Dr Rod Tayler – Low Carb Down Under Introduction
Firstly, let me wish you a happy and healthy New Year. This is the first show of 2019. I hope you’ve managed to have a good break to reflect and really kickstart a great New Year.
Now, if you’re a regular listener in the show you will know from our guests last year that irrespective of which chronic disease we looked at. Cancer, cardiovascular disease or autoimmune diseases diabetes, of course, the key has been the common denominator has been to keep of the insulin levels low. Now if you aren’t a regular listener you have got some catching up to do.
Well, my guest today to start the year I wanted to explore this low carb and high healthy fat idea. My guest is Dr. Rod Tayler. Now Rod is a Melbourne anaesthetist with an interest in weight loss research and low carb diets. He’s given so many presentations on the subject of restricting carbohydrate intake for long term health benefits. And he’s done that to medical and other allied health professionals. He is the co-founder of low carb Down Under. I’m going to let him explain more. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Rod Taylor.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Hello and welcome to “Unstress”. I’m Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Firstly, let me wish you a happy and healthy New Year. This is the first show of 2019. I hope you’ve managed to have a good break to reflect and really kickstart a great New Year.
Now, if you’re a regular listener in the show you will know from our guests last year that irrespective of which chronic disease we looked at. Cancer, cardiovascular disease or autoimmune diseases diabetes, of course, the key has been the common denominator has been to keep of the insulin levels low. Now if you aren’t a regular listener you have got some catching up to do.
Well, my guest today to start the year I wanted to explore this low carb and high healthy fat idea. My guest is Dr. Rod Tayler. Now Rod is a Melbourne anaesthetist with an interest in weight loss research and low carb diets. He’s given so many presentations on the subject of restricting carbohydrate intake for long term health benefits. And he’s done that to medical and other allied health professionals. He is the co-founder of Low Carb Down Under. I’m going to let him explain more. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Rod Taylor. Welcome to the show, Rod.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Ron, thank you. Good to be on with you.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Now, listen Rod we’re before we dive into this topic can you give us kind of a brief rundown of your own journey that brought you to this point? Professionally I guess there was your own personal experience that informed you to get to this point. Give us a bit of a background.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Well, this topic of why we’ve been getting obese and thicker over time I’ve been discussing with doctors for a long time since the early 90s. I work in the operating theatre as an anaesthetist might I spend a lot of time with your doctors and we do get to talk about these issues. The turning point for me came in 2009 when I was given a book called “Sweet Poison” by David Gillespie. A terrific book about sugar and when I read this book, I thought my goodness sugar is a huge problem. 2009 I cut sugar out of my diet and that probably included the four or five pieces of fruit I was having today which we can revisit that issue at another time. But I dropped about eight kilograms off my middle.
I’d always been a skinny sort of a guy, but this is where I was up in the mid-fifties and I’d been putting it on a little bit, and it fell off when I did this. Like eight kilograms fell off in a couple of months and that got me really interested. I did a research project at a hospital in Melbourne on reducing sugar by taking staff members and we recruited 158 staff members to reduce the sugar intake and the results were good. Results were good.
At that point, there wasn’t didn’t seem to be much of a low sugar community around but boy, I discovered there was actually the big low-carb community around and I started digging around in that I went on a conference in the US or a low carb conference and started meeting the network of people who really explored, of course, not only low carb certainly includes like sugar. So, I found there was a great network of people there and that that really got me following this up more and more.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Young boys that ever a growing movement we hear so much about it. We do hear these words the word low-cut more and more often and it seems to mean so many different things to different people. And given your position now within this movement of low cup what is low carb? What does it mean?
Dr. Rod Tayler: I think there are certain things that are really accepted pretty much by everybody about going low-carb and one of it is that we should reproduce our sugar consumption. And the average Australians having something like 16 or 18 teaspoons of added sugar every day. There seems to be a consensus. This is not a good idea and the World Health Organisation is saying we should get in ten all this and ideally five or less. So, low carb certainly incorporates low sugar as well. But there seems to also be a consensus that processed food is a problem and part of the reason is that so much processed food has sugar added to it.
One of my sorts of salutary lessons when I first found out about this was walking up and down supermarket aisles picking up different foods buffet breakfast cereals or tomato sauce or all sorts of things and figuring out how many teaspoons of sugar within each of these things.
