A fatty diet can help you lose weight— just make sure you avoid the carbs. According to a new study, those who follow low-carb diets and eat more fat lose more body fat than those who follow a low-fat diet.
Low-carb diets were also linked to a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease. The research found that even those who consumed saturated fat but avoided carbs had reaped healthy benefits.
Published in Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers studied 150 obese men and women ages 22 to 75-years-old and asked them at random to follow a low-carb or low-fat diet for one year. The participants who followed a low-carb diet consumed 30 percent of their daily calories in carbohydrates each day whereas the low-fat group ate 40 to 45 percent of their daily calories from carbs. Both groups were encouraged to eat more vegetables.
The participants did not have to cut calories, but were given nutrition information and support throughout the study. "To my knowledge, this is one of the first long-term trials that's given these diets without calorie restrictions," says Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, but was not involved in the new study.
Researchers found that those who followed the low-carb diet lost more weight than those on the low-fat diet when being measured at month 3, 6 and 12. By the time the study concluded, the low-carb group lost approximately 12 pounds compared to the loss of only 4 pounds of the low-fat group.
"It shows that in a free-living setting, cutting your carbs helps you lose weight without focusing on calories. And that's really important because someone can change what they eat more easily than trying to cut down on their calories," Mozaffarian added.
The study also discovered that HDL "good" cholesterol levels increased among the low-carb group. The low-carb group also had more lean muscle mass, whereas the low-fat group lost more muscle than fat.
"They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing," Mozaffarian says. "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."
Fat, especially saturated fat, has been previously deemed unhealthy. There has been debate over which foods we should be eating for overall health and weight loss. The Atkins diet, a popular low-carb diet, has been criticized for not being exactly heart healthy since low-carb diets are sometimes high in fat. The Atkins diet has also been said to result in water weight loss instead of body fat. The new study eases these concerns.
"Restricting carbohydrates may be an option for persons who are seeking to lose weight and reduce cardiovascular risk factors and should be studied further," the researchers write.
