Platypus, ask your husband to consider for a moment, which system evolved as the backup system, and which is the primary system. Consider that hunter/gatherer man probably had access to meat year-round, and only seasonal access to plant materials and no high starch materials at all. It is only since agriculture, that the glucose system would have become the primary system and not the backup, and this timeframe of 10000 years is not enough for the genetic changes required to bolster the backup system.

Persoanlly I think both systems are fully functional and neither should be considered a backup to the other.

Weird how this thread popped back up.. I liked this quote:



In about 50 years, everyone will know that low carb is healthier than low fat... and we will all be the "educated people" who knew and spoke out before the establishment would acknowledge it.

I wonder what that makes the people who are still crying, "the earth is flat!! the earth is flat!" Seems that this pattern is pretty familiar in history.

Andrea I hope you're right, but consider that Banting first wrote about this way of eating over a hundred years ago. Seems that there is a natural proclivity for carbs, that and big money to be made off of them. So like many good ideas, they may never come to be accepted by the majority.

Tom Sawyer said "Platypus, ask your husband to consider for a moment, which system evolved as the backup system, and which is the primary system"

That's a good point. I personally don't know a great deal about early human evolution or our pre-agricultural eating habits (other than we ate what was available - animal or vegetable) but it makes sense to me that we would have had more stable access to meat than vegetable, given growning season considerations. I am inclined to think they evolved together so that we could exist on what ever was at hand. This is a neat trick (not all animals can convert anything they eat into useful fuel) that has allowed us to spread out and live pretty much anywhere on earth.

From a sociological standpoint, I find it interesting that my husband was taught that it was a "back up system". This means that all the pre-med students in his class were also taught that ketosis is a "back up system", as an accepted/undisscussed fact, with no discussion such as we are having now. When you couple this with the wee bit of nutritional training they get in medical school (fat bad, carbs good - and they don't even get much training on that) you can see how patients who come in to talk about low carb eating might fare badly.

The reality of this arguement is very clear. The FDA says that a persons daily recomended allowance of carbs is 300 grams, one plain glazed donut has 22 g carbs 18 of which are sugar, how many donuts can a person eat a day if this was all they used to make up their daily allowance? Too many. What people who argue low carb and ketosis don't take into account is that it is NOT normal that the human body not burn fat for fuel, our glutonous American diets have our bodies working overtime burning glucose for fuel just in the struggle to keep us from becoming diebetic. As long as the body has to burn off sugar it will not and cannot burn fat. If we elliminate all sugar carbs from our diet and take in only carbs that are high in fiber and those with high nutritional value do you really think that you would need to eat 300 grams of carbs per day in order to be healthy? Deffinately not. Ketosis is just a natural period of adjustment while your body relearns how to efficiently burn fat instead of the sugar it has been so used to and is safe as long as the diet is consistant in no or low sugar. Ketoacidoses will only happen if the body is unable to properly break down fat causing ketone build up in the body. What is important to note on the safety of low carb dieting is that cheeting is very hard on your system going in and out of ketosis by binge sugar eating is not recomended. It is best if you can teach your body and your taste buds to accept a healthier way of eating and stay that way.