The Low Carb Diet Prevails!

Low-carb diet beats other diets in study.

In one of the longest and largest studies conducted, the low carb and the Mediterranean style eating habits resulted in more people losing more weight than the more traditional ‘low fat’ diets.

Like a lot of people, I was surprised to see the result that the low-carb diet even actually improved the cholesterol more so than the other two types of diet… big surprise there.

I think it should also be noted that all three of the eating style approaches (low carb, Mediterranean, low fat) all achieved weight loss along with improving the cholesterol numbers.

This study is unlike most in two areas… in the fact that it has lasted about two years… which is much longer than most studies… and that an impressive 85% of the participants stuck with the diets.

The actual research for this study was done was done in Israel with 322 participants. The participants got their primary meal for lunch at a centralized cafeteria. At the cafeteria, the three eating styles’ food was identified by colored dots.

When it came to the breakfast and the dinner meals each of the participants were coached on how to stick to their particular eating plans and were asked to keep records of what they ate.

The low-fat diet consisted of no more than 30 percent of calories from fat. It restricted calories and cholesterol and focused on low-fat grains, vegetables and fruits as options. The Mediterranean diet had similar calorie, fat and cholesterol restrictions, with emphasis poultry, fish, olive oil and nuts.

The low-carb diet on the other hand, set the limits for carbohydrates, but did not for calories or fat. It urged the dieters to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protiens.

Although most of the participants were men, both genders got about the same amounts of exercise.

Let’s look at some of the numbers:

Average weight loss after two years:

Low-Carb = 10.3
Mediterranean = 10.0
Low Fat = 6.5

Still, even to me is the surprising measures of their cholesterol. If you’ve done any type of dieting research over the past couple of years, you would know that the critics haven’t been overly kind to the low-carb Atkins style diet concerning the impact of the diet on one’s cholestrol levels… this study would seem to disprove those fears.

In fact, within this study the low-carb approach appeared to facilitate the most improvement in multiple cholesterol measures, including the ratio of total cholesterol to HDL, the “good” cholesterol. For example, someone with total cholesterol of 200 and an HDL of 50 would have a ratio of 4 to 1. The optimum ratio is 3.5 to 1, according to the American Heart Association.

Although the heart association does not recommend the low-carb Atkins diet, Dr. Robert Eckel, the association’s past president who is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado-Denver indicates a low-carb approach is consistent with heart association guidelines so long as there are limitations on the kinds of saturated fats often consumed by people on the Atkins diet.

And the last part of that statement is really a key factor to keep this in perspective. One of pitfalls for people on a low-carb eating regime is the saturated fats that are consumed. But all in all many experts agree that this study (which will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine) was highly credible.

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