Bacon and butter and lard, Oh my!
How many times have you told someone you were on a low-carb diet or how many times have you suggested a low-carb diet to a friend or relative that was trying to lose weight or improve health and got the following response?: Oh, I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t want to eat that much meat and all those eggs.
If you’re like me, you hear it all the time. I can’t recall how many times a TV talking head or a radio DJ asked MD and/or me that very thing on live TV/radio. Somehow the great unwashed masses have it in their heads that a low-carb diet is nothing but meat, meat and more meat with a little butter and cheese thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t matter how many times MD and I (and others) make the case on national or local TV and radio, no one seems to listen.
Now comes a study in Nutrition Journal that gives the lie to the low-carb-diets-are-all-meat notion.
Researchers provided questionnaires to a subset of members of the Active Low-Carber’s Forum (ALCF)–an online support group started in 2000 that currently has more than 86,000 members–requesting information about their history of weight loss using the low-carb diet. An analysis of the data reveals that
the membership of ALCF is currently 83% women, which is reflected in the makeup of respondents to the questionnaire. The age distribution showed 61% of respondents between 30 and 49 years of age. We did not request physical data on the questionnaire but asked for goals in weight loss. the responses indicate that the starting weights must have been very high with more than half of the people surveyed indicating that they had wanted to lose more than 50 pounds and 22% intending to lose 100 obs or more. In summary, the survey population was largely middle aged women whose goal was to lose a large amount of body mass.
Although the paper (click here to read in full) discusses a number of aspects of low-carb dieting, the most interesting part to me is the section describing what these people eat. Instead of replacing the starch in their diets with meat, bacon, butter or other fatty foods, the majority of respondents replaced their starch and sugar with vegetables and salads.
That’s right, vegetables and salad.
Contrary to the popular belief held by most non-low-carbing people and by the vast majority of the medical profession people starting on low-carb diets don’t just go face down in the meat and forsake everything else. Instead, according to this paper, they increase their meat intake minimally and their vegetable and salad intake considerably. This study jives with what I have found in over 20 years of clinical practice with patients on low-carb diets. Despite the widespread opinion that it is all meat, in reality it is not much more meat than people ate before, but a whole lot more nutritionally dense foods of plant origin.
This paper is written for primary care doctors to show them that low-carb diets aren’t the fad diets most think they are. The hope of the authors is that the paper will help physicians see through all the negative publicity generated by misguided opponents to these diets over the years and make them realize that the low-carb diet is a valid means of weight loss and lipid improvement.
Make multiple copies so that you’ll have them on hand to shove under the noses of any naysayers you may encounter. I certainly will.
First off, Dr. Mike, I want to thank you. I had been a LCer for quite a while (I was actually one of the respondents in the “Bacon and butter and lard, oh my” survey), but over the past year I fell off the wagon somewhat. Not completely, but enough that I felt horrible. Not too long ago I came across your blog again after more than a year and reading it got me back into the swing of things. Feeling better already! And between reading your blog and Protein Power Lifeplan, I quit smoking too. So thank you! Both items were quite helpful in getting me back on track.
And now that I’ve sucked up a little (Heh, no I really meant it. Thanks!) I have three questions for you:
1. In your Protein Power Lifeplan book, you list Ghee as a good fat for cooking (chart p. 320). Being that I recently found out, through elimination, that my horrible sinus problems were due to dairy, I have been looking into dairy alternatives. I found many with milk allergies were able to use ghee because it contained no milk proteins. However, in researching I came across an abstract on PubMed called “Cholesterol oxides in Indian Ghee” [PMID: 2887943] which says
Being that all I could see was the abstract, I really have no more information to go on than this. So assuming they did find cholesterol oxides in ghee, wouldn’t this be a bad fat to use?
2. I saw you mention.. erm, somewhere… to eat a whole foods diet using only foods that would ‘go bad without electricity’ (or similar wording). Being that I live in a hurricane state and losing power for 2+ weeks at a time has happened more than once, what kind of items would you suggest to someone who needs to stock up on non-perishable food for just such an emergency? I’d like to plan ahead instead of living off crackers for two weeks and blowing all my progress.
3. I see in the comments on your “Bacon and butter and lard, oh my!” post (10/2/2006) you were considering a post on a zero carb diet and the acid-base balance of an all meat diet. I haven’t seen such a post on your blog. Have you written this yet, and if so, can you point me to it? If not, is this something you are still planning on writing?
Thank you so much for your thoughts on this. The first two questions have been nagging at me
Hi Janet–
Thanks for the kind words about the books; we really appreciate it.
Let’s get to your questions…
1) This is the first I’ve heard of oxidized cholesterol in ghee. I’m assuming this comes from commercially-prepared ghee, which is probably made at fairly high temperatures. You can make it yourself by slowly heating butter and pouring off the ghee as the milk solids drop to the bottom. If you do this slowly and at just a high enough temperature to keep the butter liquefied, the amount of oxidized cholesterol should be minimal. As another alternative, you could use coconut oil, which has no cholesterol, oxidized or otherwise. We’ve pretty much gone the coconut oil way ourselves.
2) I would stock up on canned meats, sardines, especially, if you like them. We love them. You can also get canned salmon and, of course, tuna. And you can get a lot of canned vegetables – spinach and other greens, for example – that work fine with a low-carb diet.
3) I haven’t written the post yet; it’s still on my list of posts to write, however. Stay tuned.
Cheers–
MRE
I have no idea how many times I’ve been asked about my “diet”, which is basically zero carb. I eat lots of eggs, chicken and a ton of steak. How can anyone tire from eating a big porterhouse every night? There are some evenings after a day of IF that I eat TWO NY strips. YUMMO! I love eating what I eat and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. My cholesterol has dropped from about 225 to 152 and triglycerides as of my last blood test were at 29. Did I mention I eat GOBS of saturated fat? My favorite cuts of steak are, in order, porterhouse-ny strip-ribeye. So, to Dr. Ornish and everyone else who advocates a low fat, high carb diet…let’s compare blood tests!!
Hi Dave–
Your diet sounds like mine.
Cheers–
MRE
Mike, I have read yours and some others accounts of the low carb diet but have yet to be able to do it the way it has to be done.
Suffice it to say I have some pounds I need to dispose of and recently during a routine colon exam one polyp was found and it showed signs of cancer. One of the first things I saw when I began researching that issue is that it was caused by a “high fat” diet. That was the same thing I ran into when I was found to have Prostate cancer about 8 years ago. Bottomline, no matter what you get in the way of ailments, fat is the cause.
I think and have made note of it lately, we generally just do not realize the grams of carbs we ingest each day. We have become so accustomed to eating the bun along with the burger and drinking the coke and having the fries with some catsup not even noticing the extreme numbers of carbs they contain.
Low carb can work. I have seen it work. My Father down in Arkansas who only lived to age 95 ate two eggs with bacon EVERY morning most of his life and veggies from the garden later and never to my knowledge had high blood pressure or cholesterol. After I get this issue with the colon polyp resolved maybe I can make it work for me.
Thanks for taking up the fight…
CB
You are correct. Fat is blamed for everything. One of these days – I don’t know when – this idiocy will end.