I agree with much of your analysis (ages back, I started this yesterday)
Re partial agreement SDocs diet. In spite of the division that sometimes (often!) occurs on here. I actually don't know of any people on here who use a very low fat diet / high carb diet . This would normally be 20% or fewer calories from fat. Ornish's heart diet is only 11% from fat with 71% from carbs. I've come across T2 vegans/vegetarians elsewhere who have claimed to successfully use this sort of diet
The opposite is the very low carb and high fat (80%fat 18% protein and 2% carb) or the Bernstein 6, 12,12 diet. Again, I've seen only a handful of people who actually use this sort of diet on diabetes forums.
Most peoples diets seem to be somewhere in between the two. There is certainly no way could you eat Southport Docs vegetable soups on the lowest carb diets. Indeed, Bernstein quite explicitly forbids it and even limits tomatoes to a slice. On the other hand, people who eat any animal products would find it very hard to adopt the very lowest fat, with consequent higher carbs and often very much higher fibre than most people are used to eating.(look up the Ma Pi 2 diabetes diet)
Given that most people aren't at the extremes , it's not surprising that many people see at least some similarity between their own and Southport Docs fairly moderate diet. (and yes I do too!)
One place in your post I'd comment on is this:
" "controversial" non standard "low carb" advice is to up natural saturated fats (eggs, cheese, butter etc).....
agree that is very controversial
However there are fats other than sat fats . I think that most things I have read recently still suggest that Sat fats tend to raise LDL and suggest replacing sat fats with polyunsaturated fats rather than carbs (particularly any sort of refined carbs)
The Mediterranean diet is relatively high in fat but that fat is mainly monounsaturated . The successful (re CVD) Predimed diet contained about 20% of cal from monounsaturated, 10% from sat fat and 7% from polyunsatfat . These were mainly from olive oil, nuts, and fish, the diets tended to emphasise white rather than red and processed meats plus fruit, veg, legumes, real whole grains and some dairy. The Lyon heart trial with a similar diet (though they used rapeseed margarine rather than olive oil) was also very successful. (the BMJ article that was headlined in yesterdays newspaper articles comments, favourably on those trials
)
However, as you say there is a gap between the 38/40% fat contained in the Med diet and one of 60+%.
That's where I would think more carbs in the shape of more veg, possibly more low GI fruits but particularly more legumes (their properties were discussed elsewhere on the thread by Yorkman). The people on the Predimed diet ate 3+ portions of legumes a week.
