Robert H. Lustig.
Americans Invented Pasta (!): The World According to Robert H Lustig.
In the bizarro world of low-carb gurus, if you come up with some wild notion that would provide great support for your anti-carb beliefs - if only it were true - then guess what?
It is true! Just go ahead and believe it, conflicting evidence be damned!
Hence we have folks like David Perlmutter, author of Grain Brain, and Gary Taubes, author of much unbridled bullshit, both claiming in their books that Americans ate low-carb diets one hundred years ago. Never mind that US food consumption data and the entire history of US agriculture shows the exact opposite. Nope, in Taubes’ and Perlmutter’s worldview, Americans of yesteryear were cultivating all those grain fields, not for sustenance, but purely for shits and giggles.
Then there’s the late Barry Groves, who claimed former Olympic marathoner Mamo Wolde ate a ketogenic diet and set a new world record that hasn’t been beaten since. Only problem is, it wasn’t a new world record, and his time has been repeatedly beaten since. And there is absolutely no evidence Wolde ate a ketogenic diet. In fact, runners from his parts have been documented to eat very high carbohydrate diets. So where did Groves get this fanciful version of events?
He simply made it up.
As he did the following quote:
‘On a high-fat diet, 4703 to 8471 excess calories were required for each kilogram of added weight. On a low fat VLCD [very low calorie diet], replacing fat calories with 8g/day of equivalent carbohydrate calories reduced weight loss by 1.68kg, corresponding to 3300 calories of carbohydrate/kilogram, possibly 2500 calories per kilogram for carbohydrate alone.'”
After posting this passage, Groves then went on to claim these figures demonstrated a significantly higher amount of calories was required from dietary fat than from carbohydrates to induce the deposition of body fat.
Groves referenced this quote to a 1975 NIH publication titled Obesity in Perspective. When I emailed Groves and told him that quote was nowhere to be seen in the NIH publication, he nonchalantly replied that he’d made it up, by mixing and matching stats from that paper and another appearing in an entirely different journal (the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition)!
Sweet Jesus…
I have pointed out numerous times over the last decade that this quote was made up by Groves, yet you still see it quoted all over the Internet by low-carbers. Hey, why let a little thing like reality get in the way of a good piece of supportive copy?
And now we have Robert Lustig, continuing this shonky tradition in fine form.
Check out this IQ-destroying exchange in a 2012 interview with Alec Baldwin:
“Robert Lustig: There is no pasta in the Mediterranean diet. We started the pasta craze because of all the immigrant Italians who couldn’t afford to eat meat and vegetables here, that’s what they fell back on -
Alec Baldwin: Right.
Robert Lustig: - and it actually got exported from here back to Italy, same as chop suey did to China. You know these are all American inventions. So the fact is that the Italian diet is not the Mediterranean diet, never was, never will be.”
Wow.
Next Lustig will be telling us Italy invented Coca Cola!
For the record, not only was pasta invented long before Italians migrated to America, it was invented long before Christopher Columbus even discovered America!
No-one knows exactly when the very first bowl of pasta was served up, but the most accepted theory is that the Arab invasions of the 8th Century brought a dried noodle-like product to Sicily. This early pasta was made using flour from durum wheat, which Sicily specialised in. Under Italian law, dry pasta can only be made from this type of wheat (as with their coffee, Italians take their pasta very, very seriously).
According to John Dickie, professor in Italian Studies at University College London and author of Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, the first reference to pasta in Italy was noted in 1154 and it was about an export factory in Sicily.
He says its breakthrough as a common food came in Naples in the 1700s, when it was recognised as "a good way to feed a large part of the populace".
It wasn't until large-scale Italian immigration to the New World in the 20th century that pasta became popular outside of Italy.
In other words, Italians introduced pasta to America, not the other way around.
Stop making shit up, Robert.

Sophia Loren: “Everything you see I owe to pasta.”
Robert Lustig: “Everything you see I owe to my stubborn refusal to accept the reality of calories in versus calories out.”
Lustig’s foray into fantasyland hardly begins and ends with the ridiculous claim that pasta was invented by Americans in order to nourish poor Italian immigrants. Wait until you hear what he’s been saying about sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, and cocaine…
Sugar: The New Scapegoat for Obesity, Diabetes, Fatty Liver, and Pretty Much Everything Bad that Ever Happened to the Human Species
While we don our bullshit-proof vests in order to survive Lustig’s full frontal assault on human intelligence, let’s get a little nomenclature sorted out.
Fructose is a monosaccharide that occurs naturally, most notably in fruits and cane and beet sugar. The latter, as we all know, are processed to obtain sucrose (aka table sugar), which is a disaccharide compound containing fructose and another monosaccharide, glucose.
Then there’s high fructose corn syrup (HCFS). A sweetener made from corn starch, it undergoes processing to convert some of the starch's glucose into fructose. The exact fructose content of HFCS varies: HFCS 55 (around 55% fructose if the water was removed) is used mostly in soft drinks, while HFCS 42 is used in other beverages, processed foods, and baked goods. Much ado is made about its high fructose content, but in reality HFCS has a similar fructose content to sucrose. Not surprisingly, there is no scientific evidence to support incessant claims that HFCS is more fattening than other sugars (stop hyperventilating all you anti-fructose zealots, I’ll discuss the evidence for this in Part 2. Take your blood pressure pills and sit back down).
Despite this, yours truly personally avoids HFCS, but not for any of the reasons incessantly cited by the anti-sugar crowd (obesity, fatty liver, metabolic syndrome, spontaneous human combustion, yadyadayada). Rather, it undergoes processing involving heavy metals and toxic chemicals that I don’t want anywhere in, on, or near my persona (see footnote ** for more info).
Anyways, now that we’ve got the nomenclature sorted, let’s get back to Lustig.
In a 2012 Nature article, the highly imaginative paediatrician likened fructose to alcohol, claiming excessive consumption of both caused obesity, hypertension, fatty liver, and insulin resistance[1].
Consuming any source of calories in excess leads to overweight and obesity. And becoming overweight in turn greatly raises the risk of hypertension, fatty liver, and insulin resistance[2,3]. The best non-drug ways to reverse this unhealthy turn of events is weight loss and exercise[2].
Of course, the anti-carb crowd don’t like exercise. Too much hard work. They’d rather sit on their dimpled butts and wait expectantly for some imaginary “metabolic advantage” to come galloping in like a white knight in shining armour, slaying all their unsightly flab in one fell swoop, leaving them lean as an athlete without ever having to get out of their chair and sweat.
Keep dreaming waiting, my friends.
In a 2013 issue of Advances in Nutrition, Lustig published another gem titled “Fructose: It’s Alcohol Without the Buzz”[4]. Sounding more like a corny advertising slogan than the heading of a peer-reviewed paper, the title seems to miss a crucial point: It’s the “buzz” that makes excessive alcohol consumption so enticing, which in turn leads to intoxication and its well-documented devastating health and social consequences. Fructose does not produce an inebriated “buzz”, and nor does it cause domestic violence, road fatalities, bar fights, ill-thought and unprotected casual sex encounters, or even painful hangovers the day after consumption.

"Wine: It's Alcohol With the Buzz!"
Not be deterred, Lustig promptly pushed the boundaries of credulity even further, this time likening sugar not just to alcohol, but also cigarettes. Lustig claimed sugar should be regulated just like the aforementioned, because:
“Well, sugar meets the same criteria of ubiquity, toxicity, abuse and negative impact on society that tobacco and alcohol also achieve.”[5]
And as if all that isn’t enough, Lustig has publicly claimed sugar is just as addictive as cocaine[6]. His main platform for this outrageous claim is that in MRI scans, sugar activates the same “pleasure centres” of the brain as cocaine.
Indeed it does … but so does a vast array of other activities, such as receiving money after correctly completing a task, getting a pleasant surprise, looking at attractive curvaceous females, having sex, viewing humorous cartoons, being shown pictures of your romantic partner, and even learning a new language![7-13] Just because different activities activate similar dopaminergic pathways and the mesolimbic area in the brain, does not even begin to mean they exert similar physiological effects. Hey, I enjoy learning and practising Spanish, but wouldn’t even begin to compare it to sex, and I’m guessing most bilingual folks with healthy hormone levels would concur.
By the way, eating dietary fat also lights up our brain’s “pleasure centres”, as does consuming chocolate and high-calorie foods (both high in fat)[14,15]. In fact, Oxford researchers Ivan de Araujo and Edmund Rolls compared the effects of dietary fat and sucrose consumption by healthy adults in the same series of experiments, and found both lit up the same brain areas to a similar degree – and that was despite using a tasteless and odourless fat source (they were more concerned with examining the neurological effect of fat viscosity, rather than taste and smell)[16]
In the research examining food preference and weight status, many reports have failed to link a “sweet tooth” with being overweight or obese; far stronger is the link between obesity and having a preference for dietary fat and/or foods rich in both fat and sugar[17]. It’s no big secret that fat and sugar together make a particularly tasty combination, and many of our most notable calorie-rich treats therefore contain both. But despite its well-known palatability, caloric density and its increased consumption alongside dietary carbohydrate over the last several decades, Lustig has nothing to say about it. As with his similarly myopic low-carb cohorts, the fact that excess dietary fat also contributes to obesity and ill-health doesn’t compliment his vocal anti-carbohydrate stance. Whether he thus subconsciously or even deliberately ignores this contradictory research, or is truly unware of it, I can’t say. Neither of the aforementioned possibilities, however, inspire confidence in his research efforts and conclusions. Nor does his penchant for hyperbolic exaggeration and disingenuous analogies that extend all the way to (very selectively) comparing sugar to drugs like alcohol, nicotine and even cocaine.
Lustig and his like-minded cohorts , of course, insist their fanciful sugar-equals-narcotics claims are not an exaggeration, and as evidence are fond of citing research that used rats – not humans – as the subjects. In one of these studies, French researchers reported that when rats were allowed to choose between water sweetened with sugar, saccharin or intravenous cocaine, over 90% preferred the sucrose-enhanced water to cocaine[18]. Because a similar proportion of rats preferred calorie-free saccharin, many commentators have assumed it was the sweetness and not caloric content of the two mixtures that the rats found so “addictive”.
But is that really what was going on? Along with self-preservation and replication, the search for calories is one of the most powerful motivators of animal behaviour. Just because saccharin is calorie-free doesn’t mean the rats weren’t after calories when they drank it in preference to scoring cocaine: After all, the rats didn’t know saccharin was calorie-free, and its sweet taste would’ve indicated it was indeed a source of caloric energy. Of course, the only way to test this possibility is to have included other non-sweet food items in the study, which the researchers didn’t do. But another group of researchers did, and we’ll discuss their results in a moment.
