The fall of fat and the rise of carbs

It’s been only in the past few hundred years that there has been a concern for the type of food that a person consumes for health. The concept of watching what we eat goes back to ancient times. However the first feeble attempt to bring back what was believed to be a right way to eat dates back just a bit more than a century. During that time, a British doctor by the name of Harvey prescribed a low-carbohydrate diet for a gentleman named Mr. Banting. This was the first attempt since the Renaissance  to bring a person back to a natural diet.

The first attempts to place foods into different categories were very archaic. We have improved how we categorize but failed to improve health. This has been caused by flawed scientific information which gives people wrong signals about what to consume for optimum health. A good example of this is the concept of altering PH balance. If we were to alter our PH balance through diet it would be far more dangerous for our health than we could imagine. This is where hoaxes such as eating for blood type have spawned from, such ideas are completely nonsensical as we all share a like metabolic structure. Because of this flawed science people are often left confused on how to optimize their diet.The middle and latter part of the 19th century fell victim to endless debates on how to better one's health. During this time there was a large amount of gastrointestinal illness which caused a large boom in cereal manufacturing in order to increase dietary fiber and flush unwanted toxins from the body. Suddenly diabetes was becoming ever common in society and speculation grew in the medical community questioning the source. Doctors then studied the effects of high protein diets on patients suffering from diabetes. It was found during those studies that 50% of protein consumed converted to blood glucose (new more modern techniques have detected that it is actually 66%). When fed lean beef  compared with glucose, lean beef did not contribute to rises in blood glucose.

The researchers conversed on how crucial the full total of glucose ingested was and the rate for which that glucose was released into the blood stream. This study found there was a health benefit for the diabetic patient to gather glucose from protein because of the extremely slow rate of glucose conversion from protein. This research is now lost, to those in medicine who now push for a high-carb diet to diabetics, the worst possible diet for them to follow.

Much attention given to diets was function, instead of nutrition and the economics of farming. Several universities in the early ^1900s were land-grant institutions, one of its purposes was the improvement of farm animals. Beginning in the 30’s to the early 50’s, university biochemists researched isolated cell fragments and isolated organs which were soaked in various amounts of  proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

Just a bit later, others entered the same research, although they were interested in the whole body and its diseases, instead of cell fragments. Their initial large scale dietary claim regarding how diet affects health happened in 53, when Dr. Ancel Keys, from the University of Minnesota, published a study coined "the Seven Countries Study", this implicated fat in the ever-increasing pandemic of heart disease. This report was the final straw on the camels back for fat,  destroying any future for the promotion of a fat-friendly philosophy, and enabling the rise of glucose-loving belief systems to reign.

Suddenly an outcry against Keys’s research appeared in medical journals however the outcry was ignored  with the exception of a few. Even though the next 30 years were filled with a variety of opinions, by 85 the pro-fat rebellion was ended. The FDA, drug companies, insurance companies and lobbyists gave support to the anti fat campaign as fat was a cause for heart disease. A series of subsequent events supported the sugar-loving ideology ever-increasingly: using mass marketing, television, professional sports, and furthering of health clubs and nutrition stores.

Health and fitness, in particular, has exhaled a vast, lasting influence on people. Prior to the 70s, most had little interest in exercise for health. It changed when the growth of the aerobics movement, brought to popularity by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, and by the increasing popularity of the bodybuilding industry, large exercise machine manufacturers like Arthur Jones and his Nautilus machines caused it a surge of popularity.

New-gen exercise fans added to the rising of health clubs and to an eruption of support to the health food industry and their ideology which resembled vegetarianism increasingly. I was highly influential in these movements, and during this time I decided to become a scientist, I hoped to gather science to renew my body and health. It was also a hope to gain expertise in exercise physiology to guide patrons of my personal fitness club.
 

Glycogen loading first appeared in 1939. The researchers allowed patients only animal protein and fats over many days before working out until exhaustion. The result was the patients when fed carbohydrates, after a three day period void of carbs, far outperformed those consuming meat and fat alone.

Now in the 60’s, Scandinavian exercise physiology labs spawned an experiment series resembling the 39 study. The main tactic was maximizing the muscle’s glycogen content during exercise by first depleting the muscle, then glycogen over-compensation, in which the patient ingested an extremely high-carb diet. This sort of research was the focus of well over a thousand Ph.D. dissertations in the following thirty years.