I think we can say that the low carb craze is certainly the biggest health/fitness fad of the last year. Certainly the most controversial.
On the one side you have Atkins and others claiming that low carb diets are healthy and will allow you to lose far more weight than any other type of diet and that you can eat all the fat you want as long as you eliminate the carbs.
On the other side you have the “establishment” with their food pyramid saying low carb diets don’t result in greater weight loss than conventional diets, and the high fat content will cause you to drop dead of a heart attack.
Who’s right? Well, actually they’re both right (and wrong). Low or no carb diets will not magically cause you to lose weight while you eat all the fat you can eat, but they also won’t kill you.
First, I’d like to dispel a little media misinformation that’s been going around recently. You may have read in the last couple weeks that low carb guru Dr. Atkins died obese and with heart problems. You may have thought, "Hmmm, this low carb diet stuff must be unhealthy and ineffective then." Well, you may be wrong.
Turns out this story is being circulated (and mostly fabricated) by a certain group that has a hidden agenda against Adkins. The real story is that 72 year old Atkins fell on the ice, suffered a head injury and ended up in a coma. While in the coma and just before he died, his major organs failed and his body bloated up with 60 pounds of fluid, which is quite common in that situation.
And what about his heart disease? It was the result of cardiomyopathy and caused from a viral infection, not his diet.
“But fat is bad for our hearts” you say. We’ll that’s a topic for a whole separate discussion, and it’s probably a little too controversial for this newsletter, but suffice it to say, the long established but never proven link between high fat diets and heart disease is now slowly being eroded. If you really want a technical explanation of this, bug me about it, and maybe I’ll put an article together at a later date. Or search the Internet for Malcolm Kendrick.
Suffice it to say, the indigenous Eskimo population of Alaska eats a diet which is almost 75% saturated fats for much of the year yet has a very low instance of heart disease. Take these same Eskimos and feed them a typical “healthy” American diet high in carbs and low in saturated fats, and they start dropping of heart disease just like the rest of us. Also, despite the fact that Americans are eating less fat, and significantly less saturated fat than ever before, our death rate due to heart disease is RISING.
So if Adkins was right about a low carb, high fat diet being healthy, what was he wrong about? We know all about the miraculous weight loss that proponents of low carb diets claim. Right? Wrong! In reality they don’t exist. Nothing, I repeat NOTHING violates the first law of thermodynamics: In any closed system, the energy in must equal the energy out plus the energy accumulated within the system. In other words regardless of what ANY “expert” tells you. The only conceivable method of weight loss is to expend more energy than you consume. Atkins, and the zero carb proponents cannot offer any explanation as to how their methods break this LAW of thermodynamics. They will cite the fact that when you’re on a zero carb diet your body might excrete energy as ketones in your urine. However, it has been scientifically proven that this loss is insignificant in the scheme of things.
“So what about the studies” you say. Yes, Atkins does have a few old studies (and one new one) showing extra weight loss at the start of a low carb diet. However these studies all suffer the same flaw: they ignore water loss. You see, when you deplete the body of glycogen (carbs), you also lose water. Glycogen is stored in the body attached to water in a 1 to 4 ratio. What that means is that for every gram of carbohydrate you lose, you also lose 4 grams of water. It is well know that at the start of a carb depletion diet, the average person will lose 4 to 10 lbs of water. Water that you will eventually gain back, and that does not contribute to fat loss (the real weight loss target).
What about all the real world evidence? All those testimonials? Well, zero carb diets used to have one thing going for them. It used to be very hard to find food with no carbs. How much bacon can you eat before you just can’t eat any more bacon? There used to be absolutely nothing in the snack machine at work that didn't have carbs. People lost weight because they were lowering their calorie intake without knowing it. I say used to because now with the advent of low carb and no carb food in every grocery store and snack machine, it has become easy to overeat even on a no carb diet. People who used to find low card diets useful, are now finding they don’t lose weight like they used to.
Of course, if you think about it that, the fact that people are using these diets off and on for years should tell you all you need to know. I don’t consider a diet to be effective if you just gain the weight back again, and since all these diets are temporary solutions, and not permanent healthy changes, they will always fail in the long run.
Of course this isn’t to say a low fat high carb diet is the way to go. Americans do eat way to many processed carbs for our lifestyle. These carbs (bread, pasta, sugars, potatoes, rice, etc.) have next to zero nutritional value, provide too much energy for our sedentary lifestyles, and spike our insulin levels causing us to be hungry sooner after a meal. This insulin spike may actually be responsible for our rise in heart disease, as this spike doesn’t occur when fat is eaten along with the carbs, and is theorized to result in hardening of the arteries (see Protein Power in the recommended reading section of my web site).
So “How should I eat to lose weight” you ask. Well that’s what we’re here for, to help you setup a safe and effective diet and exercise program that will help you lose the weight, keep it off, be healthy, and look good.