A Low Carb Diet Plan That Can Save Your Life.

From: Authority Nutrition: An evidence based approach.

There is a lot of scientific evidence that this type of diet is the best option for people who want to lose weight, optimize health and lower the risk of disease.

Photo by Adam Fields.

A Low Carb Diet Meal Plan

What foods you should eat depends on a few things, including how healthy you are, how much you exercise and how much weight you have to lose.

Consider all of this as a general guideline, not something written in stone.

The Basics

Eat: Meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, high-fat dairy, fats, healthy oils and maybe even some tubers and non-gluten grains.

Don’t Eat: Sugar, HFCS, wheat, seed oils, trans fats, artificial sweeteners, “diet” and low-fat products and highly processed foods.

Foods to Avoid

You should avoid these 7 foods, in order of importance:

• Sugar: Soft drinks, fruit juices, agave, candy, ice cream and many others.
• Gluten Grains: Wheat, spelt, barley and rye. Includes breads and pastas.
• Trans Fats: “Hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils.
• High Omega-6 Seed- and Vegetable Oils: Cottonseed-, soybean-, sunflower-, grapeseed-, corn-, safflower and canola oils.
• Artificial Sweeteners: Aspartame, Saccharin, Sucralose, Cyclamates and Acesulfame Potassium. Use Stevia instead.
• “Diet” and “Low-Fat” Products: Many dairy products, cereals, crackers, etc.
• Highly Processed Foods: If it looks like it was made in a factory, don’t eat it.

You MUST read ingredients lists, even on foods labelled as “health foods.”

Low Carb Food List – Foods to Eat

You should base your diet on these real, unprocessed, low-carb foods.

• Meat: Beef, lamb, pork, chicken and others. Grass-fed is best.
• Fish: Salmon, trout, haddock and many others. Wild-caught fish is best.
• Eggs: Omega-3 enriched or pastured eggs are best.
• Vegetables: Spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and many others.
• Fruits: Apples, oranges, pears, blueberries, strawberries.
• Nuts and Seeds: Almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, etc.
• High-Fat Dairy: Cheese, butter, heavy cream, yogurt.
• Fats and Oils: Coconut oil, butter, lard, olive oil and cod fish liver oil.

If you’re healthy, active and don’t need to lose weight then you can afford to eat a bit more carbs.

• Tubers: Potatoes, sweet potatoes and some others.
• Non-gluten grains: Rice, oats, quinoa and many others.
• Legumes: Lentils, black beans, pinto beans, etc. (If you can tolerate them).

You can have these in moderation if you want:

• Dark Chocolate: Choose organic brands with 70% cocoa or higher.
• Wine: Choose dry wines with no added sugar or carbs.

Dark chocolate is high in antioxidants and may provide health benefits if you eat it in moderation. However, be aware that both dark chocolate and alcohol will hinder your progress if you eat/drink too much.

Drink

• Coffee
• Tea
• Water
• Carbonated soda without artificial sweeteners.

A Sample Low-Carb Menu For One Week

This is a sample menu for one week on a low carb diet plan.

It provides less than 50 grams of total carbs per day, but as I mentioned above if you are healthy and active you can go beyond that.

Monday

• Breakfast: Omelet with various vegetables, fried in butter or coconut oil.
• Lunch: Grass-fed yogurt with blueberries and a handful of almonds.
• Dinner: Cheeseburger (no bun), served with vegetables and salsa sauce.

Tuesday

• Breakfast: Bacon and eggs.
• Lunch: Leftover burgers and veggies from the night before.
• Dinner: Salmon with butter and vegetables.

Wednesday

• Breakfast: Eggs and vegetables, fried in butter or coconut oil.
• Lunch: Shrimp salad with some olive oil.
• Dinner: Grilled chicken with vegetables.

Thursday

• Breakfast: Omelet with various vegetables, fried in butter or coconut oil.
• Lunch: Smoothie with coconut milk, berries, almonds and protein powder.
• Dinner: Steak and veggies.

Friday

• Breakfast: Bacon and Eggs.
• Lunch: Chicken salad with some olive oil.
• Dinner: Pork chops with vegetables.

