positive health effects

[grumpyone]

I remember last year when I was on Atkins the first time reading a post that was telling why and how Atkins diet actually lowers your cholesterol plus other positive results heath-wise--my mother is concerned about my cholesterol (have never had it checked) and I was wondering if anyone knows the how and why to this so I can explain it to her. I also remember that it sometimes can stop diabetes, high blood pressure etc.

[edie]

http://learningcenter.atkins.com/briefs/viewBrief.jsp?briefId=1011&atkinspsession=d2dd9c331da45f57668e67d4ba5d

It you copy and paste this in your address bar you can read the article!

[MyJourney]

This was written back in 03 by Malcolm Kendrick MD
http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm.htm#atkins2

WHY THE ATKINS DIET IS HEALTHY

I was idly watching a programme on the Atkins diet last night which, to my surprise, was reasonably balanced. Yes folks, the Atkins diet has crossed the pond to reach the United Kingdom. Although, in reality, all it is doing is returning. After all we invented it nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.

A man called Banting promoted a diet pretty much indistinguishable from that of Atkins in 1863. In fact, the verb to ‘bant' is used in Sweden as a term for going on a diet.

Anyway, reasonably balanced or not, on this programme there was still an unquestioned view that, even if the Atkins diet did help with weight loss, it was still damaging to health. It would cause kidney disease, and osteoporosis and heart disease. Various professors of nutrition were wheeled out to condemn the Atkins diet as dangerous nonsense.

Ignoring the kidney disease and the osteoporosis for now, the nutritional professors made the usual statements. For example, ‘It is known that saturated fat increases the level of blood cholesterol and causes CHD.' They didn't quote any evidence for this. As far as they were concerned it is just a known fact.

Well, what is the evidence that a diet high in saturated fat raises your cholesterol level? Where does it come from? The Framingham Study? That world famous study that is quoted by medical experts around the world.

"In Framingham, Massachusetts, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people's serum cholesterol...” Dr William Castelli 1992 (Director of the Framingham study)

So the evidence obviously didn't come from Framingham. What about studies in children? These poor vulnerable imps, where the damage is first being done? Just to get a bit of genetic diversity into the equation, let's look at Chinese children first.

‘Children in the intervention group were fed with low-cholesterol and low-saturated fatty acid diet, and the control group with normal diet. The duration of intervention was three months. Compared with the control group, serum cholesterol levels of children under intervention were not significantly changed. Total cholesterol: 4.64 (186dg/ml) vs 4.68 (188dg/ml) mmol/L LDL: 2.66 (107dg/ml) vs 2.62 (106dg/ml).' Zhu WL et al Zhonghua Liu Xing Bing Xue Za Zhi. 2003 Sep

Then children in the UK:

‘Unexpectedly, significant inverse associations were found between the dietary content of saturated fatty acids on the one hand and the serum concentrations of cholesterol… on the other.' Samuelson G et al Br J Nutr Mar 2001

The reality is that, in many different studies, it has been shown that the more saturated fat you eat, the lower your cholesterol - although the difference is not that great. Of potentially greater importance is that a high fat diet has a more significant effect on raising HDL and lowering VLDL. Which is supposed to be very healthy indeed.

Consider this extract from the University of Pennsylvania:

‘The Atkins Diet limits carbohydrates but permits unrestricted amounts of protein and fat. Compared to a conventional, high-carbohydrate, low-calorie approach… at one year, the Atkins dieters had significantly greater increases in good cholesterol (HDL) and greater decreases in triglycerides (VLDL).'

I'm sorry that I can't present you with anything much from PubMed (the bible of mainstream medical research) about this. But as others may have discovered, any paper that supports the Atkins diet has no abstract attached in PubMed – you just get blanks. Did someone use the word censorship? Not me your honour. I would never dream of saying such a thing.

Now, anyone who has read my scribbles before will realise that I don't think the level of any lipid in your blood makes the slightest difference to the rate of CHD. But most other people do, so I think it is worth explaining why a high fat diet will automatically raise HDL and lower triglycerides.

A fact, by the way, that seems to have created stunned surprise amongst many researchers when results from the Atkins diet were published. Which just shows that they need to go back and read their textbooks again.

In order to understand why a high fat diet should, and does, raise HDL levels and lower VLDL levels (and may also lower LDL levels), you need to understand a bit about fat and sugar metabolism and the role of lipoproteins in your blood. Starting here.

