Macronutrients are the nutrients that we require in our diet in large (macro) amounts to supply us with energy (fuel); to provide us with other essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals and amino acids (micronutrients); and to make us feel full (satiated). There are three major macronutrients that the human body needs in order to function properly: fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Each has a different role in the Banting lifestyle, but before we get to that, let’s clarify one important matter. Thanks to outdated nutritional guidelines such as the food pyramid taught in schools and universities, many of us came to view proteins as meat and meat products, carbohydrates as grains and cereals, and fats as oils and sweets, while dairy and vegetables and fruits were categories on their own. You need to break free of this narrow, linear thinking because most of the foods you are going to eat when Banting contain at least two of the three macronutrients. For example, an egg contains about 6 grams of protein and 5 grams of fat. So, you cannot assume that when we say consume x amount of protein, that the protein will only come from the meat that you eat. You will find protein in vegetables, dairy, nuts and seeds, to name but a few. Similarly, carbohydrates are not only found in grains and cereals. They are spread all over the conventional food pyramid, in vegetables, fruits, dairy, nuts, seeds and even some meats!
Where did the whole ‘fat is bad’ idea start?
Fat has taken a big hit from traditional nutritional guidelines, recommended daily allowance (RDA) guidelines and conventional wisdom, with the result that for many years we have been robbed of the tastiest and most satisfying foods out there, simply because many of them contained saturated fats. It’s all because of one Ancel Keys, an American scientist who did an observational study in 1958 known as the ‘Seven Countries Study’. The aim of the study was to examine the association between diet and cardiovascular disease in seven different countries. The study revealed that the countries in which fat consumption was highest had the most heart disease, supporting the ‘idea’ that dietary fat caused heart disease.
The problem was that Keys left out countries like Holland and Norway, which consumed a lot of fat but had very low incidence of heart disease, and Chile, which had a lot of heart disease but a low fat consumption. In fact, Keys initially collected reliable data from 22 countries and the results were all over the place. But he decided to look at only the data that fitted his theory – that from seven countries. Keys became the ‘father’ of Lipid Hypothesis, which states that eating saturated fat raises cholesterol in the blood, and high cholesterol in the blood clogs arteries and causes heart disease. The study received massive media attention and had a major influence on dietary guidelines for the next few decades. In 1977, a US Senate committee led by George McGovern published the first ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’ in an attempt to reverse the epidemic of heart disease in the country. This is when the myth of the ‘healthy’ low-fat and high-carb diet became entrenched. It’s interesting to note that at more or less the same time as these guidelines were first published, the obesity epidemic started, followed closely by the diabetes epidemic. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
We call this the biggest fat lie of history!
Where does fat fit into Banting, then? Each fat molecule or triglyceride is made up of one glycerol molecule and three fatty acids. Fatty acids can be either saturated, monounsaturated or polyunsaturated. Triglycerides contain a combination of different fatty acids, so no fat is purely saturated, purely monounsaturated or purely polyunsaturated. Fats that are mostly saturated are solid at room temperature, like pure butter, whereas fats that are mostly unsaturated, like olive oil, are liquid at room temperature. Kris Gunnars gives an excellent explanation of how all this fatty stuff works on his blog, Authority Nutrition.1 It’s interesting and entertaining, and well worth the read.
When it comes to Banting, fat is there to supply us with energy, with enough fuel to get us through the day with ease. Not only is fat responsible for fuel, it also gives us that satisfied feeling. When we eat a diet higher in fat, we fill up quicker and can go longer without food. Many people assume that by eating a high-fat diet, you must be consuming endless calories, but, in fact, thanks to the satiating effect of fat, you end up eating less. Fat also adds flavour to our foods. Without fat, food tastes horrible. Have you ever noticed when you look at the label on a low-fat yoghurt product that while the fat value is low, the sugar content of the product is extremely high? This is because fat gives flavour to products; remove the fat and you instantly remove the flavour. Manufacturers of low-fat products had to come up with another way to flavour their products, so they added sugar! Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Protein is at the centre when it comes to the three macronutrients. Banting is not a high-protein diet as many people assume. The only reason why it may look like it’s high protein is because when you look at your plate of food, you will spot a fairly large piece of fatty meat with some vegetables on the side.
It is crucial to eat exactly the right amount of protein when on this diet. Once you know what your protein intake should be, you can work out your fats and carbohydrates from there. According to Dr Donald K. Layman, at the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, proteins require ‘extensive mechanisms to digest, metabolise and eliminate’ and lead to ‘high satiety to avoid excess intake’.2 In fact, says Layman, ‘it’s the only macronutrient that makes you quit eating it’, so it is relatively safe to eat. As with anything, though, if you eat too much of it, the excess protein will be stored as fat. Layman further states that the ‘benefits of higher protein, reduced carb diets’ include increased weight loss, the protection of skeletal muscle, a reduction in body fat, increased thermogenesis (the production of heat in the human body), increased satiety and enhanced glycaemic regulation. Protein is also responsible for the growth and repair of our tissues and cells. When Layman says a ‘higher protein’ diet, he means higher than the RDA for protein. The current RDA for protein is just enough to prevent deficiencies, but we don’t want to just prevent deficiencies, we want to maintain a healthy lifestyle at the same time. Current RDA values are way too low to be able to do this. According to Layman, a diet consisting of 175 grams or more of protein per day is considered a high-protein diet. On Banting, you will never even get close to that value.
