more hair pulling

Fuck. Just fuck. Fucking fuck!

The Study

"Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance"

A controlled clinical (got that!) study designed to test the effect of dietary composition on energy expenditure. YES! That is awesome.

3 diets were tested on 21 overweight and obese young adults between 6/16/2006 and 6/21/2010. After the subjects lost 10-15% of weight consuming a calorie restricted diet, the subjects then went on another calorie restricted diet but with different compositions,

• Diet A - 60% carbohydrate, 20% fat, 20% protein
• Diet B - 40% carbohydrate, 40% fat, 20% protein
• Diet C - 10% carbohydrate, 60% fat, 30% protein

Diet C is very low carb. Yes!

Now HERE'S THE KICKER. They made the food for them and watched them eat it. No cheating allowed. This is huge.  HUGE!

The only problems I have with the diet? They ran the diet for 4 weeks per diet per person. I'm not sure 4 weeks is enough to get some kind of stasis on the other measurements they made. Plus it was calorie restricted. It would be great if they just let people eat what they want to eat because that is likely how people will end up using these diets.

Measurement:

• Resting energy expenditure (REE)
• Total energy expenditure (TEE)
• Hormone levels
• Metabolic syndrome components.

Results:

• Diet A - mean REE: -205 kcal/d / TEE: -423 kcal/d
• Diet B - mean REE: -166 kcal/d / TEE: -297 kcal/d
• Diet C - mean REE: -138 kcal/d / TEE: -97 kcal/d

In other words your metabolic energy burn rate is HIGHEST on the very low carb diet. In fact it is so much higher than low-fat that you can skip that 45 minute daily run you were contemplating. Of course that's not true because that run won't do anything. But you get the idea. It's a lot of calories.  300 MORE calories per day = 31 lbs gained in 1 year.

There were other measurements that were slightly negative for the low carb diet in the eyes of the researchers. Various cholesterol measurements were considered worse. But we know these measurements are useless and show no correlation with heart disease or metabolic syndrome. Cortisol was higher for low carb. But again in a 4 week study of radically changing diets I'm not sure you'll see a stasis. I'll be the first to admit that going low carb induces radical changes on your body initially. But triglycerides were lower. There was no way this was not going to be the case. This is a very well understood causative effect.

Conclusions:

"Decreases in REE and TEE [bad!] were greatest with the low-fat diet [...] and least with the very low-carbohydrate diet."

This is exactly what would be expected. Your body can only do two things with energy.  Burn it or store it. We know carbohydrates increase insulin with cause the body to store fat. Without insulin the body therefore must burn it. Must. Through more activity. Full stop. This is the 18th of 18 clinical studies in which low carb wins. What more do we fucking need? I'll tell you what we need. A press that can report basic fucking facts.

Now for the fucking fuck part:

Response to the Study

• Wall Street Journal:  Opening paragraph - "A diet based on healthy carbohydrates—rather than a low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet—offers the best chance of keeping weight off without bringing unwanted side effects, a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests." Ummmmmm.... Hello? What the FUCK!
• David Lustig (the study's own author): "Ludwig says that restricting carbohydrates over the long term may be hard for many people. If you're trying to lose weight, "you can get a jump start with a low-carb diet, but over the long term, a low-glycemic index diet may be better than severely restricting carbohydrates." Why? Why is it better?
• George Bray (an obesity researcher): This guy wrote the accompanying editorial in JAMA.  Here's what this fuck has to say:  "[other studies] show that you can do well on any diet as long as you stick to it. Adherence is the major key for weight loss and maintenance. There is no magic in any diet." Fuck you.  Really. Fuck you Mr. Bray. You retard. 
• Marion Nestle (a nutrition professor at NYU).  States that longer studies conducted among people in their own environments, not with such controlled meals, have shown "little difference in weight loss and maintenance between one kind of diet and another." Ummmmm. What? You call yourself a researcher?  Really? More controlled is better you fuck.

I've hit my monthly allotment for swearing.  But it was necessary.