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Medical guidelines don’t include a diet low in carbohydrates

nytimes.com

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

#131

Post by oldmanjay »

dogma1138 wrote: post #33
benwr wrote: 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…

Rice is the food version of styrofoam popcorn packing. Its main quality is that it's cheap stomach filler. You can do better for yourself by using leaves instead.

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

#132

Post by nxc18 »

GarrisonPrime wrote: post #83
CPLX wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't have references on hand, but I can tell you that US medical schools are teaching: Artificial sweeteners do not appear to promote as significant an insulin response as digestible sugars do, however they appear to stimulate gluconeogenesis and lipogensis in a similar manner. In other words, drinking diet soda may not by itself cause problems, but it will stimulate your body to absorb even more of the burger and…

Thanks for the clarification. I was remembering what my doctor and some news articles told me a few years ago, both of which I'm sure gave dumbed down information.

The end result seems to be what I expected, just not the underlying cause. Regardless, it was a huge wake up call to not just treat diet soda like it was basically water.

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

#133

Post by jcranmer »

luketych wrote: post #95
jcranmer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The plural of anecdote is not data. Yes, it's a pithy saying, but it's completely true. Scientific validity requires changing one variable, and only one variable, and seeing if there is an observed effect. The real world is noisy, and anything involving biology incredibly so, which means you need larger sample sizes to distinguish signal from noise. We also know that there is some degree of mental control over physiology--see psychosomatic disorders and the placebo effect--but controlling for that is fiendishly difficult when you can't double-blind the study.

Given the baseline potential for high statistical noise, biological studies in general tend to have poor rigor. fMRI, which you've cited, is notorious for giving problematic results (see the dead salmon study).

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

#134

Post by khattam »

tzs wrote: post #116
thoughtsimple wrote: post #20

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.

> If you've been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes you should try a very low carb diet before anything else. What do you mean by "very low"? One year ago I lowered carbs, with a target of a maximum of 40% of daily calories from carbs. Results: 120 pounds lost, A1C from 8.1% (on Metformin and Actos) to 5.2% (no Actos, Metformin dose cut in half, and would not be surprised if my doctor suggests cutting it further when I s…

>What do you mean by "very low"?

I do ketogenic diet once in a while for a month or two at a time. I eat 1200kcal and try to keep the carbs around 30g (10%). It is recommended to keep it below 25g per day in the diet. I have read somewhere that I am not obese nor am I diabetic. I do it just to go from higher end of the normal BMI range to the lower end and this diet is the most effective and easiest way to do it.

I go back to "normal" diet (i.e. don't care about how much of what I am eating) after I am done getting lean and gradually gain the weight back in around a year... and repeat the cycle.

Have done 5 cycles so far. Works pretty well for me.

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

#135

Post by eatfruitnoteggs »

mchmch wrote: post #45
nxc18 wrote: 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…

This one minute video will save your life. FAT is the cause of type 2 diabetes. Fat in cells stops your body from processing sugar correctly. You need to reduce dietary fat to very low levels and your body will be able to process carbs correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51D07bvlPY

I commend your effort, but don't even try bringing up Veganism on Hacker News. I've tried to do the same and low-carb dogma ideologues lost their minds to the point logical and evidence-based dialogue became impossible. My own theory is, there is too much emotional attachment to eating meat, dairy and eggs in Americans to consider Veganism seriously. They will perform incredible mental gymnastics to justify their violent ideology promoted and ingrained by USDA and Animal Ag.

Regarding the NY Times article itself - it is the usual incoherent nonsense, citing how "USDA began recommending a high-carb, low-fat diet" as if to imply Americans then started eating whole plant foods, instead of added sugars and refined carbohydrate. Ignored also are the many studies pointing out low-carb diets are not satiating and promote weight gain and death (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), which is obvious to anyone who has had an unbiased look into Atkins "nightmare" diets [11]. Who wrote the article? None other than a "director" at an organization paid for by Laura and John D. Arnold, which have substantial ties[6] to animal agriculture industry (Another poster in this thread linked to a website trying to discredit Dr. Greger which the Arnold Foundation also paid for.)

