Low-carb diets are gaining followers by shedding pounds, but health professionals worry about long-term effects

JULIAN ARMSTRONG
The Gazette

Sunday, January 04, 2004
Atkins diets and their spinoffs work by cutting carb-rich foods such as bread, pasta, fruits, vegetables and alcohol.

Betty McLean, who has lost 26 pounds in the past six months, breakfasts like a champion of yesteryear.

"I have scrambled eggs made with butter and whipping cream, and three pieces of bacon," she said with relish. "It's diabolically opposed to everything we've been taught about losing weight."

The longtime dieter, who says she's spent the past 20 years trying to reduce her weight by cutting back on fat but "never lost a pound," is on the fashionable Atkins low-carbohydrate diet. Not only has this 5-foot-2 woman dropped from to 143 pounds from 169 pounds, but her once high cholesterol has become normal.

McLean has joined the latest diet craze. She's one of millions of overweight people across North America to turn away from established nutrition advice to cut fat and eat plenty of fruit, vegetables and grains. Instead, she has almost eliminated carbohydrates - foods like bread, cereal, pasta and rice. She also can't consume many vegetables, most fruits, dairy products and alcohol.

Followers of Atkins and its spinoffs - South Beach, Protein Power, Sugar Busters, Suzanne Somers and others - crow about quick weight loss. Seeing a sales opportunity, the grocery industry has launched a rash of new low-carb products, even including low-carb beer.

The Atkins diet is not new. The late Dr. Robert C. Atkins, a New York cardiologist, published it in 1972. Its message: if the body is denied the sugars contained in carbohydrate-rich foods, it will seek fuel from its stored reserves of fat, thereby causing weight loss.

With obesity becoming one of the biggest health issues of the 21st century, the Atkins regime has soared in popularity in the U.S. and started gaining in Canada last year. In Quebec, the Montignac diet, which bans carbohydrates and fat in the same meal, still attracts some dieters.

Sue Wheeler follows the South Beach regime, dubbing it "a lifestyle change. It's low-carb but not high-fat," said the accountant, who has lost 15 pounds since August. She found the first two weeks "tough." She missed all its no-nos - fruit, bread, rice, pasta, sugar, baked goods and alcohol. But this diet has allowed her gradually to add a few "good" carbs, such as a high-fibre breakfast cereal and some whole-wheat bread. Now she's permitted such Mediterranean diet basics as olive oil and avocados.

Just what this outbreak of low-carb dieting is doing to people's health is unknown. It's easier to see its effect in the marketplace, where a number of grocery products have been launched by Atkins and other companies.

Health professionals are worried about the number of people who are dosing up on meat and fat, eliminating most fruit and severely curtailing consumption of whole grains - foods that provide a wide range of essential nutrients such as vitamins B and C, and fibre.

Cardiologist Colin Rose and his wife, dietitian Sandra Cohen-Rose, warn that low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets, which are also high in fat, can lead to coronary artery disease, diabetes and cancers of the breast, colon, prostate and skin.

High-protein diets are bad for the kidneys, they warn, and can also precipitate gout. A lack of carbohydrates can affect brain function. Nasty side-effects are constipation and bad breath.

Granted, they allow, low-carb eating can reduce cholesterol levels in the blood, a factor long presumed to be vital to a healthy heart. But the latest dietary research now downplays the importance of cholesterol.

"Focusing on cholesterol is a myopic approach to health," said Colin Rose, associate professor of medicine at the McGill University Health Centre. "Any weight loss will lower total cholesterol and a high-carbohydrate diet will lower it more than a low-carb one," he said.

People are definitely losing weight on these diets. Duke University nutrition researcher Eric Westman told a recent Montreal conference on obesity about a study he conducted with 41 men and women who followed a low-carb diet for six months. The dieters lost an average of 17 pounds, or 10 per cent of their weight, he told the conference, which was sponsored by the dairy industry.

The Duke study was funded by the Atkins Centre for Complementary Medicine, which is supported by profits from the sale of the book. Colin Rose was one of several health professionals interviewed to suggest the Atkins centre should fund more research, including the health aspects of low-carb eating.

Other popular diets achieve similar weight losses, researchers at Boston's Tufts University reported recently. They told the American Heart Association at their recent meeting in Florida that when 160 overweight and obese people were assigned to follow one of four diets - Atkins, Dean Ornish, Weight Watchers and Zone - all lost about the same weight.

But obesity specialist Claude Bouchard described low-carb diets as "a shotgun approach" at the Montreal obesity conference. Before such a diet is recommended to the public, he called for "hundreds and thousands of studies" that prove it is healthy and safe as well as effective.

"We have very good reasons for low-fat eating," said Bouchard, former professor of medicine at Université Laval in Quebec City and now executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, La. "We have increased our life expectancy very substantially. Our grandparents were eating a high-fat diet and their life expectancy was 50 years and they had a high rate of heart attacks."

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