Low Carb Diets Impact On Cancer Mortality And Diabetes

but if we look at low-carb diets and cancer mortality there was a 2018 study that reported that people who ate the most low-carb diets had or the the lowest carb diets had a 35% increased risk of dying of cancer compared to people eating the most carbohydrates and cancer rates are lowest in people eating plant-based as we talked about yesterday so and diabetes the evidence is that there’s some short term benefits with keto diets weight loss improved glucose control reduced a1c lower triglycerides fewer medications but the downside is this keto diets do not reverse insulin resistance so if you have you’re on a keto diet you get reductions in glucose and weight and all of that and it looks like your insulin resistance is reduced so you have a load of carbohydrate the load of carbohydrate you get this huge spike in glucose because you remain so insulin resistant long term there are no long-term studies using keto to treat diabetes in humans but we have a lot of low carb studies and they consistently show favorable short-term less favorable long-term results we have a systematic review of studies that are over 12 weeks in length and there were really no differences in weight loss or a1cs with with the longer term treatment but there are a number of red flags and unfortunately we don’t have long term studies in humans or they’re quite rare we have very few of them but but the red flags are that we found that ketogenic diets are associated with fatty liver systemic glucose intolerance insulin resistance insufficient insulin secretion reduced beta and alpha cell mass dis Lippe Mia and inflammation and as I mentioned although human studies are fairly limited and the contrary evidence is for athletic performance heart disease and longevity and for athletic performance the claims are big that it will improve your athletic performance but we only have about seven studies they were done between 2014 and 2018 and between five and forty two participants each so they’re pretty small duration about four days to ten weeks and despite consistent fat loss in the athletes most studies reported reduced performance not better performance and you can just see the summary here this first 2018 study reduced performance lower peak performance lower mean power less recovery this one didn’t find any change from 2018 and then reduced performance reduced reduced this one showed improved performance this one showed a little bit of both improved with moderate intensity but worsened with high intensity and the bottom line I think really is is that these diets fail because carbohydrates require less oxygen to power muscles than fats the faster you move the more carbohydrates muscles burn and so when you’re working at high speed and high intensity you can’t exercise as fast when because your energy needs or your oxygen needs are increased and you need the carbohydrates for that