Who Won the Low Carb vs. Low Fat Diet Debate?

Is a low fat or low carbohydrate diet better? Is paleo a fad or the real deal? Can I still eat whole grains without getting a leaky gut? Should I take a calcium supplement? How do I get enough Omega-3 fatty acids? Do I really need to fork over double the price for organic blueberries? Is it really necessary to kill myself with high intensity interval training five days a week? What about free weights vs. machines, or cross-fit versus team sports, or running vs. swimming?

These are the questions that might cause anxiety-induced night sweats if you dare to delve into the alligator pits of health and wellness advice. The information space on this subject is a mess—a minefield of contradictions and confusion infused with corporate influence and the biased perspectives of health gurus like Chuck Norris selling their scientifically tested elixirs guaranteed to bring us all health and longevity if only we buy and subscribe to their new fountain of youth.

These rabbit holes of contradiction and confusion are too easy to get trapped in only to give up and take the easy out of fast food and couch surfing. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I have drawn from my own health journey and in-depth interviews with three local experts to boil down the confusion into some universal truths. In this article you will find no moneyed influence, no biased attachment to agenda-based scientific studies, and no new age tricks or fountain of youth nonsense. And, let me spoil the plot a little bit early: It’s not that complicated.

Asking the Wrong Questions and the Importance of Nature

Let’s start by dispelling the question in the title. The ongoing debate between low carbohydrate and low fat diets is an exercise in futility. You can find reputable scientific studies and their associated health guru advocates to support either perspective. The problem is that it’s very much the wrong question to ask.

When I interviewed my three expert sources for this article, I asked a different question: What are the basic universal truths of health and wellness that apply to all of us? Their answers had absolutely nothing to do with finding the right mix of carbs and fats.

Mike Aguilar is the owner of Start Fresh Fitness and is a registered dietitian and multi-certified personal trainer. He is passionate about his craft and, as I write this, is still inundating my inbox with profound thoughts and advice on health and fitness. His universal foundational principles took me a bit by surprise. Expecting him to start with eliminating added sugar and processed foods (which I will get to later in the article), Aguilar said “water, sleep, and exposure to nature.”

Now, most of us know that sleep, hydration, and getting outside are important. But, what is the connection to nutrition and diet? “These things have a big impact on how we process food,” Aguilar told me. “More stress leads to poor eating habits. Bad sleep contributes to poor digestion.”

Aguilar encouraged me to think of the human body as its own ecosystem. Nature ecologists know that a healthy ecosystem consists of interrelated components and processes. When aspects of an ecosystem are removed or degraded, it causes ecological damage or even system failure.

In the human body, the equivalent of ecological damage can take the form of inflammation, metabolic disorders, obesity, and other chronic ailments. Addressing, or preventing, these degradations of our biological ecosystems requires a holistic perspective, starting not with what we eat, but with more fundamental aspects of how we exist. Things as simple as learning how to breathe more deeply and deliberately, or walking through the trees, or seeking real social interaction.

Aguilar explained that we humans are wired to move when we are stressed. But in the sedentary life that many of us live, our most stressful moments often come at times when movement is restricted, like sitting in traffic, or stuck in a cubicle with a boss breathing down our neck. This lack of a stress outlet can then lead to inflammation and pain, which can then lead to depression, which can result in stress eating. It’s a vicious cycle.

When it comes to food, Aguilar suggests a mindset change to be more deliberate with the entire food consumption process. Make the process of buying, preparing, cooking, eating, and cleaning up a deliberately prioritized and joyful part of the day. Revel in the healthy food choices we have and then relish the process and the nourishment gained. Creating a habit of prioritizing this as a lifestyle choice will make it easier to focus on healthy choices and to reject the quick fix, which is often the less healthy option.

“It’s amazing how many clients I’ve had,” said Aguilar, “who struggle to carve out a dedicated 20 or 30 minutes to eat without stress or distraction.” This is not just about making healthier food choices. Our stress levels when we eat, according to Aguilar, influence how we process what we eat. “You can’t rest and digest your food when you are eating in a fight or flight mode.” Stress eating, or eating in a stressful environment, actually increases fat storage and indigestion regardless of what it is that we are eating.

Food Responses and Blood Sugar

Dana Sowards is a nutrition consultant, board certified sports dietitian, and owner of adashofdana.us, a performance nutrition website and business. When I spoke with Dana, the enthusiasm and commitment to her profession were apparent.

I asked Sowards the same question as I asked Aguilar: What are the universal principles of a healthy lifestyle that can apply to everyone? “I love this topic,” Sowards said, “because there is so much noise out there.”

“It’s really pretty simple,” said Sowards. “It’s about tuning into what makes us feel our best.” Okay, that is a simple concept, but I sensed that the complication comes with the execution. As we discussed this I recalled Aguilar’s advice of being more deliberate with our food consumption. Here Sowards focused more on being more deliberate with our food responses. How did you feel after dinner? How did you sleep that night? Do you have regular digestion processes?