Saturday

• Breakfast: Omelet with various veggies.
• Lunch: Grass-fed yogurt with berries, coconut flakes and a handful of walnuts.
• Dinner: Meatballs with vegetables.

Sunday

• Breakfast: Bacon and Eggs.
• Lunch: Smoothie with coconut milk, a bit of heavy cream, chocolate-flavoured protein powder and berries.
• Dinner: Grilled chicken wings with some raw spinach on the side.

Include a variety of vegetables in your diet. If your goal is to remain under 50 grams of carbs per day, then there is room for plenty of veggies and one fruit per day.

If you want to see examples of some of my go-to meals, read this:
7 Healthy Low-Carb Meals in Under 10 Minutes.

Again, if you’re healthy, lean and active, you can add some tubers like potatoes and sweet potatoes, as well as some healthier grains like rice and oats.

Some Healthy, Low-Carb Snacks

There is no health reason to eat more than 3 meals per day, but if you get hungry between meals then here are some healthy, easy to prepare low-carb snacks that can fill you up:

• A Piece of Fruit
• Full-fat Yogurt
• A Hard-Boiled Egg or Two
• Baby Carrots
• Leftovers From The Night Before
• A Handful of Nuts
• Some Cheese and Meat

Eating at Restaurants

At most restaurants, it is fairly easy to make your meals LCRF-friendly.

1. Ask them to fry your food in real butter.
2. Tell the waiter that you are intolerant/allergic to both sugar and gluten. This avoids annoying questions and weird looks.
3. You can replace bread and potatoes with extra vegetables.

A Simple Low-Carb Shopping List

A good rule is to shop at the perimeter of the store, where the whole foods are likelier to be found.

Organic and grass-fed foods are best, but only if you can easily afford them. Even if you don’t buy organic, your diet will still be a thousand times better than the standard western diet.

Try to choose the least processed option that still fits into your price range.

• Meat (Beef, lamb, pork, chicken, bacon)
• Fish (Fatty fish like salmon is best)
• Eggs (Choose Omega-3 enriched or pastured eggs if you can)
• Butter
• Coconut Oil (Choose Extra Virgin)
• Lard
• Olive Oil
• Cheese
• Heavy Cream
• Sour Cream
• Yogurt (full-fat, unsweetened)
• Blueberries (can be bought frozen)
• Nuts
• Olives
• Fresh vegetables: greens, peppers, onions, etc.
• Frozen vegetables: broccoli, carrots, various mixes.
• Salsa Sauce
• Condiments: sea salt, pepper, garlic, mustard, etc.

I recommend clearing your pantry of all unhealthy temptations if you can: chips, candy, ice cream, sodas, juices, breads, cereals and baking ingredients like wheat flour and sugar.

To visit this website click the link below

http://authoritynutrition.com/low-carb-diet-meal-plan-and-menu/

Why Are We Fat? Is It Gluttony, or Is Your Fat Actually Hungry?

Why Are We Fat? Is It Gluttony, or Is Your Fat Actually Hungry?

What if everything you ever learned about weight loss was wrong? What if losing weight has nothing to do with calories—counting them or cutting them out by sheer willpower? What if, in fact, most health professionals (including doctors and dietitians), our own government and especially the food industry are giving us weight loss advice guaranteed to make us fat?

Here’s their mantra: “Eat less and exercise more. The secret to weight loss is energy balance. There are no good or bad calories. It’s all about moderation.”

If you doubt that this advice could be wrong, just look around. We have tripled our obesity rates since 1960, and in the last decade, cases of type 2 diabetes in children have increased by over 30 percent. In 1980, there were no children with type 2 diabetes (formerly known as adult onset diabetes), and now, there are over 50,000. Seven out of ten Americans are overweight. The advice is not working. Could it be the wrong advice?

Nobody wakes up in the morning saying, “Hey, I want to gain weight today. I am going to overeat. I want to be fat.”

Rather, we have a $60 billion weight loss industry. It specializes in helping people count calories, eat less and exercise more. When are we going to realize that that our approach—as a scientific community and as policy makers—is failing miserably at stemming the tsunami of obesity and related health, social and economic costs?

Could it be we have it all wrong? Could it be the world is round, not flat, even though it looks flat, just as it seems that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight?

