Vampire Myths

A few days ago I received the following letter from a reader of the Protein Power LifePlan that I would like to share.

Dear Drs. Eades:

My wife and I are committed practitioners and advocates of your Protein Power LifePlan and have been since your initial publication in 1995. [Actually Protein Power was published in 1996, the Protein Power LifePlan in 2000] We believe that our health and appearance have been significantly improved since reversing our emphasis on carbohydrates and introducing a higher, appropriate amount of protein, good fat, while substantially lowering our overall carbohydrate intake. My overall muscle profile has radically improved, and although my wife has gained a fair amount of weight back, we believe this is simply the result of inadequate vigorous exercise at present.

We stumbled onto the attached article [a Xeroxed copy of the article was enclosed] that caused us a considerable amount of dismay and discussion. It seems, in a rough sense, diametrically to contradict the basic principles and biological/physiological rational outlined in your protein-based protocol.

Would you be kind enough to comment on the article and its claims in light of your current scientific and nutritional knowledge and understanding of the function and role of carbohydrates in the human diet? I am particularly struck by the article’s assertions in light of your comment on p. 9 of The Protein Power LifePlan: (“Carbohydrates, the third macronutrient, are totally unessential to human health.”)

Thank you kindly,

[Name withheld by me]

I’ve got to tell you, letters like this one drive me nuts.

Why?

Because it took MD and me about six solid months of writing (not to mention the 20 years apiece of medical practice and research so that we would know what to write) to complete the Protein Power LifePlan, a 400 plus page book that we consider our most comprehensive to date, and I can’t understand how someone who spends the time required to read such a book , then follows the recommendations and achieves success, can be caused a “considerable amount of dismay” by a pissy little article dashed off in a couple of hours by a free lance writer.

Maybe I’m being too sensitive, but let’s get real.

Before I get into the article (which I have reproduced below) I want to discuss exactly how the vast majority of magazine articles and other pieces of this nature come about. Editors decide what articles they want to go in which issue of whatever magazine, including online magazines. These editors then approach free lance writers and ask them to write the articles.

The editors don’t call the free lancers and say, “I want a full-blown investigative piece on the pros and cons of the low-carb diet,” because unless the free lancer is an investigative scientific journalist he or she won’t have the background to do the job. And those kinds of jobs cost the magazine a fair amount of money, well into the thousands. Typically, editors know exactly what they want and assign it.

For example, the theme of a particular issue of a magazine may be about entertaining with comfort foods, so the editor calls a free lancer and says, “We need a 2000 word article attacking low-carb diets.” The free lancer, who probably gets paid a few hundred dollars for such a piece calls a couple of “experts” and gets the needed info. Since the assignment was to attack low-carb diets any positive information is ignored and the negative information is written up.

This particular article was written by Abby Christopher, a free lance writer based in Portland, Oregon. If you google Ms. Christopher you will find that she writes frequently for Wired magazine, the trade journal more or less for computer and gaming geeks, which, of course, qualifies her to write knowledgeably about nutrition. She, being in Portland, picks up the phone and calls Diane Stadler, a “research assistant professor” at the University of Oregon. Ms. Stadler is so obscure that searching the university’s websites garners very little information about her. But Ms. Stadler, whom I suspect is a Registered Dietitian, is more than happy to provide Ms. Christopher with all sorts of negative information on low-carb diets.

To give her article a little bit more panache Ms. Christopher quotes none other than my good buddy Dean Ornish. And she does it in a carefully crafted way that would lead one to believe that Dr. Ornish was actually interviewed for this article, which I’m sure he wasn’t. She writes:

Diet guru [I love it] Dr. Dean Ornish also worries about the effect of such diets on the kidneys. “High total protein intake, particularly animal protein,” says Ornish, “may accelerate renal-function decline.”

He’s only said this about 50,000 times, so I’m sure she picked up the direct quote and dropped it in her piece.

This short article reminds me of a joke I once heard about a redneck that went to see Hamlet for the first time. When he came out of the theater someone asked him what he thought of the play. He replied” “Not much. It wasn’t nothing but a bunch of quotes all strung together.”

This article is nothing but a bunch of misleading myths about low-carb dieting all strung together. These myths have been refuted so many times in the medical literature that it defies belief that they’re still hanging on. But they are. It’s as if they’re impossible to kill. As a consequence I’ve named them the Vampire Myths.

Here is a listing of the Vampire Myths as I see them. (feel free to add to the tally)

Low-carb diets cause heart disease
Low-carb diets will destroy your kidneys
Low-carb diets cause osteoporosis
Low-carb diets decrease endurance
Low-carb diets make your thinking fuzzy
Low-carb diets cause cancer
Low-carb diets cause dangerous ketoacidosis

There are probably more, but these are the ones almost everyone is familiar with. These are all untrue. They are myths. In due course I will address all of these, but for now, let’s just hit a couple.
First, the idea that is made much of in this idiotic article concerns low-carb diets causing fuzzy thinking, so let’s take a little deeper look. Ms. Christoper writes:

…to achieve and maintain normal brain function, adults and children need 130 grams of carbohydrates a day. On the Atkins Diet or similar regimens, you’re allowed to eat about 20 grams of carbs daily at first; you can later nudge up the intake, but never to the minimum amount nutritionists recommend.

“Restricting carbs like that is going to have an effect on the brain,” Stadler warns.

She is absolutely correct. The brain does need about 130 grams of glucose per day. It actually needs more like 200 grams of glucose per day, but during fasting or a low-carbohydrate diet the body begins producing ketones, which replace at least 70 grams of the required glucose in the brain, dropping the overall requirement to about 130 grams per day. If a person only eats 20 grams of carbohydrate per day, the liver makes the other 110 grams. The liver is perfectly capable of churning out about 200 grams, or a cup, of sugar per day–even if you don’t eat anything–so the brain isn’t going to be deprived.

