What does low-carb mean?  Well, the first thing it means is that something else has more carb.  So what are you comparing it to?   Breakfast cereal?  Angel food cake?  The standard American diet (sAd)?  Anything would be low-carb compared to those.

A whole bunch of folks at the Nutrition & Metabolism Society have been working hard to help people understand that carbohydrate, and not dietary fat, is the main dietary component causing our obesity and diabetes epidemic.  They say we all need to be eating a low-carb diet, and they have the research to prove it.

I agree with a lot of what they say.  But I disagree about what to call it.  I’m sort of saying the same thing as them, because I do believe that carbohydrate [especially refined carbohydrate, manufactured carbohydrate, processed and stripped carbohydrate] is one of the major players in the obesity epidemic.  I just don’t think we should be calling it a low-carb diet.  I admit it; I’m mincing words (instead of garlic).  But if it’s called a “low-carb” diet, that would mean that a high-carb diet is the normal default.

If you call something low,  then there must be a high somewhere.  If you call dessert “blond brownies,” there must be a not-blond type.  And there is.  If you call someone pro-, then everyone else can be presumed to be con-.  So if people advocate a low-carb diet, then what does a high-carb diet look like?  And the answer is — the American diet.  The standard American diet (sAd) consists mainly of illness-producing amounts of refined carbohydrate.  Cereal and toast for breakfast, sandwich and chips for lunch, pasta for dinner.  You want fries with that?  No wonder America has an obesity and diabetes problem.  That diet, the sAd, is profoundly unhealthy.  It causes diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, arthritis, heart attacks, and strokes.  That’s not okay with me or my patients.  So why would I pick a name that presupposes the sAd is some kind of normal?  I wouldn’t.  That’s my point.

This perspective highlights the difference between absolute and relative comparisons.  Let’s pick an example from something quite familiar to me, the medical industry.  Imagine, for example, that a new medicine came to market that decreased the chance of developing a rare and horrible side effect (say, a severe rash) from 2 in 10,000 to 1 in 10,000.  For every 10,000 people who tried the medicine, the chance of getting the rash would be halved, from two to one.  You could say that the medicine was “twice as safe.”  That’s called a relative comparison.  And while it is true, technically speaking, it’s not the whole story.

The other way to look at this is that, in fact, the chance of developing the horrible rash is already very small, and it becomes slightly smaller if you switch to the new medicine.  That is the conclusion I reach from evaluating the absolute, or actual, numbers.

When we call smart eating a low-carb diet, we are making a relative comparison.  And relative comparisons are notoriously undependable because they don’t take into account where you started.  They tell you where you landed, but not how far you went.

I don’t want to call a diet with healthy amounts of carbohydrate “low-carb.”  What then?  Smart-carb?  Natural-carb?  Garden-carb?  Pre-industrial carb?  I’ve heard some people talking about the Paleo [PAY-lee-oh] (short for Paleolithic) or caveman diet, which presumes that the right amount of carbohydrate would be the amount that the average human ate in that pre-agricultural era.  Why pre-agricultural?  Because that’s before humans began to grow and domesticate grain, especially wheat.  Wheat (along with corn and soy) is the grain used to make large amounts of the processed, food-like products that may be found at the American supermarket.  But Paleo doesn’t feel right either, unless I don’t mind eating the Industrial Revolution diet.

It’s important to remember that all carbs aren’t all-bad.  Not for everyone.  It’s certainly true that some folks are so sensitive to carbs that even an apple a day will make their pants too tight.  Practically the only carbs this group of people can eat comfortably are green vegetables.  But there are lots of other people who can eat all the peaches and lima beans they want.  So, instead of low-carb, I’d like to hear people start saying they eat a low-grain diet, or a low-processed-food diet, or even a low-grain and low-fruit diet.  That’s going to tell me a lot more about how well this person understands his or her own metabolic needs.

When we call a diet “low-carb,” we are making a comparison with the sAd.  And the sAd is so high in processed carbohydrates that virtually every other diet is an improvement.  Low-carb, therefore, doesn’t tell us much.  It doesn’t say whether the recommendations target all grain, or only processed grain, or all grain and fruit, or all four categories of carbohydrate:  grains, fruits, beans and vegetables.  And it presumes that the sAd has a normal amount of carb.  Which it does not.

Roxanne Sukol is an internal medicine physician who blogs at Your Health is on Your Plate.

 

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