Do carbohydrates promote weight gain?

if it works for you to eat carbs then eat them. Sophia Loren reckons everything she had she owed to eating spaghetti.

farmers who want to fatten up cows fast to reach market weight feed the cattle grains because it is the best way to fatten them up fast

for a lot of people, they eat carbs and carbs turn to glucose and pancreas makes insulin to take the glucose to muscles and turn into fat and store as fat anything you have not used immediately and then the insulin makes you famished to eat more

think this way - people once had a feast and famine lifestyle. prior to European winter the insulin cycle ensured survival because we could eat a lot and store it as fat for the long winter and so ensure our survival. in countries without long winters we would fatten up in years of plenty ready for the years of drought

we do not have feast and famine lifestyles any longer so if carbs make you store too much fats, and elevate your blood glucose for too long, then you should reduce the amount of carbs you eat.

Hi. In general most of us would say that carbs do increase blood sugar so need to be tightly controlled. Those diagnosed with Type 2 and who are overweight are often overweight due to having had excess carb intake i.e. they lose weight when they go onto a low-carb diet, DUK does have some strange views on the right diet for Type 2s and it has been the subject of some argument in the media. The same mantra comes from the NHS and many dieticians. First 'starchy' has no real meaning for diabetics. Starchy carbs can be OK before cooking or processing but can become very high-GI following cooking and starch breakdown. NICE has now, sensibly, started to use the term low-GI carb which is the right approach. So, in summary many starchy carbs such as white bread, pasta, rice and so on can be bad for us unless kept low-GI and with low-ish portion sizes.

We are all different, and some of us can tolerate more carbs than others - and I don't mean just for blood glucose levels!

I've found that I will put weight on if I eat over 70g carb a day. It doesn't go on quickly at that level, but slowly and steadily. Other people can eat much more than that.

In my pre-diabetic days I ate high carb/low fat like a good girl, just as I was told. Result? - 22stone 4lbs. Even on 1000 cals per day I was not losing weight - you can get an awful lot of carbs in 1000 calories.

On a very-low-carb/high fat diet I can eat 2000 calories or more and not put weight on. Mind you, I hardly ever get up to that calorie level because low carb/high fat fills me up and keeps me feeling full.

We are all different!

Viv 8)

Of course carbs will promote weight gain but only if eaten in excess, just as fat will too. In fact fat has more than double the amount of calories than carbs do, so you do the maths.

Taubes talks a load of rubbish IMHO so I would not waste my money on his books.

Hi Stoomc. Yes, diabetics are the exception as they don't process carbs properly i.e. the carbs get processed to glucose and then it goes wrong and blood glucose rises. Hence carbs are not always a good energy source for diabetics. Those Type 2s, like I was, who have a failing pancreas at diagnosis i.e. not enough insulin being produced tend to lose weight around diagnosis even though not over-weight as the body just can't use the carbs being consumed. Carbs do result in weight gain for many people if taken to excess. Fats may have twice the calories but for some people their metabolism may convert carbs to stored fat more readily than fats. Peoples' metabolic mechanisms vary greatly and much of it is not well understood.

Processed carbs come with lots of fat.

Fatless carbs are quite nasty: baked potatoe without butter. pasta with no sauce, rice on its own, cereal without milk.

When you reduce carbs, you reduce fat also.

I presume that a low carb diet also reduces the absolute amount of fat intake.

But over doing the fat reduction during a low carb diet can make the diet unsustainable.

In the "olden days" when I was young. Anyone wanting to lose weight reduced consumption of sugars and starches and it worked. A great medical researcher, John Yudkin, advocated this approach.
then:
along came the healthy heart theory.based on no real research and a project by Ancel Keys[ a statitician!] to study the normal diets of 22 countries, just from statistics, to find what kept the people in some countries slim and heart healthy. Unfortunately Keys already thought he had the answers. He believed Fats to be the enemy. He had to discard evidence from 15 countries, because he couldn't get the data to fit. He eventually published the SEVEN countries Study, which purports to support his theory that fats cause obesity. This was taken up by the US government, supported by cereal farmers and sugar growers! as Gospel and hence spread to the rest of the world. More recently Robert Lustig has examined the original data again [all 22 countries worth!] He found a correlation between the amounts of sugar consumed and heart disease as well as obesity. Even in the original 7 countries of data that were published, the correlation is better between obesity and sugars then fats. However since much food which is high in sugars, is also high in fats, there is some correlation between fats and ill health.
This is one well documented case of BAD SCIENCE!
When I was a science undergraduate, If we wanteed to make our experimental data fit a specific theory, we juggled our figures [well yours truly DIDN'T] It was known as applying "The Universal Bench Constant".
I was naive and not the best statistician, so I just displayed and commented on what I found. Are you surprised that on one notable occasion, the professor announced that only one student in the class had achieved the objective? I'd presenteed my data in a sigmoid[ s- shaped ] curve. Everybody else had straightened out the curve and even taunted me for not knowing how to do that [ actually I did know that one1]
Oh how the world might have been a healthier place if my chemistry lecturer had graded Ancel Keys's work!!!
Hana

stoomc said:

I follow the laws of thermodynamics- but then you get people saying they are gaining weight while eating carbs (even under maintenance) so what is going on there? Water/ glycogen weight, under-reporting of caloric intake- or are people with diabetes the exception to the rule and they don't use carbs as energy and de novo lipogenisis is ramped up?

