The Endless War of Carbs vs. Fat
The type/quality of carbs or fat matters much more than your macro ratio of each
If you’re eating the *correct* carbs or fats I don’t think it matters much which you choose, as long as you’re getting a foundation of animal protein, fat, and nutrients.
I’ve been on both sides of the “carbs vs. fat war” over the years and have spent a lot of time thinking about it, but this is my final conclusion.
In the end, it really comes down to your goals and preferences. If you feel great filling up the rest of your diet with fat, have an “addiction” to sugary/carby foods, or have a brain tumor (I have a friend who essentially reversed his brain tumor with a ketogenic diet), I urge you to continue to do what’s working for you. If you like to lift weights and you do well with a bunch of clean carbs, have at it.
If people understand there are good and bad versions of each, they can avoid the right ones and embrace the others. Just like meat gets thrown under the bus when people eat fast food, good sources of carbohydrate may be falling to the same fate.
The type of carbs or fat you consume are hugely important! I believe that’s why carbs get a bad name so often. It’s also why fat gets a bad name (the “mainstream” blames fat for most problems when they should be looking specifically at seed oils, for example).
THERE’S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
🥩 Seed oils & animal fat
🥔 A box of pasta & a potato
🍓 Breakfast cereal & whole fruit
Get your baseline of animal protein/fat/nutrients and the rest doesn’t really matter as long as you’re choosing the whole, unprocessed version.
That’s what I posted recently on social media. I’ll break down each part of this statement below.
A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
The thought experiment here is as follows: if you’re eating a baseline of animal protein, fat, and nutrients - we’ll say 60% of your calories - then what’s the difference when looking at different energy sources to fill up the remainder?
There’s 2 emerging trains of thoughts on diets in the animal-based community. Though we consider both of these approaches to be part of the Sapien framework, some people are taking a high fat approach, while others are steering towards a higher carb diet with fruit, honey, and potatoes or even white rice.
The common link between these diets is that they’re based around whole foods and completely devoid of seed oils.
It seems like carbohydrates have taken the blame for a lot of the problems that have been caused by seed oils. And somehow whole food carbohydrates have been lumped together with refined carbohydrates and processed foods that are actually a combination of carbs and seed oils – like donuts.
So if 60% of our diet is filled with animal-based foods that are rich in protein, vitamins, minerals, and saturated fat, where should we be getting the remaining 40% of our calories from? What’s the difference between filling the remainder of our diet with fruit, potatoes, and cream compared with added sugar, refined grains, and seed oils?
🥩 SEED OILS vs ANIMAL FAT
If you compose your diet of entirely whole foods, you’re not going to be consuming any vegetable oils and you’ll naturally have a lower intake of omega-6 fats. If you need fat to cook with, then stick to a quality animal fat like grass-fed butter.
You see, vegetable oils aren’t made from vegetables. They’re made in factories and extracted from seeds using harsh chemicals and high temperatures. They’re the furthest thing from a whole food.
I’ve written about the problems with “vegetable” oils before and I’ve done many podcasts on it (here and here).
One of the biggest problems with vegetable oils is that they’re in everything. Every restaurant cooks with them. Big food corporations stuff them into their processed foods. They’re even found in MOST olive oils and avocado oils, according to UC Davis.
Additionally, consuming seed oils leaves us with an excessive amount of omega 6 fats, namely linoleic acid, in our diet and in our adipose tissue. As linoleic acid accumulates in our body it contributes to chronic inflammation and a host of chronic diseases. Read more about the problems with linoleic acid here.
At the end of the day, whether you’re filling the rest of your animal-based diet with grass-fed animal fats or whole food carbohydrates, you’re going to be avoiding these oils. And by eliminating seed oils, you’ll be protecting yourself against the chronic diseases that are appearing across our population and likely stem from decades of seed oil consumption.
🥔 A BOX OF PASTA vs A POTATO
All carbs are not created equal. Yet, for some reason, people assume that eating carbs means eating bread, cookies, pasta, and cereal. But certain carbs are less inflammatory than others.
Take a potato compared to a box of pasta, for example. Right off the bat, a potato is the better option because it is a fresh, whole food. Baked potatoes are proven to be satiating when eaten in this unprocessed form.
While pasta is problematic for at least 4 reasons:
It’s a highly processed, refined food
It’s fortified with iron
Grains are genetically modified and sprayed with glyphosate and other chemicals.
It’s high in antinutrients like gluten as well as less known compounds like phytates.
The main factors when assessing carbohydrate sources are; the level of processing, the additives, and the growing methods. Gabor Erdosi (who was interviewed on episode 21 of the Peak Human podcast) details the many reasons biochemically your body sees processed plant foods/carbohydrates differently than whole foods in this excellent presentation.
The short answer is the more processed a carbohydrate is, the faster it hits your system and the higher blood sugar and insulin response. I’ll detail more about the additives and growing methods in the next section.
🍓 BREAKFAST CEREAL vs WHOLE FRUIT
Fruit often gets hate for being high in carbs and less nutrient dense than animal-sourced foods. However, fruit is a great, clean source of carbs when compared to something like cereal.
Fruit contains fiber which blunts its glycemic response. It’s also hydrating and can be a rich source of vitamin C which you may not be able to get from animal-based foods.
