Managing your weight can prove extremely tricky as anyone conscious of their expanding waist line or sudden need for a larger size clothing size can appreciate. It seems though that for those of us engaged on a longer-term weight loss programme, not eating fat might not be the wisest move.
A research team led by Dr. Deirdre Tobias at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital appear to have uncovered a salient feature of prolonged dieting – that higher fat, lower carbohydrate diets are better for you than the low-fat or no-fat diet. In fact, consuming a certain amount of fat regularly is more helpful to reducing weight which seems counter-intuitive.
The team assessed the data from 53 diet-based studies covering 68,000 subjects. They compared long-term weight loss in those following low-fat diets against other diet regimes which lasted more than a year. The findings were mixed. Their conclusion was that low-fat diets were not as effective as the low-carbohydrate ones when it came to weight loss that was put into practice over a year. There was about 1.15 kg more weight loss with a low-carb diet compared to the low-fat type.
Low-fat diets do work however. They resulted in approximately 5.41kg more weight loss than if the dieter followed their usual diet but it could also be argued that a low-fat diet was only slightly better for us than no diet at all.
The researchers concluded:-
“Health and nutrition guidelines should cease recommending low-fat diets for weight loss in view of the clear absence of long-term efficacy when compared with other similar intensity dietary interventions.”
It appears than that the evidence for recommending a low-fat diet is not justified when better alternatives for weight management exist. It would also appear that following a low-fat diet meant removing some highly nutritious foods from the list such as avocados, salmon, eggs, the oily fish like mackerel or salmon. In fact, these types of food should be part of the healthy diet rather than scoffing foods which may be posited as low-fat but contain high carbohydrate loads that contribute to weight gain.
Dieting makes many of us conscious about the food we are eating and we tend to feel much more hungry than usual. Fat apparently takes longer to digest in the stomach so dieters can feel much more full after meal and so reduce the total volume they consume.
It would be better to follow a diet which cuts out as much processed foods, sugar and trans-fat as possible, consume fruits and vegetables, reduces portion sizes and of course to exercise regularly.
Tobias, D. K., Chen, M., Manson, J.E. et al. (2015) Effect of low-fat diet interventions versus other diet interventions on long-term weight change in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet: Diabetes & Endocrinology, 3 (12), pp. 968 – 979 Published online October 29th, 2015 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(15)00367-8
Leave a Reply