;Resize=(1200,627)&hash=badd1b674ee7f359c0727a0dc087259d87464d257e125ef50f7e8d2f6c557424 "Popular for losing weight: the consequences of crash diets for the heart and kidneys")
Crash diets bring rapid weight loss success. But they also have their downsides. In addition to the notorious yo-yo effect and the severely taxed psyche, American researchers found that vital organs also suffer from the drastic calorie deprivation.
If you decide to lose excess pounds, you usually want to do so as soon as possible. Logically, success spurs on.
But an extreme diet is a great burden for the body. The fact that he can’t cope with the reduced food intake is often reflected in a yo-yo effect: after rapid weight loss, the scales suddenly hit a lot more again.
And that’s not the only thing that drastic dietary changes are doing to us. A new study indicates that a crash diet can also cause heart and kidney problems.
That’s how dangerous long-term diets are
While most studies are based only on short-term dieting, researchers at Georgetown University in Washington are getting to the bottom of the problem of long-term dieting.
To find out more, they divided 16 rats into two different groups. The first group was regularly supplied with the same calorie intake. The second group, on the other hand, was put on a strict diet three times, in which they were fed only 40 percent of the total calories. At the end of the study, the rodents underwent a heart and kidney check using ultrasound and blood tests.
Extreme diets damage rat organs
The worrying thing is that the values of the animals, which were put on a diet several times, showed a sharp deterioration after the experiment. The heart as well as the kidney function decreased. And even insulin resistance increased, which can be a sign of diabetes. Even if you don’t look at the rats from the outside, the extreme starvation diets severely attacked their metabolism and heart.
Although the study cannot be transferred 1:1 to humans, it does provide important information. The researchers from Washington are now examining the extent to which crash diets also attack our organs in follow-up studies.