We distort knowledge faster than things. Some things are so easy to assemble that "even a child can do it" in outer space. But even children know that information disassembles all too readily.
Children
learn by playing the game of telephone that information gets garbled as
it gets passed along. Too bad that medical writers don't know that
basic lesson.
That's why that although I
am also a medical writer about diabetes, I don't ask you to trust me.
Unlike almost everyone who prepares medical articles for the Internet,
I link the primary sources so you can see that it's not just my opinion or a secondary source that
other medical writers at secondary sources like Reuters Health write.
In the children's game of telephone cumulative errors from mishearing often result in what the last player
hears isn't anything like the way it started. This can amuse children.
But it can lead us seriously astray. The brain fuel myth can lead those
of us who have diabetes to a diet far too high in carbohydrates.
If
the people who say that our brains need at least 130 grams of available
carbohydrate per day to work properly were correct, then nothing you
read here can make any sense. For about half a year I have been getting only about a third of that amount.
You can read -- but don't swallow -- what Edutopia Magazine writes about our carbohydrate requirements. "To achieve and maintain normal brain function,
adults and children need 130 grams of carbohydrates a day," some freelance medical writer named Abby Christopher writes there.
She even quotes Diane Stadler, research assistant professor in the Oregon Health and
Science University's health promotion and sports medicine division to that effect. "Restricting carbs like [the Atkins Diet ] is going to have an effect on the brain," Ms. Stadler told her.
Closer
to home is a comment by a Certified Diabetes Educator to one of my
articles here. "Remember that the brain does need 130 grams of carbs
per day for healthy function," she writes.
Even
more grievous is the American Diabetes Association's intermediate
oversimplification. While the ADA isn't as ridiculously wrong as the Edutopia Magazine article and that CDE, some people still believe what the largest diabetes charity organization tells us.
"The
recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for digestible carbohydrate is 130
grams per day," says the ADA's latest position statement on its "Nutrition Recommendations. Why do we need so much carbohydrate?
The RDA is based, the ADA says, "on providing adequate glucose as the required fuel for the
central nervous system without reliance on glucose production from
ingested protein or fat."
Ah! So it's at least 130 grams of glucose per day that our brain needs! And glucose just ain't the same thing as carbohydrate.
I really don't know about fat. But we have known for years that our bodies are very efficient at turning protein into glucose.
In
fact, I give the ADA credit for citing the primary source in its
"Nutrition Recommendations." That source is a report by the Institute
of Medicine's food and nutrition board titled Dietary Reference Intakes: Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids.
The National Academies Press in 2002 published this book. While the ADA
fails to provide a link, fortunately for those of us who like to go to
primary sources you can find it online.
What
is this Institute of Medicine and why should we trust it? The Institute
of Medicine and its parent organization, the National Academy of
Sciences, are hybrid governmental-private organizations. The U.S.
government created these private organizations to advise it on
scientific and
technological matters. Among their functions they set the official
recommended dietary allowances for the macronutrients and
micronutrients in our diet.
The Institute of Medicine takes 17 dense pages -- from page 277 to 293 -- to consider the evidence for
estimating the average requirement for carbohydrate. I've studied them
and encourage you to study the source for yourself. I don't need to
copy or summarize its recommendations because Gary Taubes did it so
well in his ground-breaking new book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, which I have written about here and in several other articles.
The IOM sets an
"estimated average requirement" of 100 grams of carbohydrates a
day for adults, Taubes writes, so that the brain can run exclusively on glucose,
"without having to rely on a partial replacement of glucose by [ketone
bodies]." It then sets the "recommended dietary allowance" at 130 grams
to allow a margin for error. But the IOM report also acknowledges that
the brain will be fine without these carbohydrates, because it runs
perfectly well on ketone bodies, glycerol, and protein-derived
glucose.
No
one should be surprised that it's glucose rather than carbohydrates
that our brains run on. For a century we have had evidence that our
brains don't need any carbohydrates. The arctic explorer, Dr.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson in 1935 wrote three articles about how "Eskimos
Prove an All Meat Diet Provides Excellent Health" that you can read on
my website starting with this article. Dr. Stefansson himself lived on an all-meat diet when he went to the arctic in 1906.
Even before he wrote those articles, the Journal of Biological Chemistry reported on the experiments performed on him and a colleague at New York's
Bellevue Hospital in the article, "Prolonged Meat Diets with a Study
of Kidney Function and Ketosis" by Walter S. McClellan and Eugene F. Du
Bois (J. Biol. Chem. 87: 651-668, July 1930).
Just now we even have evidence that some of our brains work much better on a very low carbohydrate diet. British researchers reported on May 2 in The Lancet Neurology that a very low carb diet has proved highly effective in reducing
seizures in children whose epilepsy didn't respond to medication.
Does this make sense to you? Since I follow a very low-carb diet, I may be courting a nasty case of what Edutopia Magazine calls "Um...er...can't remember...what was I going to say?"
But I go to the primary sources, and my brain seems to be working as well as ever, thank you. Hello? Can you hear me now?
