Dr. Garth Davis is a texas based Doctor, most notably known for performing gastric bypass surgeries…a few years ago, instead of going under the knife himself, he adopted a whole foods, high carb, low fat plant based diet. Since his success in defeating his own obesity, he now advocates the same dietary regime to all patients before utilizing surgery as a last resort…heres a great excerpt from his Facebook page explaining his current view on nutrition in this country…
“What will it take to make people understand that carbs do not make people fat. Patients come in to see me for weight related issues. When asked what they think the central problem is, the answer is always carbs. Yet, every diet log I look at is loaded with animal protein and fat. Just about everybody is eating eggs and sausage for breakfast. I can’t tell you how often Jimmy dean sausages are mentioned. Then everybody has sandwiches for lunch. They are quick to point out that they use turkey meat. Yes people snack on junk food but the number one snack food is chips which is more fat than carb. Dinner is always a meat and a vegetable, but the meat takes center stage. Junk food is certainly present but things like donuts are more fat than carbs. We get more protein than any other country in the world. All my patients are eating ample to excess protein when they come and seem me. So, how is this high protein working for us?
The healthiest societies now and for thousands of years have been societies that ate high carb diets. Tell the skinny Okinawan eating his yams and rice that he will get fat. The body utilizes carbs directly as energy and has a very good storage capacity in the form of glycogen. In fact, you can eat up to 500 gm of carbs before your body will go through the inefficient process of turning carbs to fat! Your body want to use carbs or store them as glycogen. It will only turn them to fat in situations of very high calorie intake and minimal calorie output.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10365981
Now fat is a whole different issue. Fat can be stored, and is stored directly as fat. In fact, a biopsy of the fat on your tush can tell us exactly the kind of fat you have been eating. It turns out, as Dr. McDougall has been preaching for years, the fat you eat is the fat you wear.
Fat is dense with calories. There are 9 calories for each gram of fat compared to 3.7 calories per gram of carb. Fat is not a primary fuel and breakdown of fat for energy is far less efficient than utilizing carbs.
I find it so strange how we cannot see this in society. All these pseudo experts spouting nonsense and confusing the public. Meanwhile all I see is patient after patient after patient suffering from excess protein and fat.
Even weight loss surgery patients seem convinced that they need more protein. They come to see me because they are gaining weight so their surgeon must have done something wrong because they are eating lots of protein and drinking protein shakes and eating deli meats and chicken and still gaining weight. Simply switching them to a low fat, high complex carb, plant based diet fixes everything.
Now you can find articles that show a low fat diet doesn’t work but that is because they are calling a 30% fat diet low fat, which it is not at all. Ornish and Essylstyn have reversed heart disease and kept prostate cancer at bay on low fat diets where fats were <12% of diet.
The EPIC study in Europe having looked at thousands of people over many years concluded that starch has very little to do with diabetes and with obesity, but meat and fat correlate strongly. They found that chicken was the most correlated with weight gain. Chicken! That is our health food in this country! And how is it working for us?
Bottom line. Eat fruits, veggies, whole grains, legumes. Avoid meat and dairy as much as possible. Eat whole, unprocessed food. This diet always works. I have not seen it fail, but I have seen all the other diets fail, big time!”
so….yep. Take a look at the powerful video below, ESPECIALLY mom’s with kids!!