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Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

nytimes.com

91–100 of 185 posts

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#91

Thank the "low-fat/fat-free" craze for that. Associating dietary fat with body fat has been one of the worse mistakes in "nutrition" in the past decades. Now most "low-fat" food has added carbs to deal with the loss of consistency. And even regular foods (especially in the US) have added sugar.

The sugar free/carb free Atkins diet of the 90s and its modern versions isn't any better. Pretty much any diet which is free of anything should be avoided.

Quite honestly, nothing beats a good caloric deficit. Especially if that caloric deficit is from a strong Paleo Diet like the one I have been using. http://how2loseweightnow.com/2016/09/11/paleo-reboot-diet-be...

What everyone should do, is instead of searching for weight loss tips to go at google and find his daily caloric maintenance, then start eating 500 calories below that with a Paleo Diet and combine all that with a respectable workout program. The fat WILL melt off.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#92
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they are. People continuing to get diabetes is how they get funding for their organization.

It's amazing how many people are ignorant of this logic, and go around wondering why big companies and governments always seem to be offering band-aids and aspirins, but never cures. :)

By that logic, everyone peddling any kind of diet, including paleo or keto or whatever diet is the fad of the day, is insincere.

The actual truth of the matter is that nutrition is far more complex than any simple summary can give you. The data you get from nutritional and dietary studies is generally so poor in quality that you can find evidence for just about any assertion if you look hard enough.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#93
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is somewhat amusing, considering that that is my actual current diet and exercise regimen (for the last several months, with the added restrictions of being almost entirely vegetarian and doing some light weight training and cycling), and I feel pretty awesome. I do agree that this thread is very monoculture-y though, which makes me uncomfortable.

Being vegetarian and being "low carb" is to some extent oxymoronic, you are getting your calories from somewhere and if it is vegetarian it mostly going to be fatty acids and carbs. A few months with "light exercise" doesn't mean anything, your personal feeling is also not a quantifiable metric, if you were actually setting yourself a specific physical goal like to run say 10KM under 40min, or deadlift X lbs you woul…

You can be vegetarian and eat a low carb diet. It's not as easy as eating meat and eating a low carb diet, but it's eminently achievable. Eggs, cheese, nuts, avocados, and oils will probably comprise most of your diet.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you realize that starch has fed the world only in a post agricultural world. That may be thousands of years, but we spent hundreds of thousands of years living without agriculture. That argument does not hold water. Secondly, eating fruit and eating sugar are two very different things. Fruit has things like nutrients and fiber that is lost in processing, which is likely the root of the disorder. The fiber, for…

I think you should go learn history to understand when we started agriculture. And even so how starch and simpler sugars played in our diets for the past 150,000 years. The fruits that primates eat are "processed" they let them ferment this is one of the reasons why like alcohol so much because amongst other things we used it to tell us when the fruit is ready to eat and it's at it's highest caloric value. We have be…

I'm pretty skeptical of your claims that starch and simple sugars played an important part in human diets for the past 150,000 years. Here's why:

1) Throughout most of the world, fruit is generally only available during an extremely limited window in any given year. And it spoils in a matter of days.

2) The big agricultural revolution was the domestication of grains. Grains are important because they keep for a long time and can therefore provide a stable year-round supply of calories even if they can only be harvested once per year. According to this wikipedia page[1], grains weren't domesticated until 11,000 years ago.

Do you have a link that provides documentation for the importance of carbohydrates in the pre-agricultural human diet?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how many people are ignorant of this logic, and go around wondering why big companies and governments always seem to be offering band-aids and aspirins, but never cures. :)

By that logic, everyone peddling any kind of diet, including paleo or keto or whatever diet is the fad of the day, is insincere. The actual truth of the matter is that nutrition is far more complex than any simple summary can give you. The data you get from nutritional and dietary studies is generally so poor in quality that you can find evidence for just about any assertion if you look hard enough.

Oh come on.. Nutrition is not that complicated. It only looks complicated because we are looking too closely at the details, resulting in myopia. We are overthinking it. For hundreds of thousands of years people didn't even know what a nutrient was, and yet they ate properly and never got any of these western problems.

Reminds me of how our western science has overcomplicated studies on meditation and we are only now learning the benefits of it because our tools are finally sharp enough to our liking (fMRI).

