Hello everyone and thanks for tuning in to the Nutrition Diva podcast today. I'm your host

Monica Reinagle and this is episode number 700 and a lot has changed in the world of food

and nutrition in the 15 years that I've now been doing this podcast. But a lot hasn't.

Diet trends come and go but the low carb approach has proven to have a lot of staying power

from Appkins to South Beach to the now trending ketogenic diet, low-carp diets,

promote quick weight loss by strictly limiting your intake of foods containing carbohydrates.

And this includes foods that otherwise contribute a lot of largely empty calories to the diet,

things like sweetened beverages, baked goods, candy and desserts. But it also limits your intake

of a lot of healthful nutritious foods, things like legumes, whole grains,

starchy vegetables and fruit. Very low carbohydrate diets tend to suppress the appetite,

which obviously makes it easier to cut calories, leading to weight loss. And a low-carb diet also

initially leads to significant loss of water weight. Now this is obviously not fat loss and it

isn't the sort of weight loss that improves your health, but the rapid change in body weight at

the beginning of a low-carb diet definitely gives dieters a sense of accomplishment.

The problem is that if and when dieters resume eating carbohydrate containing foods,

both the water and some of the weight tend to come right back on. So unless you're willing to eat

low carb for the rest of your life, the weight loss is likely to be unsustainable.

Now another criticism of the low-carb diet is that it can be quite low in fiber. Now back

in the 1970s when Robert Atkins first popularized low-carb dieting, the microbiome was not a thing.

Although low-carb dieters often complained of constipation, we weren't particularly worried

about the effects of a low-fiber diet on our gut microbes. Now of course we are much more

aware of the many roles that these microbes play in our health, everything from regulating

...