Low Carb Diet - The Truth and the Lies

Return to... Page 5

Most low-carb diets will actually recommend that dieters take multi-vitamins as a supplement when on the diet. This has led many critics to point out that this is done because the low-carb diets are actually nutritionally deficient. This is actually because of changes in your body rather than the lack of nutrition in food. When you are dieting with a low-carb slimming diet, your body has to go through a change in the process of obtaining energy. This change can cause a shock in the system causes the body to digest minerals and vitamins poorly but the key thing to remember is that it lasts only for a short while. After a few days your body will adjust accordingly and start to process vitamins and minerals normally.

Another common controversy is that the body has to work much harder when it is in a state of ketosis. Critics argue that because carbohydrates are easy to convert to glucose and thus energy that it does not tax the body much in the conversion. When the body is in ketosis however, the liver has to work hard to convert body fat to energy, ketones and triglycerides. This argument however omits a very important point, in that a carbohydrate rich diet does produce glucose easily, however often produces too much glucose meaning the body has to have the pancreas produce insulin to convert the glucose to glycogen and then fat for storage. This puts at least as much strain on the pancreas as a low-carb diet would on the liver. What is not clear is how much the liver can take and its tolerance to a long term low-carb diet. It has already been established that the pancreas does not hold up well to a carbohydrate rich diet as it causes an onset of diabetes.

Our Verdict

We are of the view that low-carb diets work. Although thorough testing about its long term affect on health and cardiovascular organs like the heart and arteries aren’t fully out, we feel that the general consensus amongt dieters and nutritionists is that the diet is fine. Over the years even hard critics have been slowly accepting low-carb diets more openly as the results are indeed very encouraging.

Another factor to support low-carb diets is that the opposite, namely high-carb diets are quite deadly in the long run. We already have proof that too much carbohydrates wreak havoc on the body’s blood sugar levels. Over a long term, diseases like heart disease and diabetes are guaranteed to follow. This shows that at the current stage we are still consuming too much carbohydrates for our own good. A change to a lower carbohydrate diet will be benefitial.