These low-fat cheerleading doctors always come up with this same dumb study. I've read it a million times. It's everyone's pat answer that eating low-fat is the best diet and that eating low-carb is just some low-calorie trick. You'd lose weight on any low-calorie diet so they say.

Let's look at their key study:

This article cites the following study from the National Control Registry that shows that a low-fat diet works. Oh yeah! It works, but why and how? It works when women eat an average of 1,300 calories per day for the entire five years in order to "maintain" their weight. Yes I said, "Maintenance" was 1,300 calories a day PLUS vigorous exercise . How much exercise? Enough to burn 400 calories per day . But ooooh nooooo, it's not the low calories and huge amounts of exercise that are keeping these people thin. We are supposed to believe that it is the heaven-sent, decreed by almighty God himself, low-fat diet! So how much could men eat to maintain weight? Men averaged 1,600 calories per day on this high carbohydrate low fat diet. They also exercised off 400 calories per day. Does anyone see any hypocrisy here?

Study cited:
http://www.uchsc.edu/nutrition/nwcr.htm

Now let's get down to the real reason these doctors are shaking in their boots. Let's get down to the real reason the government has not given grants to researchers doing low-carb, no matter how reasonable the hypotheses appear to be.

Has anyone ever heard of the lawsuit against BIG TOBACCO? How about the one against Fen-Phen? How about the ones against utility companies like in Erin Brockovich? Well, guess what!? The government itself and the NIH National Institute of Health has backed a diet that was recommended to the entire American public that is responsible for an epidemic that has killed almost 1,000,000 Americans alone per year since 1980. We are talking almost 20 million dead Americans. More than died in any war, more than died from tobacco, more than died from any drug. And that is just deaths. Right now 62 million Americans have cardio-vascular (heart) disease. Let's not even mention obesity, type II diabetes, and hypertension.

Does anyone smell a lawsuit? A lawsuit so big, so enormous with every single American in a class action suit against the government and every institution (like Pritikin) that has pushed the low-fat diet upon us. Do you understand their reluctance to fund low-carb studies? Do you understand their reticence to publish findings? The cash outlay to every single American would have to be enormous to recompense a government backed dietary recommendation that has affected so many lives!