In article ,
"FOB" wrote:

You don't NEED any carbs.

Technically, this is true, but since I don't no carb, I would like
somebody like Doug to sign off on this first. IIRC there is a proviso.

In the meantime, here's something to chew on.


"Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science
of Diet and Health"
by Gary Taubes
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-...nce/dp/1400033
462/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271102831&sr=1-1
(Available at better libraries near you.)

REDUCING DIETS 319

Though glucose is a primary fuel for the brain, it is not, however the
only fuel, and dietary carbohydrates are not the only source of that
glucose. If the diet includes less than 130 grams of carbohydrates, the
liver increases its synthesis of molecules called ketone bodies, and
these supply the necessary fuel for the brain and central nervous
system. If the diet includes no carbohydrates at all, ketone bodies
supply three-quarters of the energy to the brain. The rest comes from
glucose synthesized from the amino acids in protein, either from the
diet or from the breakdown of muscle, and from a compound called
glycerol that is released when glycerides in the fat tissue are broken
down into their component fatty acids. In these cases, the body is
technically in a state called ketosis, and the diet is often referred to
as a ketogenic diet. Whether the diet is ketogenic or
anti-ketogenic‹representing a difference of a few tens of grams of
carbohydrates each day‹might influence the response to the diet,
complicating the question of whether carbohydrates are responsible for
some effect or whether there is another explanation. (Ketosis is often
incorrectly described by nutritionists as "pathological." This confuses
ketosis with the ketoacidosis of uncontrolled diabetes. The former is a
normal condition;
the latter is not. The ketone-body level in diabetic ketoacidosis
typically
exceeds 200 mg/dl, compared with the 5 mg/dl ketone levels that are
typically experienced after an overnight fast‹twelve hours after dinner
and before eating breakfast‹and the 5-20 mg/dl ketone levels of a
severly carbohydrate-restricted diet with only 5-10 percent
carbohydrates.)

For fifty years after William Banting publicized William Harvey's
prescription for a carbohydrate-restricted diet in 1863, the primary
clinical disagreements were on the role of fat in the diet. Banting's
original prescription was a high-fat diet but then it was modified by
Harvey himself and by the German clinicians Felix von Niemeyer and Max
Oertel into lower-fat, higher-protein versions, and by Wilhelm Ebstein
into a version featuring still more fat. "The fat of ham, pork or lamb
is not only harmless but useful," Ebstein wrote.

The notion of a carbohydrate-restricted diet based exclusively on fatty

320 OBESITY AND THE REGULATION OF WEIGHT

meat was publicized after World War I by the Harvard anthropologist-
turned-Arctic-explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was concerned with the
overall healthfulness of the diet, rather than its potential for weight
loss. Stefansson had spent a decade eating nothing but meat among the
Inuit of northern Canada and Alaska. The Inuit, he insisted, as well as
the visiting explorers and traders who lived on this diet, were among
the healthiest if not the most vigorous populations imaginable.

Among the tribes with whom Stefansson lived and traveled, the diet
was primarily caribou meat, "with perhaps 30 percent fish, 10 percent
seal meat, and 5 or 10 percent made up of polar bear, rabbits, birds and
eggs." The Inuit considered vegetables and fruit "not proper human
food," Stefansson wrote, but they occasionally ate the roots of the
knotweed plant in times of dire necessity.

The Inuit paid little attention to the plants in their environment
"because they added nothing to their food supply," noted the Canadian
anthropologist Diamond Jenness, who spent the years 1914-16 living in
the Coronation Gulf region of Canada's Arctic coast. Jenness described
their typical diet during one three-month stretch as "no fruit, no
vegetables; morning and night nothing but seal meat washed down with
ice-cold water or hot broth." (The ability to thrive on such a
vegetable- and fruit-free diet was also noted by the lawyer and
abolitionist Richard Henry Dana, Jr., in his 1840 memoirs of life on a
sailing ship, Two Years Before the Mast. For sixteen months, Dana wrote,
"we lived upon almost nothing but fresh beef; fried beefsteaks, three
times a day . .. [in] perfect health, and without ailings and failings."
..
--
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 16 April 1953
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw