Lowcarbezine!

Isn't this an all meat diet? How can that be healthy?

This is one of the most common misconceptions about a low carb diet, and one that I'm afraid many of the leaders in the low carb field haven't handled too well. Dr. Atkins protested recently that vegetables weren't needed for health (true on one level, extremely questionable on another), while the Hellers have people convinced that broccoli is high carb, which is most emphatically is not. (It has about the same carb count as green beans, which they consider a low carb vegetable. Go figure.)

A low carb diet is not, and was never meant to be, a NO carb diet. Even during its most restrictive Induction phase, for instance, the Atkins diet allows 2 cups a day of low carb vegetables, which is far more than the average American is eating. And many low carbers eat low carb vegetables in pretty much whatever quantities they want, to good effect. There's no reason in the world you can't have peppers and a few onions (easy on the onions, they're a borderline veg) in your scrambled eggs for breakfast, put celery in your tuna salad at lunch, and serve it on a bed of lettuce, or stuffed into a tomato, and have mushrooms on your steak and broccoli on the side with your dinner -- even all in the same day.

It's not even true that you can't have any fruit on a low carb diet, although more fruits are high carb than are vegetables. Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, cantaloupe, honeydew -- all these are very low carb fruits. Grapefruit is about 10 g a half, and a fresh peach is about the same, a plum is slightly less. You don't want to pig out on fruit, but a 2" wedge of melon, or a half-dozen strawberries for dessert is just fine.

You do, of course, want to be aware of the few high carb vegetables --
things like peas, corn, winter squash, and potatoes -- but that should just be part of an ongoing policy of knowing approximately what the carb count is of everything you eat. Get a food count book, and use it! Knowledge is power.

What about that assertion that "You can be healthy without vegetables" is, on one level, true? Well, the Eskimo ate just about no vegetables in the winters, although they ate fruits and vegetables in season (short season!), and they didn't get any horrible deficiency diseases. But then, they ate a lot of their meat raw, and ate all the organs and such, as well as the muscle meats. Also, despite not having heart attacks or diabetes or obesity or rotten teeth, they didn't necessarily live to great ages -- easy to die of an accident living where it's that cold -- so we don't know about some diseases that come with age. I'm not sure it's a good idea to base our diet completely on the diet of the Eskimo.

There is considerable evidence that vegetables have very valuable phytochemicals along with their vitamins and minerals, and they also add
far more variety, volume, and fiber to your diet for the carbs they carry than anything else could. Further, while it has now been shown that fiber, in and of itself, does not prevent colon cancer, eating vegetables -- a very specific source of fiber -- seems to. So eat your low carb veggies!

Posted by HoldTheToast at November 17, 1999 08:14 PM