Linda Bacon, Ph.D, dreads swimsuit season, but not because she has anything against the beach.

Instead, the California-based nutritionist fears what the season brings: scores of otherwise health-conscious citizens who subject themselves to deprivation diets (like the Master Cleanse) or intense exercise regimens, often in blazing hot weather, to look slimmer in revealing clothes.

Many unwittingly end up harming their health — and possibly even their hearts.

“Early June and January are the two times of year people do crazy, desperate things to get thin fast,” says Bacon, a nutrition professor at the City College of San Francisco, California, and the author of “Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight.”

“They go on fasts, yo-yo diets, detox programs, and ‘cleanses’ without realizing that there are serious consequences to weight loss and nutrient restriction.”

That crash dieting doesn’t work and can be dangerous is a message that gets lost in the national clamor over rising rates of overweight and obesity.

Thinking of trying a lemonade fast or cabbage soup diet? Here’s what to keep in mind if fitting into your skinny jeans or your Speedo is high on your summer agenda.

Crash diets may harm your heart

Cardiologist Isadore Rosenfeld, MD, a professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, in New York City, and author of the forthcoming “Doctor of the Heart: A Life in Medicine,” opposes crash diets (less than 1,200 calories a day) and detox plans like the Master Cleanse.

The Master Cleanse involves consuming a mixture of water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper — and nothing else — for several days.

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He says these very low-calorie regimens are based on the false theory that the body needs help eliminating waste.

Research suggests rapid weight loss can slow your metabolism, leading to future weight gain, and deprive your body of essential nutrients. What’s more, crash diets can weaken your immune system and increase your risk of dehydration, heart palpitations, and cardiac stress.

“A crash diet once won’t hurt your heart,” Dr. Rosenfeld says. “But crash dieting repeatedly increases the risk of heart attacks.”

Bacon adds that long-term calorie-cutting can eventually lead to heart muscle loss. “Yo-yo dieting can also damage your blood vessels. All that shrinking and growing causes micro tears that create a setup for atherosclerosis and other types of heart disease,” she says.

Chip Stinchfield, a 55-year-old shop owner in New Canaan, Connecticut, has experienced the cardiac effects of dieting firsthand. On the advice of friends, he went on a Master Cleanse for days and exercised vigorously. Another time he ate nothing but cottage cheese, beets, and peanut butter. Both were “quick, easy fixes” that helped him drop up to 10 pounds fast.

But both diets also gave him shortness of breath, heart palpitations, and “the feeling like I was going to have a heart attack.”

Under pressure from his family, who thought his dieting might disable or kill him — like many extreme dieters, Stinchfield kept his doctor in the dark about his radical habits — he eventually went back to sensible eating.

Beware of fad diets

Experts have known for decades that extended crash diets can be dangerous — especially when the diets become a fad.

In the late 1970s, an osteopath named Robert Linn published “The Last Chance Diet,” a best seller that advocated a miraculous “liquid protein diet.” Following the lead of their favorite celebrities, millions of people bought quarts of Dr. Linn’s liquid formula and embraced the diet (or one of many copycat versions), averaging just 300 to 400 calories a day.

The diet seemed to work wonders — some people reported losing as many as 10 pounds a week on the formula. But then the news of sudden deaths began to trickle in.

Health.com: 6 diet trends you should never try

An investigation led by the Food and Drug Administration turned up nearly 60 deaths among liquid dieters. Although some of the deaths occurred in people with underlying diseases such as atherosclerosis (and therefore could have been coincidental), government researchers who examined otherwise healthy dieters who died of ventricular arrhythmias found that the pattern of deaths suggested “the effects of protein-calorie malnutrition on the heart,” including atrophy of the heart muscle.

Experts have since tried to pinpoint the dangers of crash diets (technically known as “very low calorie” diets). Shortages of potassium, magnesium, and copper have been suggested as possible causes of the arrhythmias seen in crash dieters, and studies have also found that the diets can cause a drop in blood pressure and sodium depletion.

