Welllll.....this thread is FOOD for THOUGHT!!!!..............I will check in again, no comment ~ this time....lots to think about.

To make matters worse, our produce today is modified/hybridized for sweetness. I am willing to bet that the sweetcorn that we ate as kids was 1/2 as sweet as the corn they sell today. The stuff we get now makes my teeth hurt.

Same goes for apples, peppers etc etc. Nutritional value of these foods has gone down with soil nutrient depletion and the sugar content has gone up.

Trying to be "healthy" gets more and more difficult all the time!
C.

I agree completely! I read that fruits have less and less fiber and more and more fructose.


it is so frustrating that even the natural foods: meats, poultry, veggies are contaminated with growth hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides, etc. It is kindof like an "asymptote" in math: we can try and try to approach 'healthy', but will never quite get there! http://www.freemathhelp.com/asymptotes.html

LC is a great start!

Do you have any proof to back that up?

I ate wheat and corn for years. And even when I got migraines, had acid reflux, acne, and was depressed, I considered myself healthy. But I wasn't. I gave up wheat and corn, and then I knew what healthy was.

Just because your body *can* digest things, doesn't mean it is meant to digest large amounts. I would suggest that when you start a vegetarian diet, that then, your body degrades, and that's why it then has a hard time digesting meat later. However, if you start your life eating the wrong foods (like most of us do unfortunately) what happens is that your body adapts to it up to a point that it finally reject it, and you get sicker and sicker- like I did until I changed my diet dramatically when I was 24.

Eating more carbs may not make me sick- but eating wheat and corn will. Eating gluten and other grains usually make me uncomfortable. Sugar makes me uncomfortable, feels kinda like a tweaker. I admit to having white potatoes the other day- didn't notice much of a reaction- but it was a small serving, and not followed by any other carb indulgence.

Carbs are not a food group- they are a macro. They are found in dairy, nuts, seeds, fruits, vegetables, and grains. To say we are not designed to digest 'carbs' is a gross over simplification.

Amen to that. Its grains that do the most damage to my system. Rice is the only grain I'm able to digest without any intestinal distress but because it makes my blood sugar spike I only eat it once in a great while. I don't even miss wheat or corn. Pain is a great motivator.

Carbs are terrible for humans, we weren't meant to eat them, and this just goes to prove it!!"

Ummm, no. We were born with the ability to digest starches and carbs just as we were born with the ability to digest protein and fats. In fact, carbs are broken down before ANY OTHER macronutrient. (Saliva in the mouth)



Thoughts?[/QUOTE]

This is interesting......Carbs could possibly be digested first because the enzyme amylase for starch digestion needs to work at a certain higher pH. One that would be found in the mouth and not in the stomach - hence - it gets digested first. Carbs turn into blood glucose and glucose acts like shards of glass in the bloodstream, wrecking havoc everywhere. That is why diabetics have so many problems. Hence, our homeostatic mechanism of insulin to hustle it away quickly, and we normally need very little of it. However, glucose in the blood does take longer to kill than starvation does....and so we did evolve to consume carbs to increase our chances of charging our "battery" aka adipose tissue/fat....which would increase our chances of making it through a famine. Those are my thoughts. So I believe we were meant to be omnivores, but take away the threat of starvation and a better fit might be to revert to carnivore. I went to school with someone with your name by the way....I'm wondering what state you live in.

I actually agree with the OP's "general" point, just not the specific one. Yes, most people who are LC especially VLC, if you suddenly eat a ton of carbs, there's going to be 'adaptation' issues starting with the fact that your body isn't carrying the water weight necessary for proper processing and is likely to dehydrate important areas to come up with it pronto.

The larger issue is usually more that the 'cheat foods' contain gluten or lactose or other things people are usually mostly weaned off until then.

I also think you have to consider though -- and this does support the adaptation argument, but it highlights that there is a good reason for the shock to the system -- that sometimes, it isn't even just an issue of a far more SEVERE reaction than one used to have because you aren't used to it now -- though that is part of it; not merely about eating something different than you're used to; but actually about the change in our mental evaluation of the results, due to our new experience.

For example some people eat poorly for many years and they never know how bad they feel.They feel that way all the time, so like the reference to how a frog will boil in water if the heat turns up gradually enough, people just don't realize it. They go LC and as a side-effect usually take grains out of the diet, and they're shocked, once the detox period passes, at how good they feel, comparatively. Eventually they get used to that, and that is normal. Then they eat the stuff they used to, that they miss, and they're overwhelmed by how BAD they feel -- and sometimes realize that they always felt that bad and just hadn't realized it, and only changing their eating got them out of that cycle.

Sometimes it is as much an emotional realization of the situation, as a physical one.

PJ

I think this argument has gone deep and wide, more so than it needs to be. When people who are low carbing cheat, they feel like hell, which is how they always felt when they were eating high carb diets. So yes, it's because they're eating carbs, specifically. That's all.

Lol, my thought exactly, Cubbby! Before I went LC, I had digestion problems quite often, and I didn't realize it was from the way I was eating. A couple pieces of pizza would bring on diarrhea, painful stomach, gas. Haven't had those problems since I started this WOL, but I think I would if I started eating the crap I used to eat again.

I kind of look at it like this: I now know that certain foods are poison to my body. I can't say that they affect everyone like they affect me, and I would never dare be that presumptuous. I find it presumptuous for someone to tell me that if I eat strychnine, the reason I'm convulsing is that I'm just not used to it.

It seems to me that that's what colejames is saying, and I find his attitude to be a bit troll-like. Like he joined the forum just to p*** people off and get a laugh out of it.

This is all I know for sure. I have suffered with IBS since I was a kid. I haven't had one episode since I started LC'ing in January. That is all I need to know... along with my blood sugar is now in the normal range.

Take care,

Tami

I didn't feel at all like hell when I ate carbs during my past diet. I felt normal, just as I do now with my low carb diet. For me, it's the shock of not eating carbs for a while and suddenly re-introducing them that is what causes me to feel like hell.

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.

Hi Moggsy,

same thing happened with me: when I limited wheat and eliminated white sugar & HFCS, my arthritis pain went away. Not to mention my stomach became flatter. I remember feeling odd for a few days and couldn't pinpoint what was different until I realized that my every day leg pain and back pain was gone!

When I am lo-carbing, I do not eat low-carb bread products at all simply because I do not like the taste. I want to have the real thing - or nothing. But I miss good bread! I am the only person in my family with arthritis pain, the others eat wheat, whole-wheat and sometimes meat (vegetarians for the most part of the week) and are pain-free. How about rice? I have many friends from Japan and China, and they eat a lot of rice and vegetables and some meat, and arthritis is not a popular occurrence there. It seems so unfair, yet the only conclusion that comes to mind is that it's me, I must have apparently lost the ability to digest wheat a few years ago and the badly-digested by products of wheat caused my arthritis.

Since I miss bread, I feel tempted to experiment: how about if I "keet" the bread and just eliminate sugar & HFCS?? hmmm, would arthritis pain still be gone? Have you tried this experiment?

When I ate the SAD, I thought hourly burping, f~rting & lethargy were normal. Now I know they only occur when I eat more than minimal amounts of carbs.