Low carb mania is here! Recent polls indicate over 30 million Americans are engaged in some form of controlled carbohydrate dieting. From Atkins to South Beach to the Zone, dieters are altogether rejecting grain products - the very "staff of life" - and are turning both the food pyramid and conventional nutritional wisdom, upside down. Carb counting is fast replacing calorie counting as the dominant preoccupation of American dieters.

Calorie counting, after all, was based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Thermodynamic and chemical laws were applied to human metabolism and its object: food, reducing the messinesss and mystery of assimilation (how does bread become blood?) to problems of physics and mathematics. In order to "solve" the problem the body had to become a machine, and food was likened to fuel for the body- engine. In scientific terms, a "calorie" is nothing more than a heat unit indicating the amount of substance it takes, when burned, to raise a ___ of water 1 degree celius (Technically coal can be considered a calorie rich substance). In the past dieters focused their efforts primarily on limiting calories, and less on raising their own metabolic rates through exercise, and through exerting balance and moderation in their eating. The science of calories, in this instance, provided a convenient distraction from commonsense, and contributed to a general ignorance about our bodies and food, as well as a significant rise in the rate of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and other ailments, in our population.

Carb counting, on the other hand, disposes with the absurd onesideness of caloric content, which is a strictly abstract and quantitative standard of measurement. Significantly more sophisticated, carb counting acknowledges that there are radical differences in the way in which carbohydrates, proteins and fats are metabolized and effect the body - I.e., not all calories are the same! There is a growing perception that some fats - like those found in coconut or flaxseed - actually stimulate the metabolism and promote weight loss, whereas some carbohydrates - like the starches found in bread or potatoes - are rapidly transformed into adipose tissue through the insulin response they provoke.

The problem with the controlled carbohydrate diet is that, as with the calorie counters of past, the carb counters are fixated too rigidly on another abstraction: carbohydrate. Carb-O-Hydrate is literally anything that can be broken down into the constituents Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. This includes things which are not edible, like Fiber. Though many low carbers understand the qualitative difference between digestible carbohydrate and indigestible fibers and sugar alcohols, and many product labels specify both the total carbohydrate and net/effective carb ratings, the infinite qualitative and health-promoting difference between an equivalent serving of carbohydrate qua parsely and an Atkins Endulge Bar, is rarely comprehended. If the low carbers are guilty of anything it is that through focusing on eliminating "carbs" (a revealing abbreviation indicating the intensity of the desire to limit carbohydrate intake. What better way than to cut down to size the 13 letter enemy to a 5 letter one), they disregard the infinite subtlties and healing idiosyncricities of carbohydrate containing foods, effectively throwing out the baby with the bath water. Little attention is given to the glycemic rating of the carbohydrate rich foods. Agave sweetener, with a glycemic index of 11 compared to processed beet or cane sugar, with a rating of 115, the effect it has on blood sugar is 11 times slower (and eleven times less likely to provoke the oversecretion of fat-building insulin). Puffed rice, for instance, has a rating of 130. The only way to truly understand which carbohydrates to eliminate and which to include is to acknowledge their glycemic ratings.

Perhaps the best way to elucidate both the virtues and vices of the carbohydrate restricted diet, is to consider it from a deeper, more evolutionary perspective.