In another study, it was claimed rats frequented the side of a maze where they were given Oreos to the same extent as the side of the maze where they were given an injection of cocaine or morphine. Furthermore, when the researchers “used immunohistochemistry to measure the expression of a protein called c-Fos, a marker of neuronal activation, in the nucleus accumbens, or the brain’s ‘pleasure center,’” they found that “the Oreos activated significantly more neurons than cocaine or morphine.”
In the widely cited Connecticut College press release for this unpublished study, neuroscientist Joseph Schroeder stated:
"Our research supports the theory that high-fat/high-sugar foods stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do ... It may explain why some people can’t resist these foods despite the fact that they know they are bad for them."
And according to co-researcher Jamie Honohan, “Even though we associate significant health hazards in taking drugs like cocaine and morphine, high-fat/high-sugar foods may present even more of a danger because of their accessibility and affordability".[19]
Seriously? What about the majority of people who successfully manage to resist Oreos? If Oreos are truly more addictive than cocaine and morphine, yet are far more readily available and accessible, why aren’t the vast majority of us nursing “dangerous” Oreo addictions?
The Connecticut College study has not been peer-reviewed and published, yet enjoyed widespread press coverage. A subsequent study involving rats, drugs and Oreos that was peer-reviewed and published did not receive anywhere near the same kind of coverage, no doubt because its findings did not lend themselves to sensationalist headlines. In this study, researchers took three groups of rats and allowed them to spend time in empty compartments, or compartments containing Oreos, rice cakes or heroin. In the heroin arm of the study, 75-100% of the rats showed a preference for spending time in the heroin room (the results varied with increasing dosages). In the Oreos group, 69% of the rats preferred the Oreos room which, while not on a par with the heroin results, still indicated a strong preference for the sugar- and fat-rich biscuits. But guess what? A similar proportion of rats in the rice cake phase - 72% - demonstrated a preference for the rice cake room.
The results of this study support suspicions that rodent preferences for sucrose and saccharin in the French study above may have been more the result of sustenance-seeking rather than pleasure-seeking. Let’s face it, rice cakes – free of sugar and fat - are hardly the most palatable of foods, and the rats appeared to agree: When given infusions of either liquefied Oreos or rice cakes, the former elicited significantly more tongue protrusions than the latter[20]. Yet a similar proportion of Oreos and rice cake rats subsequently drifted to their respective food-containing rooms, which tells us assumptions from rodent experiments that sugar is as addictive as hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and morphine are probably overly simplistic, premature … and wrong.
One shortcoming of the above study is that it did not directly compare heroin, rice cakes and sugar with each other. But even if researchers one day do publish such an experiment in which the rats preferred sugar/fructose/Oreos/gelati/Chupa Chups/insert-whatever-the-heck-sweet-food-you-want-here – but not rice cakes - to cocaine or heroine, there is still one very major problem:
They’re rats, not humans!

Spot two or more differences between the above creatures? If so, congratulations – you’re smarter than many professional researchers! If not, don't despair - a long and lucrative career making idiotic analogies between sugar and hard drugs awaits you!
Rodent studies are notorious for producing results that cannot be replicated in human beings. For example, did you know that if you take two groups of mice and give one group supplemental CLA, a fatty acid found in meat and milk fat, then that group will turn into a bunch of buffed and shredded little mofos? The difference between the two groups is striking – CLA induces massive body fat reductions of 60-80%.
Based on these rodent results, CLA supplements promptly became a hit among bodybuilders, only to fizzle out a short time later.
Why?
Because CLA simply does not have the same effect in humans. Study after study has shown the fat loss effects of CLA in human volunteers to be either non-existent or negligible at best.
Oh, and one other thing: Not only do mice have an exaggerated response to CLA when compared to other species (rats, hamsters, pigs, humans), but they are also far more likely to develop fatty liver as a result. Which suggests all those fatty acids being liberated from adipose tissue overwhelm the mouse liver's ability to sufficiently increase fat oxidation.
This may came as a shocking surprise to many researchers and to folks like Lustig, but mice are not the same as humans.
No, really!
Then there’s the monumental wank known as the low-carb “metabolic advantage”. Years ago, low-carbers, led by a guy called Dr Michael Eades - who made millions telling people low-carb diets were the schnizzle for weight loss despite having to wear a girdle on TV because he was so fat - were fond of pointing to studies showing greater weight and fat loss in rodents on isocaloric ketogenic diets.
For some strange reason, they weren’t so fond of pointing to the studies in which rodents on ketogenic diets did not lose any extra fat or weight[21-23].
But no matter, because in tightly controlled ward studies with real live human beings, ketogenic diets have repeatedly failed to show greater weight or fat loss.
Extrapolating results from furry, four-legged creatures with a tail that weigh 250 grams to two-legged hominoids, without first bothering to validate those results in experiments with the latter, is stupid.
Truly, truly stupid.
Stop and think about this for a moment. If sugar was truly as or more addictive than illicit drugs, why do so many people risk fatal overdose and imprisonment to engage in the latter? If sugar really lit up the brain like cocaine and heroin, why on Earth do people resort to burglary, violent robbery and even prostitution to afford these drugs, when they could simply go to the supermarket and for a couple of dollars easily and legally buy a kilogram of pure, unadulterated sugar, guaranteed free of harmful fillers and cutting agents?
And has anyone really seen a person who has just removed sugar from their diet curled up on the ground, sweating and shaking in agony, as is par for the course among those in the midst of heroin withdrawal?
Seriously, do the people who promote this sugar = narcotics rubbish really believe in it? Do they honestly see no difference in allowing their kids to have an Oreo or a snort of cocaine? Between having a can of soda or a hit of heroin?
If so, then make no mistake: They’re completely fucking nuts.

On February 14, 2004, one of the world’s greatest and most amiable cyclists, Marco “Il Pirata” Pantani, was found dead in a Rimini hotel room. He was only 34. The cause of death was acute cocaine poisoning. Unlike a heroin overdose, there was no slipping off into a dreamy haze. Dying from a cocaine overdose is a very painful and nasty affair: Pantani would have suffered a massive heart attack and died in excruciating agony. I really, really wish he was bingeing on Oreos instead of cocaine that night. A big massive WAKE THE FUCK UP to all those terribly deluded alarmists who think table sugar is just as addictive and destructive as cocaine. That we have professional doctors and researchers who really believe this crap reveals a lot about why so many people are still completely clueless as to how to eat in a healthy and non-neurotic manner.

This is Douglas Glenn Colvin, better known as Dee Dee Ramone, bass player and songwriter for the greatest musical band ever to grace this planet: The Ramones. The popular and likeable Dee Dee was a long-time heroin user, and was found dead on June 5, 2002 by his wife Barbara. He was 50 years old. An autopsy established heroin overdose as the cause of death. Again, I really, really wish Dee Dee had chosen Oreos as his ‘drug’ of choice, instead of smack. If so, he’d still be with us today, and I could go see him and Marky Ramone playing Ramones covers at The Corner. But he’s not, and so I can’t. Tell me again how sugar is just as addictive and destructive as heroin? 

This is Ramone, a most handsome creature named after the greatest musical band ever to grace this planet. I once accidentally dropped some sugar-rich candy on the ground … he promptly came over, sniffed it, licked it, then left it and strutted off, utterly unimpressed. However, Ramone has been known to become so frenzied at the sight and smell of meat, rice and vegetable mixtures that he’ll jump, spin, hyperventilate, and bolt straight through a fly screen door, knocking it right off its fixtures (Ramone, I really hate it when you do that). And don’t dare try moving his bowl while he’s in the middle of chomping down this mixture … he might just separate your hand from your wrist. Stay tuned for my new study titled "Home-Cooked Meals More Addictive than Sugar, Cocaine, Heroin, Morphine, Social Media and Watching 'If You are the One'", currently under peer review.
There is one addiction-like syndrome I’ve observed related to sugar, and that’s the anti-sugar crowd’s unshakable penchant for intelligence-insulting bullshit. Like a lot of extremists, it seems they just can’t help themselves.
Your Fat is Not Your Fault! Nor is Your Outrageous Gullibility!
So why do so many people fall for such nonsense?
One of the ways Lustig has been able to gain such a wide audience for his outlandish claims is to employ the old “your fat is not your fault!” routine. In the worldview of folks like Lustig, daring to tell an overweight person who wishes to lose weight they should exercise more and/or eat less (i.e., telling them the truth) is akin to calling them a “glutton and a sloth”. In his televised rants, Lustig repeats these two words with nauseating frequency, claiming overweight and obese people are routinely being told they are “gluttons” and “sloths”, even by their own doctors[5,24].
Despite having little basis in reality, this brand of polarizing hyperbole works a treat, because people love being told they are unfairly marginalized victims. Given the choice between having to admit they played a key role in their own problems – always a bitter pill to swallow – or being able to blame their misfortune on someone or something else, many people will instinctively choose the latter. Blaming others and portraying ourselves as hapless victims is always easier – at least in the short-term – and allows us to avoid discomforting introspection. Not to mention the unpleasant truths this introspection can reveal about ourselves, and the effort required to change for the better. Much easier to instead listen to folks like Lustig who blame obesity wholly on profiteering food manufacturers, the “Coca-Cola Conspiracy”, and misguided health authorities (certainly guilty of perpetuating misinformation, but ironically Lustig is repeating their great mistake, which was to overlook the fundamental role of overall caloric intake and expenditure and instead erroneously blame obesity on a single dietary component).
Also at fault, in Lustig’s view, are all those heartless sods who have been calling you a “glutton and a sloth” instead of acknowledging that overweight people are just innocent victims of an evil substance the ever-imaginative Lustig considers to be just as addictive as cocaine and socially destructive as alcohol.
Exactly who these accusatory commentators and especially insensitive doctors are, Lustig never reveals. Most likely, I suspect, because they don’t exist; while there are indeed some rude doctors, the overwhelming majority would never employ such tactless language when addressing their overweight patients. And folks like myself, who rightfully and unashamedly point to the science showing calories to be the final and indisputable arbiter of weight gain and loss, are simply stating the plain facts. Contrary to what Lustig wants you to believe, we’re not on some cruel, perverse mission to make overweight people feel worse than they already do. If you’re currently overweight, then whether it was due to “gluttony” or a far more modest calorie surplus that led to insidious weight gain, or whether it was due to “sloth” or to a schedule so busy and distracting that exercise found itself sliding further and further down your “to do” list, is not for me to say. I don’t know you, and therefore cannot even begin to make such a judgement call.
