Thursday, March 15, 2007

Atkins beats other diet plans in study, take 2

A friend sent me a couple more news stories about Atkins beating other plans. I posted a link to the AP article several days ago, but wanted to include these two links as well. :)

From Science Daily:
Science Daily — ...Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have completed the largest and longest-ever comparison of four popular diets, and the lowest-carbohydrate Atkins diet came out on top.

At the end of a year, the 77 women assigned to the Atkins group had lost an average of 10.4 pounds. Those assigned to LEARN lost 5.7 pounds, the Ornish followers lost 4.8 pounds and women on the Zone lost 3.5 pounds, on average.

After 12 months, women following the Atkins diet, relative to at least one of the other groups, had larger decreases in body mass index, triglycerides and blood pressure; their high-density lipoprotein, the good kind of cholesterol, increased more than the women on the other diets.


Full story here.

From KTRE TV, an ABC affiliate:

The beleaguered Atkins diet may get a breath of life from a new study that suggests the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet regime leads to more effective weight loss with fewer negative health effects than three other weight loss strategies.

The study, which pits the Atkins diet against the Zone, Ornish and LEARN diets, appears in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).


Full story here.

A doctor's blog entry about it:
MEDICAL RESEARCH SHOCKER: ATKINS DIET WORKS!!! (Yes, you are detecting sarcasm.)

And another doctor also weighs in:
Low-carb diet wins, losers cry foul

So let's see. We have an approach that helps you lose weight, lowers triglicerides, raises HDL cholesterol, and has "fewer negative health effects" than the other approaches studied. The study is even published in JAMA. So what's wrong with it? It flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Too bad so many people can't see the obvious.

If you want to see the actual study, a .pdf of it can be found here.

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