I read an awful lot of studies on nutrition, supplements, and so forth per my job, most not really worth noting here on BZ. Not that they are bad studies per se, but they don’t really tend to tell us anything we don’t already know or add much to the body of knowledge. Once in a while a study comes out that really deserves some discussion, and this is one of those. The most common criticisms of such nutritional studies are they don’t run long enough to really see the differences between diets, and or, they’re not large enough to see differences between groups. Other criticisms are a lack of focus on the quality of the foods ingested. These and other criticisms often result in people ignoring the findings of various studies that examine say one dietary approach vs another on end points such as weight loss.

One of the big debates in nutrition is a low carb vs low fat diet on weight loss. This recent study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA. 2018;319(7):667-679) had over 600 adults, attempted to focus on the quality of the food, and ran 12 months! The study also examined genotype pattern and insulin secretion. Frankly, I’m surprised this one has not gotten more attention than it did, but I suspect that’s due to the results, but I digress…

The mean macronutrient distributions in the healthy low fat was diet (HLF) vs the healthy low carb diet (HLC), respectively, were 48% vs 30% for carbohydrates, 29% vs 45% for fat, and 21% vs 23% for protein. So obviously not a keto diet per se, but still a substantial macro nutrient difference in F/C to parse out the differences. It’s also important to note the protein intakes were essentially the same. Another common criticism of nutritional studies is they often fail to match protein intakes between groups, then claim the effects were due to the differences in fat or carbs!

So what were the results? Pretty much what I had expected. When the source calories are healthy, isocaloric, and protein the same between groups, the effects are essentially the same. The HLF diet group lost 5.3 kg vs the HLC diet group that lost 6.0 kg, “…and there was no significant diet-genotype interaction or diet-insulin interaction with 12-month weight loss.”

Cont:

https://brinkzone.com/low-carb-vs-lo...r-weight-loss/