Again, why low carbs?

People ask again and again why carbs are bad for you. I guess the simple answer is, "because they make your body store fat."

Some people tell me, "I love carbs, I eat a lot of them." One friend in particular eats almost no fat and FREAKS if some fat gets into her diet. Well, if you have no fat in your diet, you are going to suffer somewhere. See my post on sat fats and the fact that they do have some redeeming qualities. But if you are not fat, you shouldn't change your eating habits too much unless you have high triglycerides, low hdl, high ldl, wrong size ldl particles, high blood pressure, diabetes, high inflammation indicators or a history of breast cancer or other cancers. why?

Because a high carb diet affects all of the above. Keep track of your carb intake for one day. Those slices of bread, the hidden sugars in drinks, yogourt, peanut butter and lots of other places all add up. They added carbs when they took out the fat.

Your body will make energy out of fats and stored fat if you cut your carb intake. Eat a piece of toast with peanut butter on it in the morning if you find you can't live without carbs. You'll burn it off quickly, and then your body will go back to burning fat if you eat protein, vegetables that are low sugar, and low sugar fruits. It's all about burning the fat around your middle-it is the most dangerous fat and impedes your organs and strains your heart.

Without carbs, you may have higher cholesterol, but as your triglycerides lower, the size of your LDL particles will get bigger, and that is good for your heart. The small LDL particles are the ones that stick together and cause blockages.

The only for sure scientific correlation is that people who have good levels of HDL have fewer heart attacks. So of course that is the ultimate goal, is to get that number into the approved range. And that takes a change in diet, to include olive oil, oils from nuts, lean proteins, salmon and other fatty fish and vegetables that don't raise your blood sugar.

The easiest route is to follow South Beach as closely as possible. It's the sugar in our diets that is killing us. And carbs equals glucose equals sugar. Bye bye baked potato, rice, white bread, chips and pop.

Women, Insulin and Breast Cancer

It used to be all about estrogen. It was postulated that obese women, and there are too many of us, synthesized estrogen in adipose tissue. Now there is some thought that insulin is also part of the problem, due to high carb diets we are all following to keep fat levels low.

But we know now that that's all bunk, right, and we should be following a "plant-based, Meditteranean, low carb, right oil and fat" diet.

Anyway, an article of interest is "Insulin, Insulin-like Growth Factor-I, and Risk of Breast Cancer in Postmenopausal Women." Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol 101, Issue 1, Jan 7/09.

The multitude of authors conducted a study and looked at 835 subjects who were nondiabetic. They looked at their various blood profiles and concluded that insulin levels were positively associated with the risk of breast cancer but with a few caveats, like hormone use. Obesity was also associated.

The conclusion was "these data suggest that hyperinsulinemia is an independent risk factor for breast cancer and may have a substantial role in explaining the obesity=breast cancer relationship."

They observed "strong positive association" between risk of breast cancer and high fasting insulin levels in postmenopausal women who weren't diabetic and weren't on hormone therapy.

This means that women who are obese have to lose weight, get their insulin levels down and get active. It also mentions high estradiol levels but I'm not sure what women can do about that, other than lose the adipose tissue that produces too much estrogen.

I'd love to hear some medical comments on this.

More evidence

Today an article in Archives of Internal Medicine on the benefits of a low carb diet with a vegetarian twist.

It benefitted blood pressure, apolipoproteins and the ratio between total and ldl cholesterol.

More proof that carbs are not good for us.

I've been looking at articles from as far back as 2000, regarding things like "the metabolic syndrome, LDL particle size, and atheroclerosis: the Atherosclerosis and Insulin Resistance
(AIR) study". This was the first study to show a relationship between having small LDL particle size, metabolic syndrome and thickening of plaques in the arterial walls carotid and femoral arteries. And smaller LDL particles are not good.

Another article from the Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology journal, called "Change in LDL particle size is associated with change in plasma triglyceride concentration", talks about how LDL particle size is inversely related to plasma triglyceride concentrations, so the higher your triglycerides, the smaller the size of your LDL particles. It seems the smaller particles are the ones found in plaque folks.

I'm painting a picture here.

So how to lower your plasma triglycerides? Eat fewer carbs. In Canada the RDA for carbs is about 300 g. On South Beach, I would say you get less than 20g a day during Phase I, probably 50 during phase II and less than 100g during Phase III and the rest of your life, depending on whether you gain weight or not.

Exercise is also good for you. It burns whatever glucose you might have in your system and gets you into fat burning mode. It also increases your fitness level and endurance.

Next post: insulin levels and breast cancer

I didn't know sat fats did anything good...

"The approach of many mainstream investigators in studying the effect of consuming saturated fats has been narrowly focused to produce and evaluate evidence in support of the hypothesis that dietary saturated fat elevates LDL cholesterol and thus the risk of CAD. The evidence is not strong, and overall, dietary intervention by lowering saturated fat intake does not lower the incidence of nonfatal CAD; nor does such dietary intervention lower coronary disease or total mortality." (German and Dillard, Am J or Clin Nutr, 2004)

What?

That was 5 years ago and today on CNN the Crestor add still vilifies sat fats and cholesterol in contributing to CAD.

Anyway, I think changes are starting to happen, perhaps with Pres. Obama's stress on utilizing science.

In any case, we know that sat fats are essential in the body. Heck, we produce them ourselves, especially lactating women feeding their babies.

OK, so some good sat fats:

Butyric acid - may play a role in cancer prevention, is a modulator of the immune response and inflammation, functions as an antitumor agent by inhibiting growth and promotion differentiation and apoptosis (s-that is, cell death).

caproic, caprylic and capric acids - the second two have antiviral activity, monocaprin has antiviral activity against HIV, caprylic acid has antitumor activity in mice.

lauric acid - antiviral and antibacterial functions, kills heliobacter pylorii in the stomach, anticaries and antiplaque agent, has adverse effects on various microorganisms including bacteria, yeast, fungi and enveloped viruses, by disrupting lipid membranes and deactivating them.

myristic acid - associated with CAD but most strongly related to average serum cholesterol concentrations, can also increase HDL levels.

palmitic acid - in normal healthy people with normal cholesterol levels, palmitic acid lowers serum cholesterol, replacement of laurate-myristate with palmitate-oleate has a beneficial effect on an important index of thrombogenesis.

stearic acid - and other acids with less than 12 carbon atoms are thought not to increase cholesterol concentrations. Produces beneficial effects on thrombogenic and athergenic risk factors.

So they are not completely without merit. Next time, the effects of sat fats on cholesterol.