Why Cutting Carbs Is So Tough

The ways that foods can harm our bodies goes far beyond whether or not you consume too many calories and gain weight.

You could get most of your calories from table sugar and not gain weight if you do the math correctly. But this diet will eventually severely damage the hormonal regulation in your body.

The Okinawans got their carbohydrates primarily from vegetables with a low glycemic index, primarily the imo sweet potato (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-buettner/okinawa-blue-zone...). They also consumed a decent amount of Omega-3 fatty acides, since they ate fish three times a week; fish that was likely not contaminated with mercury or factory farmed. It's worth noting that once sugar and refined carbohydrates were introduced into their diet, they went from having the highest longevity out of 47 prefectures in Japan to the 26th (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/3342882/Japanese...). That article came out 10 years ago, and the situation is worse now (haven't been able to find any written sources for this, but it's explained in the documentary 'Sugar Coated').

As a counter to the Okinawans, we can look at the Maasai people of northern Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people#Diet, who exclusively ate meat, milk and blood from cattle yet had no incidence of heart disease, cancer, tooth decay, or obesity.

I think the point here is that we haven't really honed in on what exact macronutrient composition is the perfect one for a human body. Humans appear to adapt well to any macronutrient composition, as shown above by the diets of different cultures (I think if you took a global survey in 1900 of what different societies were eating, you would find all manner of different diets but very low rates of disease in all or most of them). What we have identified is that we're seeing unprecedented levels of cancer, obesity, alzheimers and cardiovascular disease. So the question to ask is "What changed in the past 50 years?" I would say it's a few things (ordered by severity):

1. Sugar. We don't need sugar to survive, yet we eat mountains of it.

2. Refined, high GI carbohydrates.

3. Vegetable oils. Seed oils like canola, sunflower, or palm oil (not Olive/Avocado/Coconut oil) are high in pro-inflammatory Omega-6 fatty acids and polyunsaturated fats.

4. Factory farmed meats, also high in Omega-6 fatty acids.

You can find counterexamples to any macronutrient focused diet, as we did above, but there doesn't exist a society that consumes sugar, refined carbohydrates, or vegetable oils in abundance and still lives long, disease free lives. To date, there is no counterexample that says the modern western diet is in any way healthy.

Regarding the studies you mention, I don't doubt that heavily processed meats like bacon and sausages are bad for you, though it's because of the Omega-6 fatty acids in factory farmed meats which are known cause arterial inflammation and contribute to atherosclerosis (grass fed beef, pork, or pastured chicken does not have this problem). That said, I am heavily skeptical of any studies that show 'links' to cancer. Just because two things correlate doesn't mean that one causes the other. Nutritional studies are notoriously difficult to conduct accurately, and have been plagued with bad logic (correlation != causation), bad statistics, and perverse incentives (such as the incentive to reach an interesting conclusion or risk losing government funding) or conflicts of interest (being funded by the sugar industry or big pharma). You ask for a good source (not blogposts/youtube videos) on what the OP posted; in kind, could you link to the studies that you're talking about?

Just want to mention that there are always people who don't read the literature or properly follow a "diet plan" for lack of a better word to call it.

If you are doing the Ketogenic diet, right at the end of Gary Taubes' book entitled "Why we get fat and what to do about it" which is about the diet (and is the same the guy who wrote the linked article) it says this about your daily diet in regards to vegetables:

    FOODS THAT MUST BE EATEN EVERY DAY:

Salad Greens: 2 cups a day. Includes arugula, bok choy, cabbage (all varieties), chard, chives, endive, greens (all varieties, including beet, collards, mustard, and turnip), kale, lettuce (all varieties), parsley, spinach, radicchio, radishes, scallions, and watercress. (If it is a leaf, you may eat it.)

Vegetables: 1 cup (measured uncooked) a day. Includes artichokes, asparagus, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, celery, cucumber, eggplant, green beans (string beans), jicama, leeks, mushrooms, okra, onions, peppers, pumpkin, shallots, snow peas, sprouts (bean and alfalfa), sugar snap peas, summer squash, tomatoes, rhubarb, wax beans, zucchini.

The vegetables that he says you need to stay away from: "...“starchy” vegetables such as slow-cooked beans (pinto, lima, black beans), carrots, parsnips, corn, peas, potatoes, French fries, potato chips."

So clearly the guy who wouldn't eat lettuce didn't do his research or just heard "to cut all carbs is what you must do".

The book is a great read, very enlightening, and I've successfully done Keto several times and lost a lot of weight and body fat using it, all the while feeling better. I surely do not eat that many vegetables a day, if any, because I hate most allowed vegetables (I just have Caesar salads occasionally), but I still manage to feel good and lose weight. This feels like a lot of vegetables suggested for a "meat only" viewed diet, and it seems like more than I'm sure most people eat daily anyways, which I guess is probably sad, but hey.

One last pitch for reading the book, it's essentially just science of the body and fat and talk about the history of various studies and how they relate to the science you just learned until the very end where in the appendix it basically says, ok here is how you actually do it, if you didn't figure it out by now (at least that's how I remember it).

> lettuce is a carb

The typical advice I've seen is to limit 'net carbs' which is the difference between the total carbohydrates and 'dietary fiber'.

Also, a serving of lettuce contains a very small amount of carbs, e.g. 1.2 g per cup for butterhead lettuce. Low carb diets seem to usually consist of less than 50 g of 'net carbs' per day so eating even lots of lettuce seems entirely compatible with them.

Overall tho, nutrition just seems like an inherently 'causally dense' subject, i.e. there are lots of seemingly plausible explanations for any phenomenon. Maybe there is no one simple explanation for everyone everywhere, in general.

What dietary changes did you make to get rid of your acne? I've experimented with a few things and have had relatively good success, but a purely dietary method seems healthier.