Indecisive nutrition 'experts' should leave us alone [Bread will kill you, keep the cows off Atkins]

And now, the 2003 Nutritional Villain of the Year is - may I have a drum roll, please! - bread.

That's right, folks, the staff of life turns out to be a stake through your heart, if you read the latest reports. Bread makes you fat, they say.

Bread-phobia appears to be almost entirely due to the Atkins diet and all its low or no-carb permutations that have recently swept the country. The basic idea is that if you eat only meat, dairy products and vegetables you'll feel full and lose weight.

Bread sales across the country are falling like punched-down dough as chubby consumers shy away from carbohydrates. I heard all about this for the second or third time on a radio program on the way to work the other day. They were interviewing bakers who were wondering what to do to revive sales. Maybe they need a bread check-off.

Studies and anecdotal experience show that the Atkins diet works, at least in the short term. Close to home, both my parents lost weight in the first year. In recent months they haven't.

One veterinarian I chatted with about the diet wondered what happens to people's livers when they're on the Atkins diet for long periods of time. He knows what happens to cows that eat too much protein and not enough roughage.

Wasn't it just a few years ago that bread was the culinary darling du jour? But as with so many other foods, fame has proven to be treacherous. Look what happened to eggs, butter, chocolate and red meat. Two or three decades ago the once-beloved egg was suddenly renamed as the great villain, a nasty little thing that raised your cholesterol and gave you heart attacks.

Then real butter came under attack, and we were all supposed to eat margarine. Dairy products in general, once a cornerstone of the nutriiton pyramid, were suddenly discovered to be fattening and bad for you. So much for my childhood instructions to "drink lots of milk for strong bones."

The next victim was red meat. I don't remember exactly what the reasoning was behind that vilification, but we were to substitute with chicken and fish. Chocolate got a nutritional hatchet job for being fattening, probably because we love it so much. But that was then.

Now eggs are OK to eat again, since they're wonderfully complete nutritional packages. Cholesterol evidently has more to do with your genetic inheritance than your diet, though diet is still important for those who need to bring their levels under control.

Butter has been found to be better for your blood vessels than margarine, and red meat is great for adding vitamins and minerals to your diet, especially iron. Chocolate is a mood elevator and teeth protector. I knew all along it made me feel better; now many experts agree.

In the past two years many nutritionists have restored dairy products to a place of honor as the best source of calcium for a calcium defiecient nation. Several recent large studies have also shown that dairy is an aid to weight loss. The calcium and perhaps other components in dairy products have the effect of speeding up the metabolism, so you burn calories faster.

In the 1973 movie "Sleeper," actor Woody Allen played a vegetarian California health-food store owner who is cryogenically frozen and then thawed out 200 years later.

After he's properly re-warmed, his hosts offer him - to his horror - a healthy meal of steak and brownies to restore him to good health.

Of course, not all nutritional experts agree that eggs, meat, milk and butter are good guys again, but the tide has certainly turned.

I have great hopes that in a few years this smear campaign against bread will blow over and carbohydrates will be restored to their proper place in the national diet.

Before nutrition became a polticial issue, grade school students, myself included, were taught a pretty simple, user-friendly program for staying healthy and slim. The gist of it was that everyone should eat three moderate - moederate is a key concept, here - well-balanced meals each day.

Well-balanced meant a combination of meat and dairy, fruits and vegetables, and breads and starches. It did not mean a continuous intake of nutritionally worthless, high-calorie pop, chips and candy.

Maybe it's not so much what you eat, but how much, and how much you exercise. Not a revolutionary thought, exactly, but one that might be usefully revived from the dustbin of nutritional history.

Ann Hansen covers news in west-central Wisconsin and is the small acreage section editor for The Country Today. She may be reached at shansen@bloomer.net.

Ketosis and ketoacidosis are not different.

You really really really are embarrassing yourself here. The misrepresentations in your post are basically the whole post.

People, ketosis is a natural state. It is UNNATURAL to never go into ketosis. Only quite recently did man stop going into ketosis for extended periods. This was as a result of the agricultural revolution. Before then man went into ketosis for extended period. Ketosis and ketoacidosis are two separate thing. Ketosis occurs in a healthy adult. It is safe and beneficial. It is a healthy process. Ketone are the preferred food of the brain. (Contrary to the assertion that Redwood made that glucose was the only food the brain could use earlier.) Ketoacidosis occurs as a result of muscle wasting in very sick individuals and diabetics.

Man NEEDS absolutely no carbohydrates - NONE. Redwood has a carbivore type agenda here and he is pulling out all the carbivore lies.

Read the following links, Redwood need to go to continuing education if he thinks the brain doesn't use ketones only glucose. The human race would have died out thousand of years ago if he was right.

