Low-carb Diets and Teens

Nonsense or Common Sense?

By Kelly Burgess

I was floored when my 16-year-old daughter told me that her best friend's soccer coach had put the entire girls' soccer team on a low-carbohydrate diet. After all, in the reams of writing I've done on the subject of childhood nutrition, there are a few general "rules" about kids and food that seem to come up over and over. They are:

• 1. Teenagers should never diet.
• 2. Girls should never be told they need to diet.
• 3. Girls who diet risk loss of bone mass.
• 4. Female athletes who diet risk loss of bone mass, cessation of menses and eating disorders.
• 5. Low-carbohydrate diets are bad for everyone.

So my question became this: How do these "rules" apply to low-carb diets and teens? What I discovered is that while numbers 1 through 4 are absolutely true, 5 is definitely open to a healthy interpretation.

Katie Bark, nutritionist and special project coordinator for the Team Nutrition Program at the Montana State University Department of Health and Human Development, says that rule No. 1 is unequivocally true.

"Teens should not be on a diet, because we don't want to teach young people to diet, and we don't want them to develop that diet mentality," says Bark.

She's right to be concerned. According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), eating disorders are on the increase among teenage girls and young women. AACAP estimates that as many as 10 in 100 young women suffer from the two most serious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa and bulimia. This disordered eating comes from a variety of societal factors, and encouraging teens to "diet" is no solution. Rather, says Bark, the family should focus on good eating and exercise habits all the time.

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