Spanish forum debate: carbs, carnivore diets and insults

Forum debate: carbs, diets and disqualifications

Are carbohydrates really the enemy, or just a late trend reaching Spain? In the Responsible Consumption subforum, users have been arguing about this for 724 days, and nobody agrees. The opening thesis is simple and cruel: a specific profile — male, over 30, overweight, lifelong sedentary — discovers a fitness influencer’s video and decides his problem wasn’t the sofa, but bread. From there, it becomes a cult.

The profile diagnosis: poor, older, believers

The portrait opening the discussion shows no mercy. It describes a man from a small town, well past 30, around 40 years old, with established obesity and childhood sedentism, convinced that taking short walks counts as exercise. A recurring detail: his previous diet involved eating twenty garlics and onions daily because «they are antibacterial», using the phrase «I’m strong as a bull» as an identity shield. He hates those with fit bodies but desires them; this resentment fuels everything that trinc.

The second phase is the epiphany. One day YouTube serves him videos of influencers with bodybuilder thumbnails and headlines like «stop eating sugars and your life will change». He concludes he has discovered something revolutionary and that his issue was inactivity, not carbohydrates. The third phase is inflated self-esteem: needing to beat his chest, he adopts these trends — arriving from the US five or ten years late — applying them quickly, poorly and aggressively.

The cult phase: bread as sin

From then on, adherence is religious. Beliefs are defended even without results, appetizing food becomes sin, and discourse turns single-minded. The fifth phase, supplements, is described as the most ridiculous: a 95 kg obese man convinced turmeric and chlorella will solve what quitting bread didn’t. The same mental mechanism that once attributed miraculous powers to garlic now attributes them to a bottle of capsules.

Reactions were immediate. One participant defends that carbohydrates are necessary, that life’s joy lies in bread, pasta, rice and red meat, and banning them oneself is absurd. Another adds an interesting twist: some eat a slice of bread spread with half a kilo of lard and blame the bread instead of the lard. And those who skip sandwiches all week because «flour is poison» end up eating a lettuce plate with half a liter of olive oil — pure fat — justifying it by saying it’s olive-based.

The counterattack: carnivore diet enters

The issue complicates when carbohydrate restriction advocates appear with solid arguments. One claims he has eaten mainly red meat, butter, omelets, bone broth, sardines, salmon, some cheese, fried blood and beef liver for two months, losing eleven kilos, seeing his belly disappear, having better hair, sleeping well, no acidity or joint pain, and more energy. His conclusion: the carnivore diet is natural for a hunter from two million years ago, and carbohydrates are harmful.

The rebuttal comes with data and history. It recalls that eighty years ago almost nobody went to gyms, people ate whole loaves of bread, migas and cereal derivatives, and original gazpacho was made with unleavened bread, not tomato juice. It argues the type 2 diabetes epidemic started fifty years ago, not ten thousand, and that the main problem is being fat, not eating bread. The response notes type 2 diabetes went from nearly non-existent to today’s biggest epidemic, with estimates that by 2050 half the population will be diabetic or prediabetic, blaming genes alone isn’t enough.

Deadlock: nobody yields, tone heats up

The exchange devolves into accusations about whose brain is fried by carbs and who is ignorant of food biochemistry. They debate if diabetes causes or results from obesity, if insulin resistance stems from carb abuse or excess body fat, and if genetics explain why some populations suffer more. The only repeated figure is the US one, claiming half the population is prediabetic.

Some try to lower the temperature with common sense: no food is bad per se; timing, method and quantity matter. The reply calls this seemingly impartial discourse actually hiding a foolish idea. If consensus exists, it’s that the food and pharmaceutical industries have huge interests in keeping the argument as is.

In the end, clarity is absent: everyone thinks they’re right, and nobody changed their mind in 724 days. Some will keep eating bread guilt-free, others paying for turmeric supplements. Meanwhile, the «flour fat guy» stays there, watching videos.