Chewing the fat: the low-carb diet phenomenon

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August-Sept, 2003 by Stephen Byrnes

"Now in my mid sixties, after 40 years of eating a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, I weigh 3kg (7 lbs) less than I did when I married and my wife is 7 kg (15 lbs) lighter. I also seem remarkably fit for my age. I took up archery in 1982 at the age of 46 as a social outlet. In all I have taken twenty British Records in Target, Clout, and Flight archery, plus eleven international Gold Medals and four World Records. This, despite the fact that I take very little exercise as, for the last 13 years I have spent most of my days sitting in front of a computer. I attribute this to my diet too as it is well documented that Eskimos, on a high-fat diet, do not lose muscle tone when they retire to their igloos during the protracted Arctic winters."

Over the years, Groves has seen the low-carb diet help with a wide range of conditions besides weight loss including gastrointestinal disorders, migraines, eczema, psoriasis, arthritis, autoimmune diseases like lupus, heart disease, even multiple sclerosis.

Life Without Bread

Life Without Bread (Keats Publishing; 2000) is mostly based on the clinical experience of Dr. Wolfgang Lutz, an Austrian medical doctor who successfully used low-carb diets for decades on thousands of patients. The results of Lutz' clinical successes have been published in several European medical journals (mostly in German) and he even authored a German version of LWB as far back as 1967 to good response (the book is now in its 6th edition). His work, however, was ignored in the English-speaking countries. After many years, with the help of American biochemist Dr. Christian Allan, Lutz succeeded in securing an American publisher and the results of his experience and research are now available to all English-speaking people.

In Lutz and Allan's definition, the low-carb diet should include no more than 72 gms of carbohydrates a day. The rest of the diet should be made up of protein and fat from a range of plant and animal sources. In sharp contrast to other low-carb books, Allan and Lutz discuss the effectiveness of low-carb nutrition in treating and preventing several diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, colitis, and Crohn's disease. Obesity is also dealt with, but is not the main focus of the book.

Lutz and Allan assert, "We've presented powerful evidence that the low-fat theory of nutrition has not fulfilled its promise, and that low-carbohydrate nutrition is a valuable tool in the fight against disease. This alternative to the fat theory is based not only on clinical information from over 10,000 patients in Dr. Lutz' practice, but also on basic biochemical facts and large amounts of published research data from many scientists and medical researchers throughout the world." (10)

In their meticulously referenced book, Allan and Lutz explain exactly how excessive carbohydrate intake negatively impacts the body's hormonally-controlled metabolic processes. Metabolism is a delicate equilibrium between anabolism (processes that build up and repair) and catabolism (processes that break down). "Too much carbohydrate in the diet disrupts the balancing act between anabolic and catabolic forces because it sends too much insulin into the blood. Since the body will always move to balance anabolic and catabolic reactions, increases in insulin must be dealt with in some way." (11)