A Sea Change In Dietary Advice

Low-carb should be the first approach in treating diabetes and obesity.

[Update a few minutes later]

Meanwhile, “Big Pasta” Barilla has been meddling in nutrition science.

[Sunday-morning update]

No, despite the headline, there is zero scientific evidence that listing calories on menus is helping people lose weight, and this article provides none. This “study” is nonsense. First, it’s self reporting. Second, it’s premised on the assumption, for which there is zero evidence, that counting calories is helpful, when calorie counting is a scientifically bogus concept, that assumes all calories are equal in their effects on metabolism. The kind of calories matter, and the way they measure calories, by literally burning food, is not how your body metabolizes calories, so it doesn’t even make sense thermodynamically.

4 thoughts on “A Sea Change In Dietary Advice”

    1. I missed that. Thank you.

      No way, no how, is that low carb. It’s a reduction from the normal insane guidelines, but not by a whole lot. I’d call it low carb if under 20%.

  1. What boggles my mind (and arouses my dark suspicions) is what the heck took them so long?

    I’m a type 2, and from literally day 1 I went low carb, even though the hospital docs tried to push me into “healthy” low fat, high carb (I wasn’t quite stupid enough to believe that the way to treat an inability to handle carb loads is to throw more carbs at it). That was 10 years ago. I went from taking supplemental insulin to just oral meds in weeks, and to no meds after a couple of years (with almost-normal blood sugar levels). Oh, and my cholesterol dropped, too (something I did not believe would happen).

    Weight loss? I can’t comment much on that; I needed to lose 5 pounds, and did, but I may well have done so anyway. Weight loss wasn’t my goal or of help (5 pounds from being very lean wasn’t enough to make a difference, I guess) but in all other aspects, low carb was even better than I’d hoped.

    I have never been able to understand the unadulterated quackery needed to recommend that a type 2 diabetic eat a lot of things like rice, pasta, and potatoes. All those contain massive amounts of starch, and even a high school chem student can tell you that starch *is* glucose (sugar). It’s glucose molecules joined by glucosides. And, when it encounters the first phase of your digestive tract it turns to free glucose, fast (15 minutes or less).

    So, any doctor recommending a diet high in starch is defacto recommending one high in sugar. And when dealing with a type 2 diabetic, it is beyond the pale to recommend then increasing sugar intake. They normally prescribe massive medication increases (euphemistically called “adjustments”) to handle all these carbs, and those meds have nasty side effects (such as the fact that high doses of pancreatic stimulators will burn out your pancreas.)

    Low carb works for type 2. The results are fast and obvious; most diabetics use a blood glucose meter, and with that they can see the results (lower blood glucose levels) within 24 hours of going low carb.
    That fast, that easy. Yet the medical establishment has been killing us for years via pushing us to go high carb.

  2. About a quarter century ago, I started gathering material for a diet and exercise book detailing how I avoided following my dad into an old age dominated by obesity. It was going to be called “I Heard the M&Ms Call My Name.” I never got around to finishing it, but among its principles was the idea of “relative calories,” with fibrous plants (such as kale) at 1x, meat protein as 2x, fats at 3x, and carbs at 4x. I always wondered why anybody accepted the standard dietary calorie, as if we had a vacuum furnace instead of a stomach. After I successfully dropped 30 pounds and kept it off, I tried to talk my dad into joining me. He preferred to go on injecting insulin so he could eat chips and drink Pepsi to his hearts’ content. He lived to be 87, but I think he’d’ve been more comfortable if he’d been 60 or 70 pounds lighter.

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