Are all carbs bad? Americans vs Kitavans
 

According to Gary Taubes and others, modern diseases such as diabetes, obesity, stroke etc have a simple cause: excess of carbohydrate in the diet. However, there is evidence to the contrary. Let's compare the diet of the native inhabitants of Kitava, an island in Papua New Guinea, with the standard American diet.

Parameter / Kitavan / American
Fat (%) / 21 / 33
Saturated fat (%) / 17 / 11
Protein (%) / 10 / 15
Carbohydrate (%) / 69 / 52
Carbohydrate (grams) / 380 / 322
Calories / 2200 / 1833 (females), 2475 (males)
fatty acids w6:w3 / 0.5 / 20
BMI / 18 (females), 20 (males) / 28

In short, they eat more carbohydrate (380g) than we do (322g), but don't get fat (but they get fat when they switch to our diet). They also don't suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. "Malnutrition and famine did not seem to occur. [...] The residents of Kitava lived exclusively on root vegetables (yam, sweet potato, taro, tapioca), fruit (banana, papaya, pineapple, mango, guava, water melon, pumpkin), vegetables, fish and coconuts." [3]

If carbs are the main cause of obesity, the Kitavans would have been fat. They aren't, and this falsifies the carbohydrate hypothesis, unless I'm missing something. Perhaps the macronutrient composition of the diet doesn't matter at all. Perhaps the benefits people get when they do a low-carb diet have nothing to do with carbs. Something to think about when it's very late, but you can't sleep because you have insomnia.

References:

1. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/nhanes_products.htm
2. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.c...ch/label/Kitava
3. http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/
4. http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/omega-6-000317.htm

Compare the GI and GL of their carbohydrates with the GI and GL of the typical American carbohydrate laden diet - sugars, HFCS, refined carbohydrates, etc - and you may find that one of the contributors to obesity is the TYPE of carbohydrate consumed.

Also, I bet they do a lot more physical exercise in Kitava than your typical american.

Try posting the other stats from the study as well:

. Less than 0.2% of the caloric intake came from Western food, such as edible fats, dairy products, sugar, cereals, and alcohol, compared with roughly 75% in Sweden



. The elderly residents of Kitava generally remain quite active up until the very end

You can't just isolate one factor and use it to debunk all sorts of stuff. You need to take everything into consideration.

All carbs are not created equal...
 

I think that we have to consider that all carbs aren't created equal.

What is missing in the Kitavan diet is wheat!!!

Stephan Guyenet (Whole Health Source Blog), who has also looked into the Kitavans and their health, argues elsewhere on his blog that wheat seems to cause hyperphagia (technospeak for over-eating). The more wheat is eaten by a particular population, the more calories they consume.

What's more, today's bread products are a far cry from those we used to eat. In the "olden days" most products made with wheat, from pancakes to bread, were made using some kind of fermentation process, which is not the case today. So, not only are we eating more wheat, the kind of wheat we are eating (present company excepted, of course ;) ) is also completely different from a few generations ago.

There are other cultures and populations that have rice as their main carbohydrate staple and who also don't get fat until modern wheat products, and pasteurized milk, are introduced into their diet (cf. Japan, China).

A few other things missing in the Kitavan diet are omega 6s in over-abundance, which is present in the SAD due to all the vegetable oils we are supposed to eat because they are so healthy (doh), as well as over-processed fructose beverages and other products containing HCFS.

The Kitavans eat their fruit whole and fresh, I assume, with most of the original enzymes intact; they don't drink "Smoothies" and eat fructose-laden yoghurts.

What is also missing from the Kitavan diet is milk. I don't see any mention of dairy products on the above list at all.

And again, milk by itself, and milk products, are much more processed and denatured than they were a few generations ago before refrigeration and pasteurization. In the "olden days" milk would have been raw milk, and it would have been made into all sorts of foods, all of which would have been teeming with "good" bacteria, unlike the milk we get today.

