Are Low Carb Diets Healthy?
There’s increasing evidence that low carb diets could be bad for your health in the long term. Although many people have enjoyed quick weight loss while on a low carb diet, it can result in problems such as dizziness, fatigue, depression, bad breath, hair loss, weak bones, kidney disease, heart disease and death in some cases. One recent study mentioned in the a Woman’s Day article asserts that the Atkins Diet can result in cancer and even death.
The latest low carb diet craze is called the Dukan Diet and many celebrities have jumped on the bandwagon. It sounds like a very complicated set of rules to follow. Calorie Lab is testing it out; it’ll be interesting to see the results.
According to the author of Jorge Cruise, author of The 3 Hour Diet, low carb diets will deplete sugar known as glycogen that’s stored in your muscles for your body to use as energy. When you don’t eat carbs, there’s very little glycogen stored up for later use and so the body begins to burn stored fat. You might think this is a good thing except that forcing your body to burn stored fat is called ketosis, a toxic state that causes all those health problems mentioned previosuly. Eventually, your body will turn to your body’s lean muscle tissue and burn it for energy. Your body can’t afford to lose lean muscle tissue because that’s what burns fat in your bodywhen you aren’t exercising.
A low carb diet can also cause you to overeat so-called “low carb foods“. Or else it will cause you to binge on carbs whenever you fall off the wagon of your low carb diet.
Remember back when health experts were recommending the low fat diets? All of a sudden, food manufacturers were marketing foods as low fat in hopes that people would buy them in place of regular foods. My favorite example of this is the label on chocolate syrup that touts it as a “fat free food”. Sure, it’s fat free but it’s not sugar-free or calorie-free! And that’s the other thing. Many salad dressings were re-invented to be “low fat” because they replaced the fat with sugar so it would taste better.
The same phenomenon is happening with low carb foods. They are replacing carbs with artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols but no one really knows what will be the long term effects on your health.
The bottom line is that calories are calories, carbs are carbs and fat is fat. There’s no point in trying to fool your body into losing weight by forcing it into an unnatural state. Eat moderate amounts of every food group that contains each one in balanced proportions and you will be able to maintain a healthy weight. Add in some regular exercise and you will see a calorie deficit that should eventually result in weight loss.