Low-Carbohydrate Nutrition

Laura Dolson's Low-Carb Food Pyramid from About.com

Why Low-Carb?

Since 1998, I have supported low-carb nutritional protocols for the treatment of multiple health problems, and for the management of obesity.  

The Low-Fat Hypothesis has been so prevalent it takes what someone once called a paradigm shift for people to fully understand how little it is based in valid data.  Doctors are no exception.  As a group we are poorly educated in nutrition to begin with, and the Low-Fat Hypothesis was just as pervalent inside medical schools as it was in the mainstream media.  It wasn't until 11 years ago, that I realized just how wrong "conventional wisdom" can be.  

I was trained by and worked for the United States Air Force for 12 years.  In 1998 I was stationed in Panama, at Howard Air Force Base.  There was a male nurse that worked in my unit.  He told me about his father.  His father was the classic "apple" type body shape--all his obesity was abdominal (he was all gut with skinny arms and legs).  He was in his 60s 5' 3" and 271 pounds.  He had so far suffered one heart attack, he had high triglycerides, a low HDL (high-denisity lipid) in his cholesterol reading.  The nurse in my unit told me that his father was prescribed a low-carb diet, and that his father had undergone a complete transformation.  He lost 100lbs and all indices of good health--blood pressure, cholesterol, triglyceride levels improved dramatically.  

Interested, I began researching the idea of Metabolic X Syndrome or insulin resistance and I was persuaded that refined carbohydrates, particularly grains, are the source of many of our Western health problems.  I also began to cease thinking of certain pathologies as diseases but as adaptive traits that turn against the human body in the presence of prosperity; what once enable a robust survival in the context of hardship, now can work against us amidst abundance.  At the time the book I first read was by the Doctors Eades, Protein Power, which you can find in the book column at the last.  I actually began buying dozens of his books and handing them out to patients.  

Since that time, many other studies and mainstream books have surfaced about low-carbohydrate eating which support the findings of the Eades (which you can also find on the right).  And of course, Dr. Atkins who preceded them, was prescient of the current clinical findings on the benefits of low-carbohydrate diets.

There will be more posts on this. Stay tuned.