For decades the Western world has been led astray by Big Food and Big Pharma, resulting in an epidemic of obesity, poor health and a bloated weight-loss industry featuring one fad diet after another. The Real Meal Revolution1 was written with the purpose of changing this tide. It offered a challenge to laypeople and health-care practitioners alike to learn the truth about nutrition and get back to healthy eating habits that are sustainable in the long term. No more starvation diets, no more quick fixes and no more overindulging in foods that drive sugar addiction.
Within months of its launch, social media pages had sprung up in support of Professor Noakes and his revolution, but with them came myriad new fads and bizarre recommendations for quick and easy weight loss. Food was once again being weighed and measured and divided up into calories and units. Followers were advised to force-feed, not feed, themselves and then douse themselves in freezing water! Products for skin tightening and flat bellies sprang up everywhere and recipes for substitute cakes, sweets and rich desserts soon littered the Banting pages. Worse still, desperate dieters on these groups became an easy target for unscrupulous charlatans flogging supplements with promises of reduced blood sugar, faster weight loss and tighter skin.
Fat bombs, bullet coffees, spike days and dessert for breakfast? How can any of these things fit into a healthy, sustainable eating pattern? The short answer: they don’t. Here we take a look down this rabbit hole of madness and bust some of the most common myths we’ve come across.
For years we have been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Unless we eat breakfast we will be running on empty, like a car with no fuel. Without breakfast, our metabolism will stall and we will miss out on the essential nutrients that we require for the day. Breakfast gives the brain the glucose it needs to function and, we are told, may even help us to maintain our ideal weight.
Where did this idea originate? And is it based on sound science? In order to answer these questions, we need to ask ourselves who benefits most from us eating breakfast. Keep in mind here that this claim predates the Banting era, and that egg and bacon for breakfast is thus regarded as a huge no-no. Instead, the ‘healthy’ breakfast products pushed on us are largely sugar-coated cereals. Food manufacturers invest millions each year to try to convince us that these cereals are the essential way to start the day.
Let’s take a look at some of the most pervasive myths surrounding breakfast.
Previous studies done on children did show that those who ate breakfast performed better at school than those who did not. However, a recent systematic review of 45 studies done between 1950 and 2008 has revealed that most of the evidence in favour of this belief came from studying children who did not have access to food at home at ANY time of the day. In other words, the children who allegedly benefited from having breakfast were nutritionally compromised from the start; they were from low-income homes and were not getting sufficient food to begin with. The same benefits of eating breakfast were not seen in well-nourished children. The bottom line is that children perform better when they are not distracted by hunger; it does not have anything to do with when they eat.2
Studies have shown that breakfast eating habits do not play a major role in weight loss or gain. In fact, one study showed that habitual breakfast eaters who started skipping breakfast actually lost more weight than those who usually skipped breakfast but started eating it during the study.3
This myth has seen people force-feeding themselves breakfast and those with no appetite for breakfast being told to force it down. This flies in the face of one of Banting’s central tenets: ‘Eat to appetite’. If you are not hungry in the morning, your body is telling you that you do not have to eat!
Breakfast does not significantly increase your resting metabolic rate. Some studies have shown that people who eat breakfast only burn about 11 more calories a day than those who do not. Given that a woman who eats moderately will consume about 2 000 calories in a day, this figure is insignificant. Other studies have shown no change in metabolic or cardiovascular health whether people skipped breakfast or not.4
Our bodies have evolved to work very effectively after short periods without eating (up to a few days, in fact). Studies have shown that our metabolic rate actually increases over a three-day period of fasting.5 One study even showed that after 74 hours of fasting, the metabolic rate only decreased by 8 per cent.6
This makes sense when you think about our earliest ancestors who did not have easy access to food and who had to rely on hunting. If our bodies did not respond by giving us MORE energy after a couple of days of fasting, how would we have caught our food? So, if you eat at 8 p.m. you will still be conscious at 1 p.m. the following day!
Besides increasing your metabolism, a period of fasting could be good for you in that it lowers glucose and insulin levels. Insulin sensitivity is higher when your energy stores are depleted. It makes sense then that many people actually benefit from pushing ‘breakfast’ to later in the day. The longer you fast, the more your insulin sensitivity increases.
Studies have revealed that although people who skip breakfast are indeed hungrier by lunch time, they do not eat any more than people who have eaten breakfast, and therefore actually end up eating LESS in a day than their breakfast-eating buddies.7
Furthermore, although there is nothing wrong with eating breakfast, it does create a big ‘eating window’ – which is the number of hours during the day that you are consuming food. A recent study found that a larger eating window is associated with MORE fat storage and a higher chance of health problems like diabetes.8 Admittedly, this study was done on mice, but the research is important. One group of mice ate when they wanted to and the other group was only allowed an eight-hour window in which to eat between afternoon and night. The mice that ate at liberty gained fat and developed problems with cholesterol and blood glucose. The mice that ate only in the eight-hour window weighed 28 per cent less and had no health problems – and yes, the groups ate the same fatty foods. Scientists believe that by cutting down on your eating window, your body does a better job of metabolising the food that you eat, and burns more fat. Skipping breakfast may even prime your body to feel hungry less often. This has been seen as one of the benefits of intermittent fasting.
Then why do so many people complain that they are really hungry within a couple of hours of eating breakfast? We are not talking about cornflakes and toast here, but low-carb breakfasts full of great protein and fat.
People who experience post-breakfast hunger are often told to eat more, with the result that they gorge themselves to the point of nausea, overdoing the amount of food they should be eating and, very often, still feeling hungry before lunch. In clinical practice, we regularly see people gain weight this way. Their post-breakfast hunger sets in 30 minutes to two hours after breakfast, and is often accompanied by irritability and poor concentration. Interestingly, if these people eat the same meal later in the day, they don’t experience the same post-meal hunger.
There are a number of mechanisms that may cause this post-breakfast hunger, but the most likely culprit appears to be cortisol. Cortisol, often called the ‘stress hormone’, reacts to any perceived stress, whether we are running away from a wild animal or tearing our hair out over a looming work deadline. Cortisol helps us to cope with the stress by helping us maintain focus and stay alert, and sharpening our memory recall. Cortisol also helps us get out of bed in the morning. In the early hours of the morning, as the body prepares to rise, cortisol levels begin to increase and continue to climb for about an hour, during which time you eat breakfast. Cortisol has an effect on insulin, and high levels of cortisol, which we see around the time we eat breakfast, can exert a pronounced effect on the secretion of insulin triggered by eating.
