Adopting a low-fat diet and foregoing guilty pleasures such as crisps and fry-ups may not be the best way to slim, a study has found. For the last 25 years, BWH ranked second in research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) among independent hospitals.
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Low-fat diets do not yield greater weight loss than other slimming regimes, said a study Friday, adding to the long-running debate on how best to shed extra pounds or kilos.
“There is no good evidence for recommending low-fat diets”, says lead author Dr Deirdre Tobias from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
Another diet bites the dust after research shows a low-fat regime is not better for long-term weight loss. “Additional research is needed to identify optimum intervention strategies for long-term weight loss and weight maintenance, including the need to look beyond variations in macronutrient composition”. Hall pointed out that there’s little high-quality evidence that “whole food diets” work for weight loss, and, more important, people have a lot of difficulty sticking to new eating patterns of any kind over the longer term. Rather, there are a variety of weight-loss plans and “there isn’t one that floats to the surface as the optimal diet for weight loss”.
Twenty of the trials included specifically enrolled patients with chronic diseases and 35 were designed specifically to compare weight loss interventions; 13 of the trials had no intended intervention for weight loss, and five were created to maintain a certain body weight.
“The issue is that they need to be easy to follow and easy to maintain and often people start off on diets, particularly fad diets and then they can’t continue them for the required amount of time”.
How aggressive the intervention was also varied by study. A few of the studies attempted to restrict calories as well.
But studies examining low-fat diets didn’t always show that they were more effective than other types of diets.
“Energy balance calculations suggest that at the point of maximum weight loss, diet adherence has already substantially waned”, he wrote.
Cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra said: “This analysis confirms that dietary advice to reduce the intake of fat and increase the consumption of starchy carbohydrates has been a complete and utter failure for tackling obesity”. The same was true for when the difference in serum triglycerides was at least 0.06 mmol/L (17 comparisons; 1.38 kg, 95% CI 0.50-2.25; I=62%).
The results are so abysmal, in fact, that doctors are now at a loss about what specific advice they should give people who want to lose weight. “That’s not the real challenge”.
“These benefits are attenuated but not lost if weight is regained”.
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The findings published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology looked at all previous studies from clinical trials that compared the long term effect lasting longer than one year of low-fat and higher-fat dietary interventions.
