Jeff Volek, Ph.D., and registered
dietitian and professor in the Human Science Department at Ohio State
University, has done enormous work in the field of high-fat, low-carbohydrate
diets, investigating how it affects human health and athletic performance.
Volek has published many scientific
articles as well as several books, including "The
Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living,"
and "The
Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance."
Both of these books were co-authored
with Dr. Stephen Phinney, a physician and true pioneer in this field, who has
studied low-carb diets even longer than Volek.
Starting out as a dietician, Volek
was taught that low-fat diets were healthy and that saturated fats and
cholesterol should be avoided. But in working with diabetics, he kept feeling
that something was "off." Why should diabetics eat so many carbs?
"In essence, it drove me
to want to understand metabolism and nutrition at a much deeper
level," he says. "I was also into
self-experimentation ... I was at the time into very low-fat diets, thinking
that was how I would optimize my own health. But I decided to experiment with a
very low-carb diet."
Low-Carb Diets Can Benefit Athletes
and Non-Athletes Alike
His experimentation began in the
early '90s and, to his great surprise, his low-carb experiment proved to be
anything but harmful. This fueled his passion for
understanding how humans respond to diets that are very low in carbohydrates, and led him to continue his education. He has now spent the last 15 years
conducting research in this area, and the outcomes from most experiments have
been very encouraging.
"The science continues to
point in the direction that there are a lot of applications for these diets for
a large number of people. We're still sorting out a lot
of the details, but clearly we need to change the way we feed Americans and the
way we think about nutrition in order to reverse ... obesity and
diabetes."
He's also done research on low- and
non-fiber carb diets and athletic performance, and here too results have proved
quite positive — despite running counter to everything he was taught about diet
and performance in school, and in most of the scientific literature as well.
"It's been an interesting
journey to say the least ...The things I was reading, the things I was taught
were not really based on a lot of science, and were a lot of half-truths and
misinformation, which still persist today,"he notes.
Is Your Diet Driving Your Metabolism
in the Right Direction?
Most of the food (fuel) people eat
these days is moving their metabolism in the wrong direction. The Westernized
diet constantly biases you toward using more nonfiber carbs for fuel.
Most Americans are primarily burning
glucose as their primary fuel, which actually inhibits their
body's ability to access and burn body fat. Healthy fat, meanwhile, is a far
preferable sort of fuel, as it burns far more efficiently than carbs. As noted
by Volek, humans evolved to primarily burn fat as fuel — not carbs — and yet
that's not how we're feeding our bodies.
"As a result, we're
running into a lot of metabolic problems, because we're constantly inhibiting
our body's ability to burn fuel that we evolved to burn,"he says.
We all have to eat; we need fuel to
live. Without generating ATP you cannot survive at all. The question is how to
do that efficiently, without generating harmful reactive oxygen species (ROS),
which can destroy your mitochondria and contribute to disease?
It's all about keeping your
mitochondria healthy, and low-carb,
high-fat diets tend to do that far more effectively
than high-carb, low-fat diets.
Healthy Fat Is a 'Cleaner' Burning
Fuel
An indirect measurement included in
one of Volek's books shows that when people burn fat as their primary fuel,
their respiratory quotient can go down as low as 0.7 as opposed to 1, which
suggests they're generating less carbon dioxide.
Regardless of the fuel your body
burns, you're going to generate carbon dioxide and water. But when you burn
fat, you generate 30 percent less carbon dioxide, suggesting it's a lot
"cleaner" fuel.
"To use the term 'clean,'
that's kind of a provocative term, but I think it is an appropriate one because
... there's a lot of 'exhaust' associated with burning carbs for fuel ... free
radicals, reactive oxygen species ... That contributes to the metabolic
problems we're seeing in this country."
Also, the most efficient way to
train your body to use fat for fuel is to remove some of the sugars and
starches from your diet. According to Volek, that's true for everyone, whether
you're an elite athlete or a sedentary diabetic.
In essence, the reason why low-carb
diets work so well is because it helps you escape this non-fiber, carb-based
metabolism that depends on insulin levels to drive blood sugar into cells and
use carbs for fuel.
Volek also introduces another term:
"carb intolerance" — a metabolic impairment that you suffer from if
you're insulin resistant or prediabetic. As noted by Volek:
"It really makes no sense
if you're carb intolerant to be consuming half your energy from nonfiber carbs,
and to be trying to force your body to burn more carbs."
In Health,
Dr. Niewierowski
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