One thing you’ve got to know and most, but a lot of people know it but not everybody does that four grams of sugar is a teaspoon. So, if you say pick up some yogurt blue container of yogurt and you see that it’s got 28 grams sugar in it, well, that actually means that there are seven teaspoons of sugar in that 28 divided.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: That’s a magical and very important number for people to carry around with them in their heads and it’s a good reason for doing your four times table.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Indeed. It’s eye-opening. So, one of my colleagues Peter Bruckner who’s that that had been the doctor for the odds at cricket team he’s a great advocate. He runs an organisation called “Sugar by Heart” aiming to reduce sugar consumption in Australians by 50% by the year 2025. So, in his talks, he holds up a bottle of barbecue sauce. It’s quite a big bottle later boss. And he said how many people think there are more than 20 teaspoons in this bottle and half the hands go up and he says 40.
Well, what about 89 and one or two hands left up. And the answer is in that bottle of barbecue sauce. There are 125 teaspoons of sugar. So, if any of your listeners mixed on, they’re going to the supermarket pick up a bottle of barbecue sauce and tomato sauce is not much better, divide the figure that they see of grams of sugar which in this case is 500 grams. Divide that by 4 and we get 125 teaspoons. So, it’s good for people to know about this and just giving up sugar can make big differences for people’s health, people’s weight people’s markers for risk.
We haven’t even really got to low carb, but I just think that we should be emphasising and re-emphasising it. And really if you want to take control of your health and live up to the best potential your own health or sugar certainly it is the absolute no brainer starting point. But then beginning more to add to the story it’s not just sugar.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: This is where people need to take that next step along of understanding because it’s not complicated biochemistry, but I can see where we’re headed. I think some of my listeners would too, let’s go on.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Right, all right. What about other carbohydrates? So, the average Australian use has been probably about 200 to 250 grams of carbohydrate a day. Now there are different definitions of what actually was low carb or very low carb but generally, one scientific accepted version of low carb is it’s less than 130 grams a day. So, already people to go low carb need to think well on having 200 to 250 but really the experience of the people working in the field to get good results across the wide widely varying groups in the population, we really need to get much lower from that.
So, we’re looking to get to 50 grams a day and some people to really get good results really need to go lower than that down to 25 or 30 grams a day. So, what if 30 grams a day look like? Well, essentially, we’re cutting out the bread the rice, pasta, potatoes, the sugar, the processed food. And so, well what are we going? We would cut those things out which by the way most of those don’t contain really much in the way of good nutrients and there’s sort of starchy. And they’re good to fatten you up and that’s what they’ve always been good for in nature.
Sort of at the end of summer in our prehistoric times eating getting hold of a lot of fruit or even some grain ripens at the end of summer was a great way to fatten up. And that had an evolutionary advantage by fatten you up and enabling you to get through a long, cold winter with some pet stores. And our problem today is we do it 365 days a year.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Well, we not only do at that amount of time we do it because we’re actually encouraged to do it. I mean the foods you’ve just grains particularly have and all the foods that are that emanate from that are the foundation of the food pyramid. And I know that in the recommended daily intake RDE’s when it comes to carbohydrates the authorities are telling us it’s around 300-310 grams per day.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Yes, this is problematic. We can dig closer into that but if I could just say at this point well, what should we be eating then? And people like me would say we should be eating Whole Foods and those Whole Foods include meat, fish, eggs, vegetables and if you can tolerate it and the great majority of people can tolerate dairy. Butter and cream and cheese.
So, these are basic foods which are low carb and eating those foods not too difficult to get down below 50 grams of carbonate. And also, the foods are whole so they can contain good nutrients micronutrients the minerals and the vitamins which are essential for us. Essentially, we’re going to be talking lower carb, quite low-carb. Good amount of protein. Now, this protein think is a little bit argued but most people would say most authorities over time and say we’ll look 15 to 20 percent of your calories as proteins. And to do that a great way to do it is meat, eggs, fish. These are great sources of complete protein that have all the essential amino acids.
Some of them might say what about vegetarian? Can you do this as a vegetarian? Look, it’s possible. You would certainly have to be watching the micronutrients pretty carefully and there are people who can do that. Vegetarians constitute about 8% of the world’s population. If you were vegetarian and they were looking to do this it’s doable but it is going to require fairly close attention to detail and getting your essential amino acids and your essential nutrients and vitamins.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Now, there’s another half to this equation because it’s low carb healthy or high fat. Let’s just talk for a moment about the fat because this has been demonised and yet it’s a very important part of not just our diet but making a success of this approach. Talk to us a little about that. You mentioned some of the facts but let’s just revisit that a little bit.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Up until about 40 years ago, we had a higher fat diet. Probably around these sorts of 36-38% of our calories come from fat. Around about this time there was an epidemic or coronary heart disease. And for example, it affected President Eisenhower and us and everybody got serious and what causing this epidemic of heart disease? Ischemic heart disease. And because blood vessels in the heart look to have some fat in them, the function was that well it must be fat in the diet is becoming fattening our arteries, so, if we cut the fat in our diet that will get fewer heart attacks and the other vascular diseases that go with that.