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I can only speak for myself stoomc, I eat carbs although not in excess any more and I have lost over 5 stones now *simply by eating less, and 4 stone of that weight loss was when I was using insulin to help control my bg levels, so Taubes theories dont impress me at all.

So for me fewer calories equalled loss of weight, and I didnt have to increase the fat in my diet at all, in fact the fat was probably reduced along with the protein and carbs, although I've never counted calories, fat, or protein and in fact I no longer count carbs either now I'm not using insulin and having to carefully match my carb intake to the insulin I used.


* OK it wasnt that simply, but I did it and I now couldnt eat the quantities of food that I once did so I assume that my stomach has shrunk over the last 4 years.

Well said, hanadr, I have always taken US research with a pinch of salt if you will excuse me mentioning another no no food!
History is full of the big companies using bad science to sell more (witness the amount of bottled water we are conned into drinking, and the drinks companies "losing" the sentence from the original research "....most of which comes from our food" Personally since ditching the carbs with every meal advice I've lost a lot of weight that I had been fighting for years, also since ditching the low fat advice, and enjoying butter and cream again (as well as organic full cream milk) my weight still went down and my cholestrol levels are now, according to my GP amazingly healthy.

There is so much conflicting advice out there and where to get sound advice is a bit of a lottery, but as a rule of thumb is, if there is a big business involved any where, sponsoring the research or whatever, beware!

Hi Hanadr. You're right. There's an awful lot of bad science around supported by ignorance and commercial interests. It drives me nuts this advice to 'keep the fat and salt low' given to diabetics (and everyone). The salt thing at the level we now have is only needed i.e. reduce it, to protect the heart once the damage has been done thru excess carbs. I think people now assume that what we eat called 'fat' is what causes the body to store 'fat' i.e. the same word. Whilst it does contribute, the carbs escape attention. I learnt a long time ago in business that Group-think is a very dangerous thing and many health professionals have it in spades.

sigh, sorry we've been here before.

Ancel Keys had several degrees including a second post grad degree in physiology he from the Univ of Cambridge. He was not just a statistician. He did a large amount of laboratory research.

Re :The paper with the alleged cherry picked graph and the Seven Countries study.
Here is the paper that contains the graph dated. Note that it's dated 1952
http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/pdfs/Keys ... Health.pdf
It is one graph out of many in a long paper
Keys explains in the paper that this graph utilised data from six countries that had comparable data to that available in the US. (some of the countries in the FAO data didn't even have death certification so were in no way comparable, others were only a year out of wartime occupation) You see the graph in context and decide.

I cannot find any paper by Lustig on this graph.
Here are the actual correlations using the 22 countries from normally quoted Yerushalmy and Hilleboe critical paper of 1957. There is an obvious correlation between the B26 category arthereosclerosis and degenerative heart disease and percentage of calories from fat when using all the 22 countries. It wasn't some fiction made up by Keys.



Y and H then added together the “death from arteriosclerotic and degenerative heart disease” with “other diseases of the heart,” and compared this with percentage of calories from fat. When they did this the correlation disappears.
However the fat category includes both animal and vegetable fat, if just animal fat and indeed animal protein are considered the correlations remain strong
There is a negative correlation across all categories between percentage of calories from vegetable fat and all forms of heart disease. There is also a negative correlation between all heart disease and percentage of calories from carbohydrates.
Interestingly the highest correlation is between total calories and B26.
If you take the correlations between fat and all cause mortality you will however find a negative correlation. Keys was however looking at heart disease.
There are also many other considerations which may influence the associations (wealth etc) some of which Keys discusses in his paper.
See Plant Positive http://www.plantpositive.com/3-the-jour ... -taubes-3/
and Denise Minger http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/12/22/the-tr ... -it-wrong/

Correlation doesn't infer causation but can form an hypothesis.

Which leads to the Seven countries study and much laboratory research.
The seven countries study did not start until 1958 and continued (s) for fifty more. Only 3 of the countries studied were in the contested graph. In each comparison country (to the US) cohorts were chosen to reflect more traditional ways of life and more industrialised. (16 cohorts)
http://www.sph.umn.edu/epi/history/overview/ The study was of it's time when formulated so naturally can be criticised but it doesn't make any sense to conflate it with the 6 countries graph described above and perpetuate an internet mythology
edited (I removed this and was going to post it separately because it really isn't on the original topic.
I agree with the original poster about carbs and de novolipogenesis and should have posted about that.
I restored it because someone else has now commented on my original

hanadr said:

along came the healthy heart theory.based on no real research and a project by Ancel Keys[ a statitician!] to study the normal diets of 22 countries, just from statistics, to find what kept the people in some countries slim and heart healthy. Unfortunately Keys already thought he had the answers..............

