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slavekate80 -> RE: Is it healthy to cut out all carbs, no matter what they are? (10/18/2013 8:39:20 PM)
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To DrMaster4U2 - If you're getting enough calories, then it's unlikely for you to only be eating 8-10g of protein a day. That may be the total from high-protein foods like eggs, but vegetables, grains, and beans have enough that it's possible, if something of a challenge, to meet daily minimums without flesh foods and dairy. Put your entire daily diet together, using a site like Calorie Count or something - don't forget condiments and beverages - and I think you'd find that your daily total is much higher than 10g, much of it from nickel-and-dime sources like lettuce and peppers. Two ounces of whole wheat will get you 6g right there, a small side salad with no nuts and no dressing probably has 3 or so... it adds up.
8-10g on a consistent basis will prevent male-pattern baldness, all right - it'll kill you first. It's dangerous. Luckily, it's also very difficult to get protein intake that low if you're not starving yourself and aren't forced onto an extremely limited diet because nothing else is available.
Nutrition does affect the way genes are expressed. It doesn't affect genes themselves, unless you're talking about the possibility of increasing the rate of genetic mutation, and that's a different topic. So if you have the genes for a trait or disease, nutrition may affect your chances of that trait or disease developing in you, but the genetic blueprint is the same and will be passed on the same either way. From your profile, it appears that you were born in the late 1940s, and therefore your childhood nutrition and growth was mostly in the '50s and '60s. The typical Western diet has changed dramatically, and largely for the worse - beef cows are fed differently, sugar and corn syrup consumption is way up, refined starches have replaced whole grains and legumes, panic over saturated fats leading to higher consumption of margarine and other trans-fatty junk before we figured out recently that trans fats are awful for you, higher consumption of pre-packaged convenience foods, giant portion size of just about everything except vegetables. While I don't doubt these things existed in 1960, they didn't dominate the American diet in 1960 the way they did in, say, 1990. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Most of us who experienced our childhood and adolescent growth in the 1980s and 1990s had worse diets, possibly with long-term metabolic consequences. Type II diabetes in children and adolescents is on the rise, and it was once called adult-onset diabetes since it was so rare in the young. I was obese as a teenager and it took awhile to whittle myself down to a healthy weight, and well over a decade later I still have to limit carbohydrates to stay there.
Perhaps we're talking past each other on the metabolic pathway term, defining it differently. I'm referring to the way a particular person's body takes up and uses a particular compound. Yes, your diet will alter this over time, but it's a slow process. My body doesn't know where a molecule came from; it's going to process a sucrose molecule the same way regardless of the source. If I eat way too much junk food that will eventually damage my body's ability to process sugar in a healthy way - this might have already happened. But my body is not going to take up sugar from a tomato differently than sugar from a bite of candy, assuming it's the same type.
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