Low Carb Diets Feed Your Brain

Brain Metabolism During Fasting

A search on any of the red herrings he has trotted out will disprove them. i don't have time to do each and every last one but research anything he says before you believe it.

"Man NEEDS absolutely no carbohydrates - NONE. Redwood has a carbivore type agenda here and he is pulling out all the carbivore lies."

Tell you what, before I walk away from this, even with all the reputable organizations I have quoted and copied/pasted, maybe you can have an observation: What reason do I have to get onto a thread I didn't start, to talk to people I will probably never meet, to voice a minutely marketed opinion about something that won't cure aids or world hunger, and not getting anything out of it but name calling from you, to lie? I have nothing to gain in this by quoting out of my books or using the web because it is in reach. I voiced an opinion based upon studies and using studies, and I get nothing out of it but attempted public degradation from someone I don't know, nor care to if they have this little to offer, by attacking the idea without all the facts. You disregarded the organizations I quoted and posted with "Did a lot of culling to get those ehh."

I probably should hve walked away earlier, but I had some folks like LadySmith asked me some honest questions that I felt I should answer to be honest.

I am walking away now. The last time I "got into a discussion" on a web site about this, it ended the same way. My time is running short on this planet, and I don't have it to waste on people that have nothing to offer but name calling and attacking the messenger rather than reviewing the information I provided. And that is obvious as you have not entered one piece of discussion to repute the John Hopkins or University Med Centers entries. It has all been at me and not the information. Thank you, no thanks. It is no longer an intelligent discussion if it ever was.

I wish you a long life, illness free, and in good health. Sometimes people, who have something to gain, sell used cars under falsehoods and partial truths to make money. That is what I feel to many of the low carb/high protein diet pushers do. Can it work? According to reputable medical organizations, yes. But the price to pay in too many study results, is a little too high for my taste. You can have it.

I wish you a long life, illness free, and in good health. Sometimes people, who have something to gain, sell used cars under falsehoods and partial truths to make money. That is what I feel to many of the low carb/high protein diet pushers do. Can it work? According to reputable medical organizations, yes. But the price to pay in too many study results, is a little too high for my taste. You can have it.

Thank God I discovered low carb because now I will have longer life, I have reversed illnesses directly related to low fat/high carb diets.

That is what many of us here are saying. For a significant amount of us the low fat diet was killing us. Once we started eating a low carb diet we literally felt almost reborn in a way. I know that my health issues completely reversed themselves with a change of diet alone.

I know of diabetics who have basically reversed their diagnosis simply by changing their diet. I know of several people who have lost tremendous amounts of weight with this change in diet without struggling with ever constant hunger, brain fog, mood swings, constant fatigue and with abundant energy.

However, through all of this I have realized that what works for some may not work for others and that is okay. I respect others enough to let them make up their own mind about their diets. However, I will never ever eat low fat fake crappy tasting food again.

If grain adds the tenderizing component of fat to a steer, why would it behave differently when ingested by humans?

Because grain doesn't "add" fat. Because human metabolism is different from that of bovine animals. Because humans make almost no de novo fat from carbohydrates, as do cattle and pigs. Virtually all the fat that people carry around is of dietary origin. It gets sent to the adipose cells for storage when the caloric intake of the diet chronically exceeds the caloric expenditure of daily life. The reason this happens is that the energy has got to be put somewhere and the body has no storage for protein, only a few days storage for carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen), and almost unlimited storage for fats. In a diet (meaning customary intake of foods, not weight-loss regimen) that is hypercaloric, the body switches substrate usage away from fats and toward carbohydrates and proteins. It does this to protect the liver. The long term result is that the excess daily calories get stored in adipose tissue in the form of fat from the diet. If you were to take a representative sample of all the fats and oils you've eaten, their chain-lengths and proportions, over the past couple of years and were to compare the profile to that of a sample taken from your adipose tissue, they'd be almost identical.

There's as much picture thinking and screwy reasoning going on with fat and carbohydrates as there is with bovine growth hormones. Why won't bovine growth hormones do anything to humans (or other primates) while it has an effect on non-primates? Because the bovine growth hormone is incapable of docking with the primate growth hormone receptor. Primate growth hormones, though, can dock with non-primate growth hormone receptors.

I wish you the same and am truly sure you are in better shape than I given your job and opportunities to work out. I have nothing to gain from pushing low-carb. I am glad Atkins did. He persevered, made money (nothing wrong with that), and provided me a better understanding of what natural whole foods are.

I would make one suggestion to you - actually read his books. It makes discussing them easier. At least you didn't call him Adkins!

I wish you a long life, illness free, and in good health.....

