Loading ...Low Carb Critics Keep On Keeping On
Just when you think that low-carb has gotten a lot of new respect in the mainstream media, you get a whiff of the old garbage that used to be seen whenever there was an article about it. Before the new popularity of these plans caused much of the press to start not necessarily lauding it as a great thing, but simply as popular and a force that is making businesses stand up and take notice with all kinds of new products or low-carb menus at restaurants.
A blast from the past, then, was the impression I got when I read this article from The Rocky Mountain Collegian (article no longer available). Although “article,” I believe, is a misnomer. This is really an opinion pieces. I say this because the only people quoted about the diet (other than the neutral party of the waitress) were “old guard” nutritionists who are inherently critics of anything smacking of “low-carb.” Not once was an actual advocate of such diets quoted. Even the random college student they asked was a critic.
That being said, I will poke a few holes yet again in the incredible misinformation out there about these plans. For one, they are not no carbohydrate plans, they are low carbohydrate plans. This means that people can consume carbs, but they need to be careful not to consume foods that are very dense in them, like bread, pasta, potatoes, and sweets. Most vegetables tend to be very high in fiber and fiber can be subtracted from the carb count when considering them as meal options, so they end up being a very good “bargain” for low-carbers. So you end up with low “effective carbs,” “net carbs,” etc. Fiber is subtracted because it passes through your system without being converted to energy or effecting blood sugar levels. A cup of broccoli flowerets, for example, because it is so high in fiber, has only 1g of effective carbs. So one could theoretically have 20 cups of broccoli in a day without going over one’s carb allotment on the strictest phase of the strictest program!
Yet the mainstream media and the critics continue to portray these diets as meat/cheese only diets. If they simply read the books they would understand that they are far from it, but this seems to be too much work, especially when you already “know” what they are about because you’ve heard them maligned so often.
The cliché criticisms in this article can be immediately dismissed. Yes, some water weight is lost in the first week or so on these plans, just as it is on many diets. But after that, the weight loss is strictly fat. Many people have lost 100 lbs or more, and that is certainly not water weight!
As for the questions of long-term effects of the diet, well, they’ve done studies that have lasted for 1 year so far. Now many nutritionists are grudgingly agreeing that it might be ok to go on one of these plans for a short period because the studies have shown they are effective and carry health benefits and no discernable negatives for at least that first year. But nutritionists seem to have a different standard for these plans than for, say, the low-fat craze that they pushed on the public for many years. These plans were determined to be the best way to eat not based on any real world or long-term studies, but by theories and animal models. There was never a concern about the “long-term” effects of these plans because they were the politically correct ones and could not be questioned.
At the end of the article, you quote Perryman going back to the “same old message” of the USDA food guide pyramid that has done nothing to stop obesity in this country, with its emphasis on grains as the largest food group. This pyramid has been convincingly maligned by one of the most prominent and progressive nutritionists out there, Dr. Walter Willett, the Director of the Department of Nutrition for Harvard’s
The answer, of course, is nothing. Nutritionists have been schooled in a certain mindset where anything labeled as “low-carb” has to be criticized. No open mind, not even a reading of the many books out there, some of which promote vegetable consumption in a very loud manner. Rather, the nutritionists and the mainstream media tend to play this game of ping pong where they trade back and forth the misconceptions that come from lack of research, understanding, and willingness to really find out the truth, and of course a pre-defined bias drilled in over many, many years.