I’m going to tell you about the best low-carb book I’ve ever read. In fact, it’s exactly the book I wish I had written myself.  And I’ll tell you why I didn’t in a bit, but first I want to clear up a few misconceptions I may have spread in my last post.

I get feedback on the posts I write from three sources.  First, MD looks at them and tones them down if I’ve gone off on some sort of political tangent or if I’ve scattered in a bit of too colorful language.  After she gives me the go, I put the posts up and wait to see what the commenters have to say.  The third source for feedback is my friends, some MDs and/or PhDs and some not, who pick up the phone and call me.

MD okayed what I wrote. The readers who commented seemed to realize what I was trying to say.  But the phone calls were a different story.

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The first week of January is the traditional time for overweight people to start a diet.  For years I’ve told my patients (and anyone else who would listen) to fight the holiday eat-a-thon and start the new year at the same weight they started the month of November.  During the time between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, so the media typically reports, the average weight gain is anywhere from five to ten pounds per person.  A study in Nutrition Reviews showed the weight gain to be much less on average but a little over five pounds in those who are already obese.  This same study confirms a belief I’ve had for many years.

The best and easiest way to stay slim is to never become obese in the first place.

What I mean by making this seemingly obvious statement is that when a person goes from being normal weight to being overweight it is an indication that something metabolically has gotten broken.  At this point, no one knows for sure what gets broken, but many (and I count myself in this ever growing group) believe the damage occurs in the mitochondria, the organelles within the cells that are the energy furnaces.  Once whatever it is that gets broken breaks, it is difficult from that point on to lose weight and maintain weight loss without effort.

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A little over two years ago I wrote a couple of posts arguing that we cut our ancestral teeth on meat, and that contrary to all the vegetarian blather about colon length, tooth structure, etc., the archeological and anthropological convincingly demonstrates we were descended from meat eaters, not vegetarians.  (Click here and here for those posts.) A couple of recent developments have now inspired me to write a third.

First, I noticed in both talking with people at the Ancestral Health Symposium last August and attending a number of the talks that many followers of their own version of the ancestral diet are dismayingly including more and more carbohydrates.  And recommending more to their followers.

When MD and I wrote Protein Power in the mid 1990s, we used the Paleolithic diet as an argument for the efficacy of the low-carb diet.  If pre-agricultural man evolved in a milieu devoid of carbohydrate-dense foods, we posited, then natural selection should have culled those who didn’t thrive on such fare, leaving us, the descendants, powered by metabolic processes that performed better on protein and fat substrates.  If the rampant obesity and diabetes (we just thought it was rampant then) was a consequence of a diet we weren’t designed for, then switching to one that better suited us metabolically should produce substantial changes to the good.  Which it undeniably does.

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Over a half decade ago Professor Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, famously wrote

“The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

Dr Diamond was referring, of course, to the devolution of human health that took place as mankind suffered the corporal transformation driven by the mismatch between hunter-gatherer genes and an agricultural diet and lifestyle. Smaller stature, decreased cortical bone thickness, obesity, increased incidence of infectious diseases, dental caries, periodontal disease, vitamin deficiencies, and even famine – all common in agriculturists – were not, for the most part, the lot of pre-agricultural man.

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In the last post we discussed ramping up the fat intake as the single best way to hurry the low-carb or keto adaptation along.  I didn’t mention it in the previous post, but another little secret is to keep an eye on the protein intake. Too much protein will prevent the shift into ketoses because the liver will convert some of the protein into glucose – this glucose will then be used first and slow down the ketogenic process.  Which, if course, prompts the question, how much protein is too much?  As long as you’re getting your protein from meat, especially fatty cuts of meat, you’re probably okay.  If you go for the extremely lean cuts of meat, say, skinless chicken breasts, or if you are supplementing your diet with low-fat protein shakes, you could have a little more trouble low-carb adapting.  If you’re going the shake route, I would recommend you add some coconut oil to the shakes for a couple of reasons.  First, you’ll hasten the keto-adaptation, and, second, the fat it coconut oil will help remove the fat from your liver (which I’ll discuss more later in this post).

A glass of Tinto de Verano pictured at left. A great way to hydrate. (See note at bottom of post.)

As I said, you need to really crank up the fat intake to push yourself over the adaptation divide as quickly as possible.  If you don’t like fatty cuts of meat, you can add a little medium-chain triglycerides (MCT) to your diet.  MCT are absorbed more like carbohydrates and are used quickly by the body.  They are almost never incorporated into the fat cells, so they burn quickly, and any extra that might be hanging around are converted to ketones.  So, MCT will drive the ketone production process.  And so will coconut oil if you prefer that.

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