Most diets revolve around lowering your caloric intake, but if you don’t consume enough calories you could put your wellbeing in danger. This is according to a new Swedish study, which found that a low-calorie crash diet can increase your risk of gallstone attacks.
For the study, which was reported in the International Journal of Obesity, the researchers spent a year following 6,640 people who were losing weight on diets with different caloric levels. The “crash diet” was a period of six to ten weeks in which participants consumed liquid meals providing 500 calories a day. After this period, these dieters gradually took up more solid food, following a maintenance diet and exercise regimen for nine months. The other participants went on a “low calorie diet” in which they consumed 1,200-1,500 calories a day for the first three months, including two liquid meals a day, and then followed a weight maintenance diet of all solid food for the next nine months.
The results of the study revealed that gallstones affected the wellbeing of 48 people on the crash diet, requiring hospital treatment, while this was only the case for 16 people in the low-calorie group. The researchers surmised that this could be because the people on the crash diet lost more weight overall. At the end of three months, the crash dieters had lost 30 pounds, while the low-calorie dieters had only lost 17. Yet, those in the low crash group seemed to have started to gain weight by the end of the year, as the end weight loss result was 24.5 pounds, compared to a loss of 18 pounds in the other group.
But what exactly is a gallbladder attack? Your gallbladder holds bile, and releases it during the digestion process when your body needs help breaking down fats. In bile, there is water, bile salts, protein, bilirubin, fat and cholesterol, and the most common type of gallstones is made from this latter component. When there is an excess of cholesterol in your bile, it can harden into small stones, and rapid weight loss causes this to occur, and it forces your liver to secrete extra cholesterol into your bile.
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