Even a Banting breakfast will have this effect. Protein triggers an insulin response and some amino acids in protein may actually trigger a significant insulin response. With the assistance of cortisol, this insulin output can be disproportionate to the food you have eaten. This big boost of insulin can cause quite a sharp decline in blood glucose and, although not sufficiently low to be undesirable, the body perceives this rapid drop in blood glucose as dangerous and triggers a hunger signal.
Why doesn’t this happen to everybody? The answer lies in insulin sensitivity. The more insulin sensitive someone is, the greater the likelihood that they will experience this problem. This does not mean that all insulin-sensitive people get hungry after breakfast or that all insulin-resistant people stay feeling full after eating a substantial breakfast. But insulin sensitivity does appear to play a key role.
If you are experiencing sufficient stress in your life to raise your cortisol levels, you need to find a way to address that stress, such as meditation, exercise or massage.
Believing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day leads to an ‘only one way to eat’ mentality. When you believe that a certain meal is essential, you can develop a mental block that overemphasises the importance of that meal, resulting in negative psychological responses should you not be able to maintain the habit. For example, if you miss the meal you believe is essential to weight loss, you may despair because you think your fat loss has now slowed, when in fact it hasn’t. Diets should not create psychological barriers that make the journey harder. Eating should be flexible and convenient for your lifestyle.
What people seem to forget is that there is a high degree of individual variability. Breakfast is great for some and not so great for others. Theory and speculation do not invalidate individual experience and real-life results. Insisting that someone eat breakfast to achieve weight loss could be the very thing that makes it harder for him or her to lose weight. Some people feel and do better not eating breakfast, and there is no reason for them to change. Don’t let anyone tell you that your weight-loss success hinges on any one meal.
A body in ‘starvation mode’ is said to be in a state of metabolic shutdown, in which you not only stop losing weight, you may even gain some. We are often told not to skip meals because doing so may result in some form of metabolic damage as a result of ‘starvation mode’.
Let’s be clear, this is a bizarre notion. Think of prisoners of war or people in food-deprived Third World countries. People who do not eat lose weight. Their metabolisms do not shut down. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be extremely disadvantageous for the survival of the human species if after one or two skipped meals our metabolisms shut down, leaving us lethargic and unable to hunt for our next meal.
There is a difference between fasting and long-term calorie restriction. Daily calorie restriction does lead to decreased metabolic function (but not after one or two days). As we decrease our energy intake, our energy output (metabolism) adjusts downwards, but this is because the body is still being fed and adapting to the available food. Take the food away completely and the body switches to using stored fuel. This being abundant in most cases, it does not require the body to decrease its metabolism.10
Some people assume that a zero-calorie diet will result in the metabolism coming to an abrupt halt, but studies tell us a very different story. When we rely on food for energy, decreasing that food will ultimately result in decreased energy expenditure, but when the body gets NO food, it switches from using food consumed to food that has already been stored in the body in the form of fat. Suddenly there is a good availability of food and energy expenditure actually increases.11 In a recent study, it was shown that the metabolism or resting energy expenditure of people fasting over four days increased continuously. There was no metabolic shutdown. Think about that ancestor of yours who required sufficient energy to go out and hunt three days after his last meal.
What if we skip meals often, like every second day? Won’t we affect our metabolism then? The answer is no, which is why intermittent fasting often proves to be a very effective way to lose weight. Studies have shown that even over a 22-day period of alternate-day fasting there is no measurable decrease in metabolism or total energy expenditure. In one particular study, fat oxidation (the use of fat for energy) increased by 58 per cent while energy from carbohydrates decreased by 53 per cent. The body switched from burning glucose to burning fat with no overall drop in energy.12
Another aspect of this myth is that if we skip meals our bodies will scavenge our muscles for energy. This is nonsense. Human beings store fat for good reason. When we do not have a supply of food, our bodies’ preferred source of fuel is … fat! Not muscle. Our bodies will continue to use fat stores right up until we get to about 4 per cent body fat and, let’s be honest here, none of us can claim 4 per cent body fat. In one study, subjects who practised alternate-day fasting over a period of 70 days experienced a decrease in fat mass of 11.4 per cent, but no change in muscle and bone mass.13
So, what’s the deal with the decreasing metabolism bit? To explain this, let’s have a look at the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Please note, these participants were not fasting: they were eating a very low-calorie diet. The study followed 36 young, healthy, psychologically stable men who restricted their caloric intake for six months. Their calories were restricted in various phases, but the least amount of calories they were allowed was 50 per cent of their ‘normal’ maintenance calories. (Compare this daily deficit of 50 per cent below maintenance to a typically recommended ‘ideal’ moderate deficit of 20 per cent.) Although by the end of the study their metabolic rates were significantly lowered, at no point did the men stop losing fat until they reached 5 per cent body fat right near the end of the study. All of the participants lost approximately 25 per cent of their starting body weight and reached about 5 per cent body fat. They simply lost weight to the point where their bodies could lose no more.
By the end of the study the men’s metabolic rates had dropped about 40 per cent, but this was in response to severe and prolonged dietary restriction. A metabolic adaption to significantly lower energy intake is known as adaptive thermogenesis. Adaptive thermogenesis happens as a result of any prolonged deficit; obviously, the more excessive the deficit, the more significant the drop. Nevertheless, 40 per cent is nowhere near a 100 per cent metabolic shutdown.
Furthermore, this metabolic slowdown is not significant enough to stop weight loss, although it may slow down progress over time. It is definitely not going to cause weight gain.
Lyle McDonald explains this phenomenon in detail in his book The Ketogenic Diet: ‘Generally speaking, most dieters restrict calories too much when dieting for fat loss. The logic is that a greater caloric deficit will yield faster and greater fat loss, but this is not always the case. Excessively low caloric intakes are countered in the body by a reduction in metabolic rate which slows fat loss. This reduction can range from 5 to 36% of resting metabolic rate, depending on the severity of caloric restriction. While the exact cause of the decrease is unknown, possible causes are a decrease in thyroid hormones, loss of lean body mass, or a decrease in the activity of the sympathetic nervous system.’14
A further extension of this myth is that we need to eat every three hours, or six meals a day, to maintain our metabolism. We have just seen that our metabolisms do very well on no food, so the human metabolism certainly does not need to be stoked every three hours. Common sense should dictate that human beings certainly did not evolve this way. Food was very often seasonal. Meat had to be hunted and there were no fridges, freezers and pantries from which hunter-gatherers could continuously snack.
