Zero-Carb?

My pal Jimmy Moore, of Livin' La Vida Low Carb, wrote to me:

I wrote a blog post today about whether a zero-carb diet for a pregnant woman is advisable to instigate a conversation and somehow it turned into a debate about why I suddenly believe in zero-carb instead of Atkins. I'm not sure how people made that leap, but I'm prepared to remedy it by doing a follow-up post asking the question, "Is a zero-carb diet healthy or not?" In it I will express what I believe about a no-carb diet--namely that it is deficient of essential nutrients, variety, and healthy ingredients humans need.

I'd like to get YOUR reaction to that question for inclusion in the blog post. Anything you send to me will be quoted in the column, so please feel free to share your specific answer to the question "Is a zero-carb diet healthy or not?" THANKS!

Is a zero-carb diet healthy?

For what values of "healthy?" We have reason to believe that the Inuit (Eskimo) lived on a nearly carb-free diet during the winter, and they apparently didn't suffer scurvy or other nutritional deficiency diseases. This is evidence that given the proper balance of animal foods, carbohydrate foods are inessential.

On the other hand, the Inuit were eating a very different diet from your modern low carber. They ate game and wild-caught fish, not animal foods from domesticated animals that had been raised on a commercial diet. They ate a diet so high in fat many of us would find it unappealing. They ate parts of the animal many modern Americans won't touch -- liver, brains, kidneys, marrow, all of the organ meats (some of which, I might add, do contain a bit of carb, liver especially.) And they ate much of their meat, fish, and blubber raw -- and aged it well first. It is impossible to extrapolate from the effects of such a diet that a diet consisting solely of the animal foods available in your local grocery store, and familiar to modern American palates, is healthful, much less ideal.

Heck, we don't even know if the Inuit diet was ideal for them. It's not like they did lots of research and came up with some brilliant diet plan. They simply ate the only foods available to them during much of their local year. Were they healthier or less healthy during the few warm months when they did, indeed, eat fruits and vegetables? I know of no records indicating any study of this, one way or the other. It is, I suppose, conceivable that a healthful carb-free diet could be constructed, but it is unlikely that such a diet could be arrived at simply by eating whatever meat, fish, poultry, and fats came to hand.

More importantly, such a diet would be ridiculously limited. Even many foods considered "free" on Atkins and other ketogenic plans would be off-limits -- eggs, for instance, have about a half-gram of carbohydrate apiece. Many seafoods contain carbohydrate in the form of glycogen. Coffee contains a little carb, as does the heavy cream so many of us put in it. Cheeses have a little carb, too. So do even the lowest-carb nuts. So to go zero-carb we're looking at far narrower diet than even the most restricted, induction-level plans would allow.

So we arrive at the question "How long can anyone eat that way?" This is my biggest objection to the idea that if low carb is good, no carb must be better: It's unlivable. I have said it before, I will say it again, however many times it takes to pound it into people's heads: THERE IS NO FINISH LINE. Whatever you do to lose weight is what you must continue to do to keep it off. It does you exactly no good to cut carbs even further than you need to to lose weight and improve your health, in hopes of losing your weight super-fast. You can't keep it up. You'll go nuts. You'll get to the point where, screw the donuts, you'd sell your soul for a little celery and onion in your tuna. And then you'll quit, and gain back every pound you lost so quickly.

You also won't be getting anywhere near the variety of nutrients you can get by including the whole array of vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds that you can fit into, say, a 20 or 30 gram per day non-fiber carb allotment. There is absolutely no question that the hereditary diet of human kind, the hunter-gatherer diet, includes plant foods as available. As I mentioned, even the Inuit ate them during their short local summer. And there is a vast quantity of research demonstrating the value of the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants these foods provide.

The path to success lies through making your diet as interesting, varied, and enjoyable as you can, while staying within what Doc Atkins called your "Critical Carbohydrate Level" -- the level of carbs at which you stop losing weight and start gaining. This makes for both optimal health and the greatest chance of the permanent life style change essential for long-term success.

For the record, I had a two-egg omelet for breakfast today, cooked in olive oil, and filled with about 2 ounces of braunschweiger (liverwurst) and a little sliced tomato. It was utterly delicious (I'm inordinately fond of braunschweiger,) seriously filling (I don't expect to be hungry again much before three or four this afternoon) and dazzlingly nutritious. It also contained 8 grams of non-fiber carb. Why would I swap that out for a plain slab of meat if I don't need to?

Dana