thenutritionwatchdog.com What's in your food? Discover which "healthy" foods are harming your health and which foods protect your body 
By: Cat Ebeling RN, MSN-PHN, co-author of the best-seller: The Diabetes Fix
A few years ago low carb, keto, and carnivore were all the rage, and low-carb diets have helped a lot of my readers, but new research is actually showing us that the right carbs can be very healthy. I want to show you how some of the leanest, healthiest people on the planet eat large amounts of carbohydrates, and what that means for you.
What did the leanest people on earth eat?
A Swedish physician named Staffan Lindeberg studied the native islanders of Kitava, in Papua New Guinea, and found they ate about 70% of their calories as yams, sweet potatoes, taro, and fruit, and were virtually free of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Not far away, in the highlands, the Tukisenta people lived almost entirely on sweet potatoes and were just as lean and healthy.
The Okinawans in Japan, eating their traditional diet, got close to 85% of their calories from carbohydrates and became some of the longest-lived people on earth. The Tsimane in the Amazon live on plantains, rice, and cassava and have the cleanest arteries ever recorded, and closer to home, the Tarahumara of Mexico’s Copper Canyon traditionally thrived on corn and beans with almost no diabetes or heart disease.
Many of these groups eat 400 to 500 grams of carbs a day, far more than most Americans, and what surprised me is how little fat they eat, around 12% of calories for the Okinawans and Tarahumara and as little as 3% for some of the Papua New Guinea highlanders.
I do want to point out, though, that none of these people ate refined flour, excess sugar, packaged snacks, or seed oils, and they moved and worked all day, so it wasn’t the carbs alone that kept them lean, it was their whole lifestyle.
It all comes down to whether your mitochondria, the tiny power plants inside your cells, can burn the fuel you eat. When your mitochondria are healthy and you’re active, they burn through the carbs you eat and use them for energy. But when inactivity, poor sleep, sugar, and seed oils slow them down, glucose backs up into your bloodstream, raises your blood sugar, and gets stored as fat.
What would happen if diabetics ate MORE carbs?
Back in the 1940s, every doctor thought sugar and white rice were about the worst things a diabetic could eat. So when Dr. Walter Kempner at Duke University built his famous 90% carbohydrate diet around white rice, fruit, and sugar, he fully expected it to make his diabetic patients worse. Instead, when he tracked 100 of them, nearly two-thirds saw their fasting blood sugar drop, the group average fell by 47 points, and 18 came off insulin completely, whether or not they lost weight, all while eating about 100 grams of plain white sugar a day!
Another doctor at the University of Kentucky tried a similar plan with diabetic men, using high-fiber, carb-rich foods, and in just two weeks their blood sugar dropped and many of them were able to stop their insulin and other diabetes medications. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s right there in the research.
Does high carb, low fat work, and low carb, high fat work too?
Of course, plenty of my readers have brought their blood sugar down on low carb too, so both clearly work, and Denise Minger, a nutrition researcher and author of Death by Food Pyramid, has a great explanation for why. She spent years in the low-carb, paleo world before digging into this old research, and she found the benefits show up at either end, with very low carb or very low fat. Kempner’s diet and the Kentucky diet both kept fat at around 10% of calories, right in that low-fat sweet spot.
The trouble is the middle zone she calls the “Swampland,” where most Americans eat, with lots of carbs and lots of fat on the same plate. The “low-fat diets” that supposedly failed in studies were usually around 30% fat, barely different from the 34% most Americans already eat, so they never really tested low fat at all. A mixed plate of real food won’t make you fat, but if you’re trying to turn around high blood sugar or stubborn weight, it helps to pick one side or the other.
Insulin and fat storage
It’s become common knowledge that carbs and sugar make insulin rise, and that when insulin goes up, your body stops burning fat. It sounds logical, but it’s not the whole truth. In one study, people cut the same number of calories either by eating fewer carbs or by eating less fat, and while the low-carb group had lower insulin and burned more fat, the low-fat group actually lost more body fat. That doesn’t mean low fat is better, it just means insulin alone doesn’t decide whether you lose fat. Insulin also supports your thyroid, which is why cutting carbs for too long can leave some people feeling cold, tired, and even gaining weight.
Long-term low carb can do something unexpected to your blood sugar, too. Plenty of people do great on keto for the first several months. But some who stay on it a year or more see their fasting blood sugar creep into the low 100s and their A1C edge toward the 6s, because the body gets less efficient at handling carbs. When those people slowly add healthy carbs back in, their numbers usually settle back down.
Back in the ’90s, when low fat was the big diet trend, I ate low fat and high carb, and I lost body fat, but my blood sugar swung up and down and I’d get sleepy after meals, mostly because I wasn’t eating enough protein. Years later I went low carb and found myself tired and craving carbs after hard workouts. These days I eat protein forward with a small amount of healthy carbs like sweet potatoes, squash, rice, and a few vegetables, and I feel better than I ever did on either extreme.
Which carbs are best?
The carbs I personally love are the ones that show up in the healthiest traditional diets, like sweet potatoes, winter squash, beets, white potatoes, colorful root vegetables, and whole fruit. I like to pair them with good protein like grass-fed beef, pastured eggs and chicken, or wild-caught fish. And try to have some carbs at dinner, because when your blood sugar runs low overnight, your body releases cortisol to bring it back up, and that can wake you at 2 or 3 in the morning.
Those lean, healthy island and village people weren’t counting carbs or doing anything fancy. They moved their bodies all day, spent time outside in the sun, slept when it got dark, and ate real food straight from the land, and if you live a little more like they did, your body will use the carbs you eat for fuel instead of storing them as fat.
Along with carbs did you know that this food is the fastest way to lower A1C……
According to the US National Library of Medicine, there’s one special food you should be eating daily.
Because for folks with blood sugar issues, it works just as well (or even better) than metformin.
No one wants to take meds like metformin for the rest of their lives. So if you’d like to dump yours in the trash, you should try this out.
Put all the horrible side effects of metformin behind you. No more diarrhea, stomach aches, feeling sick or losing your appetite.
Instead, you just enjoy this tasty food every day to lower your A1C and lose weight at the same time.
To get the full story and learn which special food to eat, watch the complimentary video here.
