>Some new, radical approaches to controlling
>diabetes stress cutting carb consumption dramatically, so you take much less
>insulin.
Warning: this was the old method of treating diabetes, and was abandoned
(about 40 years ago, I think) for the current method (mostly complex
carbohydrate) when studies showed diabetic on the (then) new carb diet did
better than on those on low-carb diets. Of course, perhaps the new low-carbs
methods are substantively different than the old ones.
>Where this dovetails slightly with food combining is that in the early, very
>low carb phase that Protein Power recommends if you have bad cholesterol
>ratios, high blood pressure, or are more than 20% overweight; you shoot for
>30 grams of carbs a day.
This will have profound effects on your metabolism. Below about 30 gms/day
your body cannot maintain the normal areobic chemistry cycle. It switches to
another based on directly burning fat metabolites (this apparently normally
serves as a starvation metabolism). This state is called ketosis, from the
ketones of fat metabolites that start floating about your bloodstream.
Ketosis can make you drop weight like crazy.
>Later you raise your carb level to 40% of the
>calories at any meal, with 30% protein and 30% fat [The Zone]
Again, a little caution here; in a high-protein diet most of the protein is
burnt for energy and the kidneys have to dispose of the nitrogenous wastes.
Over a lifetime this appears to accelerate the natural decline of the
kidneys. Kidneys are a bad thing to have trouble with as they tend not to
recover well; by the time you have symptoms you'd already be irreversably
quite ill.
However, I don't think this diet is greatly different from the current
standard american diet.