What I can say with the utmost certainty is that if you are currently overweight, then you got that way because there was an imbalance between your caloric intake and caloric expenditure; the former exceeded the latter long enough for you to gain excess weight. If you want to reverse the situation, then you need to create a caloric deficit (something you can learn how to do properly in The Fat Loss Bible).
Despite its rock solid scientific foundation, Lustig furiously rejects the calories-in-versus-calories-out paradigm. He parrots the low-carb promoters who erroneously claim it’s the type of calories you eat that determine whether you get fat, and that the caloric type responsible for overweight is carbohydrate. Lustig takes this anti-carbohydrate mantra further by claiming simple carbohydrates like fructose, high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are the most fattening caloric sources of all.
In a 2013 interview that appeared on an Australian ‘science’ show, a clearly incensed Lustig asks:
“Did all of a sudden the entire world just become a bunch of gluttons and sloths? All at the same time? I mean, get real!”
When you watch the footage of this interview (available here), Lustig’s seething anger as he asks this hypothetical question is readily evident. He obviously harbours an extremely poor regard for those of us who maintain that an excess of calories caused the obesity 'epidemic'.
The only thing is, we’re right.
And, in an about-face, Lustig inadvertently acknowledges exactly that when he then complains:
“And now the food tastes great. In fact, it tastes so great we can't put it down. This is a win-win for the food industry. The complied with the arguments of the 1980s. They've gotten us to eat more, and they are making money hand over fist. The problem is - they're doing it at our expense, and we're losing our health.”[Bold emphasis added]
Lustig, who apparently believes food shouldn’t taste great (he’s clearly not of Mediterranean origin), then pulls another about-face, and switches back to anti-calorie mode:
“'Calories in, calories out' is how we got into this mess. It depends on where those calories come from, it depends on what those calories are, it depends on how those calories are metabolised, as to whether or not they will cause weight gain. When you burn protein for energy, it takes twice as much energy to metabolise that protein into energy as for carbohydrate. It's known as the 'thermic effect of food'. Those calories are not recoupable. So you actually burn more energy metabolising protein than you do carbohydrate.”
Lustig seems to be rather confused as to just what caused the obesity 'epidemic'. First he angrily scoffs at the notion that excess caloric intake caused the rise in obesity, then he admits we’ve indeed been eating more since the 1980s, then he goes back to dismissing the role of calories and claiming that it is carbohydrates that are fattening.
Lawdy, lawdy.
Let’s address Lustig’s incoherent claims one by one.
Firstly, no, the entire world did not become “gluttons” and “sloths” overnight. Lustig seems to forget that for much of the world’s population, starvation is still a much more pressing issue than no longer being able to fit into a pair of size 8 jeans. And among those populations that did go on to develop unprecedented levels of obesity, no-one ever said it happened overnight: Lustig’s hypothetical question is a classic strawman ploy. The obesity statistics clearly show a progressive increase over three decades in the number of obese folks[25,26], and this correlates nicely with food intake data showing an increase in caloric intake over the same time frame.
Secondly, Lustig’s claim that “'Calories in, calories out' is how we got into this mess” is complete and utter hogwash. A flippant disregard for “calories in” versus “calories out” is what got us into this “mess”. This flippancy was an unfortunate side effect of our health authorities’ myopic obsession with dietary fat, and despite being highly critical of these authorities, Lustig appears hell-bent on making sure we repeat the same mistake, only this time by myopically focusing on sugar instead of fat. He claims it’s not the amount of calories you consume and expend that matters, but the type of calories. And by doing so, blissfully demonstrates just how truly ignorant he is of the abundance of ward research showing this to be completely wrong. To top it all off, he parrots the low-carb glorification of protein as a thermic powerhouse, even though controlled research shows this effect to be minimal and that isocaloric diets higher in protein cause no extra weight loss.
Perhaps most bizarre of all is when Lustig complains that “now the food tastes great.” What, exactly, is he saying here? That food didn’t taste great prior to the 1980s? That he would prefer our food tastes bland, or even bad? Food is one of life’s great pleasures, and it damn well should taste great. Any assertion to the contrary reeks of the Spartan, self-depriving mentality that so many misguided health fanatics seem to believe is part and parcel of healthy eating. That this pervasive belief is not just wrong but in fact harmful to both physical and mental wellbeing is something we’ll explore far more closely in Part 2.
Also worrisome is when Lustig complains that the food industry has “gotten us to eat more.” Whoa, wait a minute. You could certainly make a strong argument that with incessant advertising, attractive packaging, and novel products, the food industry has swayed our perceptions and influenced us to eat more. But claiming they’ve “gotten” us to eat more suggests the food industry went beyond mere persuasion and somehow put the food right into our mouths. When considered along with Lustig’s incessant rambling about addiction, it’s clear he believes we’re all at the mercy of external forces, hapless sods all incapable of resisting the temptation of sweet, tasty foods. “I believe in victims, not perpetrators”, he says[5]. Except of course when it comes to the food industry; in Lustig’s eyes, it clearly is a major perpetrator.
And maybe, in a sense, it is. It ‘perpetrates’ catchy but often nonsensical advertising, and a pursuit of profits that may or may not be accompanied by a regard for possible public health outcomes. But it is a perpetrator who cannot force you to put a single morsel in your mouth. Unless you are an adult who for some strange reason allows others to spoon-feed you, then nothing enters your mouth that you didn’t put there yourself.
I will repeat: No food or drink enters your mouth that you didn’t put there yourself.
Regrettably, advertisers have been bullshitting us ever since there was advertising, and companies have been behaving badly ever since there were companies. And since at least the early 1960s, ‘respected’ health authorities have been getting just about everything spectacularly wrong when it comes to the primary prevention of conditions like heart disease and obesity.
But there comes a point when, having realized these entities often spout bollocks and get things wrong, that we have to step up and take responsibility for our own physical condition. We can accept that we’ve been uncritically following garbage advice, and instead smarten up and defer to what the actual science says and to what empirical history shows us, and move forward accordingly.
Or we can simply sit around and complain we are the victims of our “pleasure centres”, of “addiction”, of a vast “Coca Cola Conspiracy” that allegedly paralyses our free will. We can convince ourselves these forces are so powerful they render us all helpless victims and we therefore need Big Government to come along and rescue us, to make everything alright again by using its powers of force to impose new taxes and restrictions on sugar (as Lustig is demanding), even if wasn’t actually sugar that made us fat.
In other words, we all have a choice:
-Act like grown-ups, accept responsibility for our own actions, and vow to abide by physiological reality from this day on as best we can, or;
-Act like petulant little children who refuse to accept our own excesses led to our present condition, and instead angrily blame someone or something else, while simultaneously expecting someone else to do something about it.
If his physical condition is anything to go by, Robert Lustig appears to have opted for the second strategy. Every photograph and every piece of video/TV footage I’ve seen of Lustig shows him sporting a major gut. As I wrote in a recent article, this would be irrelevant if his field of expertise was accounting or engineering, but for an individual who positions himself as an expert health commentator and vigorously blames sugar for the obesity epidemic, it speaks volumes. If sugar really is the cause of obesity, then Robert clearly isn’t following his own advice. But if he is avoiding sugar, then he’s simply living proof that too many calories and/or not enough physical activity are the true causes of overweight.
The irony is even bigger than his waistline. Like his low-carb cohorts Jimmy Moore, Gary Taubes, the girdle-wearing Michael Eades and the late Robert Atkins, Lustig loudly proclaims to know the cause of the obesity epidemic and smugly ridicules those who disagree with him, all the while sporting a clearly oversized midsection.

These folks refuse to acknowledge scientific reality, and while they’ve perversely made a lot of money doing so, they are nonetheless paying the physical price for it.
Don’t you do the same.
In Part 2, we’ll look at the evidence that clearly shows sugar does not and cannot induce weight gain independent of its caloric content. I'll also share with you what I consider to be one of the most important dietary studies of all time. Chances are you’ve never heard of this study, but don’t worry, come next week you’ll know all about it. And you’ll begin to realize why the country that is most obsessed about diet and health, a country from which the overwhelming majority of diet gurus and bullshit health fads emanate, ranks so poorly on the healthy and longevity charts. Meanwhile, you’ll learn about a country where the people view food as a source of pleasure and don’t give a shit about “eating for health”, yet nonetheless eat healthier, live longer, and have far lower rates of obesity and heart disease!
Stay tuned folks…
Click here to read Part 2.
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Note: The author of this article does not receive and has never received any form of compensation from the sugar industry, soft drink manufacturers, nor any other food industry group.
Anthony Colpo is an independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist, and author of the groundbreaking books The Fat Loss Bible, The Great Cholesterol Con and Whole Grains, Empty Promises.
Footnotes
*Yes, it’s true: I started drinking beer in Spain. Damn you Shaun, for introducing me to Alhambra, especially the Especial and Reserva versions! Apart from a single Estrella sighting, I’ve not seen any Spanish beers back here. What am I supposed to do now? Huh?! LOL
**The process used to convert corn starch to HFCS relies on a long list of chemicals, two of which (mercury grade caustic soda and hydrochloric acid) can transfer trace quantities of mercury into the finished product[27]. And at least one part of the process makes incidental use of a toxic, synthetic fixing agent called glutaraldehyde.
In light of this dependence on chemical processes, you could hardly call HFCS a natural product. But on July 3, 2008, that’s exactly what the US Food and Drug Administration gave the food industry permission to do. In response to continued petitioning by the Corn Refiners Association, the FDA allowed products containing HFCS to be labelled “natural” so long as glutaraldehyde did not come into contact with the syrup[28].
ǂThis article originally stated that Penélope Cruz married Tom Cruise. For those who give a shit, it has come to the attention of yours truly that Penélope stopped short of becoming Mrs Cruz-Cruise after reportedly concluding she wanted no part of his Scientology gig. She dumped Cruise and instead teamed up with Javier Bardem, the bloke she co-starred with in the 1992 film Jamón Jamón, the critically acclaimed movie about sex and ham. Well, that's all I remember of it. Bardem is an atheist and a big AC/DC fan, which automatically makes him a far more attractive prospect than some couch-jumping Scientologist. Cruz evidently agreed, as she went onto marry Señor Bardem; they now have two children.
References
30 
Why Low-Carb Diets are Terrible for Athletes: Part 1
Posted In Cardiovascular Fitness,Nutrition

Something real strange happened in the eighties.
