From Aubrey de Gray's "Ending Aging":
"For instance, one established effect of very low-carbohydrate diets of
the Atkins type is to bring down both triglyceride levels and the body's to-
tal exposure to carbohydrates, so some advocates have hypothesized that
these diets would reduce a person's AGE burden. Unfortunately, it turns
out that the metabolic state that these diets induce (the notorious "ketosis")
has the unfortunate side effect of causing a jump in the production of the
oxoaldehyde methylglyoxal, a major precursor of AGEs that is also, ironi-
cally, produced within the cells of diabetic patients when they are f o r c e d to
take in more glucose than they can immediately process (see Figures 1b and
1c). A recent study tested the size of this effect in healthy people who suc-
cessfully followed the first two phases of the Atkins diet for a month, and
who had the ketones in their urine to prove that they were sticking to the
diet. These previously healthy people suffered a doubling of their methyl-
glyoxal levels, leading to concentrations even worse than those seen in
poorly controlled diabetics. 7 Like other oxoaldehydes, methylglyoxal is far
more chemically reactive than blood sugar (up to 40,000 times more reac-
tive, in fact), and is known to cause wide-ranging damage in the body, of
which AGE cross-links are but one example. This potentially makes the
Atkins diet a recipe for accelerated AGEing, not a reprieve from it. "
