The last few studies I’ve posted on here seem to have been designed by their authors to show that low-carb diets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Of course none of these studies have used real low-carb diets – they’ve all used diets that are called low-carb, but really aren’t. They’ve set up a low-carb straw man, knocked it down, then crowed about it. These antics have left us all longing to see a study using a real low-carb diet.

Fate has dropped two studies into our hands that clearly demonstrate the superiority of low-carbs diets when matched against the high-fiber, high-cereal diet beloved of so many in the nutritional establishment and even against low glycemic index (Low-GI) diets.

In the same couple of week period two studies came out – one you’ve probably read about; the other you likely haven’t. By combining the data from these studies, we can see how these three diets match up.

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A recent, well-financed study shows the glycemic index (GI) to be a less-than-optimal way of managing diabetes with diet.  Meanwhile, a major name in the world of mainstream nutrition comments on this study and shows his own bias.  Oh dear.  Let’s take a look.

Before we launch into this study, which we’re going to just briefly review because I want to spend more time on the commentary, I want to propose to you a thought experiment.  Suppose I ask you to design a study to see what happens when subjects with diabetes eat low-GI carbs as compared to what happens when they eat high-GI carbs.  It seems pretty simple.  If you’ve got half a brain, you would recruit subjects with diabetes, go through all of the randomizing rigmarole to ensure that both groups of subjects were as alike as possible, i.e., subjects in both groups were about the same size, same ratio of sexes, same degree of blood sugar elevation, etc.  Then you would start the subjects in one group on an amount of carbohydrate, let’s say 220 gm per day, that were mainly low-GI carbs and the other group on about the same amount of carbohydrate composed of high-GI carbs.  You would teach each of these groups how to follow their specific GI diets and would have a way of monitoring for compliance.  Then you would set them to it and recheck them in 3 months or 6 months or a year or whatever you decided your study length to be.  Pretty simple stuff, right?

Just for grins, let’s throw in a twist.

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The point of the cartoon above by Eric Allie holds true for the recently released Jupiter study: the reporting of the data by the media often overshadows the actual data.

Let’s first take a look at the reporting.

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You think carbohydrates aren’t addictive?  You think it’s easy to give them up?  You don’t think it possible that people might prefer carbs to life?

Think again.

A story appeared in the online version of Time Magazine last year that I read when it came out, put aside to blog about later, then got sidetracked.  A reader sent me a link to it a few days ago, which brought it back to the front of my mind.

The article discusses a study being done in Germany using a carb-restricted diet to fight cancer.  In pre-WWII days, a German scientist, Otto Warburg, received a Nobel Prize for his work in sussing out the fact that cancer cells don’t generate energy the same way that normal cells do.  Cancer cells get their energy, not like normal cells, from the mitochondrial oxidation of fat, but from glycolysis, the breakdown of glucose withing the cytoplasm (the liquid part of the cell).  This different metabolism of cancer cells that sets them apart from normal cells is called the Warburg effect.  Warburg thought until his dying day that this difference is what causes cancer, and although it is true that people with elevated levels of insulin and glucose do develop more cancers, most scientists in the field don’t believe that the Warburg effect is the driving force behind the development of cancer.

But it stands to reason that it can be used to treat cancer that is already growing.  Since cancers can’t really get nourishment from anything but glucose, it stands to reason that cutting off this supply would, at the very least, slow down tumor growth, especially in aggressive, fast-growing cancers requiring a lot of glucose to fuel their rapid growth.

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