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Over the last few years there has been a craze in very low-carbohydrate diets, with the version popularised by the late Dr Robert Atkins being the most famous of them all. While the first low-carbohydrate diet was actually popularised in the 1864 by an English undertaker and coffin maker named William Banting, they have since come in and out of fashion several times (the first Atkins craze was in the 1970s; the more recent second one now seems to be on the way out, but Dr Atkins isn’t around to create a third – although someone else probably will).
While it is true that eating an excess of the types of carbohydrates that are digested too quickly causes all sorts of problems, the Atkins Diet is an extreme version of carbohydrate restriction. By almost completely eliminating carbohydrates, the diet consists mostly of protein and fat. Eating large amounts of protein places strain on the kidneys (making kidney stones and kidney damage more likely), which have to eliminate abnormal ketone bodies, and strain on the liver as well. The kidneys use water to eliminate toxins, and so there is a seeming initial weight loss (which is mostly just water). But there is a price to pay – the body’s fat cells adapt to a prolonged state of ketosis by becoming highly attractive to fat. Also, the body’s insulin receptors are swamped by the high amount of saturated fat the diet introduces to the bloodstream, leading to an increase in insulin levels to compensate. Increased insulin causes the synthesis of fat by the body, so the person on Atkins is doomed to gain the weight they have lost back, and probably end up even fatter than when they began, at the expense of their health in the meantime. The whole point of the diet is supposed to be to lower insulin levels, but when they go up the fat comes back, as does the chronic inflammation associated with excess insulin levels, and accelerated aging results.
Because the Atkins Diet is very poor in essential nutrients, even Atkins himself recommended vitamin supplementation – but this leaves out the important phytochemicals found in fruits and vegetables that are known for their antioxidant and cancer preventing benefits. There are serious health effects on a diet extremely high in meat and other high fat / high protein foods. A prolonged state of ketosis leads to an increase in lipid oxidation, which causes heart disease and neurological degeneration, among other problems. High meat consumption may increase the risk of colon cancer by 300%, and the high sulphuric content in meat can lead to a very acidic environment in the body, which may compensate by using calcium from the bones as a buffer. Not surprisingly, people on a high meat diet are more likely to have broken bones, effectively suffering from the osteoporosis so common in old age at a much earlier stage.
People on the Atkins Diet have also been found to have increased LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, Lp(a), fibrinogen, and homocystine levels, all of which increase the risk of heart disease, stroke and blood clots (Preventive Cardiology 5(2002):110). The very high level of saturated animal fat in the diet is associated with a greatly increased risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Critically low levels of vital electrolytes such as calcium and potassium result due to the kidneys’ elimination of them with the ketones, which can lead to sudden death from cardiac arrhythmia, as happened with the tragic case of a 16-year-old girl who died in class after just nine days on the Atkins Diet. Because it’s rare for 16-year-olds to suddenly drop dead, an autopsy was performed to find the cause of death; it is likely that many older people, whom it was assumed had died of a heart attack, actually had this happen to them instead. All of these diseases are most commonly seen in the elderly; thanks to Atkins, a person can now experience them at a much younger age if they want.
The diet also ignores a very important fact about brain chemistry – while it is possible for the brain to function on ketones in an emergency, it works far better when supplied with glucose. Ketosis is supposed to be an emergency backup only for when a person is starving to death, and all studies have found that people perform far worse on mental tests than normal when their brains are running on ketones instead of glucose (which happens on the Atkins Diet). So not only do you become sick on Atkins, you become stupid as well. Not a good deal.
As Dr James W Anderson, Professor of Medicine and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Kentucky School of Medicine remarked, “[T]his is absolutely the worst diet you could imagine for long-term obesity, heart disease, and some forms of cancer. If you wanted to find one diet to ruin your health, you couldn’t find one worse than Atkins’.”
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