If I may be so bold,

Bang your head against the wall sufficient times, and you are rewarded with a knot on the forehead.
You know the level of (in)sanity or innocent ignorance that must be possessed in order to utter the preceding dietary claims. The same principle applies to many arguments on this site.

State your views/credentials/knowledge once, then leave it alone, especially when replies are on their face without foundation or basis. You will then live longer. :-)

Atkins does not "totally cut out carbs". During the induction phase (1st two weeks) one limits carbs to 20 gms/day. And those carbs should be good carbs (whole grains, nuts, veggies, etc.) Later one increases carbs depending on their tolerance, weight loss goals, and exercise calorie budget. Most carbs in the US marketplace are processed junk foods - aviod them and one can achieve lots of health benefits. Eat them and one tempts all sorts of health problems!

"I would make one suggestion to you - actually read his books"

Just to straighten out a misunderstanding: I read his book, and owned the cookbook also. (I gave both to my daughter) From my entry #62:

"If the health conditions mentioned, even the most common one mentioned, diarrhea which is reported to start in most patients that get it in about two weeks, start, then the patient will discontinue the diet. Hence the regaining of the weight lost. I got it at about that time when I tried the diet myself. I lost weight on the Atkins, until the diarrhea got so bad that I was unable to function normally."

I entered this to remind you I have investigated the diet and have even participated. I'm not shooting something down from around the corner, but I would never recommend anything that is questionable, especially by name medical organizations, with possible health risks.

Oh, and it is not my job. I'm not a nutritionist, I'm a physical trainer and I run fitness facilities and mass train for the government preparing soldiers. I am not paid by the soldier and I am not gaining anything with any dietary recommendations. I aim them at nutritionists for consumption. Nutrition is not my field, but I have received some training and trust those who have. Thank you for the recommendation, been there, done that.

I stand corrected. I apologize.

I think the dangers of high carb consumption are coming out. The diet the government recomended in the early 70's culminating in the food pyramid in 92 is not a diet good for man either historically or medically. Strangely the Canadian food rainbow came out in 92, and the English "The Balance of Good Health" came out in 94 (commisioned in in 92). 1992 was a good year all in all for the grain producers! Con Agra probably spent a little money lobbying in the preceding years.

As to the diarrhea, I get it when I add carbs back to my diet. From what I understand some people get constipated on the low carb diets. It never happened to me. Good luck. I hope we both will continue to read. It is hard for me to consider a high carb diet as I feel so much better when wheat, corn and potatoes are not in my diet. I eat a little beans and rice though not on a daily basis.

We agree to disagree.

This is anecdotal, but here's the results of being on low fat diets for many years. My now aged mother, always on the heavy side, has since the 1960's when she worked in the food service industry and learned about the "benefits" of a low fat diet and exercise, has consistently followed this regimen. She is still 50 lbs overweight, heavily arthritic with deformed and inflamed hands and knees, can hardly walk having required knee surgery and probably needing it in other joints as well. She also has had interstitial cystitis for years, which was alleviated for awhile when she cut out carbs as an experiment (she also lost thirty lbs.) but immediately resumed when she went off the diet. She did not like the idea of eating all that protein and fat, and went back to the starches. I came to call it the Russian peasant diet.
I am convinced that high carb diets cause an arthritis type condition, and can see some of it occurring in myself especially when I splurged around the holidays. My dad, who ate what my mother cooked or served eventually became a diabetic (although it was not diagnosed until just before his death) and developed the most arthritically deformed hands of any person I have seen. None of his relatives had a history of arthritis. Maybe they both had Celiac sprue, but they were so indoctrinated in the benefits of high carb diet that it would have made no difference. I think a person can often clue into the truth by just looking critically at the world around them. Government agencies are too much into the politics of the day to be a source of truth. And very few people can eat according to the official food pyramid without eventually looking like a hog. Maybe that's the goal!!.We are going to be auctioned off by the pound by the government.

Bread is unhealthy, and I have posted that here in the past.

Humans did not evolve to eat bread.

True. Are you familiar with Celiac Sprue?

Both of you are getting carts before horses. The cause of celiac sprue does not lie in bread (or gluten) but in defective production of digestive enzymes followed by immune response often after an infection of the digestive tract that breaches the intestinal mucosa, making possible the development of the immune response in the first place (this is why feeding solid foods to infants is a bad idea--their intestinal mucosa still has leaky tight junctions and proteins can enter and provoke an immune response with life-long consequences). Some people are unable to rapidly break down aspartame because of a defect in the metabolism of phenylalanine. This doesn't, though, mean that aspartame is the cause of phenylketonuria or is dangerous and should be avoided.

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