London: Low carb diets like The Atkins could cause serious health conditions, according to medics.
Doctors from New York, writing in the Lancet, describe a 40-year-old woman on the Atkins diet who developed dangerously high acids in her blood.
Public health doctors writing in the journal said low carb diets were "far from healthy".
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.
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."
However 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.
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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