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Carbs can be your worst enemy if you’re trying to lose weight.
The “Today” show recently featured a perspective piece suggesting that the key to losing weight is cutting down on carbohydrates more than worrying so much about balancing the calories we eat and burnaccording to an article published last December in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
“The body fights against calorie restriction,” lead author Dr. David Ludwig told “Today.”
limit calories it makes people hungrier, but it also slows metabolism, the show said.
“So there are not too many calories in the bloodstream. There are very few.”
The popular ketogenic diet is a low-carb, high-fat diet that puts your body into ketosis, the process in which your body burns fat for fuel, instead of carbohydrates.
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When our bodies produce too much insulin, fat cells are programmed to store calories, he explained.
Ludwig, endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Harvard Medical School, advocates the “carbohydrate-insulin model” of obesity.
The pancreas produces a hormone called insulin to control the amount of sugar, or glucose, in our bloodstream, where it works as a “key” to help glucose enter our body’s cells, according to Healthline.
Ludwig suggests that our way of thinking about weight loss is backwards.
“Given the choice between bread and butter, for years we focused on getting rid of butter,” Ludwig said.
“But maybe between the two of them, the bread is the bigger issue.”
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He says it’s not so much that eating too many calories leads to weight gain, but rather that the high sugar content of certain carbohydrates causes our bodies to store too much energy, which in turn causes us to eat even more.
We begin to build fat stores when the calories we eat are greater than the calories we can burn over time, said Dr. Karl Nadolsky, an endocrinologist specializing in diabetes, metabolism and obesity.
“Everybody thinks obesity is about energy balance,” said Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco, who in 2006 described a similar model of excess of insulin leading to weight gain.
“So, it’s calories in, calories out. Therefore, it is about two behaviors, gluttony and laziness. Therefore, if you are fat, it is your fault. Therefore, diet and exercise. Therefore, any calorie can be part of a balanced diet. .”
Grl looks at the mirror and measures his weight by scale
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Ludwig and his co-authors point out that the energy balance theory that people take in more than they burn explains why people gain weight, but it is the “why” that is not addressed.
“The common advice, ‘eat less, be more physically active,’ that we tell people doesn’t work very well. The results are not that successful,” said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Washington. St. Louis Medical School.
But Ludwig’s paper generated controversy in the medical community, with researchers “defending and deriding” the paper, according to MedPage Today.
“If weight loss were as simple as eating fewer carbohydrates, you’d think that two-thirds of Americans who diet every year would have had some success by now,” said Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, an associate professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa. and medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute, a non-surgical weight management center.
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However, significant research on the low carbohydrate diets currently underway that is providing tangible results for some patients.
Dr. Jeff Volek, a registered dietitian and professor in the Department of Human Sciences at The Ohio State University who has researched low-carb diets for more than 25 years, told the “Today” show that research shows that people who people who follow a low-carbohydrate diet can lose 10% of their body weight.
And people are taking it away.
Assortment of unhealthy products that are bad for the figure, the skin, the heart and the teeth. Carbohydrate fast food.
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The show highlighted one of its patients, a 42-year-old woman, who signed up for a low-carb diet study in 2019, which contained 37 grams of carbs daily, which was also high in protein and healthy fats, such as avocados and walnuts. .
In six weeks he lost 20 pounds, but now, three years later, he has lost a cumulative 88 pounds.
She told “Today” that “it wasn’t easy” giving up her favorite foods at first, like pasta and potatoes, but the results are worth it.
“When you limit carbohydrates, the body becomes really good at burning its own body fat because it doesn’t have a lot of sugar to burn for fuel,” Volek said on “Today.”
Volek explained to Fox News why low-carb diets often fail.
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“The vast majority of adults in the United States (more than 100 million people) are consuming too many carbohydrates relative to their tolerance, which is why low-fat diets don’t work for most people. A strong body of research demonstrates that reducing carbohydrates is a safe, effective, and sustainable approach to improving weight and metabolic health,” he said.