And so, that’s where all this started. There are other people around about the time particularly in the 60s and 70s argued vehemently that fat wasn’t the problem at all that sugar played a huge part in this. That’s kind of how it started. Now for the last 40 years, Western world has been on a low-fat diet. We have reduced to around about 32 percent of our calories and 36 percent and I would just ask and how’s that worked out in practice? Have we got healthier? Do we have less type-2 diabetes? How have we done? And the answer is we have dead abysmally. And this low-fat diet has been a complete disaster.
The thinking and the science that I followed these days said we’ve already talked about carbs which are getting down to sort of 5 to 10 percent of our calories or 25 to 50 grams. We’ve talked about protein which we’re going to let you figure if 20% good healthy amount of protein to giving me. Where do we get the rest of our calories? And the bottom line is from fat. Now there are healthy fats and not so healthy fats.
And the healthy fats are whole, the things that come from Whole Foods like fish and eggs and olive oil for example. Their healthy fats from these would be recommending getting more of them. There are unhealthy fats clearly when we started hydrogenated fats in the thirties and beyond when you produced fats called trans fats and these are clearly been shown to be problematic for particularly vascular disease. They’re banned now and they’re mostly disappeared out of our food supply. But that illustrates that not all fats are the same.
The other facts that I’d be worried about would be the so-called vegetable oils. These are highly processed, so these are things like sunflower safflower, rice bran, canola oils.
They’re very cheap and they’re added to our foods and particularly our processed foods and takeaway food in large amounts. So, these were only introduced into our diet in about the 1930s. And I’d ask the question again well how they’re helping working things then? And the answer is our health markers have been going downhill. And I think there’s a good argument but this is probably worth doing a little bit more work on for people to look at and also, we certainly got rid of vegetable oils out of our cupboard in our household about five years ago or something and we do better with butter and olive oil and coconut oil and in that regard, these were much healthier.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: It’s an interesting historical point though, isn’t it? It was a sliding door moment if you like where we stood at the crossroads and thought, “Okay, there’s this epidemic of heart diseases in the rising in the 30s 40s” and culminating in Eisenhower’s heart attack which attracted a huge amount of attention in I think it was mid to late 50s. And this sliding door moment was… Well, what’s changed and what had changed? Was the introduction of all these seed oil or vegetable oils? And then that discussion between fat and sugar and of course, we know which camp won out in the end and as you have asked rhetorically, I think how we are doing since then and it’s not a pretty picture.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Absolutely. Look, there’s one more confounding factor. People used to smoke a lot more in the 40s 50s 60s. And so why was ischemic heart disease on the rise even before vegetable oils and much greater amounts of processed food and sugar came into our diet. And so, you could argue, look the increase in that 50s 60s and 70s heart disease was actually on the back of smoking where smoking was so much more prevalent than it is today. We essentially arrested the wrong suspect and we’ve been paying for it ever since.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: It’s interesting because you as an anaesthetist as you mentioned at the beginning spend quite a bit of time apart from, of course, monitoring very closely your patients, you’re in a room with a lot of other health professionals and they are health professionals whether they’re orthopaedic surgeons or heart, whatever they are and they must know your position and particularly that it’s changed over the years. Is that accepted? Give us a bit of a sneak in part the operating theatre and the thinking.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Well, I think it’s really well expected. It is very well accepted by an individual doctor. They going to argue with you about sugar, they are going to argue with you about high carbohydrate, they are going to argue about a lot of the bread and pasta. And I’d say the majority of people I work with now they do this. They do it in their own lives. The weight comes off, the blood pressure comes down, they feel better and their families do it.
So, on individual levels there are big changes taking place in amongst that a more informed member of the support members of the society and that’s certainly the case and they’re increasingly spending patients off to low-carb doctors for a range of conditions, not just weight, not just diabetes, not just vascular disease but a whole range of things which really appear to be linked with poor diet which includes autoimmune kind of conditions. Some of which just when you get people’s diets or without miraculous thing to diminish them and that’s pretty well documented.
