Living Low Carb (7 page)

There are three kinds of foods—fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. All of these provide calories.
But the carbohydrates provide calories and nothing else.
They have none of the essential elements to build up or to repair the tissues of the body.
A man given carbohydrates alone, however liberally, would starve to death on calories.
The body must have proteins and animal fats
. It has no need for carbohydrates,
and, given the two essential foodstuffs, it can get all the calories it needs from them.

You heard it here first, folks. And you’ll be hearing it again throughout this book:
the body has no physiological need for carbohydrates.
You cannot live without protein. You cannot live without fat. But you can survive perfectly well without carbohydrates. No one is saying you
ought
to, or that you
have
to—just that you
can.
This is simple, basic human biochemistry. There is no “minimum daily requirement” for carbohydrates—which raises the question worth keeping in the back of your mind as you read through the rest of this book: why would the dietary establishment—including the American Dietetic Association—continue to insist that the only healthful diet consists of one in which the
majority
of the calories come from the
one macronutrient for which we have no physiological need?

But I digress.

Sentiments similar to those of Ogilvie were echoed in the Mackarness book’s introduction, written by Dr. Franklin Bicknell:

The cure of obesity… can be, of course, achieved by simple starvation, but as Dr. Mackarness explains, this is both an illogical and an injurious treatment, while [a treatment] based on eating as much of everything one likes except starches and sugars and foods rich in these, is both logical and actively good for one’s health, quite apart from the effect on one’s weight.
The sugars and starches of our diet form the least valuable part and contribute nothing which cannot better be gained from fat and protein foods like meat and fish, eggs and cheese, supplemented by green vegetables and some fruit.
Such a diet provides an abundance… of vitamins, trace elements, and essential amino acids—an abundance of all those subtle, yet essential, nutrients which are often lacking in diets based largely on the fat-forming carbohydrates.

A little context: ever since 1829, when William Wadd, Surgeon-Extraordinary to the Prince Regent, proclaimed that the cause of obesity was “an over-indulgence at the table” (i.e., eating too darn much!), the conventional wisdom was that fat people are fat because they eat too much food. Period. This view, that only the quantity and not the quality of food that people eat makes a difference, had a stranglehold on mainstream medicine—a stranglehold that continued through the twentieth century with the cooperation of the sycophantic American Dietetic Association and is only now, in the twenty-first century, beginning to loosen.

To give you a sense of the spirit of the era, the medical correspondent of
The London Times,
on March 11, 1957, wrote at the time of Mackarness’s book: “It is no use saying as so many women do: ‘But I eat practically nothing.’ The only answer to this is: ‘No matter how little
you imagine
you eat,
if you wish to lose weight you must eat less.
’” (Emphasis mine.)

Mackarness comes out swinging, right in his author’s introduction, leaving no doubt what “side” of the quality-versus-quantity argument he’s on: “Starch and sugar are the causes of obesity. Particularly modern refined and processed starches and sugars, the ever ready, highly publicized carbohydrate foods of twentieth-century urban man.” He puts forth the interesting argument—foreshadowing much of what we hear today in the discussions of metabolic type—that there are two kinds of people, whom he characterizes as Mr. Constant-Weight and Mr. Fatten-Easily.

According to Mackarness, if you give both types the same exercise and feed them the same food, one will stay the same weight while the other will gain. When Mr. (or Ms.) Constant-Weight—people we hate who seem to be able to eat anything and not gain an ounce—take in too much carbohydrate, the extra food simply causes a revving-up in their metabolism that burns the extra calories consumed, and they stay the same weight. Nothing is left over for laying down fat. “But,” Mackarness writes, “when Mr. Fatten-Easily eats too much bread, cake, and potatoes, the picture is entirely different: his metabolic rate does not increase. Why does he fail to burn up the excess? The answer is the real reason for his obesity: Because he has a defective capacity for dealing with carbohydrates.”

