About permanent damage. Here's an explanation of the distinction between permanent and chronic.
Permanent
Imagine you hit your thumb with a hammer, and you break your thumb. Imagine that your thumb does not heal. This is permanent.
Chronic
Imagine you hit your thumb with a hammer repeatedly, each time you hit, you break your thumb. But, imagine that each time it breaks, it heals almost instantly. This is chronic.
In the case of permanent, even if you stop hitting your thumb, your thumb remains broken. In the case of chronic, when you stop hitting your thumb, it heals.
Diet works as a chronic system, not permanent. The exception is with deficiency or poisoning over several years. For example, a deficiency of B12 will lead to permanent irreversible physical damage after a couple years. Some deficiencies can cause temporary reversible damage, fixed with appropriate supplementation.
Low-carb is not deficient nor is it poison. But, just like any other diet, it affects hormones. This primarily depends on the previous diet. For example, if we start with a diet that is high in carbs, then we go low-carb, we'll need less insulin, and insulin will drop. Technically, this is hormonal disruption. Low-carb typically includes meat and lots of fat. If, for example, we go from a diet that lacks meat, then go low-carb, there will also be hormonal disruption of a different kind. In this case, some hormones (testosterone, estrogen, probably others as well) will go up due to the greater amount of substrate for their production and metabolism, i.e. fat, cholesterol, protein, certain vitamins like the B complex, etc. This too is technically hormonal disruption.
I believe that when you say hormonal disruption, you mean detrimental, i.e. something bad, yes? Low-carb is unlikely to cause detrimental hormonal disruption of any kind. On the contrary, it's more likely to restore normal production and metabolism of all hormones, but primarily insulin.
Having said all that, it's still possible that low-carb allows existing or new pathogens to take over during the transition. But if that's true of low-carb, it's also true of any other diet, when we change from one to another significantly. However, the likelihood of that happening when we change from any diet to low-carb, compared to any other change, is low. This is because low-carb removes the primary culprit for basically every disease, i.e. obesity, heart disease, neurological disorders, etc - carbs.
Within the context of permanent vs chronic, low-carb acts in a chronic fashion, just like any other diet. Once you quit, that's it for the effect, it goes away, and a new effect occurs, depending on what diet you go with this time around. There is this false belief that somehow we can go on a diet, fix the problem, then get off the diet and return to our previous diet, hoping that the problem does not come back. If the problem was caused by the previous diet, and if we go back to that diet, the problem will simply return.
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