'Good' Carbs?

#102

To my knowledge, neither Berry nor Bikman (nor all the other keto physicians like Atkins, Phinney, Westman, Volek, the Eades) address females as a specific group in depth, neither midlife females and folks with PTSD/haywire cortisol - as well as the the subgroup of athletes with gut dysbiosis. I do care about developing nuanced understanding of human health via LCHF/keto, and expanding the spectrum of research & resources - so I’ve made a habit of observing who’s addressing what and seeking experiential reports from those focused on the unique hormone balancing of midlife females and others with high cortisol.

It can be challenging to have substantive discourse online without sharing a nuanced familiarity with foundational LCHF/keto books that explore metabolic healing, case examples, and phased plans for sustainable eating (The Art & Science Of Low Carbohydrate Living, Protein Power, The New Atkins For A New You, The Obesity Code, and the only female-focused ones, Radical Metabolism and The Hormone Fix: Keto-Green are some of my faves). Context is everything - and I also think the reality of diversity within the humans doing LCHF/keto deserves continued acknowledgement and ongoing study of certain groups. The good carbs and good-carbs-cycling subject has very different impacts and implementations for different subgroups of ketoers - IR vs Non-IR, females vs. males, midlifers vs. teenagers, weight-lifters/high intensity trainers vs. sedentary, etc. Dietary healing may have different approaches for PTSD people vs. no-PTSD, those with gut dysbiosis and those without, etc.

For my own slow, but ongoing, recomposition success, I credit the nuanced self-healing hormone-balancing approaches of the pro-alkaline LCHF/keto women’s health advocate camp (Louise Gittleman PhD, Anna Cabeca MD, Christiane Northrup MD, Stephanie Greunke RD, Stephani Ruper, Amy Berger MS) and also some of the paleo-keto female writers (this article and its long comments thread by Gruenke touches on many of the female-specific angles on carbs). And, as a non-alcoholic, I also credit the wine-with-food research of Salvatore Lucia MD (for cortisol reduction and gastrin production), and the realistic approach of the Drs. Eades and others when it comes to gastronomy!

Specializations of keto for addressing cortisol are hopefully in process - Anna Cabeca MD certainly has her own personal experience and case studies to draw from, which compelled her to write her book (with rave reviews by functional/LCHF/keto people like Mark Hyman MD, Christiane Northrup MD, and David Perlmutter MD).

Good carbs as part of a well-formulated ketogenic way of eating can be a method for making it culturally and personally sustainable in the world at large and in our household community gatherings, special events, holidays, and cross-cultural potlucks… Westman/Phinney/Volek address this quite well in the New Atkins For A New You Book. Despite what some with food addictions might do with it - it’s not a mere ‘justification to eat just any sugar or starch’, it’s quite a culturally-sensitive, well-formulated, pleasurable sustaining way of living a well-satiated and neurologically enlivened ketogenic life. :rainbow:

(Heck, the Drs. Eades in their classic book Protein Power reported on a client of theirs who fit his carb allowance in such a way that he ate one piece of his fave candy per day (17g carbs) - which was his one treat in his overall psychological life - it helped him stay the course and lose a ton of fat and sustain the recomp. Such a hit of sugar wouldn’t work for me, but for that guy it was a drop in the bucket so to speak).

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #103

I agree with @David_Stilley . Carbohydrate is just another name for sugar. Women don’t need to eat it any more than men. Like @PaulL I remain unconvinced. Claiming a useful function needs serious back up data.

