Yes, this argument's gone deep and wide, maybe more so than necessary, so what the hey -- I'll dig it even deeper and wider . And since this is the war zone, I won't even put my PC hat on.

I'm a terrible sexist when it comes to diet. Observation has convinced me that young healthy men who've never been obese tend to have a serene, sweeping and wrong view of human nutrition. Their good fortune in having a blazing hormonal/metabolic furnace becomes -- understandably but incorrectly -- the standard model for the rest of the species, especially the fat and/or otherwise metabolically damaged female portion.

The symptoms of mal- and sub-nutrition from over-ingestion of sugar and flour in a population will appear most dramatically in the women, who typically become fatter and more diabetic than the men, and in greater numbers. This is very well-documented (see Taubes, either GCBC or WWGF, for a nice summary of the literature). Furthermore, there are some sad indicators that these disorders increase in severity in successive generations, even showing up now in infants.

So I don't fault you for putting your opinions out there and starting an interesting conversation, but with all due respect, your experience probably does not apply to, say, me -- a perimenopausal woman who was formerly obese, with a morbidly obese mother -- nor to the great many folks on this forum who've been fat and/or otherwise sick, and therefore came to low-carb eating for relief.

It's been *my* experience -- and the experience of a great many low-carbers -- that eating glutenous grains or significant amounts of fructose does indeed create bloating, discomfort, and even serious disease. It's just that (as some of the folks responding here have said) we simply used to put up with those things on a daily basis and accepted them as *normal,* not necessarily realizing there was another option available.