Low Carb Diet Side Effects: How to deal with them

Salt and fat are very important on a low carb diet.

If you've being doing low carb for a while, you may have heard of people saying that they had a "bad reaction", or suffered "side effects" on the diet. One of the most obnoxious side effects constantly stated is that you'll get bad breath. The press likes this one, as if bad breath was the worst thing that you could have happen to you. Personally, I never had a problem with this, nor did any of my family members who went low carb. Maybe we were just lucky? Anyway, the side effects people encounter are probably from them either not getting enough fat, from not getting enough salt, or from going on and off the diet regularly (see my post about how your body makes enzymes and hormones based on what you've eaten recently). Or maybe a combination of all of that. So, what to do about these unpleasant "side effects"?

First and foremost, throw your fear of fat out the window. You don't want a lot of protein. You want fat, mostly saturated animal fat. It's best to avoid synthetic, man-made vegetable fat. Eating a low-carb, low-fat, high protein diet will make you sick. They call it "rabbit starvation" because rabbits are such lean meat, you'll die if that's all you have to eat.

Some things that can happen while on a low carb diet are tachycardia (racing heart). What can cause this? Low blood pressure. Eating a low carb diet lowers your blood pressure, and if you have low blood pressure already, you know that you sometimes get a fast heart beat. The mum-in-law has low blood pressure, and she sometimes gets a racing heart. She says that it's because your heart needs to get that blood pumped around your body somehow, even if it has to beat faster to do it. It's usually nothing to worry about, although I would suggest seeing a doctor just to be sure.** Something that may help this, is to increase your salt intake. Salt intake does raise your blood pressure slightly (between 1 and 6 mg/Hg) and it may be enough to avoid the side effect of low blood pressure. In fact, increasing your salt intake on the low carb diet, especially in the beginning, can prevent you from losing too much salt from losing too much water. You retain water when you eat carbohydrates (chemically speaking, water is required for their metabolism, and they're made of water, hence the 'hydrate' part). That leads to the point that if you eat a high carbohydrate meal once or twice a week, you will gain water weight, sometimes crazily so. This is not because you've eaten too much per se, it's because you're retaining water. It can take a week or two of eating low carb again to lose the water weight.

Another cause of low blood pressure may be if you're on medication for your high blood pressure, and you go on a low carb diet, well, you may need to have your doctor adjust your blood pressure medicine down to compensate.

I personally (and I know this is anecdotal) do so much better on a low carb diet when it comes to my heart. I have a hard time getting enough potassium when I eat the standard American diet, and I once wound up in the emergency room with sinus arrhythmia, my heart was stopping momentarily, literally skipping beats. Needless to say, it scared the hell out of me. The doctors told me that my potassium was low. I don't get sinus arrhythmia on the low carb diet. Probably because red meat is a great source of potassium. I also noticed that my heart doesn't beat as "hard" as it used to when I would lay down to go to sleep. I used to be able to feel it beating loudly, and it doesn't make so much noise any more. My pulse is normal, it just seems like it's working more efficiently or something. And again, this is all anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt (pun intended).

**Please note, that if you are having problems, especially to do with your heart, see a doctor. Have blood tests, get hooked up to an EKG and make sure you don't have an underlying medical condition.

The Usual Fare: How your body adapts to what you're eating

After reading some of the comments on the news articles I read for what I wrote last night, about how McDonald's made the commenters sick, I got to thinking about it and the mum-in-law pointed out that most of them probably are vegetarian and perhaps ate it in a pinch, and then did get sick because their bodies did not have enough of the enzyme to digest the meat. It had nothing to do with the fact that it was McDonald's. If they'd eaten at Austin Land and Cattle, they'd have had the same response, and I don't think a $42 steak should make you sick. Unless your body just isn't used to eating meat.

Your body responds to what you usually eat by making enzymes (like protease) and hormones (like insulin) to deal with your daily food intake. This goes for all food components, fat, carbohydrates and protein. I personally don't eat very many carbs, usually. I still need to lose about twenty pounds, so I'm going to keep on the very low carb band wagon until I lose all the weight. Now, yesterday, if you read my post about what we ate for lunch, you'll know that we all felt like crap afterwards. This is because your insulin production is based on what you ate for the last meal and maybe overall on what you ate in the last day or two. If you do very low carb and want to eat sugar again, just like with a vegetarian who hasn't eaten meat in a while, you have to go gradually off of it. If you are vegetarian and decide that you're going to eat meat again, and you eat a double Whopper, you're probably going to be sick. And it isn't because of the food itself. The same happens if you're a low carber. Say for instance, you go to France on holiday and you eat half a dozen pain au chocolat, you're going to be sick. I suggest ramping up for that LOL

According to Lippincott's Illustrated biochemistry text, the things that stimulate insulin synthesis (production) are glucose, amino acids, and gastrointestinal hormones, and it says that "the synthesis and release of insulin are decreased when there is a scarcity of dietary fuels [i.e. carbohydrates]..." p.310

In other words, if you don't eat carbohydrates, your body isn't making very much insulin. Why would it? That would be inefficient. Luckily the body is highly adaptable, and in the case of former vegetarians will go back to making the enzymes for digesting meat in a couple of days. Same for the low carb folks. Fall off the wagon, and your body will start making insulin again. If we weren't so adaptable, you wouldn't be sitting here reading this because your ancestors wouldn't have lived.


