How Low Do the Carb Grams Have to Go, in a Low Carb Diet?

Positive effects from a low-carbohydrate diet begin when carbohydrate intake drops to less than approximately 25% of total calories. Since there’s no research on this, I’ve had to estimate this percentage from my extensive studies and experience.

Consistently, I observed that fat storage occurred when carbohydrate content was 25- 30% or higher of total calories. Below this amount, fat storage from carbohydrate slowed, and fat burning increased. Obviously, an individual’s calorie intake affects these variations in the storage of fat from carbohydrate. Although I’ll give the details of my version of the low-carbohydrate diet in a later chapter, you can see that you have a much wider range for carbohydrate gram ingestion for this diet type to be effective than that offered by the misinformed “experts” (such as Atkins) who promote a very restrictive, low, and virtually impossible-to-maintain daily carbohydrate intake.

I argue that the combination of carbohydrates and fat, our typical diet, is the most fattening. Insulin, the fat storage hormone, increases from eating carbohydrates. The result of high blood insulin and glucose levels is a stimulation of storage of both carbohydrates and fat as body fat. When carbohydrate (hence insulin) is low, fat from the diet burns as energy. As long as carbohydrate intake is low, fat comes out of the fat cells and circulates in the blood, available for burning as fuel by muscle and organs.

My advocacy of this diet doesn’t imply that I think it’s more important than the Energy Balance Equation. It’s not: the best results in the control of weight come from balancing what one eats and burns.

We still need much more research to define the optimal percent of carbohydrates in the diet and the length of time to adapt to burning fat. Unfortunately, most scientists working with low-carbohydrate diets never drop the carbohydrates low enough. They don’t get to the point where the body switches over to maximal fat burning. I feel that carbohydrate intake must be below 25% of total calories before the positive effects begin. Rarely do researchers drop below 35%, and an intake of a 30%- carbohydrate is too high to push the body into a maximal fat burning zone. The Zone program by Dr. Barry Sears is 40%-carbohydrate; that’s much too high to drive fat burning.

Regardless of what one chooses to do about diet composition, the most important consideration is the Energy Balance Equation. However, one must understand this: to get optimal results, one must follow a low- carbohydrate diet.