Living Low Carb by Jonny Bowden Read Free Book Online Page A

anything on a so-called “balanced” diet of 2,000 calories; but when these same subjects were put on a diet of primarily fat with very low carbohydrate, they were able to lose even when the calories went as high as 2,600 per day. The February 1957 issue of the American journal Antibiotic Medicine and Clinical Therapy reported: “If … calorie intake was kept constant… at 1,000 per day, the most rapid weight loss was noted with high-fat diets …. But when the calorie intake was raised to 2,600 daily in these patients, weight loss would still occur provided that this intake was given mainly in the form of fat and protein. ” (Emphasis mine.)
    Still, the criticism from the medical establishment was enormous—this work contradicted the mantra that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. One of the criticisms leveled at the two researchers was that the weight their patients lost was “just water weight.” So Kekwick and Pawan did water-balance studies that showed water loss to be only a small part of the total weight lost. Interestingly, as recently as 2002, a very well-designed study done at the University of Cincinnati and Children’s Hospital Medical Center 13 compared weight loss on a very low-carbohydrate diet to weight loss on a calorie-restricted low-fat diet, and found again that the greater weight loss experienced by the lowcarb dieters was not due to water loss. The exact words: “We think it is very unlikely that differences in weight between the two groups… are a result of [water loss] in the very low-carb dieters.” Yet to this day, the myth persists that the majority of weight lost on low-carbohydrate diets is mainly from water.
    Eat Fat and Grow Slim and the Theory of Metabolic Disorder
    The dietary establishment remained firmly convinced, as it does to this day, that the only thing that mattered when it came to weight reduction was calories; but there were pockets of dissent popping up throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. One of the leaders of this dissent was Dr. Richard Mackarness, who ran Britain’s first obesity and food allergy clinic and who in 1958 wrote Eat Fat and Grow Slim (which was revised and expanded in 1975). 14 He argued that it was carbohydrates, not calories, that were the culprit in weight gain. The following lines, from the foreword to the book, give the reader some idea of what’s coming. They were written by Sir Heneage Ogilvie—a consultant surgeon at Guy’s Hospital in London, the editor of The Practitioner, and a former vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, England.
There are three kinds of foods—fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. All of these provide calories. But the carbohydrates provide calories and nothing else. They have none of the essential elements to build up or to repair the tissues of the body. A man given carbohydrates alone, however liberally, would starve to death on calories. The body must have proteins and animal fats . It has no need for carbohydrates, and, given the two essential foodstuffs, it can get all the calories it needs from them.
    You heard it here first, folks. And you’ll be hearing it again throughout this book: the body has no physiological need for carbohydrates. You cannot live without protein. You cannot live without fat. But you can survive perfectly well without carbohydrates. No one is saying you ought to, or that you have to—just that you can. This is simple, basic human biochemistry. There is no “minimum daily requirement” for carbohydrates—which raises the question worth keeping in the back of your mind as you read through the rest of this book: why would the dietary establishment—including the American Dietetic Association—continue to insist that the only healthful diet consists of one in which the majority of the calories come from the one macronutrient for which we have no physiological need?
    But I digress.
    Sentiments similar to those of Ogilvie were echoed in the Mackarness book’s introduction,