No, I’m not referring to Boy George. Or the proliferation of fluorescent clothing and polished cotton disco pants. Or the popularity of applying eye-liner before a night out on the town – among heterosexual males.
Nor am I referring to the beyond-boofy hairdos of the era that sported fringes so large they gave more shade than a Stratco verandah.
Nope, I couldn’t care less about any of those fads, because their lifespans were relatively short. But something else arose in the eighties whose global impact was to be far more severe and far longer lasting.
That something was low-fat mania.
Due to the stunning realization by health authorities and certain authors that carbohydrates yielded around 4 calories per gram, while fats supplied around 9 calories per gram (something actually known to scientists for decades prior), these busy-body authorities decided – during what must have been a very drunken brainstorming session – to start urging the world to eat less fat in order to prevent obesity.
This overly simplistic and, quite frankly, patently stupid strategy was based on the premise that human beings –not exactly known for their temperance and moderate behaviour – would obediently lower their fat intake, and make no attempt whatsoever to compensate for the decreased caloric intake and decreased satiety by consuming greater amounts of alternative macronutrients.
But they did. And how. To make up for the lack of taste and satiety imparted from the now departed dietary fat, they not only began adding more sugar to their cereal and squeezing more syrup onto their pancakes, they began consuming a far higher quantity of carbohydrates overall. In fact, they just couldn’t get enough of those sweet, delectable carbohydrates, so to squelch their between-meal carb-cravings, they began guzzling down ever-greater amounts of sugar-laden juices and soft drinks.
And that was the folks who actually lowered their fat intake. Many did not, but consumed extra carbohydrate anyhow, convinced by all the “fat-makes-you-fat” hysteria that extra carbohydrate calories were somehow inconsequential.
Amidst this burping, flatulent orgy of carb-binging, food manufacturers quickly realized a golden opportunity was staring them in the face. They began pumping out low-fat, carbohydrate- and sugar-rich foods en masse, and a multi-squillion dollar industry was born.
All around the world, people were gorging themselves on the kind of caloric and carbohydrate intakes that would do many professional athletes proud.
There was just one wee problem: Most of these people weren’t professional athletes. In fact, most didn’t even exercise, let alone compete in triathlons. The 1980s, in effect, was the era in which normal-weight sedentary people all around the world began doing what anyone commencing regular strenuous training in a glycogen-dependent sport should do: increase their caloric and carbohydrate intake to cover the increased energy demands imposed by their new training regimen.
They just left out the training regimen. Sedentary housewives and businessmen were eating more carbs and calories, but they remained sedentary housewives and businessmen.
The result: Planet Earth promptly became home to the fattest and most diabetic population this world has ever known.
The moral of the story? Excess calories are real and have consequences, whether they come from protein, fat, or carbohydrates. If you are going to emulate the dietary macronutrient composition of a pro athlete, then you better damn well train like one.
The eighties: Bad clothes, bad hair and male pop stars kitted up like ugly sheilas. Almost as silly as low-fat mania.
Stupid Is as Stupid Does
The story doesn’t end there folks. Oh nooooo, not by a long shot. Because in the late 90s, something else really strange happened.
No, I’m not talking about the cigar-based antics of a certain ex-President and his chubby intern, the screwballs who blamed Columbine on Marilyn Manson albums, or the share price of Pets.com.
No, I’m referring to the rise of a creature every bit as deluded and simple-minded as the authorities who convinced the world to go low-fat.
The name of this Do-Do-like creature?
The low-carb guru.
The low-carb guru was typically a cardiologist or family physician who realized far greater fame and fortune was to be had in becoming a “diet doctor” than prescribing warfarin and treating coughing, wheezing, carbuncled Medicare recipients. The low-carb guru usually looked like he himself could sorely use some good fat loss advice, but this hardly mattered to a population beleaguered with obesity and diabetes and desperate for the next novel-sounding quick-fix.
If it was a novel magic bullet the population wanted, then the low-carb gurus were more than happy to give it to them. So in response to the myopic and simple-minded war on fat, they presented their revolutionary solution:
A myopic and simple-minded war on carbohydrate.
Bloody brilliant!
Well, not really. Truth be told, it was bloody moronic. Some people lost weight on the low-carb diets by unwittingly lowering their caloric intake, just as some folks lost weight on the low-fat diet when they were able to refrain from consuming extra carbohydrates.
But, just like many folks in the low-fat era believed carbohydrate calories were without consequence, many of the newly-converted low-carb devotees became convinced that fat and protein calories were inconsequential. Only carbohydrates needed to be restricted, they were told, because carbohydrates caused insulin release, which by some magic voodoo process caused fat gain.
I say “voodoo” because real science showed that in real life humans, isocaloric high- and low-fat diets cause no meaningful difference in metabolic rate (when there is a slight increase in metabolic rate, it is almost invariably seen with high-carb meals and diets) and no meaningful difference in de novo lipogensis (creation of new fat). Tightly controlled metabolic ward studies in which the likelihood of non-compliance was greatly reduced, and in some instances made virtually impossible, repeatedly showed no difference in fat-derived weight loss between isocaloric low- and high-carb diets.
This of course, mattered little to the low-carb gurus and their gullible followers. The gurus simply ignored the tightly controlled human dietary research and instead cited ad nauseum very short-term studies in which intravenous insulin infusions, or administration of insulin to adipose cells in petri dishes, caused suppression of lipolysis and stimulation of lipogenesis. From these largely irrelevant studies they built a virtual religion whose fundamental tenet was “Carbs raise insulin, insulin makes you fat”.
To give the impression that these unnatural experiments actually had relevance in humans, they cited the half of free-living studies comparing low- and high-carb diets that showed greater weight loss in the former. The remaining half that found no difference were simply ignored, as of course were the multitude of metabolic ward studies that completely failed to show any difference.
Bah, impartiality and conflicting evidence…who needs it?
The poor schmucks who soaked up this bullshit, that’s who.

The nineties: When serious athletes started taking nutrition advice from blokes who looked like this.
Thanks to their belief in the nonsensical metabolic advantage spewed forth by the high priests of low-carb, millions of low-carb devotees endured constipation, bad breath, lethargy, and a socially awkward diet in the hope of weight loss that never materialized. They slashed their carb intake even further, pissed on their Ketostix even more fervently (“turn purple, you bastard! PURPLE dammit!!”), but still no weight loss aside from the 2 or 3 kilos of electrolyte-flushing water loss they experienced at the start of their low-carb misadventure.
Low-carbing turned out to be a big disappointment. Nary a dent was made in obesity rates, and as Generation Quick-Fix waddled off in search of the next overhyped load of bollocks, the lucrative low-carb empire collapsed. Atkins Nutritionals went bust, the follow-up to the best-seller Protein Power bombed, and unwanted copies of Dr Atkins New Diet Revolution, The South Beach Diet, and Protein Power started appearing on shelves of charity shops faster than you could say “Low-carb pasta tastes like soggy sawdust – only worse”.
“Good riddance!” exclaimed a disillusioned and fat-as-ever population.
However, they spoke too soon, for not all the low-carb demons had been exorcised. Along with the rise of the low-carb gurus beginning in the late 90s, something else really bizarre happened.
It was this: swayed by the low-carb hypebole, many highly active strength and endurance athletes started eating low-carb diets, despite the fact that a literal mountain of research has shown that high-carbohydrate diets were the far superior choice for glycolytic activities.
Intelligently applied non-ketogenic low-carb diets (in other words, not the kind recommended by the low-carb gurus) were actually a viable short-term choice for diabetic and totally sedentary folks (however, the negative effects of keto and non-keto low-carb diets on T3 levels makes them a questionable long-term option). But for athletic folks, they were a terrible choice, period.
So while in the eighties sedentary folks started eating diets with macronutrient and caloric profiles more akin to those of serious athletes, the opposite was now occurring: Many serious athletes were consuming diets with a carbohydrate content suitable only for diabetics and inactive people.
And they were suffering for it.
Don’t Run a High-Octane Machine on Low-Octane Fuel
Activities like boxing, cycling, mixed martial arts, running and even high volume weight training are dependent on a steady supply of carbohydrate to replace the muscle glycogen that would otherwise be exhausted during these glucose-dependent activities. As research has repeatedly shown, low-carbohydrate diets are simply incapable of maintaining optimal glycogen levels and vastly inferior to high-carb diets when it comes to improving performance.
While those pursuing weight loss were hoodwinked with the “carbohydrate-insulin” hypothesis, athletically-inclined folks were reeled in with an equally unscientific theory known as the “fat adaptation” theory. According to this hypothesis, your performance and mood may suffer during the first week or so of a low-carbohydrate diet (this much is actually true), but after this adaptation phase, your body will become wonderfully adept at running on fat and performance in your chosen sport will skyrocket. You won’t have to worry about glycogen depletion or “hitting the wall”, because your newly fat-adapted body will just keep drawing on body fat to power your workout into the next millennium.
This theory is utter rubbish.
Before I detail the science showing exactly why, let’s take a look at some real life examples of what happens when endurance athletes are suckered by the fat adaptation hogwash. Here’s an email I received from Kevin, an avid marathon runner who attempted an ultra-endurance event after months of low-carbing. He recounts what happened, and it wasn’t a very happy experience:
Hi Anthony,
I've followed you for years going back to the Active Low Carb website, which has banned me. I have The Great Cholesterol Con and The Fat Loss Bible.
Preface: The lowcarb approach to diet is insidious. That the initial weight loss is all water doesn't make much difference to most, including me. But I have a story that explains why I finally quit the lowcarb bull:
I'm a marathon and ultramarathon runner. A couple years ago I ran the Antelope Island 50 mile race. Antelope Island is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake of Utah. Months of diligent lowcarb eating had caused me to lose 20 pounds by race day. Initially I felt I was running slower than my norm but attributed it to the cold. The race was in March and in Utah it tends still be winter-like in March. As the day warmed I tried to increase my pace but still lagged below my normal pace. 
The island is a bit over 25 miles long. Runners start at one end, run to the other end then turn around and come back. The island has a small mountain dead-center. The course requires running to the top each way. When I was climbing it for the second time, my energy level was so poor I was unable to run and instead was trying to race-walk. By the time I got back down to level ground I was having leg cramps and shivering from the cold. Runners passing me were wearing shorts and t-shirts so it wasn't that cold. This was around mile-40. By mile-45 the cramps had progressed to my ass, lumbar back, shoulders, triceps and neck. I ultimately finished, dead last among the 200 runners. 