The true extent of the risk posed by crash diets is unclear, however. Much of the research has been conducted in obese people — a population that can actually benefit from these extreme diets — and in most studies the health of the participants is carefully monitored.

Experts stress that very-low-calorie diets should only be followed with a doctor’s supervision. But crash dieters are more likely to consult their friends than a doctor — which can get them into trouble.

Brooke Robertson, 23, learned these lessons the hard way. Last spring the Auckland, New Zealand, mom reportedly suffered a minor heart attack after she lost 100 pounds on a diet of Red Bull and the occasional fistful of dry cereal.

Despite the international publicity, Bacon doesn’t think desperate dieters will consider Robertson a cautionary tale. “There’s absolutely no benefit to fasting or detoxing,” she says. “Extreme diets are simply bad for you and they don’t work. But every year people engage in magical thinking.”

How to lose weight — safely

If you’re overweight, slimming down is critical for your overall health. Even moderate weight loss can lower your risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, and some types of cancer.

But it’s important to lose weight safely, which usually means slowly: Most experts recommend dropping just 1 to 2 pounds a week. And despite what some brand-name diets claim, the best way to do so is to exercise regularly and stick to a diet that limits saturated fat and sugars and emphasizes fruits and vegetables, lean meats and fish, and whole grains.

“The key to losing weight is a combination of diet and exercise,” says Dr. Rosenfeld. “One alone will not do it.”

A meat-heavy diet itself has no bearing on the prevalence of asthma, according to the scientists who conducted the study. Yet, frequent burger eating could be a signal for other lifestyle factors which raise asthma risk.

“This is a sign that the link is not strongly related to the food itself, but that burgers are a proxy for other lifestyle and environmental factors like obesity and lack of exercise,” said Gabriele Nagel of the Institute of Epidemiology at Ulm University, Germany, who led the study.

She added, however, that there were “biologically plausible” links for the positive effects of a healthier diet, which could be down to the antioxidants found in fruit and vegetables, and the omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in fish, which have anti-inflammatory properties.

“Fruit and vegetables contain antioxidants and other biologically active factors which may contribute to the favorable effect…in asthma,” Nagel said.

In particular, she added, foods rich in vitamin C have been linked to better lung function and fewer asthma symptoms.

Around 1.1 million children currently receive treatment for asthma in Britain, while in the United States it is the most common chronic childhood disease, with around 10 million children diagnosed with it.

Nagel’s team looked at data on 50,000 children aged between 8 and 12 years from 20 rich and poor countries around the world.

While diet was not linked to children being more prone to allergies in general, it did seem to influence the prevalence of asthma and wheezing, they found.

“Overall, more frequent consumption of fruit, vegetables and fish was associated with a lower lifetime prevalence of asthma, whereas high burger consumption was associated with higher lifetime asthma prevalence,” they wrote in the study, which was published in Thorax, a British Medical Journal title.

This study adds to an existing body of evidence showing the health benefits of a so-called Mediterranean diet — rich in fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and fish — including reduced risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and depression.

Source

I get lots of different health news and information sent to me and an article by a heart surgeon caught my attention.  I’ve kept the article in its entirety and I recommend you take a few minutes to read it.  It’s very informative.  The article discusses the myths and dangers of the “low fat” diet.

Enjoy!

Heart Surgeon Says Low Fat Is A Big Fat Lie

By Dwight Lundell MD

What you are about to read requires an open mind. You have to look at facts instead of massive advertising and failed, faulty theories. Are you ready?

Fact: From 1900 to 1980, obesity rates in the US remained stable at 14% to 15% of the population.  Since 1980, however, obesity rates have skyrocketed. Today, nearly 66% of the population is overweight or obese. This spike is directly linked to the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) creation of the food pyramid, advocating 11 daily servings of grains and cereals.  This is not a coincidence.

