Just wanted to clarify low carb does not necessarily have to mean high protein which as you stated can have a negative impact on kidney function.  And yes everyone should consult with a Dr.about their own concerns and questions about achieving weight loss.

I just wanted to post a couple other articles from Mr Denninger about this. Both which have been taken offline, that go into more detail and give perhaps better explanation of how this works. The texts in blue and green are of articles that were originally posted on his site but have been taken down from public view. All credits are due to Mr. Denninger and while I would prefer to merely link to these articles on his site that is not possible so I have copied and pasted them to hopefully better inform others about some of the low carb information that I read before making my own decision on doing this.

Again I'm not a Dr. and any questions should be asked of your own trusted healthcare providers.

Edit: I probably read about a lot of this for a couple years before I decided to move forward. Mr. Denninger had wrote about this at various times over several years and it interested me quite a bit but some of these posts actually put it all together in one place and in such a way that it all finally clicked for me.

More Intentionally Misleading Crap

  Here we go again....

Protein keeps your hard-earned muscles happy, your stomach from growling an hour after you eat, and your metabolism humming at a fiery pace. But just like other really good things, getting tons and tons of extra protein isn't always better. Here, five weird ways your body can go haywire when you start eating insane amounts of protein.

The article goes on to claim that once again if you're doing a carb-restricted diet it means high protein.

Nope.  It's high fat, low carb, moderate protein.

Second, there are "effects" they list that are nonsense. Let's go down the list:

My breath doesn't smell like acetone and never did, yet I eat few carbs and lots of fat.  

Why?  

Because "acetone breath" is a feature of ketoacidosis, not ketosis.  The former is a pathology associated with unregulated diabetes, the latter is a normal bodily state in the absence of material amounts of carbohydrate (that is, lipid consumption for fuel as opposed to carbohydrate consumption.)  The latter is not a pathological state.

My mood never "took a dive."  It is more even, but that's because carbs produce a 'sugar high' and that is an altered state of consciousness.  But like a junkie that high wears off, and then of course you want more drug.  Removing the fast carbohydrate content also removes the spikes higher -- and the downer that follows.  Doubt me on this?  Go talk to any parent about "sugar highs" in their kids.  You get them too -- we just don't talk about it because then the media and others would have to admit that this sounds like a drug addiction -- because it is!

The next load of garbage has to do with "wrecking your kidneys."  First, once again, low carb is not high protein, which is what is being referred to here.  And yes, high protein (wildly in excess of dietary needs) can stress the kidneys and for those people with kidney problems that is to be avoided.  But, again, low carb, high-fat diets are not high protein and thus the issue doesn't arise -- once again.

GI issues?  Constipated and bloating?  Bah.  Carb overload often leads to the ****s; I'll pass.  No, I don't get constipated.

Gaining weight?  Really?  My 60lb weight loss on a high fat, low carb diet stands as a direct counterexample and I'm one of millions for whom it has worked.  Will you gain that weight back?  Sure, if you start eating the carbs again!  I haven't and I haven't.  There's that.  Then there's this lie (again):

In fact, one long-term study of more than 7,000 adults found that those who ate the most protein were 90 percent more likely to become overweight compared to people who ate less of the stuff.

Which of course says nothing about carbohydrate intake.

Yes, if you eat carbs and lots of protein (or fat) you'll gain weight -- and quickly too.

So.... don't do that.

The good news is that it appears from the comments on this piece of garbage that a lot of other readers have it figured out -- and that's good news.

What's even better news is that it might sink in to readers that this sort of horsecrap permeates everything that the mainstream media -- including but certainly not limited to Faux sNooz -- "reports."

Here is another one also offline.

So it appears that people basically can't read, or more like it, they read into things whatever they feel like, instead of reading for content.

Or, maybe, I'm not specific enough.  So let me try this again.

We'll go back to what I said was the cardinal rule of carbohydrates, if you're going to eat them and have concern about your body mass:

Thou shalt not fill thy glycogen stores.

There.  That's it.  Finis.

