Sunday, October 4, 2009

Low Carb Research

Does anyone have access to this full paper? It looks interesting:

Low-carbohydrate diets: an update on current research.

The diabetes and obesity epidemics have stimulated research to assess the benefits and potential risks of low-carbohydrate diets. Carbohydrate comprises less than 45% of calories in carbohydrate-restricted diets, but very low carbohydrate ketogenic diets may restrict carbohydrate to 20 g initially with variability in the carbohydrate level subsequently. Some research suggests that low-carbohydrate diets may achieve better early weight loss than comparison diets higher in carbohydrate. Studies of up to 1 year suggest that weight loss on low-carbohydrate diet is comparable with fat-restricted diets with higher carbohydrate content. Limited research has been conducted to evaluate low-carbohydrate diets in managing type 2 diabetes. Although science continues to advance in this field, current research suggests that low-carbohydrate diets can be a viable option for achieving weight loss and may have beneficial effects on glycemic control, triglyceride levels, and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels in some patients.

3 comments:

Ammi said...

I'm afraid I don't have access to it, but it does look interesting. I'd be interested to find out how the beneficial effects on HDL work though, since I don't recall seeing anything about low carb impact on HDL levels when I was doing some cholesterol research the other week.

High levels of soluble fibre in fruit/veg diets have been shown through epidemiological research to work well to mop up LDL so I would imagine that you would need to be careful on your choice of fruit and veg (eg. plenty of broccoli and spinach) to keep the soluble fibre up and the also assist the HDL.

If you hear more, please let us know!

Chris D said...

I grabbed the full text, you can get it here
http://www.sendspace.com/file/23q9dl

Ilya said...

And here also:
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/32/7/1147.full.pdf+html