Every type of diet has its good points and bad points, this includes the controversies surrounding them. The choice of which diet is correct for the lifestyle and for the type of health condition including diseases.
Water-related weight loss
In the first week or two of a low-carbohydrate diet a huge deal of the weight loss comes from eliminating water retained in the body.
Vegetables and fruits
Many critics fight that low-carbohydrate diets inherently require minimizing vegetable and fruit consumption which in turn robs the body of important nutrients.
Micronutrients and vitamins
The main low-carbohydrate diet guide generally suggests multi-vitamin and mineral supplements as part of the diet regimen which may lead some to believe that these diets are nutritionally deficient.
Other controversies
In 2004, the Canadian government ruled that food sell in Canada could not be marketed with reduced or eliminated carbohydrate content as a selling point because reduced carbohydrate content was not determined to be a health benefit, and that existing “low carb” and “no carb” packaging would have to be phased out by 2006.
Calorie restriction
Calorie restriction, or caloric restriction (CR), is a nutritional regimen that restricts calorie intake, where the baseline for the restriction varies, usually being the previous, unrestricted, and intake of the subjects. CR when not connected with malnutrition is thought to improve age-related health and to slow the aging process in some animals and fungi. CR is one of the few dietary intervention that has been recognized to increase both the median and maximum lifespan in a variety of species, among them yeast, fish, rodents and dogs.
There are currently continuing studies on primates to show if CR works on primates, and even though they are showing positive indications it is still not certain that CR has a positive effect on longevity for primates, including humans, due to the very lengthy time required for the completion of such lifespan studies |