Now, this means you basically divide foods that bear carbohydrates into two groups: Those that can fill your glycogen stores and those that cannot.

Those foods that have no carbohydrate in them (that is, those that are comprised solely of fats and/or proteins) cannot fill your stores, since they do not have anything in them that gets turned into glycogen; you may therefore eat them freely. (Yes, I realize this is not strictly true, but it is functionally.)  You do not wish to eat a huge percentage of protein, however, because your body will wind up*****ing it out (it cannot use that much) and this is hard on the kidneys.  Further, there's no point in consuming something that won't serve your nutrition needs and anything that you eliminate without using it is in that category.  For those people without kidney disease this is not harmful, but there's no reason to put that stress on your body as it confers no benefit and it's an expense (out of your wallet, for openers) that serves no purpose.

Ok, back to the the carbohydrate thing.  Your blood has roughly 1 teaspoon of sugar (16 calories!) in it at any given time.  That is only enough to power your body for a few hundred feet.  Your liver can store in the neighborhood of 100-150g of glycogen.  This amounts to roughly 600 calories worth of energy at most (4 calories/gm for carbohydrate.)  The liver is the only source of glycogen that is globally available to the body.  The muscles also store glycogen, and depending on your build that's anywhere from another 100g to perhaps four times that much; so in a highly-trained athlete you might have 2,000 calories available via this method -- however, any storage in a muscle is local to that muscle because the enzymes necessary to liberate it as free glucose into the blood are not present in the muscles -- they are only in the liver.

Walking consumes approximately 100 calories a mile; running about 20% more (it's less efficient on-balance than walking) so to consume your liver's store of calories, assuming it is full of glycogen when you start, you must walk 6 miles or run about 5.  It's actually worse than that because your leg muscles are large and hold a goodly percentage of your total body glycogen, and you use those while running or walking -- thus, to deplete your glycogen reserves if you start with them full you probably need to run or walk somewhere between a 10k and a half marathon worth of distance!  That's a long way and most people don't exercise anywhere near that much in a day on a regular basis.

What this means is that it is very easy to fill your glycogen stores; the average person may have 1,500 calories of total glycogen storage available while the highly-trained athlete, with far more muscle mass, probably has just over 2,000.

This, by the way, is a very good thing because any material amount of sugar in the blood is bad.  In fact it's so bad that it's effectively poisonous; the presence of too much is diabetes and that excess sugar is extremely destructive, resulting in the death of tissue all over your body. This is why diabetics go blind, have their limbs amputated and ultimately die if they can't keep their blood sugar under control.

In other words the glycogen mechanism in your body is a buffer that, when operating properly, mediates carbohydrate absorption that occurs at a rate faster than your metabolic processes can consume the energy in them, allowing that energy to be consumed at an appropriate rate. If this buffer runs out of storage capacity then the remaining energy is converted to fat for longer-term storage.  When the buffer is empty then the body will consume said energy (from stored fat.)  While some fat is consumed under aerobic exercise conditions even when glycogen is present the metabolic preference is to consume first free glucose then glycogen as that is metabolically easier to process (it is more efficient) than fats are.

So what can you eat that bears carbohydrates without filling said glycogen storage and thus forcing the storage of fat on your body (that is, weight gain)?

That's easy.  Here's an example:

Edit note: This did not appear in the copy and paste of this article so I had to upload and link to the picture so it could be referenced for the rest of the discussion to make sense. 

This is a label off a package of brussels sprouts.  Note that it says there are 6 servings of 45 calories each, and each serving bears 8g of carbohydrates -- but three of them are insoluble (fiber) and thus 5g per serving are carbs that will be liberated into your blood during the process of digestion.

This is a 24oz package.  Half of a package is a full, large cereal bowl of said sprouts, massing 3/4 of a pound, and if you eat those that's three servings or 15g of carbs, all of them slowly released, for a grand total of 120 calories over the space of two or three hours - a rate slower than the rate at which your body naturally consumes energy.

