Nutrition
The Magic of Low-Carbohydrate Nutrition
Low-carb isn't just about eliminating carbohydrates—it's about glucose restriction as one of the most powerful tools to reprogram your metabolism for health and longevity.
Nutrition
Low-carb isn't just about eliminating carbohydrates—it's about glucose restriction as one of the most powerful tools to reprogram your metabolism for health and longevity.
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The headline certainly caught your attention, didn't it? In any case, we don't want to beat the same drum as so many who jumped on the low-carb train and keep missing their exit.
Fundamentally, we deliberately steer clear of the "low-carb" topic. Simply because we're against ideology and—in our view—some issues in these circles are fundamentally misunderstood.
A fun fact on the side: Every January, interest in "low-carb" peaks, only to drop significantly over the course of the year, until the cycle begins again in January. Quite amusing. (See Google Trends, search term: low-carb)
Generally speaking: Glucose restriction is certainly one of the strongest, best, and most powerful tools to fundamentally reprogram your energy metabolism and align it with health and longevity.
Thousands of studies show: When the body no longer swims in glucose, wonderful things happen:
So far, so good. What often gets overlooked, however, is the fact that it's frequently not so much about the absolute carbohydrate content in food, but about the way carbohydrates we consume are metabolized.
This bears repeating: Throughout at least 99.5% of our evolutionary history, species of the genus Homo, including Homo sapiens—that's us—hardly ate starchy plant parts. Large amounts of glucose from food—that is, starch consumption generally—were the exception, not the rule.
Here are some key points that illustrate why "low-carb" actually works by avoiding starchy plant parts—beans, potatoes, bread, rolls, grains in general, etc.—and why starchy plant parts cause problems:
✓ In ancestral eating patterns, carbohydrates and sugars are derived mainly from fruit and protein.
✓ The volume of fruit is a natural brake. Moreover, the fructose it contains either goes directly to the liver or—this is a new finding—is converted to glucose in intestinal cells and slowly enters the bloodstream. In both cases, blood sugar remains flat.
✓ The high protein content of the diet ensures that the body can produce its own glucose via gluconeogenesis as needed—blood sugar stays flat in this process too.
✓ Starchy plant parts almost always contain a significant amount of plant proteins. These proteins cannot be well digested due to their particular amino acid sequences and natural accompanying substances such as protease inhibitors.
✓ There is evidence suggesting that these large protein fragments can interact directly with receptors in the body, for example, manipulating satiety signals (leptin) or directly triggering insulin secretion.
✓ These plant proteins often contain natural opioids that are produced during digestion and create a "sense of well-being"—often we eat not because we're hungry, but because of this feeling.
✓ For this reason, many people find it very difficult to permanently avoid starchy and protein-rich plant parts, especially grains.
✓ First and foremost, eating should satisfy by providing satiety. After that, a natural aversion should kick in. No one has ever eaten kilograms of fruit and meat "just like that"—but sausage sandwiches, pizza, and cake continuously run in as so-called palatable foods in large quantities.
In a nutshell: The high proportion of glucose from starch in plants is often not the real problem—the real problem is circumventing natural satiation regulation and metabolic functions, which promotes insulin resistance and leads to massive overeating—without realizing it.
That in turn allows the body to bathe in glucose.
Behind "low-carb" there's actually much more than simply eliminating carbohydrates. Anyone who struggles to reach ketosis might have lost sight of the goal. It's not so much about glucose or carbohydrates themselves, but about everything you "drag along" when consuming starchy or protein-rich plant parts.
This also means: It's not correct to subordinate everything so much to the goal of "removing carbohydrates from your diet" that you end up avoiding bananas (= carbohydrates) but then eat kilograms of seed-and-nut bread. If you live this way, you haven't understood the Paleo template—and that's really what it's about.
Brings us to the final point: There's concern about the current "rethinking" of nutrition in some quarters: grains, beans, potatoes, and company are becoming cool again, and their consumption is being promoted as particularly healthy. The losers are animal products, especially animal protein. Yet our ancestors showed us over millions of years how to protect the body from the glucose bath and thus from premature death.
These three articles and studies we read this week:
Quote: A recent study suggests that "a strawberry a day" (or more precisely, 37 of them) might not just keep a doctor away, but an entire fleet of them, including the neurologist, endocrinologist, and possibly even the oncologist. The report explains that fisetin, a naturally occurring flavonoid most commonly found in strawberries and to a lesser extent in other fruits and vegetables, reduces the complications of diabetes.
Quote: Both withdrawal of the high-fat diet and two subcutaneous injections of a cholesterol-lowering agent (...) mitigated cholesterol enrichment in the muscle membrane (...) and glucose transporter dysregulation completely. This was associated with complete restoration of metabolic function. These results identify cholesterol enrichment in skeletal muscle membrane as an early, reversible feature of insulin resistance (...).
Quote: Our study showed that metabolic changes caused by green tea administration induce AMPK activation and modulate the expression of genes involved in metabolism, particularly in adipose tissue, thus offering a therapeutic strategy for combating insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, and obesity in rats.
