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Low Carb
Dietary
Guidelines. Carbs or Fats?
by Tanya Zilberter, PhD
What
you are usually warned about are diets that are high in fat while being also
high in carbohydrates. 
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Restricting the carbohydrate intake makes their end product glucose less
readily available as fuel therefore making the body switch to using another
fuel for energy. Which one? Next best as far as it concerns body's preferences
is fat. No matter where it comes from - food or from under your own skin,
abdomen or thighs.
Normally, substances other than carbs can be converted into glucose.
For instance, proteins. The process of conversion named gluconeogenesis ("the
making of new glucose") when proteins are broken down in order to produce
new glucose takes place in liver and kidneys.
This fact too often leads to the halve-fouls conclusion that high-carb
diets spare protein thus preserving muscles. Basing on this (halve-true)
assumption, advocates of high carbohydrate diets argue against low carb ones.
They don't pay attention to the other part of the truth: carbohydrates spare
not only protein, but also fat, your own fat including.
The whole truth is that high availability of glucose results in fat
sparing! Glucose is absolutely preferable fuel and as long as it is there
for energy needs, the body doesn't bother looking for anything else, fat
including, be it food fat or body fat.
This explains well why high fat diets are so infamous for their detrimental
health effects. An excess fat intake combined with even not necessarily high,
but just sufficient carb intake makes the body fat stay where is has always
been - in fat depots, plus some new from food.
As it actually happens in vast majority of epidemiological studies.
Epidemiological studies deal with large massifs of data when there's no
control upon the data. For example, the famous Nurse Study where hundreds
of thousands of nurses were surveyed through decades.
The researchers make all kind of slices across the data, e.g., comparing
reports on fat intake with heart disease risks and coming to the absolutely
correct conclusion that these two positively correspond. What is missing
is the carbohydrate intake factor. Maybe there are data on carb intake in
those surveys, but the researchers don't expect them to be relevant and therefore
don't look at them. That simple.
Meanwhile, this sad picture is not observed when high fat intake is
combined with low carbohydrate intake. This time, low availability of glucose
forces the body to pursue alternative fuel and this time this fuel is fat.
Including body fat.
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