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Home » Diets that Work » It's not just how many calories, but what kind, study finds

LOS ANGELES A calorie is a calorie is a calorie or is it?

Maybe not, a small study has found. Once the pounds are shed, the proportions of carbohydrates, proteins and fats you chow down on may determine whether you keep the weight off or slowly but surely pack on pounds again.

In an intensive, seven-month experiment during which 21 overweight men and women had their diets strictly controlled down to each last morsel, researchers showed that a traditional low-fat diet seemed to make the metabolism more sluggish than a high-protein one during the most difficult part of weight loss: keeping fat off once its shed.

The preliminary work, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, provides support for a growing group of scientists who argue that what people eat may be just as key as how much they eat.

In a nutshell, from a metabolic perspective, all calories are not alike, said study senior author Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Childrens Hospital Boston. The quality of the calories going in affects the quantity of the calories going out.

Maintaining weight loss is a challenge that stymies the vast majority of dieters. Only 1 in 6 overweight and obese adults say they have ever held onto a loss of 10 percent body weight or greater for even a year, the team noted in its report.

Scientists knew that weight loss was accompanied by a slowdown in the bodys metabolism. To test whether different foods might influence that, Ludwig and his colleagues recruited overweight and obese adults ages 18 to 40. From 2006 to 2010, they marched the volunteers through several controlled feeding studies.

The 13 men and eight women followed a 12-week weight-loss regimen that helped them shed 10 percent to 15 percent of their body weight followed by a four-week weight-stabilization phase.

After that, each subject was fed three different diets for four weeks at a time: a traditional low-fat diet (60 percent carbohydrates, 20 percent fat and 20 percent protein), a low glycemic index diet (with 40 percent carbs, 40 percent fat and 20 percent protein) and a very low-carbohydrate diet a la Atkins (with 10 percent carbohydrates, 60 percent fat and 30 percent protein).

At the beginning of the study and at the end of each four-week stint, the subjects were hospitalized for three days to undergo a battery of tests. Scientists measured their resting energy expenditure using indirect calorimetry, which assesses gases in the breath to calculate calories burned.

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It's not just how many calories, but what kind, study finds

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Home » Diets that Work » It's not just how many calories, but what kind, study finds