Eating Low Carb?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Grain exports and domestic sales are huge money. Wheat exports are something like 20 million metric tons per year. I don’t know how much we use domestically. The grain industry has a vested interest in influencing USDA dietary recommendations.</p>

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<p>You could try tracking your carbs first with a web tool and then dial them down. There’s nothing that says that you have to be at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent. You can figure out what you’re doing now and then dial it down 10 or 20 percent and see how you feel.</p>

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<p>Yes. There are many degrees of “low carb”. Honestly, just not eating carbs morning, noon, and night and in-between would be a “low carb” change for most of us. The standard American diet is carb-loading all day every day, like we are prepping for the Boston marathon. Not such a great diet for sitting at a desk.</p>

<p>There are several approaches that people try. Some advocate a severe cold-turkey approach to very low carb at the start and then adding back some carbs. I did a more gradual approach, where I progressively whacked carbs from my diet. Here’s where I would start if I were doing it again or recommending a approach to a friend:</p>

<p>Step 1:
Stop drinking sugar. Drinking soda, sweet tea, fruit juice, or sports drinks is the absolute worst possible thing you can do. It causes insulin resistance. It causes diabetes. It causes coronary artery disease. And, the sugar is converted directly into fat by the liver. It’s silly to even think about losing weight as long as you are drinking sugar. This isn’t even one where you want to “cut back”. Just stop.</p>

<p>Step 2:
Look at your diet and cut out as much sugar as you can. Candy, breakfast cereals, desserts. We all have our own ability to make changes, but start chipping away at it. If it means one scoop of ice cream instead of two, start there. Make a change. Then, look for the next one.</p>

<p>Step 3:
Contrary to conventional wisdom, there’s no such thing as “heart healthy grains”. Grains are what you feed to cattle to fatten them up for market and people aren’t much different. So, start with the junk grains: crackers, chips, pretzels, bagels, cereals… Look at your diet and start chipping away at the worst of them.</p>

<p>Step 4:
Once you’ve worked your way through the first three steps, then start looking at ways to cut back on breads, pastas, and so forth. These foods are not friends to your waistline. What I did was allow one meal a week for a “carb-fest” – pasta, pizza, or bread. Now, it might be once a month. </p>

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<p>Do not be afraid of eating fat. There are only three things you can eat: protein, fat, and carbs. Most of us can only eat so much protein and we have to eat something. So, it is very hard to eat low-carb and low-fat at the same time. That’s called starvation and it’s not a very effective long-term strategy. One of the real disasters in nutrition has been all the “low-fat” versions of products. In many cases, the fat was replaced with sugar, which is infinitely more damaging that the fat it replaced.</p>

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<p>This is great
The inspiration that I needed to get started! I appreciate your detailed answers. I am impressed with your success stories!</p>

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<p>Yes, a lot of nutrition experts think that the rise in obesity in the US can be traced largely to the low-fat edicts starting a couple decades ago. Fat got replaced by carbs, sugar was added to everything, eating carbs begets eating more carbs, and well, here we are.</p>

<p>I feel really bad that I was a good mom, and bought my always hungry son things like zwiebacks and pretzels to snack on, since they were “low fat.” Carb craving and weight issues have been things he’s had to deal with now into adulthood (luckily he was into sports when young, and has an active job, but I would go back and feed him differently if I could.)</p>

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<p>Amen. Not to mention all that “healthy” apple juice that we fed 'em as toddlers. Probably the single worst thing you could give a kid.</p>

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<p>I did the same things goldfish and apple juice</p>

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<p>Where do beans fit in as far as carbs go? (black beans etc)</p>

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<p>1 gram fat, 41 grams carbs, 15 grams of protein. There is a ton of fiber in there (15 grams) and some remove fiber grams from total carbs. I’d say that beans are fine in a low-carb diet but I’d want to offset them with something else like eggs, beef, soy, etc. I think that beef chili is pretty good (homemade, the stuff in cans usually has more sugar than I like).</p>

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<p>The typical US diet is excessively high in both carbs and fats, with both carbs and fats heavily tilted toward the “junkier” kinds.</p>

<p>Indeed, during the period when the government was suggesting to lower fat intake, Americans’ fat intake rose, although it fell in percentage terms because carb intake rose more. Meanwhile, physical activity outside of formalized exercise and sports declined.</p>

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<p>Actually, the US grain industry would love it if everyone in the US ate a meat-heavy low-carb diet, since much more grain would be needed to produce the meat for human consumption than if humans just ate the grain.</p>

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<p>I’m sure that the grain industry has economists that already see through that fallacy.</p>

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<p>It is not a fallacy; why else would poor agricultural societies eat a mainly grain-based diet, while richer societies add more meat?</p>

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<p>Go into your local grocery and compare the cost of a pound of corn chips to a pound of beef.</p>

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<p>The raw corn input for each product is not necessarily the main component of the grocery store price. In any case, a better comparison would be a pound of beef or other corn-fed meat to a pound of corn tortillas, or a pound of processed beef (e.g. beef jerky) to a pound of processed corn (e.g. corn chips).</p>

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<p>I guess you’re making a stronger case for my argument then.</p>

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<p>Beans would be pretty far down the priority list of carbs to kick out of your diet. They are high carb. However, they are also high fiber. The fiber slows the absorption of the carbohydrates. The real killers are carbs that hit with big quick load. Drinking sugar is the worst because you can drink the sugar of five oranges in a minute. The liver has no prayer of metabolizing sugar that quickly. Slightly different mechanism, but similar problems occur with rapidly digested refined grains. Bread, pasta, cookies, cake – all that is instantly converted to glucose in the stomach. That’s fine if you are running a marathon this afternoon, but – for the rest of us – it triggers a series of events (insulin spike, converting excess glucose to fat, etc.) that are not conducive to managing our waistlines!</p>

<p>Our ability to tolerate carbs tends to decrease as we age because most of us get more insulin resistant over time. This means that we release more and more insulin when we eat carbs. Among other things, insulin tells the body to store fat instead of burning it. When we release so much insulin that our pancreas can’t make enough, then we have Type 2 diabetes.</p>

<p>I found that I could no longer eat at age 50 as I could when I was 25. Of course, it’s still calories. You just get an extra metabolism bonus if the calories you cut are sugar and carbs.</p>

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<p>On the contrary, the amount of corn that goes into a pound of beef is greater than which goes into a pound of corn tortillas, so the corn farmers would rather people eat beef than corn.</p>

<p>Of course, junk food companies have different motivations from the farmers. But some of them can probably switch between corn chips and pork rinds as low carb dieting increases and decreases in popularity.</p>

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<p>Wrong again. On economics</p>

<p>People wouldn’t be able to afford beef if consumption went a lot higher.</p>

<p>Of course if you can show me a commercial where grain producers said that whole grains make people fat so that you should eat beef or chicken or tofu instead to be healthier, I’d guess you’d have some evidence that the grain lobby agrees with you.</p>

<p>Evidence of a co-marketing arrangement would work too.</p>

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<p>I understand what you are saying about fruit juice/sodas (love my Pepsi) and glucose/insulin. Also got it about carbs w/fiber and w/o/fiber.</p>

<p>So what about eating actual pieces of fruit? Does the fiber in the apple help with the sugars in the apple like with beans?</p>

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<p>I have trouble eating healthfully and feeling full. I know fiber is best for staying full longer as well as fats but any suggestions for low carb/fat food that will stick around for awhile and not leave one feeling hungry in an hour?</p>

<p>As an aside, I have lost 35# since 4/1/12 but am now struggling with maintenance and definitely have binge days when I make up for a week of low carbs in a day.</p>