Low fat diets not as effective as low carb or Mediterranean diets

A major new study has claimed that low-fat diets are not as effective for losing weight as following low-carb or Mediterranean diets, which are high-fat.
The study, published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology journal, also concludes that no diet works particularly well over the long-term.
53 long-term studies carried out from 1960 onwards were analysed by the researchers, comparing more than 68,000 people’s diets, and concluded that the ‘traditional’ advice of cutting out fat in order to lose weight is wrong.
One of the problems with low-fat food is that it often includes unhealthy amounts of sugar to bulk it up and improve the taste. Sugar is increasingly blamed for the obesity epidemic and the rise of type 2 diabetes, so therefore low-fat diets are not as healthy as people thought.
Certain diets were said to be more effective than others, such as the low-carb high-fat Atkins diet, although no diets worked effectively over a long period of time, the researchers said.
The research indicated that sustained weight loss was generally experienced for approximately six months when following a diet, but after this point, most people do not lose more weight, whilst some people even put the weight back on once they stopped dieting.
In weight-loss trials, people following a low-carb diet lost, on average, 2.2lbs more than people following a low-fat diet.
The study’s leader, Dr Deirdre Tobias, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said: “There is no good evidence for recommending low-fat diets.”
“Behind current dietary advice to cut out the fat, which contains more than twice the calories per gram of carbohydrates and protein, the thinking is that simply reducing fat intake will naturally lead to weight loss. But our robust evidence clearly suggests otherwise.”
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and American Diabetes Association.