The answer is yes. Our focus on calories has missed the mark entirely. Even if you held the Guinness world record for calorie counting, you could easily be off by 100 calories a day. Do that for 30 years, and you will be 20 to 30 pounds overweight.

The End of Counting Calories

David Ludwig and Mark Epstein published the most important scientific paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association since the Watson and Cricks paper on DNA in 1953, which changed our whole way of thinking about genes. They also explained their findings in the New York Timespiece, “Always Hungry? Here’s Why.”

It’s not that Isaac Newton and his first law of thermodynamics was wrong. It’s right—energy is conserved in a system. This is the whole foundation of our calories in/calories out, energy balance concept of weight loss. Just eat less and exercise more, and all the pounds will melt off.

But there is one fatal flaw in that thinking. The law states that energy is conserved in a “system.” It is true that, in a vacuum, all calories are the same. A thousand calories of Coke and a thousand calories of broccoli burned in a laboratory will release the same amount of energy.

But all bets are off when you eat the Coke or the broccoli. These foods have to be processed by your metabolism (not a closed system). Coke and broccoli trigger very different biochemical responses in the body—different hormones, neurotransmitters and immune messengers.

The Coke will spike blood sugar and insulin and disrupt neurotransmitters, leading to increased hunger and fat storage, while the thousand calories of broccoli will balance blood sugar and make you feel full, cut your appetite and increase fat burning.

Same calories—profoundly different effects on your body.

Is Your Fat Hungry?

Dr. Ludwig, for the first time, explains why. It’s not overeating that makes you fat. It’s being fat that makes you overeat. Once you start to consume refined carbs, such as bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and any form of sugar, you start making a certain kind of fat cells called VAT or visceral adipose tissue.

This is no ordinary fat. It is super fat. Hungry fat. Dangerous fat. This fat starts an inexorable cascade that leads to obesity. It’s like falling down an icy slope where it’s almost impossible to stop yourself. You need a big ice axe and crampons. We ordinary mortals are no match for this hungry fat.

Here’s what happens.

Those hungry fat cells suck up all the available fuel in your blood stream (glucose, fats, ketones). Your body then thinks, “Oh, my god, I am starving. I better eat more and slow my metabolism, so I don’t die.” The problem is, anything you eat gets sucked up into those fat cells around your belly, leading to a vicious cycle of hunger, overeating, fat storage and a slowing down of your metabolism. No wonder we gain weight and can’t lose it.

The key trigger for all this is a simple common hormone that we all need (but not too much of).

Insulin.

If we make too much insulin, it drives the fuel in our blood into our fat cells. Too much insulin also does a lot of other bad things like cause heart attacks, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, cancer and dementia.

When it comes to causing spikes of insulin that start this miserable chain reaction, not all calories are created equally. Sugar and refined carb calories are the culprits. Americans eat, on average, about 152 pounds of sugar and 146 pounds of flour a year (almost a pound of sugar and flour per person per day!). These are actually pharmacologic doses of sugar and flour!

Eat More Calories, Weigh Less?

There are many studies showing just how different sugar and fat calories are. Most scientists still hold on to the dogma that fat makes you fat, that fat causes high cholesterol and that low fat is the way to go to live a long healthy life. Plenty of evidence proves otherwise. What if the fact that this conventional wisdom is completely wrong is what has actually caused our obesity epidemic?

Dr. Ludwig points to studies in which all calories are held to be equal, but those participants kept on a low sugar and refined carb diet burned 325 more calories a day than those eating a low fat diet. Bottom line: Eating a high carb, low fat diet slows down your metabolism.

Most striking was an animal study (and yes, we are not animals but the results are still very impressive). The study found that animals eating a low fat diet put on 70 percent more body fat even while eating fewer calories than animals eating a low carb diet.

Let me say this again. Animals eating a low fat diet and fewer calories got fatter than those eating more calories and a low sugar and carb diet—70 percent fatter.

If you restrict your calories, you will end up triggering very ancient biological adaptions that protect us from starvation. You will slow your metabolism and get a lot hungrier.

You can’t voluntarily control your weight over the long term. Willpower is no match for these ancient programmed hormones that make sure you don’t starve to death.

