Let me ask you a question – would you rather live a healthy life for 79 years by restricting what you eat, or would you rather eat more of what you’re told not to and live to be 82?

A number of popular diets have people reducing the amount of carbs (I choose to say BAD carbs as opposed to GOOD carbs). Depending upon what diet you are on, you will replace those bad carbs with either good carbs, or protein or fat or combinations of the three.

Sound familiar?

At the moment, the keto diet is very popular. It’s based on replacing the bad carbs with more protein and fat. The protein includes red meats as well as fish, poultry and plant-based protein. Some diets have people eating mostly meat with only a few veggies or fruit.

Many of these diets, including the keto diet, claim to not only help a person lose weight, but they boast of reducing the chance of cardiovascular disease, strokes and diabetes.

I tried a higher protein diet a couple years ago and began having a lot of kidney pain. I learned that high protein diets can be very hard on the kidneys. I found that the only way to reduce the kidney pain was to take a supplement (chromium picolinate 800mg) and reduce the amount of protein I was eating.

With so many low carb, high protein/fat diets there are out there, are they really doing you good?

According to this report:

“A team from Harvard University and the University of Minnesota decided to look at observational data from the large Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study.”

“The results, published in August in the Lancet Public Health, finds a potential danger in low-carb diets. Based on carb intake alone, researchers estimated that a 50-year-old participant who eats less than 30 percent carbs will live to be 79.1 years old, compared with 82 years for someone eating more than 65 percent carbs.”

“This dovetails with new research presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in August. Researchers from the Medical University of Lodz in Poland looked at data from 24,825 participants in the U.S. National Health and Examination Survey collected from 1999 to 2010.”

“Those with the lowest carb intake had a 32 percent higher risk of dying overall compared with participants who ate the most carbs. When the authors looked specifically at deaths from heart disease or stroke, the risk was 50 percent higher.”

The results of the study prompted lead author Maciej Banach to suggest that the low-carb diets may  have short-term usefulness, they may pose more long-term risks.

Of all of the diets that I have tried over the years I found that eating a diet 60% GOOD carbs, 30% protein and 10% fat, along with limiting the total number of calories per day along with exercise proved to be the healthiest way to lose weight, reduce blood glucose levels, reduce triglyceride levels and reduce high blood pressure, all of which have positive health benefits. However, it does take personal discipline and works best when you have the support of those you live with and others to help keep you accountable.