The CarbSmart Podcast

Welcome to the CarbSmart Podcast, where your decision to embrace low-carb nutrition becomes a fun and delicious lifestyle! I’m your host, Dana Carpender, here to guide you through the ins and outs of everything low carb – or talk to the people who do!My sister Kim is asthmatic. Between not getting enough oxygen and having taken prednisone way too often, she has had an even harder time with her weight than I. It’s not for lack of exercise; she’s a middle school teacher on a spread-out one-story campus that has her walking fifteen to twenty thousand steps every work day; on her days off she walks around the lake at a local park. She’s worked with a trainer. She eats zero junk. It’s just hellishly hard.(When she signed up with the trainer, Kim was told, “You know, you’ll have to stop drinking soda and eating fast food and chips and stuff, right?.” When Kim told the trainer she didn’t consume any of that junk, the trainer was distinctly at a loss. After all, we all “know” that obesity is due to bad diet, right? Right?)Then last year Kim heard about a new program called LORE in San Diego, where she lives. Dr. James LaBelle, Medical Director of Lore Health, was offering free treatment to teachers needing to lose weight, including a free continuous glucose monitor, dietary advice, support groups, and free Wegovy, a GLP-1 drug. Kim was in.(Interestingly, Kim discovered that her breakfast of plain yogurt with vanilla extract and Splenda was spiking her blood sugar. Who knew?) So far, Kim has lost 22 pounds.Do you or anyone you know have a medical condition that makes weight loss near impossible? Sometimes these are obvious, like Kim’s asthma, but others are hidden – and it seems there are many left to be discovered and diagnosed. Do you keep close track of your blood sugar with a monitor? What do you think of using GLP-1 drugs for weight loss? Let us know in the comments below.It was clear I needed to talk to Dr. LaBelle! So here he is.Like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell because you don't want to miss a single episode.Follow CarbSmart on Social MediaFacebook https://www.facebook.com/CarbSmartInstagram https://instagram.com/CarbSmartPinterest https://pinterest.com/CarbSmartYouTube https://youtube.com/c/CarbSmartTwitter/X https://twitter.com/CarbSmartTikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@carbsmartCheck out more CarbSmart Podcast Episodes: https://www.carbsmart.com/category/podcast-episodes#carbsmart #lowcarb #keto #ketodiet #ketorecipes #lowcarbdietLinks and Show NotesWebsite CarbSmart.comhttps://CarbSmart.comEpisode 30 Featured Recipehttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast30recipeFind Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpenderhttps://www.carbsmart.com/author/danaShow Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/three-question-interview-with-dr-james-labelle-carbsmart-podcast-episode-30.html

This show, we have something a little different. This show. Features something I did not write myself that has not happened before.But let's start with this. How old is a low-carb diet?If you look at the traditional diets of various peoples, including the seal, fish, and Blubber diet of the Inuit, several North American native peoples who flourished on pemmican. And the African Messiah herding people who thrived on milk, meat, and cows blood.Very old indeed. But how about low-carb diet books?So far as I know, the oldest in the English language at least, is Banting's Letter on Corpulence. Having lost weight and dramatically improved his health on a low-carbohydrate diet. Banting wrote and self-published the book back in the mid-Victorian era, and he distributed it for free.By the third printing, he had distributed 63,000 copies and banting have become synonymous with dieting. So here it is, Banting's Letter on Corpulence.Like, subscribe and hit that notification bell because you don't want to miss a single episode.Links and Show NotesWebsite CarbSmart.comhttps://CarbSmart.comEpisode 29 Featured Recipehttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast29recipeFind Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpenderhttps://www.carbsmart.com/author/danaShow NotesComing Soon.

