Tue, Oct-03-06, 22:16
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Senior Member
Posts: 5,323
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Plan: food? what's food?
Stats: 234/185/165
BF:nothin' but wobble
Progress: 71%
Location: YAY! trees and grass!
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oh this is going to be fun...
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Although low-carb diets have been used for more than 30 years, the National Weight Control Registry database indicates that less than one percent of 2,681 people successful in maintaining weight loss of greater than 30 pounds for more than a year have used reduced-carbohydrate diets.
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all of whom seem to be on this message board... interesting. let's also compare that to the millions who have lost and then gained back all the weight from slim fast or weight watchers or jenny craig, or any other low-fat diet.
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Humans produce enzymes for digesting starch, including one present in our saliva. Carnivores have no starch-splitting enzymes in their saliva. We also have taste buds which guide us to enjoy the sweet flavor provided by carbohydrate-rich plant foods. The human gut differs significantly from the guts of obligate carnivores (3).
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let's remember something, class... humans are not carnivores. we are omnivores. we have teeth that have developed for eating both meat and plant fibers. and since when did low-carb mean no plants?
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Only strictly or strongly herbivorous animalsprimates, rabbits, capybara, and wombathave an appendix. Our appendix produces starch-splitting enzymes, clearly adapted to a starch-rich diet (3).
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again, we are not herbivores, we are OMNIVORES. we eat everything... including some things we shouldn't  .
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Among humans, Eskimos have had ample opportunity to develop carnivore-type characteristics and ability to thrive on a meat-dominated diet. For many generations the Eskimos obtained about 90 percent of their calories from meat and fat from seal, whale, caribou, and fish. Yet scientists have not found any evidence that Eskimos have special genetic adaptations to this carnivorous diet (5).
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well gee... you didn't give evolution a whole lot of time for one culture of humans to develop specialized processes for that particular diet, especially not when europeans came in and screwed everything up 500 years ago.
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Repeated metabolic studies in controlled conditions have shown that people convert only small amounts of starch to stored fat. When human subjects overate as much as 1000 calories (250 grams) of refined starch daily for one week, on the seventh day they were converting less than 10 percent of the carbohydrate to fat, producing only 10 grams of new fat daily from the process (13, 14, 15). At this rate, a person would have to overeat (on top of a calorie-adequate diet) a daunting 10 four-ounce potatoes or bananas, or about 20 slices of whole grain bread, every day for a whole year to gain one extra pound of fat. If you increase your starch intake, this stimulates your body to burn more glucose, and the body usually stores any excess as glycogen, not fat (15). If you manage to eat more starch than needed to fill your glycogen stores (generally a difficult task), the body has to expend about 25% of the carbohydrate calories to convert them to fat (15). In contrast, eating a high-fat diet does not stimulate your system to burn more body fat, and if you eat more fat than you burn daily, more than 95% of it will become body fat (15,16). Your body burns a mix of carbohydrate and fat daily (the proportion depends on your activity level). To lose body fat, you have to eat less fat than you burn. Some studies suggest cutting fat may be more important than cutting calories.
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hmmm... i notice that the word "insulin" is not mentioned anywhere in this paragraph. and if we really did have to eat an entire loaf of bread and 2.5 pounds of potatoes and/or bananas EVERY DAY for a YEAR to gain just one pound of body fat, then gee, i guess NONE of us would be sitting here overweight today. they're completely ignoring the fact that insulin stores excess CALORIES as fat until all the glucose is burned off first... it doesn't matter what those calories came from.
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If you eat a combination of starches and fatty foods that exceeds your caloric needs, your body will store any excess calories from fat as body fat. You can force your body to run on dietary fat by reducing your starch intake, but your energy levels will drop because your body prefers to burn carbohydrate, and your breath rate will increase because burning fats requires more oxygen than burning carbohydrates.
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last i checked, my body was much happier running on protein and fat... just like my fireplace MUCH prefers to burn oak than wadded-up newspaper.
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People in Okinawa eat a high-carbohydrate (55%) diet, and have rates of heart disease, cancer, senility, and diabetes that fall among the world's lowest. Okinawa also has the world's highest proportion of disability-free centenarians. Japanese, Greeks, and Kitavans eat diets similar to the Okinawans, and have rates of degenerative disease much lower than Americans.
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let's not forget that those societies are not eating the massive amounts of processed foods, either. their carbs are coming from clean sources, mainly rice.
sounds to me like this whole research paper and all the studies supporting it were funded by the wonderful people who brought us the food pyramid in the first place.
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