Lowcarbezine!

Low Carb and Calories Revisited

Did you see it? Huh? Huh? On October 13th, Associated Press ran an article, carried in newspapers from coast to coast, detailing a new study that suggests that Dr. Atkins was right all along: People can, indeed, eat more calories on a low carb diet than they could on a mixed, but calorie controlled, diet, and still lose weight. Can't you just hear Dr. Atkins saying "I told you so!" from the Great Beyond?

The study, presented to the American Association for the Study of Obesity, was directed by Penelope Greene of the Harvard School of Public Health. It was paid for by the Atkins Foundation, although the foundation had no control over the design of the study (which is, of course, as it should be.) Here's how it went:

Twenty-one overweight volunteers were divided into three groups. Two groups were given the same number of calories every day - 1500 for women, 1800 for men. One group ate 55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein, and 30 percent fat. The other group ate 5 percent carbohydrate, 5 percent protein, and 65 percent fat. (Notice, by the way, that the percentage of protein remained the same. I've said before that the term "high protein diet" for a low carb diet is misleading. We really eat a high fat diet, and a fine thing it is, too.)

The third group got the same nutrient ratios as the low carb/calorie restricted group - 5 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein, and 65 percent fat - but also got 300 more calories per day - or 1800 calories per day for women, and 2100 calories per day for men. Since the study lasted about 3 months, those extra calories added up to 25,000 per customer, or about 7 pounds, if the old 3500-calories-equal-a-pound-of-fat theory of dieting holds strictly true.

The food was supplied for the participants at an upscale Italian restaurant, which sure sounds like a nice way to diet. Every day the participants picked up their dinner, and the next day's breakfast and lunch. The meals looked similar, but were prepared using different recipes. Interestingly, the low carb meals were light on the red meat, heavy on the fish, chicken, salads, and vegetable oils - hardly the "nothing but bacon and cheeseburgers" image many people have of the Atkins diet.

So what happened? Everybody lost weight. The folks on the high carb diet lost an average of 17 pounds, while the low carb/low calorie diet group lost an average of 23 pounds. But what about the folks who got the extra 300 calories a day? They lost an average of 20 pounds apiece.

This appears to be confounding the medical weight loss establishment - comments like "It violates the laws of thermodynamics" and "hard to believe" have been bandied about. Some have tried to explain away the results by suggesting the higher calorie/low carb group was less hungry, and so cheated less, or perhaps got more exercise.

A few thoughts come to mind looking at this study, and the reactions to it.

First of all, the skeptics all sound as if there had never been any previous demonstrations of this calorie-wasting effect of a low carbohydrate diet - yet there have been several studies, starting with Kekwick and Pawan, two well-established and respected English scientists who, back in the 1950s and '60s, showed that people who lost slowly on a diet with as few as 1,000 calories per day when those calories were largely carbohydrate, lost weight easily when those 1,000 calories were protein and especially fat.

Kekwick and Pawan did a second experiment in which they found that on a carb-containing diet of 2,000 calories per day, subjects did not lose at all, but that they did lose weight eating as much as 2,600 calories per day when the carbs were omitted. Then, as now, the medical establishment tried to come up with reasons why Kekwick and Pawan's results couldn't possibly be correct. I sometimes wonder where we'd be now if, instead of trying to explain away Kekwick and Pawan's work, medical researchers had set to work on discovering the mechanism involved.

(To see an abstract of one of Kekwick and Pawan's published studies, go to the Atkins site, here: http://atkins.com/Archive/2002/1/11-175782.html )

Far more recently, and most dramatically, a study of the effect of a low fat/high carb diet versus a low carb/high fat diet on weight loss in obese adolescents was done at Schneider's Children's Hospital in New Hyde Park, NY. To the great surprise of the skeptics, not only did the kids on a low carb/high fat diet have a greater improvement in blood work than the kids on the high carb/low fat diet, but the low carb kids lost twice as much weight as the low fat kids - while eating 66% more calories, on average, than the kids on the high carb/low fat diet.

So this shock and amazement at the results of this new study are, shall we say, somewhat misplaced. It's already pretty clear that - despite cries of "the laws of thermodynamics!" - a low carb diet does, indeed, confer some sort of metabolic advantage. It's time for the medical establishment to stop trying to prove that the earth is really flat, and to start studying just exactly how this calorie-wasting mechanism works.

Secondly, it seems to me that the low carbers who got the extra 300 calories per day weren't really needed to show some sort of metabolic advantage. After all, the low carbers who ate the same number of calories as the low fat group lost an average of 6 pounds more than the low fat dieters, fully a 35 percent greater weight loss. You'd think that right there was enough to demonstrate an advantage - some difference in the number of calories burned between the two groups.

Thirdly, I'd like to point out that the low carbers who were eating more calories were still eating a reasonable number of calories, as were the subjects in all the studies that demonstrate a metabolic advantage for a low carb diet. There is every reason to think that a low carb diet will allow us to eat enough calories so that we can feel satisfied and comfortable, and still lose weight. There is no research I am aware of indicating that we can eat unlimited calories and still lose weight. Eat 7,000 calories per day, and the chances are you will not lose weight, and may even gain, even if you're eating a very low carbohydrate diet.

And finally, I'm glad that this study dents the reputation of a low carb diet as being composed only of red meat and butterfat. Despite the constant cracks about pork rinds and bacon, it seems to finally be coming to the public attention that a low carb diet embraces a wide variety of healthy foods, including fish and poultry, vegetables and low sugar fruit, nuts and seeds, monounsaturated oils, and, yes, red meat, eggs, butter, and cheese.

I only hope that this study, coming, as it has, when the whole world seems to have discovered the benefits of a low carb diet, will finally lead to the research needed to determine why a low carbohydrate diet speeds calorie burning, instead of another long and tedious debate about why the results of the study can't possibly be true.

Posted by HoldTheToast at October 22, 2003 08:38 PM