Low carbs diets are any diet 100 grams of carbs a day or less. 100 grams is the Atkins' standard. Atkins is the mother of all modern low carb diets. There are some low carb diets that go higher than that, into the 150 grams a day, but on this blog, we stick to 100 grams or less.
How low you go on your daily carb allotment is individualized. It all depends on your results. Forget your goals. Goals are not results. You can have a book of goals and obtain none of them. Results are the only thing that counts and obtaining results is not necessarily dependent on carb allotment. You can be 0 carbs and still not achieve any results.
Why people think that obesity is a "carb disease" is unknown to me. Carbs are only a contributor, not the cause. If carbs were the cause, then all these obese "keto" and carnivore people would be as lean and trim as fitness instructors.
People really need to wake up from their carb hypnosis because, in here, you will get a rude awakening. Obesity is the result of poor blood glucose regulation.
The most important thing to remember about low carb is that you shouldn’t be carb counting. What you should be doing is eating carbs only in the form of non-starchy vegetables. No sugar, no grains, no legumes and very limited tubers and roots. Non-starchy vegetables are all leafy greens, cruciferous (flowers), fungus (mushrooms) and low sugar fruits. Low sugar fruits are night shades. Night shades are tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, yellow squash, etc. Certain legumes (pulses) can pass for vegetables because they are more pod than pea, like green beans or pole beans. But legumes like black beans, lentils, kidney beans, etc. are not acceptable, especially since people want to make a meal out of them by replacing meat. They are garnishes at most and left out at best.
So, if you are eating only the right vegetables, listed above, you don’t have to count any carbs whatsoever and you would never know if you are under 100 grams or over or what. It doesn’t matter. Carb counting is only for people that insist on having chocolate cake, since even the occasional tuber or root does not require a carb count. Stop counting. Obesity is not a disease caused by lack of counting. It is primarily caused by lack of understanding.
2. "Keto" causes leg cramps.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you would know that leg cramps are caused from a lack of magnesium when doing "keto" and sometimes even just from following low carb. You should supplement with 400 IU of magnesium a day, but over all, you have to keep your electrolytes in check. I recommend this electrolyte guide.
3. Going low carbohydrate will cure dental problems.
Dental health can be affected by a number of things. Improper hygiene is usually the main cause. Other than that, certain hormonal states and/or medications cause dry mouth, which can have a serious impact on dental health. The mouth needs saliva, with the proper enzymes, to maintain healthy teeth and gums. Genetic differences in the body’s acidity/alkalinity, effects dental health by influencing oral microbiota. You can make this worse or better by using rinses or even a change in diet.
But the most common dental problems are caused by two things:
- Too much sugar in the diet.
- A narrower, smaller jaw due to the effects of agricultural foods.
Agriculture depleted food of important vitamins and minerals needed for strong bones and teeth. With time, this change in our food supply caused for the jaw to become narrower and weaker, causing impacted teeth, problems with wisdom teeth and crooked and/or slanted teeth. Basically, the teeth no longer fit in the jaw. That is why this type of issue is usually claimed to be "genetic" by dentists. It cannot be fixed with diet. We simply evolved, with time, to have narrower faces and weaker jaws.
So, the only thing you can do with diet for better dental health is to get rid of the sugar, in order to stop rotting your teeth. There is also a possibility your new diet might change your oral microbiome, which can either improve your dental issues or make them worse. You just don’t know because we have a vastly different oral microbiota between individuals and they react differently to different diets.
Practice good oral hygiene and visit a dentist often to prevent costly dental issues in the future.
4. Saturated fat is "good" for you.
Saturated fat is better for you than "vegetable oils" or any type of plant oil. Even if you get the best olive oil you can find, butter is still a better fat. Why? Because it is closest in composition to the fat that naturally accompanies protein. We did not evolve eating plant based fats.
Having said that, we also did not evolve eating added saturated fats like butter, ghee, lard, tallow, duck fat, etc. Though these fats have been around for a much longer period of time than plant based fats, they are still relatively new to the food supply. Basically hunter/gatherers do not add fat to their food. They cook over an open fire, where the adding of fat is just not necessary. Hunter/gatherers eat the saturated, animal fat that comes with protein. If the animal is particularly fatty, such as a sea lion, then they get to eat more of that animal's fat, but if the animal happens to be lean, they eat less. This varies by region and the diet of the tribe. Wild game is mostly lean and it's what is most commonly eaten.
For this reason, control your added fat intake, especially if you aren’t achieving results. Dowsing your food in mayonnaise, butter or hollandaise sauce is not the normal way we have eaten for 99% of our history. So no, it’s not just pizza that’s unnatural. It’s that block of cream cheese in your eggs.
5. Going "keto” will cure acne.
Again, just like the dental claim above, acne is a result of changes to the skin's microbiota caused by excess oil secretion.
Skin varies between areas of the body. For example, facial skin is different from arm skin and this is why acne occurs only in certain areas where more oil is secreted. This can be caused by certain medications or hormonal states. This is why teens usually suffer from acne, but this problem can persist beyond the teenage years for many people.
Sometimes diet can change hormonal states and skin floral. This can cause a decrease or increase of acne. It can also not cause any change at all. It just depends on your initial hormonal state to begin with and what exactly was flaring up your acne symptoms.
Ketogenic protocols, on this blog, are used exclusively for the treatment of metabolic abnormalities.
6. When insulin levels lower, you can develop frequent headaches. Consuming artificial sweeteners will prevent this.
It is impossible for me to be able to tell for sure what is going on here, but let’s say for the sake of this response that lowering insulin levels produce a headache. In that case, what’s occurring is the symptom of a very powerful metabolic adaptation towards hyperglycemia. This is basically a high set point of both insulin and glucose. In this state, the body does not want insulin levels to lower because it has adapted to high glucose levels which require higher insulin levels. Of course, the high glucose is difficult to obtain because you aren’t in taking glucose through the diet, so the body will simply ramp up its own internal glucose production in order to keep the set point high.
The headaches are just a pseudo "hypoglycemic" symptom in response to lower blood glucose. Even if your blood glucose is 150 mg/dL, the body still insists that’s too low, causing pseudo symptoms. This drives you to eat something to help the body continue its trajectory.
Eating sweet things that have no calories, will not improve this problem. Do not let artificial sweeteners lull you to sleep. You will eventually further deteriorate your blood glucose regulation, through dopamine over expression, and the body will continue setting the bar higher and higher and breaking down all of your lean muscle into glucose. It won’t break down your fat into glucose, even though it has that ability. Instead it will break down your lean muscle mass, since it wants to spare your fat mass at all costs. This is one of the major differences between Type I and Type II diabetes. Type I's can’t even keep their fat mass. Type II's can only keep their fat mass.
I recommend you drop all sweet tastes from the diet. The sweet taste is affecting your ability to regulate your hormones properly through a dysregulation of dopamine. All metabolic hormones are slaves to insulin levels. You must take control of your insulin and blood glucose levels first in order to allow everything else to follow suit.
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