Carbs are a great delivery mechanism for calories. So good, in fact, that the caveman part of your brain really insists on eating as much of them as you possibly can. Some people have problems getting the caveman part of their brain to shut the fuck up and consequently they eat too many carbs. They do that for so long that that end up having a foot amputated and die young of kidney failure.
Empty carbs, the carbs most people think of as carbs, are a terrible source of nutrition and are the primary reason most people are fat. Bread, skinned potatoes, pasta, corn, and sugar. That kind of shit. You know, the delicious carbs. The carbs that the caveman part of your brain really insists you eat more of. Cutting those from the diet helps regulate hunger for people who are calorie counting.
You can get 100% of your daily carbohydrate needs from green vegetables. You can do that pretty easily because you don’t actually need that many carbs.
That said, if you have a healthy relationship with food, are at a healthy weight, and your bloodwork doesn’t show any signs of metabolic syndrome or heart disease, keep on keeping on. Congratulations, you can eat whatever you want. Just understand that being adult, especially an adult in the US, that can tick all of those boxes is pretty rare and other people do have issues they’re trying to correct, and have to keep an eye on their diet. Generally, that means cutting out the fun carbs even if they’re not doing keto.
It would be a lot more accurate if you edited your comment so that every instance of “carbs” was replaced with “calories”. Cave-people had no way of knowing what any of the nutrients were in the foods they ate. Their enemy was starvation. Ours is the opposite, and all sources of calories contribute to weight gain. Sugars, fats, and salt are considered the three main villains in highly processed food addiction, not sugar alone. What you’re describing is known as the toxic food environment.
I worked as a pharmacy tech for a while, in a grocery store. My pharmacist had informed me that pharmacies, at least the ones in grocery stores, generally operate at a loss. So why keep them? I don’t know if there are any tax benefits of kickbacks, but what is known is that the regulars at the pharmacy were spending twice as much on groceries as everyone else. What were the lion’s share of medications in the pharmacy? Various heart disease and high blood pressure meds, stuff for diabetes, and various forms of ozempic-type meds. There were other things too of course, but you can see this pretty clear picture of, as before, a toxic food environment gently manipulating everyone into eating all the hyper-palatable foods that are making them sick, and then needing to get prescriptions for medications in the pharmacy at the same store where they are buying all of the things that are poisoning them into needing those meds in the first place. It’s pretty disgusting right?
But again, it’s not just carbs. If you look at the various sugar diets - those will actually cause rapid weight loss. They’re terrible diets, don’t do them, but they will result in probably even more short-term weight loss than keto. Neither are sustainable, see my comment here for more on keto. In short, keto is absolutely garbage and should be avoided.
I do not eat whatever I want, nor am I young. When I was 30, one of my family members had died of a heart attack at the age of 46. I was already working on shifting to a more vegan lifestyle after seeing one of those documentaries that showed what factory farms are like, but seeing a loved one die at such a young age and such a close age to where I was at the time added urgency in learning more about the nutritional side of things, which is what led to my following a generally whole-food plant-based diet. Easily one of the best decisions I have ever made in my entire life.
the presence or absence of carbs has a huge effect on whether or not fat and salt will make you diabetic or fat. keto works for that reason, and also for the satiation factor; fat is the most satiating macronutrient (although it’s certainly possible this varies by individual; i would still challenge you to overeat on keto to the point you gained substantial weight - i thought i’ve been overeating for weeks and it turns out i’ve lost 5 lbs 💀)
as with any diet, your health depends on still getting all of the critical nutruents you need (protein minimums, fat minimums, specific amino acids, vitamins, minerals), and some of that requires more management on keto (sodium, potassium, and magnesium usually require supplementation, ime; fiber is a good call as well, depending on your intake of leafy greens)
your link about keto just links to… this post, it seems like, so i can’t say anything in response to it. but keto is a sustainable and healthy long term diet. i have lived it for about 9 years. i would probably agree we have a toxic food environment (your guy was way too condescending and sarcastic for me to tolerate, sorry), but i would say keto is a very good diet for adapting in a healthy way to this toxic food environment
unfortunately, it would be difficult for me, personally, to follow an entirely plant based diet, partly based on satiety and partly because i’m allergic to soy. i also suspect i wouldn’t tolerate plant based carbs much better than i tolerate other carbs, as someone who suspects he’s been self-treating diabetes, possibly for a decade (rice and potatoes are plant based and they definitely still fuck me up lol)
additionally, i have concerns about your knowledge on the subject. satiety is a very important subject when it comes to food health, which we’ve discovered with recent studies and the advent of GLP-1s, and you don’t mention it at all in your post (especially given, you do talk about meds in your post?), so i don’t know if you really have all the knowledge you should when speaking on this subject. a pharmacy tech does not specialize in nutritional science (not that i do either, but i at least live and read about this shit)
finally, i will say that keto, while being a good diet you can do long term and healthily, is not for everyone. not everyone can survive the 2-4 week period of initially weaning yourself off carbs. that’s totally understandable, and for those people, it would be better to focus on whole food, nutritious meals, exercise, and calorie management, along with the advice of a doctor and any medications they may need. a plant based/whole food based diet may also help, but has similar compliance requirements and probably issues that keto does
at least keto lets you have treats, as long as they’re not carbohydrates lol
I’m going to believe metabolic doctors on this. No offense but a pharmacy tech, even a pharmacist, is not a metabolic doctor.
