Research Sez: It’s Carbs, Not Fats, That Fatten Us

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Why Your Supermarket May Never Be the Same

There are two things taken as virtual gospel in the nutritional and health sciences when it comes to weight control:

1. Calories are calories, and if you take in more than you burn off, regardless of the source, you’ll gain weight.
2. It’s difficult but demonstrably possible to lose a significant amount of weight; unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to keep that weight off permanently because the body wants that weight restored and will drive its owner mad with hunger to get it back.

The are two problems with No. 1. First, this truism has been around for 134 years, and it’s hard to believe that the biological sciences haven’t learned any more on the subject of weight gain in all that time. Second, even during most of those years there were some scientists who believed it was more complicated than that; that there are calories in protein, calories in fat and calories in carbohydrates, and the body may not treat them all the same way.

As for No. 2, it still holds true. Unless, that is, the body actually does treat calories differently depending on their source, in which case keeping weight off may be more or less difficult depending on one’s calorie sources.

This reality is what makes the latest issue of the AMA Journal such a hot read in weight-loss circles. It contains a report on a study conducted by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital which indicates that when it comes to calories, those from fat and protein are not the problem: it’s those derived from carbs that are the fat-creators. This has shaken a lot of pillars of the medical community, where the standard dietary recommendation endorsed by everyone from the USDA to the American Heart Association has been to go with low-fats and plenty of carbs. But Ludwig’s findings are awfully persuasive.

In a nutshell, he crash-dieted 10 to 15 percent of the weight off some obese volunteers, whose bodies responded as expected: by burning far fewer calories than normal to store more energy as fat. And then he divided them into three groups, and put each group through a rotation of three different diets. One diet was low-fat, high-carb. One was the Atkins diet, high-fat and low-carb. And one was not just low-carb, but selectively so, avoiding sugars and starchy, refined or processed food items and substituting “complex” carbohydrates, which take more energy to digest.

The results were striking: The volunteers burned off 300 more calories per day on the low/complex-carb diet than they did on the low-fat — an amount equal to 60 minutes’ worth of moderate physical exercise — and 150 more per day than on the Atkins, although all three diets provided the same number of total daily calories.

The implications of this — that it is carbohydrates, not fats, that pack on the pounds — have rocked a lot of people back on their heels. Especially people in the Food Industry, High Carbohydrate Division, such as purveyors of sodas, desserts, baked goods, breakfast cereals, sweets, snacks and other high-carb items. These enterprises can be expected to dig in their heels. There will be PR blowback. They will point out that fats contain twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates, which is true, and that Ludwig’s study was far too brief — just one month long — to be remotely conclusive, which is also true.

But follow-up studies on a larger and more independent scale will not be long in coming, and if Ludwig’s conclusions turn out to be correct — and the AMA Journal does not traffic in half-baked research — the effect will be earthquake-like in the fields of medicine, nutrition, commerce, agriculture and food marketing. In the 1990′s, the fat-is-bad doctrine resulted in literally countless food products replacing the tasty fats in their ingredients with equally tasty sweeteners. A shift to a carbs-are-bad doctrine would most likely result in a similar 180-degree shift.

In just a few years, the American diet could be significantly different, especially to American dieters. And also to people whose fortunes are linked to the consumption of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, who may at best be looking for work, and at worst for bridges to leap from.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Research Sez: It’s Carbs, Not Fats, That Fatten Us is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/07/18/research-sez-its-carbs-not-fats-that-fatten-us/

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