Misconception #3: High protein/low carbohydrate diets must be good because people lose weight

Any diet in which you take in less calories than you burn will allow you to lose weight. Eat 1,200 calories of chocolate a day and you are guaranteed to lose weight—although most of us would agree that this isn’t a very nutritious plan. So the question isn’t whether you can lose weight on a given diet. That’s the easy part. It’s whether the diet is sustainable over a lifetime, while promoting health and protecting against disease. Without the necessary carbohydrates required to efficiently burn fat, the high protein/low carbohydrate diets cause the blood to become too acidic, due to an abnormal accumulation of fat metabolites (a process called ketosis). The body’s response is to break down bone to buffer this excess acidity, promoting osteoporosis. Furthermore, ketosis is metabolically an unnatural state which often leads to fatigue and nausea, in addition to bone loss. The initial weight loss experienced with high protein/low carbohydrate diets is due to decreased body water, not fat. When confronted with a very low-carbohydrate diet, the body responds by first mobilizing its glucose stores in the liver and muscle. The stored glucose is actually packaged into the compound glycogen, which has a water coating. The water, which is removed when the stored glucose(glycogen) is utilized for energy, and then eliminated in the urine. This, along with the diuresis induced by the excess ketone bodies accounts for the prominent initial weight loss—weight that’s gained right back after a normal carbohydrate balance is restored.

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