Low-Carb Diet Trumps Low-Fat Diet In Major New Study

An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports on a new study (abstract) showing that low-carb diets have better health benefits than low-fat diets in a test without calorie restrictions. "By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity. While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat. They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,' Dr. Mozaffarian said. 'Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that's a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.' ... In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides — a type of fat that circulates in the blood — plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group. Blood pressure, total cholesterol and LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, stayed about the same for people in each group."

Comments

Too simple

[Errol backfiring]

That is a bit too simple. Lots of modern food contains so much energy that our internal alarm switches are blown off-line. Therefore, you don't feel full anymore and you keep eating. That is called Insulin resistance (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) It is hard to overeat on apples. It is easy to overeat on sweets.

Off course, the food industry just loves to create food that makes you keep eating, because that will also make you buy more of it. That is why even organic meat contains sugar and all kinds of syrup nowadays. The first step to a healthy life is to eat real food.

A change in diet - from what?

[jandersen]

What kind of diet did they start from? If the participants were typical Americans, it was probably something that was very heavy in sugar and other refined carbohydrates; more so that in fat, if I'm not mistaken, so cutting down on carbohydrates is no doubt the most important improvement to the diet one could make. Cutting back on fat would probably be the next, big step.

It is sometimes hard to remember just how extreme the typical Western diet is; it is perhaps particularly visible to me, because I have completely stopped drinking sweet drinks (including fruit juices and artificially sweetened drinks). Now I find I can't get through a whole glass of Coke - it's just too much, but only a few years ago I could drink whole liters of the crap.

As others have remarked, there is no need to follow any special diet, just stop eating and drinking crap. Of course, with the selection available, that in itself is actually not easy.

The diet is unimportant...

[gumper23]

I recently lost 40+ pounds in ~6 months using Atkins and no exercise (just started exercising this week). I'm 46.

My takeaways:
1. If calories in calories burned, you'll lose weight.
2. The hardest part about that is controlling appetite.
3. The best way to control appetite is with a low carb diet.

This is the second time I did Atkins. The first time (10 years ago), I lost 60+ pounds in 6 months and I exercised 5 days a week. A guy at my gym had a shirt that read "Look great naked! 90% diet, 10% exercise" and the shirt was right. Diet is much, much more important that exercise when it comes to weight loss.

So, uh, no - diet isn't unimportant - it's the *most* important thing for weight loss - at least in my personal experience.

Re:The diet is unimportant...

[BringsApples]

When people have a strong will, they are healthy. It's what it takes to have a strong will, that's the secret to life. Health is the result of living in some sort of self-designed balance between activity and rest - but there's more that's going on than activity or rest, because there's a part of us that's never active, and never at rest. Sometimes simply directing your will to do some job (temporary or not) will give you an insight into health and what it is.

All this hyped-up talk about what to eat is only to sell you something. If you want to be healthy, then you need to not only be active, but have your will in it. Once you get your goal in mind, and direct your attention to it, more than just your health will improve.

Re:Empty Calories

[Lumpy]

"fried chicken, I've pretty much put back on"

It's the crap on the outside of the fried chicken causing the problem. If chicken places would use a good soy based flour the carb content of fried chicken would drop like a stone. Buddy of mine created a batter for his out of soy that tastes better than anything I have ever had at a chicken joint.

Restaurants sneak in carbs because carbs are cheap.

My weight loss diet last January

[I'm New Around Here]

A couple months ago, I posted a detail of the diet I was on during January. I'll repost it here. It isn't the best argument that a high-fat diet causes weight loss, because of how radical it was. And it was short-term only. But it did work.

=======================
Let me tell you the long version of my one month diet. The short version is I lost 30 pounds in 31 days, and never felt any different.

On January 1st, I started a month-long diet plan. I had scrambled eggs in the morning, with mushrooms, onions, red bell peppers, and breakfast sausage mixed in them. I sauted the vegetables first in butter, added the sausage, and then the eggs, with some salt and seasoning. I made four days worth at a time, using eight eggs and half a package of sausage. So on average I had two eggs and two ounces of sausage. The calorie count was about 600 calories.

For dinner I had a salad. For a good salad, start with a big bowl. The ones I used hold a quart or more. Shred four leaves of iceberg lettuce, add a couple leaves of romaine, throw out the stalk part (or eat a couple as I'm making the salad). Add half a large tomato, diced, handful of chopped onion, sliced hard-boiled egg, shredded cheese, halved black olives, a few croutons, and small amount of ranch dressing. I prefer Thousand Island, but would have used too much, so went with Ranch, which I don't actually like. If the wife had made chicken the previous night, add a piece of chicken, sliced or pulled. Calories without the egg or chicken was about 100 calories, and is what I had half the time. With an egg add another 80, and with chicken add 300.

