Hey- will we low carbers have anyone useful to talk to in our nursing homes?
We'd better come up with a plan so we can play scrabble with some similar opponents.

"Lifetime low carbers who haven't lost their marbles retirement estate"

lol- oh dear....better prep your kids NOW!
I'll be like Sylvester Stalone's mum- Never give up, age disgracefully!

"But hey, "I can eat Pop Tarts and lose weight" Yeh, bully for you."

Agreed. I think too many people are focused on just their weight, or body composition. Although we know it is more than calories in/calories out of course you'll still lose weight eating carbs if you restrict calories enough. I'd probably lose weight off a diet of paper and sawdust too, doesn't make it healthy though!

Absolutely, it can't be a bad strategy to try to avoid potential toxins and focus on natural, nutrient-dense food first and let everything follow from there, including a relatively lean body.

There is no magjc to low carb from a fat loss perspective, we still have to make day to day decisions to limit our intake or maximise our fat-burning BUT we can do this without being on a blood-sugar rollercoaster AND minimise the health impacts of high blood sugar/insulin to boot.

We did not, collectively, get into this obesity/diabetes mess eating too much fat, this is abundantly clear ...

Hey- will we low carbers have anyone useful to talk to in our nursing homes?
We'd better come up with a plan so we can play scrabble with some similar opponents.

"Lifetime low carbers who haven't lost their marbles retirement estate"

Unfortunately I'm afraid of what they will feed us in the nursing home!! :noway: We better start stockpiling hoards of bacon now!

An interesting sidelight to this and another item in the news ...Senator George McGovern, who died a few days ago. He was a classic big-government liberal, recognized almost universally as a politician who sincerely and deeply cared about what he saw as the poor quality of the American diet circa 1977.

As detailed in Gary Taubes' "Why We Get Fat," Sen. McGovern convened a Senate panel that year to examine and try to fix the poor diet of the time. That's the kind of thing a good government can do -- fix things (like personal tastes, habits, incorrect "common sense" etc. Like outlawing Big Gulps in NYC -- but that's another story.)

As Taubes points out, at the time common sense said that carbs -- especially bread, pasta and potatoes -- make you fat. I remember my aunt in 1962 losing five pounds... how? By taking the bread basket off the dinner table for a couple months. But boy was she ever wrong! It was obvious to Sen. McGovern (despite contrary testimony) that it wasn't carbs that were the problem -- it was fat! What could be clearer? Fat make you fat. This was the weighty conclusion of the McGovern panel.

So government money funded academics who were tasked with fleshing out the Senate findings, and soon after, the first Food Pyramid was printed. School lunch menus were altered, farm bills written to support grain producers, pamphlets designed, articles planted in print media to support the new correct thinking. It was largely successful. The American diet improved over time, gradually reducing saturated fat and increasing carbohydrate consumption --you can see it in graphs.

Funny thing, though, after about a ten-year lag time, graphs show obesity and diabetes 2 beginning parallel rises, too. (Same thing in a few other countries that eventually adopted a similar viewpoint, like Canada & Australia -- but not in countries that kept to their old ways, like Japan and France.)

This is only to say that while I admire McGovern for his devotion to public service, (he was an amazingly brave bomber pilot in WWII too-- I read his biography), it is obvious that even the most well-intentioned Senate panel is capable of causing vast unintended harmful consequences -- in a word, havoc. Ultimately we have to be responsible for our own decisions and not hand our judgment off to some kindly agency out there...

All one has to do is visit the local mall and mingle among shoppers to see the consequences in action -- a sight Sen. McGovern and his fellow senators could not have imagined in 1977.

Thanks DeadVim

"Yes, some of it is personal responsibility but trying to just maintain a decent weight on a grain-based diet is torture for a lot of people."

You are right-- because the advancing nutritional information is suppressed. Not by a censor per say, but by the difficulty of getting government grants to fund contrary studies. But perhaps more importantly:

I don't remember which book it was but the author observed that even if the doctor personally follows low-carb and believes in it completely, he or she is much safer in advising patients to follow the official high-carb Food Pyramid because if a heart attack (or meteor strike!) occurs he or she will not be sued having advised the conventional approach.