The Low-Carb Fraud

We’ll discuss why the low-carb diet is so appealing, how we’ve been tricked in thinking it’s healthy, and the truth about its health impacts. But this book is also concerned with the beliefs about nutrition that underlie those things: where the belief that carbs are bad came from, and why it has persisted despite so much evidence to the contrary.

worse, than the SAD it seeks to replace. In this book, I will explore a couple of important questions: Why do people think low-carb diets are a good idea? What’s the truth behind the low-carb hype? What’s the truly optimal diet for achieving an ideal weight while also obtaining health and longevity?

In this book, I will explore a couple of important questions: Why do people think low-carb diets are a good idea? What’s the truth behind the low-carb hype? What’s the truly optimal diet for achieving an ideal weight while also obtaining health and longevity? If there’s one thing

Perhaps the most telling report on the low-carb diet and health is the recent summary of 17 studies published in January 2013 involving 272,216 subjects,59 in which a low-carb diet showed a statistically significant 31 percent increase in total deaths. This finding is even more telling than the statistics suggest because this 31 percent increase is in comparison to the already high mortality typically observed for the SAD, when compared to a whole food, plant-based diet. Also, this study is the first opportunity for us to consider low-carb claims and inferences based on long-term population-based data from multiple nations. These findings, and the inability of the low-carb diet to reverse serious diseases like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, makes the initial decreases in body weight often observed with the low-carb diet “irrelevant,” as the authors of this report note.

I agree that humans must have consumed some amount of animal-based food during their evolutionary past. But I don’t agree that we should use highly questionable evidence from ancient history to vigorously assert the correct amounts of protein and fat to be consumed in the present day, when we have access to far superior research methodologies and experimentation.