So, low-carb down under the website that I set up in 2012. Now have 53 Australian doctors are virtual all the states and this is a good resource and if you go to one of those doctors that you’re going to get good advice on taking up and falling a low carbohydrate diet. And one other point I’d like to make about these doctors is that we’re essentially all saying the same thing. It’s not like there are 53 different versions of this.
There’s a sort of an agreement, we agree on what’s really important. Well, there’s a lot of support that means sort of increasing support for scientific literature. And after all, things being considered after that, it’s just a common sense anyway.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: It’s so interesting because given almost everybody that I have spoken to on my podcast over the years and for literally every chronic degenerative disease they acknowledge that the lower the insulin level because of course, sugar and carbohydrates which quickly get broken down into sugar cause insulin levels to rise. They all agree that the lower the insulin levels the better the health. And this is basically what the low carb high fat does. Has it been enthusiastically embraced by public health authorities?
Dr. Rod Tayler: Not formally at the fact that there are signed or public health authorities moving into this direction. There are guidelines for example guidelines on the management of type 2 diabetes. Now by the way touchy diabetes is a condition we should all be very concerned about because probably something like half about adult has either got it or have got the pre-diabetes that precede it.
We should all be interested and it’s good to see that guidelines are starting to introduce the idea of low carbohydrate nutrition and an option in addition to pills to get in control of type 2 diabetes. Yeah, just think half of us should think that we need to do something about it and the other half of which would be worried too because who knows where we’ll be in 10 years’ time if we don’t think… Type 2 diabetes is basically something you don’t want to get because it’s raw linked with all sorts of bad outcomes.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: You’re in the operating theatre seeing a lot of operations and presumably some of these people on the table have got type 2 diabetes. Remind our listeners why type 2 diabetes is such a problem.
Dr. Rod Tayler: You mentioned insulin before. And if we have a high sugar high carbohydrate diet, we produce more insulin. And one of insulins roles is to store fat. Now as I mentioned earlier that’s a good thing I mean our Palaeolithic times to store fat at the end of summer for inventions possibly not a good idea to have berries and raised in short when it was packing away fat inter-cell packing away fat into the liver, into our guts on to have bellies, on to all parts of the body doing that 365 days a year. Bad idea.
Talking about other diseases including vascular disease and including autoimmune diseases is the common factor in the more appears to be insulin resistant. And insulin resistance really means that initially the levels of insulin in the body go up, this helps the storage thing, but it is also linked with inflammation. And so, we keep going with this for a while we get inflammation parts of our body.
The liver, for example, fatty liver disease hugely common lead to resistance will link to it obesity went with a lot of bad things. And of course, obesity is linked to insulin resistance. That’s why in our caveman days this was a good thing because it helped you pack away a lot of fat and the problem today is, we’re packing it away and packing it away.
Insulin is the key hormone. It’s really essential, it’s our fat storage hormone and if we want to get rid of that fat and we also want to get our information down and we also want to make sure that our arteries are clear then getting insulin low and that lays it the next question well how do we get our insulin low? Well, certainly cutting sugar. And on a low carbohydrate diet is a great way to go. And I wonder if I could slip into talking about how often we should eat?
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Yes, this is good Rod because I know the low carb down under site has some fabulous resources and some great YouTube clips and all this but one of the most popular is, of course, the legendary now that Dr. Jason Fong who talks a lot about this. Come on, tell us a little bit about not just what we should eat but how often we should eat?
Dr. Rod Tayler: Yeah, right, well having covered what you would do it’s a big question that really didn’t come up really me go on my screen or I think most other people screen until maybe about three or four years ago. And Jason Toronto-based kidney doctor in position started talking about well, is it really a good idea to have three meals a day and three snacks a day? Because that’s what we’ve been told to do by our dietary authorities over the last 30 or 40 years in the hope that we would eat less overall.
And that doesn’t seem to have played out. And so, there has been thinking now more to will cut out a snack for a start. Do we need to snack? Did our caveman ancestors, did they snack? Did they stop in the morning tea time and have some calories while out hunting? I doubt it. The effect of cutting out snacking is to reduce insulin because every time you eat something you put out a little bit of insulin particularly for carbs to a small extent to a protein which I don’t think we should mostly be concerned about.