Mackarness was suggesting a metabolic disorder, and he was on to something. He was really the first diet-book author to postulate some sort of metabolic defect in the way some people process food (especially carbohydrates) that causes them to send much of what they eat to their fat stores. Dr. Alfred Pennington (of the DuPont-execs study) had come to the same conclusion. Summing up a 1953 paper called “Obesity: Overnutrition or Disease of Metabolism?” published in the
American Journal of Digestive Diseases,
Pennington wrote: “Analysis of the results … appear[s] to necessitate an explanation of obesity on the basis of some intrinsic metabolic defect.”

Writing for the general public, Mackarness had a simpler way of putting it. He came up with a great analogy: the steam engine.

The orthodox view is that a fat man’s engine is stoked by a robot fireman, who swings his shovel at the same pace whether fat, protein, or carbohydrate is in the tender. This is true for Mr. Constant-Weight, but as he does not get fat anyway, it is only of academic interest to us. It is certainly not true for Mr. Fatten-Easily, with whom we are concerned. Mr. Constant-Weight has a robot stoker in his engine. The more he eats—of whatever food—the harder his stoker works until any excess is consumed, so he never gets fat. Recent research has shown that Mr. Fatten-Easily’s stoker is profoundly influenced by the kind of fuel he has to shovel. On fat fuel he shovels fast. On protein slightly less fast
but on carbohydrate he becomes tired, scarcely moving his shovel at all.
His fire then burns low and his engine gets fat from its inability to use the carbohydrate which is still being loaded into the tender.
Mr. Fatten-Easily’s stoker suffers from an inability to deal with carbohydrate.

At the back of his book, Mackarness lists foods that can be eaten without reservation, which are meat, poultry, game, fish and other seafood, dairy products, fats and oils, most vegetables, and some fruits; foods that can be eaten in moderation with some caution, including nuts and higher-carb vegetables and fruits; and foods that could be eaten once a day, such as beans, beets, corn, potatoes, and bananas. While some low-carb theorists of today might quibble with the inclusion of dairy, what’s more interesting is the Mackarness list of “never eat” foods. Are you ready? Don’t shoot the messenger.

•  breakfast cereals

•  bread and rolls

•  biscuits and crackers

•  macaroni products, noodles, spaghetti, and other pastas

•  rice

•  jellies, jams, and preserves

•  ice cream, cakes, pies, and candy

•  sauces and gravies thickened with flour or cornstarch

•  beer

•  sweet wines and liqueurs

•  sodas (and all “sweetened fizzy drinks”)

•  sugar

The Mackarness diet suggests that carbs be kept as low as possible—no more than 60 grams a day for most people (and in some cases 50 grams or fewer a day). This figure is in the ballpark of the recommendations of many low-carb diet books of today. (
Life Without Bread
¹⁵
recommends a maximum of 72 grams a day, and the ongoing weight loss and maintenance programs of the Atkins diet and Protein Power are in the Mackarness range, as is the beginning program for overweight sedentary people adhering to the Schwarzbein Principle. It is also practically identical to the generic program for beginners that I recommend in
chapter 12
.)

We should not leave Mackarness without mentioning that he was one of the first to note the emotional and psychological component of overeating. Here’s what he said, in words that will undoubtedly ring true for thousands of people today.

So far, then, two big factors in the production of obesity have emerged.

A
defect in dealing with carbohydrates
which makes a person fatten easily on an ordinary mixed diet; Overeating, especially of sugars and starches as a result of
loneliness, fear or emotional dissatisfaction.

When the two factors are present, weight is gained very rapidly.

So anyone who finds himself tempted to overeat for emotional reasons and who shows a tendency to get fat, should be careful to choose low-carbohydrate foods.
¹⁶

Overeaters Anonymous

Mackarness was not the only one to notice the emotional component of overeating. Interestingly, on the other side of the ocean, in 1959—less than a year after the publication of Mackarness’s book and 24 years after the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous—two women in Los Angeles began the fellowship now known as Overeaters Anonymous. A spiritual program to address compulsive overeating, it was based on the same 12-step principles as its predecessor, but with one significant difference. While alcoholics and drug addicts could conceivably abstain from their drug of choice, compulsive overeaters could not. They had to eat to survive.

