Living Low Carb (34 page)
Authors: Jonny Bowden
On the other side of this argument are those who feel that judiciously and carefully adding small amounts of carbs back while monitoring your weight and health is perfectly fine to do. The problem may be that some people just can’t do it. It’s an open question that has no “right” answer other than “
it depends on the person, the situation, and the individual metabolism
.”
Bernstein also has a slightly different take on protein than many of the other low-carb-diet authors. While he’s hardly anti-protein, he doesn’t feel it should be unlimited. “A certain amount of protein does get converted to blood sugar by the body, and that will raise insulin and build fat,” he points out.
The Diabetes Diet and The Diabetes Solution: Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
Without a doubt, this is the program I’d use if I were diabetic. And for good measure, I’d buy the companion book,
The Diabetes Solution
, which goes into even more detail about things that can be of enormous help to any diabetic.
But this program is also great for weight loss. It’s definitely a little strict—think Atkins Phase One, but indefinitely. (There are a number of distinctions between the Bernstein program and Atkins Phase One, but you get the idea). If you’re the type who would rather pull the band-aid off all at once and be done with it, you’ll probably resonate to this book. There’s no “treat day,” there’s no cheating, and it’s tough love all the way. But it works.
If you can’t fathom the idea of protein, fat, and vegetables making up your diet for pretty much the rest of your life, you might want to look at some of the other programs. If you’re neither diabetic nor seriously overweight—and if you’re not what we might call “metabolically resistant”—you may be able to tolerate a bit more generous carb allowance than the one in the Diabetes Diet.
And if you simply want to make some basic healthful changes to your diet and move in a more low-carb direction, this book is probably not for you.
JONNY’S LOW DOWN
(Especially If You’re Diabetic)
A very good no-nonsense program by the guru of low-carb approaches for diabetes. Yes, it’s strict, and yes, it could even be considered “hard,” but there’s a big upside: once you commit to it, it’s easy to do, and it will pretty much knock your cravings out of the ballpark. And it will control your blood sugar, whether you’re diabetic or not
.
Whether it’s necessary to go this drastically low-carb forever is an open question. A lot of studies show disappointing weight regain after an initial success using carb restriction, and I suspect that’s because people simply start adding back carbs way more than they should. If you had high blood pressure that was controlled by medication, would you stop taking the treatment and expect your blood pressure to stay low? Low-carb diets—in Bernstein’s view—are the treatment for diabetics (and perhaps for anyone with an insulin-related weight problem). For him, there’s no going back—the carb level of the diet is pretty much fixed, and that’s that
.
9. D
R
. G
OTT ’S
N
O
F
LOUR
,
N
O
S
UGAR
D
IET
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
A pretty underwhelming book that can be summed up in one sentence: don’t eat flour or sugar
.
About Dr. Gott’s No Flour, No Sugar Diet
This is a pretty uneventful and unoriginal book that reads like it was cobbled together from a few basic nutrition texts, circa 1959. It’s all party-line dietetics, with one big—and important—exception: no flour, no sugar.
After the one good recommendation to cut out sugar and flour, the rest of the book is the same old “anti-Atkins,” “anti-saturated fat” stuff, with reactionary conventional medical advice on supplements that is as illinformed as any I’ve seen. Want examples? Chromium picolinate is dismissed as “linked” (a weasel word if there ever was one) “with adverse side effects including anemia, memory loss and DNA damage.” (Not a word about the studies of Richard Anderson, PhD, at the USDA on chromium and insulin sensitivity and glucose control.) Want more? “Grapefruit in and of itself does nothing to increase weight loss or metabolism.” (Sorry, doc. Scripps University studies show that it does just that.) And green tea extract is dismissed in two sentences, one of which is “Since green tea naturally contains caffeine, use of these supplements may suppress the appetite but may also cause nervousness or insomnia.” (Read about green tea in
chapter 9
, page 305.)
So okay, when it comes to nutritional supplements, Dr. Gott knows nothing. Maybe we could forgive him if he had something original and interesting to say about diet and food.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t.
But the message “no flour, no sugar” is a good one, and it’s definitely a legacy of the “low-carb” revolution. I would have given this a “recommended with reservations” except for the party-line junk about saturated fat and the know-nothing approach to supplements. That and the fact that there are so many other good books that handle the “no sugar” recommendation better.
Dr. Gott’s No Flour, No Sugar Diet as a Lifestyle:
Who It Works for, Who Should Look Elsewhere
Cutting out flour and sugar is always a good idea and would work for anyone. If you want a really basic, no-frills program, I suppose you could do worse than this one. But it’s kind of like kindergarten nutrition for the low-carb lifestyle. Anyone wanting a more fleshed-out, well-thought-out plan should look elsewhere.
