Thursday, July 17, 2008

Atkins wins...or does it...

NEJM published a new study comparing low carb to low fat to Mediterranean diets in their effectiveness in promoting weight-loss and improved lipid regulation. In short, those assigned to the low carb diet lost more weight and saw better lipid numbers than the others. The study is here:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/359/3/229


Dean Ornish, the king advocate of low-fat diets, argues that the "low-fat diet" in the study was hardly low fat at all, and that the "low carb" diet encouraged more non-meat choices than the traditional Atkins-type low carb diet. In other words, the source of the group differences reported in NEJM may be factors that aren't reflected in the labels that the groups were given. Ornish's comments are here:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/146641

1 comment:

John Billimek said...

By the way, this study is getting mad coverage in all the papers, but the slant different papers take is interesting.

The LA Times - July 17: "Low-fat diet not tops for weight loss, study finds" (touts the Atkins diet as the winner over low fat diets)
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-sci-diet17-2008jul17,0,3445866.story


NYT - July 16: "More Evidence That Diets Don’t Work" (refers to Ornish's comments) http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/more-evidence-that-diets-dont-work-2/

Reminds me of a scene from Arrested Development:

Michael: I’ll make some popcorn.

George Michael: Popcorn? Really? Cool. Yeah, the hell with Atkins, huh?

Michael: Oh, yeah. Why blow it now? I’ll fry up some bacon.