A Low Carb Diet May Help You Live Longer
An earthquake hit the field of diet and nutrition recently with this article: Food for Thought: Have we been giving the wrong dietary advice
The article debunks the famous “Seven Countries Study”, a 20 volume compendium by Ancel Keys, that was seminal in developing nutritional guidelines in the U.S. and U.K. in the 1980s. Keys sought an explanation of rising heart disease in developed nations, and concluded the culprit was elevated cholesterol resulting from high fat diets, particularly red meat. The problem with Seven Countries? “The Seven Countries study classified processed foods, primarily carbohydrates, as saturated fats.” Ibid. That included such low-carb fare as biscuits and cake. The study blamed meat when the real evil was carbohydrates.
Low Carb Warrior
Gary Taubes, author of the book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, has long disputed research, like that of Keys, that finger fats as the source of our dietary woes, starting with his infamous piece in the NYTs “What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?”, which I discussed here. I recommend reading that 2002 piece by Taubes, who was at the time the Science Editor for the Times. He now runs the Nutrition Science Initiative which focuses on "reducing the individual, social, and economic costs of obesity, diabetes, and their related diseases by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research". In other words, NuSi seeks to scientifically demonstrate that carbs are a, if not the, problem.
Taubes also published a diet book that offers up a low-carb diet as a sane way to avoid all of the lifestyle ills of the modern Western diet. Here are some of the diseases and recent studies involving low-carb diets:
Diabetes, peripheral neuropathy and obesity: I was convinced of the low-carb diet when I heard that all the Hollywood starlets were on it. Seriously, it started with Atkins for me, and as he, Taubes and many websites attest, low-carb (including things like paleo, West Beach, Mediterranean, NutriSystems and a bunch of others) is the easiest and healthiest way to lose and control weight. Diabetes (or metabolic syndrome) is often connected with obesity, and insulin resistance (Type II diabetes) can typically be controlled with low carb. Type I diabetics must be on low carb to avoid dying. See Atkins for weight control and “Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution: A Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars”. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you read the comments on these books, some of which are quite moving. You wouldn’t see so many testimonials if this was snake oil or a ‘fad’.
Heart disease and stroke: The primary attack on the Atkins diet is that you would die from heart disease (it didn’t help when Dr. Atkins himself may have keeled over from heart disease, even though it wasn’t diet related). This criticism came out of the ‘fat is bad’ movement that started with the Seven Countries study. The SCS focused on cholesterol, and everyone use to think that blood cholesterol would rise with dietary cholesterol. That’s been proven false, and as Taubes documents in GCBC, cholesterol gained favor in the medical profession not so much for its predictive value, but because it could be easily and cheaply measured. The latest research on heart disease has focused on inflammation as the key to heart disease, and low carb diets are best for lowering inflammation, as well as other risk factors. See e.g. New study demonstrates low-carb diets reduce risk for heart disease and inflammation.
The sine qua non of inflammation is triglycerides, and a low carb diet unfailingly dramatically reduces them. Stroke, like heart attacks, is caused by a blockage of blood, and so if you reduce heart disease, stroke risk should be similarly reduced.
Cancer: This is a rather surprising one, until you think about it. It is increasingly recognized that cancers are sugar monsters, and hence reducing carbohydrate consumption could prevent, slow and maybe cure cancer. For example:
first, contrary to normal cells, most malignant cells depend on steady glucose availability in the blood for their energy and biomass generating demands and are not able to metabolize significant amounts of fatty acids or ketone bodies due to mitochondrial dysfunction. Second, high insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-1 levels resulting from chronic ingestion of CHO-rich Western diet meals, can directly promote tumor cell proliferation via the insulin/IGF1 signaling pathway. Third, ketone bodies that are elevated when insulin and blood glucose levels are low, have been found to negatively affect proliferation of different malignant cells in vitro or not to be usable by tumor cells for metabolic demands, and a multitude of mouse models have shown anti-tumorigenic properties of very low CHO ketogenic diets. In addition, many cancer patients exhibit an altered glucose metabolism characterized by insulin resistance and may profit from an increased protein and fat intake
This is now entering clinic trials at Duke University. They call it ‘low calorie’, but what they really mean is low carb. See:University study on low-carb diet for cancer treatment. See also “Is there a role for carbohydrate restriction in the treatment and prevention of cancer?” which is the Europeans getting into the act.
It should be noted that Atkins spent many years running a cancer clinic in New York, without any success in treating cancer with a low-carb diet. Theoretically, a Ketogenic Diet seems like it should work, but the evidence that it does is slim and anecdotal. For instance, there are reports of people entering concentration camps during WWII with terminal cancer, but emerging years later with no sign of disease. I've been told that there are one or more clinics in Russia that treat disease with enforced starvation.
For an example of killing yourself with food, see this piece which suggests Steve Jobs died of cancer as a result of his hi-carb, vegan diet and the follow-up which discusses the Nutrition and Metabolism article.