It is a mystery as to when this notion of constant grazing became popular, but as recently as the 1970s most people still ate three meals a day and snacking was frowned upon. Having a friend around for tea and cake was an occasional treat and even then we were strictly limited lest we ruin our dinner. Grazing around the clock will prevent your body from burning fat. When we eat constantly, we release insulin constantly, which places the body in an absorptive phase. Put less delicately, you are making fat! Insulin levels need to decrease before fat stores can be used for energy. A further problem with constant grazing is that it is very easy to lose track of how much you are actually eating. It also becomes more difficult to keep track of the nutrients you are taking in and whether or not you’re consuming the appropriate combination of macronutrients.
Lastly, grazing leaves you feeling unsatisfied. Studies have shown that people are seldom satiated after a small meal. Psychologically, this leaves them wanting more and the chances of overeating later increase. Many people who eat six smaller meals a day become fixated on food. Besides having experienced it ourselves, we see clients who are constantly thinking about when their next meal should be, what they should eat, whether they should eat the cheese and hummus snack at lunch or leave it for dinner … It’s crazy! When the brain gets enough food at mealtime, this doesn’t happen. The food obsession stops and you become more productive when you are not constantly stopping to eat. If you stop letting food be your master, you will find that you have time to go out and live your life.
Throwing away the scale seems to be all the rage in low-carb circles at the moment and, let’s face it, the idea of never having to confront those numbers on the scale again can be liberating. The advice to throw away the scale is based on one thing: that scales don’t accurately reflect the changes going on inside the body during weight loss, and this is correct to a degree.15 For many people, focusing on the health factors of a low-carb diet rather than weight loss can be less stressful, but there are pros and cons to this and it may not be the best advice to dump the scale just yet. Research has shown that those who monitor their weight are not only likely to lose more weight, but are also more likely to keep it off.16
The scale can also be a great early detection tool. It will tell you before your clothes do that you are gaining weight, enabling you to get things in check before the problem becomes more difficult to deal with.
Checking weight is helpful, but we need to consider body composition too. The scale does not differentiate between lean mass, fat mass, water, organs and bone. Many dieters assume that any loss is good and any gain is bad. This is not necessarily so.
Your body weight fluctuates with daily fluctuations in water, and it can be by as much as one or two kilograms. Some days you will drink more water, on other days less. On hot days or during exercise you will lose water. Eating a few extra carbs will attract water. Carbs stored in muscle as glycogen store water along with them, so after a higher-carb meal, it’s quite possible to see a weight gain. Water fluctuations are usually why we see a big loss in weight in the first week on a low-carb diet.
Everything in your stomach and gastrointestinal tract has weight, so if you’ve eaten some ‘heavy’ meals recently, you’ll weigh more than if you haven’t been eating much. This is where ‘colon cleansing’ scams get you. Empty the colon and of course you will weigh less, but at some point you’ll need to eat again and that weight will be replaced.
Some people get hysterical on a daily basis when they see slight fluctuations on the scale, but you must understand that these fluctuations are normal. What you want to look out for is a steady increase or decrease over time.
So, why might it not be such a great idea to chuck the scale?
For people wanting to lose weight, keeping a method of accountability is one of the best ways to do so. Gauging how we are doing by how we look and feel or how our clothes fit does not necessarily work in practice. When we are not having a look at the scale it is easier to remain unaccountable for the snacking here and there and for the clothes that don’t fit quite as loosely as they should. Oftentimes when we hear someone complaining that they are not losing weight we are tempted to tell them to give the scale a miss, but is it not better to face the problem head-on, review your eating plan or lifestyle habits, and get back on track?
Some people have no problem with the normal daily fluctuations and like to monitor how every meal affects them, but generally weighing yourself once a week in the morning before eating will reveal a trend over time. Regular weighing will ensure that you know whether the trend is up or down. Recognising weight gain early can help you modify your eating habits to ensure that you don’t have to face a 10-kilogram fat increase a little further on down the road.
Women may experience more significant fluctuations in weight around the time of menstruation, and for women who feel that this is going to discourage them, perhaps weighing once a month will be better.
We recognise that health is so much more than a number on a scale. We know that the scale cannot measure overall fitness, stress levels or happiness, and that the numbers should not dictate how you feel about yourself. However, they can certainly help you to manage your weight better.
If getting on the scale creates prolonged anxiety or disappointment, or drives you to make extreme changes that could be unhealthy or lead to fad dieting, it may benefit you to skip the scale and use a measuring tape instead. Whatever the method, keeping accountable is a good thing, and if your weight or measurements are not decreasing, it is better to face the problem and seek help from somebody who can tweak your diet and get you on the right track.
We frequently get asked about cheat days – a day of the week on which you can eat whatever you want. These, according to those who advocate them, allegedly prevent you from feeling deprived, boost your metabolism and increase your chances of diet success. We do not recommend them for several reasons.
Firstly, Banting is a lifestyle. The purpose is not just weight loss; people who undertake to eat this way are encouraged to embrace it as a long-term lifestyle change. It therefore makes no sense to revert to bad habits once a week.
Secondly, many people who cut out sugar and carbohydrates do so because they are addicted to them. You wouldn’t tell a recovering alcoholic that it’s okay to have a drink once a week, or an ex-smoker one cigarette a week. So, why does the same advice not apply to someone addicted to sugar? Abstinence is the only thing that works for addiction, period. Reducing carbohydrates to below 25 grams a day helps to stop cravings. According to Professor Noakes, one of the reasons why traditional diets do not work is because addictive foods are not eliminated or sufficiently restricted. People who revert to eating 75–100 grams of carbohydrate just reignite their addiction. Unfortunately this often applies to ‘substitute’ cakes and cookies too. Their sweetness triggers the addiction and makes it easier to fall off the wagon and go back to adding addictive and unhealthy foods to the diet.
