Lose Weight How Many Carbs Daily
How many carbohydrates do you need to eat? This is one of those perennial questions around which there is endless debate. One the one hand, mainstream nutritionists continue to recommend very high carbohydrate intakes. On the other are “fringe” groups who are convinced that carbohydrates are the cause of all ills in the world.
And while I have discussed these controversies previously, primarily focusing on health issues, I want to look at the topic again in a more athletic context.
It’s safe to say that most carbohydrate recommendations that you will see are put in terms of percentages, you should be eating 45% of your calories as carbs, or 65% or whatever number is being used.
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Now, I don’t like to use percentages to set up a diet as they can be terribly misleading. A low percentage of a very high calorie intake may have more total carbs than a high percentage of a lower calorie intake.
And the body doesn’t care about percentages. Putting nutrient recommendations in terms of grams per kilogram or per pound is generally more valid (with one exception I discuss below). The percentages are simply meaningless without knowing how many carbohydrates are being provided in terms of gram amounts.
In that context, a typical ketogenic/low-carbohydrate diet might contain 0.5 g/lb (~1 gram/kilogram) of carbohydrate. An average moderate carb diet (such as The Zone or Duchaine’s Isocaloric Diet) might contain 1 g/lb (~2 g/kg) of carbohydrate or slightly more.
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A typical high-carbohydrate diet would, of course contain more than that (perhaps 2-3 g/lb or more). Typical recommendations for endurance athletes are in the 3-4 g/lb (6-8 g/kg) range and carb-loading may require 5-8 g/lb (10-16 g/kg) of carbohydrate.
Still, whether you’re looking at carb recommendations in terms of percentages of g/lb (g/kg), there is still a huge discrepancy between different experts. Some recommend lots of carbs, some recommend medium amounts, some recommend almost none.
Who’s right? Well, I am. Because rather than giving some single carbohydrate recommendation (that can’t possibly take into account all possible situations), I look at the individual and their needs to decide how many carbohydrates might be needed daily. Any absolute approach can’t be right.
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Which is what I’m going to look at in detail in this article. The punchline, of course is that I’ll end up concluding that how many carbohydrates someone needs (or should consume) daily depends on the same factors that affect other nutrient recommendations: goals, preferences, types and amounts of activity, and our old friend, genetic variation. By the end of the discussion, I’ll have set both minimum and maximum intake values depending on different conditions that might crop up. Let’s start with minimum amounts.
Despite oft-heard claims to the contrary, there is no actual physiological requirement for dietary carbohydrate. Even the RDA handbook acknowledges this, right before recommending that a prudent diet should contain a lot of carbohydrates.
To understand why carbs aren’t essential, I need to discuss the concept of an essential nutrient briefly. And, in brief, an essential nutrient is defined as:
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The second criterion is the reason that dietary carbohydrate is not an essential nutrient: the body is able to make as much glucose as the brain and the few other tissues need on a day-to-day basis from other sources. I should mention that the body is not able to provide sufficient carbohydrate to fuel high intensity exercise such as sprinting or weight training and carbs might be considered essential for individuals who want to do that type of exercise. I’ll come back to exercise later in this article.
But from the standpoint of survival, the minimum amount of carbohydrates that are required in a diet is zero grams per day. The body can make what little it needs from other sources. What, you ask, are those other sources? Read on.
When carbohydrates are restricted completely, the body still has a small requirement for glucose (although this decreases over time) and the body has to find something to make glucose out of. That something is lactate and pyruvate (produced from glucose metabolism), glycerol (from fat metabolism) and some amino acids. It’s the amino acid use that can be problematic since they have to come from somewhere.
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Now, if no food is being consumed (e.g. total starvation), that somewhere is generally muscle tissue (the body will also break down liver proteins); the body will readily break down body protein to scavenge the amino acids it needs to produce glucose.
In doing so, the muscle released alanine and glutamine (produced in the muscle from the breakdown of leucine and the branch chained amino acids, so you know) which can be converted to glucose in the liver. This process goes by the unwieldy name of gluconeogenesis which just means the production of new glucose.
Protein losses during total starvation are extremely high to start, gradually decreasing as the brain switches over to using ketones for fuel (this reduces the body’s glucose requirements which means less protein has to be broken down to make glucose).
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Even so, during complete starvation there is always some loss of body protein. Over long periods of time, this goes from harmful (because function is compromised from muscle loss) to downright fatal. Especially as folks get extremely lean and body protein breakdown increases.
In this context, an under-appreciated fact of liver and protein metabolism (but discussed in detail in The Protein Book) is that over half of all ingested amino acids are broken down in the liver in the first place. A good portion of those can be used to make glucose and this is especially true when carbohydrates are restricted.
Switching from starvation to dieting, this is fundamentally a big part of why protein requirements go up when folks are dieting, more of the ingested protein is being used in the liver to make glucose, meaning that more total protein has to be ingested to make sure there is sufficient amounts to support things like protein synthesis in skeletal muscle.
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I don’t want to discuss this in detail here (since this article is about carbohydrates) but the topic is covered to some degree in nearly all of my books. My original Ketogenic Diet had a thorough examination of protein sparing on a diet and, of course The Protein Book discusses how protein requirements change during dieting in detail.
I’d also note that, as long as protein intake is sufficiently high (e.g. the diet is covering the increased breakdown of protein in the liver and elsewhere), the amount of carbohydrates which are truly required is still zero.
This is the basis of my Rapid Fat Loss Handbook approach: eliminate all non-essential nutrients (including carbohydrates) and provide only those that are essential (in this case large amounts of high-quality protein and essential fatty acids) to generate the largest deficit and maximum fat loss per day.
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But, let’s assume that you don’t just want to eat massive amounts of protein, how many carbohydrates are needed to limit (or prevent) protein loss on a diet?
Early research into the topic of starvation and low-carbohydrate dieting found that as few as 15 grams of carbohydrates per day can limit nitrogen loss in the body. And raising carbohydrate intake to 50 grams per day severely limits the need for the body to use amino acids for gluoconeogenesis (which is why I suggested setting daily carbs on the low-carb days of The Ultimate Diet 2.0 at 50 grams).
Basically, in the context of dieting, dieters can either jack up dietary protein to cover the increased carbohydrate requirements of dieting or simply eat slightly more carbohydrates to provide them directly.
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Both have the same end-result. 15-50 grams per day limits the body’s need to break down protein and will allow protein requirements to be set lower than a diet providing essentially zero carbohydrates per day.
Since I’m going to use the term ketosis in just a second, I need to define what it means. When fatty acid burning is ramped up to high levels (as when carbohydrates are restricted), the body starts producing ketone bodies in the liver.
As noted above, many tissues in the body can use ketones for fuel, basically they are an alternative energy source to glucose when it’s not available.
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When ketones build up in the bloodstream beyond a certain point, a condition called ketosis is said to develop. In contrast to the diabetic ketoacidosis (which occurs in poorly treated Type I diabetics), dietary ketosis is not dangerous and is an adaptation by the body to total starvation.
Many diets such as The Atkins Diet and other very low-carbohydrate diets are based around establishing ketosis for various reasons which are beyond the scope of this article. I only bring this up as most ketogenic diets set a carbohydrate intake level of roughly 30 grams per day (allowing some vegetables but little else) although I’ve never found support for that specific value.
I bring this up in the context of this article as many people start such diets with the specific goal of developing ketosis (again, for a variety of reasons). Since many books give the 30 g/day value for a ketogenic diet, folks get a little anxious about
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