Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets - No 1 introarbohydrate Deficiency? | Perfect Health Diet

Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, I: Can There Be a Carbohydrate Deficiency? | Perfect Health Diet

Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, I: Can There Be a Carbohydrate Deficiency?

Filed under: Carbohydrate Deficiency, Low-Carb Diets, Zero-Carb Dangers

It’s frequently said in the Paleo blogosphere that carbs are unnecessary. Here’s an example from Don Matesz, an outstanding blogger who eats a diet extremely close to ours:

Protein is essential, carbs are not…. You can only cut protein so much, but you can cut carbs dramatically.

Dr. Michael Eades has mocked the idea of a carbohydrate deficiency disease:

Are there carbohydrate deficiency diseases, Mr. Harper, that you know about that the rest of the nutritional world doesn’t?  I’ll clue you in: there aren’t.  But there are both fat and protein deficiency diseases written about in every internal medicine textbook.

Such statements made an impression on me when I first started eating Paleo five years ago. But several years and health problems later, I realized that this view was mistaken.

How Should We Look for a Carbohydrate Deficiency Disease?

To find a carbohydrate deficiency syndrome in humans, we should look at populations that eat very low-carb diets, such as:

• The Inuit on their traditional hunting diet.
• Epilepsy patients being treated with a ketogenic diet.
• Optimal Dieters in Poland, who have been following a very low-carb diet for more than 20 years.
• Very low-carb dieters in other countries, who took up low-carb dieting in the last 10 years as the Paleo movement gathered steam.

We should also have an idea what kind of symptoms we should be looking for. Major glucose-consuming parts of the body are:

• Brain and nerves.
• Immune system.
• Gut.

The body goes to great lengths to assure that the brain and nerves receive sufficient energy, so shortfalls in glucose are most likely to show up in immune and gut function.
So, we’ve mapped our project. Over the coming week, or however long it takes before we get tired, we’ll investigate the evidence for carbohydrate deficiency conditions in humans.

Related Posts

Other posts in this series:

1. Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, II: Mucus Deficiency and Gastrointestinal Cancers A Nov 15, 2010.
2. Danger of Zero-Carb Diets III: Scurvy Nov 20, 2010.
3. Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, IV: Kidney Stones Nov 23, 2010.

References

[1] Holman RT. The slow discovery of the importance of omega 3 essential fatty acids in human health. J Nutr. 1998 Feb;128(2 Suppl):427S-433S. http://pmid.us/9478042
[2] Aiello LC, Wheeler P. The expensive tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Current Anthropology 1995(Apr); 36(2):199-211.