The facts: low-carb diets

While it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your carb intake for your blood sugar levels, going to the extremes is not advised. The secret to managing carbs is how you include them in your diet. These tips will help.

What raises blood sugar? The simple answer is carbohydrates. So why not just remove them from your diet? Why not quash blood sugar by swearing off bread, pasta, rice and cereal? Because carbs may not be the villain they have been made out to be.

The low-carb craze is on the downswing, and that's a good thing because over the long haul, very low-carb diets simply aren't good for you. That doesn't mean it's not smart to cut back on carbs — but don't go crazy.

When low-carb diets first became popular, they seemed to be a breath of fresh air after the low-fat (and high-carb) diets that preceded them. Remember low-fat cookies and low-fat snack cakes?

With low-carb diets, suddenly people could load up on bacon and still lose weight as long as they were willing to eat hamburgers without buns and pretty much give up sandwiches and spaghetti.

People were amazed at how effective these diets could be. Weight loss could happen very quickly, sometimes within days. And amazingly, it often seemed to come with added health benefits, including lower cholesterol, blood pressure and triglycerides - the blood fats linked to heart attacks.

The most extreme kind of low-carb diet was pioneered by the late Robert Atkins, M.D., whose first book, Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution, came out in 1972. It promised quick and long-lasting weight loss and prevention of chronic disease, all while allowing high-fat steak and ice cream.

Since then, other, more moderate low-carb diets have allowed small amounts of carbohydrate-rich foods, but they still cut out most grains as well as starchy vegetables and even fruit.

If you're overweight or obese, and you have insulin resistance — and especially if you have prediabetes or diabetes — cutting way back on carbohydrates can have immediate health benefits. Your blood sugar and insulin levels will go down, your triglycerides and blood pressure may fall and your levels of "good" HDL cholesterol may rise.

However, did you know that the low-carb diet will also wreak some havoc? When your body breaks down lean body mass — muscle — for energy, your metabolism slows because muscle tissue burns up a lot of calories.

This may be one reason that the weight often comes back after you've been shunning carbs for a while.

Ironically, low-carb diets may even interfere with insulin sensitivity; a certain amount of carbohydrate in your diet may be needed in order for the pancreas, which produces the insulin that keeps blood sugar in check, to work well.

The effects on your heart are also questionable. Especially if you switch to a high-saturated-fat diet, as people do when they start eating their fill of steak and bacon, your "bad" LDL cholesterol will go up. Levels of homocysteine, an amino acid that increases the risk of heart disease, may also rise if you eat a lot of meat and too few vegetables. And to get rid of the ketones produced when your body burns fat for energy, your kidneys need to work overtime, which raises your risk of kidney stones.

When it comes to carbs, diabetes and diet the old adage ‘everything in moderation’ comes into play. Be careful with your carb intake but managing it in such a way that it will not backfire on your blood sugar level. This advice will help you make the right decisions.