But the story doesn't end there. I had put up a tent near the start-finish line the night before the race. I slept in the tent and was first on the course on race day. I'd planned to sleep in the tent after the race rather than make the 6 hour drive home. Crawling into the tent I was shivering from the cold. The shivering aggravated the cramping. I lay in the sleeping bag trying to get warm enough to stop the intense shivering and horrific cramping. Around midnight I couldn't take the it anymore. I crawled out of the tent and crawled to my car. It took several minutes to unlock the door and get myself seated in the passenger seat. Then I turned the heater on full-force. I sipped gatorade all night and the cramping didn't stop til dawn. The entire night was a wide-awake nightmare. 
So I learned the hard way. Low carb proponents want to lose weight without controlling their diet. Some, like me, try to get around it with intense exercise. But as the body becomes more efficient it loses less weight through exercise. That's the closest thing to a true metabolic advantage. And it was an advantage during famines, I imagine. 
Thanks for continuing the fight, although you won't convince anyone unless they've gone through an ordeal similar to mine. 
Kevin
Kevin’s experience is being played out by misguided exercisers the world over. Serious strength and endurance athletes, suffering from an irrational fear of carbohydrate, go to great lengths to avoid the very macronutrient they actually need the most. When their performance inevitably dives, they first attempt to rationalize it away, figuring they’re “having a bad day”, or that it “must be the headwind slowing me down”. After several months of persistent bad days, even when the weather is fine and a nice strong tailwind is blowing, reality starts to sink in. A deeply unsettling feeling that something’s just not right begins dominating their thoughts every waking moment.
That something is a lack of carbohydrate, which causes glycogen depletion, which in turn leaves muscles unable to get the glucose they need to produce ATP, the ultimate cellular fuel source.
I’m intimately familiar with this whole scenario, because I’ve been through it myself. In what now seems like a lifetime ago, when I was far less wiser than what I am now, I figured I’d prove to the world that ketogenic diets could indeed adequately fuel glycolytic activities. I ‘d been following a low-carb diet for several years, and a ketogenic intake for around a year, so the usual objections trotted out in response to clinical studies about lack of fat adaptation did not apply. During the final 18 months or so of finishing my book The Great Cholesterol Con, I had been doing very little bike riding and had been maintaining my strength and fitness on a “skeleton” regimen comprised of weight training and a couple of hours of MMA training on the weekends. After escaping from a suffocating marriage, then finally finishing the book, I decided to reward myself with a brand new Scott CR1, a game-changing machine that at the time was setting new benchmarks in carbon fiber bicycle frame technology.
I bought my new bike and began eagerly hitting the hills. At first, I was able to zip up the hills with little problem. "Ha!", I thought, "who says low-carb ketogenic diets can't power high level physical activity?"
It wasn't long before reality came knocking. Hard. My energy and performance started tanking. My times got slower. And slower. My rides progressively felt harder and harder. It felt like someone was slipping an invisible and increasingly heavier weight vest over my shoulders with each and every ride.
Off the bike, my legs started feeling heavy and tired - classic signs of glycogen depletion. My arms and torso felt fine, indicating that the cycling was tapping into my leg muscles' glycogen stores much faster than what my low-carb diet could replace them. The problem wasn't insufficient calories or fat, as I was eating plenty of both and maintaining my weight.
The final straw came one day as I was riding up a route well known to Melbourne road cyclists as "The Wall". When I was passed by a cyclist with thighs not much bigger than my forearms, I immediately sought to rectify the situation by catching up, slipstreaming, then passing him. But no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't catch the guy - it was like someone had ripped out the muscles from my legs and replaced them with lead. There I was, with my speed-skater-like thighs and world-class super-light road bike, being left in the dust by someone with the physical presence of a starvation victim and riding an old Giant. It was at this point that a rising sense of anger and disgust finally overpowered my stubborn denial. I had to face the facts: despite my enthusiasm for ketogenic dieting, it was killing my cycling performance.
The rest, as they say, is history. I began increasing my carbohydrate intake and my performance immediately improved. Nowadays, I average around 400-500 grams of carbohydrate per day, and my ride times have improved to the point where I can power up to Mount Lofty on a heavy-ass steel-framed single-speed significantly faster than what I used to do on the feather-light Scott. My old low-carbing days are now just a distant bad memory, but the sad reality is many active people out there are still plugging along in a mire of substandard performance, waiting for a magical fat-derived performance boost that will simply never arrive.
The moral of the story? If you want to train, perform and look like a serious athlete, you better damn well eat like one. People who perform vigorous exercise have no business eating a diet best suited to diabetics and sedentary soccer mums.
In Part 2, I’ll delve into the sports nutrition research that conclusively shows low-carb diets to be a complete dud when it comes to fuelling high level exercise. We’ll also take a closer look at some athletes who supposedly achieved athletic success following a low-carb diet.
Until then, keep eating your berries and sweet potatoes,
Anthony.
Click here to read Part 2
Why Low-Carb Diets are Terrible for Athletes: Part 2
Posted In Nutrition

“Statistics are like a bikini: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."
Luca Mascitelli, MD.

Before we discuss the research showing why low-carb diets are a really, really stupid idea for athletes, I want you to imagine the following post-training conversation between a coach and a star football player whose performance has recently gone to hell in a hand basket:
“Joey, come over here, I need to talk to you”
“Sure, what’s up coach?”
Joey, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Waddya mean coach?”
“At the start of the year, you were tearing up the field, now you’re playing like a fairy. My elderly mother-in-law could run rings around you. What the hell is going on? You got women problems again?”
“Nah coach, I haven’t touched any underage girls since the player counseling program last year”. 
“OK, that’s good. So what’s wrong then? You been drinking? Taking drugs? Family problems? Money trouble? Talk to me Joey, talk to me.”
“Nothing like that, coach.”
“Joey, for the last 3 weeks, you’ve been dragging your butt around like a tired old man. I gotta know why…the sponsors are freaking out, the newspapers and radio shows are having a field day, team management is breaking my balls…think, Joey, think…what happened 3 weeks ago that could’ve caused all this?”
“Well coach, I did change my diet a bit.”
“What do you mean ‘a bit’?”
“Well, a month ago my diabetic Grandma visited from Rockhampton and she was telling us how she lost 5 kilos and felt so much better after following the Dukan Diet and -”
“The WHAT diet?”
“The Dukan Diet. It’s by some French bloke who reckons you should eat lots of protein and bugger-all carbs for weight loss. So I went on the Internet and found this website called Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb, which I think is Mexican for a crazy person on a low-carbohydrate diet or something, but anyway, it was saying that these low-carb diets are wikkid for athletes and he even did a podcast with some athlete from one of those countries way up North where the sheilas all have blond hair and pigtails who reckons he felt so much better after starting a low-carb diet, so then I Googled some more and found this article by a bloke called Groves who said that a guy named Momo performed the fastest ever marathon time in Olympic history, and it was because he was from Ethiopia and everyone knows that in Ethiopia everyone eats like the Masai warriors who eat nothing but fatty milk and meat and Zebu cow blood and-“
“Joey!”
“Yeah coach?”
“You know that banned list we give all you players at the start of the year?”
“You mean the one with prohibited stuff we’re s’posed to avoid, like 15 year-old groupies, strip clubs, Hong Kong taxi-cab roofs, and alcohol on airplanes?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. You remember what was at the top of the list? What’s at number one on the list of things to avoid?”
“Can’t remember coach…”
“Fad diets, Joey, fad diets! For chrissakes, we pay big money for a professional sports nutritionist to dial in your eating programs, right down to the very last calorie, and we can’t afford to have you guys stuffing it up by following every half-baked diet scam you come across on the Internet!”
“Sorry coach.”
[The story has a happy ending: Joey met with the team nutritionist, got back on a high-carb diet, religiously took his post-workout carbs, started dating a girl over 18 years of age, and went on to have an awesome season].
Avoid What the Pros Avoid
Low-carb diets have never gained a foothold in professional sport for one simple reason; professional athletes are expected to perform consistently at a high level. Their very livelihood depends on it.
If their performance suffers, all hell breaks loose. Sports columnists start writing savage critiques, fans start calling for their heads, sponsors start wondering whether they should continue with lavish endorsements, and team selectors start sizing up other promising athletes as potential replacements.
So, apart from the occasional wayward Joey, low-carbohydrate diets are avoided like an infectious disease in the upper echelons of sport. Given that they’ve been repeatedly shown to kill performance in glycogen-dependent activities, it’s little wonder that top-flight athletes and their coaches avoid them like a bad smell.
Unfortunately, low-carb propaganda has swayed many amateur athletes and serious recreational exercisers who don’t enjoy the same professional advice available to elite athletes. As we learned in Part 1, these folks have been duped into believing the fallacious “fat adaptation” myth. Because they don’t have the kind of professional, financial and social pressures that would promptly terminate any elite athletic dalliance with low-carbing, many non-professional athletes have adopted these diets then struggled along in a state of denial, often for years on end.
If that’s you, then my advice is to have a change of clothes ready, because Coach Anthony is about to pour a big bucket of ice cold water over you and finally snap you out of your low-carb stupor.
Fat Adaptation and Other Low-Carb Fairy Tales
In order to justify use of a diet in athletes that science has repeatedly shown to be a complete crock, low-carb authors and Internet ‘gurus’ use a mix of pseudoscience and selective citation to support their case.
Let’s start with a study frequently cited by the fat adaptation believers, which examined the effect of a ketogenic diet in six moderately obese, untrained subjects. Stephen Phinney and his colleagues placed them on a zero-carb diet of lean meat, fish, or fowl for six weeks, supplemented with minerals and vitamins and providing 500-750 calories per day. At the start of the study, the subjects performed a treadmill endurance test with a mean workload of 76% VO2 max and a mean time to subjective exhaustion of 168 minutes. After six weeks, the subjects lost a mean 10.6 kilograms, were able to perform the test at only 60% VO2max, a lower heart rate, and a mean time to exhaustion on the treadmill of 249 minutes[1].
Wow, a performance increase of 81 minutes, simply by eliminating carbohydrates! Damn, I’m throwing out the noodles, changing my last name to Atkins-Moore-Dukan-Eades, and quitting my job to become a professional power-walker! London 2012, here I come, baby!
Oops, hang on a minute. I think I see a few problems with this study. Do you see them too?
--The study involved untrained and very unfit subjects. So the improved results at the end of the study could simply have been due to improved fitness and acclimation to the walking test, not to any special "fuel-mobilizing" effect of the low-carb diet;
---The tested activity was walking, which is about as low intensity a physical activity as they come. The lower the intensity of the exercise, the less of a factor glycogen depletion will be. But the fact remains that the fitness gains conferred by walking are limited, and most sport activities require a far higher level of exertion;
---There was no high-carbohydrate control group. How on earth can this study be used to argue for the comparative benefits of low-carb nutrition in physical activity when there was no comparison diet?
