Do Low Carb Diets Cause Vitamin Deficiency?

[fatburner]

I often read of various benefits of low carb diets but I don't really see how you can get a sufficient intake of vitamins. Surely cutting out most of the fruits and vegetables from your diet will harm your health.

How do people get around this problem? I am wary of vitamin supplements as I have often heard they don't really work.

[silicon toad2000]

I feel that low carb diets reduce intake of things like breads, pasta, rice and sugars, not vegies or fruit.

[LoveFreedom]

Low carb diet the Atkins way may be a good way to lose weight in short term but since it does not allow for fruit it may have a negative impact on your vitamin C intake. On the other hand, many people live on bread, pizza and pasta with little fruit anyway, so often a change to low fat - low carb diet (with salads and veggies as snacks) is a great improvement.

White sugar and white flour and to some degree cheese are very addictive, cutting them down or out of your diet causes majority of people to feel much better.

Carbs in veggies and fruit are different to a bowel clogging glue in flour and insuline demanding sugar. Low carb diet, to some people, means cutting down on both. A big mistake, I believe!

[Keith]

To quote Wikipedia, during the induction phase of Atkins "Carbohydrate intake is limited to 20 net grams per day (grams of carbohydrates minus grams of fiber, sugar alcohols, or glycerin), 12 to 15 net grams of which must come in the form of salad greens and other green vegetables (brocolli, green beans, spinach and asparagus)." ie. you cut your carb intake, but almost all the carb you do get should be from vegies.

IIRC, Atkins also recommended taking a vitamin supplement.

Note: This is not a recommendation.

[Joeschmoe]

I agree with the poster above. If you don't get deficiencies on a Pizza/fast food diet. Chances are you won't get deficiencies on any diet that is based on whole foods. Now, if you make the bacon diet, you might encounter some issues.

That being said, i think there are more healthful options.

[Josephus Magnus]

Most diets recommend taking vitamin supplements.

[PianoManGidley]

Originally Posted by Josephus Magnus

Most diets recommend taking vitamin supplements.

This is true. Many scientists have started waking up to the realization that even with a properly balanced diet with healthy foods, the body STILL can't get all the essential vitamins to ensure the most long-lasting health, and therefore recommend taking a daily multivitamin.

[garentee]

About 5 or six years ago I did a modified Atkins diet. I included plenty of veggies(as I grow them for a living) and fruits. I refused to go without fresh strawberries and peaches etc. Plus Once a week I completely went off the diet for a day. I ate whatever I wanted. I ate whoopie pies and pizza if I felt like it. The result ? 30 pounds in about 8 weeks.. I did this in the middle of summer when I usually lose quite a lot of my winter fat. Atkins works until you get back into bad habits which I definitely did by going to work in a wine and cheese shop which came with its own set of really interesting issues...Different story for a different day.

[Joeschmoe]

Originally Posted by PianoManGidley

This is true. Many scientists have started waking up to the realization that even with a properly balanced diet with healthy foods, the body STILL can't get all the essential vitamins to ensure the most long-lasting health, and therefore recommend taking a daily multivitamin.

Maybe "balanced" diets aren't quite so balanced. What other animal on earth needs vitamin and mineral supplements? I think someone who ate only whole unprocessed food and gets enough exercise and enough food shouldn't need supplementation. But if your "balanced" diet includes Skim milk, or white bread, then it won't provide what you need.

I think it shows how off our idea of balanced is.

[Jennihul]

A great experiment was done with two dudes who lived in a controlled environment and ate nothing but Pemmican for a year. They not only survived, they thrived and were found to have no deficiencies. Inuit and Eskimo cultures eat nearly 100% meat based diets and are fine until they move and start eating what we call normal food.

Obviously, low carb diets are not nearly as restrictive as that.

Remember, the "recommended daily allowance" of vitamins and minerals is a wild guess in most cases. Just to be on the "safe" side, the creators of these recommendations doubled and in some cases tripled the allowances. Your body probably does not require nearly as much as you think.

Most deficiencies we face today as modern humans comes from modern food inventions, not natural eating habits. Atkins or low carb is actually closest to the ideal diet for most of the humans on this planet. Fresh meats, fish, eggs, limited or no dairy, fresh veggies and berries and fruits in season. Before machinery, what do you think humans ate? Exactly those things. For tens of thousands of years. Even longer if you count pre-homo sapiens.