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And a little tangential thing I read today while I was researching the above, for your amusement. It's about the stupidest thing I've ever read actually. From a study,

Protein dietary reference intakes may be inadequate for vegetarians if low amounts of animal protein are consumed:

"The health benefits of vegetarian diets are well-recognized; however, long-term adherence to these diets may be associated with nutrient inadequacies, particularly vitamins B12 and D, calcium, irno, zinc and protein...

Results and Discussion...

Furthermore, two food groups (nuts/seeds and fruits/vegetables) contributed to nearly 20% of dietary protein, sources not recognized by the DRI report. These are important distinctions because protein from cereals and vegetables (particularly if these foods are less refined) has poor digestibility. Traditional vegetarian diets (e.g., Indian and Guatemalan vegetarian diets) with low amounts of animal proteins and large proportions of cereal and vegetable protein have protein digestibility scores averaging 70% (range 54–77%) compared with plant-based diets with a large proportion of animal protein (mean 88%, range 78–93%)..."

Now you tell me how a diet is simultaneously healthy and yet long-term adherence causes deficiencies. And not only that, in the results of this paper, they even say that plant protein is not as digestible as animal protein. The prior is codswallop if I ever read it and the latter should really have some vegans and vegetarians raising an eyebrow about what they've been fed (hint: lies). Someone has an agenda, and it ain't in the interest of your health. If I eat meat only, as Stefansson (and the Inuit) did, no supplements are required. Chew on that.

Grocery Run

I've made it a habit whenever we go to the store now to watch what other people are buying who are in line next to me, just out of curiosity. Today there was a lady in front of us, she had no meat or protein that I could see, except for two cartons of eggs. What she did have, was two loaves of white bread, macaroni and cheese, white spaghetti noodles, among a bunch of other carb laden merchandise. She spent about $200 (that's what the mum-in-law said), I didn't see the total. I could buy a lot of meat for that, and be much more satiated than after eating all that junk. She was overweight, but not terribly so, of course, she would probably be considered obese by the BMI standard.

Behind us was a family, mother, father, and three school age kids, a boy and two girls. They appeared to be a normal weight, although they were talking about sports the kids played, so I'm assuming they are not genetically predisposed to insulin resistance and because they're lean, they play sports and burn the carbs off before they do damage. I believe it was Taubes who said in Good Calories, Bad Calories, that athletes are not thin because they're athletes, they're athletes because they're thin. For some that works well, others, it eventually stops working, which is why many people who are thin when they are young are not when they get past 40. They too had no meat or protein that I could see, except for a box of flax seed meal. They had multiple boxes of granola bars (which in my opinion are nothing more than sugar laden junk food most of the time), pop tarts, frozen bread thingies with cheese on them, snack cups of fruit, along with some other frozen pizzas and other frozen carb junk.

What did we buy? Besides some broccoli (we're making Chicken Divan again tonight, it's delish!), we bought a bunch of marked down chicken livers and ground beef, for our dogs. We decided that we have too many dogs, eight at the moment, so that we can't afford to feed them entirely meat all the time, but we decided we could supplement their dog food. Before you freak out and wonder how or why we have so many, we live in the country and seem to have a knack for accumulating unwanted and dumped dogs. The last dog we got, dug into our fence during a storm. We put up fliers and no one claimed him. We figured he was dumped and decided to keep him since he chose us LOL. One of the dogs is actually mine, the other seven are my in-laws'. My dog was also dumped, we found him at a filling station, curled up in a little ball on the pavement. People had been feeding him hot dogs, he was malnourished, and absolutely covered in fleas. He also had a hurt back. He's completely better now, after being on Previcox for some months, we were able to take him off of it, and his back seems completely better. I don't understand how people can just throw a dog away like it's nothing. But whatever, their loss is our gain.

Anyway, we currently feed them the Costco brand, which isn't terrible, since the first ingredient is chicken, but it still doesn't have enough meat in it I think. The third ingredient is rice. I'm sorry, but the ancestors of dogs, living in the paleolithic probably didn't eat much in the way of rice. They may have eaten some grains from the intestines of the animals they ate, but probably not much. On that note, hubby and I were talking about it, and we wondered if that wasn't how people came to invent bread (and subsequently settle down to get their fix of it). It's possible I suppose, that if ancient people roasted intact, the stomach of big game animals that they may have gotten something the consistency of bread if the animal were eating grains.