When you eat fat it is absorbed by the gut and stuffed into very large lipoprotein known as a chylomicron. The fat in a chylomicron is almost all stored in the form of three fat molecules attached to a glycerol molecule, a structure known as a triglyceride. Three fats and a glycerol = tri-glyceride. By the way, cholesterol also sits in chylomicrons as a co-passenger. (Anything insoluble in water/blood, such as cholesterol, has to be carried around in a lipoprotein)

Chylomicrons are then released into the bloodstream and travel through the body losing chunks of triglyceride all the while as they pass fat cells. (Fat cells attack chylomicrons with a ‘lipase' enzyme, chopping bits off). As this happens chylomicrons shrink, turning into Very Low Density Lipoproteins (VLDLs), which are otherwise known as… ‘triglycerides.' How confusing is that?

In fact, the nomenclature in this area must be the most confusing in all of medicine.

LDL is known as ‘bad' cholesterol
HDL is called ‘good' cholesterol
VLDLs are named triglycerides…
It's little wonder that most people haven't the faintest idea what anyone is talking about in lipid metabolism. Chylomicrons, VLDL, HDL and LDL are all lipoproteins. I wish that people would stop calling them things like ‘cholesterol' and ‘triglycerides', and ‘good' cholesterol and ‘bad' cholesterol. It really doesn't aid understanding.

Anyway, moving on. Apart from chylomicrons, the gut also sends out VLDLs de-novo, and the VLDLs do pretty much the same thing as chylomicrons, dropping off triglycerides here and there (mainly into fat cells) and shrinking. Quite what the difference is between a shrunk down chylomicron and a VLDL is, I don't know. (By the way, just in case you're wondering, VLDLs also contain cholesterol as a co-passenger. All lipoproteins have cholesterol in them)

Not all chylomicrons and VLDLs travel round dropping off triglycerides. Some go straight to the liver where they are absorbed, broken down, and unpacked. And their contents are used to make other things the body needs.

However, wherever they go, all of the ‘fat containing' chylomicrons and VLDLs produced by the gut drop off their fat load, shrink, are then absorbed and completely disappear. So a few hours after a meal they are gone. And if you were to measure VLDL levels a few hours after a high fat meal they would have returned to ‘normal'. Whatever normal may be.

Thus, if you eat a high fat meal, almost all sign of it will have disappeared in a relatively short space of time. And there will be no change in any lipid level. Or at least not any lipid level that anyone can be bothered measuring.

However, if you eat a high carbohydrate meal, the metabolism acts in a very different way. Carbohydrates are absorbed and transformed into sugars in the gut, from whence they go straight into the bloodstream, same as fat. But because sugars are soluble in water they don't need to be carried in a lipoprotein, so there is no immediate effect on lipid levels from a high carb meal. You just get a sharp rise in blood sugar level.

A certain amount of the sugar will be absorbed into fat and muscle cells, and then stored as glycogen. But if you eat a big carbohydrate meal, the fat and muscle storage cannot cope, and the excess sugar has to be absorbed by the liver to prevent the sugar level getting too high.

However, the liver cannot store that much sugar, so it starts to convert it into fats, in the form of triglyceride. At which point, the liver then packs this excess triglyceride into a VLDL and sends it out into the bloodstream - along with some cholesterol. (Unlike with sharks, the liver in humans is not an energy storage organ)

So you get a kind of delayed VLDL rise after eating carbohydrates. But there is a key difference between the VLDL made by the guts, and the VLDL made by the Liver. The VLDL made by the liver, unlike that made in the gut, shrinks into a low density lipoprotein (LDL). The dreaded heart disease causing lipoprotein – the one they call co-lest-erol.

Why does this happen to ‘liver manufactured VLDL', when it doesn't happen to the VLDL made in the gut? Well, as liver manufactured VLDL leaves the liver, it interacts with an HDL molecule which transfers it's proteins to the VLDL molecule. One of the proteins transferred is apolipoprotein B-100. And the apo B-100 molecule is the unique LDL ‘identifier.'

On the other hand, VLDL made in the gut has apolipoprotein B-48 attached to it and this VLDL doesn't become an LDL molecule as it shrinks.

Now, if you are not already completely confused, I will explain what this means.

Rewind. If you eat fat, it is absorbed from the gut, packed into chylomicrons and ‘VLDL B-48s,' and transported around the body and then got rid of. Gone. So immediately after a high fat meal you will have a very high triglyceride level, made up of VLDL B-48, but this will fall relatively rapidly. Importantly, there can, and will be no effect on HDL or LDL levels. And so if you measure the lipid levels in the fasting state (which is when such things are measured) you will find nothing at all after a high fat meal.

