It's not the protein that they eat, it's the high blood sugars!
When blood sugar enters the bloodstream in excess it can by bound to a hemoglobin molecule and become glycosylated hemoglobin. Now, normally hemoglobin (a protein) is not filtered by the kidneys because the molecule is too large to fit through the filtering pores. Glucose, on the other hand, is filtered through the kidneys when it is in excess; this is one of the methods that the body uses to lower high blood sugars, but dumping the excess through the urine. The problem comes in when glucose is bound to hemoglobin. The body tries to dump the excess glucose by filtering it through the kidneys and into the urine, but runs into a problem. The glucose is now bound to an already too large hemoglobin molecule and now looks something like this oO. The small end is the glucose molecule and the large is the hemoglobin. When the glucose/hemoglobin molecule tries to fit through the filtering pore, it gets stuck. Pressure builds up behind the stuck molecule and eventually forces it through the filtering pore causing damage. When this process repeats itself thousands of times a day, the damage is escalated.
For the most part, diabetic complications are caused by poorly controlled blood sugars or blood sugars that are maintained above non-diabetic readings (which some doctors feel is perfectly acceptable). If you want to avoid diabetic complications, the best way to do that is by maintaining non-diabetic blood sugars as much as humanly possible.
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Also, my husband has hight cholesterol, so I'm concerned about the red meat and eggs.
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It's been known for quite some time that eating eggs does not raise your blood cholesterol. As a matter of fact, over 80% of the cholesterol in your bloodstream is produced by your own body and when dietary cholesterol is cut your body reacts by producing more itself and it's usually the bad LDL when it does. Saturated fats in red meat and eggs may slightly raise LDL cholesterol, but it also raises HDL cholesterol (something you want!), so that end result is pretty much an unchanged ratio in cardiac profile. Something else about low carbing and LDL; cutting the carbs causes a shift in the type of LDL present in the bloodstream from the dense, sticky type (high density LDL) which is harmful to the lighter, fluffy type (very low density LDL) which is now throught to be beneficial instead of harmful. Combine all that with lowering triglycerides and cardiac profiles improve considerably in most low carbers.
Blood pressure is also usually lowered through low carbing. Mine certainly was!