Weight Loss, Diet 2017 News: Paleo Diet Could Cause Iodine Deficiency, Experts Found
Selective diets like the Paleolithic diet, so-called for its aim to go back to the diet of humans back in the stone age, could keep out food items that are crucial to health and well-being.
A new study suggests that the Paleo diet could put older women at risk of iodine deficiency due to the nature of its prescriptions. The experiment followed 70 older women who are overweight or obese, with the group split in half to follow two diets; 35 of them will follow the Paleo diet, with the rest sticking to a Nordic regimen, as outlined in the paper published by the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Paleo diet tends to be rich in meat, fish, seafood, fruits, vegetables, eggs and nuts, typical staples of foragers and hunters back in the pre-civilization eras. It does away with agriculture products like dairy, grains, sugar and salt, according to Reuters.
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As a result, the group that followed the Paleo diet got the majority of their calories from fats, at 40 percent. Their remaining calories were split evenly between protein and carbohydrates, at 30 percent each.
In contrast, the Nordic diet recommends 25 to 30 percent of daily calories to be sourced from fats, with the majority, 55 to 60 percent, to come from carbs. The remaining 15 percent were to be taken from protein, a relatively smaller part of the diet.
Two years after, the group sticking to the Paleo diet lost more weight. They also became more likely to develop mild iodine deficiency, a surprising outcome that the study found along the way.
"The Paleo diet eliminates the major sources of dietary iodine in the typical diet today (i.e., iodized salt)," Dr. Margo Denke from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas offered as an explanation, as an outsider from the study.
"However attractive this type of reduction thinking is, one must also acknowledge that there are aspects of our diet today that are improvements on 'the diet from mother nature,'" Denke noted, adding that today's fortified foods like iodine salt goes a long way to help modern humans stave off micronutrient deficiency.
