New study provides support for Atkins type diet

(Medical News Today) - Was Atkins Right? New Study Provides Support For Those Who Advocate A High Protein Diet For Weight Loss And Better Health.

Bethesda, MD – “Shape Up America,” a new coalition of various health groups recently announced their collective opinion that “booming low-carb diets were unlikely to lead to long-term weight loss and may be dangerous for health.” At the same time, high protein diets are attracting their share of critics, among them the American Heart Association, which has stated that the focus on animal proteins cholesterol raises harmful LDL cholesterol levels.

The scientific community knows that high protein diets induce early marked metabolic changes in human and animal models, especially when the diet contains at least 50 percent of energy as protein, but the physiological and functional consequences of a long-term high protein (HP) diet have not been fully explored. Now, a long-term study involving male rats has found that a protein intake of three times the requirements did not produce any adverse effects in key systems.

A New Study

Researchers are aware that no long-term interventional human studies on the issue exist nor are there any complete toxicological studies on high protein diet effects. This has led to a new investigation of the wide range of biochemical, anatomical and histological parameters to determine whether long-term ingestion of a high protein diet could have adverse and/or beneficial effects in an obesity prone strain of rats.

The authors of “A long-term high-protein diet markedly reduces adipose tissue without major side-effects in Wistar male rats,” are Magali Lacroix, Claire Gaudichon, Celine Morens, Veronique Mathe, Daniel Tome, and Jean-Francois Huneau, all from the Physiologie de la Nutrition et du Comportement alimentaire, Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon, Paris; and Antoine Martin, at the Service d’Anatomie pathologique, Hôpital Avicenne, Bobigny, both in France.

Their findings appear in the Articles in Press section of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. The journal is one of 14 scientific publications issued each month by the American Physiological Society (APS) (http://www.the-aps.org).

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