Following a low carb diet
could cause serious health conditions, doctors in the
US have warned.
Medics from New York, writing in the
Lancet, describe a 40-year-old woman on the Atkins diet
who developed a serious blood condition.
Public health doctors writing in the
journal said low carb diets were "far from healthy".
But a spokeswoman for the Atkins Foundation
said the diet would not cause such health problems.
The patient treated by the New York team
was obese.
She had been following the Atkins diet
rigorously in order to lose weight and had taken recommended
precautions, including using vitamins and other supplements.
She arrived at the emergency department
of the Lennox Hill Hospital in New York one night in February
2004 after becoming increasingly short of breath and was
taken into the intensive care unit.
Before her admission, the woman had lost
appetite and felt nauseous, vomiting four to six times
a day.
Tests confirmed ketoacidosis - a serious
condition that occurs when dangerous levels of acidic
substances called ketones build up in the blood.
They are produced in the liver when insulin
levels fall due to starvation or diabetes.
Clinical problem
In the case of this patient, doctors
concluded that the Atkins diet was chiefly to blame.
Professor Klaus-Dieter Lessnau, who led
the team from the New York School of Medicine, wrote:
"Our patient had an underlying ketosis caused by the Atkins
diet and developed severe ketoacidosis possibly when her
oral intake was compromised from mild pancreatitis or
gastroenteritis.
"This problem may become more recognised
because this diet is becoming increasingly popular worldwide."
The Atkins diet suggests rapid weight
loss by cutting carbohydrates out of a diet.
For a month before she fell ill, the
woman had lived on meat, cheese and salads, said the doctors.
She monitored her urine twice daily using
dipsticks.
During the period when she dieted, she
lost around nine kilograms of weight.
Dr Lyn Steffen and Ms Jennifer Nettleton,
from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health
in Minneapolis, said: "Low carbohydrate diets for weight
management are far from healthy, given their association
with ketosis, constipation or diarrhoea, halitosis, headache,
and general fatigue to name a few side-effects.
"These diets also increase the protein
load to the kidneys and alter the acid balance in the
body, which can result in loss of minerals from bone stores,
thus compromising bone integrity."
They said "indisputable safety" was the
most important factor when formulating prescriptions for
weight loss, and added that "low carbohydrate diets currently
fall short of this benchmark."
But Dr Abby Bloch, vice-president for
programs and research at the Dr Robert C Atkins Foundation,
told the BBC her diet could not have caused the woman's
condition.
"Vomiting, from a clinical problem which
isn't triggered by diet, would have led to the ketoacidosis."
She said millions of people were on low
carb diets without experiencing health problems.
Dr Bloch added that "troublesome" and
"inappropriate" comments had been made in the Lancet about
claims regarding the ill-effects of low carbohydrate diets
which had been disputed in many studies.