It is not just sugar that fuels addiction – because of chemicals and additives, many junk foods are addictive too. Experiments have shown that, for some people, the same reward and pleasure centres of the brain that are triggered by drugs like cocaine and heroin are also activated by certain foods, especially ‘highly palatable’ junk foods that have been specifically formulated to create that ‘bliss point’ that keeps you coming back for more.
There have been claims that cheat days can be supplemented with cinnamon capsules to counter rises in blood sugar. This is nothing more than a money-making scam. Unfortunately this fad has caught on among people with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, and has authorities quite worried. Some studies have shown evidence that cinnamon might have a modest effect on blood glucose in patients with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes, but the majority have shown no effect. What the advocates of cinnamon capsules don’t mention is that cinnamon contains the phytochemical coumarin, which is hepatotoxic (liver damaging) and carcinogenic (cancer causing). Coumarin is not the active compound that lowers blood sugar, but it exists alongside the active ingredient. The tolerable daily intake (TDI) of coumarin has been set at 0.1 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. There are two varieties of cinnamon: Ceylon and cassia. Ceylon has low levels of coumarin (below 190 milligrams per kilogram), but cassia (the most frequently used cinnamon in production and manufacturing, and most commonly found on supermarket shelves) has levels of between 700 and 12 230 milligrams per kilogram. A teaspoon of cassia cinnamon per day could therefore pose serious health risks. Regular consumption of inexpensive cassia cinnamon could lead to liver damage, particularly in people whose livers are already compromised. Coumarin may also interact with a number of other medications, including warfarin. While the difference between the two varieties can be seen in stick form, it is very difficult to distinguish between them in powder form.
Given that blood-glucose-lowering effects are only seen from cinnamon doses of 300 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, a dose of cinnamon sufficient to have an effect on blood sugar could put one well above the TDI for coumarin. Because cinnamon is an unproven treatment, there is no established dose. The bottom line: don’t waste your money on a supplement that does nothing more than add to your carcinogenic load.17
There is no getting around it – junk food is bad for you. Some argue that cheat days can’t hurt, but reverting to CRAP – carbonated drinks, refined sugar, artificial sweeteners and processed foods – once a week is worse than having none at all. Furthermore, all those detrimental ingredients (trans fats, seed oils and gluten) linger in your body.
A third reason why we don’t advocate cheat days is that when we drastically change the way in which we eat, our body and sense of taste go through a period of adaptation. Continuing to eat junk or cheat foods does not allow our sense of taste to adapt. Those who have stuck to eating ‘real food’ for a couple of months will know what we mean. Our sense of taste improves when we cut out the junk.
Fourthly, cutting carbs changes the way in which our body uses fuel. It takes weeks to get into a fat-adapted state. Fat burning is important, and for those trying to achieve ketosis, it simply does not make sense to cheat. Consistency is the key here.
This is why spike days also don’t make sense. Spike days involve eating a massive amount of calories for one day periodically in order to somehow ‘kick your system’ into metabolic overdrive. This is nonsense. Suddenly increasing your carbohydrate intake will only set you back – it will not increase your metabolism. Some studies have shown that ‘overfeeding’ or spike days may increase metabolism between 3 and 10 per cent, but for no more than 24 hours. Furthermore, the more obese the subject, the less their metabolism increased. The obesity-prone individual only saw a 3 per cent increase in metabolism. In other words, the fatter you are, the less likely that a spike day is going to increase your metabolism. Worse still, this tiny boost cannot in any way justify the thousands of surplus calories you’ve just consumed.18
One pro-cheating claim is that cheat/spike days boost metabolism by upping leptin production, thereby helping the body burn more calories after overeating. Leptin is the so-called ‘satiety hormone’ produced by fat cells. The more body fat a person has, the more leptin they will have circulating in their blood. Unfortunately, high levels of leptin cause leptin resistance. The brain does not respond to the leptin in the blood, causing the fat cells to release more. There does not seem much point in eating in a way that will increase a hormone that you already have in abundance but to which you are resistant.
Those who are lean or who have been restricting calories for a long time, or who have lost a significant amount of body fat, may experience lower leptin levels. Creating a ‘leptin boost’ with a cheat or spike day, however, has a very transient effect and levels fall again as soon as the body senses a deficit, which will probably be the next day when you hop back on your diet.
Rather don’t cheat with foods that are going to jeopardise your weight loss or trigger your sugar addiction. If you are eating to appetite as you should be, some days you will eat more and other days you will eat less, and you will have days of higher and lower energy intake.
When it comes to the LCHF lifestyle, ‘high fat’ is a bit of a misnomer. The worst advice you can give someone complaining about not losing weight is to tell them to increase their fat intake, and specifically by adding fat bombs and bulletproof coffees. A bulletproof coffee is a cup of good-quality filter coffee whisked with two tablespoons each of butter and coconut oil into a cappuccino-like drink. A fat bomb is a combination of cocoa, nut butters and coconut oil generally frozen in an ice tray and used as a means to up fat intake and satisfy the sweet tooth. A fat shake is generally a cold drink made of cream, coconut cream, coconut oil and some cocoa. Remember, if you eat too much of anything, you will gain weight. Fat is extremely calorie dense, and fat-filled foods and fat-loaded drinks do not, in our opinion, have a place in a weight-loss programme.
A pervasive myth is that fat does not make you fat. Well, it does! This statement is often taken out of context and used as an excuse to binge on chunks of fatty biltong and cartons of double cream. We have seen morbidly obese people told to eat a meal of eggs, bacon, sausages, avocado, mushrooms and spinach, all fried in butter, and don’t forget the cream-loaded coffee. Stop and think rationally here for a minute. Surely if we put all that energy into our body, we are going to have to use it? And if we already have a whole lot of stored energy in the form of body fat, what are the chances of us using it?19
What the ‘high fat’ in LCHF really means is that the majority of the energy you obtain should come from fat. This does not give you licence to, or even recommend that you add fat to everything you eat. The ‘high fat’ comes from the fat already found in the food you eat, for example fattier cuts of meat, eggs, the skin on chicken, full-fat dairy products, avocados, olives and perhaps the knob of butter used to stir-fry your vegetables.