The Key to Automatic Weight Loss

Dr. Ludwig proposes a novel, radical but scientifically true way to solve the obesity epidemic once and for all.

Don’t worry about how much you eat, because you will never be able to control that. Rather, focus onwhat you eat, the quality of the food you eat, the composition of the food you eat (high in fiber, good quality protein and fat, low in starch and sugar). Then, you won’t be hungry and will shift from fat storage to fat burning. And you will prevent most chronic disease including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and dementia.

10 Take Home Lessons: Forget the Calories, Focus on the Quality of Your Diet

Here are the take home lessons from Dr. Ludwig’s paper:

1. Overeating doesn’t make you fat. Your fat cells make you overeat.
2. You make hungry fats cells by eating sugar and refined carbs.
3. Restricting your calories will slow your metabolism, make you hungry and guarantee that your weight loss attempts will fail.
4. Eating a higher fat, higher protein, lower sugar and refined carb diet will speed up your metabolism and cut your hunger.
5. Controlling what you eat is much easier than controlling how much you eat.
6. Forget calorie counting. It’s not about the calories but about diet quality and dietary composition. Just try eating 1,000 calories of broccoli.
7. End our scientifically outdated position that all calories are equal and weight loss is simply a matter of eating fewer calories than you burn.
8. Lower insulin by a sugar detox, and watch your body lose weight effortlessly without hunger or cravings.
9. To learn more, watch the movie Fed Up or read The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet (a medically designed program to cut insulin and detox from sugar and refined carbs).
10. Stop blaming yourself for lack of willpower, and start empowering yourself by eating real, whole, fresh food that’s low in sugar and starch.

Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD

About Mark Hyman, MD

MARK HYMAN, MD is dedicated to identifying and addressing the root causes of chronic illness through a groundbreaking whole-systems medicine approach called Functional Medicine. He is a family physician, a eight-time New York Times bestselling author, and aninternational leader in his field. Through his private practice, education efforts, writing, research, and advocacy, he empowers others to stop managing symptoms and start treating the underlying causes of illness, thereby tackling our chronic-disease epidemic. More about Dr. Hyman or on Functional Medicine. Click here to view all Press and Media Releases

View all posts by Mark Hyman, MD →

High BDNF Tied to Lower Alzheimer’s Risk

Dr. Perlmutter gives us some information on growth hormone for the brain.

High BDNF Tied to Lower Alzheimer’s Risk

Growth hormone for the brain. What a concept. Truth is, science has indeed identified a protein that does exactly that, and it’s called brain-derived neurotrophic hormone (BDNF). Knowing about BDNF is even more important now, as a new report clearly links higher levels of BDNF to remarkably reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

In a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Boston University measured baseline BDNF levels in a group of adults and followed them for up to ten years. They found that those individuals with the highest baseline BDNF levels developed dementia 50% less often compared to those with the lowest levels.

BDNF is a protein that plays a pivotal role in neuronal health. Your brain contains as many as 100 billion neurons and the health, vitality, and, perhaps most importantly, functionality of each one of your brain cells is intimately influenced by BDNF.

Early in life, BDNF regulates not only the growth of brain cells, but also their ability to make connections to other brain cells, a process fundamental to our ability to create a more powerful brain. But keep in mind that the process of growing new brain cells, neurogenesis, continues throughout your entire life! Think of it. As you are reading this report, your brain is actively producing new brain cells, and brain cells are always busy creating new connections with their neighbors in a process called neuroplasticity.

Both of these events, neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, are directly enhanced by BDNF, and who wouldn’t more brain cells that are more connected? No doubt you are now wondering what you can do to get hold of this magic elixir that builds a better brain. But while BDNF isn’t something you can buy at the pharmacy, the good news is that you can absolutely increase your body’s ability to create this powerful protein and pave the way for a healthier, more resilient brain.

I’ve discussed how the omega-3 oil DHA can enhance BDNF as well as how it can be enhanced with aerobic exercise in previous posts. You can get a lot more information beginning on page 126 in Grain Brain.

