Living Low Carb (9 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
When Ornish’s study showed some reversal of atherosclerosis and fewer cardiac events in the 20 men who completed the 5-year study, the public perception—reinforced by Ornish himself—was that the results were largely due to the low-fat diet. This is an incredible leap that is in no way supported by his research. The fact is that
there’s no way to know
whether the results were due to the low-fat-diet portion of the experiment (highly unlikely in the view of many), the high fiber, the whole foods, the lack of sugar, or some combination of the interventions. It is entirely possible that Ornish would have gotten the same or better results with a program of exercise, stress management, smoking cessation, and group therapy plus a wholefoods diet of high protein, good fats, high fiber, and low sugar. (Interestingly, critics of low-carb diets frequently proclaim with great righteousness that the only reason a low-carb diet works is because it is a low-calorie diet in disguise. They never level that criticism at Ornish, whose diet, in a recent analysis, turned out to be
lower
in calories [1,273 calories] than the Atkins ongoing weight-loss phase [1,627 calories], the Atkins maintenance phase [1,990 calories], the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet [1,476 calories], Sugar Busters! [1,521 calories], the Zone [approximately 1,500 calories], and even Weight Watchers [1,462 calories].)
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The Tide Turns: A Reexamination of the Low-Carb Solution
By the 1990s, it was pretty obvious that low-fat dieting wasn’t getting results. The country was fatter than ever, diabetes was becoming epidemic, and people were getting more and more frustrated and confused. The time was right for another look at the low-carb wisdom that had been around in one form or another since Banting’s day in the 1800s. To the chagrin of the medical establishment and the American Dietetic Association, Atkins resurfaced with a vengeance with his newly updated
New Diet Revolution
in 1992, followed by perhaps the most influential nutrition book of the 1990s, Barry Sears’s
The Zone,
in 1995, a year that also saw the publication of the brilliant
Protein Power
by Drs. Michael R. and Mary Dan Eades.
After massive resistance by the establishment, serious research was finally comparing low-carb diets to traditional diets, and the results were impressive. While it would be incorrect to say that low-carb diets always produced greater weight loss than the traditional kind, they
often
did; they frequently produced it faster (a huge motivating force for many people); and they almost always produced better health outcomes such as bloodlipid profiles, precisely the measures that the anti–low-carb forces had predicted would be disastrous on these regimens (see
chapter 2
). In what will probably turn out to be a signal event in the death of the high-carb dictatorship, Dr. Walter Willett—chairman of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and one of the most respected mainstream researchers in the country—recently came out publicly against the 1992 USDA Food Guide Pyramid, which for a decade had promoted 6 to 11 servings a day of grains, breads, and pastas.
38
Internecine battles among advocates of different diets were hardly something new. What was different this time was that the arguments were finally taken public. On February 24, 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture hosted a major symposium, “The Great Nutrition Debate,” which featured, among others, Dr. Robert Atkins (the Atkins diet), Dr. Barry Sears (the Zone diet), low-fat advocates Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. John McDougall, and various representatives of the dietary establishment.
39
Then, on July 7, 2002,
The New York Times
published a cover story in its Sunday magazine section titled “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” in which Gary Taubes, a brilliant science journalist and three-time winner of the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Award, brought to the table massive evidence that the low-fat diet had been the dumbest experiment in dietary history. The article created a predictable uproar, with defenders of the faith rallying to discredit Taubes—not an easy task, I might add—and the low-carbers beaming ear to ear with I-told-you-so grins.
An interesting side note: on the Dietitian Central Web site (a dietitian Internet community), the following post was found on July 14, a week after the Taubes article appeared: “Please, dietitians, download from the
NY Times Magazine
section from last Sunday, July 7, the article ‘What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?’ by Gary Taubes.
It is full of information that could rock our world
. As dietitians, we need to be prepared and informed re: changes that may be completely different from what we have learned and have been educating people about.” (Taubes has since published a superb full-length book based on that article called
Good Calories, Bad Calories
—highly recommended.)
Low-carbing had come back, but this time with a clarity and a scientific validation that had simply not been present in previous decades. It’s time now for a reassessment of the twin sacred cows of dietary commandments—
high carbohydrates and low fat
—and for a clearer look at just what could be gained in terms of health and weight loss by following a diet more like the one that sustained the human genus for 2.4 million years and sustained modern man for at least 50,000 years.
It’s time to revisit the low-carb wisdom of the past, evaluate the wisdom of the present, and see what they have to teach us about living healthy in the twenty-first century.
In other fields, when bridges do not stand, when aircraft do not fly, when machines do not work, when treatments do not cure, despite all the conscientious efforts on the part of many persons to make them do so, one begins to question the basic assumptions, principles, theories, and hypotheses that guide one’s efforts.
—Arthur R. Jensen, PhD
Professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, in
Harvard Educational Review
, winter 1969
O
n November 1, 1999, Woody Merrell—the Muhammad Ali of doctors, loved, respected, and admired across the entire political spectrum of medicine and nutrition—wrote an article in
Time
magazine about weight loss. This is how it started:
“In my 25 years of medical training and practice in Manhattan, I’ve seen a wide range of diets come and go.
Virtually none of them work
.”
A few paragraphs later, Merrell wrote: “For most of my professional career, I adhered to the generally recognized dictum of weight management.
