Do human beings need carbs

Austerity

Do we need to eat any carbs? I have found very little evidence to suggest this. Why do we need carbs? We can get the energy we need from proteins and fat. Some might say that saturated fat is "bad" for you but that myth has been debunked many times over.

I lost so much weight when I ate less than 10g of carbs per day, now I live in Asia and a low carb diet is not feasible for me at the moment :mad:

El_Dangeroso

I believe this topic has been done a few times before.

Personally I think although we don't know exactly why we need carbs we do need them. Every single population on the planet eats plants, if you were just eating meat and nothing else you'd find it near impossible to get enough vitamin C or potassium.

Even the most keto-adapted person needs 50-60g of glucose for cells that cannot use anything else, other people need 120-150g. You can manufacture this from glucose in the liver, but that creates the toxic by-product of ammonia AND consumes a fair amount of vitamins in the process. A good diet should always be about limiting exposure to toxins while maximising utilisation of nutrients. Also, the liver serves so many important functions in health, why would you want to divert its resources to do something completely unnecessary?

You can survive fine for a while on meat alone, but you can also survive fine on nothing but potatoes and a little butter (there's a guy from the Wisconsin potato council doing just this for 60 days). It takes years, sometimes decades for the full ramifications of a diet to affect health, and since no-one is ever going to do a trial that lasts for that long I'm going to hedge my bets and do as thousands of generations of humans and get my nutritious from plants and animals. The advent of being able to cook starchy tubers was probably one of the biggest leaps forward in our evolution and contributed to our ability to grow really big energy-hungry brains.

Austerity

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

I believe this topic has been done a few times before.

Personally I think although we don't know exactly why we need carbs we do need them. Every single population on the planet eats plants, if you were just eating meat and nothing else you'd find it near impossible to get enough vitamin C or potassium.

Even the most keto-adapted person needs 50-60g of glucose for cells that cannot use anything else, other people need 120-150g. You can manufacture this from glucose in the liver, but that creates the toxic by-product of ammonia AND consumes a fair amount of vitamins in the process. A good diet should always be about limiting exposure to toxins while maximising utilisation of nutrients. Also, the liver serves so many important functions in health, why would you want to divert its resources to do something completely unnecessary?

You can survive fine for a while on meat alone, but you can also survive fine on nothing but potatoes and a little butter (there's a guy from the Wisconsin potato council doing just this for 60 days). It takes years, sometimes decades for the full ramifications of a diet to affect health, and since no-one is ever going to do a trial that lasts for that long I'm going to hedge my bets and do as thousands of generations of humans and get my nutritious from plants and animals. The advent of being able to cook starchy tubers was probably one of the biggest leaps forward in our evolution and contributed to our ability to grow really big energy-hungry brains.

You can get plenty of vitamin C if you eat liver.

El_Dangeroso

Austerity wrote: »

You can get plenty of vitamin C if you eat liver.

If you eat it raw you'll get around 60mg C from 120g of liver, that's 50% of the (completely inadequate IMO) RDA, and if you eat enough to get the bare vitamin C RDA each day, you'll give yourself hypervitaminosis A.

I think the vitamin C RDA should be at least 500mg. That's the minimum gotten by healthy traditional populations around the globe. We are one of the few creatures that cannot manufacture ascorbate so an adequate intake is incredibly important for bone health and immunity, not just the immediate prevention of scurvy, which is what the RDA is based upon.

silverharp

I'd say if your diet was in tune with a paleo diet then it would be a version of ideal. so that would include local fruit and treats like honey. I've nothing scientific to back this statement up but its a hunch I'll run with for now :pac:

moonage

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

If you eat it raw you'll get around 60mg C from 120g of liver, that's 50% of the (completely inadequate IMO) RDA, and if you eat enough to get the bare vitamin C RDA each day, you'll give yourself hypervitaminosis A.

I'm sure I've read that vitamin C is needed to metabolize carbs, so the more carbs you eat the more vitamin C is depleted.

If that's true, it would follow that if you ate little or no carbs your vitamin C requirements would be quite low in the first place.

moonage

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

The advent of being able to cook starchy tubers was probably one of the biggest leaps forward in our evolution and contributed to our ability to grow really big energy-hungry brains.

Apparently, our brains reached their peak size about 90,000 years ago but since the start of agriculture 10,000 years ago they have been getting smaller.

It seems it was the consumption of fat meat that made our brains so big and energy hungry but it's their replacement with more carbs that is making them smaller.

El_Dangeroso

moonage wrote: »

I'm sure I've read that vitamin C is needed to metabolize carbs, so the more carbs you eat the more vitamin C is depleted.

If that's true, it would follow that if you ate little or no carbs your vitamin C requirements would be quite low in the first place.

Vitamin C is used in carbohydrate metabolism, it's also used for a myriad other functions, taking away one thing it has to do doesn't diminish it's importance though it might only slightly diminish it's requirement. I still maintain 500mg is optimal even for zero carbers.

moonage wrote: »

Apparently, our brains reached their peak size about 90,000 years ago but since the start of agriculture 10,000 years ago they have been getting smaller.

It seems it was the consumption of fat meat that made our brains so big and energy hungry but it's their replacement with more carbs that is making them smaller.

It was the consumption of easy to digest calories that fueled the development of big brains, this definitely included fat for sure but also cooked starch. A really great book about that is 'Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human' by Richard Wrangham.

I didn't hear anything about our brains shrinking, where'd you read that out of interest?

moonage

El_Dangeroso wrote: »

I didn't hear anything about our brains shrinking, where'd you read that out of interest?

I read it in Barry Groves' book "Trick and Treat".

He also talks about it in this article:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarians-have-smaller-brains.html

El_Dangeroso

moonage wrote: »

I read it in Barry Groves' book "Trick and Treat".

He also talks about it in this article:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarians-have-smaller-brains.html

Ohohoho.. not touching that one with a stick

--Kaiser--

moonage wrote: »

I read it in Barry Groves' book "Trick and Treat".

He also talks about it in this article:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/vegetarians-have-smaller-brains.html

Ha Ha! I knew it

Sapsorrow

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

Ha Ha! I knew it

Lol me too! :pac:

moonage

--Kaiser-- wrote: »

Ha Ha! I knew it

Er, what exactly did you know?

shimmery

do vegetables like carrots, broccilli, cawliflower, parsnips and peppers etc have carbs?i normally eat a huuuge portion of veg to overcompensate for lack of potatoes and im not sure if this is a good or bad thing.i take in high carbs in my cereal in the morn.

Blatter

shimmery wrote: »

do vegetables like carrots, broccilli, cawliflower, parsnips and peppers etc have carbs?i normally eat a huuuge portion of veg to overcompensate for lack of potatoes and im not sure if this is a good or bad thing.i take in high carbs in my cereal in the morn.

I wouldn't worry about carbs in veg tbh. I think carrots and parnips are the only ones that have a significant amount of carbs, even at that they are pretty low.

Alot of carbs in veg is also fibre, which can be subtracted from the total carbs, **I think**.

sheesh

Yes you can live without carbs if by carbs you mean all those starchy foods.

op the reason you probably lost loads of weight by eating less carbs is you probably did not replace it a similar amount of other foods, less calories in = weight loss.

maybe you should try eating less.