Are High Protein Diets Healthy?
A study released in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that diets lower in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat are not associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, and when vegetable sources of fat and protein are chosen, these diets may even moderately reduce the risk.
All in all, this is a pretty useless study from the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health. Anyone with any understanding of diet and nutrition knows (and has known for years) that the problem with high protein diets is not heart disease. It’s things like:
- Intestinal Disease
- Liver and Kidney Problems
- Cancer
- Lowered Immunity
- Osteoporosis
This is not secret information. I wrote a series of newsletters on this several years ago.
And the truly sad thing is, this same study could have tracked the real dangers of low carb/high protein diets at the same time that they were tracking heart disease and at no additional cost (it was all done with surveys that could just have added the appropriate questions) — and actually produced some useful data. What a waste!
Common – we know that indigenous people ate all the animal and saturated fats they could get their hands on, and often lots of animal protein as well, and they never had problems with heart disease. Granted you do make a distinction between different qualities of meats (one that I agree with), but how do you come to the conclusion that minimizing intake of meats from healthy animals is beneficial?
Hi Frederik,
Actually, they
Hi Frederik,
Actually, they did have problems with heart disease: http://www.jonbarron.org/natural-health/tyrolean-iceman-common-health-problems-paleo-diet
However, read the newsletters that Jon links to in the article for a better understanding of some of the concerns, which is not so much about heart disease, and what he recommends when you do eat meat.
Frederik, did you ever get an
Frederik, did you ever get an answer?