A couple of weeks ago I posted that Gary Taubes had agree to answer questions from readers of this blog.  Over a hundred readers sent in questions through the comment section.  Many of these questions were actually multiple questions, so Gary ended up with probably 200+ questions to deal with.

I’ve gone through and compiled a list of the most common questions and presented them to Gary.  Here are the questions followed by his responses.

The most commonly asked question was how do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences? Read more »

The Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America just published a report showing the amount of carbohydrate and the number of calories in the 26 best selling alcoholic beverages.

The report is in chart form in pdf format. You can download it here.

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Since I started the previous post on this subject with a letter, I’ll do the same for part 2. God knows we have enough like these to fill a book. In fact, this one was in a book. We published the portion below in The Protein Power LifePlan.

A lady from New England wrote to us complaining that she had diligently followed our low-carb diet to the letter yet,  had lost only four pounds over the first few weeks of the program. She included her food diary to show that she was indeed doing a low-carb diet. Here it is: Read more »

Today I came upon a couple of treats that could easily torpedo a low-carb diet. Many people following a low-carb diet would grab these and throw them down without even thinking about it. I know it’s true because I’ve done it myself.

The photo at the top of this post is of a small sack of dried fruit and mixed nuts sold at Starbucks stores everywhere. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve popped in to a Starbucks to grab an Americano and walked out with one of these. You can see from the size of the sack relative to my hand that these aren’t very big.

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I’ve had enough questions about the glycemic index and the glycemic load that I’ve decided to take the time and explain what it all means.  If you know what the glycemic index and glycemic load are, then you might want to skip this post unless you’re just here for the scintillating writing.

If I were to bring you into my office while you were fasting and check your blood sugar, then check it again every 15 – 30 minutes over the next two hours, I would find that your blood sugar levels wouldn’t change much.  Your blood sugar would remain at about, say, 85 mg/dL over the entire two hours.  Now, suppose I bring you in fasting, measure your blood sugar, then give you a piece of cake.  You eat the cake and I measure your blood sugar over the next two hours.  Your blood sugar would rapidly rise, then fall slowly, and return (assuming you’re not diabetic or glucose intolerant) to around your normal 85 mg/dL.

Scientists have known for years that normal blood sugars follow this kind of rapid increase, slow return to normal curve.  At some point someone asked the question: do different foods cause a different curve?  In other words, if someone eats a piece of cake does that make a different blood sugar curve than if that person eats a bowl of ice cream?

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