Monday, July 19, 2004
Fatty McAtkins
With all the furor going around about the Atkins Diet, which may or may not be more effective than 'traditional' low-fat diets (or even effective at all), but is almost certainly rough on your kidneys, it's nice to have some science.
A group of French researchers did a long-term study of high-protein diets in Wistar rats, which are prone to obesity. They found no ill-effects of the diet, even to the kidneys, and even found improvements in triglyceride, leptin, and insulin levels, as well as glucose tolerance.
However. I'm not sure how good these data are...there doesn’t seem to have been a proper control group. A no-protein diet is going is going to compare to a high-protein one very differently than a regular, mid-protein one. That said, I'd expect the differences to be really big. I look forward to more of these studies.