To me it seems like arguing that your liver has the texture of a truck tire tread because you’ve been drinking all the wrong types of alcohol. Cheap beer, gin and tequila will do that to you, doncha know. You can fix your liver by adding a glass of Sardinian dry red wine to your main meal every day and maybe cut back on the beer and gin a bit.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #104

To me the concept of treats is a psychological holdover from sugar addiction. It’s a tease keeping alive the sugar as a treat concept we grew up with as children. The blissful sugar high was replaced with the need to chase that feeling and we never get it back like the first childhood experience when we were rewarded with “treats”. Escalated sugar use created addiction and metabolic derangement for all of us.We needed sugar and carbs (same) to feel normal. The concept of food as treats is the second level of the carb battle. It’s reforming you brain to make intelligent food choices rather than constantly looking for a way to hack ketogenic eating to accommodate the old sugar tooth. It’s about learning to make correct food choices. It’s about breaking the chain that food as a reward. It is so stuck in so many people’s minds that eating disorders are affecting our whole world. After I joined the forum I saw someone made a post almost a year ago said,

“Stop treating yourself, you aren’t a dog.”

This makes total sense to me. :cowboy_hat_face:

#105

Being an ally in women’s health is optional of course.

Dismissing the unique and vast realm female physiology is typical male behavior and also just conventional American industrial culture - and it has negatively impacted women’s health research.

A male-bodied, high testosterone framework applied to female hormonal physiology is not only patently absurd, it’s also under-serving the human community. Of course, anyone truly interested in displacing this absurdity can check out the keto female physicians and other authors mentioned in my previous post - and listen to what well-informed women are saying about their applied experience with ketogenic body recomp that defies the odds, which is something to celebrate.

Scoffing is obv working for you though.

(mole person) #106

Let’s keep politics out of our nutrition discussions. A man can have an opinion about womens health that differs from a woman’s without it having to do at all with him not caring about women’s heath or denying biological differences between men and women. If you think there is a good argument for carbohydrate needs in women then make it. People will argue. Some will be men. That is no reason to dismiss their arguments.

I happen to also be completely unconvinced that women need carbs more than men. But I’m willing to change my mind if I ever see convincing evidence, I just haven’t yet. I suspect @amwassil is likewise just underwhelmed by the evidence he’s seen and his opinion has nothing to do with his gender.

(mole person) #107

You are hitting a really important point here. Eating ketogenically is only half the battle. If we fail to change our relationship with food we will ultimately stall and eventually backslide.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #108

It is a fact that much research into human biology uses men as subjects, simply because the female hormonal cycle confuses all the issues. That is not in and of itself inherently prejudiced—but forgetting to test on women, after one has turned up results on men, definitely is. It is safe to say, however, that assumptions about generalizability always need to be questioned, as do assumptions that specific sub-populations may be “different.”

For example, while the human norm is that lactase production ceases sometime in childhood after weaning, two specific sub-populations have developed mutations that permit lactase production to continue in adulthood: the Maasai, and northern Europeans. So dairy consumption can be recommended to members of those groups, but the recommendation cannot be generalized to the human race as a whole. Here is a case where two sub-populations actually are different.

Since glucose metabolism is so fundamental to animal biology, it is not to be expected that any mechanism involving it would be specific to one or the other of the sexes. Sex-linked characteristics tend to be obvious, after all. It just doesn’t seem likely that pancreatic β-cells would react differently because of the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. I doubt that it could even be affected by such conditions as pregnancy and lactation. The presence or absence of specific alleles in other chromosomes, however, could be an entirely diffferent story. In this case, I suspect that individual or population variation counts for more than one’s sex.

The best-known sex-linked medical condition is haemophilia. Men who carry the gene are always haemophiliacs, because the Y chromosome carries no offsetting gene for the bad alleles. Women, on the other hand, are usually heterozygous carriers of the gene, which is recessive. A homozygous woman would need to have received the bad gene from both her mother and her father, and up till recently, haemophiliac men never survived to reproductive age. The haemophilia that plagues the royal houses of Europe is the result of a spontaneous mutation in Queen Victoria, which she passed on to one of her sons and two of her daughters. (I suppose it is possible that a mutation on the X chromosome might be involved with glucose metabolism, but in that case I would expect the effects to be as obvious as those of haemophilia, and that it would be men who were primarily affected.)

