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Message: <blockquote data-quote="whatisitgoodfor" data-source="post: 1248742" data-attributes="member: 932">First off, I think that I need to apologize for my overzealous opinions with regards to the Atkins diet. I was an overweight, borderline diabetic (type II) with a wheat gluten allergy, so starting the Atkins diet helped me out threefold. Since starting the diet made me feel so much better, I have a sub-conscious belief that everyone that tries it will feel just as much better. LightPhoenix, getting back to the food allergies, if you will recall from your bio classes, cells use membrane embedded sugars for cell recognition. If an immune cell encounters another cell that lacks the correct sugars, it will trigger an immune response and start attacking. Effectively, it causes an allergic reaction to the "invading" cell. When a person eats a low-carb meal, the body has a chance to uptake and metabolize all of the sugars from the meal before a significant immune reaction can manifest; assuming of course that the sugars from the meal were of a type that the body considers foreign. With a high carb meal, these sugars are in the bloodstream for a much longer time, allowing the body to actually begin mounting a defense. The preceding is, of course, supposition. I've never seen any research about it, it is simply the understanding that I've gotten from piecing together tidbits from various sources (textbooks, journals and such). It may or may not be correct, and with your deeper background in BioChem, I would greatly value your opinion.***Long Term StudiesTo date, there haven't been any very long term studies published about a low carb lifestyle. The longest that I've heard or was conducted for one year, and concluded that there were no significant health risks, with the exception of a loss of some skeletal muscle mass. Of course, losing skeletal muscle mass is pretty logical when you're losing a lot of other mass as well. If you don't have to carry your obese rear around all day, it makes sense that you don't need as much muscle to carry it with.***Misunderstanding the dietIn Dr. Atkins' book, he lists out 4 phases of the diet: Induction, OWL, Pre-Maintenance, and Lifetime Maintenance. Induction is the part that everyone has heard of, reducing the total caloric carbs to 20 grams a day in an effort to jump start the body's Lipolysis system. Induction only lasts for two weeks. Induction also doesn't really allow for any excercise to be done either, due to the fact that your body is confused because the only source of energy that it's had for years is suddenly deprived. Almost always, a person will feel terrible for the first week because the body is burning through the last of it glycogen reserves and hasn't figured out how to convert fat into sugar. Ongoing Weight Loss lasts for a variable amount of time, as the person approaches their target weight. This is also the part of the diet where Dr. Atkins strongly encourages excercise begin. As a person progresses through their weight loss, they start to increase the amount of carbs they eat in a day. At this step, a person will normally find their Critical Carb Level for Loss (CCLL) which is effectively how many grams of carbs they burn through in a normal day's activity. As long as they stay below that CCLL, they will continue to lose weight; how far below it they stay determines how fast they lose weight.Pre-maintenance and Maintenance are where the person simply keeps their average daily carb intake near their CCLL and live a healthy lifestyle. They also end up looking out for any changes in their metabolism due to age, illness, or other lifestyle changes and make changes to their CCLL accordingly. As you can see, there is a lot more to the diet than just not eating carbs and losing weight. ***Back to the Long Term IssueIMO, there shouldn't be any mojor issues with continuing the diet indefintely. Since the diet is just helping you to determine how much food energy your body will burn in a day, then keeping yourself at that level of energy, there shouldn't be any problems. I will admit, though, that there is a very real possibility of people abusing the diet. Because it keeps your metabolism up while still in the same state of biochemical behavior as starvation, it would be quite possible for a person to "accidentally" starve themselves into an unhealthy state much faster than simple starvation would allow for. *** The Evolutionary ArgumentFor 10 million years, the critters that would become us were adjusting themselves to become a hunter/gatherer tool using primate. At the end of that 10 million years, approximately 50k years ago (that was the last number I hear in an Anthro class as to the emergence of H. s. s.) the transformation was pretty much complete. Since that time, effectively no changes were made to the actual biology of humans. I wasn't trying to make any parallels between modern man and critters from 10 million years ago. I was just pointing out that 10 million years were spent making a critter that could survive on a hunter/gatherer diet. (And which then spent 40k years living like that until it discovered beer. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> )As to why we don't digest fats and proteins more effectively than sugars, you need to understand a little bit more about evolutionary pressures.Just because an animal stops evolving at a point doesn't mean that it's the most efficient point for it to stop at. All it really means is that the creature has found a (to borrow a math term for a little while) LOCALIZED maxima. Most likely not an absolute maxima. As an example of this, the eyes of all mammals are wired up backwards. If you follow the path of the light through the eye, it reaches the surface of the retina (the layer of cells that detect the light) and must pass through the entire cell in order to reach the part of the cell that actually detects the light. here is a really bad ascii illustration of this---Light---->  [cell junk|| detector]As you might expect, this causes some problems, most notably that there is a spot on the retina where there can't be any light detecting cells. Instead, there is a bundle of nerves that passes back through the retina to communicate with the brain. This is what causes the "blind spot" that everyone has. Before you assume that there must be some good reason for the body to be set up this way, you should be aware of the fact that Octopi and their relatives got it right. Their eyes are wired the correct way, with the light detector closest to the light, and the nerve connection in the back. So, in short the (likely) reason for the body to digest sugars more efficiently than fats is that it's good enough as it is, and it couldn't get it any better without a major design overhaul.</blockquote>

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