Big Fat Fiasco

[Sid Bonkers]

Yes. He died 5300 years ago. He was (very) post agricultural.

I've said twice already that the Agricultural revolution occured about 10000 years ago. People had been cultivating grain for 5000 years before he was born...

The first true mammals appeared about 200 million years ago.
Modern humans appeared about 2 million years ago.

It's the other 2 million years (without refined carbohydrate) when we did all the evolving.

I'm sorry but where do you get this figure of 2 million years from and what do you call "modern humans" I assume you mean homo sapiens, yes?

Quote from humanorigins.si.edu :
Homo Sapiens:
Time Range
About 200,000 years to present
Summary
Fossils and genetics evidence shows that our species, homo sapiens, evolved in africa about 200,000 years ago and began to spread out from there by at least 100,000 years ago...
Source http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/hum ... nteractive


As for being "lactose intolerant" I guess he wouldnt have evolved to eat lots of cream and cheese then would he?

Time to face it stone age man did not eat low carb and lots of fat he ate what ever he could forage or hunt and game is/was almost always low fat and foraging means grains, roots, tubers, fruits and veg as well as other sources of protein of course like snails, insects etc and seafood and where there was seafood there is also seaweed, it all adds up to a fair amount of carbs, pretty similar to what we were eating before the fast food revolution that has happened over the last 45 years or so, coincidently perhaps when cases of diabetes started to increase, yes the Wimpy Bar has a lot to answer for :thumbup:

 

[xyzzy]

To me the carb debate has to be split into two areas, call them the Pre and Post Type 2 Diabetes arenas

In the pre diabetes arena you are really arguing if increasing carbohydrate intake can account for the increasing rates of obesity as Type 2 diabetes is just one of the many disorders that can happen because of obesity. So for example there is a known relationship between "getting something nasty" and BMI. Look here for what WHO says http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/5_population_nutrient/en/index5.html The same page details a similar link between simple waist measurement and "getting something nasty"

Given the ratio between carbs / fat / protiein has done significantly different things in different countries over the last 50 years ago yet in those countries rates of obesity and Type 2 have all risen then my opinion is in general terms a particular diets amount of carbohydrate intake has little to do with whether you end up as Type 2 unless it's a blatantly wacko high calorie one as well.

What seems to be the cause in my opinion is simply the energy density (eg number of calories) people are consuming. So perhaps its only in the last 50 years that ENOUGH people have had the opportunity to eat dangerously high calorific diets to actually reflect it in the underlying statistics. Also that the calorific "damage" of what people eat is then magnified considerably by modern society's lack of activity and exercise etc.

Again look at the table in this page http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/5_population_nutrient/en/index3.html for factors that WHO think promote or protect against obesity.

Once you've got Type 2 then the whole debate changes in my opinion. There seems to be little doubt in my mind that there is (or will be proved) a causal link between carbohydrate intake and long term survivability and I currently make a personal choice each day to say a low carb diet is my best option for my survivability.

However I would argue that what I think is best for me is by no means best for everyone and no one diet be it ultra low, or low, or medium, or high in carbs is any better than any other one. Under all these scenarios a diabetic can make an informed individual choice as to how they wish to treat their condition. Some (like me) can effectively go for low carb and little meds others can choose high carb and insulin.

In my opinion the important bit is this; so long as in both those examples those people choose the correct energy density for their style (i.e the right calorific amounts to keep them fit and healthy) then the choice of low or high or whatever carb seems pretty irrelevant to me.

In my own case I choose a 65g / day low carb diet because I get safe BG's at that level. There is nothing stopping me wanting to go ULC if I want to and say stop my Metformin or decide to quadruple it and go on insulin. The only unevenness in the choice is that I could go ULC as a plain life style choice but so could any non diabetic as well. What I can't choose is a high carb diet unless I'm prepared to take the meds or insulin to allow it.

 

[smitha48]

Dear OP,

Forty years ago we were lied to,................

Libraraising,

I was diagnosed T2 in May (ish) last year, which was 6 months after being diagnosed with serious CVHD. I too did a lot of reading, but mainly for the CVHD, came accross a doctor called Kendrick, who has written a book. He also follows the line of Fat's not bad, it's the changes in our diets over the last 50 years to include 'sugary' type foods, which includes Carbs.

However i do feel that both camps can be correct......ie get rid of some of the carbs, white bread, rice pasta etc. what i wouldn't do is replace 'good fat' with 'bad fat'.

