“Most of the people I know who have caused serious damage to their health and in many cases actually died were those who went overboard on Atkins style diets.”
Thanks for the warning, at least you do sound credible here. A few months back, on a similar thread, there was a food industry lobbyist trying to convince us that trans-fats and sugar were actually good for us. LOL. We all got a kick out it.
I do think the problem with Atkins, at least early on, was that the dangers to our kidneys of protein-loading was not well understood, and since Atkins was considered a nutcase, no one bothered to try to better understand it. If you do go back the 20+ years to Atkins, you’ll find a mindset where eggs, butter, and fatty red meat was still considered poison - so people, even on Atkins would try to minimize those, and end up on lean meat, poultry, and fish - all very high in their protein to fat ratio. So, yes, they were putting their kidneys in danger. As we’ve been saying on these threads, if you do go low-carb, you still don’t get a free pass regarding what you do eat, you still have to keep the protein levels down - which means keeping the fat levels up.
So, as to the risks, now that much more is understood, we’re keeping an open mind and waiting for some real evidence that people who properly adhere to the Low-Carb Keto lifestyle are actually putting themselves at risk. So far, no one on ping list has said anything about having that issue...so we’ll see, nor have we found anything beyond hand-waving regarding the risks. They may be out there, but we’re waiting, for now.
One other thing to keep in mind is that life is full of trade-offs. I know of one person on my list who was near suicide because of what the doctor-prescribed drugs were doing to him. He went on Keto, got off the drugs, and is doing much, much, better. Others trade off looking at a certain life of diabetic complications, versus the still un-quantified risk of kidney issues. It’s really up to the medical community to take these people seriously and come up with useful data, because these people are NOT going away otherwise - particularly if they’re looking at a future of nothing but suffering due to diabetes.
There have been a large number of people who have replaced processed junk carb food with processed junk protein food in the past twenty years. But I am going to take a wild guess that you might not consider those people to be true adherents to the “Low-Carb Keto lifestyle”. And I must admit that I love to eat a high protein Costco or Atkins food/candy bar as much as the next person. I just do not believe that they are much more healthy for you than a better tasting jumbo sized Reese's peanut butter cup, or an ice cream cone.
There are quite a few documented risks to the “Keto diet”, I do not know whether or not you feel those risks apply to you or the others here. My wife is a nurse who taught nutrition for quite a few years and I responded to medical calls for about 25 years mostly to people who had made poor lifestyle choices. But the people who I observed the most closely were my friends and coworkers. And my conclusion from living and working them were that the Atkins/Keto diet, whatever you want to call it did not work out well in the long term. And the ones who seemed to believe in it the most and went with it the longest were the ones who generally suffered the worst consequences to their health.
Usually they did lose some weight in the short term, but in the long term they typically gained it all back and more. I am talking about people that I knew for decades... I do not know anyone who it really worked out for over a year or two. And as I said before I know a few who kept it up even after their doctors told them they were going to die if they didn't straighten out their diets. They chose to believe the diet guru books instead of their doctors and nutritionists and they sometimes paid the price.
Unfortunately, the amount of true understanding of what constitutes good and bad diet choices has not increased as greatly in the past 20 years as you seem to believe. And the number of people making very bad choices seems to be increasing in this age of increased information. This is because people believe what they want to believe and the more access that they have to information... they typically just use that access to reinforce whatever it is that they want to believe.