Well put

Debbie: here it is:

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/01/how-farming-reshaped-our-genomes

‘Before farming began to spread across Europe some 8500 years ago, the continent’s occupants were hunter-gatherers. They were unable to digest starch and milk, according to a new ancient DNA study of a nearly 8000-year-old human skeleton from Spain. ‘

Nm don’t suppose u hav a link for that 8000 yr old European info do you? Fascinating.
d

Jaminet has no evidence. He has anecdotes and suppositions. He ignores our millions of years of history as a species that had access to very little accessible carbohydrate for much of its evolution. Indeed, the recently-discovered preserved European from just 8000 years ago could not digest any starch AT ALL. Poor chap must have had terrible thyroid problems and no mucous to speak of!

But isn’t Jaminet’s evidence mostly anecdotal and based on correlation studies, or have I heard wrong? If food reporting is inaccurate in studies, it’s almost non-existent if you’re using anecdotes. Jaminet recommends 20% to 30% carb even for diabetics (that’s 100 to 150g on 2000 calories a day), and made up a high-carb, high-fat diet that’s been shown in intervention studies to lead to increasing small LDL. In a population where heart disease and diabetes are major problems, it’s unclear why most people would benefit from such a diet.

Just to clarify. All of the section from ‘Some highlights’ to ‘PROTEIN HAD NO EFFECT’ is quoted material, but my quotation text didn’t come out in the above.

Thank you for all you do to get some clarity and discussion about this into the open.

‘A 2013 report [4] on the safety of low-carb diets reviewed 17 studies involving more than 272,000 people and found low-carb diets were “associated with a significantly higher risk” of death and no reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease.’

I looked on the website for this report and found the following comment with a link to Denise Minger’s critique of the study:

Some highlights:
The meat eaters group daily carb diet ranged between 37-65% of their calories. Any Paleo or Keto person would tell you that you are doing it wrong. THAT IS NOT A LOW CARB DIET! A low carb diet is less than 7-10% of your daily caloric intact. If I were to eat 65%, it would be about 150-200 carbs a day.

Also people who smoked and had higher BMIs were in the meat eaters group, you think that had ANYTHING to do with the outcome more than a diet?

And finally The veggie group and the meat group had almost equal amount of protein from animal products (eggs, cheese for example), so PROTEIN HAD NO EFFECT.

Here’s the link:

http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=61529

And here for Denise Minger:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/09/08/brand-spankin-new-study-are-low-carb-meat-eaters-in-trouble/#more-580

Best wishes,

Jan

The article still contains rubbish like :-

“Can we survive without carbs?

While we can most certainly survive without sugar, it would be quite difficult to eliminate carbs entirely from your diet. Carbs are the body’s main source of energy. In the absence of carbs, your body will use protein and fat for energy.”

An unbiased article would point out that calories can be obtained from any of the three macronutrients and that your body has the largest energy store in the form of fats, not carbs.

Seems it’s you that’s grumpy and irritable gez – a symptom common in carb eaters when they haven’t eaten for an hour or two and their blood sugar has crashed (again).

Find us five quality studies showing better health outcomes or markers and weight loss with a low fat high carb diet and we can have a conversation.

Thank you for fighting the good fight. Since we come from the minority viewpoint, however, it behooves us to hew to the facts in support of our position even more strictly than our opposition. It is in that spirit that I raise a few objections to your critique.

“But, as I pointed out in my original complaint, the dietary requirement for carbohydrate is zero…it is not factually correct to assert that carbohydrate is needed by the body.”

I’d be extremely cautious with sweeping generalizations like this. Paul Jaminet, author of The Perfect Health data, can point to a mountain of evidence that the majority of the population needs to have 20% of their calories from starches for structural elements (glycoproteins), proper thyroid function, just to name two aspects of health. I won’t summarize his arguments, because he does so eloquently on his site, perfecthealthdiet.com.

“Another major issue with these sorts of studies is that they are usually based on self-reporting of the diet which is notoriously prone to error. While intervention studies may have issues too, it is generally accepted in scientific circles that they are superior to epidemiological studies.”

The vast majority of clinical low-carb trials have this *exact same* problem: self-reporting of food intake. Even the ABC study, conducted by Chris Gardner, which is widely cited by low-carb advocates, suffers from this limitation. Frankly, until there’s a body of studies, all necessarily short-term, conducted in locked metabolic wards, there will be no credible scientific data for the superiority of either low-fat or low-carb diets.

“As regards the piece that I linked to at Authority Nutrition, I accept this was not a systematic review in the conventional sense. I also accept some of the shortcomings of the research. However, all of the studies cited provide evidence that, overall, lower-carb diets are superior to low-fat ones.”

If you accept the inherent shortcomings of short-term research and that the body of clinically-based literature supporting low-carb is quite small, you have no basis for your conclusion. Neither does NHS Choices, but that’s their problem. At best, all you can say is that there’s limited evidence that a low-carb food plan produces better health markers than a low-fat food plan.

+1, sir/madam!

Maybe you should just rewrite it, offer it to him together with the citations and links to your source research, then perhaps it would be easier for him to just run it by a few people and just replace the wrong one with your one!

It may save your time in the long run too! 🙂

Ps keep up the great work.
Debbie flint-carter