Where you see that the recommended intake should be, for example, 50 per cent fat, do not confuse the number of calories or energy derived from fat with the actual amount of fat. Getting 50 per cent of your energy intake from fat and covering your plate with 50 per cent fat are two very different things. All food is made up of energy. Fat has twice the amount of energy as protein. For example, 10 grams of protein contains 40 calories, but 10 grams of fat contains 90 calories. To simplify this, let’s look at an example of a meal. A 100-gram piece of chicken contains 25 grams of protein and 13 grams of fat. A cup of broccoli contains 6 grams of carbohydrate and 5 grams of protein. Two tablespoons of pumpkin contain 1.2 grams of carbohydrate. To this we add 25 grams of butter, containing 20.3 grams of fat. If you total these macronutrients, you get 30 grams of protein, 7.2 grams of carbohydrate and 33.3 grams of fat. If we convert these numbers to energy, we get 120 calories from the protein, which is 27 per cent of the total energy content of this meal, 28 calories from carbohydrate, making up 6.8 per cent, and 297 calories from fat, making up the largest amount of energy at 66 per cent.
It should now be easy to see that although the fat in the food does not make up a large number of grams in weight, it accounts for a lot of energy. As fat is the most calorie-dense macronutrient, adding one tablespoon of butter to a meal of 150 grams steak and a cup of vegetables sprinkled with full-fat cheese could well be classified as a high-fat meal. So, you see, in reality a high-fat diet probably comprises a whole lot less fat than you imagine.
Apart from the fact that we now know that saturated fat, in moderation, is good for us, the idea of eating it for weight loss is that it suppresses appetite and we don’t require much of it to make us feel full or satiated. It is also supposed to be self-limiting, which means that it prevents us from consuming too much of it. This is not always the case, however, as many people don’t appear to have an ‘off switch’, resulting in a massive overconsumption of the most calorie dense of the macronutrients.
In light of all this, does it still make sense to be indulging in fat shakes and bullet coffees? It should be clear by now that these items do not have a place in a healthy weight-reduction programme. Aside from being calorie laden, they are also not particularly nutrient dense. It makes far more sense to choose nutrient-dense whole foods over yet another fad.
This explanation is often given when someone has been Banting for a few weeks and has not lost weight. Typically they’ll be told, ‘Don’t worry, maybe you are building muscle and muscle weighs more than fat.’ There are a couple of problems with this statement. Which weighs more, a kilogram of coal or a kilogram of feathers? Right – they weigh the same. Likewise, one kilogram of muscle weighs exactly the same as one kilogram of fat.
We understand that muscle is more dense than fat and that muscle takes up less volume than fat, but in the majority of cases, there has been no reduction in volume and ‘maybe you are building muscle’ is just a sorry excuse for not losing fat.
We understand, too, that gaining muscle may cause an increase in weight, but this is usually only in people who are deliberately and consciously building muscle (which, by the way, is not that easy to do).
Fat is always lost much more easily and much more quickly than muscle can be built. Muscle growth is a gradual process. A male who is exercising to build muscle deliberately can build at a rate of approximately 120 grams per week under optimal conditions. A woman builds at half that rate. In contrast, a person with a good few kilograms of fat to lose can lose fat at the rate of 0.5–1 kilogram per week without much difficulty.
So, it should be clear that in most cases when someone is not losing weight over an extended period of time, the idea that fat is being replaced with muscle is highly improbable. The reality is that they are simply not losing weight and the sooner the problem is addressed, the sooner they can correct it.
Human skin is not passive tissue that remains stretched after losing weight. The skin is a living organ that adapts. People on extended fasts have demonstrated that the skin can decrease in size by more than 20 per cent. Fitness expert Mark Sisson tells us that ‘most cases of loose skin are actually just cases of excess subcutaneous fat. And because subcutaneous fat is “soft” fat, it is looser and easier to confuse with skin. It droops and jiggles and the skin that surrounds it conforms to its shape. Most cases of loose skin can be explained by overly stubborn deposits of subcutaneous fat.’20 Certified fitness trainer Ron Brown adds that to eliminate the last of this droopy body fat we need to change our body composition, not just lose weight. A little muscle toning or building will go a long way to helping us out here.21
Unfortunately, a popular trend among Banters is to take gelatine as some kind of quick fix. Most are swallowing boxed commercial gelatine in the hope that it will tighten loose skin after weight loss. Gelatine may be cheap and readily available, but it is often made from inferior-quality animals that have been raised in feed lots and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. They stand around in their own waste eating genetically modified grains that make them fat and sick. Healthy food cannot come from unhealthy animals. Animal bones are one of the best sources of collagen (from which gelatine is derived), but most commercial gelatines today are brewed exclusively from pigskin or cowhide and include no cartilage or bone. Furthermore, manufactured gelatine is likely to contain peculiar contaminants. Commercial gelatine also undergoes massive processing. According to an industry website, processing procedures include degreasing, acid demineralisation, alkaline purification, washing, filtration, ion exchange and sterilisation!
Most claims regarding the benefits of gelatine are backed up by poor scientific data resulting from poor study design or inadequate sample sizes.22 Many larger studies have noted no effects. And promising studies from the early 1900s were very variable in their results. One explanation for this could be that the gelatine made back then was brewed from a variety of blends of bone, cartilage and skin, which each differed in their physical and chemical characteristics. One fairly recent study did find that oral intake of specific bioactive collagen peptides reduces skin wrinkles, but before you get too excited, take note that this study was done on a specific supplement, Verisol®, and not on supermarket products.23
Consuming gelatine does not appear to be harmful, although there is some evidence to suggest that the ingestion of glycine (one of the amino acids in gelatine) increases insulin secretion.24 Because gelatine is rich in glycine, you may want to give that some thought. The body itself manufactures glycine and proline, two of the amino acids found in gelatine that are claimed to have beneficial effects. This is why they are classified as non-essential amino acids. What studies have found, however, is that in the absence of other nutrients, these amino acids are not efficiently utilised in the body.
In conclusion, studies do not support the claims made by the proponents of gelatine, but consuming it is not likely to cause any harm. The best source of gelatine is a home-made bone broth made from the highest quality skin, cartilage and bone from hormone-free organic meat. A home-made broth does not only contain sought-after collagen, but also essential minerals and vitamins. See page 238 for a recipe.
