Carb free diet

i bud,

its certainly possible to live with a reduced carb diet. I have tried this but i find its a tad more pleasureable to get my marmite fix on toast then it is on broccoli. I have reduced my carbs to a minimum but allow a treat at breakfast once in a while. I gather if you must have carbs its best early in the day and since i have gone low carb have lost 2 1/2 stone without a lot of pain.

Good luck, its possible so go for it.

Andy

svenmorris said:

For the last 3 days I have not eaten any carbs and my BS has dropped from 23 to 10! So I have assumed I am carb intolerant. Is it possible to live without carbs? Would love to know your thoughts.......

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Well if you're a diabetic you are by defintion intolerant to carbohydrates.

Is it possible to live without carbs? Technically yes. Carbohydrate isn't an essential nutrient because, although your brain and muscles need some glucose (carbohydrate) to function properly, as long as you have enough protein in your diet then your liver can't generate it through gluconeogenesis.

It's controversial, but you can probably live healithy on a properly formulated diet that includes very small levels of carbohydrate (<<30g). Although since there are carbs in all vegetables, you need to include at least some in your diet. Because of this I assume you mean "very low" rather than zero carb. Unless you are just chomping on steaks all day...

There are two other questions you need to answer though:

1. Is it easy?
The answer to this is "no". There are hidden carbs in lots of things, and a low carbohydrate diet is basically just meat / fish / eggs / cheese and vegetables / salad. If you adopt this lifestyle you're basically giving up fruit, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes forever.

2. Is is sustainable?
Zero carb, almost certainly not (for the reasons listed above). <30g is probably sustainable, long term, but you need to add in lots of fat if you don't want to lose lots of weight.

I think that the answer is that you probably don't need to go less than 30g a day to get good diabetic control. I think that 50 to 100g is a more sensible level to aim at if you want to do this long term.

I'm trying to do the "zero carb" thing too at the moment (by which I mean much less than 30g). I'm doing it as an experiment in becoming "keto-adapted" and to lose some extra weight for my running. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else though (although I would strongly recommend low-carbing at say 30-100g a day).

svenmorris said:

Hi,

For the last 3 days I have not eaten any carbs and my BS has dropped from 23 to 10! So I have assumed I am carb intolerant. Is it possible to live without carbs? Would love to know your thoughts.......

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I would not advise being completey without carbs. A good target is to eat a maximum of 100g, that is quite easy to achieve and is what I do. The target for you is really what you can tolerate without spiking much above 5mm which is normal. You could aim for 50g perhaps? At this level you would still be very restricted and your bg would be lowered well.

The carbs to eat are the low ones of course, but also make sure they are the most nutrition packed ones - vegs, low carb fruit, lots of salad greens and coloured items like bell peppers. Personally I believe the ant-oxidants, fibre and vitamins in these best carbs are essential for good health.

Having said that, technically the body's need for carbs is zero. But that is a tough target and probably not healthy in the long term.

Just read this in Dr Stephen Phinney's book "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living":

One could take the position that a low carbohydrate intake is the 'normal' metabolic state associated with health. This is consistent with view that the majority of human evolution occurred in the backdrop of a low carbohydrate intake.

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That is exactly the position that I take.

borofergie said:

This is consistent with view that the majority of human evolution occurred in the backdrop of a low carbohydrate intake.

That is exactly the position that I take.

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This argument is put forward a lot when low carb diets are discussed but to take this argument to its logical conclusion you might as well say that we should all return to the sea as that were we all came from, of course we have evolved over millennium to live on land and eat a diet that includes carbs and anyone wanting to turn the clock back and eat less than 30g of carbs a day needs to take vitamin supplements, how natural is that?


To answer your question svenmorris no it is impossible to live on a carb free diet as there are carbs in almost all foods bar meat and fish but it is possible to live on a very low carb diet but as said above if living on a >30g carbs a day diet you will need to know a lot about nutrients and take vitamin and nutrient supplements as you can not gain certain vitamins on such a low carb diet. Also bear in mind that diabetes is for life and not many people will want to live on such a restricted diet as this for life but if your mind is made up I suggest you read Richard Bernsteins book The Diabetes Revolution.

Bon appetit

Sid Bonkers said:

This argument is put forward a lot when low carb diets are discussed but to take this argument to its logical conclusion you might as well say that we should all return to the sea as that were we all came from, of course we have evolved over millennium to live on land and eat a diet that includes carbs and anyone wanting to turn the clock back and eat less than 30g of carbs a day needs to take vitamin supplements, how natural is that?

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The first true mammals appeared about 200 million years ago.
Modern humans appeared about 2 million years ago.
The first Agricultural Revolution was about 7-10,000 years ago (depending on where your ancestors lived).
Fast food and sedentary lifestyle were both "invented" 100 years ago.

So for at least 2 million years we evolved to eat a hunter-gatherer diet.
Refined carbohydrates have been available for a maximum of 10,000 years.

Unfortunately for your logic, evolution takes place over millions of years, not tea few thousand, and even then only under selective pressure (which has been more or less absent since the advent of industrial agriculture).

If you'd like to learn about evolution, I could recommend some good introductory books (Richard Dawkins is a big favourite of mine).

Sid Bonkers said:

if living on a >30g carbs a day diet you will need to know a lot about nutrients and take vitamin and nutrient supplements as you can not gain certain vitamins on such a low carb diet.

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This is untrue. Some people recommend that you take mult-vitamins to support you during the "shock" your body experiences during the adaption from an (unnatural) high-carb diet to a (natural) ketogenic one. There isn't any suggestion that a sensible low-carb diet is any less nutritionally complete than a high-carb diet.

In fact I'd argue the reverse. The things that I cut out from my diet in order to "low carb" are flour (pasta, bread, cakes etc), rice, sugar, fruit and starchy veg. Most of these are pretty empty micronutirtionally speaking.

I more than make up for the reduction in fruit and starchy veg with the addition of non-starchy veg like brocolli and spinich. In fact, with none of the other junk to bulk out my diet, I've never eaten so much veg.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it's difficult to argue that you need to eat fruit (or indeed imported starchy veg) to make your diet nutritonally complete.

I wonder. does anyone know when man first realised, (presumably after a wild fire), that root vedge tasted better cooked? :lol: Also since some fruits are very high in sugar, and in season would have been eaten by the bucket load, wouldn't that count as a sugar high to our hunter gatherer ancestors? :crazy: