The low carb diet lifestyle passes into and out of popularity. It’s not an easy way to manage one’s household simply because carbohydrates are used extensively in most processed foods. We’re not talking about just sugars but grains and other carbohydrates. Even the most popular vegetables tend to be high carb foods. It’s impossible to walk down the aisles in a major grocery store and not see foods packed with carbohydrates.
We have flavored everything with sugar and padded everything with grain and processed everything to make food production efficient and cost effective. The cost to our health and nutrition has become too high. But some medical experts continue to call into question the value of high fat, high protein meals as well. Instead of compensating for flavor lost by eliminating some carbohydrates from our diets, it would be better to adjust our flavor preferences and expectations to enjoy better balanced meals.
Some doctors recommend that their patients follow the South Beach Diet instead of the Atkins Diet. In fact, among doctors who treat Type II Diabetes there is a preference for adjusting the amount of calories that patients consume while reducing the percentage of carbohydrates as well. That is because Type II Diabetes is closely associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and high cholesterol. The more dietary fat a person with Type II Diabetes consumes the more damage they do to their liver and the more cholesterol their body makes.
You can compensate a little bit by taking a fiber supplement based on Psyllium husk. Psyllium blocks the body’s absorption of fats and carbohydrates because it is a non-soluble fiber. It softens and thickens the stool and is a natural laxative, so you have to be careful about how much psyllium fiber you consume as a supplement every day. Recommended doses are 1 to 3 teaspoons per day, each taken with water soon before or after eating a meal.
When combined with an increased intake of fiber a low carbohydrate diet can benefit people with Type II Diabetes. The question is whether it is necessary to add more fat to the diet as the Atkins Diet calls for. Research is beginning to support a managed fat intake rather than an increase in fat to compensate for the reduction of carbohydrates and pure sugar. In other words, people with Type II Diabetes should concentrate on eating fewer carbohydrates. Eating normal daily recommendations of fat and protein should be sufficient.
According to a study by the University of Michigan, the benefits of eating low carb meals are almost immediate. When restricting food intake to three low carb meals in a 24 hour period the body reduces insulin resistance on average by as much as 30 per cent. This is a fantastic finding and if supported by more research should lead to better, more effective intervention strategies. But one surprising finding of the study was that combining two hours of exercise with the low carb diet had no effect on insulin resistance. The exercise, if anything, caused an elevation in body insulin.
Fat is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the body needs fat in the diet. The question is how much fat should Diabetic patients consume. And that also depends on how physically active they are. Endurance athletes tend to burn twice as much fat as people who don’t get as much exercise. In other words, the more active you are the more fat you can eat. The athletes in the study followed low carb meal plans and ran for about 3 hours per day. Their bodies were able to burn more fat than the bodies of athletes who followed a high carb diet.
This research could explain why the Atkins Diet menu works so well for people who combine their dietary changes with an increase in exercise or other physical activity. Research also shows that walking for several hours per day provides nearly as many health benefits as running for the same time, without increasing stress and damage on joints and cartilage.
Low fat diets have been called into question by reams of research published after 2000. The US dietary recommendations for lowering fat have been challenged by research that shows reduced fat diets may not be as healthy as once believed. But that indication works best in the context of a normal, healthy population. A significant percentage of Americans are too fat. These people, new research shows, can burn more fat if they eat a low fat diet than if they eat a low carb diet. In other words, if you need to reduce your body fat you really would do better to cut more fat out of your diet.
Patients who need to lose a lot of body fat may already be eating high fat foods, especially foods cooked in saturated fats and oils. Too much fast food can alter your body chemistry and damage your health in large part because of the widespread use of high fat foods and food preparation processes (such as deep-frying fast food).
One interesting variation on the low-carb diet produced positive results in treating a brain tumor. By eating a special high fat, low carb diet mice with tumors improved in health. Their tumors llterally shrank. We need more research in this area, however, especially as coconut oil has now been called into question as a source of good nutrition. But there is more good news on the low carb front for brain-related research.
Another study found that consuming a low carb diet may help people with Kabuki Syndrome, an inherited condition that inhibits intellectual capacity. And yet another study suggests that a high fat, low carb diet may help patients with schizophrenia. What we should take away from this is that too many carbohydrates in the diet may not be good for brain health. How much fat one should consume is still an open question. What helps the brain may not be helping the liver. So where is the balance?
But as always there is a catch to the benefits of low carb diets on the brain. Is it the fact that carbohydrates are being reduced or that calories are being reduced? Another study shows that test subjects who reduced caloric intake rather than carbohydrates performed better on some cognition tests. The takeaway here is that reducing carbohydrates by reducing calories may be better overall for improved cognitive performance. But what the study did not show was whether a well-balanced meal plan is better than a high carb meal plan after the caloric reduction occurred.
Finally, patients who add glucosamine to their diet (especially elderly patients) may be extending their lifespans by as much as 10%, according a recent study. Glucosamine seems to have similar effects to low carbohydrate diets by reducing the metabolization of some dietary sugars. Glucoasimine has also been shown to inhibit the growth of some cancers. Glucosamine supplements are not a miracle cure for anything. They simply help the body perform certain nutritional functions better.