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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Tree" data-source="post: 1247596" data-attributes="member: 1455">My assumption detector is going off, so I have to jump in here.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> These arguments are a bit spurious.  There is no cutoff at which something ceases to be a fad and becomes long lasting.  Only hindsight can determine what was and what was not a fad.  When the U.S. shifted from stressing " hearty meat & potatoes is healthy food" to "low fat food is healthiest" it could have easily been a fad, but it was actually much more longer lasting.  How do you know the current low carb trend isn't the same?And since when is what the public knows a good measure of anything?  There are many reasons why this has only become known in the last ten years or so, and none of them have anything to do with science.  That depends on what you define as starvation.  The traditional meaning of starvation, meaning that the person isn't consuming enough calories and nutrients, and their body reduces its metabolism to compensate, is not at all what that "Caloric Advantage" involves. In the long run that's very harmful.   If you define starvation more broadly, as anything where one type of nutrient is consumed in much lower quantities, then you're right, if somewhat misleading.Before you severely criticize something, it's probably a good idea to read it so you don't base your argument on huge incorrect assumptions.    I don't doubt that many people see the Atkins diet as a quick fix that doesn't require any exercise or moderation, but that's the exact opposite of what Dr. Atkins actually recommended in his book.  He went into great detail about why exercise is absolutely neccessary, and stressed that eating fresh nutrient rich foods and developing healthy moderate eating habits is what's important, not merely cutting out carbohydrates.  He stressed that it was a lifestyle change, and stated that people who merely use it as a crash diet are doing it wrong, and probably shouldn't be doing it at all.You explained it yourself: the body does what's most efficient.  Besides, it can be explained evolutionarily.  In a hunter gatherer lifestyle, sources of carbohydrates were much rarer than sources of protien and fat, so it makes sense that the body would use these more efficient rarer sources before more common sources.  In addition, the body can store only a very limited amount of glycogen, while its ability to store fat is almost unlimited.  If the body burned fats before carbohydrates, a person who suddenly came upon a great source of carbohydrates wouldn't be able to use most of that energy, since their glycogen stores would fill almost instantly and the rest would go to waste.</blockquote>

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