This presented an entirely different set of issues, since for overeaters, complete “abstinence” from their “drug” (food) was not possible. Many of the original participants in OA attended because they were terribly overweight, but most understood that there was a compulsive emotional component to their overeating that could not be addressed by simple diets or by the prescription drug of the day, dextroamphetamine, sold under the brand name Dexedrine. What’s especially interesting for our purposes is a particular sub-group of OA that developed in Los Angeles in the early sixties. This group had noticed that, even though many people lost weight in Overeaters Anonymous, many were nibbling their way back to obesity and that certain foods seemed to feed the compulsion to eat more than others.

Can you guess what the culprits were?

Yup.

By 1963, there was a very vocal minority of OA members who were convinced that carbohydrates sabotaged any weight-loss plan because they produced cravings and addictive eating behavior. The OA contingent called them “binge foods.” One of the founders of this faction—which later came to be known as the Grey Sheet Group—wrote “I wonder if we have an
allergy of the body
too. Are we going to help the Doctors understand obesity just as the alcoholic had to educate the medical profession?”
¹⁷

From that time on—although it is little-known—there has always been a faction of OA that believes strongly that “abstaining” from carbohydrates (with a very low-carbohydrate diet) is a necessary component of emotional sobriety when it comes to food, just as it is a necessary strategy for weight loss in carbohydrate-sensitive individuals. Could this be another case of the patient profoundly understanding the disease far in advance of the medical professionals?

Calories, Carbs, or Just Plain Fat? The Roaring ’60s

In the 1960s, two books came out in favor of the low-carb approach, both of which got a lot of attention. One of them deserved it; the other did not. The one that did was a thoughtful, if somewhat misguided, treatise called
Calories Don’t Count
by a New York doctor named Herman Taller. Taller had been a fat man all his life, at one time almost 100 pounds over his ideal weight. He described himself as one of those who “only had to look at a platter of spaghetti to gain [weight].” He struggled with every version of the low-calorie diet available with virtually no results. A physician friend of his was sure that Taller had to be lying about how much he was eating, so Taller hatched a plan. Reading his experience will no doubt produce quite a number of nodding, sympathetic heads.

I proposed an interesting vacation test [to the physician who was certain I was cheating]. We would go away together for ten days, stay in each other’s company continually, eat and drink the same things, and check the results. He accepted, and we went off to a resort. I followed what was then the accepted method of weight control: a low-calorie diet. I concentrated on salads, which I now know was a mistake, ate fat sparingly, another mistake, and, since this was a vacation, drank a cocktail each night before dinner. My physician friend, who was slim, did the same. At the end of the vacation, he had lost a pound or two and I had gained nine pounds. “I don’t understand it” he said as we drove back to New York. Neither did I.
¹⁸

Taller didn’t reject the calorie theory at all. On the contrary, he wrote, “No one, least of all myself, would dispute the concept that led to the calorie fad. Any person will lose weight when he burns up more energy than he eats. This is a simple chemical law. Why, then, didn’t a low-calorie diet work? Why did people lose weight on high-calorie, high-fat diets?” Taller postulated that all calories are not the same and that carbohydrates present a different problem to the body,
at least for some people.
He rightly pointed out that low-fat diets were by nature high in carbohydrates, thus stimulating insulin and creating more fat, particularly in people who were sensitive to carbohydrates. (It is noteworthy that, almost four decades later, Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard’s prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center, said, “For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive. They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.”) Taller completely agreed that the underlying reason people become fat is an imbalance between calories taken in and calories burned. But he suggested that for some people there is a disturbance in the metabolism, with three results, none of them good: (1) the body
forms
fat at a rate that is faster than normal; (2) the body
stores
fat at a rate that is faster than normal; and (3) the body
disposes of
stored fat at a rate that is
slower
than normal. Taller summed up: “The crux of the matter is not how many calories [we] take in, but what [our bodies do] with those calories.”
¹⁹