Rethinking Carbohydrates What Low Carb Diets May Be Missing Ft. Zane Griggs

Zane Griggs (0:00)

I had high blood sugar, my thyroid was low, my sleep sucked. Glucose is more efficient at making ATP per oxygen molecule than fat is. I really don't want to go back to that overstressed state. And I find the carbs really help with insulin signaling, with keeping thyroid up, and those two things really have a downstream effect on a lot of other hormones. Sugar diet was amazing.

Mark Bell (0:20)

Some of it's just an evolution. When I eat carbohydrates, my glucose is actually lower.

Zane Griggs (0:25)

There's a conflation of carbs and processed food. When I'm telling people to eat more carbs, I'm talking about fruit, potatoes, rice, things that are true carbohydrates. They don't have some sort of oil or fat cooked into them. If carbs and sugar caused metabolic disease, how could a diet that is 95% carbs and sugar reverse it? The more we know, the more we realize how little we know.

Mark Bell (0:50)

All right, so we got some comments here from Bart K. Let's kick off the show with listening to some of this.

SPEAKER_3 (0:54)

There is no argument whatsoever that a person can bring to the table that can change this fact. It is a known physiological fact. The exact requirement for exogenous carbohydrates in human nutrition is not one single gram ever.

Mark Bell (1:14)

Pause it.

SPEAKER_3 (1:14)

Still.

Mark Bell (1:15)

What do you think of that comment right there, Zane? Right off the bat, what do you think of that? I mean, I know that you guys got some beef, but aside from the beef, from the actual comment in and of itself. Yeah, yeah. Do you think, I mean, do people quote unquote need carbs? And I guess let's maybe talk about the word need.

Zane Griggs (1:30)

Need. So here's where a lot of that gets blown. They use this word essential, right? That carbs are not essential. It's technically in nutrition, essential nutrient or macronutrient is one that your body cannot make. And our body does make glucose from our liver, right?

Our body also makes saturated fat out of sugar. So technically I could say saturated fat is not essential, but I don't see any carnivores cutting back on their saturated fat or spouting that saturated fat is not essential. So there's only any amount of protein that's considered essential.

Mark Bell (2:05)

I'll interrupt for a second too, by kind of saying a little bit, you know, the body's designed to figure out a way to survive.

Zane Griggs (2:16)

To survive, yeah.

Mark Bell (2:16)

So it's really smart. So if we have to go a couple days or a couple weeks, only eating fruit, we can easily do that. And if we have to go a couple weeks, only eating meat, we can do that. And potentially, you can maybe go longer. I don't know how long you can go, but and there's also even like trace amounts of fats within fruits and stuff like that, which we learned, I learned during the sugar diet.

Zane Griggs (2:39)

Correct. So to your point, when I know you're going with that, it's like there's survival mode and then there's optimal nutrition, or what makes us operate optimally. And I would say zero carb is not optimal, any more than zero fat is optimal, or zero protein is optimal.

Mark Bell (2:55)

We have wonderful choices nowadays. We have, we can just go and pick.

Zane Griggs (2:59)

We have abundance.

Mark Bell (3:00)

So I want to be on a mixed diet. I'd like to have a little bit of carbohydrate, a little bit of protein and keep the fats low. You can do that.

Zane Griggs (3:06)

You can, and we have plenty of science showing how optimal athletes who perform optimally or have a great mix of all three of these things.

Mark Bell (3:14)

Athletes are very, very, very rarely super low carbohydrate.

Zane Griggs (3:19)

No, they don't win if they are.

Mark Bell (3:21)

Really rare, right?

Zane Griggs (3:22)

It's pretty rare. Yeah.

Mark Bell (3:24)

I mean, we've seen people flirt with it. We know there's some people that do it like really high endurance feats and stuff like that. They kind of mess with like a lower carbohydrate thing, but they still use carbs as a performance enhancer, as a supplement almost.

Zane Griggs (3:42)

Glucose is more efficient at making ATP per oxygen molecule than fat is. So the PO ratio is actually higher.

Mark Bell (3:49)

What's PO?

Zane Griggs (3:50)

PO is phosphorus to oxygen ratio. So phosphate or phosphate, excuse me, to oxygen ratio. So the PO ratio for glucose, meaning it takes less oxygen to make the same amount of ATP with glucose than it does with fat, takes, requires more oxygen to make the same amount of ATP.