Very low calorie diets: main risks

Trying to lose weight with very restrictive diets that provide very few calories is dangerous and ineffective in the long term.

Diets very low in calories or VLCD (very low calorie diets) have an energy value less than 800 kilocalories per day, a figure quite distant from the energy needs half of a person (between 1,800 and 2,200 Kcal per day) and are, by definition, loss-making in nutrients. Use is generally linked to the hospital setting in the treatment of postoperative of some kind of intervention and, often, as preparation prior to bariatric surgery. However, for a time, it is not uncommon to detect cases of persons dealing at your own risk and these restrictive strategies in the extreme. This attitude can cause serious problems, as it can engage in various nutritional deficit.

Currently, a new trend circulates in United States: the monitoring of very low calorie diets, combined with hormone therapy by injection with human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG (typical pregnancy hormone), in order to accelerate the process of thinning. This risky technique does not receive the recognition or support from the scientific community.

Very low calorie (VLCD) diets

Very low calorie diets are followed in the medical field since the 1970s in order to induce rapid loss of weight. Most of the recommendations with regard to the appropriateness of its use, not to say all, allude to the need to limit them to clinical practice, since it is important that the patient is monitored at all times because of the risks that involves the approach of this dietary strategyin particular, in cases where its use extends over time.

In most cases used them in the treatment of morbid extreme, with a BMI greater than 40. In the same way, often, very low calorie diets are part of treatment of selected interventions of Bariatric Surgery, in particular, when they are restrictive. Its effectiveness in the short term is proven and, in a short period, the patients show rapid weight loss. However, most of the scientific literature attributed to the very low calorie diets low effectiveness in the maintenance of the weight lost in the medium and long term. In a 2006 review undertaken on this subject and published in the journal Obesity, it is concluded that, despite the initial loss in the short term of very low calorie diets is higher than the attributed to diets with a lower energy reduction (the so-called Low Calorie Diets or LCD)the durability of these losses are not greater. In addition, it is suggested that the use of substitutes for foods with diets of 1,000 to 1,500 kcal/day is a more effective and less expensive than the very low calorie diets, alternative when you want to lose weight.

In 2008, in an article in the same journal, stated that the large initial weight loss obtained by individuals who had followed VLCD were not kept at the time, as opposed to what happened to individuals who had resorted to other tools for weight loss advice-based. Most people who better maintained their weight two years were those who chose another system other than the very low calorie diets.

Diets without medical supervision

Despite the warning of risks, it begins to detect an important use of the very low calorie diets away from the clinical setting, so that some people choose to follow this type of treatment without taking into account the risks. Occasionally, the opportunity to put them into practice stems from a health care professional who provides nutritional preparations and indicates the patient form of administration, but monitors on an outpatient basis. This dietary option is carried out as substitutes for meals and not with food as such.

In most cases are sticks, syrups, soups, smoothies, etc., whose intake is the limiting element and can compromise safe different nutrient intake. A study published in 2006 in the Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, compared two clinical interventions with different VLCD. One of them had a duration of three months, with 800 Kcal per day, and another, only a month, far more restrictive, with 458 Kcal/day.

The conclusions noted a better effectiveness and profitability of the first and most important, it was more secure: all participants in the intervention of a month group and following the diet of fewer calories were diagnosed asthenia and two patients had serious complications (transient ischemic attack and atrial fibrillation). Added to this is a little issue: the price. The total cost of the intervention of a month group was 3.018 euros, compared to 582 EUR for three months, at a rate of 800 Kcal/day group.