Here it is, from the
Atkins Center. There's another link at the bottom with more information.
If your DH, cant change his way of thinking about calories, just tell him it's an "act of God" and be done with it! It's just as good an explanation!
What Is the Metabolic Advantage?
Groundbreaking research more than 40 years ago first raised the suggestion that "a calorie is a calorie is a calorie" was not necessarily always the case.
One of the most talked about aspects of doing the Atkins Nutritional Approach™ is that most people can lose weight while eating the same number of calories they did when they were on an unsuccessful low-fat plan.
Two British researchers, Prof. Alan Kekwick and Dr. Gaston L.S. Pawan, did the groundbreaking research on the metabolic advantage. In the 1950s and ’60s the two were at the top echelon of British obesity research, both serving as chairmen of many international conferences. Kekwick was director of the Institute of Clinical Research and Experimental Medicine at London’s prestigious Middlesex Hospital, and Pawan was the senior research biochemist of that hospital’s medical unit. Their seminal experiments (first on mice and then on obese humans) provided the breakthrough concept—the mechanism and rationale—and the evidence that a controlled carbohydrate, high-fat diet has a metabolic advantage over so-called balanced or conventional low-fat diets.
In the early 1950s the two researchers were struck by the many studies that suggested that diets of different compositions of fat, protein and carbohydrate provided differing rates of weight loss. Their subsequent study on obese subjects found that those on a 1,000-calorie diet comprised of 90 percent protein—and especially those on a diet comprised of 90 percent fat—lost weight (0.6 pounds and 0.9 pounds per day, respectively). However, when the same subjects were given a diet with the same number of calories, but comprised of 90 percent carbohydrate, they did not lose any weight—in fact, they gained a little1.
Kekwick and Pawan then replicated a study with humans that they had previously done on animals and found the same phenomenon: A diet of 1,000 calories worked well for weight loss as long as carbohydrate intake was low, while a high-carbohydrate 1,000-calorie regimen took off very little weight2. They then showed that their subjects did not lose at all on a so-called balanced diet of 2,000 calories. But when their diet contained primarily fat and very little carbohydrate, these same obese subjects could lose weight—even when they ate as many as 2,600 calories a day. The difference is that weight loss between the two programs comes close to being a pound per day. Despite the Middlesex doctors’ impeccable reputations, the majority of their colleagues remained skeptical, given their calorie-is-a-calorie mind-set. They set out to disprove this intellectual bombshell that Kekwick and Pawan had dropped on them.
Among other things, critics claimed that the impressive results of a controlled carbohydrate weight-loss plan were merely water loss. However, Kekwick and Pawan conducted water-balance studies that showed water loss to be only a small part of the total weight lost. Kekwick and Pawan then embarked on a two-year study of mice in a metabolic chamber. By measuring the loss of carbon in the feces and urine, they were able to show that the mice on the high-fat diet excreted considerable unused calories in the form of ketone bodies, as well as citric, lactic and pyruvic acids. At the end of the study period, they analyzed the fat content of the animals’ bodies and found significantly less fat on the carcasses of the mice that had been fed a high-fat, controlled carbohydrate diet.
Perhaps the most provocative aspect of Kekwick and Pawan’s work: During the time they were proving the metabolic advantage of a controlled carbohydrate diet, they detected and extracted a substance from the urine of people on the regimen. When that substance was injected into mice, it caused the same metabolic results they had observed in the mice on controlled carbohydrate diets, indicating that fat was “melting” off their bodies. The carcass fat decreased dramatically, the ketone and free fatty-acid levels rose and, most significantly, the excretion of unused calories via urine and feces rose from a normal 10 percent to 36 percent. They named this substance FMS, or fat-mobilizing substance. For more recent research that supports the metabolic advantage, see
Explorations Into the Metabolic Advantage.
Selected References
Kekwick, A., Pawan, G.L.S., "Calorie Intake in Relation to Body-Weight Changes in the Obese," The Lancet, July 28, 1956, pages 155-161.
Kekwick, A., Pawan, G.L.S., "Metabolic Study in Human Obesity With Isocaloric Diets High in Fat, Protein or Carbohydrate," Metabolism, 6, 1957, pages 447-460.