A Call for a Low-Carb Diet

September 2nd, 2014

New York Times, is that really you?

Via: New York Times:

People who avoid carbohydrates and eat more fat, even saturated fat, lose more body fat and have fewer cardiovascular risks than people who follow the low-fat diet that health authorities have favored for decades, a major new study shows.

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By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity.

While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat.

“They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,” Dr. Mozaffarian said. “Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that’s a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.”

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In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides — a type of fat that circulates in the blood — plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group.

First Published in 2005: Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon

Posted in Books, Food, Health | Top Of Page

One Response to “A Call for a Low-Carb Diet”

  1. sharon says:
    September 2, 2014 at 7:30 pm

    A low-carb diet seems to be the answer for many problems. Seems odd–since my grandparents ate biscuits and gravy for breakfast and cornbread and beans for dinner.

    I suspect that at least part of the reason for this is genetic changes in grain crops beginning around 1950, long before GMOs.

    The changes in wheat have been documented in many places–maybe most popularly in “Wheat Belly.” We also know that modern sweet corn was simply unknown before 1950. The old-time “sweet corn” was Country Gentleman or Shoepeg–not nearly as sweet as modern sweet corn varieties.

    It would be interesting to look into pre-GMO genetic (and glycemic) changes in field corn, especially for human consumption.

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