Low Carb Mag July 2015 | Page 77

IS IT TRUE THAT LOW CARB DIETS DON’T HAVE ENOUGH FIBRE? It can be true, if people aren’t doing the low carb diet properly. There are many myths associated with a controlled carbohydrate diet and the fact that it’s low in fibre is one of them. It seems that people reason that since fibre is carbohydrate, then the diet that cuts out carbohydrate must also cut out fibre. However, if you look at most of the diet regimes from Atkins through to the Zone Diet, you’ll see that on the whole they encourage people to cut down on grains, and again on the whole, they encourage people to increase the amount of certain types of vegetables that they eat. Ideally, these vegetables will be of the lower-carbohydrate quantity type of vegetables, but just because they have lower carbohydrate it does not necessarily mean that they have no fibre. In fact, oftentimes, quite the reverse is true. There are a minority of people who think they are following a low carb diet regime, but are doing so without referencing to any of the properly structured diets. These are the people who glibly cut out everything except meat, cheese, eggs and that sort of thing. It’s these people who don’t have enough fibre in their diet. Even then, if we eat a diet that has low fibre content for a short time, it won’t do our bodies any harm at all. It’s only over the medium and longer term that a lack of fibre may start to cause problems. So... You will only suffer from a lack of fibre on a low carbohydrate diet if you’re not doing it properly. For more information, see the article on fibre which is available on the website.