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

The diet is unimportant...

[Karmashock]

Simply eat what your body needs... beyond that, exercise. That is why people are getting fat. Not because they're eating too much but because they're not doing anything.

Look at what Michael Phelps ate. Something like three pizzas a day or something. And he was in great health at the time. Won Olympic gold medals and everything.

The diet is the wrong way around to solve a problem. Which is how to stay healthy without exercising. Now maybe there is a diet that does that but most of them say "oh and exercise"... well, if you exercise the rest isn't important.

Re:The diet is unimportant...

[rcharbon]

All Michael Phelps did was eat, sleep, exercise, and do bong hits. The typical Slashdotter, with his monitor tan, should not use him as a guideline.

Re:The diet is unimportant...

[AmiMoJo]

When people have a strong will, they are healthy.

Sorry, that's complete nonsense. The reality is that few people over the age of about 30 have a fully working, fully healthy body. Stuff goes wrong and it has nothing to do with will power, it's just genetic defects, the lasting effects of illness, accidents and age. Some people are lucky, some are not and telling the unlucky ones that they just need more "will power" is both insulting and unhelpful.

Careful selection of foods can have a huge impact of many people. I suffer from CFS and a diet that specifically supports the parts of my body that don't work very well any more really helps. The CFS developed as the result of an infection, it was nothing to do with my "will power" and no amount of will can snap me out of it.

Re:The diet is unimportant...

[bluefoxlucid]

You will be an unhealthy, lean couch potato. Exercise builds blood vessel networks, breaks down old body mass, and allows your body to remain healthy. Physical activity causes consolidated fat cells to deflate and get replaced; it causes muscle cells to rework and replace; and it moves fat storage from fat cells to highly-active muscle cells, allowing burning of fat for energy via oxidization rather than lipolysis. The physical movement of blood helps wear down arterial plaque; the heart becomes stronger with increased load; and the metabolism of more fat during increased load cycles out the blood-borne cholesterol (necessary for life!) and corrects the balance of HDLs and LDLs of various types.

I'm not gonna say it removes toxins from the body, but it does free some up if they're absorbed into cells which get deflated or replaced. Urination removes toxins from the body--that's what the renal system is for; otherwise you'd just sweat and conserve water by not pissing. Putting load on the body does tend to free float things, though: your body will engage in demolition as well as building, restructuring things instead of just adding more dense muscle mass on top of less-dense muscle mass.

The only thing you particularly emit from the process is salt (magnesium, sodium, etc.), which is not toxic; but some soluble compounds constricted within cell membranes will become free-floating, either being re-absorbed or filtered by the renal system. Most of the toxic compounds are heavy metals (chelation required), which don't move around readily, and gases (CO2, chlorine, NOx), which move around quite easily anyway--you'll accelerate the removal of everything but CO2, which is scaled, simply by accelerating respiration and blood movement.

In short: exercise has structural effects which greatly enhance health. It also accelerates the removal of some free-floating toxic compounds that your body eliminates anyway, and can temporarily make bound toxic compounds free-floating; but the removal of "toxins" isn't a major effect. Nevertheless, the slight increase in motility of nitrous oxides, the more rapid oxidization of free radical oxidizers, the more rapid elimination of excess salts and other compounds normally removed by the lymph and renal systems, and the replacement of overprovisioned forms of cholesterol with a more correct blood stream balance are, in combination and across decades, an important enough effect to warrant consideration.

The major and minor effects of physical activity are interesting to me.

Re:The diet is unimportant...

[AthanasiusKircher]

Anyone that has tried to exercise and eat what they want can tell you that it doesn't work.

THIS. Some people just have better regulating systems in their bodies -- either they have better genes, or they good about recognizing when they are full and stopping eating, or they have strong willpower, or they naturally gravitate toward eating things that their bodies will regulate well... or some sort of combination.

But the simple fact is that -- unless you're a professional athlete or a manual laborer who does REALLY hard work for many hours per day -- chances are dietary inputs have a MUCH greater impact on weight than exercise.

I know there are people here who will chime in and say "all calories are not the same" and that's true. But we can at least use calories as an approximation. It takes VERY little imbalance for your body to get way out of whack. Say you eat enough that your body stores an extra 100 calories per day. Roughly speaking, about 3500 calories will equal a pound of fat. If you maintain this, you'll gain about a pound per month. Do this for a few years, and you could end up 50 pounds overweight... all because of an extra 100 calories per day.

Now, think about what it would take to correct that extra 100 calories per day. In terms of exercise, that's roughly running a mile, or doing some other sort of less vigorous workout for a longer period.

But in terms of eating, 100 calories can be pretty small. That's less than a typical can of soda. Or a SMALL cookie. Or a tablespoon of butter or mayo. Did you squeeze an extra packet of mayo on your sandwich today? That could be your 100 calories.

So, roughly speaking, which is easier to correct? Refrain from squeezing that extra packet of mayo, or running a mile every day? If you start talking in terms of real desserts -- like a large cookie or a piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream, you can easily get to 300-700 calories. If you eat dessert most days, you'd have to run 3-7 miles to correct for that.

Of course -- it's not quite that simple. Different types of calories will produce greater or lesser feelings of fullness. Protein and fats seem to be better at reducing hunger than carbs are (in general -- again, this is speaking very roughly), which is probably the reason for the results seen in this study. So, chances are if you have the right balance of foods in your diet, you'll be less likely to accumulate that 100 calorie/day excess or whatever, because you'll feel more full without eating more.

Anyhow, that's all in the details. My general point is: it takes a lot more work to offset extra caloric input through exercise than it does to just eat a little less. If you stop and buy the giant cinnamon bun in the mornings with a large latte, you may have already consumed more calories than a typical large steak dinner. And when a single cinnamon bun or a large dessert might be 800 calories or more, offsetting that with exercise would be just insane.

Re:What they don't tell you

[jandersen]

So, in a word: a low fad diet?

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.

Re:Too simple

[Lumpy]

" It is hard to overeat on apples."

It's because fruit has a built in regulation system, eat 8 apples, and your system will do a high pressure speed purge out the other end. I ate 2 pints of blueberries once... I spent the evening on the toilet afraid to leave it.

The comments in this thread are embarrassing.

[BradMajors]

Someone posts a scientific article about dieting and everyone posts their wild unproven theories about dieting.

If I wanted to read wild speculation by uninformed nobodies I can find that elsewhere.