The low-carb diet myths debunked

Why you shouldn’t fear gallstones or hunger pangs

When you think of all the brown bread and cereals you won’t be eating, you might worry that your diet will be short of fibre. But key to my low-carb approach is to significantly increase your intake of veg, especially green veg, as a direct replacement for the carbs — and eating green beans, broccoli, spinach, courgette or cabbage instead of bread, rice or pasta will add fibre to your diet (important for gut health and making you feel full). having nuts and seeds as snacks means yet more fibre.

For example, milled linseed (just a tablespoonful, too much may be a laxative) can be a great addition to your plain, fullfat yoghurt with fresh raspberries — and it provides around 2g of the 16g of fibre we need a day.

Indeed, research published in 2018 in the journal BMJ Open, directly tackled this question of a low-carb diet being ‘frequently criticised for being deficient in B vitamins, in particular vitamin B1 and fibre, two key components of grainbased foods….’.

The author, Caryn Zinn, a dietitian from new Zealand, found that low-carb diets were able to provide the vitamins needed — and surpassed the amount of fibre. As she wrote, fibre can be easily derived from vegetables, certain fruits, nuts and seeds.

Another reasonable worry is gallstones

— the gallbladder is a muscular bag that sits under your liver.

In response to a fatty meal, the gallbladder squeezes out bile salts to help your body absorb fat from the intestine (gallstones occur when the stored bile salts crystallise).

So people worry that a more fatty diet may cause gallstones. But that’s not been the experience with my patients — so far 279 of them (141 have type 2 diabetes) have been on a low-carb diet for more than two years on average. The longest has been low carb for seven years now.

To date, not one patient has developed gallstones, which seems encouraging.

This seems to confirm the findings of the only study I could locate on this — published in the International Journal of Obesity, it involved obese patients put on two types of low-calorie diet, either low fat or high fat.

About half the patients on the lower-fat diet developed gallstones within a few months, but none on the higher-fat regimen did. It was thought that a higherfat diet (which is similar to our low-carb approach) encouraged the gallbladder to empty more regularly and thoroughly than the lower-fat meals did, so creating an environment where stones are unlikely to form.

It seems it’s old bile hanging around that is more likely to form stones.