For someone to have to work at over 70% VO2max simply from walking indicates very poor starting fitness. Once the subjects experienced initial adaptation and fitness improvements, the intensity of the exercise was not increased commensurately. So what would have happened if the subjects were forced to keep performing at a higher level of VO2max, rather than the leisurely 60% that was observed in the second treadmill session?
What would have happened if there had been another group in the study following a high-carbohydrate diet?
These questions were addressed by a subsequent study also conducted by Phinney and co. This time, eight untrained, obese females followed either a zero-carb diet or a carbohydrate-containing diet for 6 weeks. Both groups ate lean meat, fish, or fowl. Margarine was given to the zero-carb group for extra fat, while the carb group received grape juice supplying seventy-five grams of carbohydrate daily. Both groups consumed 830 calories per day.
Unlike the previous study, the subjects performed their endurance tests on a stationary cycle. And unlike the previous study, the initial VO2max target was maintained for all subsequent tests. After one week, endurance at around 75% VO2max dropped by a whopping 50% in the zero-carb group - and that's where it stayed for the rest of the study. In contrast, the carbohydrate group experienced no change in their endurance performance. Glycogen levels in the thighs of the zero-carbers also plummeted by half, but remained unchanged in the carbohydrate group. Despite their markedly different carbohydrate intakes, both groups showed similar levels of ketones throughout the study (the minimum threshold for ketosis rises in vigorously exercising individuals, as we'll discuss shortly). Rather than ketosis, the decline in endurance was highly correlated with the decrease in muscle glycogen stores[2].
Astute readers may be thinking: “OK Anthony, this study shows that zero-carb diets suck dirty workout socks when it comes to exercise, but 75 grams doesn’t exactly constitute a high-carb diet, either!”
Very good, my observant little grasshoppers. But remember, obese people are carrying a lot more body fat to use as fuel than their lean counterparts, and they tolerate severe calorie restriction far better, losing less lean tissue in the process. For lean folks engaged in regular strenuous exercise, a daily carbohydrate intake of seventy-five grams is nowhere near sufficient, as we’ll find out shortly.
Sprinting to Hell on a Zero-Carb Diet
Before we do that, let’s take a look at another study cited ad nauseum to support low-carb diets, this time involving a group of individuals participating in a sport dear to my heart: road cycling. According to the hyperbolic purveyors of low-carb bollocks, this study showed that four weeks on a zero-carb diet did not impair cycling performance.
Within seven to ten days of cutting carbs to zero, the cyclists experienced the well-known transient energy “crash” many folks experience soon after starting a ketogenic diet. During this time, the cyclists felt like crap and had trouble keeping up their training schedules. This passed, and after four weeks no decrease in endurance was allegedly noted when they were tested at 62-64% VO2max.
Cool. No carbs, no drop in performance! Who needs all that rice and post-workout dextrose, anyhow? I’m gonna start having me some whipped cream after a hard ride!
Oops, hang on - oh no, not again – another great-sounding result that’s not what it seems. Dammit, this always happens when I read the full text of a study for myself instead of believing the second-hand hogwash on Internet forums! Within minutes, I discover that someone’s been yanking our chains.
And so it is with the cyclist study. Here’s what you haven’t been told: While the performance of the cyclists at 62-64% VO2max was reportedly unaffected by the ketogenic diet, Phinney (also the head researcher of this study) admitted years later that their ability to perform more intense activity (sprinting) deteriorated[3]. Phinney, (a pro-low-carbohydrate commentator who recently co-authored an Atkins diet book with Atkins-sponsored researchers Eric Westman and Jeff Volek[4]), described the sprinting performance of the ketogenic cyclists as “constrained”.
That’s a rather subdued way of saying “their sprinting performance went down the toilet faster than a batch of amphetamines when the police knock on the door of an outlaw biker clubhouse”. 
Telling a competitive cyclist that a zero-carb diet won’t affect his ability to perform moderate endurance exercise but his sprinting ability will be “constrained” is a bit like telling a bloke that lopping off his manhood won’t affect his general mobility but will “constrain” his sex life.
Hmmm, given that most cycling races are won only after a frantic sprint to the finish, the correct conclusion from Phinney’s study would be: “Zero-carb diets are pretty much useless for competitive cyclists”. In fact, they’d be useless for any sport that includes both an endurance component and short bouts of explosive activity which is like, um, almost every popular sport in the world.
It’s at this point that the low-carb shills will interject and complain that the cyclists’ poor sprint performance was due to a lack of fat adaptation. The cyclists needed longer to become fat adapted, bro, and then their performance would have been fine, man!
Yeah, right. And if you lob off a guy’s manhood, it will magically grow back if you wait long enough.
As we have already discussed, the subjects experienced the customary initial energy crash that frequently accompanies the fat adaptation process. This was accomplished within ten days, right at the start of the study. By the end of the four week study, the subjects were well and truly fat adapted, a fact confirmed by respiratory quotient (RQ) testing. Measuring RQ allows researchers to check how a person's fat adaptation is coming along, and is typically expressed on a scale ranging from 1.0 (pure carbohydrate oxidation) to around 0.7 (pure fat oxidation). At the completion of the study, Phinney’s elite cyclists displayed a mean RQ during testing at 60-65% VO2max of 0.72 – which is a bee’s cajone away from 0.7[5]. In other words, they were as “fat adapted” as they were ever going to be.
And that’s not all folks. The study abstract concluded “aerobic endurance exercise by well-trained cyclists was not compromised by four weeks of ketosis”. But even at the lower intensity used in this study, two of the cyclists did in fact experience significant declines in their time to exhaustion (-48 and -51 minutes). Another experienced a 3-minute increase, while two others experienced a 30-minute and a whopping 84-minute increase. Calling hogwash on a published finding is never a pleasant job, as it causes the individuals involved to develop a deep dislike of yours truly and purchase Anthony Colpo voodoo dolls that they then angrily stab repeatedly, causing me to experience inexplicable shooting pains in my torso when I’m sitting with my buddies watching The Wanderers for the 576th time.
Nonetheless, as your fearless caller-outer-of-hogwash, that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. No other controlled study supports the claim that any healthy, well-trained, weight stable individual who switches from a high-carbohydrate diet to an isocaloric ketogenic diet will increase his time-to-exhaustion by a massive 57%. So why would this study have found such a thing?
Let’s take a look at the way the study was performed. During the first week of the study, the cyclists consumed a high-carbohydrate diet supplying enough calories to keep their weight stable. The next four weeks were spent on an isocaloric zero-carb diet that also resulted in no weight change. At the end of weeks one and four, the cyclists performed their endurance tests. Unlike other studies, there was no familiarization test and the tests were not performed in random order. Everyone performed the first test after one week of the eucaloric high-carb diet, then the second test after four weeks of the zero-carb diet. Therefore, the improved performances may simply have been an artifact of test familiarization; that is, improved efficiency as a result of a learning effect when performing an unfamiliar test for the second time. As Andrew R. Coggan, Ph.D, an exercise physiologist, multi-sport endurance athlete and prolific published researcher, noted: "in my opinion, and those of many others, such large changes in performance are not believeable, suggesting that the pre-diet performance of [the cyclist who experienced an 84-minute increase] was greatly underestimated"[6].
So what we have from Phinney’s study is sprinting performance that promptly went down the crapper, worsening endurance performance in 2 of the cyclists even at low exercise intensity levels, no significant change in another of the cyclists, and extremely unlikely increases in “endurance” in the remaining 2 that are most likely an artifact of test familiarization. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the pinnacle study from which we are supposed to conclude that low-carbohydrate dieting will not hurt endurance cycling performance.
Thanks guys, but I think I’ll stick to mango over pork rinds any day…
'Non-Ketogenic' Low-Carb is Still Too Low
So at higher levels of VO2max, zero-carb diets clearly destroy physical performance in both untrained and trained subjects. But what about less-restrictive carbohydrate-reduced diets - what effect do they have in normal-weight individuals undergoing strenuous exercise?
A study answering this very question was conducted by Helge and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen. During the first seven weeks of this study, one group ate a high-carb diet, the other a low-carb/high fat diet. During the eighth week, both groups ate the high-carb diet. The subjects trained three times a week during the first 4 weeks, then 4 times a week during the last 4 weeks on stationary cycles, at a controlled exercise intensity that ranged between 60 and 85 percent. The workouts lasted 60-75 minutes.
During the first seven weeks, the low-carb/high fat group ate 177 grams of carbs and 217 grams of fat per day. The high-carb group ate 546 grams of carbs and 75 grams of fat per day. Both groups ate similar amounts of protein. While 177 grams of carbs may not typically be considered ‘low-carb’, keep in mind that exercise increases the carbohydrate threshold required to reach ketosis. Indeed, blood ketones rose markedly during the study in the low-carbohydrate group, and were far higher at seven weeks than in the high-carb group.
When time to exhaustion at 81% VO2max was tested at 7 weeks, the high-carb group improved their time by 191 percent, compared to only 68 percent in the low-carb group - a hefty 280 percent difference! After the eighth week, when both groups ate the high-carb diet, the low-carb group managed to improve their time by another 18 percent, but their average time to exhaustion was still much shorter than in the high-carbers[7].
The bottom line is that both zero-carb and low-carb diets are a disaster for those engaged in regular strenuous exercise. And for anyone with a sound knowledge of the biochemistry of energy production, this is no big surprise.

Low-carb diets will kill your cycling performance.
How Muscles Produce Energy, and Other Cool Stuff
Folks, I’m going to give you a very quick primer on how your cells produce energy. It will involve use of some big words, so if your vocabulary is usually limited to short bursts of SMS brilliance like “hey sxy wot u up 2 2nyte?” then try real hard to stick with me here, okay?
Awrighty, let’s start with Adenosine Tri-Phosphate (ATP), the ultimate and immediately usable form of chemical energy for all human work. It is stored in all cells, but like the nitrous in a 9-second drag car it exists only in small and quickly exhausted quantities. When ATP is used for energy, it loses a phosphate molecule and becomes Adenosine Di-Phosphate (ADP). To keep fuelling cellular activity, ADP must be restored back to ATP. There are three pathways for rebuilding ATP from ADP, and the one employed depends on both the intensity and duration of the physical activity.