This must be one of the most pervasive myths on the internet. Also known as the acid alkaline diet or the alkaline ash diet, the natural medicine industry has jumped on this bandwagon and produced a variety of alkalising powders and supplements.
What are the claims? Proponents of this diet claim that replacing acid-forming foods with alkaline foods can improve health and fight serious diseases like cancer. The basic premise is that food metabolism leaves behind an ‘ash’ in the body, which can be either acidic or alkaline. It is true that foods do leave behind acid or alkaline ash. The type of ash is determined by the relative content of acid-forming components, such as phosphate and sulphur, and alkalis, such as calcium, magnesium and potassium, in the food we eat. This ash then makes your body either alkaline or acidic. It is believed that an acidic body leaves us vulnerable to a host of diseases including cancer, heart disease, obesity, allergies, fatigue and premature aging, as well as problems with our nervous system, cardiovascular system and muscles. It is suggested, therefore, that an overall alkaline pH in our body will protect us from diseases as well as cure the ones we already have.
Acidic-ash-producing foods include meat, fish, dairy, eggs and grains. Alkaline-ash-producing foods include a variety of fruits, nuts, legumes and vegetables. Natural fats, starches and sugars are considered neutral.
In order to understand the problem with the alkaline-diet theory, we need a basic understanding of pH. The pH of a solution is the measure of its hydrogen ion concentration. The higher the pH, the more alkaline and oxygen rich the solution. The lower the pH, the more acidic and oxygen deprived. The pH range is from 0 to 14, with 7.0 being neutral. Anything above 7.0 is alkaline; anything below 7.0 is acidic. Note that the pH value in the body varies; some parts are acidic and others are alkaline. The stomach, for example, is acidic, as it is full of hydrochloric acid and needs to be acidic to digest food adequately. Insufficient stomach acid leads to heartburn and reflux. Human blood is always slightly alkaline and has a tightly controlled pH of between 7.35 and 7.45. A blood pH that falls out of the normal range can be fatal if left untreated. Luckily a change in blood pH has nothing to do with the food you eat, but only occurs in certain disease states. It is critical for health that the blood pH remains constant. The body has a mechanism to regulate its blood pH balance, known as acid–base homeostasis.25 It is almost impossible for outside influences, like food, to change the pH value of blood.
What we eat and drink may only affect the pH of our urine. If we eat purely vegetables, we may have alkaline urine. But if we consume meat and eggs a couple of hours later, our urine may then be more acidic. The effect is thus somewhat unreliable.26 We can easily check if our urine is acid or alkaline by testing it with pH strips. However, urine pH is a poor indicator of overall health, as the alkalinity or acidity of urine has no relation to blood pH.
This is where the alkaline-diet theory starts to fall apart. Alkaline-diet enthusiasts believe that in order to maintain a constant blood pH, the body uses alkaline minerals, such as calcium from our bones, to buffer the acid-forming foods we eat. This results in a loss of bone mineral density and eventually leads to osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a progressive bone disease characterised by a decrease in bone mineral content. It can significantly increase the risk of fractures and is common in post-menopausal women.
The problem with this theory, however, is that bones are not involved in pH regulation at all. It is our kidneys that remove acid and help regulate our body’s pH. The kidneys produce bicarbonate ions that neutralise acids in the blood in a reaction that produces carbon dioxide, which is exhaled through the lungs, and salts, which are excreted by the kidneys. The kidneys produce new bicarbonate ions during the process of excretion, which return to the blood to replace the bicarbonate ions that were used to buffer the acid. We therefore have a sustainable built-in cycle with which the body is able to maintain the pH of the blood without the involvement of bones.
There are no studies that show a relationship between urine pH and bone health27 and, contrary to claims made by proponents of the alkaline diet, high-protein (acid) diets do not weaken bones – they are, in fact, linked with healthier bones.28 Furthermore, many clinical trials have concluded that ‘promotion of the alkaline diet to prevent calcium loss is not justified and that there is no evidence that an alkaline diet is protective of bone health’.29
Another popular claim is that an alkaline diet can cure cancer. Cancer, proponents claim, can only grow in an acidic environment. An alkaline diet can therefore both prevent cancer from metastasising and eliminate existing cancer cells.
But we have already shown that what we eat and drink cannot change the pH of our blood. Besides that, cancer is very capable of growing in alkaline environments. The pH of normal body tissue is 7.4, slightly alkaline. Interestingly, in most cancer experiments, cancer cells are grown in an alkaline pH.30 Cancer cells actually create their own acidic environment. It is not the acidic environment that causes the cancer; it is the cancer that causes the acidic environment.31
Finally, alkaline-diet proponents claim that our Palaeolithic ancestors consumed a primarily alkaline diet, but studies on traditional diets, particularly those done by Weston Price, have found that many early cultures indulged in acid-forming diets that were in no way detrimental to their health. The Swiss, the Masai and the Inuit, despite a high consumption of animal proteins and a low intake of fruits and vegetables, maintained excellent health.
The take-home message here is that eating fresh produce is seldom a bad idea, especially when it replaces nutrient-deficient junk food. A person switching from the standard Western diet of processed foods would most certainly benefit from eating fresh produce and reducing his or her consumption of grains. While the alkaline diet is quite healthy, the claims about the mechanism behind the diet are simply not supported by science or evolution.
We’ll start by saying right up front that there is NO reasonable scientific basis for the claims that diet should be based on blood type. The blood-type diet, created by naturopath James D’Adamo, became popular in 1996 with the release of his bestselling book Eat Right 4 Your Type. Unfortunately it is still popular today and we are regularly asked if Banting would suit a specific blood type.
The blood-type diet is based on the misguided belief that the optimal diet for any individual depends on that individual’s blood type. D’Adamo believes that each of the four blood groups – A, B, AB and O – thrives on certain foods and physical activities.
Dr Victor Herbert is an internationally recognised haematologist and nutrition scientist, and one of the world’s leading authorities on questionable medical practices. In 1984 he received the highest award for medical research given by the Veterans Administration, the FDA Commissioner’s Special Citation, for ‘outstanding and consistent contributions against the proliferation of nutrition quackery to the American consumer’.32 When asked in a CNN interview about diets to suit blood types, he said: ‘The idea is pure horse manure – no relation to reality. The genes for blood type have nothing to do with the genes dealing with the food we eat.’
