The Ups and Downs of Low-Carb Diets

A few weeks ago, while attending the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, I met with my friend and colleague Steven Smith, who has just taken on the position of Executive Director of the Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes, Florida Hospital and Burnham Institute.

This week, Steven penned a most interesting essay for the New England Journal of Medicine, in which he discusses potential downsides of a low-carb diet. Most of his argument is based on a recent study that showed progresson of artherosclerotic plaques with a low-carb diet in apolipoprotein E-deficient mice, a model commonly used to study arteriosclerosis.

It turns out that the same article was recently also discussed on OBESITY PANACEA, an obesity blog run by Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders, two PhD students, who work in obesity research and are very active members of the Canadian Obesity Network.

As they point out, the two key possibilities that Steven presents in his article are that increased level of free fatty acids in the blood (released from insulin resistant fat cells and implicated in the initiation of inflammatory processes) or a reduced level of circulating endothelial progenitor cells (produced in bone marrow and help maintain the health of the blood vessels), both possible effects of a low-carb diet, could explain these detrimental effects, but I will leave it to OBESITY PANACEA to explain…

AMS
Toronto, Canada