The Carbohydrate Debate with Chris Kresser

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where I talk nutrition, exercise, mindset and lifestyle with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus I give you tips that you can put into fast action to up level your health so you can go out there and live that big life you're meant to live. Now. Gosh. This question has been coming up on Facebook over and over and over again and it's about carbohydrates and whether someone should be fasting, whether they should go into ketosis, whether they should lower their carbs, how many carbs should they eat? And I really sat down and started to look at not just the biochemistry. Beth I want to hear what some, some people who I really respect are saying about it. And I'll tell you, one guy in particular just had the greatest explanations about this. And I thought, you know, I just got, I happen to know him, he's a super awesome guy. So I thought I'm just going to go ping him and get him on the show. So I brought in Chris Kresser today to talk about low carb diets and to help clear up some of that confusion as what really is a low carb diet? When should you be on a low carb diet? How do you really know how many carbohydrates and which carbohydrates you should have? So let me tell you a little bit about Chris. I met him a couple years ago at a conference. He's the co director of the California center for Functional Medicine and the creator of kriscreser.com Again, kriscresser.com is just an awesome website with some great resources. Highly recommend you add that to your bookmarks of favorites. He's also the New York Times best selling author of the Paleo Cure. But he's best known for his in depth research, uncovering myths and misconceptions in modern medicine and providing natural health solutions with proven results. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in health and fitness by greatest.com and again, this blog that I was just referring to is one of the top ranked natural health websites in the world. And he recently launched the Kresser Institute where he is training functional medicine practitioners with an ancestral health perspective. Plus, he lives in my old hometown Berkeley with his wife and daughter. So today's guest is Chris Kresser. All right, so let's welcome to the show. Chris, I'm so glad you're here with me today.

Jj, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Well, I was, like, tearing my hair out here because I've been getting so many questions about low carb. And I thought, you know what I thought of everything I've read out there that you are the smartest on it, and you just make the most sense of the debate. So that's why I wanted you to come on and share that with everybody. So can we just don't dive into the whole low carb diet thing because it's so funny, because one month it's in, one month it's out, and right now it seems to be all the rage. But when I went through and I was reading what various people had to say on it, and you urge caution with it. So what's up with that?

Yeah, I think there's just been too much focus on the quantity of macronutrients, like carbohydrate and fat and not enough focus on the quality of the foods that we eat. So for a long time, it was fat is bad, and everyone was eating pasta and bagels with no butter, cream cheese and lean chicken breast and egg white omelets and things like that. And then fast forward 25, 30 years, we hear, oh, wait, no, carbohydrates are bad. And now we should all be eating sticks of butter and meat and non starchy vegetables, and we should avoid sweet potatoes and potatoes like they're toxins.

But you understand, people are just like, okay, now. I just don't. Maybe I'll just. I don't know what to do anymore. Right, right.

Of course. Why wouldn't they think that? Because it's just a complete 180 from what they had been told before. And so what I'm saying is that I think the missing piece here has been it's not really about how much carbohydrate or how much fat you eat. It's about what type of carbohydrate and what type of fat you eat that makes the biggest difference in health.

Yay. And we're going to talk about some of your favorite macronutrients here in a minute. But first off, let's just backtrack a little bit, because I think one of the areas before this is there's a lot of question about what a low carb diet is. I mean, some people think a low carb diet is just that you don't eat bread. Right? You know, so there's everything from being in ketosis to, you know, everything in between. What do you consider to be a low carb diet? And can you explain, like, just for someone listening to, about a low carb diet versus very low and ketosis, all of that?

You're right. There's no consensus. And that makes it even more confusing. And sometimes you hear people talk about a certain number of grams of carbohydrate per day, and I don't think that makes sense because it's relative to how much you weigh and how many calories you eat and what your activity level is. So I like to define it in terms of the percentage of total calories you eat. So let's say you eat 2,000 calories, and that's how much you need to eat to maintain your weight. I would define a low carbohydrate diet as anything less than 20% of calories from carbohydrate. I would define a very low carbohydrate diet as anything less than 10%. And for most people, that could start being ketogenic, but certainly under 7% of calories from carbohydrate will put most people in ketosis. And. And that just means you're getting so few carbohydrates from the diet that your body starts producing its own glucose, because we all need glucose to function properly. And if you're not getting enough of it from your diet, your body will make it itself.

So what are the reasons someone should do ketosis or shouldn't do ketosis?

Ketosis is.

By that I mean a ketogenic diet, because, you know, there's been so much on ketogenic diets, your body.

