Latest issue of Consumer reports
 

I read Consumer reports because they are the only source I know of that gives product advice w/o accepting advertisements. Sometimes they go beyond that though. Often they will give (really bad IMO) advice on diets. Whenever they rate food products they always lower the ratings if a product is high in fat but never mention carbs. Best to look at their advice on taste and buying the product and to ignore what they say about nutrition. The latest issue of CR (June 2015) is no exception. On an article on the latest eating fads they gave this advice on low-carb diets:

"If your body gets less than 50 grams of carbs per day (the amount in two apples) for three to four days in a row, it will start tapping its own fat and muscle for fuel instead of its usual source : glucose from carbs."

The second part of that is new. I know people worry that people on low carb diets may eat too much protien because they do not understand that low carb diets are supposed to be high fat and not high in protien. So I have never heard anyone worry that we may eat so little protien that we may force our bodies to burn muscle. But I guess there is a first time for everything. Not sure if they got that from a peer reviewed article though.

The first part though just makes me laugh out loud. My god! If your body starts using stored fat instead of glucose from carbs then you might .. you know ... lose weight! Oh the horrors! How do people lose wieght on other diet plans w/o burning stored fat instead of getting calories from food? Why else are people going on diets?

Consumer's Reports relies upon the Food Pyramid/MyPlate for their nutritional guidance. Food fat is evil in their minds.

As remarked by Dodger, with nutrition knowledge based on the recommended Standard American Diet (MyPlate and Pyramid), the advice on food products is not surprising. One of the major challenges that needs to be overcome before the population can be helped with their ways of eating is the information provided by the medical community and the government. Until this information is changed, the media will continue to support this flawed position.

GIGO. Start with a flawed premise, end with a flawed conclusion.

I actually usually disagree with most of what CR says. I get the feeling it's like Chinese science. Heres the result we need, now go prove it.

( the reason I say Chinese science is that I have met a few Chinese defectors that worked as scientists and that's what they said it was like in China. "Here go prove the sky is green" )

That actually seems like an improvement. A couple of years ago, an article like this one probably would have said that you needed 120 grams of dietary carbohydrate a day, rather than 50. That was based on how much glucose the brain generally goes through in a day when a person's on a high carbohydrate diet. At least this recommendation is based on the threshold where most people will go into ketosis--they leave some room for a more moderate, just short of ketogenic, carbohydrate diet. The idea that ketosis guarantees loss of lean mass is utter nonsense.

:lol: I had the same reaction when I read this article. I'm a new subscriber (curiosity!) to CR, and I've already learned that I read it through the filter of my existing opinions and prejudice.

One thing that is especially funny to me is how all the fitness magazines and gurus go crazy finding the new best way to burn fat. And some of the exercise ideas or insane diet practices like cycling massive calories with absurdly high carbs one day then starving yourself off them the next are unbelievable. I love to exercise but when I see some of the workouts and debates over how to burn fat I just laugh and there are so many ideas with tons of scientists studying all these ways to burn a little more fat. Essentially they are trying to get into ketosis without getting into ketosis. They want to burn all the glycogen away fast as possible to start burning fat even a little or if they could they would ignore the glycogen entirely and go right to the fat but they only want to do it this way or that way because ketosis has such a bad rap by people who lack the common sense to comprehend that ages ago before refrigeration and mass food production during times when there were not many crops (which was likely rather often in many parts of the country due to a myriad of things) people ate meat and they certainly ate the fat on the meat. They hunted and that is how they survive and their bodies went into the very normal state of ketosis so they could survive as long as they had to.

The availability of such vast quantities of food in such wide varieties (most of it unhealthy) has confused people into believing this is what we were made for. Well, if it was then how the heck did we survive from our caveman roots because I'm 100% sure they didn't have supermarkets then and they surely did not have refrigeration.

Oh well, at least we know better. Let the rest of the world cling to their processed foods and believe that carbs are great - the more carbs the merrier. We've already seen what that's doing to our society on whole and still people are befuddled as to why.

That sounds like corporate america science, too. Actually, it's a pretty standard practice for most businesses to engage in (which is horrifying). It's so easy to manipulate statistics. That was actually one of the main points one of my professors used to make about statistics. He actually used to make aim for goals rather than just working with the data without some hypothesis to prove. He wanted us to be very aware of how overall meaningless statistics could be and how to never trust what is said but to look at the whole picture of how those numbers were obtained. That might have been one of my favorite classes.