Medical studies lend weight to low-carb-diet claims

By Troy Goodman
The Salt Lake Tribune
11/19/2002

Eat the sausage, forget the bun. And tropical oils and butter? Maybe not so bad after all.

Early medical studies on fat-reduction theories fed to Americans through so-called fad diet books show that some do work: The low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, for one, helps people lose weight, and eating more of certain kinds of fats can help melt calories away, researchers say.

Other diet schemes appear not to work so well, including high-carb/low-fat or the high-protein, low-fat plans, because they fail to reduce unhealthy cholesterol levels and other factors in the body.

The results have yet to be published but were presented recently by scientists from Duke University in North Carolina, the University of Colorado in Denver and McGill University in Montreal. All were attending the American Heart Association 2002 annual scientific session in Chicago.

The diet studies mirror ongoing research trials worldwide looking at fundamental changes in eating habits to combat epidemic obesity and heart disease.

"Science is an evolutionary process," said Robert Bonow, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, who praised the range of studies looking at diet and obesity risks.

He said more extensive research is needed to analyze trends in dieting and what happens when you mix in more-established advice on consuming more fruits and vegetables to shed weight, lower blood fats and fight cardiovascular disease.

"All of these evaluations are important ... but right now we don't have a good solid base" to recommend any one diet over another, said Bonow, who also serves as the outgoing president of the heart association.

The group used their recent presentation to update guidelines on fish consumption, urging people with documented heart disease to eat one serving each day of oily fish, such as salmon, trout or albacore tuna, to lower their risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Of course, many doctors and health experts say reduced calorie intake and increased physical activity is the best way to keep your heart and waistline in good form.

But what about the millions who swear by the high-fat, low-carb method outlined in the best-selling books by Robert Atkins?

Duke University's Eric Westman said he decided to test the practice of limiting carbohydrates and loading up on taboo fatty foods to see how it affects cardiovascular health.

After six months, the 120 obese volunteers monitored by Westman and his research team found Atkins dieters lost 13.8 percent of their girth, compared with 8.8 percent of the weight loss experienced by study subjects following a traditional low-fat diet (eating foods with less than 30 percent of their calories from fat).

The blood-cholesterol rates dropped a little in both groups; there was a higher amount of good cholesterol, called HDL, found in the veins of Atkins subjects compared with the low-fat dieters. High LDL and low triglyceride levels can protect normal- and high-fat people from advanced heart disease.

The study was partly funded by the New York-based foundation that Atkins runs.

A study by Robert Eckel, from the University of Colorado in Denver, found that a high-carb, low-fat diet helped people lose weight only if their bodies were engineered to burn the carbs rather than store them as fat. Consequently, obese people who had the inherited propensity for fat storage were not helped by the high-carb diet — even though thinner folks in the study sometimes ate a high amount of carbs and kept off extra pounds without increasing their physical activity.

"To help from gaining weight you need to eat what you can burn," Eckel said.

Another study found that a high-protein diet did little to help people with a cardiovascular condition called hyperinsulinemia, which is a risk factor for obesity and diabetes. Women in the study, however, appeared to earn some benefits from regular high-protein menus, retaining more lean muscle mass compared with total body fat.

Data from McGill University in Montreal also found certain fats seem to earn men greater weight loss compared with another group who ate a diet containing plenty of olive oil.

The researchers said "medium chain triglycerides," found in coconut oil, palm kernel oil and butter, "in combination with plant sterols and flaxseed oil may help prevent cardiovascular disease by controlling lipid levels while also increasing energy expenditure."

http://www.active.com/story.cfm?story_id=9477

Now this is interesting, since Dr. Robert Eckel was the author of the AHA's anti-Atkins announcement last March:

http://www.lowcarb.ca/articlesb/article332.html

In addiition to being quoted by the PCRM and the Ornish gang against low-carb diets, quite often!

Wa'il

Is that they need studies to tell them what people who have had trouble with weight gain have been trying to say all along!
I do find the information on MCT's interesting. I had been reading about that on the net months ago.
I now have coconut oil on my shelf because of what I found.
Poofie!

An amazing admission coming from the president of the American Heart Association. So why does his organization usually lie to the public about this?

Sheldon

This may not be th right place to air my intuitions but I was sparked off by the admission there is no data to recommend one diet against another.

My view is that we only have a little research on weight loss diets. Obviously this has been seriously hampered by the rigid orthodoxy of the dietetic establishment (very well documented by Taub elsewhere posted on this site). Now some studies are starting to come in most of which validate low carb from one angle or another.

But where we are really rudderless is that there is very little on what an optimum human diet is or might look like. I firmly believe that its different for different poeple so that presents an additional challenge. I suspect we would have some surprises if that research could be done.

I would view atkins (especially in induction) as an extreme but sometimes necessary treatment for obesity. That leaves entirely open what would be ideal dietary recommendations for normal weight people.

I hope that this field will be blown wide open and that we can satrt to get some research into this area. My own hunch is that the key might be found less in total carbs but more in unnatural substances that we load our diet with - notably refined sugars, but one could include wheat (natural but we may not be evolved to cope with large amounts of it)
and things like aspartame and hydrogenated oils.

Obviously this has big possible implications for preventing obesity in the first place rather than curing it when its out of control. The economic implications are also interesting given the big business side of refined carb production.

Yeah! Has anyone ever wondered who that engineer was anyway? I have never believed those idiotic stories about "inherited propensities" for fat storage. It sounds like kooky science to me since for instance, Italian-American suffer from high rates of obesity while Italians in Italy in Italy with whom they obviously share the same "inherited propensities" don't appear to have the same problem: to me, diet is the only problem. Period.