The main premise of the Aktins diet is to limit carbohydrayte consumption in order to lose weight and prevent and/or reverse degenerative dissease such as hypertentsion type 2 diabtees etc. This type of diet has been proven to do just that however there are draw backs to it like you say: the consumption of PUFAs,  no mention of the effects of over cooked animal fats, no mention of the type of saturated fats that can oxidize quikly such as tallow. In the short run the diet can be dangerous for the fact that if one rushes to restrict carbs, the body will produce a stess response because the body is not used to running on only ketones and free fatty acids (FFAs) for fuel. This is also the reason why people quit the diet too early because they don't allow their body to make the adaptation so that they produce the enzmes necessary to metabolize fat exclusively.

 

Over the long haul I believe that this type of diet is the healthiest anyone can consume by far as long as you make some modifications. The first modification I would make would be to cut out all PUFAs from fish and vegtable oils as recomended by this web site. The second modification I would make would be to only sear the meat you eat to reduce oxidation of iron and cholesterol + reduce the amount of toxins present from burnt food. The third modification I would make is to reduce the carbohydration level slowly so that your body adapts and there is no stress response. In Life Without Bread by Wolfegang Lutz, the author talks about this and I believe it is a better verion of the low carb diet and provides studies and pictures to show the positive effects. I personally eat meat rare as I can and sometimes even raw. There are many health benifits to this but I would not do this if your body is filled with toxins or AA for the fact that the bacteria present in raw meat will make you sick. However it is not the bacteria that makes you sick. These parasites and bacteria have a symbiotic relationship with us and they only make us sick if there are enough toxins in our body for them to overgrow. You can find more info about raw meat diets on the web just google it. There is even a yahoo forum that talks alot about this so I will not discuss it any further.

 

Another thing I would like to mention is that the body's primary fuel source is fat. We are meant to burn fat and we burn more fat a rest than carbohydrate wheather we are "fat adapted" or not. I could provide a plethora of other benifits of the low carb lifestyyle but I am running out of time. http://forum.lowcarber.org has alot of useful information about this topic and has tens of thousands of memebers that can show the health benifits of low carbing.

 

So to say that the Aktins diet is dangerous is not necessarily right or wrong. I think that you have to stick with the low carb foundation and then modify it so that it is helathy.

On the other side of the coin are the old experiments that found that animals lived fine with no fat in their diets, with cancer being just about nonexistant.  Several years ago my diet was very low in fat, and I found that my meals were not very satisfying, in terms of keeping hunger away for very long, though other factors could have been involved, of course.  However, fat and protein are generally considered to be much more satiating than carbohydrates.  I would also point out not to fall into the trap of the nutritional establishment, which is to classify food as fats, carbohyrates, and proteins.  Hardly anyone eats a meal with just one of these "items," and since fat sources, for example, can have very different biochemical and physiological effects (compare refined safflower oil to coconut oil, for instance), my argument is to think in terms of specific kinds of diets (ones that people will actually consider eating), including what cooking methods are used, whether your dairy products have additives such as carrageenan (as well as whether they are homogenized), etc.  Some peoples have lived well, in terms of health and longevity, on "low fat," "high carb" diets, but again, I prefer to just think in terms of the practical in this context.  Telling people to avoid "carbs" except in very small amounts in not likely to work, especially when they are avoiding all major sources of unsaturated fatty acids and oxidized cholesterol.  "Carbs," in general, are just not dangerous enough to worry too much about, except if you ate huge amounts of a problematic food, such as those with anti-nutritive qualities.  I have been eating much less bread recently (that I make myself) and I've been substituting things like bananas.  Since I only consume small amounts of gelatin (and no "meat" otherwise), I'm personally not concerned about cooking meat, though I find it interesting scientifically, and I know others want to know about it, because they do eat meat.

First I would like to correct something I said in the prior message. I wrote, "saturated fats that can oxidize quikly such as tallow." I meant to say lard because it is lard that oxidizes quickly from its PUF content. Tallow is very low in PUFAs.

 

You said earlier that old experiments that found that animals lived fine with no fat in their diets, with cancer being just about nonexistant. Can you provide a link to this study. What kind of animals are you talking about? Carnivorous? Herbavors? What does this have to do with humans? We cannot live healthy without fats in our diet. This has already been proven and I'm sure I could dig up some references to prove my point on this if you woud like.

 

 I don't think I told anyone to completely avoid carbs. This would be impratical. I just said to limit them because not only does glucose oxidize in the body faster than fats do, but they cause a concatination of other problems as well. They disrupt the endocrine system by putting the body through blood sugar highs and lows as well as contribute to many other health problems. Here is a pretty good site you may want to look at that compares the physiology of humans to other animals to prove that we are mostly carnivorous beings.

 

Here are some links to eating raw meat that you may find interesting.

 

Steve:

 

I was just commenting mostly in general, and I know that the "strict" Atkins types want carb consumption to be very low, at least at the beginning.  There is the 1948 study of rats that were fed no fat, but you can ask Ray Peat for better references, since they are not on pubmed.com (if they are, there is no abstract for most of the old studies).  There is also something called the Soil and Health Library, if I remember correctly.  They have some of the texts of the old animal diet studies available (some were done on rats and dogs, at least).  Fatty acids do fuel cancer, that is undeniable, at least in cancers that have been studied in this context, so consider what a fat free diet means.  Your body would make the minimal amount of fatty acids, starting with palmitic acid, which is an SFA (and acts to prevent cancer in normal physiological contexts), then a smaller number of oleic acid, then an even smaller number of the Mead acid, which is an omega 9 PUFA, and is very stable, compared to Arachidonic acid, for instance.  What is going to fuel the cancer in this scenario?  This is what I mean by things being known down to the molecular level. 

 

There are two major problems: lipid peroxidationk, which does not occur with SFAs, and stressors releasing AA, which then gets metabolized into molecules like LTB4, which are "cancer fuel," as so many studies have demonstrated.  If you avoid lipid peroxidation (by eating no or trace amounts of fatty acids, and having a diet with some antioxidants and nothing that acts as an oxidizing agent otherwise), then you only have to worry about Mead acid metabolites being a problem, and they are very stable.  Of course, there are also environmental carcinogens and other non-dietary carcinogens, but I'm assuming they are absent.