Starts to make ketones. I think I said glucose in the last answer, and what I really meant was ketones. But ketones. There's some argument that the brain functions better on ketones than it does on glucose and that in some conditions, like obesity, ketogenic diet can be therapeutic or conditions like epilepsy, conditions that affect that the neurological system, ketosis can be beneficial because ketones are helpful for the brain and the nervous system in general. So I do think ketogenic diets can play a role in certain conditions, but there's never been a traditional culture studied that followed a ketogenic diet. And I don't think it's normal or even optimal for people who don't have those conditions that I just mentioned.

So for those people that don't have the conditions that you mentioned is it something that could be harmful for them to do this? Because I know right now in the diet world there's a lot out there about ketogenic diets. Again, are there risks to it?

I think there are some risks. I don't think it's harmful in the sense that it could kill someone. But I see a lot of patients who come to me and they've done some reading and decided to try a ketogenic diet. And then they start having symptoms like low energy insomnia, depression or anxiety, agitation. Their exercise tolerance goes down. They're not able to recover from workouts as well. I see a lot of amenorrhea with women. They lose their menstrual cycle, infertility. So they're fairly significant effects and undesirable in most cases. But it's not life threatening.

Right. I just know in the people that I've seen that have been following very low carbohydrate diets, and I know a couple like Dr. Alan Christiansen saw the same thing as we start to see this raising of like, I kept going, why is there blood sugar up when everything else looks good? So we know it's not an insulin issue. And then you start to see issues with their adrenals. So my take on it was this must not be good for people who are either under chronic stress, have adrenal issues or is it creating more adrenal issues because all of a sudden people with normal fasting blood sugar started to have elevated fasting blood sugars and their cortisol rhythm went off.

Yeah, that's exactly right. In general, I would say the two main populations that I see suffer or three from ketogenic diet are people with HPA axis dysfunction or adrenal issues. As you said, people under a lot of stress, which is, by the way, most people.

I assume, stress if I don't know otherwise.

Yeah, exactly. The second group of people is women who are still menstruating. I just don't see many menstruating women have a lot of success on low carb diets. And that's in part because I think women of that age, especially if they're moms and they're working, are under an enormous amount of stress and then people with hypothyroidism, because ketogenic diets and fasting have both been shown to reduce the conversion of T4, which is a thyroid hormone that's produced by the thyroid gland, to T3, which is the most active form of thyroid hormone. So it can actually worsen thyroid hypothyroidism in people that already have it or even induce it in some cases in people that don't have it again. There is a time and a place for a ketogenic diet. It can be remarkably effective for traumatic brain injuries, for example, and the neurological issues I mentioned, possibly Parkinson's and dementia, Alzheimer's and then obesity and diabetes. But for the average person, particularly like a working mom who is fairly active and has a thyroid condition, I think it could be a disaster.

Now what about you started to mention intermittent fasting. What's your feeling on that?

I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but I think it can be very helpful in some situations and it can be absolutely the wrong choice in other situations. And to make this really easy, I would say essentially the same people that tend to benefit from a ketogenic diet tend to benefit from intermittent fasting. The same groups that I mentioned and the same groups that I mentioned as kind of caution for ketogenic diet would be also caution for intermittent fasting.

That makes a ton of sense because I know when I was looking at the research on intermittent fasting, it was showing that women were getting fertile, having all sorts of issues with their periods. So this fits in with what I've been seeing. I've also found that women in general don't seem to do as well with it. Men seem to do much better with it.

Yeah. I would also add women who are pregnant or nursing should probably not intermittent fast and should probably not be on a ketogenic diet.

Gosh, it would seem crazy to me that a pregnant woman would, would be doing that.

It is crazy, but I've seen it.

Wow.

Yeah. I mean, in the low carb community there's just been such a miss a disservice, I think, in creating this idea that all carbs are equal. If bread and sugar are bad for you, then sweet potatoes and plantains are bad for you. I mean that's just ridiculous. But that's the notion that's been created.

No, that's why I sugar impact was. That whole idea went, you know, all carbs are not the same. All sugar. To me, all carbs are going to turn to sugar. All sugar is not created equal. There's obviously a big difference between pumpkin and pumpkin pie. Right? I mean, they're just not.

It's common sense. It's common sense, but it's not. And you know, if you look at populations that followed hunter gatherer populations, there are some, like the, the Kitabans in the South Pacific who ate up to like 70% of their calories from carbohydrate, but it was in the form of sweet potatoes and fruit. And there was no evidence of any diabetes, overweight, obesity, any kind of metabolic problems in that population. And there's even a group of people called the Tuka Centa in Papua New guinea highlands who eat 97% of their calories from carbohydrate. They, they basically only eat sweet potatoes and maybe the insects that are on the sweet potatoes give them the rest, the 3% protein and fat that they get, and they were lean and free of any metabolic disease. It just goes to show that when you eat real food, nutrient dense whole foods, I think humans can tolerate a wide range of macronutrient ratios and that the particular balance of carbs and fat and protein then depend on your individual circumstances and goals.

