For the record, I've given up on the CIH, and I think that my (rather dramatic) experience losing weight with an LC diet back in the early '90s was due to much lowered calorie intake because of lowered palatability and food reward. Some time ago, I added boring safe starches back into my diet (utterly necessary after re-starting Crossfit), and I'm pretty confident that the universe hasn't imploded.
OK. (Indeed, _OK!_)
In the meantime, out there in the Twitterings and RSS feeds I continue to notice writings and tidbits about other benefits of LC diets having nothing to do with weight loss or weight control. I've already touched on my pet LC topics here on PH: neuroprotection and longevity.
Recently Robb Wolf tweeted a link to a meta-study entitled Is there a role for carbohydrate restriction in the treatment and prevention of cancer? It's a pretty good read -- among other things, outlining how (pre-)cancerous cells have a different metabolism than non-cancerous cells, and ways that an LC diet could be effective in treatment or prevention. (At the very least you should skip down to the conclusions). So now I've got another pet LC topic.
All this is confusing me to no end. Leaving obesity out of the equation, there seems to be much evidence suggesting that LC diets have some benefit. There's also compelling evidence that suggests that LC diets don't in-an-of-themselves confer such benefits.
I'm not going back to an LC diet any time soon, but this is vexing me. Do you think that an LC diet could confer any benefit with regard to neuroprotection, longevity, and/or cancer? Could this be another case of "the opposite of the cure is not the cause?"
