Low-Carb Isn’t Really Low-Carb
Throughout this book I have been emphasizing the need for a low-carb diet. I know this sounds pretty strange, but in this chapter I want to contradict myself. In truth, the low-carb diet I am advocating isn’t really low-carb at all. Let me explain.
The term low-carb makes it sound like you are on some type of bizarre diet far removed from normal eating. You feel like you are being forced by your blood-sugar problems to eat like an alien from another planet. It seems that what you are doing is not natural, not normal, and runs counter to humanity’s eating habits from the dawn of civilization.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! The truth is that the way most Americans eat today is what is strange and bizarre. It is they that are out of step, not you. Consider the common soda (take your pick: Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up, you name it). Until recently you drank sodas all throughout your life. Your momma drank sodas. Your momma’s momma drank sodas. What could be more natural and more American than “the pause that refreshes,” slurping down a good old 16-ounce Coca-Cola (with its 54 grams of high-fructose corn syrup)?
However, your short lifetime and the life of your parents and grandparents represent a tiny drop of the history of men and women on this planet. The colas were first created in the 1880s and didn’t become commonplace until the twentieth century. This means that for thousands of years of man’s recorded history, there were no sodas. The surpassing drink of choice (and necessity) was, you guessed it, water. This same idea holds true for Twinkies, Trix cereal, candy bars, rocky road ice cream, cinnamon rolls, white bread, white rice, and scores of other nasty, colon-clogging, blood-sugar-raising, insulin-demanding foods that we often consider perfectly normal and natural. Although most of you cannot remember a time when these things didn’t beckon to you from the grocery-store shelves, they are absolute newcomers to the scene of human existence.
Of course various sweet confections have been baked for many centuries, but these were primarily the food of the royalty and the rich (who suffered for their indulgence more than the poor folks who envied them). Poor to middle-class people ate rough whole-grain bread, meat (when they could get it), vegetables, and fruits when they were in season. Not only that, but if you had to eat the portion size they lived on from day to day, you would think yourself starving. They never sat down at an IHOP restaurant and ate a huge stack of white-flour pancakes smothered with sugary syrup. Had they tasted a cola they would probably have spit it out; it would have tasted sickeningly sweet to them, at least at first.
They had their health issues of course. Without antibiotics, modern medicine, and skilled surgeons many of them died prematurely. But if they did manage to live to old age they rarely suffered from heart disease or diabetes. They might be killed by a plague or an infection, but few died from skyrocketing blood sugar. In essence most of these folks were on a “low-carb” diet. They ingested far fewer carbs and sugar than the average American today, got far more exercise (mainly through work), and were generally considerably slimmer. The diet you call “low-carb” was normal for them. The lifestyle you might consider a burden was for them regular living.
It’s not really the case that you are on a low-carb diet. It is that most Americans are on a high-carb diet. No, let me take that back—most Americans are on a soaring, towering, health-destroying, pancreas-killing, life-shortening, sugar-gorging, stratospheric-carb diet.
At this point you may be asking, “What’s the point? You are just talking semantics here. I still have to cut out sweets, exercise regularly, and watch my weight.” Yes, you do, but the point is an important one. As long as you consider your diet and lifestyle some kind of abnormal one—some sort of cosmic punishment you don’t deserve—you will have a hard time embracing these changes for the rest of your days. You will look enviously at your friend who eats everything they want and never worries about it, and wonder, Why me? The reality is that they are the odd one, not you. So the next time you pass on the dessert and drink water rather than soda, and are tempted to feel sorry for yourself—don’t. You are not some miserable, unlucky person being forced to make terrible sacrifices and live abnormally just to survive. You’re just doing the reasonable thing. You are living as you should have lived all along. It just took you a while to wise up, right?