Other clotting abnormalities occur on other chromosomes and are not sex-linked. (For example, abnormalities that make the blood likelier to clot—generally involving fibrinogen and clotting factor VIII—are believed to be the true cause of cardiovascular diseasse and death in half of all people with familial hypercholesterolaemia. The other half, who do not inherit those abnormalities, live perfectly normal lives and never develop cardiovascular problems.) Also, one of the genes that can cause haemophilia is not on the X chromosome (my understanding is that it is a very rare allele). So it is important to know the aetiology of any given condition.

#109

Well, it confuses the issues for results pertaining to men, but clarifies them for results pertaining to women. So, I wouldn’t agree that it’s all the issues.

I agree that dismissing female physiology and women in general has negatively impacted women’s health research (and more). But I’m not convinced that women specifically need a different amount of carbs or certain types of them.

I do think we see enough variation around here that different people need different amounts of carbs and certain types of them, just like different people seem to need different amounts and types of protein. Some people can very healthy on a moderate carb/paleo diet, other people who have significant metabolic disruption, serious neurological issues, or other conditions will not be healthy on that type of diet.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #110

@SlowBurnMary all I said was I would have to see some evidence/data to back up your claims. That’s typical science behaviour, not misogyny.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #111

@ZuleikaD Apparently you missed this sentence.

#112

No, I didn’t. Testing on women shouldn’t be the aftermath of testing on men. If it isn’t inherently part of testing on people then we have a problem–just like testing on people of varying ethnic backgrounds should also be a part of basic testing.

(squirrel-kissing paper tamer) #113

Are you talking about this…?

(KCKO, KCFO) #114

I agree with that. I won’t even read an article anymore if the test subjects aren’t at least an admixture of the sexes. If it is ethnic and socio-economically mixed that is even better.

#115

Critical thinking is different than politics, and I will articulate whatever I think is appropriate when it has to do with women’s health and community education in an industrial medical culture context rife with male-centered frameworks that delay healing for many females.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #116

:pouting_cat:Well okay then, I guess we have lots of that to look forward to as you crusade against the evil male military industrial complex and turn everything into a feminist lesson for us ignorant forum users…whatevah :roll_eyes:

(squirrel-kissing paper tamer) #117

Just because she’s concerned about a feminist issue doesn’t mean she’s against all men. What she is saying is traditionally true. We were told the signs of heart attack were the signs men got for years and years until evidence proved we present differently. It happens a lot but it’s getting better.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #118

I don’t see the answer as mixed sex studies in any way, I don’t approve of a male centric society, most of my friends are women and I am very familiar and supportive of feminist issues and against racial and sexual inequalities in our world. I find it very disturbing. Mixed studies will just muddy results for men and women. I don’t know why mixed studies are being stressed as better, I think women deserve simultaneous equal studies for diet that are done on men. I believe sex specific studies are more relevant to everyone. I am sorry about the inequalities in our world but complaining about it day in and day out here where it will make absolutely no difference or change to that system is a waste of everyone’s energy. :cowboy_hat_face:

#119

I don’t know whether that was referring to critical thinking about topics like male-bias in medical research, female human rights activism, or androcentric society - or just about critical thinking in general - but across our society, labeling valid criticism “complaining” is a patriarchal rhetorical device that we all grew up with and that only we can stop. It obscures or derails legitimate criticism in both households and boardrooms across the industrial world.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #120

It’s probably necessary to experience discrimination personally in order to be fully aware of its effects, and I’m not sure that experiencing discrimination in one area promotes understanding of what other people experience for different reasons. I briefly dated a black man years ago, a state official whose job involved training police departments in all sorts of sexual and racial discrimination matters. We had some very interesting conversations. I learned that while I was deeply aware of the oppression of gay people, my understanding of the effects of prejudice on African-Americans was superficial and largely theoretical. My friend’s take was that although we cannot escape our prejudices, since they are trained in so deeply, the saving grace is being able to talk honestly across the various divides.