The low-carb ideologues will vehemently deny the current scientific consensus that we should derive a majority of our calories from carbohydrate (7, 8), citing flawed, biased or outright retracted research, akin to deniers of anthropogenic climate change, which is not ironic given animal agriculture also happens to be the leading cause of climate change (9). The long - and the short of it - is that humans are natural plant eaters; whole plant foods are most appropriate to our physiology (10). I, for one, am sick of the carbophobic low-carb propaganda.

. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7498104 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820038 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25246449 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19828712 5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20820038 6. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/10/the-money-behind-the-f... 7. http://www.fao.org/docrep/w8079e/w8079e00.htm 8. http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?Rec... 9. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5wfMNNr3ak 11. http://www.atkinsexposed.org/

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

#136

Post by dogma1138 »

toasterlovin wrote: post #94
dogma1138 wrote: post #81

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…

I don't know what you are skeptical about but you seem to have very poor understanding of history.

Starch and sugars are a staple of the primate diet to the point where it is and was our main source of calories for ever.

Grain has been domesticated for over 12,000 years ago, wild grain has been as early as around 30,000 BCE.

Grain isn't the only source of starch, in fact for most of our history including our recent one it never was, starchy tubers and roots were.

Fermentation is still practiced today by primates and other species and not only passive one some animals actively collect fruits and ferment them.

We have been fermenting food since before we even speciated.

Sugar from fruits and honey has been distilled as early as humans have been able to create tools, early pottery was used for 2 things fermentation and sugar distillation which is basically the same thing.

You also have some skewed views on hunting vs gathering, hunting is just as seasonal as picking fruit and it's even more, it's also considerably more dangerous and calorie intensive and overall only been massively practiced when humans started to form large communities.

So overall your paleo diet would have looked considerably different in reality, replace the jerky with trail mix, sugary syrup and some fermented goop mainly wild grains, nuts, and various berries we cannot digest otherwise and you get your paleo diet, meat was a luxury.

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

#137

Post by heisenbit »

jordanb wrote: post #14
raverbashing wrote: post #10

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.

Not just added carbs, added sugars and starches , the worst kind of carbs.

Not all carbohydrates are processed equally. Complex starches are more difficult to break down in the gut and are absorbed slower often for the better. Some don't break down much like sorbitol. Most digestible carbohydrates eventually break down to glucose and fructose.

The key insight here is that fructose is very different from glucose as it is processed primarily in the liver and converted to triglycerides - which is seen as a more problematic fat in the bloodstream.

Since fructose does not contribute directly to blood sugar levels for a while it was recommended for diabetics to switch from glucose to fructose. Turns out the latter is not so good from an inflammation perspective, liver/body fat perspective, digestive perspective and perversely blood sugar regulation perspective. Sadly even that old fructose is ok for diabetics has not fully vanished.

The medical establishment (like any establishment I guess) is slow to change. Speeding up the publication, curation and dissemination of such information may be IT's main contribution to human health.

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

#138

Post by eatfruitnoteggs »

sago wrote: post #69
mchmch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one minute video will save your life. FAT is the cause of type 2 diabetes. Fat in cells stops your body from processing sugar correctly. You need to reduce dietary fat to very low levels and your body will be able to process carbs correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51D07bvlPY

http://www.ncahf.org/articles/o-r/pcrm.html The guy on that video is well known by Quackwatch. He is a vegan evangelist, and also teaches that proteins are not required in the diet. It's motivated nonsense.

> He is a vegan evangelist, and also teaches that proteins are not required in the diet.

If anything is nonsense, it's your statement. Can you explain where he suggests such a thing?

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

#139

Post by eatfruitnoteggs »

charlesism wrote: post #73
mchmch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans never fell in love with a low fat diet. Our diet is extremely high in fat and individuals that are obese consume much a much higher amount than average. By very low fat, I am saying reduce saturated fat to near 0 and limit intake of unsaturated fat to 30g or less a day. http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-fat-intake-sad-11370...

Well, whatever the fat intake, it won't be enough to mitigate the refined wheat, and sugars.

What about instead of fat, wheat and sugars, we eat whole plant foods, which are the most physiologically appropriate things to put into our bodies?

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

#140

Post by eatfruitnoteggs »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #20

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.

If you calorie restrict and lose weight, of course you will drop glucose, triglycerides, even cholesterol. The problem is, how do you maintain a physiologically appropriate body mass throughout your entire life? By eating whole plant foods, like we've done for millions of years.

https://www.drmcdougall.com/health/education/videos/free-ele...

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