Now contemplate attempting to eat 1800 calories, most adult's base metabolic requirement on a daily basis, in Brussels Sprouts.  You would need to eat seven and a half bags of them massing 180 ounces or more than 11 pounds!

In one day.  More to the point you'd be burning some of that at the same time so even if you did attempt this it is extremely unlikely that you could ever fill your glycogen stores.

Point being that not only would trying to sustain yourself on such a food require a ridiculous pile of brussels sprouts and not only would you be eating nearly all the time it would be damned expensive!  That bag is about $2.50 at the local WalMart, which means I'd have to eat almost $20 worth of Brussels Sprouts a day.

This is the conundrum that one must face when people start talking about eating "healthy vegan" or, for that matter, any sort of vegetable based diet.  You're talking about eating like a (wild) horse or some other grazing animal that subsists in the wild (not on our "supplemented" farm feeds) on vegetable matter.  All they do is eat, and the reason is that the caloric density of said food is so low that they're constantly shoving vegetable matter down their chute in order to prevent starving to death.

In other words everyone who is making such a claim is not really basing their caloric intake on said vegetables irrespective of what they might tell you.

All of them are in fact either using high-glycemic load carbohydrates as their base energy source or they're eating a serious amount of both protein and fats from some source -- and it's probably, if they're trying to eat "vegan", the former.

If you're a peasant (or eat like one), then you will not gain weight because until your glycogen store fills your body, assuming you're not metabolically compromised, will preferentially fill glycogen rather than add fat.  The same applies if you have a lifestyle that burns calories fast enough that despite your eating habits your glycogen stores never fill (e.g. you exercise a lot, whether through your job or for fun.)

But most people are not in this category; they neither exert themselves at that level nor do they eat like peasants, titrating their intake assiduously to avoid having a bare pantry because their refrigerator and pantry are full of available carbohydrate calories.

And they don't, despite their claims, get anywhere near "most" of their intake from "good" vegetables either.  Most of their caloric intake is coming from fast, dense carbohydrates and that's bad news for most of the population, which is why so many who claim to have a "healthy eating lifestyle" are overweight and find that the weight does not come off.

Now think back to what I pointed out up above -- 1 mile of running is about 120 calories of energy consumed.  Yet you can easily consume 1,000 calories of fast carbohydrates in 15 minutes in a restaurant or at home if you eat those foods, and unless your glycogen stores are completely depleted when you do so you're odds-on to store some of that as fat.

In short it is nearly impossible to outrun your fork which is why I see all sorts of people at both fun runs and even races who are materially overweight.

Now let's add another piece to the puzzle: In order to maintain your body mass within one pound a year, plus or minus, you must be able to control your caloric intake and expense to within 10 calories a day.  That's the math; there are roughly 3,500 calories in a pound and 365 days in a year.  To neither gain or lose more than a pound you must, on average, be within 10 calories of "balance" daily.

That's impossible to do outside of strict laboratory conditions where every energy intake and expenditure can be accounted for.

But your own body systems are quite capable of doing this exactly as they are capable of holding all sorts of other metabolic levels within normal limits -- blood sugar, blood pressure and similar.  Your body systems as with those of all animals have managed to do this over the space of millions of years, or you wouldn't be here.

You just have to stop tampering with those processes.

How are most people tampering with that process?  Simple.

When you fill your glycogen storage your body is forced to convert whatever caloric intake remains to fat and store it, because if it doesn't your blood sugar will rise out of control.  The rate of digestion of that material (conversion into glucose) matters; those foods that convert their carbohydrate content more-slowly than your body consumes energy cannot fill your glycogen stores because your body can burn the fuel at a rate that exceeds what your digestive system can provide. Glycemic index measures the speed of digestion of carbohydrate content for a fixed size serving by mass while Glycemic load also takes into account density and approximates the actual glucose-adding impact of eating a given thing.  The problem is that if you fill glycogen stores quickly by eating high-glycemic-load carbohydrates then your insulin level goes up markedly to drive that process and when the carbohydrates are gone it takes a bit of time before insulin levels come back down; during that period you feel like you are starving because your body is metabolically trying to store rather than release glycogen-based energy.