What sometimes does occur is what we call Ketone Brain. Let me explain. If you are on a high carbohydrate diet containing 200-400 grams of sugar (or sugar equivalents) per day, your brain has all the glucose it needs. (It actually has more than it needs; excess brain glucose is thought by many to be one of the driving forces behind Alzheimer’s and other dementias of aging. But that’s another story for another day.) If your brain is steaming along, fueled with all the glucose it needs, then you go on a low-carb diet and the glucose is cut off, the brain converts to using ketone bodies. But this conversion doesn’t happen in a split second. It takes a little bit for the conversion to take place. During this brief period you may feel a little fuzzy headed, but as soon as the conversion is complete, you actually think more clearly.

So, Ms. Christopher, along with a little help from Ms, Stadler, has taken a couple of strands of truth and spun them into a web of deceit and misinformation.
Let’s look at one more.

Diet guru Dr.Dean Ornish also worries about the effect of such diets on the kidneys. “High total protein intake, particularly animal protein,” says Ornish, “may accelerate renal-function decline.”

Does so-called diet guru Dean Ornish have anything to worry about with high-protein diets and the kidney? Hardly.

If you want to read about protein and the kidney, click here for a full-text article from the journal Nutrition & Metabolism.

My favorite article showing the absurdity of this claim comes from research performed in Israel almost 20 years ago by Dr. Marion Blum. There have been numerous studies since showing the same thing, but I like this one because of its simplicity and elegance.

Dr. Blum and her group recruited 30 vegetarian subjects of varying ages and sexes. These subjects had been vegetarians for over 13 years (so there were no recent coverts in the bunch) and had consumed low amounts of plant-based protein for a significant portion of their lives. Dr. Blum then found a group of 31 meat-eating subjects who were the same ages and sexes as the vegetarians, but who consumed large amounts of mainly animal protein. Dr. Blum tested the kidney function of both groups.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that as we age the function of our kidneys (and all our organs, for that matter) deteriorates. This deterioration can be measured and plotted on a graph showing decreased function as we get older.

Dr. Blum plotted the course of the age-related decline of kidney function in the vegetarians. She them plotted the same thing in the meat eaters and found that the two graphs were exactly the same. There was no difference in the age related kidney function of a long term vegetarian and a meat eater of the same age and sex. (Here is the link to the full text of the study)

I guess Dr. Ornish missed that study.

Here is the article that inspired this post. I have to give Ms. Christopher stylistic credit. She was able to fit a large number of Vampire Myths into a fairly small article. I hope they paid her well.

Oh, and by the way, the quote from page 9 of the Protein Power LifePlan that inspired the writer of the letter that kicked this post off is absolutely true:

Carbohydrates, the third macronutrient, are totally unessential to human health.

The article as published at www.edutopia.org.

Caveat Eater

Learning to love (again) the much-maligned carbohydrate.

By Abby Christopher

The craze for high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets is on the wane. One sure sign is that Atkins Nutritionals, the company that produces Atkins Diet-related products, declared bankruptcy this summer. Another is that the number of low-carb foods introduced this year was down compared to the past two years. But not everyone has given up the extreme approach to shedding pounds. So, if you’re on a high-protein, low-carb diet, watch out: You may be courting a nasty case of “Um … er … ah, what was I saying?” in front of an unforgiving classroom of students. According to nutritionists, diets too low in carbs can affect brain power, not to mention energy, bone mass, and kidney function.

On a low-carb diet, “you’ll have problems with word recall, and you’ll feel less sharp,” says Diane Stadler, research assistant professor in the Oregon Health and Science University’s Health Promotion and Sports Medicine Division.

Dietary reference tables published this year by the Institute of Medicine indicate that to achieve and maintain normal brain function, adults and children need 130 grams of carbohydrates a day. On the Atkins Diet or similar regimens, you’re allowed to eat about 20 grams of carbs daily at first; you can later nudge up the intake, but never to the minimum amount nutritionists recommend.

“Restricting carbs like that is going to have an effect on the brain,” Stadler warns. She adds that a high-protein/low-carb diet can also whittle away at your bone mass, regardless of your age or relative health. Diets high in meat raise the acid level of blood, increasing excretion of calcium and phosphorus from the bone, which leads to early loss of bone density and accelerating osteoporosis. High-protein diets that rely on meat also decrease levels of urinary citrate, which can cause kidney stones.

As distance runners know, carbs are fuel, so if your lifestyle includes intense cardio workouts or you plan to start an exercise program at the same time you begin a high-protein diet, you may lack the stamina for even thirty minutes on an elliptical machine.

“Even going up a flight of stairs, not just working out, you’re going to have some fatigue,” says Stadler. And though you may be okay during short workouts with weights, Stadler adds that the potassium concentration of a high-protein diet is more likely to cause muscle cramps.

Diet guru Dr.Dean Ornish also worries about the effect of such diets on the kidneys. “High total protein intake, particularly animal protein,” says Ornish, “may accelerate renal-function decline.”

More dangerous possible consequences exist, such as raised levels of bad cholesterol, as does a less dire but socially embarrassing side effect: bad breath. But losing focus while trying to hold students’ attention is a professional downside that even a rapid drop in weight can’t justify. Working to get yourself in better shape is a worthy goal, but when shape trumps sharpness, something’s got to give. So cook yourself a veggie stir fry on rice, whip up a plate of pasta primavera, or have a slice of whole-grain bread with your soup. Carbs are back. Your brain is hungry for them.

 

Photo by Ankhesenamun on Unsplash