JONNY’S LOW DOWN
There’s nothing much to recommend here except for the powerful recommendation to give up flour and sugar. (I gave it one star each for those two recommendations.) But that’s a pretty flimsy reason to buy a book, especially when so many other diet books deliver a similar message without the smug arrogance and filler material. You can do much better than this
.
W
ALTER
W
ILLETT
, MD
AND
M
OLLIE
K
ATZEN
WHAT IT IS IN A NUTSHELL
This is a great example of a “middle ground” book. Not a low-carb plan, but a mainstream book whose authors nonetheless question the dietary wisdom of the past decades, eschew the “food pyramid,” realize the ludicrousness of “low-fat,” and present a really smart, sensible eating plan that incorporates a lot of lowcarb principles like eliminating trans-fats, processed carbs, and junk food. Plus it has the not-insignificant authority of the Harvard Medical School behind it
.
About Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less
Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less
is one of a new breed of what I’d call “food-positive” books—plans that emphasize what you
do
eat, rather than focusing on what you don’t. It’s the companion book to
Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy
, subtitled
The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating
, so right away you know this plan comes with a healthy dose of prestige attached to it.
But prestige doesn’t always translate to “cutting edge”—far from it. This is hardly a low-carb diet book, and consumer publications from Harvard (such as the
Harvard Heart Letter
or
the Harvard Mental Health Letter
) tend to be predictably conservative and establishment. So why is
Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less
included in this roundup of diet books? Read on.
The lead author of this book is Walter Willett, MD, who is the chairman of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health. As the lead researcher on the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, he’s also one of the most respected nutritional epidemiologists in the world. And he’s hardly a wild-eyed radical. But Willett broke ranks with many of his colleagues a few years ago, when he came out against the idiotic USDA Food Guide Pyramid, which at the time represented the “collective wisdom” of the dietary establishment.
*
For those of us who lean toward a more low-carb approach to eating, this was very big news, tantamount to a “Nixon in China” moment. One of the most respected nutritional researchers in the world, a pillar of the medical establishment, had actually come out and said that the high-carb, low-fat diet was pretty much a crock.
Here’s Willett on the revised (and so-called “improved”) government food pyramid, currently known as MyPyramid (
http://www.mypyramid.gov
):
MyPyramid is riddled with misguided recommendations that ignore evidence about health and diet collected over the last forty years. It’s still anti-fat, without sufficiently acknowledging that some fats are good for you. It’s not discriminating enough about distinctions between good and bad carbohydrate sources, encouraging you to eat half your grains as refined starch. It lumps together animal- and plant-based protein sources as interchangeable, failing to distinguish between healthy proteins and those that are high in saturated fat. And it recommends more dairy products than you need.
Willett argues against the processed carbs that have become the mainstay of the American diet, points out the connection between high-glycemic diets and cancer, and even questions the accepted dogma on drinking three glasses of milk per day. He also takes a swipe at the idea that we shouldn’t eat eggs because of their cholesterol (okay, it’s just a swipe, rather than the clubbing I would have preferred, but still). And he’s been an outspoken critic of trans-fats. All good stuff.
Now, there’s stuff in here to quibble with. Willett still considers saturated fat a “bad” fat, although he’s way more thoughtful about this than most, even saying that “[S]tudies have shown that eating some saturated fat in the right proportion with unsaturated fat is perfectly fine” and that “it’s virtually impossible—not to mention unnecessary—to eliminate all saturated fat from your diet.” And for my taste, he’s a little too accepting of vegetable oils in all their varieties (including corn, safflower, and soybean oils, which he recommends and I abhor).
But I’m being overly picky. There’s great information in here, and a willingness to take on a lot of the conventional wisdom. Examples: on soy (good, but not a silver bullet), on coconut (yes!), and on milk (not recommended as a daily beverage for adults). Those are some big steps indeed coming from someone as mainstream as Willett and the Harvard School of Public Health. He’s anti-soda and pro-water, and he gives ample space to the importance of both exercise and mindfulness. The book is filled with “food positivity,” a point of view that emphasizes the good stuff you
can
eat and the enjoyment of food, rather than focusing on what you
shouldn’t
do. It’s refreshing.
Best of all, he’s not dogmatic. “
[O]ne simple plan does not work for all, and… an approach to weight control will need to offer a variety of options for different people—and even for the same people, as their tastes and life circumstances change
,” he says.
