{"id":6415,"date":"2014-09-29T08:50:56","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T13:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/?p=6415"},"modified":"2022-03-21T14:59:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T19:59:00","slug":"low-carb-vs-low-fat-the-debate-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wholehealthchicago.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/29\/low-carb-vs-low-fat-the-debate-is-over","title":{"rendered":"Low-Carb vs Low-Fat: The Debate Is Over!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s mind-boggling how long this acrimonious debate has been raging among various experts. I remember myself as a fat little kid first hearing the word \u201ccalorie,\u201d but was too busy chewing my second Snickers bar to pay much attention. By 11 or 12, I was taken (or rolled) to a weight loss \u201cspecialist\u201d and remember receiving an assortment of pills, even as my mother guesstimated the calories in our usual dinner of fried chicken, French fries, broccoli with Hollandaise sauce, and hot fudge sundaes for dessert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then an immense best-seller appeared, the now-forgotten Calories Don\u2019t Count<\/em> (1961), by Herman Taller, MD. His book may have been the first to suggest that in terms of weight loss, food selection trumped the calorie count of any individual food. Teller was, as Atkins would be some decades later, a pro-fat\/low-carb advocate, and since many people really do prefer a breakfast of bacon and eggs to a bowl of granola, the dozens of low-carb<\/a> diets that rode the book\u2019s wake have remained quite popular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ornish vs Atkins<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dean Ornish, MD, the famous cardiologist, put the brakes on our steaks with his book Reversing Heart Disease<\/em><\/a>. Fat, he felt (and does to this day), was the enemy in our midst. In an acrimonious debate between two diet gurus, Ornish called the Atkins Program<\/a> the ultimate in nutritional irresponsibility. But people themselves preferred Atkins. To many men, a steak, salad, and martini are a semi-orgiastic pleasure, far removed from the concept of dieting, and many who followed Atkins did lose weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Women, who need some carbs to produce enough of the stress-buffering neurotransmitter serotonin (men have more to begin with) liked the weight loss, but found themselves with a serotonin deficit-induced snarkiness that nutritionists dubbed \u201cAtkins Attitude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ornish countered all this weight loss success with a fuss-budgety approach of ends not<\/em> justifying the means. Although weight loss might have occurred, he maintained that in the process your arteries got clogged with fat. As you\u2019ll see, this didn\u2019t turn out to be the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last diet you\u2019ll ever need?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you type \u201cdiet books\u201d into the Amazon search bar, you\u2019ll be rewarded with 142,278 selections. You can trim (pardon the pun) this down to a mere 1,598 titles if you choose \u201ctop selling diet books of 2014,\u201d keeping in mind 2014 isn\u2019t over yet and there are likely more to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But today, I\u2019m going to report on a study that should save you the bother of ever buying another diet book in your life. The researchers are physicians from Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. I thought this was a good location for such a study, since Louisiana is the fourth most obese state in the US, with nearly one in three Louisianians officially classified as obese. (Good food<\/a>, though. I feel for them.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers\u2019 goal was simple: if you take as diet goals both weight loss and<\/em> preventing heart disease, which of the two major diets\u2014low-carb or low-fat–gives you the most bang for your buck?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the study, they selected 148 men and women of all races between the ages of 22 and 75. None had evidence of cardiovascular disease or diabetes. Their BMIs (a measure of relative weight to height) ranged from 30 to 45. Keep in mind that all values above 29.9 are officially categorized as obese.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The volunteers were randomly assigned to one of two groups, either the low-carbohydrate (fewer than 40 grams of carbs daily) or the low-fat (less than 30% of calories from fat, with less than 7% from saturated fat). Both groups received counseling at frequent intervals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approximately 80% in both groups completed the year-long study, which is a very good result for studies like these. The important conclusions were published as the lead article in this month\u2019s Annals of Internal Medicine<\/em><\/a>. In comparison to a low-fat diet, those following the low-carb diet:<\/p>\n\n\n\n