Much of the theory behind the blood-type diet revolves around the action of lectin. Lectins are proteins found on the surface of certain foods that can bind sugar molecules. According to blood-type theory, there are many lectins in the diet that specifically target different blood types. D’Adamo claims that consumption of the wrong type of lectins could cause agglutination (clumping together) of red blood cells.
Given that most people are unaware of their blood type, we can assume that on most days we are eating inappropriate foods that, if D’Adamo’s assumptions are correct, would lead to agglutination. Now, agglutination is a very serious problem and not conducive to long-term survival. Imagine your blood clumping together and trying to deliver essential nutrients and oxygen to the organs and tissues. In no time at all, blood vessels would become clogged (quite possibly right after the first wrong meal) and you would experience massive organ failure due to the non-delivery of life-giving oxygen and essential nutrients. You’d think that a syndrome of organ failure due to lectin ingestion resulting in fatal outcomes would be well known to pathologists, scientists and doctors, yet there seems to be no mention of it in medical literature.
What about the science? There have been a few poorly designed studies looking at blood-type diets,33 and one that did find a relationship between blood type and food contradicted D’Adamo’s diet recommendations.34 In recent years there has been a lot of research on blood types and there is evidence that people with certain blood types may have a higher or lower risk for some diseases; however, this has nothing to do with diet.35 In 2013, researchers examined the data from over a thousand studies and yet did not find one well-designed study to support the blood-type theory. They concluded that ‘[no] evidence currently exists to validate the purported health benefits of blood type diets’.36
Among the diet’s blatantly false claims is that people of Asian descent with blood type B should incorporate dairy products into their diet. Yet we know that many non-Caucasians are intolerant of dairy due to the normal disappearance of lactase enzymes in their intestinal cells. The consequences for many of these lactase-deficient dieters who follow such advice will be severe bouts of abdominal cramps and diarrhoea.37
Yet another unreasonable claim is that people with blood type O develop hypothyroidism because they tend not to produce enough iodine. But the human body does not produce iodine, period. We get iodine by eating foods high in iodine, particularly iodised table salt, dairy products, seafood, meat, some breads and eggs.38
Any perceived benefits derived from the blood-type diet are most likely due to the removal of unhealthy processed foods. From a scientific standpoint, there is no evidence to support the blood-type diet.
Add sliced cucumber and lemon, grated ginger and mint leaves to a jug of water and you have ‘flat-belly water’. Drinking this will allegedly give you a flat stomach. While the individual ingredients certainly do have some nutritional value, you need to eat them in significant quantities to derive any benefit. Let’s take a look at each.
Cucumber: some claim that cucumber has a diuretic effect, but there is, in fact, nothing in it that will assist in the removal of excess fluid from the body. Cucumber is 95 per cent water. It also contains small amounts of vitamins K, B and C, copper, potassium, manganese and a few antioxidants. The skin is rich in insoluble fibre, but there is nothing in cucumber that will dissolve belly fat.
Ginger: ginger contains vitamin C, magnesium, potassium, copper and manganese. It has no weight-loss or fat-burning properties.
Lemon: drinking lemon water will help with weight loss only if you are using it to replace high-sugar beverages. Some claim that the pectin in lemon peel is high in insoluble fibre and this may aid digestion, but let’s be honest here, who wants to eat lemon peel? We can get adequate amounts of insoluble fibre from more palatable fruits and vegetables.
Mint: flat-belly-water advocates claim that mint suppresses appetite. While this claim has been repeated many times, we have found no scientific evidence to substantiate it. One study by Wheeling Jesuit University found that participants reported feeling less hungry when inhaling peppermint scent every two hours and that they therefore ate less than usual.39 But that’s about it.
The bottom line is that drinking water, whether hot or cold, whether infused with lemon or any other fruit, is a great way to stay hydrated. But no amount of water, infused or otherwise, is going to make your belly fat disappear, and certainly not without the correct diet.
We are told that water should be drunk warm or at room temperature, not cold. According to this claim, iced water will solidify the fat that you eat, which will slow down digestion, line the intestines and cause cancer.
This is simply untrue. Your body is an ace self-regulator, regulating its core temperature between 36.5 and 37 degrees. From the moment the water enters your mouth, heat transfer from your body begins to warm it up, and within a few minutes the temperature of the iced water equals that of your body. As an added bonus, if you drink half a litre of iced water, your body will use up about 17 calories heating it to core temperature!
Aside from the temperature issue, fat is emulsified in the small intestine into tiny droplets that are coated in bile secreted by the liver. Bile contains bile salts and phospholipids, which prevent these droplets from re-associating or sticking together and forming bigger globules. The smaller droplets are more easily broken down by the digestive enzyme lipase and absorbed into the bloodstream. The bile is either reabsorbed into the blood or bound by soluble fibres in the intestine and eliminated in the stool.
So, you can safely drink iced water and burn a few calories while you’re at it. No meal you eat will be affected by drinking iced water or piping hot coffee. It will still end up at the same temperature as your core, right to the point of exit.
Banting or LCHF is a LOW-carb, not NO-carb, way of eating. Detractors say that it is dangerous to cut out an entire food group, and we agree. While we know that carbohydrates perform no essential function in the body, we do not advocate the complete elimination of carbohydrates from the diet. The recommended level of carbohydrate consumption varies from person to person and depends on the individual’s metabolic condition, but at no time is this a no-carb diet.
This could not be further from the truth. Starchy vegetables high in carbs are not encouraged in large quantities, but if you look at low-carb food lists, you will see that vegetables actually fill the largest portion. Banters are encouraged to eat a good variety of healthy whole vegetables, primarily those that grow above the ground. Fruit is not encouraged in people who are metabolically ill, like diabetics, because it is high in natural sugars. But this does not exclude even these individuals from eating whole fruit from time to time.
Take a look at the low-carb food lists in Part Five of this book. The vegetables we eat on a low-carb diet are full of fibre, so essentially this should be seen as a high-fibre diet.
