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Starting a Low Carbohydrate Diet

If you are reading this, it means you are interested or curious to learn about the Low Carbohydrate Diet LCHF (Low Carbohydrate, Healthy Fat) and possibly trying it out for yourself.

If you wish to get started straight away – click here

Why go Low Carb?

It is so confusing.  One minute, we are told that to avoid a major heart attack and to be slim and healthy, you need to stop eating butter, eggs and reduce the fat in your diet.  Now, the emerging science has turned the food pyramid on its head and the positive effects of lower carb and higher healthy fat diet are becoming more widely understood.

A little History……

An American physiologist, Ansel Keys, who was interested in diet and cardiovascular disease, in the 1950s, was made known for his famous ‘Seven Countries Study’.  The association appeared to show that serum cholesterol was strongly related to coronary heart disease mortality.

The diet-heart hypothesis was based on ‘cherry-picked’ data in which Keys only took the data from seven countries that supported his hypothesis out of the 22 countries that were studied.

The American Heart Association, in 1956, recommended that a low- fat diet be adopted to help prevent heart disease and the Food Pyramid was advocated.

The food industry responded by removing the fat from foods and replacing it with sugar to make it more palatable.

Opposition to the low-fat hypothesis

Keys’ had strong opposition from John Yudkin, a physiologist, nutritionist and the founding Professor of the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College in London. Yudkin argued that it was not fat but the over-consumption of sugar that was the problem.

Yudkin wrote several books; ‘Pure, White and Deadly’ (1972) the book he gained international notoriety for which warned of the dangers of sugar (glucose and fructose) consumption in conditions such as dental caries, obesity, diabetes and heart attack.

However, Ansel Keys was a forceful character, could raise funds and dominated proceedings giving an aura of credibility for his diet-heart hypothesis.  The government and big industry followed. They had the funds to do the research and conducted studies which were blatantly designed to give answers to what they wanted to hear.

Ansel Keys discredited his opposition, John Yudkin, and the case against sugar was not taken seriously.

It wasn’t until 2009, a paediatric endocrinologist, Robert Lustig, made a video called Sugar:  The Bitter Truth which confirmed Yudkin’s findings. Thanks to Robert Lustig, ‘Pure, White and Deadly’, was republished in 2012.

The demonization of saturated fat resulted in the food industry producing processed vegetable oils (correctly called seed oils) and margarine to replace the natural fats and oils in our diet to reduce cholesterol. This increase in the Omega-6/Omega-3 Fatty Acid ratio increases the risk of obesity and inflammation in the body.

By this time the Big food industry and Big Pharma were making corporate profits at the expense of our health and scientists were losing funding and jobs if they did not agree with the industry.

This study, from Harvard in 2013 explains the corruption and misinformation that has occurred.

We may be living longer, however, we are not dying of infectious diseases but of metabolic diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and diabetes are becoming the norm. We are in a health crisis; health costs will cripple our welfare systems.  This has been the worst experiment on human health in the history of man.

Further Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys