What The New “Low-Carb” Study REALLY Says

A news media feeding frenzy erupted recently when a new diet study broke in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Almost all the reporters got it wrong, wrong WRONG! So did most of the gloating low carb forumites and bloggers. Come to think of it, almost everyone interpreted this study wrong. Some valuable insights came out of this study, but almost everyone missed them because they were too busy believing what the news said or defending their own cherished belief systems …

The New England Journal of Medicine

The new study, titled, “Weight Loss With a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet” was published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in issue 359, number 3.

I quickly read the full text of the research paper the day it was published. Then, I shook my head in dismay as I scanned the news headlines. I found it amusing that the media turned this into a three ring circus, putting a misleading “low carb versus high carb,” “Atkins vindicated” or “Diet wars” spin on the story. But that’s mainstream journalism for you, right? Gotta sell those papers!

Just look at some of these headlines:

“Study Tips Scales in Atkins Diets Favor: Low Carb Regimen Better Than Low Fat Diet For Weight And Cholesterol, Major Study Shows. “

“Low-Carb and Low-Fat Diets Face Off “ “The Never-Ending Diet Wars” “Low Carb Beats Low Fat in Diet Duel.” “Atkins Diet is Safe and Far More Effective Than a Low-Fat One, Study Says” “Unrestricted Low-Carb Diet Wins Hands Down” Some of these headlines are hilarious! I wonder if any of these reporters actually read the whole study. Geez. Is it too much trouble to read 13 pages before you write a story that will be read by millions of already confused people suffering the pain and frustration of obesity?

Here’s a quick look at the study design.

The low fat restricted calorie diet was based on American Heart Association guidelines. Calorie intake was set at 1500 for women, 1800 a day for men with 30% of calories from fat, and only 10% from saturated fat. Participants were instructed to eat low fat grains, vegetables, fruits and legumes and to limit their consumption of additional fats, sweets and high fat snacks.

The Mediterranean diet group was placed on a moderate fat, restricted calorie program rich in vegetables and low in red meat, with poultry and fish replacing beef and lamb. Energy intake was restricted to 1500 calories per day for women and 1800 calories per day for men with a goal of no more than 35% of calorie from fat. Added fat came mostly from nuts and olive oil.

The low carb diet was a non-restricted calorie plan aimed at providing 20 grams of carbs per day for the 2 month induction phase with a gradual increase to 120 grams per day to maintain the weight loss. Intakes of total calories, protein and fat were not limited. However, the participants were counseled to choose vegetarian sources of protein (more on that bizarre-twist shortly).

The study subjects were mostly male (86%), overweight (BMI 31) and middle age (mean age 52)

Here were the study results:

There were some health improvements in cholesterol, blood pressure and other parameters in the Mediterranean and low carb group that bested the high carb group. That was the focus of many articles and discussions that appeared on the net this week. However, I’d like to focus on the weight loss aspect as I’m not a medical doctor and fat loss is the primary subject matter of this website. All three groups lost weight. The low carb group lost 5.5 kilos, the Mediterranean group lost 4.6 kilos and the low fat group lost 3.3 kilograms…. IN TWO YEARS! Whoopee!

My conclusion would be that the results were similar and that none of the diets worked very well over the long term!

Amanda Gardner of the US News and World Report Health Day was one of the few reporters who got it right:

“Diet plans produce similar results: Study finds Mediterranean and low-carb diets work just as well as low fat ones.”

Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times also came close with her headline:

“Long term diet study suggests success is hard to come by: In a tightly controlled experiment, obese people lost an average of just 6 to 10 pounds over two years.”

Even this headline wasn’t 100% accurate. The study was HARDLY tightly controlled. Tightly controlled means metabolic ward studies where the researchers actually count and control the calorie intake.

The problem is, you can’t lock people in a hospital or research center ward for two years. So in this study, they used a food frequency questionnaire. Sure, like we believe what people report about their eating habits at restaurants and at home behind closed doors! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

“No! I swear Dr. Schwarzfuchs! I swear I didn’t eat those donuts over the weekend! I stayed on my Mediterranean diet. Honest!”

One of the most firmly established facts in dietetics research is that almost everyone underreports their food intake BADLY, sometimes by as much as 50%. I’m not saying everyone “lies,” they just forget or don’t know. In fact, this underreporting of calorie intake is such a huge problem that it makes obesity research very difficult to do and conclusions difficult to draw from free-living studies. Another blunder in the news reports is that this study didn’t really follow Atkins diet parameters OR even the traditional low fat diet for that matter, so it’s not an “Atkin’s versus Ornish” showdown at all. If you actually take the time to read the full text of the research paper it doesn’t say ANYTHING like, “Atkins is the best after all.” That’s the spin that some of the news media cooked up (and what the Atkins foundation was hoping for). It says, “The diet was based on the Atkins diet.” However, the sentence right before that says, “The participants were counseled to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein.” Vegetarian Atkins? The chart on page 236 says the low carb diet provided 40% of calories from carbs at 6, 12 and 24 months. If I’m reading that data properly, then the only low carb period was a brief induction phase in the very beginning. Does that sound like Atkins? 40% carb sounds more like the Zone diet or my own Burn The Fat program to me.

The Atkins Foundation, which partially supported this study, told reporters, “We feel vindicated.” HA! They should have paid the reporters and told the researchers they felt ripped off and they wanted a refund for misuse of their research grant!

After carefully reading the full text of this study, there are many interesting findings we could talk about, from the differences in results between men and women to the improvements in health markers. Here’s what the study really says that stood out to me. It’s what I would have talked about if the newspapers or TV stations had called me:

1. “Mediterranean and low carb diets may be effective alternatives to low-fat diets.”

I can agree completely with that statement. All three diets created a calorie deficit. All three groups lost weight. Low carb lost a little more, which is the usual finding because low carb diets often control appetite and calorie intake automatically (you eat less even if you don’t count calories). Also, if body composition is not indicated, there’s an initial water weight loss that makes low carb diets look more effective in the very early stages.

2. “Personal preferences and metabolic considerations might inform individualized tailoring of dietary interventions.”

Absolutely! Nutrition should be individualized based on goals, health status, body type, activity level and numerous other factors. Different people have different phenotypes. Some people are more predisposed to thrive on a low carb approach. Others feel like crap on low carbs and do better with more carbs or a middle of the road approach. Those who dogmatically follow and defend one type of diet or the other are only handcuffing themselves by limiting their options. Iris Shai, a researcher in the study said, “We can’t rely on one diet fits all.” Hmm, far cry from “Atkins wins hands down,” wouldn’t you say?

3. “The rate of adherence to a study diet was 95.4% at 1 year and 84.6% at 2 years.”

THIS was the part of most interest to me. When I read this, immediately I could have cared less about the silly low carb versus high carb wars that the news reporters were jumping on. I wanted to know WHY the subjects were able to stick with it so well. Of course, that’s boring stuff to journalists… adherence? What does that word mean anyway? Yawn – not interesting enough for prime time, I guess. But it was interesting to me, and I hope YOU pay attention to what I found. The authors of the study wrote:

“This trial suggests a model that might be applied more broadly in the workplace. Using the employer as a health coach could be an effective way to improve health. The model of group intervention with the use of dietary group sessions, spousal support, food labels, and monthly weighing in the workplace within the framework of a health promotion campaign might yield weight reduction and long term health benefits.”

Hmmmmm, lets see: * Dietician coaching
* Group meetings
* Motivational phone calls
* Spousal support
* Workplace monitoring (corporate health program)
* Food labels – calorie monitoring
* Weigh-ins (required and monitored)

Wow, everything helpful to long term fat loss that sticks. Can you say, ACCOUNTABILITY? These factors help explain the better adherence.

By the way, the adherence rate for the low carb group was the lowest.

90.4% in low fat group
85.3% in the Mediterranean group
78% in the low carb group

Here’s the bottom line, the way I see it:

First, please, please, please learn how to find and read primary research and take the news media stories with a grain of salt. If you want to know who died, what burned down or what hurricane is coming, tune in to the news – they do a GREAT job at that. If you want to know how to lose weight or improve your health, look up the original research papers instead of taking second hand information at face value.

Second, those who prefer a low carb approach; more power to them. Most studies, this one included, show at the very least that low carb is an option and it’s not necessarily an unhealthy one if done intelligently. I also have no qualms with someone claiming that low carb diets are slightly more effective for weight loss, especially in the short term, free living situations. Is low carb superior for fat loss in the long haul? That’s STILL highly debatable. It’s probably superior for some people, but not for others.

Third, low carb people, listen up! Even if low carb is superior, that doesn’t mean calories don’t count. Deny this at your own peril. In fact, this study shows the reverse. The low carb group was in a larger negative energy balance than the high carb and Mediterranean group (according to the data published in this paper), which easily explains the greater weight loss. Posting the calories contained in foods in the cafeteria may have improved the results and helped with compliance in all groups.

When energy intake is matched calorie for calorie, the advantage of a low carb diet shrinks or disappears. For most people, low carb is a hunger management or calorie control weight loss advantage, not metabolic magic (sorry, no magic folks!)

Fourth, choose the nutrition program that’s most appropriate for your personal preferences, your current health condition, your genetics (or phenotype) and most important of all… the one you can stick with. Then tend your own garden instead of wasting time criticizing how the other guy is eating. Your results will speak for themselves in the end. Take your shirt off and show us.

If I were forced to choose only one approach (and thank god I’m not), I would recommend avoiding the extremes of very low carb or very low fat or very high fat or very high carbs. Balance makes the most sense to me, and the research suggests that this helps produce the highest compliance rate. That’s not rocket science either, it’s common sense. If you have a serious fat loss goal, as when I compete in bodybuilding, then a further reduction in carbs and increase in protein makes perfect sense to me as a peaking diet. If an extremely low or extremely high carb diet worked for you, great. But generalizing your experience to the entire rest of the world makes no sense. Arguing from extremes is the weakest form of argument. The reason I have THREE nutrition plans (three phases) in my own fat loss program is because programs with flexibility and room for individualization beat the others hands down in the long term. In fact, I wrote an entire chapter in my e-book about unique body types, how to determine yours and how to individualize your nutrition – it’s THAT important. If you have more choices, you have more power. The people who are shackled by dogma and narrow thinking are stuck. They also risk missing what’s really important. Things like: Personalization
Adherence
Long-term Maintenance
Accountability
Social Support

and…

CALORIES!

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto CSCS, NSCA-CPT
Fat Loss Coach
www.OfficialBurnTheFat.com
PS. If you want to learn more about a balanced, flexible and proven approach, which teaches nutritional individuality and which can produce similar weight loss in one month, month after month, that the subjects of this study produced in TWO YEARS, (if you ADHERE to it!), then visit my fat loss website.

About the Author:

Weight loss is neither too easy nor too hard. In fact, weight loss is what you make it to be. You can follow the ‘easy’ route of quick fix solutions and lose a few pounds in an instant, only to gain them back in the next month or so. Or you can follow the relatively ‘harder’ route of diet and exercise and lose weight permanently. But this is not where the buck stops. There are a few more things you need to do in order to lose weight. In this article I will give you four tips on how to lose weight easily!

1. Reward yourself: Motivation plays a big part when it comes to weight loss. If you aren’t motivated enough to follow your diet program, you won’t follow it. In order to motivate yourself, you need to set milestones and incentives for yourself. Whenever you reach a milestone, reward yourself with an incentive. It has been proven that the human mind reacts positively to any kind of incentive.

So let’s say that after a month’s hard work, you lose eight or ten pounds (the number will vary based on your metabolic rate). You have reached a milestone, and now you can reward yourself. By reward, I don’t mean food. Besides eating, there are a lot of things you can do to please yourself. For example, you may buy a pair of jeans that are a size smaller than your previous set. As you wear those jeans, you will feel proud of your accomplishments with regards to weight loss; this will in turn motivate you to pursue your weight loss goals even further! You may also pamper yourself at a spa!

2. Don’t eat at restaurants: I know it is easier said than done, but if you are really serious about weight loss, you need to do it. The reason I recommend avoiding restaurants is that you never know how many calories are contained in the foods you are consuming. By contrast, if you cook food at your home, you will have much better control over the ingredients. Whenever at restaurant, it is best to satiate yourself with low-calorie salads and lean chicken meat!

3. Keep only healthy foods at home: However much you try, you cannot change your food habits if your refrigerator is stocked with junk foods. You need to remove those junk foods from your home and replace them with healthy foods. Thus there is no chance of you ever ’straying’ from your weight loss vows!

4. Try exercises that you enjoy: Don’t ever make the mistake of doing workouts that you don’t enjoy yourself; otherwise, it would be nothing short of torture. If you don’t enjoy exercising, fine, you can start walking instead! Also, if you enjoy any outdoor sports, do that!

You should also try the calorie shifting diet found at www.calorieshiftingtheory.com. This diet shifts the types of calories you eat each day, but you can eat as much as you want.

By Holly Rigsby, CPT
www.thetopsolutions.com/FitYummyMummy/

“I’ll Begin When….”
Sound familiar? Waiting for the right time to begin your fat loss program?
I’m wondering something….

What is the magic in waiting?
What do you expect will suddenly be different one week, two weeks, a month from now?

As Busy Moms – there will always be too much to do. And guess what….there is no “perfect time” – except the time that you can take RIGHT NOW – to make a firm decision to begin something that is Overflowing with benefits into your life and the lives of your family.

If I told you that you could…

~ Have more energy
~ Eliminate cravings
~ Dramatically reduce stress
~ Drop a Jean Size
~ Feel good about yourself again

Would you smile, look me in the eye and say….”No thanks, not right now, the time just isn’t right” Huh…?

If not now -to Look and Feel great…. then when? And when that time arrives….what is to prevent you from making the exact same statement? Then you look up to find another year has passed!

So what are you hoping to accomplish by putting off what you deserve to have right now?

It is quite unfortunate that during the holiday season, on the cusp of the New Year where “resolutioners” come out of their sedentary lifestyles for a brief moment as they promise…”This time I will lose weight” – only to find themselves defeated yet again as they quickly revert back to old habits.

It’s pretty obvious that this approach just does not work. Taking the easy route, the route that allows us to stay with unsupportive, familiar habits is giving us nothing in return – in fact it is draining and taking away your 3 sources power … your valuable time, money and energy.

Super Busy Mom, Sarah Z. came to an amazing realization…

“One of the things that has been holding me back was needing to feel like everything was ‘in place’ (more or less) before I took the time to exercise.

I felt like I had to ‘have time’ to exercise.

Nope, I’ve got to make time, I know…but now I know what that really means.

It means making time to do it REGARDLESS OF THE CHAOS around me. I am now starting to visualize a messy house (not too hard a stack of piles waiting for me — and me exercising anyway — and then tacking all that stuff AFTER I’ve exercised.”

This is a brilliant realization and one you need to take to heart, moms.

“Your actions express your priorities”

What statement are you making about what matters most to you if you put it on the back burner?

Moms – It’s Time! Time to make your health and fitness, your ability to reclaim your pre-baby body, your ability to look in the mirror and feel good about what you see a Priority starting today. Fit Yummy Mummy is your solution to putting your priorities into action.

Holly Rigsby, CPT, MAT America’s #1 Fat Loss Expert for Busy Moms and the author of Fit Yummy Mummy.  Holly has worked with over 300 Mom’s to help them lose the stubborn baby fat, get their pre-baby body back and reclaim their yummy-ness.

By Rob Poulos, Fat Loss & Fitness Expert & Author of “Fat Burning Furnace“

I was puttering around on the internet this morning and I saw something that caught my eye.  It was the latest data regarding our current life expectancy as humans from the World Health Organization, along with a history of how that’s changed over the years.

This info went all the way back to the Neanderthal period (the guys from the Geico commercials) up to present day humans. Those poor Geico guys only lived to be 20 years old on average, while today’s humans can expect about 75 years of life.

But did you know that today’s people have an average healthy life expectancy of just 67 years?  In other words, this is saying that you can expect 8 years of your life in poor health.  8 years!  That’s 2900+ days of poor health.  I don’t know about you, but that’s not something I’m looking forward to.

I sure think we can do better than 67 years of good health on  this planet.  And you know what?  We can.  This number is an average.  Like anything else, you don’t have to be average if you don’t want to be.  The average person doesn’t exercise properly, if at all.  The average person doesn’t know how to make the right foods selections and maintain a healthy diet.  The average person doesn’t apply themselves mentally and emotionally to maintain relatively stress free living.

If this sounds a little bit too much like you, the good news is you don’t have to be this person any longer.  While it is a shame that today’s health, fitness, and diet industry is simply confusing more people than it’s helping, there are a few people and organizations out there that can provide a realistic, effective and efficient approach to breaking past the average healthy life span and living those years full of energy, strength, and vitality.

I get questions from my Fat Burning Furnace readers all the time, after going through the FBF materials, about how they can’t believe how little exercise I recommend.  And even though I’ve told them up front that they can let go of the aerobics or traditional cardio, many still have trouble doing that.  And what I tell them is directly related to the subject of life expectancy and just how much time we really have in our lives.

I tell them that having a lean, strong, and healthy body is great.  It’s one of the most important things we can attain. Period.  But, how much time is it worth to you?  That’s the question I asked myself over and over when seeking out my own methods and developing the FBF methods.

Most people, after years and years of trial and error, come to realize that spending several days and hours a week working out is just not worth the trouble.  And carefully measuring your food, counting calories, and depriving yourself of nutrient rich foods like whole grain carbohydrates is also something that shouldn’t be necessary to enjoy a healthy and energy filled life.  And it isn’t.

What we really should be focusing on is how much time and effort is minimally required to get the results we’re looking for. Think about that.  Not how much, but how much is minimally required.  Remember, we’ve got just 67 healthy years as a starting point…If I valued my time on this planet, this is what I would be searching for.

If it really took hours and hours a week and all of that crazy nutrition manipulation to burn fat, build muscle, strength, and cardiovascular health, I’m not sure I’d do it.  Not for very long anyway.  I’ve tried that approach, for years, and if you have you know it’s no fun.  And it’s just not realistic given the demands our lives place on us in today’s world.

But as I’ve mentioned before, you don’t have to worry about that kind of stuff anymore.  The principles in my FBF system allow you to approach your genetic potential for a lean, strong, and healthy body in just minutes each week and with very simple lifestyle changes.

I’ve been using the FBF principles for a while now.  I work out twice each week.  I even take a week off entirely every few weeks or so.  I don’t count calories.  I don’t deprive myself of the foods I love.  If it’s my daughter’s birthday, I eat a piece of cake.  I just work the FBF principles and continue to stay in great shape day after day, week after week, year after year.

I work out so little because of the way the workouts are performed and created, and I eat with such flexibility because I stick with the FBF lifestyle, which gives you the power of flexibility and variation that is lacking in most programs.

What I’m saying is that I’ve discovered what is minimally required to give me the health and body that I wanted.  And many of my FBF students are doing it as well.  Sure I could add another day a week to my workouts, but at this point it would actually be detrimental to my results.  I could also start messing with my diet in all sorts of crazy ways, but that would just make my body angry and cause me unneeded stress.

So, I ask you, are you trying to find what’s minimally required to get you the results you want?  If you truly value your time and the other worthy pursuits in your life, I’m suggesting that this is exactly what you should be doing.  If you don’t, you may just end up being an average 67 year old with 8 years of poor health to look forward to.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

A new breakthrough secret is all you now need in order to forever shed countless pounds, stay healthy, and add many years to your life!

A lady doctor from Arizona has blown the lid off the best-kept secret in weight loss ever discovered — and this has the whole diet food and drug industries turned upside down and in nothing less than a torrential uproar.

Her name is Dr Suzanne Gudakunst, and she’s marching to the beat of a different drum.

And no, nothing about her “secret” is difficult — nor does it require that you do something completely out of the ordinary or anything unnatural.

Instead, the Arizonian boasts proudly “…this is something that I caught onto just before 2002 when there was so much research and exploration going around concerning the human colon and digestive system working in harmony with nutritional absorption, and I started doing independent studies just to test things at first … but which I later expanded on after seeing some fantastic results.”

This same woman medical practitioner went on to accurately determine a definitive correlation between harmful plague and parasitic infestations of the human bowel tract, and people suffering chronic obesity — and who despite intense diet and exercise appeared to be unable to lose any weight whatsoever.

Over the course of six years the Arizona doctor developed a number of natural treatments for the removal of these same harmful, even life-threatening plaques and rapidly reproducing digestive parasites — and when applied to even worse-case patients suffering extreme obesity (98% of which were in immediate danger of dying) she saw a 100% effectiveness and success rate.

She then borrowed from her research on the severely obese, and applied the same strategies on milder cases of overweight persons — only to find the same effectiveness and quality results as described above (although the individual weight loss per subject wasn’t nearly as much as those obese patients 100 lbs to 200 lbs or more overweight).

So powerful is her secret that she’s able to reverse diabetes, rid illness altogether in people suffering from cancer (linked directly to poor diet and overweight factors), as well as an elimination of an entire spectrum of serious and otherwise life-threatening diseases.

Nearly 100% of all her case subjects were told in the alternative by “conventional doctors” that they either had just months or years to live, or they would never live a life anything resembling remotely a “normal” existence — yet after applying Dr Suzanne’s treatments saw a complete contradiction to others doctors’ prognoses.

Again, nothing about her secret is unnatural or requires someone to do any major action or modification in their lives.

In fact, her entire treatment is based completely on built-into-nature ‘protection agents’ scattered throughout the world in the form of select herbs, extracts, and organic constituents, and which can be found in a variety of plants — but when combined in specific combinations and carefully chosen amounts make for a solution to what is perhaps the world’s worst ever plague: OBESITY (and the illnesses and diseases resulting from it — or at least severely aggravated or exacerbated by it).

Now to everyone else’s great gain, whether suffering from just a few extra pounds and inches, to those extremely fat and overweight, this brave, bold lady doctor is releasing to the general public her secret for forever destroying the tight unrelenting closed-fist of obesity’s stronghold over the now more than 40% of Americans labeled obese, and others worldwide.

But she’s not promising any of us for how long.

Some experts and sociologists suggest that in the bigger scheme of things, the world will never tolerate a discovery of such magnitude, any more than it would be realistic to expect a car that runs on water (even if very real) to ever become commercially available to the general public for day-to-day use.

One well-respected and famous diet & wellness author wrote years ago that if anyone ever “truly unlocked the keys to permanent fat loss, they may actually suffer the same fate as JFK.”

It is currently available at:

=> http://topsecret.fat-loss-solutions.info

…so you may want to head on over there now and get it and before someone or “something” gets it forever yanked out of ever getting in YOUR hand at least.

It’s in a very easily readable format and is quickly and readily understood and mastered by anyone with even a 4th grade reading level.

While you’re there, why not scroll down and review for yourself the huge successes others are now having with this incredible breakthrough in rapid, massive weight loss and extremely improved and enhanced health, now made freely available to the rest of us?