It would be a lot more accurate if you edited your comment so that every instance of “carbs” was replaced with “calories”.
This is factually false. Not all sources of calories are equal. It’s sugars that cause the “must have more” reaction in your brain. Fats and proteins do not do this.
Sugars in this case can come from a grape, a piece of candy, a bit of bread or pasta. Complex carbohydrates do this. They not only make you want more but cause a reaction in your body that prevents you from stopping even when you’re outrageously full.
Again, if you’re a healthy adult with a good relationship with food I’m happy for you. That’s not most people. You are not a doctor, you should not be attempting to stand in the way of people finding a healthy diet because you have baseless opinions on carbohydrates.
Carbs/fats/proteins are just the delivery of calories.
If you’re wondering we burn them in the order of protein > carbs > fats. That’s why we store them as fat, eat carbs before an athletic event, and eat protein after one.
I’m aware of the basics of macronutrient digestion and metabolism, and your description is… weird. Would you care to share a source on your claims?
It also needs to be noted, unless you’re eating nothing but supplements and highly processed powders, no one eats fat, or carbs, or protein. We eat foods, and virtually all foods contain all three macros in varying ratios. In the real world we get all three together every meal, and if you’re not, it means you’re following a diet that you probably shouldn’t.
no one eats fat, or carbs, or protein. We eat foods
Okay, but pork chops and pasta have very different proportions of the above. You can definitely structure your diet to weight towards one or the other.
In the real world we get all three together every meal, and if you’re not, it means you’re following a diet that you probably shouldn’t.
Angry JBP noises
More seriously, there’s plenty of dumb fad diets, to be sure. And now we’ve got a host of medications for basically shitting out all your calories faster than you can eat them to lose weight. But there’s definitely a problem in our general food delivery system, especially with regards to fats and sugars in fast foods.
Like, you can be blase about food composition. But there’s some shit that simply shouldn’t ever be in your diet (carbonated sodas, heavy preservatives in baked goods, lead). A lot of the “fad” aspects of diets tend to take these fundamentals and extrapolate them out to the extremes.
So you have people running away from freshly made rigatoni because it shares some of the fundamentals with fast food french fries.
If you’re bordering type 2 diabetes and carbs just make your blood sugar shoot up and crash down, reducing or eliminating carbs can get your shit back in check without medication, and make it much easier to reduce your calories (since you don’t feel compelled to stuff your face again because of shaky hands)
Yeah, they really are. The only valid medical reason to ever use the keto diet is if you have severe epilepsy, and that is an intervention that is only supposed to be done short term, and under close medical supervision.
At best keto as a general diet generally shows to result in rapid weight loss for only about a year at most, before it plateaus. Odds are any results that come from it are only because the person dropped a few high caloric foods. If your plate is usually full of meat and Mac and Cheese, and you replace that with more meat and, I dunno, buttered veggies, then you’re probably eating less calories overall. That would explain the plateau too, because being in a calorie deficit is a state of starvation, and even unconsciously we have a tendency to seek out ways to calm our cravings. That’s why plant-based diets are the most effective and consistent for weight loss, because they are naturally lower in overall calories while also providing foods that are known to be satiating.
