I had intended to point out that Dr. Michael Eades sponsored a Q&A with Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, and it's worth a read.
I found this quote concerning the general leanness of Asians on relatively carb-rich diets particularly interesting in light of my own conclusions:
The Asian question first. I do address this in the book and I address it again in the afterward of the paperback. There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem. Ultimately we can only guess at causes using this kind of observational evidence. To know anything with certainty we’d need the kind of randomized controlled trials I yearn for in the epilogue of GCBC.
It has been some time that I have thought it's less to do with carbohydrate and more to do with grains (wheat, in particular), sugar, vegetable oils, and all the heavy processing and refinement that goes into those commodities, as well as the thousands of cheap derivative Frankenfoods derived therefrom.
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And don't forget fruit. It looks as if fructose-laden fruit might very deleterious for us. Taubes has commented on fructose extensively:
From http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/16479/trouble-fructose/2
“The more fructose in the diet, the higher the subsequent triglyceride levels in the blood,” Taubes writes on page 200. While our health authorities have focused largely on the health risks of high LDL cholesterol levels, Taubes demonstrates that our triglyceride – fat – levels are even more important in terms of our risks for heart attacks.
And especially troublesome for people with diabetes is that high-fructose diets lead us to secrete more insulin, which in turn leads to more insulin resistance. That’s because fructose seems to block both the metabolism of glucose in the liver as well as the synthesis of glucose into glycogen, the way that the liver stores glucose.
It’s even worse, Taubes writes. Fructose is perhaps 10 times worse than glucose in the way our bodies form AGEs.
It happened that just as I was reading Taubes, my favorite Certified Diabetes Educator brought to my attention a thought-provoking interview with Dr. Lustig. This interview, broadcast originally on Australia’s ABC Ratio National, confirms the outlines of Taubes’s brief against fructose.
“The only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver,” Dr. Lustig told interviewer Norman Swan. The first thing that eating fructose does is causing an increase in uric acid, Dr. Lustig said. Fructose inhibits nitric oxide, which would otherwise reduce our blood pressure. “So fructose is famous for causing hypertension (high blood pressure).”
“The second is that fructose initiates what’s known as de novo lipogenesis, excess fat production….And then the last thing that fructose does in the liver is it initiates an enzyme….What happens is that your insulin receptors in your liver stop working….That means your insulin levels all over your body have to rise.”
When I wrote Dr. Lustig today to ask him the name of the enzyme that fructose initiates in the liver, he told me that they call it “c-jun N-terminal kinase-1” or just JNK-1 or Junk-1. "It serine phosphorylates a protein in the liver called IRS-1 (insulin receptor substrate-1), thereby rendering it inactive. This induces hepatic insulin resistance."
Dr. Lustig also sent me a PDF of a slides for a talk he recently gave that he called "The trouble with fructose." I swear that this just happens to be the same title I had already decided to use for this article. I have uploaded his article to my site.
Damning stuff, this. In fact, “we’re being poisoned to death,” Dr. Ludwig concludes.
It's interesting and ironic to me that fructose has now been shown to be so bad for us. Back when Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw wrote their now-classic "Life Extension," they were advocating the use of fructose because it did not elevate blood sugar the way sucrose did.
Yes. After reading Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (and thank you for that suggestion, Richard!) it became obvious to me that carbs generally can't be the problem. I've added some brown rice, yams, etc. back into my diet and have seen no weight or energy level problems, and I'm happier for it. Art de Vany's suggestions were just not working for me, so I'm very happy to have seen the good sense here.
I am still avoiding wheat and fructose though, especially the fructose (which includes sucrose, which is just 50/50 fructose and glucose). The glucose from starch doesn't seem to be a problem.
This makes sense to me too from an evolutionary perspective. Humans are omnivores, and plants store their excess energy as starch (glucose chains). Root vegetables could be quite calorically dense even before agriculture. I would expect that human digestion would be able to break this down safely, just like the fat in animals. Fructose on the other hand would never have been encountered in high concentrations very often. Honey would have been the only source, and that not often.
Patrick, can we get a link to your site? I'd like to see that PDF. Thanks.
Re: fructose…
Interestingly, though I don't eat a lot, I do consume fruit — probably the equivalent of a couple apples per day in terms of weight, spread amongst grapes, melons, cherries, berries (primarily) and assorted others.
I've taken to making fruit smoothies 2-3 times per week, but with either heavy cream or coconut milk (coconut milk and mango? AWESOME!). The batch is usually for 2-4 people, 6 OZs each. Sometimes I'll add a teaspoon of honey, not always.
I tend to think a little is better than none, or lots, but I'm prepared to be wrong (as always).
In the end, I think fructose ought to come from eating fruit with the fiber, such that it's a natural way of consuming it. Fruit juice is worse than candy bars. So, when I make these smoothies, it's always with a quantity of fruit that would constitute but a mere snack — not like 2 dozen oranges it would take to make a large OJ.
if wheat is a culprit, then how do you explain healthy agrarian populations who cultivated and ate wheat for thousands of years? are there any populations that ate lots of wheat?
i'm not sure personally, but i tend to blame the sum of industrial production and processing of our food more than individual ingredients.
These hypotheses really need to be further tested. Just carbs? Or certain carbs? I am inclined to believe it is certain carbs. I think wheat is very bad.
But — personally, there is no way I could lose weight right now eating fruit. Every time my carb intake goes higher than about 30 g. per day, I stall in weight loss. Which pretty much means I can't eat fruit right now. I am still tweaking and figuring out exactly what it is I can and can't eat. For some of us, a natural diet cutting out junk alone will do it. For others (like myself) we got fat on natural food and there is simply no junk to cut out. Potatoes alone would have made me fat, I think. And I really never ate very much sugar. There was some but it was just not excessive. Dessert once a week or so. However, I did eat pasta and bread if you consider that junk. So it is quite possible that once I lose all my weight, I might be able to add things like potatoes and fruit back in. However, I'm just not sure. I will try it. But I most certainly won't ever eat bread or pasta again in any significant amounts. And being a small person, even a single apple (27 grams carbs) would significantly raise my insulin levels.
Phil, I'm not aware of any agrarian populations that ate wheat and were healthy. The Egyptians ate plenty of it and weren't very healthy with lots of evidence of heart disease and obesity in ancient Egyptians. Weston Price documented only two European "tribes" eating grains that were healthy and they also ate significant amounts of animal products (cheese, red meat, and fish). And notably, they did not eat wheat. They ate oats or rye and always sprouted and in their whole grain form. So I'm personally inclined to believe that wheat is the worst grain and refinement of it is even worse, but I honestly do not yet know the biochemical reasons for this.
Monica:
Certainly every individual is different. Throughout my own weight loss I've eaten some amount of fruit (along with the occasional cheat meal, or a bit of bread now and then; also, potato now and then). Now, of course, I also do the very intense weight training for 30-minutes twice per week. I'm certain it contributes a great deal, but I don't know if it makes ALL the difference.
At any rate, my experience has been to lose around 10 pounds rapidly, almost "magically," in a matter of days or couple of weeks at most, and then, stay completely stalled within 2-3 pounds either way for about 2 months, then lose another 10 pounds, and so on.