One of the biggest problems with cereal is that it’s filled with iron. If you crush up cereal in a ziploc bag, and put a magnet to it, you will be able to extract iron filings from the cereal. Now, this isn’t the heme-iron that you’d find in real foods like red meat. The heme iron from whole foods, like beef, is well absorbed and utilized by our body.
The iron in cereal is known as non-heme iron. It’s hardly utilized by our body and like polyunsaturated fats, it is extremely susceptible to oxidation. Excess non-heme iron has been tied to a host of chronic diseases from diabetes to Alzheimer's to cancer. Some have even pointed out a link between iron fortification and the incidence of celiac disease.
It’s funny how big food was forced to fortify their highly processed grains to compensate for the lack of nutrients. Instead of embracing nutrient dense foods like red meat and eggs, they stuffed our foods with the wrong kind of iron so that they could sell more products.
Another problematic ingredient in cereal is glyphosate. Cereal literally comes with a serving of weed killer. One organization tested 28 children’s cereals and found that all 28 exceeded the “safe” limit for glyphosate. One of the cereals constrained 18X the amount of glyphosate that is considered safe.
GET YOUR BASELINE OF ANIMAL PROTEIN/FAT/NUTRIENTS
These comparisons are meant to illustrate the fact that including carbs as part of an animal-based diet doesn’t mean returning to the standard American diet. It’s possible to include whole food carbs without all the downsides of foods like cereal and pasta.
There’s several examples of long-lived populations who’ve thrived on high carb diets. The blue zones are probably the best example. The Okinawans famously have traditionally eaten a diet based on sweet potatoes for the majority of their calories. They also included local seasonal vegetables, seafood, and nose to tail pork.
Dr. Chris Knobbe brings up a few other traditional cultures who eat whole food, high carb diets based on what’s available to them in their environment. He outlines groups such as the Tsuksinte, Tsimane, and Tokulauns who are extremely healthy and fit, yet subsist on tubers or other whole food carb sources for much of their calories in his fascinating presentation. Of course they also get all the essential proteins, fats, and nutrients from animal sources. The common theme in these populations is they eat zero seed oils and have a very low PUFA diet, especially linoleic acid.
People who fill the rest of their diets with animal fats are also doing this. This is popular in the keto, carnivore, and paleo space. They’re getting a ton of protein, fat, and nutrients from animal sources to help them thrive, while avoiding cereal, pasta, and most importantly seed oils.
Both of these groups are getting a foundation of nutrition from animal sources, avoiding processed grains, sugar, and oils, and filling up the rest of their calories with either whole food sources of fat or carbs. And they all seem to be very healthy because of it.
WHAT DOES THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE SAY?
Last year, Dr. Kevin Hall of the NIH pitted a low fat, plant-based diet against a low-carb, animal based diet in a highly controlled study. After two weeks on one diet, participants switched to the alternate diet.
Both diets were minimally processed and controlled for protein. They were allowed to eat as much or as little as they wanted everyday over the course of three meals and some snacks.
On the low-fat plant based diet, participants ended up consuming less calories per day than when they ate low-carb. Despite this large variation in calories, they found no differences in fullness, hunger, and enjoyment of the meals between the diets.
Both groups lost weight, and even though the low fat group lost more body fat, they also experienced higher insulin and higher blood glucose levels. Every diet seems to have some tradeoffs, and I’ll discuss this more in future articles.
There are problems with most nutrition studies, and this one is no exception. It only had each group on the diets for 2 weeks, for example. You could argue this wasn’t enough time to get adapted to either of them.
The main takeaway from this, in my eyes, is that when the protein is adequate and held consistent and the foods are minimally processed, it appears there isn’t a huge difference in how people make up the rest of their energy needs.
He did another study where a diet of unprocessed foods was compared with a highly processed one. This study was controlled in a different way - it was “matched for presented calories, sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients” according to the study’s authors. Participants on the processed diet ate on average 500 more calories per day and gained more weight. This goes back to my original points of why the processing matters so much!
CONCLUSION
There are 2 main points to I want to leave you with; there’s a huge difference in the type of carbs/fats you eat, and it actually doesn’t matter that much which you choose if you choose the right version.
There’s been a carb vs. fat war for decades, and it needs to end. This is not the fight that needs fighting. Sure, some people will do better or prefer one over the other. But I don’t think it needs to be something people get dogmatic about. I’ve seen both strategies work for large groups of people throughout history and all over the world.
After doing a nutrient dense, animal-based diet favoring fat for many years, I find I’m now able to have a much better relationship with carbs because I’m metabolically flexible, and I’m choosing the correct ones. I include things like fruit, honey, sweet potatoes, or white rice cooked in bone broth in one meal per day and feel great and remain in good shape.
What we really need to do is know the real enemy. Fighting against the wrong thing is a foolish and unproductive endeavor. We’re never going to make headway as a world if it’s always a battle between the pro-carb and pro-fat camps. We need to join forces and fight the true villain - the large, industrial food industries pumping out highly processed foods and tons of misleading marketing and propaganda to go with them.
Brian
p.s. You can support my work and regenerative ranchers here in Texas by getting your meat from NoseToTail.org