The internet is rife with health misinformation and it's easy to buy into scientifically unsound propaganda. Be very careful which sources you adopt for your diet council.

Yeah okay I'm a biology major and that stuff just screams bull to me...

That's like my diabetic friend trying to convince me that it's better to eat a candy bar than an orange. I'm like uh and that's why you weight OVER 300 lbs... An orange has 80-90 calories and is very filling while a candy bar is easily 230+ calories....

Obviously everything in moderation- but unless you eat 50 oranges a day then fruits and veggies aren't going to hurt you and make you overweight.

Ditto Drina. I have a hard time with any source that isn't okay with eating fruits and whole grains--true food from God in my book--the foods our ancient ancestors enjoyed and are recognized and used by our bodies in every sense of the word when properly conusmed. The antioxidants found in a rich variety of fruits as well as vegetables (yes, even the starchy ones) cannot compare to anything in a pill or any amount of vienna sausages, bacon or pot roast!

You know, I am being pulled two different ways. Seven weeks ago I started with a personal trainer 2x a week, plus cardio 4x a week, plus started a standard diet plan tracking calories and eating only the "good" stuff. The first 5 weeks, I didn't lose a pound. I was floored. Keep in mind that I wasn't exercising at all before, nor was I watching what I ate.

So the last 10 days I stopped eating the whole grain bread and most other grains, upped my veggies and meats, still ate some fruit but not as much -- and immediately lost 2 (now 4) pounds. I still stayed within the calorie limits I started with, but I am actually now losing weight.

I know weight and health are two different things, but I do think I will continue to cut down on the grains and concentrate on protein and veggies. Thanks!

Thighs Be Gone, the incredible hyperbole and emotional baiting alone should be enough to tip most people off that the arguments contained within the article are suspect. People don't become obese by eating apples and oatmeal unless they gorge themselves in an extreme way. The problem isn't fruit and grains; it's jumbo-sized slices of pizza dripping with grease, cheeseburgers piled high with bacon and a side of fries, Pop-tarts and chocolate-chip muffins for breakfast, and a twinkie or three after every meal. To suggest that nutrient-packed fruits and whole grains are responsible for the obesity epidemic is just plain asinine and shows a complete disregard for mountains of scientific evidence.

This quote from the article is perfect:

"Imagine a nation with low to zero rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity and cancer"

It's called Japan, where the diet is primarily comprised of carbohydrates (though, of course, their rates of disease are starting to rise now that more fat, cholesterol and processed foods are entering into their diets). Now, I expect someone will argue that different cultures have different nutritional needs, which is certainly true. But that doesn't change the fact that the ideas promoted in this psychologically manipulative article are rubbish. But then again, what else can you expect from a man who published a book comparing modern medical practice to genocide?

Wow, I must be about to die. I poison myself all the time!

I'm poisoning myself with couscous and honeydew as I write this

Another great quote from the article:

"So when we eat whole grains or multi grains, be it bread, cereal or pasta, these will be broken down to glucose molecules and cholesterol and fat will be made. This applies to the sugar in brown rice and whole wheat pasta too. So every time we eat more of what we are told is healthy, we are actually giving the body what it needs to create dangerous molecules"

Which reminds of a website about, oh, I think they call it dihyrooxide or something like that. Very dangerous stuff. Funny website.

We also inhale oxygen with every breath. There are no free radicals without oxygen. With every breath, we are "giving the body what it needs to create dangerous molecules."

The article is sad, really, because not all the concepts associated with low or lower carb are bad, but an article like this makes it look stupid.

When I read the article, I was surprised that it wasn't more extreme in its advice. Boiling health and weight issues down to "too many carbohydrates" may not be nearly as far fetched as it seems. Whole grains and fruits may not be contributing to carbohydrate overload as much as refined sugars and grains, and yet they can still contribute. Eating fruits and whole grains to the exlcusion of healthy fats, higher protein foods, and non-starchy veggies, may not solve the problem. That's what I read from the article, but to villainize the food groups entirely, I think feeds into the American tendency to find propoganda easier to swallow than the balanced truth.

I have noticed that grains and fruits do give me some problems. It may make some sense to say these aren't "natural" foods, in that grains are not generally edible until cooked or processed, and that modern fruits bear little resemblance to natural fruits (not only in sugar content, but that "in the wild," fruit doesn't sit around until it reaches optimal sugar content - and if you wait for that, you're not going to get any because all of the other fruit-loving critters will have eaten it all). Our "natural" diet, as in what people ate during most of human development, probably was lower in grains and fruit. The former because it took a lot of work to process, and the second because there was a lot of competition for such foods. Honey was "naturally" part of the diet, but in very tiny, infantesimal quantities, as it was neither abundant nor easy or worth the trouble to acquire.