The first pathway involves breaking down phosphocreatine to obtain phosphate for ATP production. But phosphocreatine is also in limited supply, restricting the usefulness of the ATP-phosphocreatine system to very short duration activities, such as a 10 second sprint, a heavy triple on the bench press, or kicking your back door when your roommates have locked you outside yet again.
The second pathway utilizes glycolysis, which kicks in after phosphocreatine can no longer supply the needed energy. Glycolysis occurs in the absence of oxygen and uses carbohydrate (derived from glycogen and blood glucose) as the fuel source. Glycolytic, or anaerobic, metabolism is limited by the buildup of excess acid in the cell. The 'burn' sensation you feel in your thighs as you run up a hill or perform a twelve-rep set of squats is caused by acid build-up.
The third pathway is the aerobic system, which predominates in low-intensity, longer-duration activities such as walking and jogging. The aerobic system is also the energy system most active at rest. During these activities, enough oxygen can be supplied to the cells via the lungs and bloodstream. This allows for glucose to be broken down completely, hence avoiding the build-up of acid. The aerobic system also relies heavily on fats for energy production. Increased fat use during aerobic exercise occurs as one becomes fitter, if one exercises in a fasted state, or follows a low-carbohydrate diet.
At higher (glycolytic) levels of exercise intensity, however, fatty acids simply cannot be utilized quickly enough to supply the high-energy phosphates needed to create ATP. Only muscle glycogen can meet this need[8]. Glucose is the most rapidly accessible energy source in the body, and muscle glycogen is the most important source of glucose for muscular contraction[9]. Vigorous physical exercise rapidly depletes muscle glycogen and the harder and longer you train, the greater the degree of depletion[10].
Now, if that all left you a little bedazzled, here’s the take-home message: Glycolytic (glucose-dependent) activities will always be glycolytic, because fat simply cannot be processed quickly enough to supply the needed energy. This will not change, ever. If a fat adaptation brainwashee tries to convince you otherwise, they’re essentially trying to rewrite the laws of nature.
Fat chance (excuse the pun).
Muscle Glycogen: A Critical Source of Energy
In contrast to fat, the body can only store limited amounts of glucose. While even very lean individuals still carry several kilograms of body fat, the average 75-kilogram adult only stores around 450 grams of glycogen in their body, most of which is stored in muscle tissue[11]. Successful carb-loading (a practice used by some competitive athletes) can temporarily double this figure, but even under such a best-case scenario, total bodily glycogen stores are still limited. If high intensity exercise is carried on long enough, these glycogen stores are exhausted. If these diminished glycogen stores are not fully restored prior to subsequent exercise bouts, then performance in future workouts will deteriorate.
High intensity cardiovascular exercise (you know, sparring, running fast, riding your bike up steep hills and using it to chase trucks up and down Portrush Road) reduces muscle glycogen stores to a much greater degree than weight training. In controlled studies, muscle glycogen levels typically fall 25-40% in response to a bout of weight training[12,13]. Meanwhile, a single thirty-second sprint can reduce thigh muscle glycogen by a third, while two 30-second sprints can produce a 47% drop (glycogen depletion tapers off significantly after the second sprint)[14-16].
Longer duration cardiovascular exercise, such as marathon running can completely exhaust muscle glycogen stores in a single bout, with depletion occurring more quickly at higher intensities (>70% VO2max) than lower intensities (65% VO2max)[17].
Some of you may be reading this and thinking, “Colpo’s full of it! I train with the weights twice a week, and then do billycart racing every weekend, and a low-carb diet hasn’t hurt my performance. In fact, last weekend I won the Puckston South Inaugural Billycart Championship!”
If this is what you’re thinking, then I have two things to say to you. Firstly, congratulations on your rapid ascent in the glamorous, high-stakes world of billycart racing, your parents must be very proud. Secondly, your overall volume of exercise is quite low and, lucky for you, it is not causing any meaningful degree of glycogen depletion. At least not enough to affect your billycart prowess.
But let’s say you decide to step up your weight training efforts, ditching the “Heavy Duty” one-set-to-failure routine that you’ve been following for a more effective higher-frequency multi-set routine. Then let’s say you and your buddies buy yourselves some single speeds and go for a fast-paced blast around town a couple of nights a week. And then one of your buddies convinces you to come along to boxing classes every Thursday night and Saturday morning.
All of a sudden, your training volume has significantly increased. And all of a sudden, you start feeling weaker and more tired. You’re also becoming an increasingly grumpy SOB, shouting at the cat, shouting at other drivers, and shouting at whoever put the toilet roll the wrong way round. The last straw is when your billycart performance starts to flounder.
Dude, eat some carbs, because it only gets worse from here. You’re becoming glycogen depleted, and gorging on all the fat in the world won’t do diddly to correct the situation. You need c-a-r-b-s, the kind found in sweet potatoes, potatoes, taro, white rice, fresh fruits, and other wholesome foods that, contrary to the rantings of the Do-Do-like low-carb gurus (see Part 1) will not turn you into a morbidly obese, insulin resistant tub of adiposity.
But What about Mamo Wolde, Bjorn Ferry and Jonas Colting?
On Planet Earth right now, there are thousands upon thousands of world-class competitive athletes. But when you ask low-carb proponents for some examples of successful low-carbing athletes, they can at best muster three names: Mamo Wolde, Bjorn Ferry and Jonas Colting.
Don't Make False Claims about Mamo, You Momo
The late Degaga (“Mamo”) Wolde was an Ethiopian long distance athlete who won the 1968 Olympic marathon. Do a Google search, and you’ll find Wolde incessantly cited on low-carb websites and forums as proof that low-carb diets are great for serious athletes.
And how exactly did all these folks arrive at the belief that Wolde’s victory at the ’68 games was fueled by a low-carb diet? The source responsible is an article penned by British author Barry Groves, whose website is purportedly devoted to “Exposing dietary misinformation”.
This is what Groves has to say about Wolde’s victory in Mexico City:
“Now let’s look at a real athlete
It was 1968 at the Mexico City Olympic Games. The spectators at the marathon went wild as a relatively unknown Ethiopian, Mamo Wolde, won the marathon. Not only was the thirty-six-year-old runner the oldest man ever to win this prestigious event, he did it in a time that has not been bettered to this day [Anthony’s note: This is incorrect. Wolde’s time was not a record and has been beaten at every Summer Olympics since].
So what was Wolde’s secret?
Wolde grew up in an Ethiopian village. His life consisted of running after and hunting wild game on foot. His diet was one high in animal meat and fat, with practically no carbohydrate. Subsequent tests showed that Wolde’s body, under conditions of physical load, readily burned fat as its main energy source. Wolde had no concept of ‘hitting the wall’. It had never happened to him.”
I have searched high and low to find evidence of Mamo Wolde’s dietary habits during his competitive years, and have found nothing. If Groves has such evidence, he’s not sharing it with his readers. If anyone can confirm Wolde’s eating habits with something of more substance than unfounded conjecture on low-carb websites, I’d love to see it. Just because someone grew up in East Africa and hunted wild game at some point in their life, does not automatically mean they ate like a Masai warrior during their athletic career.
The only evidence Groves appears to cite in support of Wolde’s alleged low-carb ways is a study from a 1994 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise that had absolutely nothing to do with Mamo Wolde nor with low-carb diets[18]. This study in fact involved six American male collegiate runners whose endurance was tested on three different diets. The amount of fat used for fuel during exercise and time to exhaustion was reportedly increased on the “high-fat” diet. What Groves doesn’t mention is that the composition of said diet was 12% protein, 38% fat, and 50% carbohydrate – hardly the high-fat ketogenic affair he claims, without evidence, that Wolde followed.
This isn’t the first time Groves has cited research that does not say what he claims it does. Back in 2005, when I committed the heinous crime of truthfully stating that calories, not macronutrient ratios, were the final arbiter of fat-derived weight loss, I was besieged by smug low-carbers citing the following passage from Groves’ website:
“‘On a high-fat diet, 4703 to 8471 excess calories were required for each kilogram of added weight. On a low fat VLCD [very low calorie diet], replacing fat calories with 8g/day of equivalent carbohydrate calories reduced weight loss by 1.68kg, corresponding to 3300 calories of carbohydrate/kilogram, possibly 2500 calories per kilogram for carbohydrate alone.’”
Groves then went on to claim that these figures demonstrate a significantly higher amount of calories is required from dietary fat than from carbohydrates to induce the deposition of body fat.
Unlike the cultish followers of the low-carb religion that incessantly quoted this passage all over the Internet, I actually read the paper it was allegedly taken from (Groves referenced it to a 1975 NIH publication titled Obesity in Perspective).
The paper did not contain that quote, and the study in that paper dealt with experimental weight gain, not weight loss! I emailed Groves about this, who subsequently removed the quote from his website. He explained he himself put that quote together – he had taken the weight gain/calorie intake data from the NIH paper, and some fat loss/calorie intake data from a paper published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Needless to say, mixing and matching data from two entirely different studies to create a custom-made quote that supports a pre-conceived conclusion is hardly sound science. If you want to compare the weight loss/gain effects of high versus low carb diets, you do it in the same study among a single sample, the members of which have been randomized to either a high or low carb diet. As I explain in Part 1, and at length in The Fat Loss Bible , when this has been done under tightly controlled metabolic ward conditions, there is no difference in fat-derived weight loss between high- and low-carb groups eating the same amount of calories.
What Elite East African Long Distance Runners Really Eat
Right below Ethiopa in East Africa sits Kenya, another nation known for churning out world class runners. A number of studies have been published detailing just what these elite athletes eat – and it sure as heck isn’t a 100% meat, zero-carb diet.
Mukeshi and Thairu examined the food intake of male Kenyan runners, for two days a week over a 3-month period, and found they consumed an average of 441 grams of carbohydrate daily (8.1 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight, approximately 75% of total caloric intake)[19].
Christensen et al studied adolescent Kenyan runners from the distinct ethnic group known as the Kalenjin. This group, hailing from the Great Rift Valley, produced a staggering 40% of winners of all major international middle- and long-distance running competitions between 1987-1997. The total mean daily carbohydrate intake of the adolescent runners was 476 grams (8.7 g/kg, 71% of total calories). Total intake of protein and fat was 88 and 45 grams, respectively[20].
The most recent study to look at the dietary habits of Kenyan runners also involved Kilenjin athletes. Researchers observed them during a training camp in the North Rift Valley, and found they ate three meals and 2 snacks daily. The staple foods were bread, boiled rice, boiled potatoes, porridge, cabbage, kidney beans, and a thick maize meal paste known as ugali. Meat (mainly beef) was served at the training camp 4 times per week, although the athletes were able to access more meat when at home. Generous amounts of tea (with milk) were consumed throughout the day.