Considering biological and cultural history, the ingestion of refined grain products, and more pointedly, the grains themselves was but a recent and extremely novel development in the evolution of the diet of our species. Extracting, with any metabolic efficiency, the nutritional value out of the seed stage of grasses was an unrealistic option for our ancestors holding little viability as an evolutionary strategy. That is, until pyrotechnology - e.g. cooking and attendant appliances - was developed at the end of the Paleolithic (10,000 years ago). The Neolithic era began around the end of the last ice age, after the great mammalian herds died off or were reduced in number through over-hunting. As a result the hunter-and-gatherer had less reason to hunt, and more reason to gather. Cultivating vegetables and grasses, and eventually their seeds, provided a security that hunting no longer held. Containers sufficient for long term storage of grass seeds made possible a sense of food security that was unthinkable in the previous hunter-and-gatherer mode. From this, the sedentary, agrarian lifestyle took root, evolved, and engendered a cultural, psychological and planetary transformation that we are so thoroughly immersed in, that rarely do we aknowledge it as a significant factor in our lives. What was lost in this transition is perhaps too profound and integral in creating who we are today for us to notice, i.e. missing is any sense that anything is missing. Our human and mammalian form is based on millions of years of eating living foods, in as whole a form as is possible. The natural law of embodiment in earthly form is eat;be eaten...an endless cycle of self-ingestion, where what we breath is the vegetable kingdoms' excreta, and what we breath out as useless and effectively dead, is the life's blood of another organism. We are all living foods, and by being food we stay alive. Consider the fact that there are over 1 trillion bacteria in our body, living off of us, and what we eat, in order to stay alive. In turn, we derive essential nutrients like vitamin B12, or essential processes, like the conversion of milk sugar into glucose, from the presence of lacto and bifido bacteria. Only in an infinitesmal fraction of the evolutionary span of our species have switched from ingesting living foods, to completely cooked and devitalized grain-based products. The book "Paleolithic Diet" recently touched upon the profound difference between "paleocarbs" and "neocarbs," that is, vegetables, fruits and other living forageables versus cooked grain-based foods like cereal, crackers, and now just about anything that has been pastuerized or preserved for longevity on the shelf. Starch is composed entirely of glucose molecules, attached to one another. Various chemical processes, including digestion via amylase, or cooking with heat and water (hydrolis, also: ripening) turn the starch in say, a potato, into sugars. The problem is, that unlike kale, which has fiber, water, minerals, vitamins and various other phytonutrient and food factors to slow the release of its sugars and allow for its effective utilization, the potato, or flour, when cooked, becomes pure, unchecked glucose. Pure glucose, as we discussed, does not exist in the Paleolithic diet, the diet that is inscribed into each and every mammalian cell in our bodies. Its presence in our body and blood provoke an alarming cascade of hormonal and metabolic responses, such as the secretion of insulin, which prevents glucose from reaching poisonous levels in our blood. Glucose is an essential unit of metabolic energy for each cell in the body, but when the body is sedentary or too much high glycemic food is ingested at any one time, insulin turns excess glucose into body fat, or excretes it through the kidneys, in order to prevent it from harmfully effecting the viscosity of the blood. All kinds of complications can develop as evidenced by the predominance of blood sugar imbalances in the general population, from hypoglycemia, to hyperinsulinism, to diabetes, which can all be viewed as phases or manifestations of the same diet-based disease. (c.f. "Syndrome X")

The hunter and gatherer would happen upon the succulent sprouted seeds of plants, like the ancestors of wheat and rice, and dine upon their multitude of phytonutrients, chlorphyls, amino-acids, enzymes, etc. It is unlikely that when given the choice between a hand full of hard, flavorless seeds and their sweet, lush, flavorful sprouted alternatives, s(he) would have chosen the relatively indigestible seed. It would take heirarchally arranged societies, divorced from the cycles and rhythms of natural, vegetative and animal life, with ability to produce warm, glutinous and mystical concoctions like Bread that a world be built around the lifeless life of seeds. Some theorize humans did not domesticate the grasses, so much as they domesticated us. Wheat now covers a large portion of the world. Would it have accomplished this grand feat by itself? Monoculturing necessitates human intervention to destroy the chosen crop's natural predators, provide it its essential growing medium, and coordinate the reproductive process through seed storage, planting and pollination. In a very real sense, we are the Wheat's way of becoming and perpetuating itself. Moreover, by eating wheat and like organisms, it is possible that we become carb addicted. Our whole hormonal/emotional metabolism falls prey to the profound famine/fast blood sugar cycles that are momentarily relieved, but indefinitely prolonged by ingesting dead carbohydrates.

Ultimately the low carbers are faced with the same perils and promises that emerge through any thoroughly human experience. The promise is that, finally, mass consciousness has stumbled upon a sense of evolutionary time, and biological necessity. Certain natural laws pervade our lives, as with any particle in this vast universe. Though collectively our species chose to adapt to environmental changes by switching from a living food diet to a dead, grain-based diet, as a matter of necessity, many thousands of years ago, as individuals, now, we can regain our balance, plug back into natural currents and rhythms, and eat once again from the "Garden of Eden." Or, we can get swept away in the hype and capital driven-cultural economy and choose confections composed of hydrogenated fats, hydrogenated sugars (maltitol), chlorinated sugars (Splenda) because they are convenient low carb alternatives to wholesome living foods.