On the other hand, if you eat a high carbohydrate meal, the level of VLDL B-48 will not rise. But some time later, the liver will start converting excess sugar into fat and sending this out in VLDL B-100 molecules. And this process can go on for many hours after a meal. So the VLDL level may still be high when you measure it.

In addition to finding a high VLDL you should also find a low HDL. Because, for each VLDL the liver makes, an HDL hands over its proteins and disappears. So the more VLDL the liver makes, the less HDL you will have. Cause and effect.

Also, as you may have noted. If the VLDL B-100 all ends up as LDL, the more VLDL the liver makes, the higher the LDL level is likely to be.

Therefore, if someone is on a high carbohydrate diet, they should automatically have a raised VLDL level, a reduced HDL level and quite possibly a raised LDL level.

Golly gee whiz. A high fat diet reduces VLDL, raises HDL and may even lower LDL. And a high carbohydrate diet does the exact opposite. In short, the metabolism does exactly what you would expect it to.

So you see. Atkins was right all along. Even if he didn't appear to know why.

[snappy]

i have only been lc'ing for a month and it has already has a positive impact on my health. diabetes runs heavily on both sides of my family and before i started lc'ing, i was totally carb addicted and gaining more and more weight. i had my blood sugar tested and my doctor wanted me to start taking oral diabetes meds. i begged her for some time to turn it around and in one month, my blood sugar is back down in the normal range. i'm losing weight really slowly, but at least i have managed to keep diabetes at bay for now.

[CrysAnne]

My blood pressure dropped the first week, so much so I had to lower my dose.

[Hismouse]

Snappy it will lower your blood sugar, I know! I am a diabetic and when I behave myself it does alot of good. I just need to be more hard headed about this eating healthy thing.

[Hismouse]

I want to give a recipe for when the newbies are craving carbs. This really works for me, my daughter asked me for the recipe because she is wanting to louse 60 by Dec. for her wedding. Dark chocolate moose, here are the ing. 3 oz unsweetend chocolate, 2 tbls unsalted butter 2 cups heavy cream(well chilled) 2 tbls unsweetend cocoa powder, 2 tbls sweetner, 1 tsp vanilla, Melt the chocolate and butter in glass dish for 30 sec in microwave. whip the cream, add the cocoa,sweetner and vanilla, chill and eat spoonfuls when craving sweets.

[snappy]

i'll file that away, but it's so strange because once i got past week one i don't crave carbs at all!! before, i couldn't control myself when something bad was within my reach. but now i can say no with no effort at all. sweets don't even sound good to me. i love it. i no longer feel completely controlled by food. yippee!!

[Helen H]

Just to add to the debate about fats and health. People are often warned off Atkins because it tends to contain a lot of saturated fats, which is blamed for everything going. However, in every study carried out on humans, where the outcome was compared with the type of fat eaten, the ones eating the saturated fats lived longest and were healthiest, even if they had the highest cholesterol levels. The ones eating the polyunsaturates had the lowest cholesterol but were most likely to die.

In men, there is a VERY loose connection between risk of heart disease and cholesterol level (and none at all in women) but there is no evidence that lowering the cholesterol reduces the risk of death. Your body needs cholesterol in almost every cell, and if you don't eat it in your diet, your liver just makes more.

Modern medicine has been assuming that cholesterol is a cause of heart disease, but it's just as likely to be a symptom, the body's way of trying to protect itself from damaged blood vessels. This would explain why it is the big arteries near the heart that get covered with plaque, not the narrow capilleries. But drug companies have turned high cholesterol into a disease in its own right so they can sell you cholesterol lowering drugs for life.

Opps, getting off track here.

Ok, studies have shown that in the presence of enough calcium, increasing protein in the diet tends to remineralise bones (makes them more dense). High protein only causes a problem for bones if there is far too little calcium in the diet.

And recent study on people with existing kidney disease found that the group eating moderate protein did better than the low protein group. For people without kidney disease, there is no evidence to show that Atkins causes any sort of kidney problems. Body builders have been knocking back huge amounts of protein for years, and as a group, they are not prone to osteoporosis or kidney stones.

On a personal note, I had a complete physical after two years of strict low carb, and they results were "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it". Everything was on the good side of normal, and my bones had actually become more dense. A previous bone scan had shown I was likely to have osteoporosis by the time I was 50. This one said I was unlikely to get it in a normal lifetime.