The Low-Insulin Diet Part 1/2

How Speed of Digestion affects weight Loss

Refined carbohydrates are the bell-bottom jeans of the nutrition world — great in the 1970s, terrible in the 2020s. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, first released in 1977 are more fashion than science. In 1977, white bread is healthy because it is low in fat. By 2020s, the very same white bread had become generally recognized as unhealthy. In 1977, fatty foods like nuts, fatty fish and avocados were deemed unhealthy. Dietary fat causes heart disease, don’t you know? By the 2020s, the very same nuts, fatty fish and avocados are considered good-for-you ‘super-foods’. Healthy fats prevent heart disease, don’t you know?

The mistakes did not stop there. The Dietary Guidelines focused obsessively on nutrients (fat, protein, calories) rather than foods (cabbage, beef, eggs). This reductionist thinking imagines that all nutrients are the same. A calorie is a calorie, whether from cookies or broccoli. All carbohydrates are the same, whether from sugary cereal or bean salad. This is absurd, although repeated often enough, started to seem logical. Imagine saying that all human beings are mostly carbon and so is charcoal, so replacing Brad Pitt with a lump of charcoal is roughly the same. All calories are not the same. All carbohydrates are not the same.

Like those bell-bottoms, the dietary advice rooted in the 1970s did not age well and brought unintended consequences. Eating all those refined carbs spiked the glycemic load (GL) of the average…