Eating fat really doesn’t give us insulin spine at all. And as I say think of this one as the fat storage hormone and you want to get it down. So, as we say we get it down with low carb, but we also get it down by not eating all the time. And so, move away from snacking which seems to make common thinking to me. If you eat breakfast at 8 o’clock why would you be eating to have a snack at 10 o’clock in the morning? And it doesn’t sort of seem to make much sense in terms of lifestyle having to do that over time.
People who eat low carb and higher fat report feeling more satiated and just don’t need to be constantly eating like they were when they’re on a high carbohydrate diet. So, I think this is great. Now you can stretch this a little bit more so people cut out snacking and then they say well, look actually don’t feel that hungry at breakfast time. And so, I’m just eating lunch and dinner. I don’t eat breakfast because I’m just not hungry when I eat this diet. And so, they’re getting down to lunch and dinner.
People like it the other way and skip lunch and they breakfast and dinner. But the results in these people are often quite dramatic. They haven’t changed exactly the food’s they are eating. That they’re eating less often, insulin comes down into measuring insulin and the smart doctors who understand why carbohydrate diets are doing this and so you can track your progress. I think it is a great field.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Yeah, the measurement of the insulin is with that little pinprick and little tab. Is that how this is the best way of measuring it?
Dr. Rod Tayler: Look, now, I think more or less you’re talking about measuring blood forecast which is also a great thing to do when you keep glucose as high where your insulin will be high to particularly earlier stages of type 2 diabetes. Insulin measuring it really is it is done as a fasting blood test and it sent off to the lab and you get the values back that can tell you whether you’re high in some insulin. But the normal levels of fasting insulin are probably people vary a bit more I’d say but a bit below 10 or 15.
Well, there are people out there who are doing so well who have insulin in several hundred. Their doctors say you are going okay because they hadn’t checked their insulin. And you’re going on okay. They are actually a ticking time bomb because their pancreas can’t keep that up for long apart from all the inflammation problems that go with having high insulin.
And the pancreas is going to burn out and it’s not going to be able to produce enough insulin to keep their blood sugar’s under control. And then they’re going to make insulin injections sometimes in high amounts and nobody wants this. It’s difficult, it’s expensive and it’s preventable by having good nutrition.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Rod, we’re talking to you and talking to many of my other guests and I’m sure my listeners also think this is just so perfectly logical of course, this is what we should be doing but in the real world there’s been so many reputations and so many literally billions of dollars invested in this low-fat approach. And I know I went on to the USDA side if you googled USDA health care professionals guidelines and I put in my age and I put in my weight, my activity levels, in 2019 the USDA’s advice for health guidance for healthcare professionals to advise their patients is for me at my age, height and weight to be consuming somewhere between 390 and 450 grams of carbohydrate day and to be avoiding as much cholesterol containing foods as possible.
I think a lot of people hear a very compelling argument from some real “experts” and they think I might have an each-way bet here I think the low-carb makes so much sense but the low-fat is what everyone’s saying maybe I should go low-carb and low-fat and I’ll have my foot in both cans. What do you say to those people?
Dr. Rod Tayler: It’s going to be incredibly difficult because the only place left to get your energy from food is protein. Now it’s very hard to go above about 25 or 30 percent. If you’re going to do that you essentially would have to be on a starvation diet. And the problem with the starvation diet and I’m talking about less than 1,200 calories, 1000 calories there are even people touting 600 calorie diets.
In this starvation diet, what happens to the body? Well, the body goes into self-protection mode and comes at the metabolic rate. This means you’re more tired, you’re older, you have less energy, we’re grumpy and you’re hungry all the time. Now if you’ve got incredibly strong-mindedness maybe you can do this for some weeks or a month or in the case of people like we did, they can do it for a bit longer because they’re in the spotlight, they’re exercising like crazy but eventually, that’s not going to work. Cold, tired, grumpy, hungry, angry, not a good way to be. Ultimately will crash and burn.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Yeah, it’s just kind of highlights. I just kind of mentioned that because this makes so much sense and the lower insulin levels the better is well accepted, there is still a very strong marketing reputation ego-based message coming out which contradicts that but if you’re trying to put a foot in each camp I think you’re doomed for failure and I think this highlights the importance of the second half of the equation which is not just low-carb but fat being critical to being able to balance out everything your moods, your energy, levels, your insulin levels and your sustainability on this path.
Listen, I mentioned low carb Down Under. It’s a great movement, it has some amazing resources but if someone was hearing this and thought to themselves yep, that makes sense. What would be a couple of tips you’d give, or you did want to give them to get them started or for many people to re-engage?
