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The US recommends that people get half their calories from eating carbohydrates. So does Britain. However, in heated public hearings over the past 18 months, American low-carb advocates have pushed for guidelines to advise halving their recommended daily carbohydrate intake for millions of overweight people, to 25 per cent or less (about the same as the Atkins diet). In Britain, an official panel of leading dietary experts has put new draft guidelines on low-carb diets out for consultation, with the results due next year. Which way will we go in the war on carbs?
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Wait - what? The official US RDA of carbs is a whopping 300 grams, which is actually closer to 65% of a "typical" 2,000 calorie diet. So to claim it's only 50% is already misleading, because 250 g would be 50%.
But ok, let's go with the fantasy that the US is only pushing 250 g of carbs. If we cut that in half, that's still 125 g carbs, which is in the range of what the ADA insists that everyone NEEDS to keep their brains functioning - and is still far too much for many diabetics to handle.... and they obviously don't know what Atkins levels of carbs are, because aside from the rare individual who can eventually climb up the carb ladder to 125 g/day without gaining weight, that's not Atkins levels.
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The report, which was commissioned by Public Health England, examined the best clinical-trial evidence on differing diets’ benefits for people with type 2 diabetes. For weight-loss it concluded that, after a year, there was no meaningful difference between low-carb diets and normal-carb diets.
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When you're comparing a lower but still high carb diet with an even higher carb diet (which is not exactly what I'd call the best clinical-trial evidence), you'll always come to the conclusion that there's no meaningful difference.
What would really help them is to cut carb consumption to closer to 10% or less of calorie intake, which on a 2,000 would still be as much as 50 grams - still too high for a lot of us to expect to lose weight, and for many, still too high to expect to maintain weight loss.
But hey, at least if you can get it down to 125 or 150 g/day, people who are still in a normal weight range, and have normal blood sugar/insulin levels, that would probably keep them from gaining weight. Too bad that wasn't the point of the article at all.