Sunday, September 07, 2014

Low carb!

Anahad O'Connor writes:
People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.

By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

“They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,” Dr. Mozaffarian said. “Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that’s a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.”

In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides — a type of fat that circulates in the blood — plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.

Blood pressure, total cholesterol and LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, stayed about the same for people in each group.

Nonetheless, those on the low-carbohydrate diet ultimately did so well that they managed to lower their Framingham risk scores, which calculate the likelihood of a heart attack within the next 10 years. The low-fat group on average had no improvement in their scores.
Read more here.

In the comments section, one commenter raised this point:
The brain only uses glucose to work. How much glucose is there in fat and protein. Zero. None. Glucose only comes from carbohydrates. Search the Internet for the words "brain" and "glucose". You will find articles and textbooks that say the brain, just your brain, needs 125 +/-grams of glucose per day plus what the rest of your body needs. If you diet is not at least 50% carbohydrate, your brain will not get that amount of glucose. Broccoli is a carbohydrate but has nearly 0 glucose. And sodas have mostly fructose which does not get to the brain. Only grains and starchy vegetables have much glucose.

Another commenter said this:
Despite this study, and close to 20 other studies documenting the link between a high-carb diet and obesity, the American Heart Association, the Agriculture Department and -- astonishingly -- the American Diabetes Association -- continue to recommend the very high-carb low-fat diet that makes people obese and sick.

It is a disgrace, and it speaks to the degree to which the government and those advocacy groups are beholden to the American grain industry.

Can you imagine if the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association in the 1960s accepted donations from the tobacco industry while denying the link between smoking and cancer?

1 comment:

kotetu said...

Hi Bob,

Just FYI, the body does convert fat into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis