The Low-Carb Highway to Hell
Thursday, December 8th, 2011
I had an unsettling encounter today with someone purporting to help people lose weight and become healthier. It left me a little heated and I thought I’d wing my thoughts about it instead of the usual process of researching and constructing a post the way I usually do and have done over the years for articles in numerous national newspapers and magazines.
Ageing is often about gaining weight, sometimes too much, and the attendant ills from diabetes to high blood pressure, etc demand that we deal with this problem in an honest and effective way if we are to live the long, healthy lives we desire.
I’m often approached by people who want me to sign up as a pimp for their health products. I won’t do it because it conflicts with my message that your health is in your hands, not at the bottom of some bottle of pills pushed by a company with profit, not health in mind. In addition, I think it’s unethical to give people health advice and then turn around and sell them a product.
Something about this woman seemed different. Sincere and heartfelt even. I eschewed my normal screening questions and agreed to meet her to hear her pitch. She told me of her husband’s downward spiral into diabetes, amputation and death and her own unhealthy lifestyle as a chef that caused her to gain weight and lose control over her own health.
She had involved herself in some program, lost lots of weight and now wanted to get the weight-loss/healthy message out to others and I sounded like just the sort of person they needed to reach others and help them. Participants paid only five dollars to attend their get-togethers and it seemed to me to be a possible way to meet potential clients for my personal training. (Yes, potential ethical conflict but a guy’s gotta eat!)
When I saw her body size I should have been on alert. She was a big woman, not that there’s anything wrong with that. We sat in a booth at a groovy bar and sipped lime and sodas. She spieled, I spieled. When I saw the corporate-looking program bag on the seat next to her my radar went up. When she began describing the high-protein, low-carbohydrate regime that had helped her lose so much weight I groaned inwardly. How could I get involved with a program that advocated nutritional irresponsibility masquerading as a health boost?
It was the word “ketosis” that got all alarm bells clanging. For those of you unfamiliar, ketone bodies(KBs) are produced from fat when not enough carbohydrate(complex sugar) is available to feed the brain, red blood cells and kidneys which require sugar to operate. KBs can accumulate to hazardous levels so the sugar-starving body switches to converting muscle (and/or dietary protein) to sugar to prevent the body sliding down a hellish path to ketone acidosis. You can’t keep raiding protein for sugar, so the body switches back to KBs, and so on.
Why doesn’t it just burn fat for energy when hungry? Well, fat cannot be converted to sugar under any circumstances for the poor old brain, red blood cells and kidneys so it converts fat into KBs for these essential bodily functions as a short-term stopgap. It would be wonderful if the body just burned it’s fat reserves in times of hunger but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
These processes have been arrived at after millions of years of evolution in extremely harsh environments. Don’t blame me. I just sat for week after week in more face-to-face nutrition lectures than a doctor receives in order to qualify as a personal trainer. I sat for 4 months in the State Reference Library, devouring and notating every nutrition biochemistry text there in order to bone up on the Krebs Cycle, nucleoneogenesis and lipid metabolism so I could refute with authority the crap that is peddled in my industry as weight-loss science.
These bodily processes are near-miraculous and reflect the tough times our ancestors went through. Lent and other religious fasts last only 40 days because beyond that the body has exhausted these amazing starvation metabolic pathways and death is imminent.
To pretend that ketogenic diets are an efficient and healthy way to lose weight is sheer balderdash. KBs convert only about 10g of fat a day and it is excruciatingly hard to get the body to ride this highway to hell to any significant degree. I know, I’ve tried. I fell for this scam when I was a bodybuilder in the 1970s and followed the Atkins diet. For hungry week after week I would dip Ketostix into my urine and be so disappointed when they didn’t turn purple and believe me, I had iron will in those days.
Production of KBs, fat-burning and gluconeogenesis(conversion of protein to sugar) go on all the time when we skip meals and go hungry. The body shuttles back and forth on a continuum to keep you going. Mine is probably doing it now because I need to get this off my chest and haven’t had dinner yet.
The other thing to remember about starvation for weight-loss, and that’s what carbohydrate deprivation is, is that your body will interpret prolonged hunger as a sign of famine and shut your metabolism down somewhat in order to hang onto fat stores as a bulwark against the real famine to follow. Tiredness is also a natural consequence of food restriction. It doesn’t make sense to jump around when there is little food available. The appetite goes up as well, to compel you to get some grub, dammit! Another crazy feature of prolonged famine is a resurgence of manic energy; Bengali famine victims in the ghastly 1943 hunger could not sit still at times and roamed around incessantly. This is probably another starvation compulsion programmed in by evolution so the seriously-hungry could be afforded a last-ditch burst of energy for foraging.
Anyway, my point is that ketosis is part of a survival pathway and not a means of losing weight in a healthy and sustainable way. I found it hard to separate my emotions from my argument today and the woman I met sensed this, packing her bag, retrieving the self-help DVD she had wordlessly pushed across the table at me, and edging out of the booth.
We parted with no pretense that we would have anything to do with each other ever again and I went home with a riot of ideas and anguish in my head. It’s so unfair that people with little knowledge of how their bodies work but with a strong desire to lose weight are preyed upon by the unscrupulous or those who have fallen under their spell and continue to promulgate their charlatan message. Yes, doctors are paid to get on board this gravy train. Dr Atkins was a cardiologist but was morbidly obese at 115kg at his premature death. Modern purveyors of the same old low-carbohydrate message are shrewd and try to mask the dangers of this approach with a safety net of supplements and a cycling in and out of carbohydrate restriction but it’s the same old guff.
My girlfriend is a senior Triage nurse who treats elite athletes with acute renal failure, often because they have over-exercised on imbalanced diets and conditions of dehydration. Some lose their legs, most recover. Coupling protein overload with carbohydrate restriction sets kidneys up for failure. It is the kidneys that must process and excrete extra protein while lacking the carbohydrate fuel they require and the triple whammy is provided by the dehydration this nutritional imbalance creates.
Please! Follow the sensible guidelines provided by responsible Government authorities for weight-loss. Keep your diet balanced and healthy, just gradually cut down your food intake until the weight begins to come off. It’s a slow, long-term process, there are no quick fixes here. Expect to lose no more than half a kilo per week initially and expect that rate to slow as your Stone Age metabolism alerts to the impending famine.
I have dropped 4 kilos of merry holiday lard but it has taken me six months to so and I am a hard-training and active person now 55 years of age.
Thanks for your patience, bye now. I’m hungry!
