It turns out that the high carb vs. low carb debate is moot. A new study published this week by the New England Journal of Medicine supported what most physicians and dietitians have been telling overweight patients for decades: eating less calories is the best diet out there.
Imagine for a second that you have steadfastly ignored all of the conflicting messages in the news, commercials, and the internet about weight loss diets over the last 10 years. Instead, you studiously read only clinical research in scholarly journal articles. You would be extremely enlightened and well educated about the “best” diet for weight loss, right? Wrong. It turns out that for every study that supports a certain approach for weight loss there is another that supports the opposite. This conflict has caused scientists and clinicians to debate about “best” diet; each citing as evidence a long list of studies that his or hers as the “holy grail” of diets.
Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health and Pennington Research Lab at Louisiana State University teamed up to set the record straight. The team recruited 800 overweight volunteers. They randomly assigned each volunteer one of four diets: low-fat/high protein, low-fat/moderate-protein, high-fat/average protein or high fat/high-protein. If a diet was high in protein, it was lower in carbohydrates and if the diet was lower in protein it was higher in carbohydrates. In order to cause weight loss, each diet was designed to have the participant eat 750 less calories per day than they needed to maintain their current weight Each subject was asked to strictly adhere to the diet for 2 years.
Which diet did they find worked the best? Whichever diet resulted in the person eating less calories for the longest period of time. In contrast to what the fad diet marketers will tell you, the person’s satisfaction with the diet and their hunger levels was the same regardless of the type of diet. The authors concluded that: “… diets that are successful in causing weight loss can emphasize a range of fat, protein, and carbohydrate composition”. In other words, diet success is not a dependent on the content of the diet but on the calories consumed.
How did this study show no difference between diets while other studies have shown a strong preference for one or the other? Unlike most other weight loss studies, this study made a concerted effort to include volunteers from all different walks of life (older, younger, men, women, rich, poor etc.). Importantly, the study also recruited a fairly large number of people. This large number of subjects, known as sample size, gives the researchers the ability to better trust their results. Also, the volunteers in this study were followed for 2 years while most others follow volunteers for 1 year or less. As you may know first hand, diets become increasingly hard to stick to after 6 months. By following people for 2 years, the researchers were able to get a handle on the long-term effect of each diet. Essentially, this study was designed to avoid the flaws and pitfalls in most other weight loss studies that resulted in so many conflicting results.
Although the results from this study are important by showing that reduced calories are the most important factor of weight loss success, it is not the first to find this to be the case. A landmark study done by researchers at Tufts University essentially found the same thing. They compared 4 of the most popular weight loss diets in the United States: Atkins, The Zone, Weight Watchers, and Ornish. Like this study, each volunteer was randomly assigned one of the four diets. After 1 year, the researchers found that the most important factor for success was not high carb or low fat, but how well the individual stuck to each diet.
The practical message from this research is that the “best” diet out there is whichever helps you eat less. The next time that you are evaluating a new diet, the question shouldn’t be: “What it is?” but instead: “How Much”?.
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About the Author:
Brian Dean MS, RD is a registered dietitian and researcher. After years of research, Brian has set his sights on helping those with lower back pain. He serves on the Medical Nutrition Committee for The American Society for Nutrition and is a professional member of numerous research organizations including the International Association for The Study of Pain, American Chronic Pain Society, and The American Dietetic Association. He recently created a research-based lower back pain treatment program called The Back Pain Diet which is available from his website Stop Lower Back Pain
amazing stuff thanx
Hello, pleasant and illuminating article. I wish to add a few remarks. If you have tight cholesterol, then you may wonder, will a low fat diet low down cholesterol? This is a important inquiry, because it is a easily known fact that the most working way to lower cholesterol is direct diet. For Certain one ingredient of a diet for lowering cholesterol will include follows low in fat. Merely this is only part of the story. It is critical to get that it is the saturated fats that you want to decimate it from the foods you eat.
I have tried many weight loss diets over many years with varying degrees of success. The most useful diet programs for me have been the high protein diets, they can work well however I don’t think you should stay on them for a extensive time since of the extra strain it can place on your system. I am in addition looking into the GI and the Zone diet regime as I know several people who have lost plenty of weight using these diets. In the end your diet plan should really be a natural way of eating and not something you come off and go on.
The diet makes perfect sense and I’m sure it works – unless you’ve recently quit smoking! Nothing works short of starvation!