Low Carb Diets Make You Dumb

I know people love these diets because they allow you to drop a bunch of weight all at once but they aren't optimal for your brain function or mood. Allow me to explain why I think these diets make you dumb (at least short term until you stop doing them).

Low carb diets cause two changes that are counter to optimal brain function. These kinds of diets deprive the body of glycogen stores. Water is needed for muscle tissue to use glycogen to respond to the body's demand for glucose. By eliminating glycogen stores, your body drops the water that would otherwise be used to enable the body to form glucose.

So, great, you drop five pounds in two days because you peed out all this water your body wasn't using to form glucose. Jeans fit better...life is good, right?

Well, not if you want to do your best work, have a steady mood and have optimal brain availability.

Consider this. The brain's composition is 85% water and uses water for neuro-electrical conduction--neural impulses that allow us to access memory, process thought and basically respond to the outside world run on a watery network. Brain function starts to suffer when the hydration dips by as little as 1% below optimal levels.

So  you counter act that by drinking lots and lots of water (good, you should drink lots of water) but your brain is still suffering. The brain's number one fuel source is glucose. By severely restricting carbohydrates, your body has nothing to produce glucose with. As a result your brain starves.

So, if the brain needs glucose, a candy bar should do the trick, right?

Sorry to disappoint. Your brain needs around 150 grams of glucose a day to function optimally--but not all at once! Refined sugars are absorbed almost immediately in the bloodstream causing a flood of glucose. The result is a spike in blood sugar that causes temporary hyperactivity followed by an energy crisis--the dreaded sugar crash. Bad mood and a lack of mental clarity are the typical result of a sugary snack.

The brain accounts for 20% of the body's energy use on an average day. Activities that require concentration use even more energy. I'm convinced that eating for optimal mental function will lead to better performance on all levels--physical energy and also (although I haven't proved it out) healthy weight over time.



So eating in this way is no different than maintaining a normal healthy diet. A diet emphasizing lots of good carbs (whole grains, legumes, fruits and veggies), healthy fats and an appropriate amount of high quality protein is generally accepted as beneficial for long term health on all levels.

I know anecdotally that my own mental clarity/mood suffers on days after I indulge in lots of sugar/white flour snacks. This is unfortunate because Sunday lunch at my Mom's is full of such things. This is probably why Mondays suck so hard.

I'm musing a great deal lately about optimal mental function these days. Because of the demands of my new team, the associated learning requirements as well as my need to keep an even emotional keel while I'm under scrutiny, I'm leveraging more brain hacks these days to improve my own performance. Although it was tempting after the new year to do something "extreme" such as dumping carbs to make my pants fit better I thought I would take an opposite approach--to eat for my brain and let the cards fall where they will with my weight.