Comment on: Fat-Head – Safe Starches And Logical Consistency
I love Jaminet’s stuff, but his glucose and mucus deficiency etc assertions are just silly.
Paul JaminetI ate a high-vegetable but extremely low-carb diet from December 2005 to January 2008. At the time I thought I was getting about 300 carb calories a day, but I now consider this to have been a zero-carb diet, since I don’t believe carb calories are available from most vegetables
Source: Perfect Health Diet – Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, II: Mucus Deficiency and Gastrointestinal Cancers
300 carb calories a day is about 75g of carbs (on his “zero carb” diet), that’s A LOT of non-starchy veggies – 1 pound of broccoli has about ~15g/60cal of net carbs, so we’re talking about eating 3-5lbs or more of the damn things. It’s like me saying I’m a tee-totaller because I only drink beer – not vodka.
Now, forget calories and carbs, just think about all the stuff that can go down eating that much sheer food and indeed it being from veggies. Understand the anti-nutrients/biochemical toxins/etc in plant foods (which in small amounts are ok, but in those vast quantities…?) and it’s not a big stretch to find some compounds that can lead to various issues with stuff that hinders the uptake of various micronutrients and leads to deficiencies in mucus stuff and other such.
However, according to Jaminet:
Throughout my 2 years on this zero-carb diet, I had dry eyes and dry mouth.
Eats a metric fckton of plants, but blames the lack of carbohydrates? Glucose deficiency? C’mon…
Anyhoo, I’m more on Lucas Tafur’s side – protein issues:
– http://www.lucastafur.com/2011/03/ketomyths_08.html
Consider for a second – Jaminet’s diet was a “high-vegetable” diet, it’s likely he was getting some pretty poor amounts of essential amino acids (threonine is likely in this case) if it wasn’t a high meat or legume diet.
So in the end he’s eating POUNDS of veggies a day with all the metabolic clusterfckry such a practice entails, gets dry mouth and sore eyes, but blames it unequivocally on his psuedo “zero carb” diet, then comes up with The Perfect Health diet where you require “safe starches” to offset a “glucose deficiency”…?
Yeahhhhh, I’m not sold.
Look, I admire the guy for the work he’s done and the amazing results people are getting, his diet is better than 99% of the guru prescriptions out there, and is a model of a good high fat low carb regime in the world and society we currently reside, and I have no other real issues with it.
TL;DR – Jaminet was NOT on a zero carb diet when he developed his problems, there are tons of confounders, it’s most likely a protein uptake problem, however some people could be sensitive to VLC in this way somehow. Ketosis isn’t necessary for health, but I’m still not buying the glucose deficiency angle.
It got hand-waved by some, but gave some good points of discussion for many others.
