Bad carbs do prevent fat loss....

Today's post: Monday, 3-2-2009

Last week the major online new services had a news story that said that what mattered in weight loss and fat loss was the number of calories and that high protein, high carb, or high fat was less important.

Unfortunately unless you read what they actually studied, this headline is extremely misleading.

Here’s why. All three groups in their study ate some version of the DASH diet -- with plentiful fruits and vegetables, some nonfat and very lowfat dairy foods, and with fatty meats eliminated or nearly so. AND, all three groups had their intake of soft drinks, high fructose sweetened foods, refined grain foods, and sugar eliminated. Plus all three groups did regular exercise.

All three groups had their caloric intake cut moderately.

But even the one of their 3 groups that had a bit more fruit and whole grain foods and less protein or less olive oil ( the “high” carb diet in their study), had had their carb intake severely cut back when compared to people who still ingest soft drinks, high fructose sweetened foods, refined grain foods, and sugar several times a day.

Compared to most people, if you only eat other health OK foods and do NOT eat or ingest soft drinks, high fructose sweetened foods, refined grain foods, and sugar, you are on a low carb diet compared to what you were doing before.

And, all three of these groups that did successfully lose fat and weight no longer ingested this stuff. Plus they made sure to cut back their total calories just a bit AND they exercised regularly.

This also ignores the research that shows that eating health OK protein and green unstarchy vegetables turns off your hunger better than whole grains and whole fruit.

That means that compared to these 3 groups adding a bit more health OK protein foods and green unstarchy vegetables to the moderately restricted diets means that, had they tested that long term, they would have found that group kept off the weight and fat and continued on the program better. But this was not a long term study.

But of most importance, this study DID show that deleting the worst and least nutritious bad carb foods from your diet enough to get a moderate calorie reduction and doing regular exercise was effective in producing fat loss.

That means that even though the headlines did NOT say so, this study found that eliminating bad carbs and adding regular exercise was important and produced reliable fat loss.

This study DID show that removing the bad carbs produced fat loss.