I’ve also written about how sunlight can turn on BDNF production. In this report from Dr. Marc Molendijk and colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands, a profound seasonal variation in blood level of BDNF was observed with increasing amounts of BDNF found in the blood during months with the most sunshine. Interestingly, they were able to correlate levels of BDNF with the diagnosis of depression as well with low BDNF levels highly related to this diagnosis. This information has important implications. Not only does it offer up yet another lifestyle modification to provide our bodies with more BDNF (sunlight exposure), it might well explain why individuals may become depressed during winter months and when living in places with little sunshine.

Despite the literally hundreds of millions of research going in to finding a way to treat Alzheimer’s, it looks like that prospect remains a long way off. So we should pay attention to research that shows how the disease could be prevented in the first place. Getting sunshine, exercise and taking DHA are proven methods to raise BDNF, and now we see the science that clearly correlates elevated levels of this powerfully important factor with reduced Alzheimer’s risk.

New Research Links Gluten Sensitivity to Multiple Autoimmune Diseases

Dr. OsborneGlutenfreesociety.org

New Research Links Gluten Sensitivity to Multiple Autoimmune Diseases

Research continues to link the autoimmune spectrum of diseases to gluten sensitivity. In a recent study, gluten intolerance was found to be present in patients with multiple types of autoimmune conditions:

"Results of our studies revealed in the group of 110 patients with diagnosed gluten enteropathy, coexistence of autoimmune disease, such as diabetes mellitus type 1 in 7.2% cases, hyperthyreosis on 1.8% of cases, vitiligo in 0.9% of cases, primary biliary cirrhosis in 2% of cases and rheumatoidal arthritis in 0,9 of cases. In the group of 80 ulcerative colitis patients, coexistence of celiac disease basing on serological histopatological investigation was found in 4 patients (5%)."

A previous post on Gluten Free Society showed the connection between gluten induced liver disease (autoimmune hepatitis). Now another new study points more autoimmune disease overlap in patients with autoimmune hepatitis.

"A total of 111 patients (40%) were diagnosed with additional autoimmune diseases...autoimmune thyroiditis was the most common concurrent disease (28 patients, 10%). Other concurrent autoimmune diseases comprised vitiligo (5 patients),rheumatoid arthritis (5 patients), Sjogren syndrome (4 patients), ulcerative colitis (4 patients), conjunctivitis (4 patients), celiac disease (3 patients), systemic lupus erythematodes (2 patients), type I diabetes (2 patients), multiple sclerosis (2 patients), polymyalgia rheumatica (2 patients), and urticaria (2 patients). One patient each was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, autoimmune gastritis, collagenous colitis, hypophysitis, and sarcoidosis."

Sources

J Clin Gastroenterol. 2010 Jan 15. [Epub ahead of print]
Przegl Lek. 2009;66(7):370-2.

Gluten Free Society's Stance:

Although we have identified a number of environmental and genetic triggers for autoimmunity, the only known cause for any autoimmune disease in gluten. When will doctors quit trying to micro analyze autoimmune diseases and look at the obvious connections?

Many autoimmune disease symptoms are so similar that the only way to differentiate them is by running specific antibody tests. The problem with this is that the tests can sometimes be negative and sometimes be positive. A common example of this is between rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. For most patients two simple lab tests will determine which diagnosis is given(positive RF and ANA antibodies for lupus).

Treatment for most autoimmune conditions consists of steroids, DMARDS, and other anti-inflammatories. Do doctors ever consider where the inflammation is coming from?

Why is it so hard to accept that simple dietary changes can improve disease and health? The answer is simple. Nutrition is not taught in medical school. Most doctors devalue or dismiss nutrition because they don't understand it. Unfortunately this translates into more drugs, less real health care solutions, and sicker people.

Autoimmune diseases collectively are the number 1 disease condition in the U.S. As the American diet becomes more and more processed, so too does autoimmune disease increase. It is time to look at food a little more seriously. As we have linked gluten sensitivity as a cause of celiac disease, we should turn our sites to food with the other autoimmune disease as well. To ignore this is folly.

As the wise Thomas Edison put it:

"The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."

It Starts With Food is one of the books I recommend most often. People often ask me for my advise on diet and lifestyle. I think this book has sound ideas and easy to understand explanations.