Atkins Diet: Metabolic or Not?

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the effects of a high fat/low-carbohydrate diet such as Atkins, on body weight and composition. This paper compares such a high fat diet to the effects of a calorie-reduced, fat-restricted diet in an attempt to answer the question of whether weight loss occurs because of a metabolic advantage. Metabolic advantage means that the body begins to use fat as energy due to a lowered carbohydrate intake.

From the Paper:

"One possible reason that the subjects in the Pogliaghi and Veicsteinas (1999) study did not appear to benefit from a low-carbohydrate/high fat diet might be that they have not been participating in endurance training. As an individual exercises, the resulting muscle contractions are done using ATP. How the body creates and uses this ATP is dependant upon the amount of the energy sources available, and the intensity and duration of the exercise. In all individuals, even those who are non-obese, glycogen is generally used for ATP and thus, during moderate exercise, the body creates ATP from available glycogen. As the intensity of exercise is increased, oxygen levels in the body decrease, which makes the creation of ATP difficult. The body, at this point, will begin to burn fat to substitute for this lack of ability. Since prolonged endurance training has the affect of conditioning the muscles to "crossover" to burn glycogen after longer time duration, trained individuals will burn more fat and less glycogen than untrained individuals will. This might explain why the study done by Pogliaghi and Veicsteinas (1999) yielded such results as it did, since the individuals in the study were not trained athletes."

More papers on Atkins Diet: Metabolic or Not?:

• Essay # 74031 : "Atkins Diet"
• Essay # 84933 : "The Atkins Diet"
• Essay # 55716 : "The Atkins Diet"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: