CHAPTER FOUR
Glucose the sugar that your body burns as fuel, is a carbohydrate and is essential for a few organs in the body; the rest can run on fat, or on an alternate fuel called ketones, produced when your body burns fat for fuel without any carbohydrate. This sounds as if you have to eat at least some carbohydrate, right? (And all of the programs I’ll outline for you do contain some carbohydrate, mostly in the form of vegetables. What we’re avoiding here is concentrated carbohydrate foods: starches and sugars.)
But no, even though some glucose is essential, carbohydrate foods are not, for a very simple reason: Your body can turn protein, and to a much lesser degree, fat, into carbohydrate as it is needed—a process with the tongue-twisting name of gluconeogenesis, which means “making new sugar.” And gluconeogenesis is, in many ways, a superior way to get glucose.
You’ve been told, no doubt, that you need carbs for energy. Yet after nearly twenty years of binging on pasta and bread and potatoes and fat-free cookies, fatigue is the single most common medical complaint in the country! Americans are just plain tired. The reason is simple, and lies in that old statement, that carbohydrates, and especially sugar, are “quick energy.” Quick energy sounds good. But is it?
Let me ask you this: Would you burn straw in your wood stove to heat your house? Of course not. But straw is quick energy! And that’s what’s wrong with it, right? It burns too fast. If you wanted to burn straw for heat, you’d have to sit next to that wood stove and throw in another handful every three or four minutes. If you tried to put in a whole bale of straw, for lasting energy, it wouldn’t work that way, would it? You’d burn the house down, because it still wouldn’t burn gradually; it would all burn at once. In the same way, your body doesn’t have any way to use carbohydrates gradually—except to store them as fat.
Or think of it this way: Gasoline is quick energy. Really quick energy! So quick that if you were to drop a lit match into your gas tank, it would burn so fast you’d be extremely fortunate to survive. The fact that gasoline is such quick energy is why cars have carburetors or fuel injectors—to make sure that only a tiny bit of gasoline gets lit at a time.
Your body doesn’t have a carburetor. Your body doesn’t have any way to feed the carbohydrate you eat into your bloodstream gradually. When you eat a breakfast of cereal, milk, juice, and sugar in your coffee, four sources of carbohydrate floods into your system fast. Very fast! Your body senses this as a threat, and takes action to fix it.
By the way, the only thing your body can use carbohydrates for is fuel. Protein can be used to make glucose for fuel, but it is also essential for body repair and maintenance, making enzymes, creation of antibodies to protect you from disease, all sorts of things. Fat can be used for fuel but is also used for making hormones, cell walls, nerve and brain tissue, useful things like that.
So here comes the million-dollar question: Why should a population that is sedentary and obese get most of their food as pure fuel? It makes no sense.
On a low-carb diet, your body rapidly remembers how to use fat—including your stored fat!—and protein for fuel. And it makes fuel out of fat and protein at the rate it needs it, not too slow, not too fast. The result? Energy that is stable and constant, instead of the roller-coaster ride from sugar break to sugar break.
“I believe in moderation in all things,” people frequently tell me, implying, of course, that my avoidance of carbohydrate is immoderate, their intake of carbohydrate, including highly processed sugar and white flour, is moderate. I agree that moderation is a cardinal rule of health and happiness. One question, however, remains to be answered: What is “moderate”? Suppose, for instance, an individual were to eat only half of the sugar that the average American does. Sounds pretty moderate, doesn’t it? Just think, only half!
Yet a person who ate only half the sugar of the average American would still be eating more than ten times the sugar that the average American ate in 1800, and more than four times the average American’s sugar intake in post–Civil War times. So what’s moderate?
If you were to drink one can of sugar-sweetened cola per day, and eat no other sugar at all, no cookies, no candy, no ice cream, no cold cereal, no prepared foods with added corn syrup, you would still be consuming well over twice the sugar that your Victorian era ancestors did. If you consumed a 1,500 calorie-per-day diet—a not-uncommon level among women—that one can of cola would represent fully 10 percent of your calories; one-tenth of your nutrients replaced with pure, valueless sugar. So what’s moderate?
The explosion of American sugar consumption, from about 7 pounds per person per year in 1800 to an incredible 152 pounds per person per year now (and somebody’s eating more, folks, because I’m eating less!), represents an increase of more than 2000 percent, the single most drastic dietary change in the history of humankind.
The second most drastic change was the Agricultural Revolution itself, when humankind went from eating very few grains and beans, to making them the staples of the diet. To simply cut back “a bit” on these substances, and then call one’s consumption “moderate,” makes a joke of the very concept of moderation. In short, I am moderate. It is the standard American diet that is desperately immoderate.