Health News
Is A Zero-Carb Or Low-Carb Diet Appropriate For Someone Who Is Pregnant? -
"Is it safe for unborn and newborn babies if their Moms to eat nothing but store bought meat, animal fat and water -- and nothing else -- for the entire duration of the pregnancy?"
For some people Zero-carb is not a good idea, and in fact is almost impossible for very long, as the number of foods that contain no carbohydrate at all is quite small. I’ve spent quite a lot of time designing low-carb menus that have all the essential nutrients in them. Although it is possible at 20 grams of net carbs, it is not at all easy. Just adding 10 or 15 more grams makes it much more attainable. If you want to make it easy, go to 40-50 grams per day, which means you can also get a wider variety of phytonutrients as well. I realize that there are some people who are extremely sensitive to carbohydrate and cannot tolerate this much, but in my experience most people can, especially if most of the carbohydrate comes from non-starchy vegetables. (For example, spinach and other greens have carbs, but they are so wrapped up in fiber that most people will not experience a blood glucose impact at normal amounts.) To eat zero carbs is to seriously restrict the range of nutrients you can eat, and not a good idea.”
“This question is actually of some interest because, as you write, people get the idea that, because there is no biological requirement for dietary carbohydrate, zero carbohydrate diets are recommended. In fact, I don’t know anybody who recommends a zero carbohydrate diet but the question points up some of the confusion in the whole field. What you really want to know about a diet is the immediate effect on the plasma distribution of macronutrients. So a zero carbohydrate diet, of course, does not mean zero glucose in the blood.
Obviously, in the absence of diseases, you can survive for a long time with zero carbohydrate. That’s what you do when you’re starving. As far as we know, most of the undesirable effects of starvation reside in the absence of protein, total amount and availability of essential amino acids and, to a lesser extent, essential fatty acids. The other side of the coin is high and low fat where, if carbohydrate is low a high fat diet may have lower total fat in the plasma than a low-fat. The point is the limitations of ‘you are what you eat’ and it is not obvious, in terms of blood glucose that zero carbs is so different from low carbs. In general, more information is needed than the level of one nutrient to predict the effect of a diet.
A side issue is that it is probably impossible to get a zero-carb diet with normal food. Even meat has some carbohydrate in glycogen and cell material. When you brown meat in frying, the brown part is a reaction between the carbohydrate and protein in the meat. The browning reaction is called the Maillard reaction and is chemically similar to the reaction of glucose with proteins, under conditions where there is high blood glucose, to produce so-called advanced glycation products (AGEs), the best known of which is hemoglobin A1c.”