This does seem like a bit of common sense. But how often do we really take the time to think about how the last meal made us feel physically and mentally? How often do we evaluate our energy levels and sleep patterns in association with what and when we eat? Rather than starting with a specific regimen, Sowards suggests a process of experimentation and observation.

Getting into more specifics, Sowards suggests that the single most important clinical indicator of dietary and metabolic health is blood sugar. And, more specifically, it’s the extent to which our blood sugar fluctuates throughout the day. “How we manage blood sugar,” Sowards said, “is the center of our metabolic health.” It has less to do with the ratio of carbs to fats and much more to do with the quality of the carbs and fats we ingest. “If we have drastic swings in blood sugar,” Sowards said, “the fall on the other end [of the sugar high] causes a craving for more sugar.” And we are back to another vicious cycle.

How do we smooth over our blood sugar peaks and valleys? This is where the quality of our food comes into play, and here again, we find some simple universal truths that apply to everyone. First, we should minimize added sugar and highly processed foods.

The Importance of Whole Foods

Erik Hansen is a holistic health, wellness, and performance coach and owner of Enliveenergy.com. His answer to my question was a simple but profound one-liner: “Whole foods will always be our best food choice,” said Hansen.

This tied into where Sowards was going with choosing the right foods to regulate blood sugar. But, what, exactly, are whole foods? “A whole food is exactly how it comes from nature,” said Hansen. “Processed foods will always create a nutritional deficiency. Nature never isolates anything.”

“But buying whole foods is more difficult and expensive, isn’t it?” I asked. Hansen wasn’t having that. “Is it really easier to buy fast food?” He challenged. “Highly processed foods create an emotion in us,” Hansen said. “There is an art and science [used in the food industry] to create a flavor-addictive, or hyper-palatable food profile.”

This brings us once again back to Aguilar’s advice, reiterated by both Sowards and Hansen, of being more in tune and deliberate with our relationship to food. Part of this, as Hansen clarified, is about breaking away from the influence and emotions that are created by the billions of research and development dollars that processed food companies and fast food chains pour into creating the most addictive products—a little more sugar there, just the right crispy texture there, and some catchy brand marketing to tie it all together. Did you ever see a great advertisement for a bowl of mixed greens?

If we, as individuals, make a conscious decision to be more deliberate in our relationship with food, we make it easier to break away from the temptation of target-marketed and hyper-palatable processed food products. If, as Sowards suggested, we pay closer attention to how the food we eat makes us feel, sleep, and poop, we will reprogram our relationship with food in a way that will allow us to crave what’s good for us.

The Basics of Nutrition

All foods that we eat are made up of three macronutrients which are fats, carbohydrates, and protein. We cannot survive without consuming at least some of all three. When it comes to fats and carbs, there are healthy and unhealthy options. Like Erik Hansen advised, whole foods are always better than processed foods. Added sugar, for example, is pure carbohydrate, but it’s a simple carbohydrate with little nutritional value. Similarly, trans fat is an industrially processed fat which is terrible for us. But the high fat content of an avocado or a fillet of salmon is very good for us.

In general, Dana Sowards advised me that it’s better to not try to minimize fat or carbs, but to balance them. However, a highly active athlete who burns a lot of calories might benefit by favoring a slightly higher carbohydrate intake while a more sedentary person should actually favor a slightly lower carbohydrate intake and higher healthy fat consumption. This may seem a bit counterintuitive after decades of bad information promoting so-called “low fat” diets, but know that eating fat doesn’t mean getting fat. Eating too much sugar (a simple carbohydrate) is more likely to cause unhealthy or unwanted weight gain.

Getting enough protein is important, and a good rule of thumb if you want to measure it is to consume about one gram of protein per pound of your body weight per day. Opinions do differ on this one, but consider that given the same overall calorie intake, if you consume less protein, you will be consuming more fats or carbs or both. You cannot escape the triple constraint of the three macros. If you cut back on one, you will add more of another. A good approach for the average person is to balance them out rather than try to minimize any of them.

Beyond the three macronutrients, nutrition quickly gets very complicated. There are the micronutrients, amino acids, gut bacteria, supplements, glycemic index, sodium, and on and on and on. These are often the areas that generate raging debates among health professionals and self-proclaimed gurus with conflicting scientific studies and sometimes dubious influences. We will not delve into this here and will close with a reminder that 90% of the battle is in the simple universal truths of living healthy. Eat whole foods. Minimize added sugar and ultra-processed foods. Make food preparation and consumption a deliberate part of your day, as Mike Aguilar said. Get enough sleep. Walk and move. And get outside.

Exercise vs. Movement

You may have noticed that I have not even mentioned exercise. This is deliberate. Too many people start with “working out” and look at their nutrition profile as an afterthought. Here I can speak to my own health journey a bit because I made the same mistake in my 30s after receiving a gut punch from a doctor about having “borderline high” cholesterol and being told I could “stand to lose a few pounds.”

