Starvation Diets Can Cause Deadly Heart Rhythms

Starvation Diets Can Cause Deadly Heart Rhythms

Weight loss typically reduces blood pressure, improves blood sugar regulation and blood fats, and enhances metabolic Rapid weight loss through starvation diets (800 calories or less per day) often causes decreases in muscle tone, and heart rhythm disturbances. 

Bulgarian scientists, in a study of 29 obese adults on starvation diets, found that 20 of the subjects developed a potentially fatal heart rhythm called ‘acquired long QT syndrome.’  This greatly increases the risk of ventricular fibrillation and sudden death.

In the normal heart, impulses travel across the chambers and cause a uniform contraction of the atria and ventricles (upper and lower chambers of the heart).  Starvation alters cell health and impairs normal conduction of the impulses.

Following starvation diets to lose weight is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater – you will be the skinniest corpse in the cemetery.  (Annals Internal Medicine, 150:501, 2009)