ATKINS DIET- CAUSE FOR LIFE-THREATENING COMPLICATION
Doctors, in a case study reported in 'The Lancet' on 17.03.06,
placed a safety question mark over the Atkins diet, the high-protein food regime that unleashed a craze in the United States in the 1990s.
Atkins stresses lashings of meat, butter and other dairy products, high-fat foods, typically limited in classic diest, but cuts potatoes, rice and pasta to negligible levels and greatly limits intake of fruit and vegetables. The diet's premise is that a carbohydrate-starved body will start to burn up stored fate cells, a process called ketosis.
But in their case reported in the British medical weekly, doctors at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital blame Atkins for a "life-threatening complication" for a woman who had strictly followed the diet.
The
patient, a 40-year-old obese woman, reported a weight loss of nine kilograms a month after she began the diet. She ate meat, cheese and salads, supplemented by minerals and vitamins sold by Atkins Nutritionals Inc., the company founded by diet pioneer Robert Atkins in 1989. She was admitted for emergency treatment, complaining of a shortness of breath, nausea and repeated vomiting that had lasted severap days, as well as mild gastric pains. Urine and blood analysis showed she had severe
ketoacidosis, a condition in which dangerously high levels of ketone acids build up in the liver as a result of a depletion of the hormone insulin.
Ketoacidosis, which is more usually seen among diabetics and victims of starvation, can lead to a coma. The patient responded well to rehydration and glucose infusion and left hospital after four days. The doctors said that their patient had an underlying ketosis caused by the Atkins diet, and developed severe ketoacidosis, possibly when her oral intake was comprised from mild pancreatitis or gastro-enteritis. Also the doctors felt that this problem may become more recognised because this diet is increasingly popular worldwide.
Low-carbohydrate diets for weight management are far from healthy, given their association with ketosis, constipation or diarrhoea, halitosis, headache and general fatigue-say the doctors. These diets also increase the protein load to the kidneys and alter the acid balance of the body, which result in loss of minerals from bone stores, thus compromising bone integrity.