So let's talk about you for a moment. Let's shift gears and talk about if you were sitting down to have your all time favorite meal, what would it be?

Oh, that's hard. I'm kind of a foodie and I love trying different things. So I would get very bored with just one favorite meal. But I can tell you what I tend to eat on a regular basis. Pretty much every meal for me is some protein, typically animal protein. So it could be grass fed meat or cold water, fatty fish or shellfish, eggs, something like that. And then I'll have a large portion of non starchy vegetables. So could be anything from a salad, from my garden, or steamed broccoli or something like that. And then I will have a portion of starch and I like to mix it up a lot with starch. So I could have anything from a sweet potato to roasted red potatoes, to plantains to taro. I make my own taro chips by slicing taro and cooking them in duck fat or lard. I might have yuca mashed yuca or yuca fries. So it's pretty straightforward and pretty simple for me. I found that I do best on a moderate carbohydrate, moderate fat, relatively high protein diet.

And what about something in terms of your daily routine? Because everybody always wants to know, what do people eat and how do they live? So if we're going to look at your daily routine, what's one thing that you do and every day that you think just makes a huge difference in your life?

I've had a sitting meditation practice since I was 17, so I'm 42 now and I have a hard time imagining life without that. It's the kind of bedrock anchor for my day. It keeps me focused and relatively calm and just keeps it really cultivates awareness for me and it's something that allows me to roll with the punches and not get too torn up about any particular thing.

Awesome. Now I would love to have more resources for everybody because you are my go to resource. There's a couple websites and blogs out there that I just, when I have a question, I always go to and you're one. You're at the top of the list. So I want to share that with everybody. It's chriskresser.com and when all the low carb stuff started coming up, I'm like, you know what? I want to get a lot of different opinions. Of course I'm looking at the biochemistry of it. But I was like, all right, why am I seeing what I'm seeing? And you had the sanest response to all of it. I loved it. So if you are looking for a place to get great health answers, your blog is amazing. And it's kriskresser.com it's spelled with K R E S S E R. So Chris C H r I s Kresser k r e s s Dasher.com is my go to. And Chris, if they go there, what else can they find there?

Well, relevant to this conversation, I actually have an ebook that's called the Low down on Low Carb and it has much, much more detail on all of the things that we've been talking about. What is a low carb diet? When is it beneficial? Who should follow it? The seven things everyone should know before they try a low carb diet and then the three step process for determining your ideal carbohydrate intake. And there's a lot of other free eBooks, including 9 Steps for Perfect Health, which is a 65 page ebook that summarizes all my top recommendations for just staying healthy with diet and lifestyle change.

Awesome. Because you've had not only a big, big footprint out there into the world of, say, the consumers, but you're also out there training practitioners. So you are just a great resource and I hugely appreciate it. Now after the break, I'm going to be answering the listeners questions, so stick with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question is awesome. And it comes from Sharon from Chicago. And Sharon says, jj, I've been following the sugar impact diet. The question I have now is how many carbohydrates can I really eat in a day? All right, so one of the things I have you do both on the virgin diet and the sugar impact diet is go through your personal discovery process to figure out which foods work for you and which don't. Just like Chris talked about that he found that he does better on a higher protein, lower carbohydrate diet. I know through going through my own personal discovery process that through the virgin diet, I do better with that dairy and gluten. And through the sugar impact diet, I do better with an optimal amount of protein for me, high fat and lower carbohydrates, but not low, low carbohydrates. And that I do better with carbohydrates in the evening. And so the reason I have you go through in the sugar impact diet, we taper down so that you're eating more whole foods, carbohydrates rather than refined ones. The difference would be between eating say a, you know, french fries versus a baked sweet potato versus pumpkin pie versus roasted pumpkin, eating the whole foods as much as possible and then also gauging through your energy and your weight and your waistline and your focus, how you feel when you have different levels of carbohydrates. So you can really get a feeling for what you need throughout the day. And again, remember, it's really about the quality and the combinations. You want to make sure that with each meal you're getting in some high quality protein like wild fish, like grass fed beef, like pastured pork or chicken, some healthy fats, things like avocado or coconut or nuts or seeds or olive oil or olives, loads of non starchy vegetables and a little bit of these more whole food carbohydrates, wild rice, legumes, sweet potato, pumpkin, slow, low carbs, and then again how much of those you have. Play around with that and see, make sure your weight's staying where you want it to be, that your energy is great, focus is great, your waistline staying low. Those are the real markers for if you're eating right for you now. If you'd like to submit a question, just go to jjbirgin.com ask and you can leave a voicemail for me. I can't wait to hear from you. And one more way, I'd love to hear from you. I would hugely appreciate it if you could jump on Stitcher or iTunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you that you are worthy Dare to live a life that matters.

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