Besides its other benefits, protein is responsible for providing us with the building blocks of life: amino acids. Meat protein sources contain all the essential amino acids that are absolutely vital for our various biological processes.
Carbohydrates can be divided into three groups. The first is sugars that are sweet. These are the short-chain carbohydrates found in our food. Examples include galactose, fructose, glucose and sucrose. The second is long-chain starches, which get broken down into glucose in the digestive system. The third is fibre, which cannot be digested by our bodies, but which the bacteria in our gut use to maintain our digestive health. You should also be aware that sugar alcohols commonly used in low-carb or carb-free products are also classified as carbohydrates. Although they taste sweet, they don’t usually provide many calories.
When we consume carbohydrates, the insulin in our body converts these carbs to glucose. Some of it gets sent to our muscles to be used for energy, and whatever is left over is converted to fat and stored in our fat cells for later use. There is only so much carbohydrate your muscles can use, so if you consume more than what’s needed for muscle energy, the rest will be stored. Because carbs provide us with no satisfaction, it’s not long before we reach for them again. Once again the body takes what it needs for our muscles, and then stores the rest. This process will just continue like a bad song stuck on repeat unless we limit the amount of carbs we consume to give our body a chance to use our stored fats first for energy. In order to afford our body this chance, we have to decrease the amount of carbs we eat to very low levels. The level will depend on how well your body can handle carbohydrates, and will differ from person to person. Some do fine on higher amounts of carbohydrates, while others do better on smaller amounts. We’ll discuss this a bit later in the section on carbohydrate intolerance.
Although Banting is a low-carb diet, carbohydrates are still extremely important to the lifestyle – more specifically, the type of carbohydrates you eat. Carbohydrates in the form of vegetables as per the green and orange lists are important to maintain a healthy lifestyle, purely because vegetables provide us with loads of fibre and other essential nutrients like vitamins. Most of the carbohydrates you eat from now on will come from vegetables and a few other foods on the green list. Other carbohydrates like rice, pasta and refined grains are meaningless and should be avoided. The only reason why dietary guidelines like the food pyramid advocate a large consumption of these refined carbohydrates is because they had to make up the calories from somewhere after forcing protein and fat values down to a bare minimum.
As with anything in life, too much of a good thing is not always a good thing. Conversely, too little of something can also have a negative effect.
Many first-time Banters wrongly assume that because this lifestyle is based on a high-fat, low-carb diet, they can go big on fats. In reality, though, ‘high fat’ does not give you permission to go overboard on fat. What it really means is that you should be eating more healthy fats, specifically a combination of saturated and unsaturated fats, and that your total fat consumption per day in macronutrient value should be higher than your protein and carb consumption.
We’ve found that many of those who complain that they’re not losing weight on this lifestyle are 99 per cent of the time overdoing the fats. They are simply eating too much fat, and this causes them to stall or even gain weight. Often inexperienced Banters will advise those who complain they are not losing weight to up their fat intake, and this is the worst advice you could give. You can’t tell someone to add more fat without first knowing how much fat they are currently consuming and, second, what their individual body fat percentage is.
Let’s look at the first one: how much fat is that person currently eating? Almost all the foods we consume contain plenty of fat. Everything from proteins and dairy to fruits such as avocados and olives contain fat. Nuts and seeds are especially high in fat. Let’s take one meal as an example: say you have two large eggs, 50 grams of streaky bacon, half a medium avocado, 1 cup of mushrooms fried in one tablespoon of butter, and a cup of coffee with about two tablespoons of fresh pouring cream. This one meal will give you a total fat macronutrient value of more or less 70 grams. That’s 70 grams of fat from the foods you ate in just one meal. The only ‘added’ fat in this case was the tablespoon of butter. Some people eat only twice a day while others eat three times a day, so you can see how quickly fats can add up. To go and add more fat to an already fat-rich meal is total insanity and a definite recipe for disaster.
Now let’s look at the second one: what is his or her individual body fat percentage? A person with a very high body fat percentage naturally has enough fat stores and ideally should first burn the stored fat before consuming more. Giving someone with a high body fat percentage more fat means his or her body will burn the fats he or she is eating before it will burn the stored body fat, resulting in a fat-loss stall. The higher a person’s weight, the bigger their body fat percentage and the less fat they need to eat. So, if your body fat stores are enough to provide you with the energy/fuel you require, then you don’t need to consume so much fat; the amount of fat you consume should be just enough to give you that satisfied feeling and nothing more. A smaller person or someone who doesn’t have so much weight to lose can increase their fat intake to provide them with enough energy to get through the day.
In summary: on the one hand, if you have enough fat stores to burn, then adding too much fat can lead to fat-loss stalls and possibly weight gain. On the other hand, if you don’t have enough fat stores, you may have to add more healthy fat to provide you with enough energy to see you through the day. The bottom line: the more weight you lose, the more fat you can consume.
