Free Living Low Carb by Jonny Bowden Page A

Times Magazine section from last Sunday, July 7, the article ‘What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?’ by Gary Taubes. It is full of information that could rock our world . As dietitians, we need to be prepared and informed re: changes that may be completely different from what we have learned and have been educating people about.” (Taubes has since published a superb full-length book based on that article called Good Calories, Bad Calories —highly recommended.)
    Low-carbing had come back, but this time with a clarity and a scientific validation that had simply not been present in previous decades. It’s time now for a reassessment of the twin sacred cows of dietary commandments— high carbohydrates and low fat —and for a clearer look at just what could be gained in terms of health and weight loss by following a diet more like the one that sustained the human genus for 2.4 million years and sustained modern man for at least 50,000 years.
    It’s time to revisit the low-carb wisdom of the past, evaluate the wisdom of the present, and see what they have to teach us about living healthy in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER 2
    Why Low-Carb
Diets Work
In other fields, when bridges do not stand, when aircraft do not fly, when machines do not work, when treatments do not cure, despite all the conscientious efforts on the part of many persons to make them do so, one begins to question the basic assumptions, principles, theories, and hypotheses that guide one’s efforts.
—Arthur R. Jensen, PhD
Professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, in Harvard Educational Review , winter 1969
    O n November 1, 1999, Woody Merrell—the Muhammad Ali of doctors, loved, respected, and admired across the entire political spectrum of medicine and nutrition—wrote an article in Time magazine about weight loss. This is how it started:
    “In my 25 years of medical training and practice in Manhattan, I’ve seen a wide range of diets come and go. Virtually none of them work .”
    A few paragraphs later, Merrell wrote: “For most of my professional career, I adhered to the generally recognized dictum of weight management. I advised my patients to count their calories and follow a low-fat diet .”
    He then talks about his experience with a few patients who weren’t getting anywhere, no matter what they tried. Skeptically, he put them on a low-carb diet.
    Finally he wrote: “I have become a convert. Carbohydrates… are often prime saboteurs of our weight. [O]f all the diets I’ve seen over the past few decades, the moderate-fat, lower-carbohydrate ones are the most successful. They stress not how much food you eat but what kinds. Calorie counting is not as important as carbo counting .” (All emphases mine.)
    The article is titled “How I Became a Low-Carb Believer.” 1
    What convinced Merrell—and what is convincing more and more of his colleagues—is the fact that lower-carbohydrate diets really work for many, many people. The evidence of the senses is hard to argue with. People lose weight, feel better, and, equally important, have major improvements in their health. Chronic complaints and ailments have been known to disappear. Some of these people had tried every possible diet, had adhered to every conventional cholesterol-lowering, fat-reducing program, and wound up in exactly the same place as when they started—and sometimes were even worse. Yet on lower-carb diets, they do great.
G ENIUS AND ANTI -A GING G URU
C HOOSES L OW -C ARB D IET !
Ray Kurzweil is a scientist, inventor, and recipient of the National Medal of Technology. Largely considered a genius ( The Wall Street Journal called him “the restless genius,” and Forbes called him “the ultimate thinking machine”), his fans range from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton.
Recently Kurzweil teamed up with Terry Grossman, MD, the founder and medical director of the Frontier Medical Institute in Denver and the author of The Baby Boomers’ Guide to