Claims against Atkins diet disputed

It takes decades for damage to occur, says researcher

Chris Zdeb, The Edmonton Journal

Monday, November 24, 2003

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EDMONTON - The wildly popular Atkins diet flies in the face of most medical advice, but research shows people lose twice as much weight on such low-carbohydrate diets, which encourage dieters to eat eggs, red meat, shellfish and butter, than on low-fat diets, which recommend eating less fat and more carbs.

It's the main reason people have snapped up 15 million copies of the Atkins diet books over the last 30 years. So many people are low-carbing it these days that it's created spinoff markets of low-carb grocery foods and low-carb restaurant dishes, says Jeff Volek, a kinesiologist at the University of Connecticut who has studied low-carb diets for five years. These plans are especially popular with guys because they involve eating a lot of meat and limited fruits and veggies. Diet disciples ignore claims by the medical establishment that the diet, designed by New York cardiologist Dr. Robert Atkins, who died from a fall last April, may increase your risk for heart disease and kidney failure.

The latest such warning comes from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an American nutrition advocacy group, which says the Atkins diet may cause heart disease and could have killed a teenage dieter who was on it.

The group, which advocates a strict vegetarian diet, stressed it could not prove the allegations.

But PCRM called on the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to monitor and check for signs that the Atkins and other low-carb diets like it may be harming people's health.

One dieter said he believed the diet clogged his arteries. The parents of a second dieter who died while on it blamed the meat-heavy regimen.

Volek, a respected researcher, says the claims are ridiculous.

It takes decades for atherosclerosis (the degeneration of arteries because of a buildup of fatty acids) to cause problems, he explains. Volek's only read what he's seen on the Internet, but his scientific opinion is that the teens must have had an underlying genetic propensity that put them at risk. He says the group PCRM has spoken out against the Atkins diet before and suggests they may have a hidden political agenda.

Volek recently lectured researchers and graduate students in the department of agricultural food and nutritional science at the University of Alberta about low-carb diets. He explained such food plans are an alternative to diets high in carbohydrates, which increase blood sugar levels as they are broken down into sugar.

The pancreas responds by cranking out more insulin to lower the elevated blood sugars. Unfortunately, insulin causes the body to transfer the excess sugar into muscle and fat cells where it is stored as fat.

People eat about 50 carbohydrates a day on a low-carb diet, compared to about 350 carbohydrates on a low-fat diet, which means less sugar to be stored as fat. Instead, the body draws on stored fat to create energy, resulting in dramatic weight loss.

People on low-carb diets report feeling less hungry, Volek says, which improves their chances of keeping the weight off after they go off these diets. Most people regain all the weight they lose on low-fat diets within five years.

Critics say that over time the body will starve itself on a low-carb diet, but Volek says that will never happen, because the body will simply signal that it requires more food.

If low-fat diets are as good as the medical establishment claims, and many, many people have bought into the argument, why are there more obese people, Volek asks.

People are turning to low-carb diets because they can lose twice as much weight in about half the time. Short-term research has also found that symptoms such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol that increase the risk for stroke and heart disease are not made worse. In fact, some people have seen their symptoms improve.

Longterm research is needed to determine the effect of low-carb diets on health, Volek says. In the meantime, alternate diets should not be dismissed just because they go against the status quo.

czdeb~thejournal.canwest.com