Like with so many other things, technological 'progress' is a double-edged sword: whilst I would never deny that it has brought many improvements in our quality of life, at the same time, Big Food, with its over-processed cheap products, have contributed to a drastic decrease in the quality of the food eaten by many in the rich world.

My two cents.

amanda

Their native diet was not hybrid, thereby retaining all of there good qualities.

The Kitavans don't eat refined carbs. Consequently, the actual amount of carbohydrate they absorb is very little considering that we can't digest fiber. Eating it is not enough, we must also digest it. They get fat when they eat our diet. Note that they eat more saturated fat.

So do the Kitavans contradict the carbohydrate hypothesis? No, it just confirms that we can't digest fiber. What if we eat more fiber, will that do? No, since the fiber we eat comes from refined grains from which we also get the refined carbohydrate. In other words, the fiber doesn't protect us, it protects the plant.

Yeah. Well, I think eating like the Kitavans is fine - very good in fact. But for somebody with a crappy metabolism from (eating crap and also dieting all their lives) eating like the Kitavans might not produce great results. Maybe one can get back to having a great metabolism and eat like them and be in amazing shape. Not sure.

But it's definitely a good point. I think you can be healthy eating carbs - sure, but it's hard if you are coming from a place where all you do is gain eating more than a certain amount of anything.

Regarding the wheat I totally agree with this one. It doesn't seem to be such a nutritious food and causes so many problems for so many people.

They eat 380g of non-fiber carbs (total carbs - fiber), that is, starch and sugar. If Dr Lindeberg had included fiber in his calculation, the percentage of carbs in their diet would have been even higher, but as we can't absorb those carbs, when we calculate calories from carbs, we must subtract the fiber content. I'm almost convinced that we can eat as much starch from tubers as we want, as long as we don't touch grains (wheat in particular, as amandawald said) and sugar (fructose in excess). But, as far as I can see, the pure carbohydrate hypothesis from GCBC doesn't explain all the available data and must be false. It's what I think Stephan Guyenet believes as well.

I have isolated the amount of carbs and not mentioned the type because that's what Gary Taubes did in his book. Besides, the GI of their root vegetables (yam, sweet potato, taro, tapioca) isn't exactly low.

When I lost all the weight I wanted to, I started eating more carbs and I haven't gained it back at all.

The kitavan diet is so appealing to me. Way more so than to eat meat for every meal. I played around on fitday to try and come up with a daily diet that would work and it is a lot of food


3 Banana, raw
6 Sweet potato, cooked, baked in skin, without salt
.75 cup coconut milk, canned
1 med Onions, mature, raw
1 cup Kale, cooked
2 med Apple, raw
5 oz Fish, dolphinfish, raw (mahi mahi)
1.75 cups mashed Parsnips, cooked
1 Tbsp Honey
2 cups Cassaba melon, raw

2136 cals, 69%carbs, 21%fat, 10%protein

This looks yummy to me. I am pretty sure I would not me hungry at all.

Actually I read somewhere that fiber turns into saturated fatty acid in our guts somehow so this high fiber diet could actually act as a high fat diet in our bodies. So it is possible that they are in fact eating a ketogenic diet. Maybe what I was reading was about gorillas not humans but we may do the same thing. Carbs that don't have a bunch of fiber are just poisonous.

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter how much starch a plant contains, if we can't break through the fiber (which we can't do unless we process the plant before we eat it), then we can't get to the digestible starch.

Anyway, since the Kitavans develop the same diseases we do when they switch to our diet, they are not immune to the carbohydrate content. Consequently, there must be something which prevents all that carbohydrate content of their diet to be absorbed. Fiber is the most obvious suspect.

Yes, that's true. But only a very small portion of a certain type of fiber will be converted. This is because our gut isn't built for that specific function. And we eat a very small amount of this type of fiber compared to the insoluble fiber we do eat. So basically that's not enough to have any significant effect. The fiber in question is called either soluble fiber or resistant starch, I forget which.

Fish is meat.

Oh I thought they had those special mahi mahi trees out there :lol: . I didn't say I don't like meat I said I don't like it for every meal :p

How much animal flesh do the Kitavans eat per day?