Deep Nutrition on Carbohydrates

I was going to write a full review of Deep Nutrition. The book contains such important, almost unheard information in the first half, I cannot help but recommend it. But I was so deeply dismayed by chapter nine that I felt it needed its own rebuttal. This also gives me the chance to present some of my arguments on carbohydrates. As readers of Gary Taubes and some of the other popular authors know, the low-carb message is still going strong and the arguments are usually very compelling. That's why it's important to get all the science. This entry is mostly a rebuttal of Shanahan's argument in Deep Nutrition. I may at some point create a future post focusing solely on carbohydrates.

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Here again we have the old argument that carbohydrates cause metabolic damage. But Shanahan presents the argument in an even more dissappointing fashion than most. Part of this is deliberate obfuscation, and part is just a general lack of scientific rigor.

The deliberate obfuscation is in not making a distinction between dietary sugar intake and chronically elevated glucose levels. Most of the damage Shanahan refers to throughout chapter nine are due to chronically elevated blood glucose. Shanahan speaks throughout the chapter as though we’re referring to dietary sugar, and this viewpoint is reinforced near the beginning with a statistic on average sugar consumption (consulting the endnote confirms the statistic refers only to refined sugars).

Shanahan then does an about face at the end of the chapter, saying that to your body, all carbohydrates are sugar and goes on to recommend strict limiting of all of them. How she comes to this conclusion when the previous chapter* makes clear similar logic does not apply to other macronutrients is beyond me. She even claims that excessive carbohydrate overloads the pancreas.

Really what we are concerned about here is diabetes and pre-diabetes, as it is the elevated blood glucose that causes all the disruption discussed in chapter nine. But if we want to know how most effectively to reverse and prevent diseases such as diabetes, then we must give seroius consideration to diets with proven efficacy, such as Joel Furhman’s Nutritarian Diet (a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet with emphasis on plants and whole foods). Or, more simply, we can observe the many traditional cultures that enjoy high-carbohydrate diets, such as the Kitava and rural Zulu, yet do not suffer the maladies described in chapter nine. Since this is a book that focuses on what to eat by observing traditional cultures, omissions such as this are a great disservice.

Refined sugar is as dissimilar to sweet potatoes as corn oil is to coconut oil**, as far as your body is concerned. So anybody intuitively grasping the point of chapter eight should get this point as well. One is stripped of nutrients and has possible damaging side effects. The other is a whole food, in natural form, complete with all the nutrients available to metabolize it.

Perhaps it is the fact that the standard Western diet is so rich in refined carbohydrates, where such nutrients have been stripped, that so many people develop an inability to properly process carbohydrates. And perhaps it is why diets such as Joel Furhman’s, which would provide such nutrients in abundance***, are so successful at reversing conditions such as diabetes.



*Chapter eight focuses primarily on the distinction between traditional fats and vegetable oils and how vegetable oils are uniquely damaging while traditional fats are healthy. It is an argument I am so far in complete agreement with. Traditional fats are things like butter, lard, and coconut oil.

**I don't want to get too deep into specifics here, but food must always be taken as a whole, so any refinement is already potentially damaging. Also, there is evidence humans are primarily starch-based eaters, and long strings of glucose do not metabolize the same as glucose-fructose pairs.

***Specifically the nutrients that help the body properly metabolize carbohydrates are being provided by the dietary carbohydrates in the form of whole foods. Although this can initially cause high blood sugars in people with poor glucose metabolism, the problem typically corrects itself with very good fasting and post-prandial readings within a few days to a few weeks. See DrFurhman.com for more info.