Scientists: avoid fats, not carbs, if you want to lose weight

The N.I.H. authors sought to test a more recent conclusion by Mr. Taubes that “any diet that succeeds does so because the dieter restricts fattening carbohydrates”. The focus turned back on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which recommended limiting the tippy top of the food pyramid: fats.

The book contends that certain kinds of carbohydrates rather than fats or simply excess calories are to blame for rising obesity rates. With less insulin, the body may also burn existing fat stores for energy and lose weight. The researchers pitted low-carbohydrate enthusiasts against low-fat enthusiasts.

It is a central dogma of the low-carb lifestyle: that while avoiding carbohydrates will force the human body into fat-burning mode, any diet that fails to suppress insulin will trap body fat in place and thwart a dieter’s hope of shifting to a leaner, healthier body type.

Ms Conroy, who runs Edinburgh Nutrition, said: “The evidence points overwhelmingly towards a low-carb diet for a variety of reasons”. What happened next did not fit into the Ludwig/Taubes model.

Research from the National Institutes of Health suggests trimming the fat in your diet may be more effective for losing weight than cutting carbs, at least in the short term.

The researchers said their findings were strong. So, keeping an ideal level of insulin into your blood stream through a low-carb diet would boost metabolism so that fats are burned faster, other studies had shown. Cutting carbs did indeed decrease insulin production in the study.

David L. Katz, founder of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, added in that even though this study shows a possible higher weight loos for low-fat diets, scientistis overall still believe that fats are not as bad as people once thought. “We’ve known for quite some time that reduction of dietary carbohydrates causes an excess of water loss”, he says, so the weight loss may be due to water loss.

The findings, from a study of 19 obese volunteers, confirmed the predictions of an earlier computer simulation conducted by the same team. “It just kept burning the same amount of fat as it did before which led to a substantial imbalance between the fat eaten and burned and therefore body fat loss”.

Next Hall and his associates will investigate how reduced-carbohydrate and reduced-fat diets affect the brain’s reward circuitry as well as its response to food stimuli.

Then for six days, subjects were given diets containing 30% fewer calories, which was achieved by reducing either total carbs or total fat from the baseline diet; the amount of protein stayed the same. Yet, those participants weren’t allowed to go home during the research. That means that low-carb dieters had a net deficit of about 400 calories per day-but those on the low-fat diet had a net deficit of about 800 calories per day, resulting in slightly less body fat. A low-fat diet was the fad of the 80’s and 90’s and more recently a low-carb diet is the way to go, according to The Washington Post.