One last thing to remember: a lifestyle high in unhealthy carbs and high in unhealthy fats will lead to weight gain – this is a scientifically proven fact.
How much is too much when it comes to protein? The amount of protein you need to eat will depend on your goal – whether you want to lose weight or build muscle (in the case of bodybuilders) – your age, your level of physical activity, etc. But seeing as this book is all about weight loss, you’re probably asking: What are the effects of too much or too little protein on weight loss?
Eating too much protein can result in your body converting any excess protein into glucose, and this can result in fat storage. In his blog Optimising Nutrition, Managing Insulin, Marty Kendall explains that, when it comes to protein, ‘A small amount (approx. 12%) will be converted to ketones and used as if it were fat. About 14% can be used either as glucose or fat. But around 80% of protein can only be used as glucose. This glycogenic protein in excess of the body’s requirements will also require insulin to be used for energy in the mitochondria or to be stored in the fat cells. High levels of protein will generate insulin which will reduce fat metabolism (i.e. lower levels of ketones). If your pancreas is struggling to supply enough insulin to maintain blood sugars then the insulin load from protein will make it harder for your pancreas to keep up and achieve optimal blood sugars. If you are trying to lose weight then excess insulin (over and above the amount used for protein synthesis that receives glycogen) will also promote fat storage.’3
Too little protein can also be problematic, as it can cause our health and body composition to suffer, leading to fat storage. If we don’t consume the right amount of macronutrient protein during each meal, protein synthesis will not happen optimally and the small amount of protein that we have consumed will just end up being stored as extra calories. This is why it’s so important to eat the right amount of protein per meal, and why you need to try, at least, to get the value for this macronutrient spot-on.
Is too much carbohydrate bad for you? This is one of the most interesting questions out there. The short answer is ‘yes and no’. ‘Yes’ if you have a metabolic disease such as type 2 diabetes, in which case too many carbohydrates are very bad for your health. But if you are generally healthy and don’t have a metabolic disease, then a few carbohydrates won’t harm you. Healthy people can tolerate higher amounts of carbs than those with metabolic diseases. Those who are more active and do more high-intensity training, such as weightlifting, can also tolerate more carbs. At the end of the day, we are all unique and what may seem like few carbs for one person will be a lot for another. Once again, what works for one won’t necessarily work for another.
Also note that if you eat high-carb and high-fat, your body will first use up the carbs and only then use the fats. And like the other macronutrients, your body will use what it needs of the carbs for muscle energy and store the rest. The bottom line is that a high-carb, high-fat lifestyle is by far the unhealthiest and most fattening. The only successful way to weight loss is to keep your fat count high and your carbohydrate count low.
So far we’ve dealt with too many carbs. But what about too few carbs? To answer this, let’s take a look at carbohydrate intolerance …
As Professor Noakes explains, there are two types of people: those who can utilise and metabolise carbohydrates well and are thus carbohydrate tolerant, and those who can’t and are thus carbohydrate intolerant. What exactly does this mean and how do you know which one you are?
Carbohydrate intolerance is thought to be genetic and there is some interesting research that shows that certain cultures have more of a specific enzyme responsible for carbohydrate digestion than others. When we eat carbohydrates, they convert to glucose in the body under the action of insulin. The glucose that cannot be used immediately as fuel or stored in the muscles and liver is converted to fat. In people who are insulin sensitive, carbohydrates are metabolised well. But in those whose cells do not respond readily to insulin, we see an increase in fat storage. Carbohydrate intolerance and insulin resistance are terms often used interchangeably because they usually go hand in hand. We discuss insulin resistance more fully in Part Two of this book.
If you stand sideways in front of the mirror and your tummy looks like an oversized ‘boep’ or ‘boepens’, then you’re most likely carbohydrate intolerant. And if you have a propensity to gain weight when you eat starchy foods, you’re most likely carbohydrate intolerant. While there are a number of blood tests you can have done to determine your status, abdominal obesity is one of the primary signs of carbohydrate intolerance and insulin resistance. Other signs may include increased blood pressure, irritability, sugar cravings and decreased energy, especially after meals.
This is the simple part: firstly, eat low-carb (keep your carbohydrates fairly low; there’s no need to go aggressively low if your aim is to steadily lose weight). Secondly, eat slowly and chew your food. By doing this, you will give whatever amylase (the enzyme that helps you digest carbs) you do have more time to break down the carbs you just ate. And thirdly, eat only healthy carbs such as vegetables that are nutrient dense and high in fibre. Tip: Look out for the foods on the Green Food List marked *LIND* (low insulinogenic, nutrient dense); this way you can be 100 per cent sure that you are choosing the best foods. Try out Meal Plan 1 in Part Five of this book to get you started.
If you’re one of the lucky ones and can tolerate carbs, you can eat more of the vegetables on the orange list. If you aren’t close to goal weight but you don’t gain weight by eating fruit, then you should be okay to continue eating fruit, but once again moderation is key.