You may be confused regarding net carbs versus total carbs. So let’s demystify it. Shall we. Keep listening.I see it online all the time. Total carbs or net carbs. I also see are you strict keto, lazy keto, dirty keto? What’s your daily carb limit? What are your macros? But particularly Total carbs or net carbs.I am all for anything that works for the individual, but I fear that this kind of focus on micromanagement may scare some people off.Total Carbs or Net CarbsThe first commercially successful low-carb diet book was Banting’s Letter on Corpulence first published in 1863 at William Banting’s own expense. It was such a success that Banting became a synonym for dieting and Professor Tim Noakes has revived the term in South Africa.Banting stated, “My kind and valued medical advisor is not a doctor for obesity, but stands on the pinnacle of fame in the treatment of another malady, which as he well knows is frequently induced by Corpulence.”Banting’s diet was four meals per day consisting of meat, greens, fruits and dry wine. The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, starch, beer, milk, butter, and saccharin matter. Here, saccharin matter refers to anything that turns to sugar in the bloodstream. The artificial sweetener we call saccharin had yet to be invented.Notice something, no mention of counting carbs, much less total versus net carbs. Just eat meat, green vegetables, fruits and dry wine. The diet worked for Banting and for many others.I have on my shelf a book I found when I was cleaning out my late great-Aunt Betty’s house called Eat and Grow Thin; the Mahdah Menus published in 1914. It too outlined a low carbohydrate diet. It too calls for no counting. When I was growing up, everyone knew that if you wanted to lose weight, you gave up potatoes, spaghetti, bread, and sweets, and focused on animal protein and green vegetables. Every diner and coffee shop offered a diet plate consisting of a bunless hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese and either sliced tomatoes or a half a canned peach.Enter the Stillman DietIn 1967, Dr. Irwin Stillman’s diet was both very low carb and low fat calling for almost nothing but very lean meat, plus at least eight glasses of water per day. Having tried it as a kid, I can attest to it being effective, but too limited for continued use.Enter Dr. Atkins and Counting CarbsI trust we can take it as read that the Atkins diet works by liberalizing fat and including some vegetables and those in increasing quantities. As the diet progressed, the Atkins diet was and remains far more livable than Stillman’s.Links and Show Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-28-understanding-net-carbs-vs-total-carbs.htmlWebsite CarbSmart.comhttps://CarbSmart.comEpisode 28 Featured Recipehttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast28recipeFind Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpenderhttps://www.carbsmart.com/author/danaShow Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-28-understanding-net-carbs-vs-total-carbs.html

Eat It Again! How Repetition Rewires Your TasteIf you’ve just recently gone low-carb, say as a New Year’s resolution, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer difference from your old diet.Faux-tatoes instead of mashed potatoes. Lunches that don’t include sandwiches, heavy cream and flavored stevia in your coffee instead of creamer. I am here to cheer you on and give you good reason to stick it out. A reason that doesn’t have to do with the scale or your health.Many years ago, when my sister was a private school teacher, her pay was painfully low. She had to scramble each spring to find a summer job. For a few years, she worked for a company that brought over French foreign exchange students. She had to find them host families, and then during the week, she drove them around the San Diego area in a van, showing them the sites and giving them a taste of American culture.Speaking of taste, every single French teenager she worked with simply adored liver pate, but found peanut butter revolting. From this, it becomes clear every taste is an acquired taste. If you’re just starting your low-carb journey, you may find that some things taste…funny. Not bad, just different from what you’re used to, different from what you grew up on. Please remember that all tastes are acquired tastes.Do you know how old I am?“How old are you?” I hear you cry. I’m so old. I walked home for lunch every day. Through elementary school, mom largely relied on simple stuff for our lunches, canned soup, frozen pot pies, or macaroni and cheese, or frozen pizza and wagon wheel shaped noodles with jarred spaghetti sauce and Parmesan.The jarred sauce she used back in the 1960s was Ragu Old World Style. I don’t know if the recipe has changed over the past 50 odd years, but it currently contains tomato puree, which is water and tomato paste, salt, olive oil, sugar, dehydrated onions, dehydrated garlic spices, garlic powder, onion powder.That was the jarred spaghetti sauce of my childhood, and I often had it at lunch. My mother did make awesome homemade spaghetti sauce for family dinners. I wish I had that recipe.Then at 19, I quit sugar and white flour. I started eating whole wheat noodles and I switched over to a jarred sauce that had no sugar.It tasted… funny. Not bad, mind you, I was willing to eat it. It just tasted different. It wasn’t what I’d grown up on, but I wasn’t going back to eating sauce with sugar and it, so I stuck with it. Pretty soon, that sauce was what my taste buds expected, and it tasted great.Links and Show Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-27-eat-it-again-how-repetition-rewires-your-taste.htmlWebsite CarbSmart.comhttps://CarbSmart.comEpisode 27 Featured RecipeLow-Carb Cocoa-Peanut Porkieshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast27recipeFind Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpenderhttps://www.carbsmart.com/author/danaShow Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-27-eat-it-again-how-repetition-rewires-your-taste.html