Study after study has shown that an LCHF diet is the most effective diet for lowering the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease. For more than 50 years we have been brainwashed into believing that saturated fat causes heart disease, but there is simply no evidence to support this. The dietary guidelines on which we have traditionally based our nutritional beliefs are themselves based on poorly designed and flawed studies. A review of data from 21 studies involving almost 350 000 people tracked for an average of 14 years concluded that there is no relationship between the intake of saturated fat and the incidence of heart disease or stroke. In other words, there is no link between eating saturated fats and heart disease. What does lead to an increased risk of heart disease, however, is a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar.
Some people assume that this is a high-protein diet. It’s not. It’s a moderate-protein diet. Furthermore, it has never been proven that high protein intake damages the kidneys in healthy individuals. Some studies have actually shown an improvement in diabetic nephropathy (damage to the kidneys caused by diabetes) through a ketogenic diet.40
Many followers of the low-carb diet consider it a lifestyle, not a temporary change. Medical experts in particular who promote LCHF have followed this way of eating for many years with no ill effects.
People following low-carb diets have actually been shown to lose more fat and less lean body mass compared to those following low-fat diets. There are studies to prove it.41
Banters follow a nutritionally dense diet comprising meat, fish, eggs, nuts, healthy fats and a variety of vegetables as well as fruit. Making smart food choices will help you to avoid nutritional deficiencies.
On the contrary, ketogenic diets have been used since the 1920s to treat illnesses like epilepsy, and no harmful effects have resulted from a long-term ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diets have been shown to be useful in the reversal of type 2 diabetes and are currently being studied for their neuro-protective effects in conditions such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
People love to spread this one, but it’s simply not true. Dr Robert Atkins, originator of the Atkins Diet, died as a result of injuries sustained from a fall on an icy Manhattan street. The official cause of death on his death certificate states ‘blunt impact injury of head with epidural hematoma’.
One of the biggest diet industry myths involves calories. A number of dieticians and nutritionists all over the world still repeat the tired mantra that if you shed a certain number of calories from your diet, you will lose weight. This is wrong, and if you are still basing your weight-loss programme on calories, the chances are good that you are going to be frustrated by a lack of results.
So what are calories? A calorie is a measure of the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Although used at first in engineering and physics, the calorie eventually found its niche in nutrition, where it is used to measure the amount of energy food contains.
In terms of nutrition, we talk about a kilocalorie (kcal), which is basically 1 000 calories. You may also have seen the word ‘kilojoule’ used to describe food energy. The kilojoule (kJ) is the unit of food energy recommended by the World Health Organization. The simplest definition is provided by Zoë Harcombe in her book The Obesity Epidemic: ‘A kilojoule is the amount of solar radiation received by one square metre of earth in one second.’42
How does this relate to food? Well, the human body requires energy in order to operate. Everything from brain activity to blood flow needs energy, and we measure this energy in calories. Now, we have been told that a pound (or 454 grams) of fat equals 3 500 calories.43
Where does this number come from?
It is widely accepted that human fat is made up of an estimated 87 per cent lipids (fat). Eighty-seven per cent of 454 is 395 – so that would be 395 grams of pure fat. Fat has 9 calories per gram. So multiply 395 grams by 9 and you have 3 555 calories per pound of fat. So if we reduce our calorie intake by 500 calories a day, it stands to reason we should lose 454 grams a week.44
It sounds simple, and as Fred Stare,45 founder and former chair of Harvard University’s Department of Nutrition, says: ‘Calories are all alike, whether they come from beef or bourbon, from sugar or starch, or from cheese and crackers. Too many calories are just too many calories.’46
Or are they?
A calorie is just a unit of energy until it enters the human body, but when you take a moment to contemplate that human beings are biologically complex and that different types of food influence different chemical reactions within the body, it becomes absurd to think that an energy unit like the calorie alone can determine the make-up of the body. Different calorie sources can have very different effects on hormones, energy expenditure and the regions of the brain that control hunger and food intake.
Let’s take a quick look at the macronutrients. Protein and carbohydrate each contain 4 calories per gram, while fat contains 9 calories per gram. Protein, carbohydrate and fat are converted to energy in the body in different ways. The conversion process itself uses up energy. Carbohydrates are easily converted by the body, using up only 6–8 per cent of their calories in the process. Fat uses 2–3 per cent, but protein uses 25–30 per cent of its calories to break down into amino acids. This means that depending on WHAT you eat, different amounts of energy are available to the body. You can see that there will be more calories available to a person who eats a high-carbohydrate diet than to someone who eats a high-protein diet. Simply put, 100 calories from protein ends up as 75 calories, whereas 100 calories from carbohydrate ends up as 94 calories.
A big problem with the calories-in, calories-out theory is that the two do not work independently of each other. When we decrease calories-in, the body decreases calories-out – we discuss this further in the ‘starvation-mode’ myth. Feed your body less and your body consumes less energy. If you keep cutting your calorie intake, your metabolic rate just keeps decreasing. In order to lose more weight, you then need to reduce your calorie intake further.
Research has failed to prove the calorie-balance hypothesis,47 and the theory has a number of major shortcomings, which Gary Taubes explores in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories.48
To further highlight the dangers of focusing too much on calories, we believe that calorie counting may lead to eating disorders. Of course, we are not saying that everybody who counts calories has an eating disorder, but calorie counting can become a fixation. Spending hours trying to calculate energy-in/energy-out, obsessing over portion sizes, and trying to calculate how much energy has been expended during exercise are habits that become hard to break. Dedicated calorie counters regularly deny themselves certain foods and often make less-healthy food choices or avoid social situations involving food in an attempt to eliminate calories from their diet. Calorie counting is stressful and not conducive to learning to eat to appetite. When you stop eating once you’ve reached an artificial, self-imposed calorie limit (rather than when you feel satisfied), you lose your sense of hunger and satiety, which can perpetuate a fear of food and trigger binge eating.
There is no way to accurately measure individual energy needs and expenditure. For years, advocates of calorie-counting diets have offered calculations based on age, height, weight and activity, ignoring the fact that we all have different metabolic requirements. How can all 40-year-old women, 160 centimetres tall and weighing 90 kilograms, be lumped into the same basket of calorie requirements?
Of course, just because calorie counting is not an accurate way to determine how much food we need does not give us an open invitation to eat through the contents of the fridge every day. We need to use a bit of common sense. Your body needs to use what you put in, or it will store the excess.
Our bodies are very efficient at doing these calculations for us; we need to start feeding them with the correct foods and learning to recognise the brain’s signals.