The Carb Conspiracy

Hopefully, I think we are about at the end of the ‘No Carb’ diet fad. It first appeared decades ago and then returned to knock us off our feet in more recent years. The steakhouses loved it ! The pizza parlors were not so impressed.

It was quite a craze and it managed to change the face of the food industry. For a while there, everything was ‘low carb’ or ‘carb free’. The double whammy came with the dramatic increase in the use of artificial sweeteners which allowed us to fool ourselves into thinking we were living the ‘Low Carb Life’ when in fact we were living in the “Age of the Artificial Sweetener”

We became focused on only one number, we made our purchase decision based on the ‘grms of carbs’ on the label of a product. But to say a ‘carb is a carb’ is like saying ‘A dog is a dog’ or ‘flower is a flower’ and to treat all carbohydrates as equals was probably the biggest mistake made by most of the people trying to lose weight the low carb way.

It didn’t exactly come to a grinding halt, as with anything of great size - once it got rolling is gathered speed and once in motion the brakes took a while to take hold. Like a speeding train on the tracks we can still hear the screech of the brakes being slammed on as the ‘gung-ho’ dieters of the day fell into the abyss of impossible temptation and cravings and the weight they had lost just piled back on. As with most diets that restrict us to the extreme in someway, the results vanish leaving us frustrated and back at square one.

The upside of the mighty crash is that there are a few grains of truth in the whole mess. The effects of low carb versus conventional weight loss diets was published in 2004 (Annals of Internal Medicine Vol 140 issue 10) which concluded that indeed those on a low carbohydrate diet did have a more favorable overall outcome after one year than did those on a conventional diet.