Low-Carb Meat Diets Vs. Vegetarianism. And…. Fight!

I’ve tried low carb; everything from South Beach to hard core Atkins. For me it worked out pretty well, but it wasn’t a sustainable diet. I don’t mean ‘sustainable’ in the tree-hugger sense, I mean it wasn’t a diet I could sustain. No fruits or breads whatsoever? Yeah… I don’t think so.

Low carb diets rely on depriving your body of sugars – all sugars, and even the stuff your body turns into sugars. This puts your body into ketosis, where it burns your stored fat more rapidly than normal to provide energy. fat is water soluble, so low-carb dieters should drink plenty of water (not diet pop, or coffee, but actual water) daily.

This is meant to make me lose my appetite?

My biggest complaint other than food boredom while on low carb was that it was expensive. Constantly eating large volumes of meat is pricey compared to the cost of fresh fruits and veggies. While apples and broccoli seem expensive compared to, say, boxed macaroni and cheese, it’s a pittance compared to eating steak or whole roasted chicken every night.

Nothing could be more opposite to a low carb, meat intensive diet than vegetarianism. At its heart vegetarianism comes from noble motives; some are motivated by the belief that eating animals lacks the compassion we should have for others (yet plants are some lesser species undeserving of this compassion because they lack recognizable faces). Others from the belief that meat is bad for your system.

Certainly PETA has spent a fortune trying to convince us that meat putrefies in the gut because, according to them, humans can’t digest meat. Lierre Keith kicked holes in that argument by pointing out “Carnivores cannot survive on cellulose. They may on occasion eat grass, but they use it medicinally, usually as a purgative to clear their digestive tracts of parasites. Ruminants, on the other hand, have evolved to eat grass. They have a rumen (hence, ruminant), the first in a series of multiple stomachs that acts as a fermentative vat. What’s actually happening inside a cow or a zebra is that bacteria eat the grass, and the animals eat the bacteria.

“Lions and hyenas and humans don’t have a ruminant’s digestive system. Literally from our teeth to our rectums we are designed for meat. We have no mechanism to digest cellulose.”

And Lierre is a former Vegan. Ouch. You okay, PETA?

A diet high in vegetables is good for you. No dispute there. Both camps agree on that. Fruit? Here’s where the parting of the ways begins.

Me, I like fruit. It’s a great way to have something sweet as a snack, it’s usually very portable so its handy for lunches, and it’s packed with vitamins and other nutrients. The low carb diehards will (correctly) point out that eating fruit, which contains natural sugars, will kick your body out of the state of ketosis and you’ll stop losing weight.

What’s worse, because you were going through so much water (because fat is water soluble, and you needed the H2O to burn the FaT) your body suddenly starts storing liquids you drink, worried it’ll need those water reserves in the near future.

Long story short, people who go off a low carb diet like Atkins often see themselves “gaining back” 10-15 lbs within a few days! This sometimes results in a “what the hell is the point?” attitude followed by a weeklong binge on ice cream, chocolate, and pizza such that just as the water retention subsides, you’ve actually gained that 10 lbs in actual fat replaced. Lovely, eh?

PETA and other vegetarian organizations tout studies that claim, they say, that vegetarians live longer. Dr. Russell Smith decided to look at these studies. In a review of about 3,000 articles in the scientific literature, he found only 2 that compared mortality data for vegetarians and nonvegetarians.

One was a 1978 study of Seventh Day Adventists (SDA’s). Although published analyses of this study claim that it showed that the vegetarians lived longer, Smith’s analysis of total mortality rates as a function of the frequencies of consuming cheese, meat, milk, eggs and fat attached to meat found that the total death rate decreased as the frequencies of consuming cheese, eggs, meat and milk increased.

The second study was published by Burr and Sweetnam in 1982. Again, while some people claimed the study showed that vegetarians lived longer, when Russell looked at the data he concluded the opposite. He found that the all-cause death rates were slightly greater for vegetarian men compared to nonvegetarian men; and significantly greater for vegetarian women compared to nonvegetarian women.

Countering those 2-out-of-3000-and-results-misrepresented-by-PETA studies, Emmanuel Cheraskin surveyed 1040 dentists and their wives. Those who had the fewest problems and diseases (as measured by the Cornell Medical Index, just to keep everything on the up-and-up) had the most protein in their diets; yet almost all the treatments for chronic disease found in alternative publications these days begin with the recommendation of a vegetarian diet.

A vegetarian diet without careful planning (and even some with) can lead to deficiencies in vitamin A, vitamin B6, thymus extracts, zinc, and cysteine. In other words, stuff you get from meat. Stuff your body needs.

So what about Atkins, et al? As I said above, it’s a touch diet to maintain. There are plenty of cook books and so on, and I’ve tried many of the low-carb recipes out there. many are delicious! But they do take a while to make. Sometimes a dude just wants to whip up a quick lettuce and tomato sandwich. Absolutely verboten on Atkins’ diet!

The detractors of the low-carb diets bitch that “how could a diet with fat in it make you lose weight?” Because fat doesn’t make you fat. Eating too much makes you fat – even too many baked potatoes. But one chief complaints is “There has never been a long-term study to see whether Atkins’ works or not!”

Here to tell us about his long-term study to see whether the Atkins diet works or not is Gary D. Foster, PhD, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education and professor of Medicine and Public Health at Temple University. Gary split people up into groups, with 153 participants in the low-carb group. For two years the participants ate a low carb, Atkins style diet.

They were allowed 20 grams daily with unrestricted consumption of fat and protein during the first 12 weeks of the study. Any carbs they ate had to come from mainly low-glycemic index vegetables. They were encouraged to eat 4-5 small meals every few hours and to use butter, mayonnaise and vegetable oils instead of margarine and they were discouraged from trying to ‘do a low-fat version of the program as it will disrupt weight loss.’

At the end of the first 12 weeks (called the induction phase by the late Dr. Atkins), study participants were allowed to increase their carbohydrate consumption by 5 grams daily each week in the form of more vegetables, some fruit, and even whole grains and dairy products until their weight became stabilized.

They were told to watch their carbohydrate intake primarily while urged to consume foods that are “rich in fat and protein” to satiety. The behavioral modification implemented with this group was to “limit carbohydrate intake.”

Although the Chicken Littles in the press have relished in scare stories about how high-fat, low-carb diet cause heart disease, there were “no serious cardiovascular events” that happened during this study. Dr. Foster noted that consuming a low-carb diet is not the heart health risk most medical professionals once feared, writing “A low carbohydrate diet is associated with favorable changes in cardiovascular disease risk factors at two years.”

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses. For the first 6 months people in the low carb group reported bad breath, constipation, and dry mouth. This is mainly because while they were otld what to eat, no one was actually given a copy of an Atkins or South Beach book and they didn’t know to drink lots of water.

Also, just as vegetarians have to watch they don’t go low on B6 and other vitamins, low-carb eaters would do well to take potassium for the first few weeks to prevent the constipation.

At the end of the day, a vegetarian diet isn’t as healthy as its proponents claim, and a low carb diet isn’t as bad as its detractors say. But both kinda suck for long term health. I think Graham Hill’s Weekend Vegetarian concept is a nice compromise.

The best diet? one that doesn’t make you feel deprived, one you can stick with, and one that won’t make you too fat or too thin at your level of activity.