Jennifer

[WanderingOak]

Originally Posted by Jennihul

A great experiment was done with two dudes who lived in a controlled environment and ate nothing but Pemmican for a year. They not only survived, they thrived and were found to have no deficiencies. Inuit and Eskimo cultures eat nearly 100% meat based diets and are fine until they move and start eating what we call normal food.

Obviously, low carb diets are not nearly as restrictive as that.

Remember, the "recommended daily allowance" of vitamins and minerals is a wild guess in most cases. Just to be on the "safe" side, the creators of these recommendations doubled and in some cases tripled the allowances. Your body probably does not require nearly as much as you think.

Most deficiencies we face today as modern humans comes from modern food inventions, not natural eating habits. Atkins or low carb is actually closest to the ideal diet for most of the humans on this planet. Fresh meats, fish, eggs, limited or no dairy, fresh veggies and berries and fruits in season. Before machinery, what do you think humans ate? Exactly those things. For tens of thousands of years. Even longer if you count pre-homo sapiens.

Jennifer

Exactly. Also, most 'vitamin supplements' are just artificial compounds that some scientists believe are the equivlalent to their natural counterpart. This article on Vitamin C does a good job explaining this.

[fatburner]

Originally Posted by Jennihul

...
Most deficiencies we face today as modern humans comes from modern food inventions, not natural eating habits. Atkins or low carb is actually closest to the ideal diet for most of the humans on this planet. Fresh meats, fish, eggs, limited or no dairy, fresh veggies and berries and fruits in season. Before machinery, what do you think humans ate? Exactly those things. For tens of thousands of years. Even longer if you count pre-homo sapiens.

Jennifer

I'm not sure why you would use mans past eating habits to determine what the optimum diet would be. Are there records about what health problems people had thousands of years ago? The main health problem people seemed to have in the past was DYING young. If you only live to 30 years old you have a greatly reduced chance of obesity, cancer, heart disease etc. However the idea of an atkins style diet with all of the consumed carbs coming from fruit and veges does sound reasonable.

Thanks for the vitamin c link Wandering Oak, I've never really found taking vitamin supplements to have the same benefits as eating fruit and that article goes some way towards explaining why.

[escapee]

I'm not sure why you would use mans past eating habits to determine what the optimum diet would be. The main health problem people seemed to have in the past was DYING young. If you only live to 30 years old you have a greatly reduced chance of obesity, cancer, heart disease etc.

The shorter life expectancy for ppl of the past was due to to poor sanitation. It's not surprising that sanitation was voted the most important medical advance since 1840. Instead of dying of Malaria and other bacteria based disease, modern men will find different reasons to die ( Cancer, diabetes and heart disease) albeit at older age ( sometimes a lot younger ).

Did Coca cola just achieve a record sales ?

[Keith]

Originally Posted by escapee

The shorter life expectancy for ppl of the past was due to to poor sanitation.

Poor sanitation was definitely a major contributor to the lower lifespan in mediaeval times. However, it was hardly the only one.

And then there's quality of life. The human body is very resilient - it can survive on very little. Heck, lots of people survive eating the Standard American Diet, ingesting lots of alcohol and doing basically zero exercise. But surviving is a far cry from getting all that you need to live a life of high quality

[escapee]

Speaking of Alcohol, I just love how the popular press promotes the moderate use of alcohol to reduce the risk of heart disease but they will ignore the facts that even moderate alcohol consumption increases the risk of contracting various kind of cancers.

"The findings from this prospective study suggest that moderate alcohol consumption increases breast cancer risk."[29]

Alcohol consumption has been shown to increase the rate of breast cancer in women.[27]

Alcohol consumption and breast cancer risk in the ...[Am J Epidemiol. 2007] - PubMed Result

A study showed that one or two alcoholic drinks a day increases the risk of breast cancer by 10 per cent compared with light drinkers who drank less than one drink a day. Women who have three or more drinks a day increase their risk of breast cancer by 30 per cent. The type of drink was not a factor.[30] "A typical 50-year-old woman has a five-year breast cancer risk of about 3 percent. If her risk jumps by 30 percent, her individual risk is still only about 4 percent."[31]

Sometimes not reading anything at all is better than reading newspaper.

[Jennihul]

Poor sanitation and trauma.

I'm not talking about medieval man, even at that stage of the game they were already screwed by the invention of agriculture.

I'm talking about Cro-magnan and pre-agriculture.

Remember, their DNA is our DNA. That they surived and even thrived is not a fluke. The earth provides perfect food for the creatures that evolved OF that earth. It cannot be any other way.

The badness began when our brains got the better of us.

Jennifer