Diet Revolution Completed: Low-Carb Wins Out Over Low-Fat in National Study

A national health study has found that diets low in carbohydrates, complimented by moderate amounts of fat, are better for you than the low-fat diet that doctors and government authorities have recommended for decades. At the end of a year-long trial in which a racially diverse set of 150 men and women were asked to either obey a low-carb or low-fat diet, researchers found that those in the low-carb group were significantly healthier:

“[P]eople 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.”

The results are especially encouraging because neither group was asked to reduce the amount of calories it consumed, a task which often trips people up who are attempting a new diet. Individuals in the low-carb group saw inflammation and triglyceride metrics plunge while those of the low-fat dieters remained constant. 

“[T]hose on the low-carbohydrate diet ultimately did so well that they managed to lower their Framingham risk scores, which calculate the likelihood of a heart attack within the next 10 years. The low-fat group on average had no improvement in their scores.”

As health and nutrition author Johnny Bowden explained in his 2012 interview with Big Think, processed carbohydrates are perhaps the biggest fad diet ever, taking the long view of human agriculture, because our bodies learned to perform well without them for hundreds of thousands of years: 

Read more at the New York Times

Photo credit: Shutterstock