New Study on Low carbing damaging your arteries

El_Dangeroso

Browsing around the interwebs today you may have seen this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8218780.stm

or

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208833/Low-carbohydrate-Atkins-style-diets-increase-risk-heart-disease-stroke.html

or

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/lowcarb-diet-damages-arteries-study-shows-1776780.html

Fellow low carbers, don't feel disheartened. This study is a really flawed piece of research, lets break it down why:

1. If you extrapolate the ratios for the 'low carb diet' into a 2000cals a day diet then the carb level is at 60g which is still pretty low carb but the protein ratio works out at 225g! That's equivalant 37 eggs a day, I like eggs, but that's excessive even by my standards. That makes this an excessively high-protein diet, not a low carb, moderate protein, high fat diet such as Atkins et al.

Now when you eat excess protein - and 225g is excess to the tune of 150g for most people, then half of it gets converted to glucose via neoglucogenesis adding a further 75g of carbs making the total 135g a day! Hardly low carb in anyone's book.

2. I haven't read the study (neither has the writers of the above article, it hasn't been released yet) but the fact that the dietary cholesterol was kept at .015 tipped me off that they couldn't possibly be feeding the mice saturated fat, they must feeding them vegetable oil such as soybean or corn oil, which is common practice in rat and mice studies. Industrial seed oils such as these are packed with Omega 6 and are a disaster for heart health as well as implicated with causing an array of cancers including breast and prostate.

Combine 96g omega-6 rich oil with 135g of sugar pumped into your blood and you are headed for a heart-attack.

Plus the fact that every other study in humans has shown the opposite and that the leading cardiologists Dr. William Davis, who previously advocated low fat diets changed his mind when he saw how powerful reducing carbs and increasing saturated fat is in preventing cardiac events.

El_Dangeroso

Ooh, I tracked down the abstract:

http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/116/16_MeetingAbstracts/II_77-b

Ah, so they genetically modified the mice to knock out the apoE-/- gene, ie the gene that means you can metabolise fat properly.

So the rest of us who have our apoE-/- gene's intact (and trust me, you'd know about it very quickly if you didn't!) have nothing to worry about.