When their intake data was tallied up, it was found that mean daily carbohydrate was 607 grams (10.4 g/kg, 76.5% of calories). Daily protein and fat intakes were 75 and 45 grams, respectively[21].
As it stands, there is no evidence whatsoever that Mao Wolde ate a low-carb diet, and any claim that elite East African runners shatter world records whilst eating nothing but meat and fat is total nonsense.
Mamo Wolde running to victory on what was almost certainly not a low-carb diet.
Bjorn Ferry
Björn Ferry is a gold medal-winning Swedish biathlete who claims to follow a low-carb diet. However, I’ve searched for details on his diet, and found very little. This article discusses a book he has co-authored with his advisor, and according to the English translation: “Ferry will not say it was only dietary change that gave him the gold. There were many factors that played a role.”
So exactly how many carbohydrates Ferry eats is a bit of a mystery. And even if he does follow a low- or even zero-carb diet, that pretty much proves nothing. In fact, given the overwhelming evidence against low-carb diets in the literature, we would be more than justified in suspecting that, if Ferry can succeed on a low-carb diet, he’d do even better on a higher-carb diet.
According to this article, Ferry experienced a lackluster 2009/2010 season. If Ferry upped his carb intake to ensure optimal glycogen stores, maybe his performances would become a whole lot more consistent.
Maybe his mental outlook would improve too, given that both glycogen depletion and low-carb diets have been shown in clinical trials to worsen anger and mood scores[22,23]. After all, this is a guy that "During the 2010 winter Olympics...was quoted saying he would not mind if athletes who use banned substances would get the death penalty or, "at least lots of kicks in the balls.""[24]
Hmmm, sounds exactly like the kind of wonderful, rational, balanced, clear thinking I've come to expect from low-carb devotees. The death penalty for people who kill, maim and torture innocent people? Sure. But for people who use ergogenic drugs?! Sorry folks, but that is certified screwball talk.
Bjorn Ferry's solution to doping in sports: "Kick 'em in the balls and kill the bastards!!" Please don't let this guy enter politics.
(Update June 3, 2013: Since originally posting this article, a couple of Swedish readers have written to assure me Bjorn is actually a nice guy, and nothing like the crazed noose-wielding image his anti-doping comments tend to portray. Also, in response to my recent article debunking the pseudoscientific smack talk of one Danny Albers, one of these readers also reported Ferry has a cookbook with low-carb recipes, which still doesn't tell me a whole lot about the actual diet he follows himself. According to Google’s English translation of his website, Bjorn’s diet is “Swedish, organic and high in fat” which, as I recently noted elsewhere, sure leaves a lot of wiggle room regarding his carbohydrate intake. Lastly, even if Ferry did follow a true ridgey-didge low-carb diet leading up to his 2010 victory in the Winter Olympics biathlon, then that pretty much proves...nothing. How would he have fared if he was on a high-carb diet? As I wrote in the Danny Albers article, legendary triathlete Dave Scott won the grueling Hawaiin Ironman not once, but a stunning six times, while following a vegan diet. That would seem to be a pretty shining endorsement of vegan diets for athletic performance - until one watches the video of Scott reporting how much better and healthier he felt after adding poultry and fish back to his diet. Yep, sometimes athletes succeed in spite of their diets, not because of them...)
Jonas Colting
Jonas Colting is a Swedish athlete who is also cited as following a low-carb diet. However, after winning the Ultraman Hawaii , Colting admitted:
“Between stages I ate non-stop; Recovery drinks, rice pudding, bananas, Clif-bars, candy, chips, water, cookies and some normal meals like Thai food after the first day and fresh fish and mashed potatoes after day 2. My appetite was great all through out and I didn’t have any of that bloating that sometimes occurs during massive physical activity. Except for on the bike during the first day, but I know why that happened.”
When someone pointed this out on a website devoted to the unabashed adulation of all things low-carb, Colting himself replied:
"…you need to put that in context of the event of the Ultraman. It presents physical strains 99.9% of the population will never face and during any kind of event like this, the first priority is to promote digestion.”
Also, as this is an extremely hot and humid event the carbs loads the body on fluids as one gram om [SIC] carb binds four grams of water.
So although I did consume some fast and generally unhealthy carbs I also ate healthy foods and furthermore spent the hundreds and hundreds of days prior to the event maximizing metabolism and health through training and a balanced diet.
I´m not a die-hard low-carb person in every stretch but rather believe in the “train low-race high” concept which includes more carbs during ardous endurance events. None of the negative side effects of excess insulin etc will then occur."
Translation: "I did not eat a low-carb diet. I actually ate a truckload of simple and complex carbs during the event, and my diet leading up to the event was in no way a low-carb diet in the traditional sense. It was in fact a balanced diet featuring a lower-carb content than what is normally adhered to, followed by a high-carb intake prior to and during the event to maintain optimal muscle glycogen levels."
Colting is not a "die-hard low-carb person" because he knows full well that following a true low-carbohydrate diet will ruin his athletic performance.

Jonas Colting: The 'low-carber' who eats quinoa, sports drinks, rice pudding, bananas, Clif-bars, candy, chips, cookies, Thai food and mashed potatoes. 
Conclusion
Study after study shows that both low- and zero-carb diets are an extremely poor choice for highly active individuals. The best that low-carbers can do to defend their dying fat adaptation hypothesis is to cite a dead Kenyan runner who probably never followed a low-carb diet, a Swiss biathlete whose exact carb intake remains a mystery, and another Swedish athlete who does not follow a low-carb diet but rather a “lower-than-usual-carb” diet during part of the period leading up to a competitive event.
I think it’s safe to say that the evidence in favor of low- and zero-carb diets for athletes is next to non-existent. Do yourself a favour and start listening to real science rather than the performance-destroying pseudoscience spewing forth from the Bizarro world inhabited by misguided low-carb fanatics.
Ciao,
Anthony.
Click here to read Part 1.
See also:
Sorry Danny Albers, But Low-Carb Diets Still Suck for Athletes!
—
Anthony Colpo is an independent researcher, physical conditioning specialist, and author of the groundbreaking books The Fat Loss Bible, The Great Cholesterol Con and Whole Grains, Empty Promises. 
References
1. Phinney SD, et al. Capacity for moderate exercise in obese subjects after adaptation to a hypocaloric, ketogenic diet. Journal of Clinical Investigation, Nov, 1980; 66 (5): 1152-1161.
2. Bogardus C, et al. Comparison of carbohydrate-containing and carbohydrate-restricted hypocaloric diets in the treatment of obesity. Endurance and metabolic fuel homeostasis during strenuous exercise. Journal of Clinical Investigation, Aug, 1981; 68 (2): 399-404.
3. Phinney SD. Ketogenic diets and physical performance. Nutrition & Metabolism, 2004; 1: 2.
4. Westman EC, et al. New Atkins for a New You: The Ultimate Diet for Shedding Weight and Feeling Great. Fireside, Mar 2, 2010.
5. Phinney SD, et al. The human metabolic response to chronic ketosis without caloric restriction: preservation of submaximal exercise capability with reduced carbohydrate oxidation. Metabolism, Aug, 1983; 32 (8): 769-776.
6. Dr. Coggan's comment was made in a 1995 post on the USENET newsgroup rec.sport.triathlon, which can be accessed here: http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/coggan.html
7. Helge JW. Adaptation to a fat-rich diet: effects on endurance performance in humans. Sports Medicine, Nov, 2000; 30 (5): 347-357.
8. Van der Wusse GJ, Reneman RS. Lipid metabolism in muscle. In Handbook of Physiology. Exercise: Regulation and Integration of Multiple Systems. Eds: Rowell LB, Shepherd JT. American Physiology Society, Bethesda, MD: pages 966-967.
9. Groop L, Orho M. Metabolic Aspects of Glycogen Synthase Activation. In: Molecular and Cell Biology of Type 2 Diabetes and Its Complications. Eds: Belfiore F, Lorenzi M, Molinatti GM, Porta M. Basel, Karger, 1998; (14): 47-55.
10. Ahlborg B, et al. Muscle Glycogen and Muscle Electrolytes during Prolonged Physical Exercise. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, 1967; 70 (2): 129-142.
11. Olsson KE, Saltin B. Variation in total body water with muscle glycogen changes in man. Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, Sep, 1970; 80 (1): 11-18.
12. Haff GG, et al. Carbohydrate supplementation and resistance training. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 2003; 17 (1): 187-196.
13. Haff GG, et al. Carbohydrate supplementation attenuates muscle glycogen loss during acute bouts of resistance exercise. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, Sep, 2000; 10 (3): 326-339.
14. Esbjörnsson-Liljedahl M, et al. Metabolic response in type I and type II muscle fibers during a 30-s cycle sprint in men and women. Journal of Applied Physiology, Oct, 1999; 87 (4): 1326-1332.
15. Hargreaves M, et al. Muscle metabolites and performance during high-intensity, intermittent exercise. Journal of Applied Physiology, 1998; 84 (5): 1687–1691.
16. Spriet LL, et al. Muscle glycogenolysis and H+ concentration during maximal intermittent cycling. Journal of Applied Physiology, Jan, 1989; 66 (1): 8-13.
17. O’Brien MJ, et al. Carbohydrate dependence during marathon running. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, Sep, 1993; 25 (9): 1009-1017.
18. Muoio DM, et al. Effect of dietary fat on metabolic adjustments to maximal VO-2 and endurance in runners. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 1994; 26 (1): 81-88.
19. Mukeshi M, Thairu K. Nutrition and body build: a Kenyan review. World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics, 1993; 72: 218-226.
20. Christensen DL, et al. Food and macronutrient intake of male adolescent Kalenjin runners in Kenya. British Journal of Nutrition, 2002; 88 (6): 711-717.
21. Onywera VO, et al. Food and Macronutrient Intake of EliteKenyan Distance Runners. International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2004; 14: 709-719.
22. Keith RE, et al. Alterations in dietary carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake and mood state in trained female cyclists. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 1991 Feb; 23 (2): 212-216.
23. The research regarding low-carb diets and worsened mood outcomes is reviewed here: http://anthonycolpo.com/?p=89
24. 'Swedish biathlon star Bjorn Ferry on doping "Drugs cheats should get the death penalty!"'. Bilde.de. Available online:
http://www.bild.de/news/bild-english/news/swedish-biathlon-star-demands-death-penalty-for-drugs-cheats-11481888.bild.html