Dr. Rod Tayler: Yeah, right. Well, okay, everybody’s got to take responsibility for their own health, and you’ve got to find the things that work for you. Things that might work for you will be the online environment and so there are a lot of good groups out there, low carb groups, low carb down under is one of them. There are great YouTubers out there, are some good books to get your hands on and also low carb Down Under, we’ve got this bunch of doctors out there which are really good.
In some ways we’re asking people to make quite a big change from what they used to and given some help and supporting that is really good. We’d be encouraging people to find out and get them help. We’ve also got a great bunch of low carb diet issues on our sites and working with the low carb doctors. There’s a lot of people from sort of more conservative allied health areas who move into this and mainly love it and that finally, they’re getting good group results for their patients, good results for themselves, good results for their families and good results for their patients.
We’ve got a long way to go and people don’t change easily. Human beings are fairly conservative and tend to follow the herd. And there might have been survival advantages in that at times, but I think following the herd and dietary point of view with the high process food, we take away through high sugar it’s not going to be a recipe for success.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Now listen, I just want to ask you finally because we’ve covered a lot of great territories here and we’re going to have links of course to your low cut Down Under website which as I’ve mentioned has some terrific resources. But taking a step back from this in your role in that organisation from your many years as a health practitioner and anesthetist because we’re all on a journey in our lives, what do you think the biggest challenges for people on their health journey through life in our modern world?
The Biggest Health Challenge
Dr. Rod Tayler: I think the culture that surrounds us. And if I can just take an example of the Tea Room in the operating theatre. It’s a largely female environment. What’s in the Tea Room? Now, these are generally speaking they’re a brighter bunch of people. They have got a qualification, they’re intelligent. What’s still going on? Well, people are always bringing cakpes, chocolates, biscuits. It’s always somewhat imperfect. And just the amount of temptation without that out there often places where you will go out and you’re going to see so you want to pick up a snack in a shop at the service station or something like that. What’s there?
We just surround it really with so many environments and that might include your home environment, your parent’s environment, your work environment. We are surrounded by cheap, sweet, non-nutritious foods which are tempting. And so, it takes a bit of work to stand up against this but increasingly people are standing up against it. They’re getting great results. They’re losing masses of weight, they’re getting their health back. It’s doable but Ron we’ve got a long way to go. There are just traps waiting for you out there every step.
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: Well, Rod I think that’s a good note to finish on because I think our conversation is going to put people on the right path there. So, thank you so much for joining me today. As I said we’ll have links to your website but thank you, I really appreciate your time.
Dr. Rod Tayler: Thanks, Ron. It’s been a pleasure.
Conclusion
Dr. Ron Ehrlich: When it comes to those figures, how many carbs? Be at 130 grams a day, 50 grams a day, 25 grams a day? You actually need to spend about one or two weeks weighing and measuring the food you eat to get an idea of your carbs and protein levels. There are many great carb and protein converters online. I’ve even included a guide in my own book.
The weight of the food is one thing, but the carb and protein levels are another. For example, an apple might be 15 grams of carbohydrate, a banana could be 25 grams, a baked potato 35 grams and a serve of broccoli 6 grams. So, you see there’s quite a difference between serve broccoli at 6 grams and a baked potato at 35 grams. A slice of bread 12 grams, so a sandwich there it is 24 grams. And so, you start to get an idea of what you’re eating. It’s not measuring for life, it’s just getting your head around what you are reading and what low-carb actually means and the same is true for protein and to some degree fat.
Now, if you find this low carb low fat still a little confusing let me shed some light on this issue that you may not have considered. The low fat, three meals day advice has been so entrenched and so many careers and reputations have been built on this advice over the last 40 years that it is not going to be rescinded easily. People are not going to throw their hands “You know what? I was wrong, sorry”.
A great deal of money also has been invested in the pharmaceutical management of some chronic preventable diseases. This is a story that is so easy to miss but once you become aware of it it’s very difficult to ignore. My point here is this – When you hear an expert say publicly that there is no evidence to support a low-carb high healthy fat approach please substitute that very authoritative-sounding statement with the person you are listening to has not read the literature or just chooses to ignore it.
Now I know that sounds harsh but I’m afraid it is true. We will have links to the low-carb Down Under site which includes a fantastic YouTube channel with so many lectures that they have recorded over their meetings, so they have had over 10 million. Yes, 10 million views. We have some great things also planned this year – A new app is coming. Why? To make it easier for you to find and hear the show. So, until next time, this is Dr. Ron Ehrlich. Be well.
This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.