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Low-carb diet facts
Feature by Jonny Bowden
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about low-carb diets because at this time of the year you are bombarded by messages of weight loss.
I find that the whole concept of low-fat or no fat foods is quite misguided and diets like the Atkins Diet that suggests carbs are evil make me shake my head.
I was reading an article Jonny Bowden wrote on low fat diets where he explains why not all low-carb diets are created equally and there are some basics facts you should know about.
I guess, if you have 50, 100 or 200 lbs to lose then adopting a low carb diet at first may help with your weight loss goals, but then you have to quickly learn how to eat a healthy carb portion that falls into your recommended daily intake.
If you want to understand more about Jonny Bowden’s approach to low carb, I’ve included an excerpt of his article below.
>>> Living Low Carb with Jonny Bowden
Having just finished the revised and expanded edition of my 2004 best-seller “Living Low Carb: Controlled-Carbohydrate Eating for Long-Term Weight Loss
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about definitions.
>>> How exactly do we define low-carb, anyway?
For years, low-carb suffered from bad publicity. Atkins – a superb nutritionist and very smart guy — couldn’t shake the stigma of recommending “pork rinds” (a recommendation that was taken out of context) and people who didn’t know any better thought his diet forbade all carbohydrates (it most certainly doesn’t).
Then there was the ketosis confusion. Ketosis — a harmless metabolic state that the body goes into when carbohydrate intake is very low — became identified with low-carb diets largely because early editions of Atkins’ books stressed ketosis as a desirable goal for the first stage of the Atkins diet (which limited carbs to 20 grams a day).
But very few low-carb diets put the body into ketosis.
Then there was the American Dietetic Association and its spokespeople, who frequently have a questionable relationship with the truth. These folks even characterized Barry Sears’ “The Zone: A Dietary Road Map to Lose Weight Permanently : Reset Your Genetic Code : Prevent Disease : Achieve Maximum Physical Performance
>>> So what exactly is a low-carb diet?
The American Dietetic Association designates “low carbohydrate diets” as less than 130 grams a day (or 26% of calories from a 2000 calorie diet). Though I hardly think this is “low”, it seems to be a decent working definition, given that most Americans consume a whopping 300 grams of carbs a day! (Just for the record, carbohydrate consumption before the epidemic of obesity averaged 43%, just about what is recommended by Dr. Sears in “The Zone”.)
According to Richard Feinman, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and head of the Nutrition and Metabolism Society (of which I am a proud member), 26%-45% of calories from carbs is a good range for what we might call “moderate” or “controlled” carbohydrate eating. According to Feinman, less than 30 grams a day should be referred to as a “very low carbohydrate ketogenic diet”; the term “ketogenic diet” should be reserved for the therapeutic approach to epilepsy, for which it works quite well.
Some low-carb diets for weight loss limit carbs strictly (20-30 grams) for the first couple of weeks (the Atkins Induction Phase), then add them back gradually. Many health professionals and weight loss experts believe that you can get most of the benefits of “controlled carb eating” with anywhere up to 100 grams a day. In a recent blog, I talked about a study in which they used a vegan version of Atkins that contained 130 grams of carbs a day and everyone still lost weight and had improvements in their risk factors for heart disease to boot.
Remember — hard as it is to believe — your body has no physiological requirement for carbohydrate. That’s not to say you shouldn’t eat carbs- you should!
But if you’re looking to lose weight and improve your health, you should get the vast majority of them from vegetables and fruits.
Carbs from fruits and vegetables are loaded with vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, fibre and other good stuff that your body thrives on. And you can eat more vegetables and berries than you can imagine and still stay in the range of 100-130 grams of carbs a day! Add to that about 100-120 grams of protein and about 60 grams of fat, and you’ve got a blueprint for health and weight management that will work for just about anyone.
>>> If you’re looking for a way to boost your weight loss, consider checking out Dr. Bowden’s super-charged training program: Diet Boot Camp
Photo by chotda
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July 6th, 2010 at 9:03
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