The Carbohydrate Brain Fuel Myth

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?