I’m happy that Regina Wilshire (of Weight of the Evidence) is back. I’ve been trying to post a comment there, but Blogger seems to be uncooperating. Here was my point:

One semantic quibble. I’m not sure I would call a diet of 43% carb low-carb. Is it be a low-carb diet when nearly half the cals are from carbs?

I would call it controlled carb, or reduced carb, or even lower carb.

Like I said, it’s a quibble, but IMO, it’s worth differentiating a 43% carb diet compared to the 10-15% carb of an non-maintenance Atkins or Protein Power.

Now, you could argue that those are very low-carb diets, but I think that low-carb sites and books tend to mean very low-carb, not moderate carbs.

I’ve mentioned before that I have had some success with low-carb diets. But in this last go-round, I found myself being really resistant to go back to an Atkins or Protein Power style of eating.

I guess I have two issues percolating in my mind on this subject.

First, I think that one of the reasons I’m a bit leery of the more restrictive low-carb diet is that I’m trying to get away from processed foods, and while you certainly can low-carb without processed foods, making the diet palatable (read: including old familiar foods) seems to involve including some “fake” foods.

The other question I have is more relevant to the specific comment above. Just how low-carb do you really need to go? For every Michael Eades that talks about reviewing thousands of studies in support of very low carb, there’s a Joel Fuhrman who makes the same claim against low carb.

What I believe is that the answer is found in the middle, but that the two sides can’t see it since they so want to be right. Maybe the question isn’t how much saturated fat there is (though I’m sympathetic to the claim that our ancestors didn’t each much saturated fat since their protein was much, much leaner than ours is today).

I think it has a lot more to do with how much refined carbs we eat. And in the context of lots of refined carbs, saturated fat may well be very, very harmful, for example. And that part of the problem with all these studies is that they tend to isolate specific variables (which is necessary for research purposes), but that then tend to be more difficult to translate into real life.

Anyways, for good or ill, I think that “low-carb” has a specific connotation. But maybe that’s just me? Do you think of a 43% carb diet as low-carb?

Update, 5/18:  Mike Eades (of Protein Power fame) has an interesting blog post that looks at this issue of whether it’s restricted carbs or weight loss that leads to improved markers (such as lipid levels). According to his read, the lower the carbs, the more the benefit.