In other words despite having energy available to your body it is present inaccessible because your body's processes are attempting to drive storage to rather than consumption of reserves and thus you get hungry.

This almost-inevitably drives you to overeat despite having plenty of glycogen in your system and if you do eat since your buffer is full virtually all of what you eat at that point will go on as additional body mass.

So remember the cardinal rule and then add a secondary consideration: Thou shall not fill they glycemic stores and thou shall not eat high glycemic-load foods for they drive outsized-insulin responses and thus make you hungry.

This means:

• Eat all the green vegetables you wish; they are both low glycemic index and load and in addition have a low caloric density.  It is virtually impossible to consume a material percentage of your daily caloric intake via these foods and they contain plenty of high-quality nutrients.
  
  
• Eat fruits in moderation and only whole.  "Moderation" means, for example, one whole orange every few days or a half-dozen strawberries daily.  No juices, no dried fruits, etc.  The reason is the same; they are high glycemic both in load and index, and are calorie dense as well.  This means they will fill said stores rapidly. The most-important of nutrients in fruits is Vitamin C (ascorbate); due to an error in our genetic code we are missing an enzyme required to produce it in our bodies naturally and thus must take it in via our diet in some form. (There are many other examples of this in nature; for example, cats cannot synthesize taurine due to an error in their genetic code.)  Note that while many fruits are relatively high in glycemic index in their natural state they are reasonable or even low in glycemic load.  A whole orange, for example, has a moderate glycemic index but a low glycemic load.  Orange juice, on the other hand, has a nearly-identical glycemic index but three times the glycemic load -- and thus has a markedly bad impact on both insulin response and blood glucose.  Eat the orange but do not drink the juice!
  
  
• Do not eat starches of any form, ever, period, and do not add sugars to your diet except in very small portions used as a garnish.  All of these are high-glycemic load and most are also high glycemic-index.  They contain nothing you need and cannot obtain from other parts of your diet.  These are the "insulin bombs" that vegetarians and others trying to "reduce the fats in their diet" usually wind up eating, and they're directly counter-productive to both metabolic control and maintenance of healthy body mass.  Examples are potatoes (including the sweet variety) and other tubers, rice and any grain-based foods such as pasta, breads, cereals and similar.  Most of these foods are processed (e.g. cereals and breads), all of them are calorie-dense, all of them have a moderately-high to high glycemic index and all of them have a high glycemic load, with many exceeding that of white bread!  High-fructose corn syrup is arguably the worst of the bad, but none of these are good.  Get them out of your pie hole!

Now as I have pointed out above if you follow these three points there's no way you could possibly eat enough to remain in caloric balance (or even lose weight at a reasonable rate) from the "good list" above alone.  You'd be eating almost-literally all the time and in volumes that would make you look like a grazing animal.

So now we come to what's next -- protein and fats.

You need a decent amount of protein in your diet.  Protein contains essential amino acids that are necessary building blocks for every tissue and organ group in your body.  Consuming roughly a quarter to as much as a third of your caloric intake in the form of proteins is good.  While proteins do get consumed as fuel (as well as being building blocks) they are slowly broken down and thus have a low glycemic impact (that is, glycemic load.)

Fats are the remaining category.  These too have an extremely low glycemic load (materially lower than protein, in point of fact.)  And here people go off the rails because there are four kinds of fats, basically. They are:

• Saturated fats.  These are (almost all) from animals.  They are also the fats that everyone has been screaming about to limit for the last 30 years.  However, as people have done so the prevalence of heart disease and similar has gone up rather than down.  With any sort of actual scientific process one would think that when a change is prescribed, it is made, and then the results are the opposite you'd re-examine the hypothesis.  That would be logical, but don't expect logic from zealots.  If saturated fats are the cause of such evil events then explain how the Inuit had extremely low rates of heart disease, obesity and diabetes while eating a diet extremely high in saturated fats (seal meat) right up until they added unrestricted carbohydrates to their diet -- then their rates of all of the above exploded.  Saturated fats are solid at room temperature or slightly below and do not go rancid for a long time. I eat these on an unrestricted basis in their natural form, and use them for cooking as they are suitable for same due to their relatively high smoke point.  If you like bacon you have a great source of lard for cooking purposes in the form of the excess bacon fat from cooking it; reserve it in a coffee mug and keep it in the fridge.
  
