Thursday, November 09, 2006

Low Carb Diets again Prove Safe

My patients will tell you, there's no particular diet that I believe to be better than another for weight management.

I only have two real rules regarding diets and weight management:

1. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than you burn.
2. If you want to keep it off, you have to actually like what you're eating.

I've often said that if anyone ever walked into my office and told me that they love low-carb diets, lose weight on them but don't stick to them because they're scared they're not healthy I'd simply tell them to get back to low-carbs and get out of my office.

Fact is low carb dieting has proven itself to be safe time and time again.

Well, it's time again, again.

Yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine Thomas Halton and colleagues (including Walt Willett) published a 20 year retrospective study utilizing data from the 82,802 nurses in the Nurses Health Study who have completed their extensive dietary questionnaires, looking at the rate of development of heart disease as a function of low-carb dieting.

I'll just skip straight to their conclusion,

"Our findings suggest that diets lower in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat are not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease in women. When vegetable sources of fat and protein are chosen, these diets may moderately reduce the risk of coronary heart disease."
Frankly my only problem with low-carb diets is the fact that most people find them far too restrictive to stick to....and of course, if you don't like the way you lose the weight, it'll never stay off.