I really believe that a balanced healthy diet is the way ahead. It seems to me, and i am no expert, that a mixture of 'reduced carbs and careful use of fat is the way ahead.

There are many on this 'diabetes' forum that will disagree with me, and a few on the 'heart uk' forum also, but when you have both illnesses you have to do something.

My diet as above has kept my BG under control and halted, for now, the progression of my CVHD.

The reason for putting the link on this site was so people could see there is a different view point from the current medical advice, that may be worth considering only after investigation.

To me, and as I said i'm no expert, a little of bit of both camps seems to be the way ahead.

All i can say is look after yourselves, it is after all your illness.

 

[borofergie]

I'm sorry but where do you get this figure of 2 million years from and what do you call "modern humans" I assume you mean homo sapiens, yes?

No I meant when our species divereged from that of the Great Apes. It doesn't make any difference where you draw the arbitrary line, you can go back to our mammalian ancestors if you like, it doesn't change the argument.

As for being "lactose intolerant" I guess he wouldnt have evolved to eat lots of cream and cheese then would he?

Well we all started off drinking milk, but no, he didn't evolve to drink large quantities of cows milk through adulthood. Neither did you.

Time to face it stone age man did not eat low carb and lots of fat he ate what ever he could forage or hunt and game is/was almost always low fat and foraging means grains, roots, tubers, fruits and veg as well as other sources of protein of course like snails, insects etc and seafood and where there was seafood there is also seaweed, it all adds up to a fair amount of carbs, pretty similar to what we were eating before the fast food revolution that has happened over the last 45 years or so, coincidently perhaps when cases of diabetes started to increase, yes the Wimpy Bar has a lot to answer for :thumbup:

The "stone age" lasted for about 2 million years. Agricuture only existed for at most the last 5000 years of that. So for 99.75% of the stone age, early humans had no reliable source of carbohydrate.

Nobody has ever said that they didn't eat any carbs, just that it would be difficult to fuel a 3000 calorie a day diet based on the unreliable sources that they had access to.

it all adds up to a fair amount of carbs, pretty similar to what we were eating before the fast food revolution that has happened over the last 45 years or so, coincidently perhaps when cases of diabetes started to increase, yes the Wimpy Bar has a lot to answer for :thumbup:

Yes, I agree completely.

What you are describing is a low-carb diet. Even on my "ULC" (Paleo like) diet I can pack away a fair amount of veg and even a little bit of carefully chosen fruit (although the fruits that I can eat are berries rather than cultivated modern fruits). I try not to over-indulge myself on insects.

The big game changer is access to refined carbs like bread, pasta, rice, sugar and cultivated fruit. All those things are very different from what your Stone Age man was eating.

You don't even have to go that far back: my grandparents generation still regarded rice and pasta as foreign food.

 

[Dillinger]

Black swans?
Edit: My earlier Paleo comment was based on the uploader's other videos, but I think he touches on it at a few points as well (paraphrased "how could something we've eaten for millennia make us ill" - silly)

Karl Popper and his swans;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

 

[Sid Bonkers]

As for being "lactose intolerant" I guess he wouldnt have evolved to eat lots of cream and cheese then would he?

Well we all started off drinking milk, but no, he didn't evolve to drink large quantities of cows milk through adulthood. Neither did you.

Er, that was irony Stephen not a serious point mate :lol:

As for the real debate the fact is we evolved as omnivorous which is why we have a mouth full of different types of teeth I guess and its just not true that we never used to eat carbs or that we ate a lot of fat we just ate whatever we could find just like we do today only its a lot easier to come by now which is why most western countries and cultures have obesity problems its not what we eat its the amount that we eat, calories in vs energy expended get the balance wrong and you wont lose weight no matter what diet you eat which is probably why some low carbers cant shift the weight.

 

[Unbeliever]

.

My opinion is that we've evolved to survive very close to starvation, and that any diet we eat will lead to bad things (sacrifices made to deal more immediate threats that no longer matter today)

Edit: Whatever diet Man used to eat back then may well turn out to be the ideal (as far as things like obesity, diabetes and heart disease are concerned) but arguing that it's ideal because it's what we used back then is silly.

I too, completely agree. We should all bear this in mind. It would help to keep things in proportion. Rather than feeling deprived because we can't eat what we like whenever we want we should think about why we eat . Thats not to say we can't ever find pleasure in food but we should recognise that this is a luxury.

It can be very difficult of course, because of the way food is regarded in our culture- it wasn't always so even within living memory but it is now deeply embedded.