Low Glycemic load diets DO help create fat loss….

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Today's post: Friday, 4-20-2007

Low Glycemic load diets DO help create fat loss….

A headline in Reuters on line health news yesterday said: “Glycemic Load has no effect on Weight Loss”

And, the abstract or brief preview of the article suggested something similar as well.

But, BEWARE misleading & false headlines.

The study then described proved nothing of the sort.

So the headline was wrong for that reason.

And, two relatively recent other studies prove that the headline is wrong.

Perhaps more important is the fact that people who eat a low glycemic load diet are MUCH healthier than people who eat a high glycemic load diet. There is abundant research on that also.

Roughly speaking the glycemic load of a diet or a meal or a food is a measure of how much effect it has on creating rapid rises in your blood sugar.

Here’s what happened & more precisely why the headline is wrong.

Researchers got two groups of people who were willing to eat what the researchers put on their diet plan – no more & no less.

Each group was then given a diet that was somewhat calorie restricted and had more vegetables in it than the average American now eats.

One group was given foods within the daily calorie restriction but with lower glycemic load foods other than the vegetables. The other was given higher glycemic load foods other than the vegetables but with exactly the same calories.

Both groups then lost the same amount of weight on the scale.

This proves that weight loss on the scale tends to be reliably produced by moderate calorie restriction. That’s already established as mostly true. So that’s not news

(Studies recently show Weight Watchers is one of the most reliable & proven ways to lose weight & fat. And they achieve that precisely because they have worked out a way to make it practical & doable for people to achieve moderate calorie restriction.

But, the people who succeed in sticking with Weight Watchers program figure out that they must eat a lot of nonstarchy, green vegetables -- which are very low in glycemic load; & they do so. Weight Watchers makes it blatantly obvious by assigning such vegetables ZERO points.)

The fact that both groups in the study apparently were able to stay on the diet was because both diet versions had a lot of vegetables; the study period was not long; & the calorie restriction was moderate.

But -- & this is a HUGE but – other studies have found that weight loss & fat loss are NOT the same. The researchers seem NOT to have looked at whether or not there was a difference in the FAT lost between the groups. If the lower glycemic load diet had more protein since protein foods are usually low glycemic foods, other studies suggest strongly the lower glycemic group lost more FAT.

2. Since both groups ate a lot of vegetables which are mostly VERY low glycemic foods, the comparison was between moderately low glycemic load intake & low glycemic load intake.
They didn’t include a third really high glycemic load group. Such a diet would have been unhealthful for the third group for one thing.

3. But here is the real & most forceful reason the headline is false, people who followed a calorie restricted really high glycemic load diet with virtually no vegetables would have dropped out and messed up their study.

Those poor people would simply have gotten too hungry to stay in the study.

In real life, the people who stay trim or who lose fat they keep off permanently do so by eating enough protein; health OK fats & oils; and fiber, mostly from nonstarchy, green vegetables that they can eat this way forever and mostly NOT get hungry or malnourished.

And, protein foods, health OK fats & oils; & foods high in fiber are ALL very low glycemic load foods !!

In this limited time study, the participants in both groups simply ate what they were given.
So, the research did what it did do, yes. But what it clearly did NOT do is show that you can eat other than a low glycemic load diet and stay free of excess body fat.

And, it most definitely did NOT show that you can stay free of excess body fat permanently eating high glycemic load foods.

So, anyone who read the headline & thought that it meant they could lose fat permanently by eating high glycemic load food but just eating less –
and who tried it, would be bitterly disappointed in the long term fat loss they experience.

That notion has been tried by most dieters & most diets. It fails over 95 percent of the time. And, other research shows that people who experience such failures damage their health.

So the headline was not only totally false & misleading it was dangerously so.

Be warned by this post so you don’t get fooled too.