i never been anywhere near what people might call fat. But my weight has fluctuated over the years. At one point several years ago I was down to about 160 (after a trying a non gluten diet to cure the dizziness I’ve complained about. It didn’t work.) A couple years after that I ballooned up to 180 or so and it showed. Since then I probably float around 170. I usually don’t look fat but I sometimes have a smallish belly—sort of like the characters from Doonesbury.
As you can tell from reading this blog lately, I’ve been reading about diet and have been intrigued by the argument that carbs are the real cause of fattening. So for the past month or so I’ve been “sort of” avoiding carbs—not eating much toast, rice, pasta etc. It’s not something I’ve put much thought into, just a general disinclination towards carbs. (Not total avoidance. I had a hamburger with a white bread bun last night.) And I have clearly slimmed down quite a bit.
(To be more precise, I’ve really been avoiding simple carbs and sugars. I still eat a fair amount of beans which are a complex carb.)
So what is the crux of the argument against carbs? Gary Taubs is a science writer and the leading voice in the anti-carb movement. He has a semi-recent NY Times op-ed stating his point:
If obesity is a fuel-partitioning problem — a fat-storage defect — then the trigger becomes not the quantity of food available but the quality. Now carbohydrates in the diet become the prime suspects, especially refined and easily digestible carbohydrates (foods that have what’s called a high glycemic index) and sugars.
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The obvious mechanism: carbohydrates stimulate secretion of the hormone insulin, which works, among other things, to store fat in our fat cells.
Basically, carbs are sugar, and sugars spike your insulin causing your body to hoard fat (and ultimately set you up for diabetes.)
As Taubs states at the end of the piece, this is not an ironclad argument. More research needs to be done, blah, blah, blah. But he does voice the obvious thought.
From this perspective, the trial suggests that among the bad decisions we can make to maintain our weight is exactly what the government and medical organizations like the American Heart Association have been telling us to do: eat low-fat, carbohydrate-rich diets, even if those diets include whole grains and fruits and vegetables.
Now, I mentioned before that there was another time my weight dropped: when I was avoiding glutens (as well as dairy and a few other things. Not meat though.) When you skip glutens you avoid a lot of carbs—glutens are in bread, cereal etc. My one junk food treat in that time was potato chips which are gluten free. So, I was probably on a low carb diet, just not really thinking of it in those terms.
As a counterpoint to all this I offer my Dad who ate plenty of carbs, drank a fair amount, basically put no thought into his diet yet remained thin his whole life. (He did have heart issues though.) So there’s probably no one-size fits all method here. But I suspect fat’s reputation is going to rise in coming years and carbs’ will decrease.