So for a month, Jan 1st to 31st, with only a couple exceptions, I had 1000 calories or less a day. The biggest exception was because I was out of town with my wife for a doctor visit one day. I ate a healthy dinner, but a few more calories than a salad. The other exception was a salad at Wendy's for lunch, also out of town, and a salad for dinner at home. Also, for a snack during the day, I would have eight to ten black olives, or a banana. I ate a banana on five or six days, and the black olives on fifteen to twenty days. The other days, I had nothing more than scrambled eggs and a salad.

To round that out, I drank at the most, a quart of water a day. One glass in the morning after breakfast, small sips during the day when my mouth was dry, and one glass after dinner. Again, the two exception days, I had diet soda or tea with the meals. With the salad of course, I got some more liquid, but the water my body used was simply provided by breaking down the fat cells. And I broke down a lot of fat cells. When I got up in the morning and used the toilet, my urine was a very dark orange. That was from the debris, solids and liquids, of unneeded cells.

During that month, I never felt tired, worn out, or light headed. I went from 230 pounds to 200 pounds. I did the same work I do all the time, fixing computers, crawling under desks, carrying them out to the car and back, installing network printers, etc. I didn't go to the gym at my apartment complex, or do any other workout.

As for hunger, I am always hungry anyway. I usually snack whenever I have the chance between jobs, tv shows, slashdot flamewars, and am still always hungry. So going a month being slightly more hungry wasn't really noticeable. Really, it's more boredom than hunger to begin with anyways.

Of course in the five months since I went off the diet, I regained some of the weight. Eight pounds in the first two weeks, as the depleted-but-surviving fat cells refilled with water. But that means I managed to destroy twenty-two pounds of them in one month. I want to go back on the diet, and get well below 200 pounds, but just haven't yet. Maybe now that my daughter's finished school, I can plan my life a bit more again.
--

*not* a low fat diet

[Mr. Slippery]

"The low-fat group included more grains, cereals and starches in their diet. They reduced their total fat intake to less than 30 percent of their daily calories, which is in line with the federal governmentâ(TM)s dietary guidelines."

This is not a low-fat diet. The 30% recommendation was an incredibly tepid compromise: the standard American diet is around 35% fat. So this its along the lines of telling peoople "Oh, you smoke 35 cigarettes a week? Try to keep it to 30."

For comparison, the Ornish plan is around 10% calories from fat.

So this study compared a high-fat, high-sugar diet (no restrictions on an America's sugar intake == high sugar) with a higher-fat, no-sugar diet. The usual crap research that people tout as showing low-carb diets useful.

Re:The diet is unimportant...

[SQLGuru]

If the equation to be healthy is (and I'm not arguing that it isn't)

Caloric Intake == Exercise (or at least approximately equals)

You are assuming that people want to maximize the Caloric Intake variable. I think most of us are trying to minimize the Exercise variable instead. To do so, we are looking for the maximum Caloric Intake that requires the least amount of Exercise so that we can still be healthy. Low-carb seems to be better at this than Low-fat.

Re:What they don't tell you

[Ol Olsoc]

Were is the science that backs your theory?

The whole situation is a little complex, but we might start out with what we evolved to deal with. This seems to work with wild animals. It is obvious in the case of frank carnivores, and frank herbivores. Horses seldom seek out a juicy steak, and Cheetas don't often beg for loaves of bread.

With omnivores like humans, it is a little more complex. We're designed to eat a lot of different things.

So what has happened? Why do people have so much trouble maintaining a healthy weight?

Ever since I can remember, we have been bombarded by th e concept that there is a scale of healthy eating, and that elimination of as much fat as possible is desirable, and the ne plus ultra of healthy living is veganism, followed by vegatarianism, then low fat/high carb, then the unwashed masses of high protein, and the soulles spawn of Satan - the Atkinists.

So here's one citation from the NIH:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... Less central obesity in men consuming a high milk fat diet. It's a narrow study, but interesting.

Here's one from Harvard. An opinion piece, but well done:

http://www.foodandnutritionres...

Here's a nice link with references.

http://authoritynutrition.com/...

I tried a low fat vegetarian diet for a time in the very late 80's, specifically, I ate eggs for protein, otherwise, all "healthy" veggies and starches.

Aside from being hungry all the time, losing only 2 pounds, and having my GI tract all bitched up for months, it was awesome. After 6 months, I gave up and ate a nice juicy medium rare steak. In around a week, I was back to feeling normal,

Interestingly enough, my parents ate probably 4 times the fat I did. And had absolutely no weight problem at all.

Where did we go wrong? Just an educated guess on my part:

Bread and pasta. That stuff is awesome and versatile. It's also a great way to fill a person up with not much more than empty calories.

Sugar. Likewise great tasting stuff. But seriously, just how fucked up is it that we as a nation are debating how Mexican Pepsi is healthier than US Pepsi? It's sugar asswipes.