Obesity in and of itself is the primary driver of type 2 diabetes, and overconsumption of fats - especially saturated fats - are drivers of insulin resistance. So while keto might provide short term symptom relief since your body doesn’t have to process sugars, it is about the worst thing you could do for yourself to treat the illness, because you are making the underlying cause worse in the long run, as well as driving progression of cardiovascular disease. Effective, sustainable treatment of type 2 diabetes has to involve, first most chiefly, overall weight loss; but you also need to lower total fat intake, as well as replacing the harmful fats like butter, lard, coconut and palm oils, as well as meat and dairy, with good fats like canola and olive oil, and whole food sources of good fats like nuts and seeds, and avocado.
You can find a solid, real scientifically backed program for both type 2 and type 1 diabetes treatment here.
I want it to be understood, I am not interested in internet arguments when it comes to this subject matter. This is not banal identity politics. This is life and death. I have seen too many loved ones die and all from poor lifestyle habits, including type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t need to fucking happen, and I am sick of people flippantly advocating for something that is quite literally the opposite of everything that nutritional science has found to be truly effective. It is grossly irresponsible. Keto is just one more re-branding of a long history of failed anti-carb diets. They never have worked, they never will work, and the only job they need to do is sow enough doubt in people’s minds to get them to keep eating all of the things that are killing them. It is the tobacco industry playbook plain and simple.
This was me, is me. I had to start a no grain diet to get my blood sugar down. Between that and exercise, I have avoided, so far, having to take meds for diabetes.
I am diabetic, but my average blood sugar is in the normal range without medication. If I eat wrong or get lazy, I have problems
I have diabetes and I have this guide to carbs and healthy eating. It’s 45-60g carbs per meal I think, and the portions are hilarious. It’s like 1/100th of a bagel or something.
A regular sized bagel is 60g of carbs, more or less. My dietician had me target 60-75 grams of carbs per meal with a total daily target of 225-245 for my type 2 diagnosis.
All of the anti-carb diets are a joke. Carbs are fucking great.
Carbs are a great delivery mechanism for calories. So good, in fact, that the caveman part of your brain really insists on eating as much of them as you possibly can. Some people have problems getting the caveman part of their brain to shut the fuck up and consequently they eat too many carbs. They do that for so long that that end up having a foot amputated and die young of kidney failure.
Empty carbs, the carbs most people think of as carbs, are a terrible source of nutrition and are the primary reason most people are fat. Bread, skinned potatoes, pasta, corn, and sugar. That kind of shit. You know, the delicious carbs. The carbs that the caveman part of your brain really insists you eat more of. Cutting those from the diet helps regulate hunger for people who are calorie counting.
You can get 100% of your daily carbohydrate needs from green vegetables. You can do that pretty easily because you don’t actually need that many carbs.
That said, if you have a healthy relationship with food, are at a healthy weight, and your bloodwork doesn’t show any signs of metabolic syndrome or heart disease, keep on keeping on. Congratulations, you can eat whatever you want. Just understand that being adult, especially an adult in the US, that can tick all of those boxes is pretty rare and other people do have issues they’re trying to correct, and have to keep an eye on their diet. Generally, that means cutting out the fun carbs even if they’re not doing keto.
It would be a lot more accurate if you edited your comment so that every instance of “carbs” was replaced with “calories”. Cave-people had no way of knowing what any of the nutrients were in the foods they ate. Their enemy was starvation. Ours is the opposite, and all sources of calories contribute to weight gain. Sugars, fats, and salt are considered the three main villains in highly processed food addiction, not sugar alone. What you’re describing is known as the toxic food environment.
I worked as a pharmacy tech for a while, in a grocery store. My pharmacist had informed me that pharmacies, at least the ones in grocery stores, generally operate at a loss. So why keep them? I don’t know if there are any tax benefits of kickbacks, but what is known is that the regulars at the pharmacy were spending twice as much on groceries as everyone else. What were the lion’s share of medications in the pharmacy? Various heart disease and high blood pressure meds, stuff for diabetes, and various forms of ozempic-type meds. There were other things too of course, but you can see this pretty clear picture of, as before, a toxic food environment gently manipulating everyone into eating all the hyper-palatable foods that are making them sick, and then needing to get prescriptions for medications in the pharmacy at the same store where they are buying all of the things that are poisoning them into needing those meds in the first place. It’s pretty disgusting right?
