The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

English breakfast at our hotel. A good low-carb diet.

It was bound to happen.  Forever the low-fat diet promoters, whenever asked about low-carb diets, would always say: Show me the studies.  Well, we showed them the studies, the vast majority of which demonstrated the superiority of low-carb diet, but they didn’t like what they saw.  So they demanded more.  The rallying cry became: Show me the long-term studies.  Now that those are in, the anti-meat folks are running out of options.  But one of their own great lipophobes (Lipid  = fat; phobic = fear of.  Lipophobe = fearer of fat.), David Jenkins, has come to the rescue.

Since the low-carb diet has proven so effective, opines he, why not make it even more so by making a vegetarian version?  Then dieters can have all the advantages of a low-carb diet along with all the advantages of a plant-based diet.  That is, assuming there are advantages to a plant-based diet, more about which later.

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Despite the title of this post, it isn’t really about why low-carb is harder the second time around per se. It’s more about attitude toward dieting and why diets in general are difficult, sometimes even the first time.  What with it being a new year and all, I figured I would go ahead and get things stirred up early with my thoughts on the psychology of dieting.

I can’t begin to count the number of people whom I have seen in my office who have fallen off the wagon and who told me that they just couldn’t stick with their low-carb diet for any number of reasons.

A typical conversations goes something like this:

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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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I’ve just discovered that the soft-cover version of Good Calories, Bad Calories is out.  I guess it has been out for a few weeks, but I just discovered it was available.  If any of you have been waiting for the paperback before reading this terrific book, now is the time to get it.

Since GCBC came out a year or two ago, I’ve gotten countless comments asking me what Gary thinks about this topic or that one.  And I’ve gotten comments from folks asking me to ask Gary a question for them.  I was going to interview Gary and post his responses to my questions when it occurred to me that you all might like to ask questions of him directly without having them come through me.  I contacted Gary this weekend to see if he would be willing to answer specific questions from people on this blog.  He very generously agreed to do so.

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