We do eat a lot more grains (mostly not whole grains, but even whole grains) than our ancestors probably did - and a lot more than most current cultures do. That doesn't make grains evil, it does mean that in America we don't "do" moderation very well.

There might be a link to grains or at least gluten grains and autoimmune disease. The link may be simple carbohydrates or to the gluten itself. There's been just enough research evidence to be "interesting," and not nearly enough to be conclusive. (That my autoimmune disease and fibromyalgia seems to flare when I eat more carbohydrates/grains, for me, is enough evidence to keep me experimenting to find the best proportion for myself for weight loss and feeling good).

A lot of the problem, though is that we want to think of foods as healthy or unhealthy - there is no such animal. It cannot be determined in a vaccuum, because any food can be unhealthy if eaten to excess or to the exclusion of other foods. Also, what your health problem is, determines to a large degree what healthy means.

If you are starving to death, then a candy bar could be more healthy than an orange (however, that's not normally, the typical American problem). If you were forced to choose between living on candy bars, and living on oranges - you might want to pick candy bars because they contain fats, carboyhydrates, AND proteins - more "nutrition" than an orange in that sense, but since the macronutrients: fats, carbohydrates, and proteins are not scarce in the average American diet, why would we make choices based on such - instead what is probably more important in the US and many other modern industrialized nations are "micronutrients" like vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other phytonutrients some of which we may not even have discovered yet.

As is often said, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." You have to read an awful lot to get a good "big picture" understanding of nutrition. By the time it's condensed to the level of the popular media, it's lost most of it's truth and a good deal more of it's practical value.

Julie, you're probably thinking of the killer dihydrogen monoxide molecule!

I agree with your last point that there are some merits to cutting carbs, especially the over-processed junk foods and sweets. As a nation, it would benefit us greatly to nix the Krispy Kremes, Wonder bread, Fritos, McDonald's fries and Oreo cookies. But no, I'm sorry, replacing oranges and kiwis with butter and prime rib isn't going to make cancer, heart disease and obesity go away.

This guy is a quack, plain and simple.

Kaplods, the article essentially proposed (quite explicitly, I may add) that by adding fruits and whole grains to our diets we are literally poisoning ourselves, and that to cure obesity and disease we ought to drastically reduce or eliminate them in favor of foods that are high in saturated fat and cholesterol.

Do you buy that?

[I] think this was written by the ghost of Dr.Atkins...........LOL!!!

Even Atkins wasn't this extreme.

If you believe that is the essential proposition, of course not, but I'm not convinced that was the author's intended proposition. I did not get from the article that the author believes that whole grains or fruits should be excluded from the diet, but that rather that they comprise far too much of the modern American diet (and I'm not sure I disagree with that).

To lose weight, I've found that I have to limit high-carb foods fairly drastically (and that eating whole grains and fruits "instead" of sugar and other refined carbohydrates didn't help all that much). I also feel much better (with fewer symptoms of fibromyalgia, arthritis, and autoimmune disease) on a diet that is much lower in sugar and carbohydrates (even "natural" ones) than I would have ever told you was healthy until only about a year ago. I still have trouble "believing it" (which is probably why I keep making mistakes, eating too many fruits and grains because I can't in my mind come to grips with the reality that these foods worsen my health issues and stall my weight loss - it still on some level fails to jive).

Remember that the food pyramid only recently cut the "recommended" servings of starches and grains from up to 11 to down to 6 (and still only recommends that "half" be whole grains).

I've tripled my meat consumption since having to cut carbohydrates, and my cholesterol levels are dropping (faster than my weight), so I'm not sure that even the argument that some of our grains and fruits should be replaced with higher protein (and even fattier) foods is completely bogus. In reading alot of the research that both exonerates and condemns Atkins, I've found a lack of evidence that the plan is universally harmful. For some people, the results speak for themselves. If you're eating a low carb diet, and all of your health indicators, including high blood pressure, blood sugar, lipid levels.... are improving, for as long as they are improving, is probalby a fair endorsement. Unfortunately we all can only be lab rat and scientist, as much of the research is not particularly compelling in favor of a universal healthy diet.

The native Inuit (eskimo) have very low incidence of heart disease (on their natural diet) and eat primarily meat and fat, with little vegetation (although what they do eat, like blueberries tend to be very high in antioxidant levels, and maybe a little goes a long way - it's also been said that seal or whale blubber has more vitamin C ounce for ounce than an orange). They also get tremendous amounts of exercise (I'm really wondering if exercise isn't the bigger piece of the puzzle - that activity level compensates for the "excesses" in a diet.)

It's a lot more complicated issue than it's often given credit for.