  
• Unsaturated fats that are naturally-occurring.  These are found in plants on a natural, that is, unprocessed, basis.  Avocados, for example, contain these fats, as do many seed kernels (nuts.)  These are perfectly fine to consume in unlimited amounts as part of your fat intake in their natural form (by eating said plant.)
  
  
• Unsaturated fats that are not naturally-occurring.  IMHO these should not be eaten. Vegetable oils generally cannot be produced by any sort of natural process.  Most of these are produced using a multi-step chemical process involving (usually) hexane and sodium hydroxide (lye.)  While these chemicals are later removed their use is not the salient issue -- it is the concentration of substances from what would be an outrageous amount of the raw plant material into a small volume of resulting oil.  Just because something comes from a thing does not make it ok; water is essential for life but in large enough quantities it is dangerous or even life-threatening.  The problem with most unsaturated fats that are produced from plant-based sources lies here; they are not natural products in that there is no possible way for you to consume them in the quantities used for cooking or eating today by consuming them in their natural form as the amount of the source material you would have to eat is grossly in excess of what you would otherwise take in.  I attempt to eat none of these, but this is hard to do especially if you ever eat out as all the jack-a-wad fools have driven fryers and such to use these oils rather than saturated oils (which is, in my view, exactly backward.)
  
  
• Hydrogenated and trans-fats.  IMHO these should not be eaten in any quantity, ever, period.  These are not naturally-occurring products in any form.  It is not simply a matter of concentration and extraction (as with the above category), these are also chemically modified to produce a shelf-stable product that is not attacked by naturally-occurring environmental bacteria.  The rise of these products in our diet and their promotion as being "healthier" than saturated fats is correlated with the gross increase in heart disease worldwide.  This began as a wartime measure with Crisco as the nation had serious shortages of naturally-occurring fats during that period and unfortunately turned into a huge business when peace returned.  It is very, very hard to avoid these fats in packaged products, although trans-fats are being phased out (thank God!)  Nonetheless hydrogenated oils proliferate, and you should carefully read labels and eschew any product containing them.

I don't claim to be a doctor but I know how to read.  I also know how to look at what the so-called "experts" have told us for decades and what the result of following their advice has been.  The basics of how the body works is also a set of known public facts, in particular how glycogen is stored and consumed, and what happens when that storage is full.  I also know, from personal experience, that the claims by many that it is impossible to perform athletically without carbs are lies.

Finally, I have myself and many others as examples.  Not only did I lose 60lbs by eating this way it's five years later and the weight has stayed off.  I went from not being able to run a quarter-mile to running half-marathons.  I'm in better physical condition now than I was when I was 17.  While there is no such thing as "no risk" of a bad health event in anyone's future I require no medication, my blood sugar is normal, my blood pressure is normal and I'm of normal weight. I don't count calories and when I reached what appears to be a reasonably-ideal weight the loss of body mass stopped without conscious intervention on my part.

Humans, as with other animals, have evolved to fit their environment over millions of years.  We wouldn't be here if our bodies were not capable of taking care of themselves on a gross physical level; the species would have never survived.  Yet we did right up to the point where we were capable of engineering our own destruction through stupidity and, in my opinion, outright bull**** and fraud.

It's your *ss folks -- literally, the size of your *ss.  I can't make this sort of decision for you and shouldn't be able to.  Nor should anyone else.  But before you believe those screaming on this matter with regard to what has been the "standard recommendations" over the years, whether it be reductions in salt intake, limiting saturated fats or anything else ask that they square their recommendations against known biological facts and if they can't, demand an explanation.

Good luck getting one.