But again, it’s not just carbs. If you look at the various sugar diets - those will actually cause rapid weight loss. They’re terrible diets, don’t do them, but they will result in probably even more short-term weight loss than keto. Neither are sustainable, see my comment here for more on keto. In short, keto is absolutely garbage and should be avoided.
I do not eat whatever I want, nor am I young. When I was 30, one of my family members had died of a heart attack at the age of 46. I was already working on shifting to a more vegan lifestyle after seeing one of those documentaries that showed what factory farms are like, but seeing a loved one die at such a young age and such a close age to where I was at the time added urgency in learning more about the nutritional side of things, which is what led to my following a generally whole-food plant-based diet. Easily one of the best decisions I have ever made in my entire life.
the presence or absence of carbs has a huge effect on whether or not fat and salt will make you diabetic or fat. keto works for that reason, and also for the satiation factor; fat is the most satiating macronutrient (although it’s certainly possible this varies by individual; i would still challenge you to overeat on keto to the point you gained substantial weight - i thought i’ve been overeating for weeks and it turns out i’ve lost 5 lbs 💀)
as with any diet, your health depends on still getting all of the critical nutruents you need (protein minimums, fat minimums, specific amino acids, vitamins, minerals), and some of that requires more management on keto (sodium, potassium, and magnesium usually require supplementation, ime; fiber is a good call as well, depending on your intake of leafy greens)
your link about keto just links to… this post, it seems like, so i can’t say anything in response to it. but keto is a sustainable and healthy long term diet. i have lived it for about 9 years. i would probably agree we have a toxic food environment (your guy was way too condescending and sarcastic for me to tolerate, sorry), but i would say keto is a very good diet for adapting in a healthy way to this toxic food environment
unfortunately, it would be difficult for me, personally, to follow an entirely plant based diet, partly based on satiety and partly because i’m allergic to soy. i also suspect i wouldn’t tolerate plant based carbs much better than i tolerate other carbs, as someone who suspects he’s been self-treating diabetes, possibly for a decade (rice and potatoes are plant based and they definitely still fuck me up lol)
additionally, i have concerns about your knowledge on the subject. satiety is a very important subject when it comes to food health, which we’ve discovered with recent studies and the advent of GLP-1s, and you don’t mention it at all in your post (especially given, you do talk about meds in your post?), so i don’t know if you really have all the knowledge you should when speaking on this subject. a pharmacy tech does not specialize in nutritional science (not that i do either, but i at least live and read about this shit)
finally, i will say that keto, while being a good diet you can do long term and healthily, is not for everyone. not everyone can survive the 2-4 week period of initially weaning yourself off carbs. that’s totally understandable, and for those people, it would be better to focus on whole food, nutritious meals, exercise, and calorie management, along with the advice of a doctor and any medications they may need. a plant based/whole food based diet may also help, but has similar compliance requirements and probably issues that keto does
at least keto lets you have treats, as long as they’re not carbohydrates lol
I’m going to believe metabolic doctors on this. No offense but a pharmacy tech, even a pharmacist, is not a metabolic doctor.
This is factually false. Not all sources of calories are equal. It’s sugars that cause the “must have more” reaction in your brain. Fats and proteins do not do this.
Sugars in this case can come from a grape, a piece of candy, a bit of bread or pasta. Complex carbohydrates do this. They not only make you want more but cause a reaction in your body that prevents you from stopping even when you’re outrageously full.
Again, if you’re a healthy adult with a good relationship with food I’m happy for you. That’s not most people. You are not a doctor, you should not be attempting to stand in the way of people finding a healthy diet because you have baseless opinions on carbohydrates.
Carbs/fats/proteins are just the delivery of calories.
If you’re wondering we burn them in the order of protein > carbs > fats. That’s why we store them as fat, eat carbs before an athletic event, and eat protein after one.
That’s not true. Learn more about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle if you want to understand.
I’m aware of the basics of macronutrient digestion and metabolism, and your description is… weird. Would you care to share a source on your claims?
It also needs to be noted, unless you’re eating nothing but supplements and highly processed powders, no one eats fat, or carbs, or protein. We eat foods, and virtually all foods contain all three macros in varying ratios. In the real world we get all three together every meal, and if you’re not, it means you’re following a diet that you probably shouldn’t.
