meat like veal and Canadian bacon, and you initially limit fruit. On Sugar
Busters, you eat meat and cut out white flour, sugar, and starchy vegetables.
All of these diets initially reduce insulin, leading the body to rely on fat stores
for energy. While on the surface this may seem logical, these diets are all fraught
with other unseen dangers. There are no studies or long-term data that look at
lowcarb diet followers beyond two years. Yes, they show initial weight loss, but
I suspect that if the studies were to go any longer, they would show lowcarb diets
to be a complete disaster on hormones and overall health.
If you’re on the Atkins Diet, which is way too high in fat, this simply shuts
down growth hormone, which is the hormone that keeps you young. Do doctors
routinely check for growth hormone levels? Of course not. Do you want to do
anything to shut down the hormone that is keeping you youthful? I don’t know
about you, but that’s not for me. The Atkins Diet is also bad for your thyroid, as
it encourages a highprotein lifestyle. Too much protein can shut down the
thyroid hormone from converting to its active form. Thyroid hormone is a major
hormone that keeps you fit. It controls your whole life, not just your metabolism.
If you’re on the South Beach Diet, which favors manufactured
polyunsaturated oils such as corn and soybean, the thyroid gland is also
negatively affected. Polyunsaturated oils in their free fatty acid state also
interfere with the conversion of thyroid hormone into its active form. And didn’t
you just read here how bad polyunsaturated oils are for your health? They can
promote heart disease and cancer. Do you really want that?
Sugar Busters favors fake fats such as margarine. However, I just discussed
the dangers of trans fats. This diet ends up messing up sex hormones. It is the
sex hormones that keep you fit and young. This diet similarly disturbs leptin, the
hormone that controls hunger.
The cellular damage and hormonal havoc of all these popular diets is
immediate, although you may not feel it for a while. Hormonal havoc eventually
leads to a sluggish metabolism. But the implications of hormonal imbalance go
far beyond a sluggish metabolism. These are serious hormonal disturbances that
come with grave consequences. Yes, you lose weight as you initially balance
insulin, but you will pay dearly later—with your health.
Due to boredom and deprivation, I doubt that any person can really adhere to
lowcarb diets for any extended period of time. These types of diets can actually
worsen carbohydrate cravings, and many people end up rebounding to a higher
weight than where they started. I hear it from my patients all the time: “I lost 15
pounds on this or that lowcarb diet, but I ended up gaining all the weight back
and then some because I felt so deprived of carbs that all I eat now is potatoes
and bread.”
andrews555
(Andrews555)
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