[buu700]

whether you have low or high fat in your diet, you could fill a good portion of that total caloric intake with protein instead of carbohydrates and that would still satisfy the claims that you can mitigate against "Higher carbohydrate intake was associated with an increased risk of total mortality"

This doesn't contadict any of your points here, but: my understanding is that excess dietary protein is broken down into glucose via gluconeogenesis, in which case I suspect that the high-protein and high-carbohydrate diets wouldn't have significantly different results.

[acconrad]

Not exactly. Protein has a higher thermic effect in that it requires more energy from the body to break it down into amino acids. So say you fill both your glycogen and your amino acid requirements, given just proteins and carbs, while both will be converted to glucose, the metabolic effect required by the body to process protein will be higher than the carbohydrate.