MIT researchers attack Atkins diet with distorted claims about carbohydrates and mood

Tuesday, April 20, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: low-carb diet, Atkins diet, dietary carbohydrates

The attacks on Atkins continue: this time, with claims that the Atkins diet can put you in a bad mood. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has issued statements about the link between dietary carbohydrates and serotonin (a brain chemical responsible for regulating mood, among other things). It is absolutely true that the consumption of carbohydrates raises levels of serotonin in the brain, but this is precisely why the Atkins diet is so important: too many people are literally "addicted" to carbohydrates due to these mood altering effects. They automatically reach for sugar and white flour when they need a mood fix. They eat carbs in the same way that a crack addict takes another hit. When a person chooses food for its psychoactive effects, that's the basis for an addiction.

The Atkins diet gets people off the carbohydrate addiction and allows their brain to function normally, without diet-induced chemical swings. Does this cause people to be in a bad mood? At first, yes. Just like quitting cigarettes or kicking the coffee habit makes people irritable, too. Any time you kick a drug habit, you're going to feel a little crabby, and dietary carbohydrates are often little more than an indirect chemical addiction.

So for MIT to claim that the Atkins diet initially puts people in a bad mood is hardly a revelation. You could say that kicking heroin puts you in a bad mood, too. But really, if the Atkins diet helps you lose body fat, isn't that going to put you in a good mood eventually? In fact, it is being overweight that makes so many people depressed to begin with. If they can shed those pounds (and a low-carb diet definitely helps people shed pounds), you're going to be much happier, even without carbohydrates.

The bottom line? The sort of press reports you see in the article below are nothing but an ongoing smear campaign against the Atkins diet. Furthermore, these statements from MIT researchers are nothing but conjecture: there were no studies conducted to reach any conclusion like "the Atkins diet puts you in a bad mood." If anything, studies have shown that people who control their carbohydrates and lose weight are happier than those who don't.