If your nutritional program is so good, why do you still take drugs?There’s no question that good nutrition improves our health. Heck, many type 2 diabetics do away with all need for medication by eating low-carb. But can proper nutrition prevent all illness and do away with all need for drugs? Let’s talk about it.I got this question years ago, back when I was blogging. The fellow who posed it clearly thought that if one’s nutrition was all it should be, there should never be a need for medication. In particular, the Wellbutrin I take for ADHD and seasonal affective disorder, and the sleep medication I take for a diagnosed sleep disorder.Does ideal nutrition do away with the need for medicine?I can only suppose that those who feel this way are ignorant of history. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 1900, fully 30 percent of deaths in the US were of children five and under. Some of them would have been trauma victims, and of course, trauma medicine has improved dramatically.But many of them were killed by infectious diseases, diphtheria, pertussis, tuberculosis, pneumonia and flu. Between vaccination and antibiotics, the rate of death from these diseases has plummeted. This is the main reason that average lifespan has increased so dramatically. But was the American diet ideal in 1900?Not by our standards. The American rate of sugar consumption was 90 pounds per capita per year, about half of what it is today, but still higher than it had historically been. Certainly, people ate bread, potatoes, and other concentrated carbs. However, soda intake was 12 bottles per year, and the bottles were far smaller than the 20 ouncers common today.How old am I? I’m so old I can remember 6 ounce bottles of Coca Cola in Coke machines. Processed food was far less common. Home cooking was the standard. Frozen food and fast food didn’t exist. Highly processed seed oils were not a thing. Home gardening was more common, especially during the Great War, when victory gardens were urged.Yet, people were dying young. So, let’s go back further. Let’s go back to the Middle Ages. In 14th century Europe, sugar consumption was limited to the wealthy. Interestingly, grain consumption among the peasants, so the vast majority of people, was rarely wheat, but rather barley, oats, and rye. All of which are easier on blood sugar than wheat flour.Links and Show Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-26-why-do-you-still-take-drugs.htmlWebsite CarbSmart.comhttps://CarbSmart.comEpisode 26 Featured RecipeLow-Carb Brussels Sprouts with Parmesan-Bacon Cream Saucehttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast26recipeFind Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpenderhttps://www.carbsmart.com/author/danaShow Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-26-why-do-you-still-take-drugs.html

Isn't it important to eat a balanced diet?How many times have you been told it's important to eat a balanced diet? Doctors, mom, health class, magazine articles, everywhere.Remember to eat a balanced diet. It's been repeated so often that it's accepted without a thought. Except, of course, by me, you, and our low-carb ilk. Let's talk about it. Like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell because you don't want to miss a single episode. Isn't it important to eat a balanced diet?Well, maybe. The big question is, what the heck is a balanced diet? The phrase doesn't seem to have any concrete meaning. Certainly, it varies from species to species. A balanced diet for a tiger would be very different from a balanced diet for a rabbit. Similarly, historically, human diets would have varied dramatically from region to region and from season to season.Is the government, my plate, successor to the food pyramid, a balanced diet? It suggests more of some kinds of foods, particularly grains, than others. Is it balanced to eat six to ten one-ounce servings of grains a day, but only five or six one-ounce portions of protein foods? Is it balanced to omit fats entirely as a food group and recommend low-fat or fat-free dairy, restricting saturated fat to 10 percent of calories?Remember that there are essential fats, but the essential level of grain intake, and of carbs in general, is zero. Remember hardcore low-fat diets, some as low as 10 percent of calories from fat, Ornish, Pritikin, those guys? I never heard “not balanced” thrown at them. Many of the same people are now pushing a plant-based diet, i.e. vegetarian or vegan diet, nearly devoid of saturated fat and cholesterol.I find it incredible that we could increase our intake of any highly concentrated substance by over 2,000 percent in 200 years time, the increase in American sugar consumption between 1800 and 2000, and not have it be a health threat. Heck, if we drank that much more water, it might be a danger. Two better questions would be:What diet comes closest to that on which the human race evolved?And, What diet makes my own personal body work best? Links and Show Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-25-isnt-it-important-to-eat-a-balanced-diet.htmlWebsite CarbSmart.comhttps://CarbSmart.comFind Hundreds of Articles and Delicious and Easy-to-Make Low-Carb Recipes by Dana Carpenderhttps://www.carbsmart.com/author/danaShow Noteshttps://www.carbsmart.com/podcast-25-isnt-it-important-to-eat-a-balanced-diet.html