I misspoke, it’s not an order as one after another. It’s how fast you digest to get the calories from it.
If you ate something with all 3 you would break it down “in order” because you metabolize one faster.
Water content also plays a role in time.
Okay, but pork chops and pasta have very different proportions of the above. You can definitely structure your diet to weight towards one or the other.
Angry JBP noises
More seriously, there’s plenty of dumb fad diets, to be sure. And now we’ve got a host of medications for basically shitting out all your calories faster than you can eat them to lose weight. But there’s definitely a problem in our general food delivery system, especially with regards to fats and sugars in fast foods.
Like, you can be blase about food composition. But there’s some shit that simply shouldn’t ever be in your diet (carbonated sodas, heavy preservatives in baked goods, lead). A lot of the “fad” aspects of diets tend to take these fundamentals and extrapolate them out to the extremes.
So you have people running away from freshly made rigatoni because it shares some of the fundamentals with fast food french fries.
And I would take the pasta over the pork chops any day, although they would be whole grain pasta.
They’re really not, but not everyone needs them.
If you’re bordering type 2 diabetes and carbs just make your blood sugar shoot up and crash down, reducing or eliminating carbs can get your shit back in check without medication, and make it much easier to reduce your calories (since you don’t feel compelled to stuff your face again because of shaky hands)
Yeah, they really are. The only valid medical reason to ever use the keto diet is if you have severe epilepsy, and that is an intervention that is only supposed to be done short term, and under close medical supervision.
At best keto as a general diet generally shows to result in rapid weight loss for only about a year at most, before it plateaus. Odds are any results that come from it are only because the person dropped a few high caloric foods. If your plate is usually full of meat and Mac and Cheese, and you replace that with more meat and, I dunno, buttered veggies, then you’re probably eating less calories overall. That would explain the plateau too, because being in a calorie deficit is a state of starvation, and even unconsciously we have a tendency to seek out ways to calm our cravings. That’s why plant-based diets are the most effective and consistent for weight loss, because they are naturally lower in overall calories while also providing foods that are known to be satiating.
Obesity in and of itself is the primary driver of type 2 diabetes, and overconsumption of fats - especially saturated fats - are drivers of insulin resistance. So while keto might provide short term symptom relief since your body doesn’t have to process sugars, it is about the worst thing you could do for yourself to treat the illness, because you are making the underlying cause worse in the long run, as well as driving progression of cardiovascular disease. Effective, sustainable treatment of type 2 diabetes has to involve, first most chiefly, overall weight loss; but you also need to lower total fat intake, as well as replacing the harmful fats like butter, lard, coconut and palm oils, as well as meat and dairy, with good fats like canola and olive oil, and whole food sources of good fats like nuts and seeds, and avocado.
You can find a solid, real scientifically backed program for both type 2 and type 1 diabetes treatment here.
I want it to be understood, I am not interested in internet arguments when it comes to this subject matter. This is not banal identity politics. This is life and death. I have seen too many loved ones die and all from poor lifestyle habits, including type 2 diabetes. It doesn’t need to fucking happen, and I am sick of people flippantly advocating for something that is quite literally the opposite of everything that nutritional science has found to be truly effective. It is grossly irresponsible. Keto is just one more re-branding of a long history of failed anti-carb diets. They never have worked, they never will work, and the only job they need to do is sow enough doubt in people’s minds to get them to keep eating all of the things that are killing them. It is the tobacco industry playbook plain and simple.
This was me, is me. I had to start a no grain diet to get my blood sugar down. Between that and exercise, I have avoided, so far, having to take meds for diabetes.
I am diabetic, but my average blood sugar is in the normal range without medication. If I eat wrong or get lazy, I have problems
I have diabetes and I have this guide to carbs and healthy eating. It’s 45-60g carbs per meal I think, and the portions are hilarious. It’s like 1/100th of a bagel or something.
That’s a pretty absurd amount of bagel to eat. XD
Here is a really good program for treatment of both type 1 and 2 diabetes. If you follow it you might actually be able to eat a whole bagel.
A regular sized bagel is 60g of carbs, more or less. My dietician had me target 60-75 grams of carbs per meal with a total daily target of 225-245 for my type 2 diagnosis.
Checks out, if your bagel weighs more than 4.5-6kg
Sounds about right for average US bagel size.
I’ve never seen a bagel under 20kg so that makes sense.