Actually carbs are necessary and carbs are sugars. In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long. Personally I am not sure I am buying the narrative about fructose - but it is plausible that it might be bad - but glucose you'll have in your blood even if you don't eat any sugar - because your own body produces it if you don't get it from the food directly.
I wonder why nobody has started sweetening stuff with glucose as a 'healthy sweetener'. It is maybe 3 times more expensive than normal sugar - but I guess this is mostly because it is not a common product - cane sugar in Poland is of the same price - and the impact on the price of the end product would be marginal.
> Actually carbs are necessary
This is NOT true. Carbs are ONE form of energy that the body can use for fuel. Fat is the other one.
> people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.
I guess you're saying I don't exist?
For about 10 years, I haven't eaten carbs beyond the VERY rare cookie or two every other month and the insignificant trace amounts in above-ground leafy vegetables and the like. I'm not alone, there are lots of us who eat this way. Whole online communities, full of people who each have their own reasons. I did it for general health and fitness reasons, others do it to reverse their type 2 diabetes.
In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.
The planet used to be dotted with cultures that eat animals and fish primarily or exclusively for hundreds to thousands of years. The Inuit, Mongolian nomads, tribes in the Amazon, etc. They mostly don't exist anymore. (But not because of their diet.)
It's not a big group, but there ARE modern people who live on a carnivore diet for years on end and don't appear to suffer any notable long-term effects. Generally these are either extreme keto/paleo adherents, bodybuilders, or those who are trying to manage a medical condition.
> Angus Barbieri
So far as I can tell, he consumed yeast extract, which all my suppliers of assure me does in fact contain carbohydrates.
But perhaps Barbieri ate a special kind that didn't?
> In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.
Read a little about this on Wikipedia, that's insane! I'm still being stubborn and halfway refusing to believe there were no bad side effects, though lol
OK - I stand corrected on the point of consuming carbs.
But our body produces glucose anyway - so consuming or not does not change much. Brain needs glucose.
> Brain needs glucose.
That is actually incorrect, just a common misconception. You might want to read up on ketogenic diets, and specifically the state of ketosis itself.
If you have an ultra-low carb diet (<30 g/day) with only moderate protein consumption (<30% of daily required calories), then the body can’t produce enough glucose to power the brain. Instead, it starts to convert fats to ketones in the liver, and the brain actually runs fine on ketones as well. Alternatively, if you’re not underweight, you can fast for 24 hours with a moderate activity level, and should enter ketosis regardless of diet (as you start converting stored body fat into ketones to power the brain).
Interestingly, you then notice that the “low blood sugar” mental haze disappears as your brain switches over to ketones, and you kinda avoid the rollercoaster between mental highs and lows throughout the day that you usually get with a carb-based diet – instead, mental energy is kinda just at a constant “medium” throughout the day. It’s also easy to measure more objectively, if you pick up a glucose monitoring device + “keto sticks” from a pharmacy.
I saw this randomly the other day - what do you make of it?
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2020/10/excessive-ketone-me...
have you ever actually tried to read about indian diet on Amazon? ... it's not because they hunt(ed) fish and capybaras that you can make such a claim, go figure
i also tried to find a link for a paper here but it's been a long time but basically the population we have the smallest register of disease is an indian tribe around the coast of South America that mostly has a super high carbohydrate consumption compared to the rest of the world (will edit and comment if i find it)
edit: yeah, doubt i'll find but another counterpoint, go look at the rate of disease of Eskimos... they eat meat only!
> In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.
What is “long?” There are people living years on no carbs at all.
Who is living years without any carbs?
The Inuit, for starters. Oh, and me.
So far as I can tell, Inuit get about 15–20% of their calories from carbohydrates, because of all the glycogen from the raw meat they consume.
But I am only looking at summaries outside a bunch of paywalls, so I can't confirm the quotes on the wikipedia page.
There are no essential carbohydrates. Essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids, yes. Essential carbohydrates, no.