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You really need to do some research rather than relying on dubious sources hana, Keys was actually a Scientist, I would have thought you would have known that, he did oversee a study that was known as the “Seven Countries Study” which was based on evidence between different diets which led him to rightly or wrongly surmise that he Mediterian diet was better than a diet made up of processed foods including executive saturated fats.

It was researchers Yerushalmy and Hilleboe using the same data-set which Keys had shown strong relationship between dietary fat and atherosclerosis, pointed out even stronger positive correlation between animal protein intake and incidence of coronary heart disease, although this relationship exists with sugar as well, but was ignored.

If you want to know more about him there is a lot of genuine information about, you could even start with a visit to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys

To dismiss him as just a statistician is inaccurate nonsense, some of his observations as a "scientist" have been found to be incorrect but that happens to all studies and our knowledge is constantly expanding.

He also pioneered the BMI system of determining body fat which is still used today, not bad for someone you describe as a statistician eh?

Sorry phoenix, I hadnt seen your reply I must have been posting my reply to Hana.

As usual you put things far better than I am able to :thumbup:

stoomc said:

I have received back a few emails from obesity doctors and a few people who know this stuff a lot better than me and they ALL verified 100% that carbs are very rarely converted to fat. (None of them have anything to sell)

Here is one link- http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-lo ... t-fat.html

So, for the average person for myself anyway- carbs are nothing to fear.
I have no idea about diabetes metabolism and handling of carbs, so I am going to have to bow out at this point.

Thanks for the replies!

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It depends on how you phrase the question. I'm no scientist, but I can see how I might agree that carbs aren't converted to fat - ie, not directly. However, the carbs are metabolised into glucose, and it is the excess glucose in the blood that is stored in the fat cells when the muscle/organ cells can't or won't take up any more glucose for energy. At least, that's how I understand it.

edit to add: If carbs don't get converted to fat, how come cattle, sheep and pigs are fed high grain diets to "finish" them to a sale weight?

It may well be that someone like me (like Sid, I can only speak from my personal experience) hasn't really been able to handle carbs from a very early age. I was diagnosed diabetic in 2010, age 60; this was an early diagnosis as my BG levels had been tested every six months for the previous 9 years. However, I have now been dieting for weight loss (with varied success) for 50 years, and had already realised that I did not lose weight on 1000 cals per day, when those cals were mainly carb, long before diabetes. But everyone still kept pushing "low fat high carb" at me, and calling me a liar, so I persevered - and became diabetic.

Maybe my weight-gain-from-carbs was an early indication of my propensity for becoming diabetic? even though my BG levels were perfectly "normal".

By the way, jacket potatoes are very good with just a sprinkle of salt. I learned that while I was low-fatting! 25 cals per oz of jacket potato - very important when you're on 1000 cals per day. Don't be afraid of a little salt. We need it - just not too much! I have a slight shake in my morning omelette and that's it. I don't add it in cooking, I wait to taste. I have lived up here for over 12 years and have only bought one drum of sea salt in all that time, so I don't eat it to excess.

Viv 8)

Sid Bonkers said:

stoomc said:

I follow the laws of thermodynamics- but then you get people saying they are gaining weight while eating carbs (even under maintenance) so what is going on there? Water/ glycogen weight, under-reporting of caloric intake- or are people with diabetes the exception to the rule and they don't use carbs as energy and de novo lipogenisis is ramped up?

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I can only speak for myself stoomc, I eat carbs although not in excess any more and I have lost over 5 stones now *simply by eating less, and 4 stone of that weight loss was when I was using insulin to help control my bg levels, so Taubes theories dont impress me at all.

So for me fewer calories equalled loss of weight, and I didnt have to increase the fat in my diet at all, in fact the fat was probably reduced along with the protein and carbs, although I've never counted calories, fat, or protein and in fact I no longer count carbs either now I'm not using insulin and having to carefully match my carb intake to the insulin I used.


* OK it wasnt that simply, but I did it and I now couldnt eat the quantities of food that I once did so I assume that my stomach has shrunk over the last 4 years.

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hi Sid, would you mind letting us know how many carbs you eat, roughly per day? Especially interested in how many you ate when you were losing the weight? Many thanks!

Sorry, edited as I meant to add my thoughts... I'm no scientist so can't comment on the weight gain issue as a fact or not.. but I DO know from personal experiences and careful diet/BG/Carb counting, that carbs DO increase my BG levels, more than any other food.

I also know that in the weeks when my carbs are very well controlled and under 100g daily, I lose weight; but when the carbs totals are between 100-150g, I dont lose weight, just maintain. If I eat over 150g, I put weight on (I know this for fact as I did it at Christmas and again over a birthday weekend recently... those extra carbs can make the difference of up to 3lbs extra weight for me in one week!).

viviennem said:

Don't be afraid of a little salt. We need it - just not too much!

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And iodized salt at that. The iodine is usually added to table and cooking salts and exists in sea salts bit still, in some areas, where salt has been extracted locally, it contains no iodine and the result is Goiter and Cretinism. It was common in some valleys in the Italian Alps where the salt that they consumed contained no iodine. The 'air' was blamed, for being too compressed between the steep high valley walls. Lacustrine, riverine and esturine diets tend to come with the complete package of trace elements and vital nutrients.