We are lazy. We don't want to actually meditate to learn if it works or not. We just want to strap somebody into a machine without having to do the hard work ourselves. Our nutritionists are lazy as well. Would rather fund all these ridiculous research studies than experiment on their own bodies. Pathetic example of over measuring. Reminds me of how if all you have is a hammer then everything will start to look like a nail.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sugar free/carb free Atkins diet of the 90s and its modern versions isn't any better. Pretty much any diet which is free of anything should be avoided.

People basically evolved without any sugar (fructose) except what they could get in fruit (which was limited and contained fiber). With the sugar islands it became available to people though expensive and volatile in price. With high fructose corn syrup etc. it became a consistent priced commodity with little to no volatility.

"People basically evolved without any sugar (fructose) except what they could get in fruit"

What about honey?

Edit: don't forget that sugar is in every plant that makes use of photosynthesis.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#97
post #21

Whether or not you believe in low/no carbs for everyday health, it is uniquely horrifying that the Diabetes association is promoting a high carb diet. Having recently made changes to my own eating, which still includes carbs but at a much less extreme amount, I'm amazed at the differences. I don't have diabetes and the doctors say my blood sugar control is very good, but the energy differences I feel before and after…

Which diet do you mean? I looked and can only see evidence of their recommending 45-60 g of carbohydrates a meal. That's 180 g a day, some 60 g below my personal non-diabetic maintenance level.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should go learn history to understand when we started agriculture. And even so how starch and simpler sugars played in our diets for the past 150,000 years. The fruits that primates eat are "processed" they let them ferment this is one of the reasons why like alcohol so much because amongst other things we used it to tell us when the fruit is ready to eat and it's at it's highest caloric value. We have be…

I'm pretty skeptical of your claims that starch and simple sugars played an important part in human diets for the past 150,000 years. Here's why: 1) Throughout most of the world, fruit is generally only available during an extremely limited window in any given year. And it spoils in a matter of days. 2) The big agricultural revolution was the domestication of grains. Grains are important because they keep for a long…

We evolved near the equator. There are more sweet things there year-round. Don't forget about honey.

Fiber, fiber, fiber. Sugar seems to be okay when it is packaged together with its copartner, fiber.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#99
post #50

I've been on a low carb diet since June. I've lost 30 pounds and my high blood pressure is now gone (I read 97/63 last week). My glucose went from 134 mg/do to 96 in 2 months. A1C from 6.5% to 5.5%. Now normal again. If you've been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes you should try a very low carb diet before anything else. It really seems to work.

Please see my comment/video above. Dietary FAT is the cause of type 2 diabetes. Very low carb/keto diets seem to work at first because they reduce the need for the body to process sugar. The problem is the underlying system is still broken. This is just preventing the symptoms from occurring (high body fat, insulin spikes). Over time, your cholesterol will skyrocket and heart attack/stroke are inevitable. Very danger…

What? This flies in the face of of all current competent scientific research.

Re: Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

#100
post #58
post #21

Whether or not you believe in low/no carbs for everyday health, it is uniquely horrifying that the Diabetes association is promoting a high carb diet. Having recently made changes to my own eating, which still includes carbs but at a much less extreme amount, I'm amazed at the differences. I don't have diabetes and the doctors say my blood sugar control is very good, but the energy differences I feel before and after…

> Diet soda, although technically not containing carbs, prompts a similar insulin response to drinking sugared soda Is there any scientific basis for this claim?

I get annoyed when people stop a discussion dead in its tracks by asking for references like this, especially when they can easily look it up themselves if they actually cared about the answer rather than winning.

If you think about it, any molecule that isn't sugar but tastes like sugar will have a similar molecular shape to sugar. Hmmmm I wonder if this will fit into receptors in other places in the body, not just on the tongue. Maybe it will affect gut bacteria. Maybe even trigger other events within our bodies.

If we would stop and think with an open mind, many of these arguments would become discussions, and we wouldn't need to play the baby card by asking for proof.

Remember how long it took to finally get enough proof in order to show others how wrong our mainstream religions are? And even with all the evidence we have accumulated, still people say, "show me the proof. I'm a reasonable man." Bullshit.

Let's not fall into this trap again. Many of these questions can be answered without slow, hard science. We don't need to hit everything with the biggest hammer in our toolbox before we can move forward.

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