Now the latest and weirdest one. Soybeans. Seen how many American men have tits now? Even ones who aren't obese?

Our friend the phytoestrogen, brought to you by soybeans and peas. And we are consuming a whole lot more of that stuff than we should. And I'm not certain that the rise of testosterone supplements isn't a backwards way of trying to treat men with bitched up hormone levels.

Another wasted research project

[angel'o'sphere]

All those foundings in this study could have been 'discovered' by an internet research (google is your friend).
We know since 30 years or longer how nutrition works and how to proper eat and stay healthy. Well, we as 'we who care' or 'we, the scientists who researched it'.
It is astonishing, amazing even, that an american institute does a study about a topic that is basically 'researched out'.
But I guess that is the typical american arrogance. Assuming first no one ever really did 'a study' and if they figure 'oh, someone did' they jump onto the wagon: 'yeah, but that was in europe'. So european studies are not trustworthy? Or is it that 30 year old insights aged somehow and are no longer valid? Hint: http://www.montignac.com/en/th... or Atkins(Atkinson?), btw an American as far as I know. He also solved everything around nutrition. But well, instead of simply understanding what is going on you call it 'diets'. Sigh, I believe Atkins lost his credibility when companies started to sell pre packed food for the microwave with his name on it.
Anyway, lets get a few things straight many people here falsely assume about diets and nutrition.
EXERCISES
Exercises make you more healthy, but they don't help you to stay or become slim in case you eat to much
You can easy verify this by googeling how much energy you burn, sitting, sleeping, running, swimming ... and how much a simple big mac with french fries (plus ketchup! plus the coke!) is in calories.
LACK OF WILLPOWER
Will power does not help if you eat the wrong things or fall into the american myth that you should eat a snack 6 times a day (rofl, those six snacks alone have more calories than the rest you eat over a day). Hint: exercising does not help ... so your willpower only helps to resist a cake with cream.
GENETICS
The influence of genetics is nearly non existing (for a white anglo saxon christian american). Yes, Maori or Inuit have a slightly different metabolism, they even become really 'fat' by only eating proteins or 'fat' ... actually they eat low carb ... funny, isn't it?
SWEETENERS
(chemical) Sweeteners have no calories in themselves, but they
a) are triggering some responses in the body, like insulin levels, but also change absorption of other carbs in your guts. So the prime mistake e.g. is to eat an ordinary cake/torte with a coffee containing sweeteners. That will increase the 'calorie bomb effect' of the cake a ten fold, a normal coffee with sugar is much better.
b) most (chemical) sweeteners are suspected to cause cancer (well known since over 30 years, but it seems the food industries can avoid to make this public somehow, Aspatam, Saccarin, Cyclamat etc.)
c) Fructose or other 'sweeteners' are proclaimed to be not digestible. Well, see below, that actually depends on your personal gut bacterias.
GENETICS AND BACTERIA
While the genetics of humans have a low influence, the genetics if the hut bacterias have a high one.
The general mantra that it is healthy to eat lots of fibers is wrong in many cases. If you believe you are eating super healthy but you are fat nevertheless chances are you caught some bovine bacterias that can indeed prepare the fibers (which should be undigestible) into carps that your body happily is digesting. The estimate is that about 25% of the 'super fat' harbour bacteria like that.
Now the explanation: INSULIN
Suppose you eat to fat. Extreme example: you eat a pound of butter. You would never do that? Wow, ever ate 100grams mousse au chocolat? That mousse contains roughly 90grams of butter, a bit of chocolat and a bit of eggs. Well, perhaps only 80.
What happens if you digest that? Well, the simple answer is: nothing. That is one of the reasons it is a famous dessert. On paper it has a lot of calories but they are all fat. That means: if you eat that as a breakfast, 90% of the fat w

A closed-loop feedback diet system

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I also lost about 30 lbs, with no exercise, by changing my diet to a low-carb diet. But I used a closed-loop feedback for food selection for less than US$20.

I (and several others) purchased a blood sugar meter. Basically, we would check our blood sugar levels (BSL) at 1 and 2 hours after eating. We all found that some foods would take us up to 120 (the upper limit for our experiment), but some foods blasted BSL up to 200. Avoiding foods that triggered high levels caused us all to lose weight, feel less hungry, and we snacked less or not at all. All of us saw significant-to-radical improvements in our health. The real surprise is how many foods affected some of us, but not others. The more we compared notes on food, the more we realized it to be dependent on the person's response. Foods that affected all of us tended to have wheat, corn and related by-products.

I share this, hoping others will give it a try and report back.

The idea of a one-size-fits-all diet makes as much sense as a one-size-fits-all shoes and clothing. I'm convinced we need to take advantage of the feedback tools available and customize your own diet, based on your body's reactions.