in
The Protein Power Lifeplan
, this number is amended to 40) plus, of course,
at least
your minimum protein requirement. Phase two is the one to go with if you want to lose a little fat, recompose your body (i.e., change the ratio of fat to muscle or, as people often say, “tone up”), or improve your general health. In phase two, the maximum carb allowance is upped to 55 grams a day, in addition, of course, to the protein allowance determined above. You can eat
more
than your minimum protein requirement but not less, and you can eat
less
than your maximum carb allotment but not more. The rest of the diet comes from fat.

Nearly everyone will fall into one of four categories of minimum protein requirement—less than 60 grams a day, between 60 and 80 grams a day, between 80 and 100 grams a day, or between 100 and 120 grams a day. You find the category you belong to and then refer to the corresponding chart. The chart will tell you exactly what protein foods in what amounts you can have
per meal and snack
. For example, if you’re in the 80-to-100-gram category, you should be getting about 34 grams of protein per meal. The chart shows you exactly how to make any combination you can think of from meat, fish, poultry, eggs, hard cheeses, soft cheeses, curd cheeses, or tofu to get the right amount of protein per meal.

Like nearly all the diet or lifestyle plans discussed in this book, Protein Power is all about controlling and balancing insulin. The Eadeses have a clever way of determining the actual insulin-raising (or active) carbohydrate content of foods. Even though fiber is not metabolically active, it’s technically counted as a carbohydrate on food labels and the like. But it doesn’t raise insulin at all, since it’s not even digested. So the Eadeses have come up with a formula in which you subtract the fiber from the total carb content of a food to get what they call the “effective carbohydrate content,” or ECC.

That’s the only number you have to pay attention to when counting your carbohydrate grams. For example, 1 cup of fresh raspberries has 14 grams of carbohydrate but 6 grams of fiber, so you’d subtract the 6 grams of fiber from the 14 grams of total carbohydrate to get a mere 8 grams of ECC, and only those 8 grams would count toward your carbohydrate allowance for the day. (This is now standard operating procedure for most low-carb diets, some of which call the number “effective carbs,” some “net carbs.”)

The book has charts of the ECC for a huge number of foods, so you don’t have to figure them out for yourself. You use these charts to put together your daily carbohydrate allowance (or, if a food is not listed in the chart, you can easily compute it yourself from the label’s listing of total carbs and total fiber). Counting only effective carbs, you could easily have 1 cup of broccoli, 1 cup of cabbage, 3 celery ribs, 1 cup of green beans, 1 cup of lettuce, ½ cup of mushrooms, ½ cup of zucchini, 1 cup of spinach, and 1 cup of raspberries in one day on phase one. Even though the total carb content of these foods is about 44 grams, 16 of them are fiber; subtracting the 16 from the 44 (all done for you in the charts) leaves you with only 28 grams of usable (effective) carbohydrate, well under the cutoff for phase one and not even close to the cutoff for phase two.