Laura Schoenfeld: Again, this is a little bit difficult because I have a reputation for promoting adequate food intake and carb increases for certain conditions, so I tend to get a lot of clients that need help reintroducing carbs or need help identifying what their carb intake should look like. This is something that … carb reduction, again—I’m going to repeat this, and I’ll probably repeat this a lot during the course—carb intake, when we talk about low carb versus moderate carb versus high carb, is very, very arbitrary. Looking at an average American, low carb could be 30 percent of their calories, but if you’re talking about a Paleo diet or the ancestral health community, 30 percent carbs could be considered a high-carb diet. There’s a lot of kind of arbitrary designations of carb intake and what’s high carb, what’s moderate carb, what’s low carb. I just find it to be a very individual approach when I’m working with clients.
I have some clients that can’t go above a hundred grams of carbs without having gut symptoms or gaining a lot of weight. I have other clients that if they don’t get at least 150 grams of carbs during the day, then they have a lot of blood sugar issues, and they have really bad performance in their particular athletic pursuit. I would say I skew towards a more moderate-carb approach, and maybe that’s my own personal bias, but I just think that the one-size-fits-all carb reduction that is recommended by a lot of the Paleo gurus out there is not appropriate or even effective for a lot of people in the long run. Maybe that’s why I tend to have a little bit of a bias because I think there needs to be some level of balance in that discussion and making sure people know that eating carbs, especially whole-food carbs, is OK. I’ve had clients before that … again, I work with a lot of disordered-eating clients, but I had a client one time that would only allow herself to have half a banana and half a sweet potato for the day because she was so afraid of sugar and getting cancer because she had already had cancer in the past. She was having a lot of symptoms like infertility and mood dysregulation and that kind of stuff that was being caused by the carb restriction. Like I said, I have a little bit of a bias towards carb moderation, but again, it’s going to just come down to individual patients and seeing, whatever their lifestyle is, if that supports a more high-carb intake or a low-carb intake.