I advised my patients to count their calories and follow a low-fat diet
.”
He then talks about his experience with a few patients who weren’t getting anywhere, no matter what they tried. Skeptically, he put them on a low-carb diet.
Finally he wrote: “I have become a convert. Carbohydrates… are often prime saboteurs of our weight. [O]f all the diets I’ve seen over the past few decades, the moderate-fat, lower-carbohydrate ones are the most successful.
They stress not how much food you eat but what kinds. Calorie counting is not as important as carbo counting
.” (All emphases mine.)
The article is titled “How I Became a Low-Carb Believer.”
1
What convinced Merrell—and what is convincing more and more of his colleagues—is the fact that lower-carbohydrate diets
really work
for many, many people. The evidence of the senses is hard to argue with. People lose weight, feel better, and, equally important, have major improvements in their health. Chronic complaints and ailments have been known to disappear. Some of these people had tried every possible diet, had adhered to every conventional cholesterol-lowering, fat-reducing program, and wound up in exactly the same place as when they started—and sometimes were even worse. Yet on lower-carb diets, they do great.
G
ENIUS AND ANTI
-A
GING
G
URU
C
HOOSES
L
OW
-C
ARB
D
IET
!
Ray Kurzweil is a scientist, inventor, and recipient of the National Medal of Technology. Largely considered a genius (
The Wall Street Journal
called him “the restless genius,” and
Forbes
called him “the ultimate thinking machine”), his fans range from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton.
Recently Kurzweil teamed up with Terry Grossman, MD, the founder and medical director of the Frontier Medical Institute in Denver and the author of
The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever
. The two turned their not-inconsiderable brain power and experience to studying the science of life extension.
In their seminal book,
Fantastic Voyage: The Science Behind Radical Life Extension
, they discuss genes, diet, exercise, stress, genomics, and cutting-edge research on gene manipulation.
They also discuss their personal dietary programs, arrived at after consuming and digesting hundreds—if not thousands—of research papers related to even the most obscure areas of health and longevity.
These guys are serious about health and life extension.
Would you like to know what they personally eat?
Low-carb diets. Both men consume no more than 80 grams a day of carbs, or 1/6 (about 16%) of their total calories from carbohydrates on a daily basis.
Food for thought.
How can something that is so counterintuitive work? (And it
is
counterintuitive for most of us—after all, even Gary Taubes, in his seminal article “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”,
2
said he couldn’t quite get over the feeling that the bacon and eggs on his plate were going to somehow jump up and kill him.) We need to remember that low-carb eating is counterintuitive precisely
because
we have all been taught a number of “truths” that we have internalized as nutritional gospel but which may in fact be nutritional hogwash.
We “know” low-carb diets can’t work because they are often high in fat or cholesterol (which we “know” causes heart disease), are often high in protein (which we “know” causes heart disease, bone loss, and possibly cancer), and may be higher in calories (which we “know” causes weight gain). Yet people eating the low-carb way are losing weight and lowering their risk for heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. There is even some indication that they may be lowering their risk for some cancers.
3
How do we explain this? It is as though all three of Christopher Columbus’s ships had returned home with great bounty from the New World, but the people back in Spain shook their heads in disbelief, saying, “How can this be? It must be a trick. The ships have to have fallen off the earth, because we
know
the earth is flat!”
My doctor kept telling me not to try a low-carb diet because he thought it was so dangerous. Then his wife lost 50 pounds on Protein Power and now he’s really done a 180.
—Adele P.
I’ve got news for you: low-fat is the flat-earth theory of human nutrition.
See, all theories of weight loss fit into one of two major categories of thought—
all of them
. There is no exception to this rule. If you understand the two categories, you’re immediately better informed than half the population on the subject of dieting and weight loss.
Let’s call category one the Checkbook Theory. This is the idea that when it comes to calories and weight loss, the human body is like a checking account. You eat a certain number of calories, and you burn up a certain number of calories. If you eat
more
than what you need, you
gain
weight. If you eat
less
than what you need, you
lose
weight. Much like a checking account: if I deposit (take in) more money than I write checks for, I have some extra cash (i.e., I gain weight). If I spend (put out) more than I take in, I have to dip into that cash (i.e., I lose weight). If what I deposit exactly equals what I spend, I have a zero balance (i.e., my weight stays the same).
Let’s call category two the Telephone Theory of weight loss, based on the game of Telephone you may have played as a child. You line ten people up, then whisper something in the ear of the first person. That person whispers it to the second person, and so on down the line, until the words are repeated to the last person, who then says them out loud. What usually happens is that you start out with something like “A rose is a rose is a rose” and you wind up with “Gardenias don’t grow on the planet Mars.” Applied to weight loss, the theory goes something like this: the stuff that goes on
in between
the calories coming in and the calories going out is
much
more important than the actual number of calories involved. There are so many enzymes, cofactors, energy cycles, hormones, neurotransmitters, eicosanoids, genes, and other variables in the human body that determine the fate of the food coming in, that it is impossible to predict what’s going to happen to someone’s weight just by knowing the number of calories that go in. It would be like predicting the outcome of Telephone simply by knowing the phrase that was originally said. Sure, if everything goes perfectly, “A rose is a rose is a rose” comes out as “A rose is a rose is a rose.” More often, though, it comes out as “Adam Sandler’s latest movie stinks.”