When my doctor first recommended low carb for weight loss and my insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome I was skeptical. Especially when I asked "how low" and my doctor admitted honestly that he didn't know.
Frankly, I didn't really give his recommendation much consideration at all, because I was convinced that low carb diets were "dangerous," and that there were tons of studies out there proving it.
About a year ago (a couple years after my gp's recommendation) another doctor recommended low carb (a woman who had lost almost 100 lbs herself on low carb), and I started giving it more serious consideration.
In that year, I've read and reread more of the research. Some of the older studies and some of the newer ones. As I do so, the more I am convinced that grains may not be the wonder foods we've often been taught they are.
Even as I look at the research, a lot of the low carb diet studies were actually studying virtually no carb diets (not only large amounts of fatty meat, but large amounts of processed meats, and virtually no vegetation at all).
But there are many studies that indicate that a low carb diet, especially if it contains lots of low carb vegetables does not pose a health hazzard, at least not to everyone.
I'm more convinced that there may be some truth to metabolic typing (the theory that different people require different proportions of carb/fat/proteins and it may be a factor of their metabolic type).
Diet research, I believe really is in its infancy. There's a lot more we don't know than what we do. The reason most weight loss therapies are statistically ineffective may be because we're trying to find a one-size-fits-all approach.
If you were studying a medication's effectiveness on relieving headaches, and you made no attempt to distinguish between types of headaches, you might conclude that the medication was ineffective when it really was very effective, but just for migraines. You've got to know that there are subtypes of headaches, or your research will be invalid.
I think that may be true of weight loss as well. The person who has been fat, virtually from birth may be very different than the person who gained weight in middle age. Also, the person with 15 lbs to lose may be very different from the person who has 80 lbs to lose who may ber very different from the person with 300 lbs to lose. There may be a few subtypes of overweight folks, there may be 200. It's possible that the therapies that work for one type, don't work for others.
I'm learning that I definitely DO have physiological responses to sugars and starches that are very dramatic and specific. Just one example is headaches. I thought I just had sinus problems that resulted in a near constant headache. It wasn't always a bad headache, but it was just always there. I recently discovered that if my carb consumption is low enough (lower than I though I needed to eat) my headaches disappear. They don't just lessen in intensity (which they did on a moderate carb diet), they DISAPEAR!
Just for a quality of life issue (even if low carb diets were unhealthy in the long term), it's a persuasive argument for me to continue. It's so great to be headache free, that I almost wouldn't care if low carb diets were unhealthy. Although as I research, I don't think that's the case, and I'm confident that my quarterly bloodwork would detect signs of that. I have a pretty comprehensive blood panel drawn every three months, so if all of the health indicators stopped moving in the better direction, I might have to reconsider my food plan. That's a far cry from deciding that all low and lower carb diets are dangerous because some people have a raised cholesterol with Atkins (and usually these studies don't really study Atkins - they study long term use of induction, and they don't monitor whether the people are following it correctly or whether they are using the popular misconception of Atkins as the "all bacon, no veggies except an occasional small salad" diet).
Last edited by kaplods; 01-02-2009 at 01:12 PM.
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Blood Sugar, Memory & Low Carb
