Low carb bread

Hi. How interesting to find a consultant who understands carbs and their effect on diabetes. He sounds slightly extreme but the point is well made. You have my sympathy. My wife struggles to keep her weight down as a non-diabetic and has even lower carbs than me and very low portion sizes or everything but still puts on weight. Some people just have mechanisms that don't handle calories in the best way. It shows how excessive the calorie intake is that most of us have and the recommended daily intake is far too high. I suspect you are doing nothing wrong. Do you exercise at all?

Slesser1 I too am amazed at such a forward trhinking consultant. Where is he/she? He's right that the so-called Heart Healthy high carb diet is probably responsible for triggering diabetes in susceptible people.
Hana

Hi Slesser. Yes, do try to find some form of exercise that doesn't stress the joints too much. As you probably realise your DN is talking rubbish and I wonder were she heard that lack of carbs causes kidney failure? Where do they get their information.

Slesser1 said:

I have to admit, I dont exercise as I should, but then never have, so I still think I should lose weight anyway. Ive just been reading on the forum that 10 min exercise 3 x a day is the best way forward. I could try that. I have joint problems so prolonged exercise is a no no. I'm going to persevere with what I'm doing for a while longer and see how it goes. I just cant understand how im not losing weight when I eat hardly any fat or carbs. As for my consultant, I am doing as he suggests, but my diabetic nurse tells me I need to eat carbs with every meal. I feel healthier cutting them out, but then ive read that lack of carbs can cause kidney failure! Aaahhhhhh!!! X

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Umm..no offense to your nurse, but I think if I was going to take somebody's advice, it would be a hospital consultant and not a nurse who has perhaps done a one week course on diabetes and got a certificate!

Lack of carbs does NOT cause kidney failure. The spurious relationship to kidneys comes from the fact that if you are unfortunate enough to be in kidney failure and on dialysis, your shot kidneys cannot handle protein well, and so you are advised to eat a very low protein diet (and avoid too much potassium, for similar reasons). A healthy kidney can handle protein perfectly well. The theory being that if you eat low carb you are automatically going to eat high protein. That in itself isn't necessarily true - really high protein diets aren't brilliant for bringing down blood glucose either, because the body can make glucose from protein (just slower and more steadily than it does from carbs).

Lack of carbs does not cause anything. They are not an essential nutrient, unlike protein and fat. They taste nice, and the some food containing carbs (eg vegetables) have lots of other benefits. If lack of carbs caused kidney failure, the human race would have died out millions of years ago.

(Type 2 Diabetes, which is caused/exacerbated by too many carbs, CAN however cause kidney failure. So can Type 1, but the carb connection is less simplistic).


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The staple starch in China has been rice for a few thousand years and they have grown to 1,300,000,000 people. It is only in the past 10 to 15 years that diabetes has become, quite suddenly, a major problem in China. It is not easily explained by rice consumption alone but by increased use of refined rice coupled with a shift in work patterns and subsequent lack of exercise. China has become more westernised in lifestyle and a lack of exercise appears to be the cause of the rise of diabetes, together with greater consumption of refined carbohydrates.

It is the rate at which the refined starches are metabolised together with, because of reduced activity, the lower levels of hormones and ezymes in the blood plasma which are normally required to aid the various cell functions that causes the imbalance. It is not the starch itself. You can't have diets which rely on a high proportion of refined starch if you are not very active. You have to cut down on starch, switched to unrefined starch or become more active. Or combine all three.

Whilst you can do without starches altogether, the Inuit and Saami have been doing it for a few millenia, you cannot easily switch to their diets either. A traditional Inuit diet would result in serious internal bleeding for most modern westerners after a few years. The extent to which human population groups have, through natural selection, become genetically adapted to suit their lifestyle and food supply is only recently becoming apparant. Our lifestyle, and food supply have both changed dramatically in the past few decades and we start to see the results.