Dieters have been buying high-protein diets all across America, Britain and the rest of Europe, over the past several years. These high protein diet plans promise easy, fast weight loss, but do they deliver?
Answer: No.
Instead of helping weight control, high-protein diets can be unhealthy, and tests show they are unlikely to lead to long term weight loss. Indeed, they may actually cause ill-health.
Excess Protein in Diet
It is a fact that most people in this country are slowly and some cases quickly dying from malnutrition – that’s poor nutrition. They over-feed on high-protein foods at the expense of carbohydrate foods and this, in turn, leads to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Most people in the Western world have an excess of protein (and fatty) foods – usually in the form of animal protein.
High Protein Diets – Unhealthy
- High-protein foods are likely to be high in cholesterol and saturated fats – substances that can promote heart disease and various cancers.
- Weight loss from high-protein diets comes at first from losing water. However, long-term weight control means losing fat, a goal that calls for changing eating habits over time and from taking more exercise.
- On high protein diets people can temporarily lose large amounts of weight, and can even lower their blood cholesterol, sugar, and triglycerides, says John McDougall, M.D., but the method is unhealthy. On a very low-carbohydrate diet, like the Atkins diet, the body burns fat, and byproducts of this are ketones, which suppress the appetite and can cause nausea.
- These high-protein diets contain significant amounts of the very foods, i.e. meats, that the American and British cancer societies and heart associations tell us contribute to our most common causes of death and disability. The reason blood cholesterol, sugar, and triglycerides may be reduced on high protein diets is that people are eating much less because of their loss of appetite, and sometimes nausea. In general, weight loss and health benefits are temporary because the high protein plan is too unpleasant to continue – so people go back to their old way of eating!