I was a skinny cross-country runner in high school who could drink a six-pack of sugary soda every day and eat a steady diet of frozen chicken nuggets or Taco Bell. This might work okay when you’re eighteen, but it catches up to you when you’re approaching thirty. To get back in shape I took to running again—first a mile, then before long a regular 5k. Other than slightly improving my endurance, it did little good.

Fast forward to age forty, another doctor, and another concern about “borderline high cholesterol.” This doctor, however, was a paleo diet fanatic and gave me a bunch of paleo propaganda. She said she thought I could get my cholesterol down through diet and didn’t even mention exercise.

I didn’t buy fully into the paleo cult, but it did send me down a multi-month path of self-learning about nutrition. I learned how wrong the old food pyramid was. I learned about macronutrients (fat, protein, carbs), micronutrients, amino acids, metabolic health, and the like.

I eliminated sugary drinks and minimized added sugars and ultra-processed foods. Within weeks, I dropped the persistent extra ten pounds and reduced my cholesterol levels back down to normal. But better than that, I felt ten years younger—more agile, more active, more energized. All without even lifting a dumbbell or lacing up running shoes.

The moral of that story is, to live a healthy lifestyle, start with what you eat, not with what you can lift. As the saying goes “abs are made in the kitchen.” What we eat and how we eat heavily influences how we benefit from exercise, not the other way around.

So, what do our three health gurus say about exercise? Here again there was a consistent theme of simplicity. Let’s start, first of all, by calling it “movement,” not exercise. Think about how a human being moved during the course of a day about 15 thousand years ago. That human probably would have done a good amount of walking and maybe a little light running (rarely a sprint). They would have been carrying something, reaching up or out for some things and bending down to the ground for others. And they probably threw and caught something during the day.

How does that translate to our modern lives? The good news is that replicating this natural movement does not require killing yourself in a gym six days a week unless you are training for something specific like a strongman competition or triathlon. For the average person who just wants to feel better and be healthier, this is about moving naturally—walking, reaching, bending, throwing.

“All we need to do is move naturally,” said Hansen. “Exercise machines do not move naturally.” According to Aguilar, “walking is crazy under-rated.” According to Sowards, “walking is one of the best ways to regulate blood sugar.”

The message here is that most of the benefits of exercise (or movement) come with the easier stuff, like walking. Sowards also recommends “gentle movements like Yoga—something that teaches you to slow down.” While slowing down to exercise may seem counterintuitive, it should also be a bit of a relief to know that you don’t have to “hit the gym” with the bros to see who can lift more, or “max out your heart rate” in a high intensity interval. Those things certainly can refine and improve your athletic prowess if you want to go there, but they are not the place to start for general health and wellbeing. Start by going for a walk and then think about what Aguilar would call “natural patterns of movement.” Think about that stone age human and the way they would have moved throughout the day and do things to mimic that.

Motivation to Move

What about motivation? Isn’t that the biggest challenge for many of us? I know it is for me. Sowards reminded me of something I already knew, which is that, once you start, you’re done. She suggests that all you have to do is commit to that first ten minutes of activity. Even if you only do that ten minutes, you’re still better off than the same ten minutes on the couch watching “The Voice.” But, Sowards told me she finds that most of the time when people start with ten minutes, then they find it much easier to keep moving for more.

This is certainly true for me. The hardest step is the first one. Take action. Groan and complain while doing it if you have to, but take the action, and your mind and body will thank you soon enough.

I would like to come back to one of the first pieces of advice offered by Aguilar as one of the universal principles of good health, and that is exposure to nature. This is about much more than Vitamin D (although that is important). Immersion in nature has enormous benefits both physically and mentally.

There is a reason that most of us have images of nature or wildlife as our screensavers. Our modern lifestyles and technologies are ripping us away from our connection to nature. Like Aguilar’s advice to be more conscious with food, we should also be more deliberately aware of our natural surroundings—the trees, the sky, the flowers, the snow, the rain, the views, the bugs, and all the rest. When you go for that walk, don’t just put your head down and charge ahead. Walk with deliberate awareness of and appreciation for the natural surroundings. Try to walk over grass or dirt if you can. Look around you—at the clouds, the sun, the moon, and notice the breeze in the air, or the bird that just flew by. Use the parks and open spaces available nearby and be grateful for the gifts of nature. And come back inside renewed and calmed by your experience.

So, who did win the debate between low carb and low fat diets? The answer is neither. According to my sources, we should not be trying to minimize either carbs or fats. We should instead be trying to eat healthy carbs and healthy fats, along with sufficient protein.

Like journalism like this? Consider becoming a sustaining supporter (and get our printed copy monthly at home.)
Democracy needs journalism more than ever. We’ve been telling the truth for 24 years. Your support helps us keep telling it for at least the next four years.

Democracy needs journalism more than ever. We’ve been telling the truth for 24 years. Your support helps us keep telling it for at least the next four years.