Neurological Disorders: This one surprised me, and I Googled it on a lark when many at MindX complained of schizophrenia and related mental problems. Sure enough, low-carb helps!
“We report the unexpected resolution of longstanding schizophrenic symptoms after starting a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet.”
Schizophrenia, gluten, and low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diets: a case report and review of the literature
This study is also out of Duke, so they are taking the low-carb ball and running with it. There are a surprising number of papers that link insulin resistance with inflammation of the hypothalamus (inflammation again—like in heart disease). A low-carb diet is also a low gluten diet, and there is quite a bit on the connection between gluten and schizophrenia.
One (very good) poster at MindX shared a terrible story of long-term suffering, for which no cause could be found by his doctors. I recommended a Ketogenic Diet, but he said he was treating the disease with scheduled drugs and massive doses of astaxanthin. A couple years later he wrote that the problem was a gluten intolerance and that he had adopted a gluten-free (low-carb) diet. Problem solved!
For a review of this subtopic see: The Ketogenic Diet as a Treatment Paradigm for Diverse Neurological Disorders
Ticket to a Fantastic Voyage?
Cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are the major killers in modern diets. To that list we can add a number of others:
The book presents biochemical and other scientific evidence to show how these changes [in diet] are implicated not only in the modern nutritional diseases [including stroke] but also in other growing disease problems such as Alzheimer's disease, osteoporosis, senile dementia, and depression.
Book description: The Modern Nutritional Diseases: And How to Prevent Them : Heart Disease, Stroke, Type-2 Diabetes, Obesity, Cancer.
Ray Kurzweil’s “Fantastic Voyage” talked about bridges to immortality, and the first bridge is staying alive. For that purpose, I think a Ketogenic diet would help. A Ketogenic diet is a diet low enough in carbs to cause ketosis. Typically, this is said to be about 30 grams per day, but I don’t count carbs and just rely on ketosticks, which are cheap and available without prescription in any pharmacy. Human metabolism has absolutely no need for ingested carbohydrates
there is no clear requirement for dietary carbohydrates for human adults
Ketosis is caused when the body has insufficient carbohydrate/glucose from diet. The body will metabolize fat in order to obtain ketones, that then serve as a supplementary or alternate metabolism to a glucose metabolism. Ketosticks measure a waste product that results from the body’s metabolizing fat.
A Ketogenic diet should all but guarantee that you will live as long as genetically possible. Low carb diets have been purposed to cure or treat nine of the top ten causes of death. Many studies of indigenous groups eating traditional diets have shown that they had essential no incidence of a raft of ‘modern’ diseases that include things like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, not to mention things like obesity and gout. That changed as soon as they adopted the Whiteman’s diet. The Pima Indians, once sleek and well-fed on a traditional diet, are now the fattest group on the planet, with the highest incidence of diabetes ever recorded.
So, a Ketogenic diet can help you live as long as possible. How about longer? There have been a rash of articles recently many having to do with the hypothalamus (low carb has been shown to prevent inflammation of the hypothalamus as discussed above). Even if you were to die of old age, old age may come much later if you follow a ketogenic diet. Here’s a sample:
“Scientists have long wondered whether aging occurs independently in the body’s various tissues or if it could be actively regulated by an organ in the body,” said senior author Dongsheng Cai, M.D., Ph.D., professor of molecular pharmacology at Einstein.
“It’s clear from our study that many aspects of aging are controlled by the hypothalamus. What’s exciting is that it’s possible — at least in mice — to alter signaling within the hypothalamus to slow down the aging process and increase longevity.”
. . . inflammatory changes in the hypothalamus can give rise to various components of metabolic syndrome (a combination of health problems that can lead to heart disease and diabetes).
See also, Hypothalamus: Brain Region May Hold Key to Aging.
. . . cancer reverts to an ancient form of metabolism called fermentation, which can supply energy with little need for oxygen, although it requires lots of sugar.
Davies and Lineweaver predict that if cancer cells are saturated with oxygen but deprived of sugar, they will become more stressed than healthy cells, slowing them down or even killing them.
P.S. Two of my favorite comments at Amazon to Dr. Bernstein's book:
This book has changed my life! By Matt panik -- I was a vegetarian for 4 years, still struggling with weight and feeling run down. Working with my doctor I began to show signs of diabetes even though my diet was "spot on". I was turned on to this book by a type 2 diabetic that is having great success with the information from Dr. Bernstein. Once I adopted this meal plan outlook I have started to lose weight, feel much better, and can actually get out of bed in the morning without hitting the snooze bar. I highly recommend this book, if only to understand what food does to your body and how to control those effects from a diabetics perspective.
Very informative by David Leachman -- It is amazing that one book has so much good (and better) information than the American Diabetes Association. Very well written and easy to validate what he states. The FDA really misleads us all.
RedQ
Note: This one of my first posts and is discussed in Intro to RedQ in the Introduceyourself sub-forum.