So I recently had someone challenge me on the notion of LC diet, by bringing up the fact that mother's milk is quite high in carbs. And that if evolution dictates LC is the correct diet for humans, then why did evolution not make mothers milk more like 70% Fat - 20% Protein and 10% carbs? Did nature mess up when it comes to Momma's milk?

I had no good rebuttal for that one. )< :

Any thoughts?

Only the foremilk is carby, fat and sweet. The sweetness of it and satiating fat in combo is promptly calming to the baby (who, being a baby, is screaming in unhappiness at hunger), and gets the insulin flowing, which at that point is a fine thing as the infant is not insulin-resistant nor is the quantity of it unreasonable, and the majority of the milk is the hind-milk which is higher in nutrients including protein.

I have no idea about the official medical part of this. That's just what I was told many years ago (long before me and lowcarb).

Cow babies eat different than cow adults. Why not humans.

PS Out of insatiable curiousity, me and my ex both tried both foremilk and hindmilk (I bet that was an overshare!). The foremilk is surprisingly delicious. The hindmilk is quite dull comparatively.

You could rebut by saying we are talking about adult nutrition.
Could be that the needs of infant mammals are different than adults. As adults we seem to have all kinds of diets all over the planet. I would also mention the variations.

I found a nice overview at the British web site :
http://www.parentingscience.com/cal...reast-milk.html

Looks like on average, breast milk is (percent calories) 42 % carb, 54 % fat, and 4 % protein (I know the numbers don't add up, that's just what I got from the web site.

Breast milk composition varies as the baby grows. Does your challenger think we should eat like a 1 day old baby, or 3 months, or 17 months?

Breast milk composition also varies per mother, from 2-5 grams of fat per ml of milk (the most variation), and with maternal nutrition and BMI, and with nations. Does your challenger think breast milk is as uniform as a can of formula?

I do get a kick out of the idea of babies arguing about which macronutrient profile is better.

Yeah, all mammals have large macronutrient differences between their milk and their adult diets. Milk exists ONLY BECAUSE infants and adults require different diets. There is no reason for milk to exist as an evolutionary adaptation if the babies could eat the same as the adults. Fish babies, bird babies, reptile babies all eat what fish adults, bird adults, reptile adults eat.

So, if the question is "Did nature mess up when it comes to Momma's milk?", the answer is "no". Pretty good rebuttal, eh?

If you have to explain anything by way of "mistakes of nature", you're wrong.

If Seejay is correct, the real question is "Where in the world would adult evolving humans get 42 percent of their calories from carbohydrate?"

Just my view but I think You guys are forgetting the prime reason we low carb in the equation.

"Carbs make the body store fat"

Humans are the only animal that take so long to grow up.A baby deer for example must walk in a day.No time is spent for brain development compared to a baby human.The walking comes alot later and most of the energy is spent on the brain.

Carbohydrate is almost double that of cows milk while protein in human milk is around 1/3 of whats in cows milk.The cows dont need fattening up....they need muscles and fast so they can walk and are able to escape if the need arises.

Yeah, I guess the most obvious rebuttal is that even pure carnivores like big cats, wolves, etc all drink Momma's milk (Which I'm assuming is fairly similar to human milk in terms of macronutrient comp.) yet must eat as carnivores as adults.

Dang it...I ALWAYS come up with the good come-backs too late!

Could it be that mothers milk(human)is very high in carb to "fatten" up the baby to ensure survivability.

Challenge him back.

In order for the argument to even be considered, we must first establish that cow's milk and mother's milk are equivalent in all respects. They are not. The rest is merely academic.

If mother's milk was the proper food for humans throughout their lives, then we would not lose the ability to digest lactose nor would the mother stop lactating. But then, what would be the proper food for the mother? Her mother's? But what does she eat when her mother dies? Her own milk? See, the argument fails at one point or another. The mother's milk argument is not a question of diet but of species: We are mammals. However, not all mammals have the same obligatory diet. There are carnivores, herbivores and omnivores.

So what are we then, carnivores, herbivores or omnivores? Based on scientific evidence, we are optimally carnivore yet opportunistically omnivore. We are certainly not herbivores in any way for the simple reason that an exclusive plant diet lacks essential nutrients for humans. We are opportunistically omnivore at a price. The farther we go from an all meat diet, the worse our health gets. There is a point where we just can't reproduce and that's the survival threshold. Above this we're OK. Below we cease to exist. However, in between this threshold and the optimal level, there's a spectrum of disease states, any of which can do us in depending on the severity.

The point is that unless somebody knows that a disease-free state exists, all he argues is a gradient of some disease state. So why does milk contain lots of sugar? Do we drink mother's milk for 75 years? Where does the sugar come from if not from our mother's milk? So if 10% is OK for a baby human for a couple of years, how much is OK for a grown human for how many years? If lactose is OK, is sucrose/fructose/glucose just as OK?

good arguments. I'll add another.

I do believe that most of us as adults would have no problem living off a 25 percent carb diet if we didn't first destroy our bodies with 70 percent carb diets for many years.

OUCH! Most mammals start being weaned when their teeth start coming in. Also, getting more teeth makes it possible to eat more foods. It is actually sort of anomalous that humans are so slow to develop compared to other mammals.

I agree. Then there's that teeth argument. If we were built to handle lots of sugar or even lots of plants, why do our teeth rot out? So we use a brush and soap to prevent that decay. Does it prevent it 100%? No, only partly and only for a time. It doesn't, for example, prevent mineral leech elsewhere in the body to affect the teeth internally which will make them brittle and we'll lose them anyway. A stick and a rock, that's the science we must work with. If a stick and a rock can't prevent our teeth from rotting out, then we're not eating the right things.

Herbivores do have thicker tooth enamel which allows them to eat carbs without it rotting their teeth. The fact that humans have comparatively thinner enamel is a pretty compelling argument against us eating too much like herbivores. Despite the proclamations of "plant based diet" advocates.

Humans or you?I have never had a cavity in my whole life and was a sugar addict a huge portion of my 39 yrs.You have proof of this humans having less enamel then cows?

Considering that we are made from what we eat, it's reasonable to assume that our teeth enamel depends on what we ate during childhood.

Diagram of herbivore tooth structure

Regarding you being free of cavities - that is due to the lucky happenstance of you being born in the era of fluoridated water and toothpaste. Your high sugar diet would have rotted out your teeth without such artificial protections.