Note that it’s a misconception that the brain needs us to eat carbs just because it requires glucose as fuel (I hope to post on this soon). However, I agree that there’s a rebound problem that lasts a couple of days if you eat low-carb and then fall off the wagon (or simply return to formerly high levels of carb intake). Finally, given that no one has yet shown an all-meat diet to have any ill consequences or vitamin deficiencies, I’m not sure it’s all that hard to do low-carb right. :-)

-insulin guy-

That said, I think Taubes has done the best job of anybody of assembling the actual knowledge we do have today. The book works very hard not to present his “views”, but rather a review of the actual scientific literature and how it stacks up against different hypotheses. It doesn’t seem particularly controversial (scientifically speaking), nor was it just newly discovered, that absorption of many vitamins is impacted by carbs.

If you have seen any research that disputes the point Taubes quoted from the 1970s and which I quoted in turn, please do let me know; I’m trying to take a look at primary research where possible.

(Funny XKCD!)

Nutrition is very complex, and made tougher by virtue of genetic diversity, and the fact that it is difficult to control all the variables in any study.

On the other hand, it is interesting to reflect that for all the emphasis nutritionist’s place on vitamins, from an evolutionary perspective it is precisely because vitamins are so unimportant that the ability to synthesize them was jettisoned from our metabolisms. They are the chemicals that cost more energy to make than to just gather them from the environment.