THE FAT BLOCKER DIET: “FAD-DIETITIS.”
Perhaps worst of all, bad diets can make you sick. In the 1970s, many of the young nurses I knew became ill after going on the liquid protein diets. And I could always count on having one or two patients in the intensive care or the coronary care unit with cardiac arrhythmias due to the use of liquid protein diets and / or diuretics. People also came to the hospital with head injuries sustained when they passed out while on semistarvation diets. It became a routine thing to see patients with heart problems caused by fad diet-induced potassium or magnesium loss, and I saw numerous cases of colitis and diarrhea caused by what we doctors referred to as “fad-dietitis.”
At that time, some of my colleagues asked me to examine their secretaries in an effort to discover why they seemed to be constantly fatigued. One surgeon said, “Find out why she keeps walking into doors.” The culprit was usually a diet-related metabolic disorder. Some of them were eating nothing but rice or another single food for days and weeks at a time. Now, rice is a perfectly good food, but it does not contain all the nutrients and other substances that we need to thrive. I was actually astonished to see cases of beri-beri, replete with heart failure secondary to nutritional deficits, among the rice-only dieters. (Beri-beri, caused by a lack of vitamin B1, had been all but eradicated in this country. It took fad diets to bring it back.) Another secretary told me that her new wonder diet consisted of nothing but carrots and enemas! It’s no wonder these women became ill.
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