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Hi All,

Just a few remarks about the underlying assumptions in Ron's letter on
high/low carb diets.  I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with him, just
thought that once you start 'being academic' about the issues you may as
well do a full job.

<One poster insists that high fat diets lead to elevated LDL cholesterol.
<This is a commonly held perspective, but there is considerable debate of
<that issue in the medical literature, and cholesterol levels are no longer
<believed to be very good predictors of cardiac incident. (Currently,
<homocysteine is recognized as one of the better predictors.)

The issue of fat diets elevating LDL cholesterol is a different one
logically from what is a good predictor of cardiac incident.  Of course,
the underlying assumption in fat diet leading to bad cholesterol is that
the bad cholesterol will lead to a cardiac incident.  There may be a better
indicator, but again the two indicators are probably linked too and
animal-based diets, of course, do lead to heart disease and a lot of other
major Western killers-debilitators.

Animal-base and high fat are not the same, however there is a correlation
as animal food generally is very high in fat (when unmodified) with no
fibre and plant food is varying in fat (low to high but with little
saturated fat with few exceptions and of course no cholesterol) with lots
of fibre (modification can take this out too of course).  LDL cholesterol
may not be the best indicator of heart disease but its correlation with
heart disease (as well as animal-base food) is unchanged and is
continuously recognized.

<The same poster says that she wants to see the studies that support
<the low carb diet. Well, I would like to suggest that she peruse the peer
<reviewed medical literature. There are a number of articles, published
<over the last 75 years, that report health benefits from such
<diets. The earliest I'm aware of arose out of Vilhjalmur Stefanson's
<experience of living with the Inuit on the north coast of Canada. He
<asserted the good health of these people who survived and even thrived,
<in one of the most hostile climates in the world, eating a diet that
<was mostly comprised of meat and fish. Subsequent experiments with such
<diets were reported in the literature.

You would also want to look at just what surviving and thriving meant in
that study.  The Inuits' very high animal protein diet does lead to
osteoporosis without fail in all subjects, of course only if they survive
beyond a certain age which many don't do.  You'd also need to look at other
lifestyle factors as we barely tend to walk 25k a day in minus 25 degrees
while hunting for seals.

<The same poster admits that the Atkins diet does result in weight loss, but
<asserts those who return to eating a high carb diet quickly gain weight
<even beyond the point at which dieting was begun. Well, that looks like a
<compelling case in favor of consuming fewer carbs on an ongoing basis.

That doesn't follow at all according to any rigorous logic.  Ron assumes
here that any type of weight loss is good and that is false.  If you very
quick to gain weight after a diet it actually signals that what you lost
was probably mostly water and the diet was a very dangerous one you should
not do on an ongoing basis, unless you want to dehydrate yourself and cause
ketosis.

<Then there is the perspective that such diets increase the risk of cancer.
<That is difficult to square with the positive results that have been
<reported for trials of the ketogenic diet among cancer patients.  It seems
<that such diets result in halting tumour growth, while avoiding the usual
<trend of physical degeneration in the patient.

What causes, triggers or contributes to cancer is a totally different thing
from what makes it slow down or suppress once its formed.  What would
follow from your logic is that what slows down cancer in a patient who
already has it is what we should be doing to avoid it.  Should we take
cancer drugs then to avoid developing cancer?  Of course not.  Usually our
very crude treatments to cancer consist of things that kill the cancer as
well as killing the patient (we have not developed sufficiently selective
agents yet) except they are dosaged so that the patient just survives for
the moment.  What halts the growth of tumour usually halts the regeneration
and growth of other cells to, that's why cancer patients on their various
treatments do so very badly.  You simply must separate logically cancer
causing and cancer sustaining, or cancer preventing and cancer halting
phenomena.

<I'm not convinced that one diet fits all perspective will survive much
<further research.

If one wants a more wholistic approach than one should look beyond
reductivist studies indeed.  The only problem is that you still keep
relying on just these which seems to be a methodological glitch.

<I suspect that our dietary needs may be as individual as
<we are. I have tried to look carefully at as much information as I can.

Maybe truth doesn't lie in quantity but quality too. Care has many
forms.

Niko