For most of my 25 year career and 5,000 heart surgeries, I accepted low-fat dieting theories.  I also believed the theory that dietary cholesterol was a primary cause of heart disease. But as heart disease continued to soar, year after year, my doubts began to haunt me.

I treated thousands of patients after they became ill.  The question that haunted me was what was causing heart disease, obesity and diabetes in the first place?  As I examined the data, it was clear that these conditions spiked in the 1980s and continued to climb.

Study after study has demonstrated the negative effects of consuming a grain-based, low-fat, high-sugar diet.  On the other hand, there is no credible evidence to suggest that a low-fat diet equals lower incidences of heart disease and obesity.  In fact, all the evidence proves otherwise. The low-fat and cholesterol theories are based on incomplete science.

“We are what we eat” is a slogan that is often repeated. But it is not quite accurate.  Instead of focusing on what we put inside our bodies, we should focus on how our bodies metabolize the foods we put there. And how we metabolize low-fat, high-sugar and grain-based foods is clearly reflected in obesity and heart disease statistics.

Fact: 65% of the nation is overweight or obese.  More people develop heart disease today than ever before at an earlier age.  Every 34 seconds a person in this country loses their life to a heart attack.  That’s 2,500 a day.

The National Institutes of Health, the National Cholesterol Education Program, the American Heart Association, the US Department of Agriculture and a host of other medical organizations continue to promote a low-fat diet and statin medications to reduce cholesterol.

These organizations are wrong, but to admit it threatens their bottom line. You don’t have time to wait for government, the medical community and food manufacturers to admit their mistake. And you can stop blaming yourself for excess pounds and ill-health, if you have faithfully followed their mistaken regime. Your life and health happens now and it’s in your control.

The cholesterol and low-fat theories are firmly planted in our consciousness. From the advice of our physicians, to the TV ads for statin drugs, to the grocery store aisles packed with low-fat foods… these faulty theories are reinforced at every turn. Their powerful marketing may be persuasive, but it is not scientific fact.

Here’s the first step that will go a long way to improving your health.  Return to the diet of your grandparents, before governments and food manufacturers declared war on fat and real food to fit faulty theories.  Your grandparents were not afraid to drink real milk and eat eggs, butter and red meat.

I am not advocating these foods in large quantities. But their elimination, in favor of low-fat, high-sugar, grain-based foods has resulted in inflammation and staggering rates of obesity.

Packaged low-fat foods created for shelf life – not human life – never touched your grandparents’ plates.  Hydrogenated omega-6 vegetable oils and margarine were not even invented.  For your grandparents, sugar was a treat reserved for special occasions. Today, it has become a daily staple.

The drug companies have done a magnificent job convincing us that we cannot get well without medication. This is not true. Your body is a tremendous, self-healing organism.  When you consume real food and essential nutrients, it will respond and flourish.

Low-fat packaged foods, filled with sugar and omega-6 oils, strongly contribute to inflammation. This is the true cause of heart disease, diabetes and a host of other diseases.  There is no better time than right now to understand how the faulty cholesterol theory created an epidemic of inflammation and what you can do about it.  You only have one heart. Keeping it healthy is not nearly as difficult as you might think.

Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ.  He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation and Chief Medical Advisor for Asantae. In 2003, Dr. Lundell made the most difficult decision of his 25 year surgical career.  As traditional medicine continued to chase the cholesterol theory of heart disease, Dr. Lundell closed his surgical practice. He then devoted the rest of his life to speaking the truth that inflammation causes heart disease. By lowering inflammation, heart disease has a cure.

Dr. Lundell is the author of the world-wide bestselling book, The Great Cholesterol Lie. This book is a revealing look at heart disease and the faulty theories of low-fat diets and cholesterol.  He also reveals his clinically-tested recommendations for lowering inflammation that can prevent and reverse heart disease. For more information, go to the website www.thecholesterollie.com

I hope you enjoyed the article.  If you have any questions, feel free to email me!

Sincerely,

Dr. Jason Gerard, DC