NIH study: cutting dietary fat more effective than cutting carbs for body fat loss

lemurcat12

AlabasterVerve wrote: »

Stephan Guyenet's blog post on the study is well worth reading, IMO:

A New Human Trial Undermines the Carbohydrate-insulin Hypothesis of Obesity, Again

Yes, very good and interesting blog post. Thanks for linking.

ElJefeChief

http://reason.com/archives/2015/08/14/government-health-tips

lemurcat12

lemurcat12 wrote: »

In the real world, the 18 gram sugar difference between baseline and restricted fat could be due to more vegetables or even just a piece of fruit plus a few more vegetables, which you'd expect people to be eating if lower fat. You also get sugar in foods like plantains, sweet potatoes, beets. I expect my sugar consumption would go up if I ate low fat, but mostly from whole foods like this, as I don't really like sweets without fat. Worth looking at the specific explanation in the study, though, for sure.

To follow up having read everything, of course this is irrelevant, as they were given the food they ate. I wonder why the change, but it doesn't seem to matter since what they were worried about was whether insulin would be affected by a decrease in sugar.

Gianfranco_R

stevencloser wrote: »

minties82 wrote: »

140g is not low carb by a long shot. For a small woman dieting it represents about half of her entire intake (when setting macros in MFP by percentage at about 1200kcal).

I could get 9.7 slices of cheap multigrain bread in for 140g of carbs!

No self respecting low carber would be eating all that bread. Even my partner only has 6 slices of bread a day and he is not on any sort of diet what so ever. He loves his carbs.

They explained why they didn't go lower. They wouldn't have been able to keep calories in both groups the same without increasing either fat or protein in the low carb group and they absolutely didn't want to do that as to not change results because of that.

Also, of course 140 would be about half for a small woman at 1100 calories. It would be less than 20% for someone who is eating 3000. Context is important. I don't think "low carb" is defined by a constant value of grams.

Edit: @Umayster asked the same, that's why.

They wanted to test especially for lowering carbs (particularly sugar, I guess because that's the boogeyman) vs. lowering fats. So they kept the other two macros each at around the same values as baseline. And they didn't want to risk lowering insulin secretion in the low fat group, to show Taubes he's wrong.
"Note also that the RF diet did not have a decrease in sugar content compared to baseline (Table 2). This was important since a decrease in sugar content with the RF diet would be expected to decrease insulin secretion despite no change in total carbohydrate content compared to baseline."

In the study, those 140 grams were 29% of the calories. So, toward the "moderate" side.

stevencloser

Gianfranco_R wrote: »

stevencloser wrote: »

minties82 wrote: »

140g is not low carb by a long shot. For a small woman dieting it represents about half of her entire intake (when setting macros in MFP by percentage at about 1200kcal).

I could get 9.7 slices of cheap multigrain bread in for 140g of carbs!

No self respecting low carber would be eating all that bread. Even my partner only has 6 slices of bread a day and he is not on any sort of diet what so ever. He loves his carbs.

They explained why they didn't go lower. They wouldn't have been able to keep calories in both groups the same without increasing either fat or protein in the low carb group and they absolutely didn't want to do that as to not change results because of that.

Also, of course 140 would be about half for a small woman at 1100 calories. It would be less than 20% for someone who is eating 3000. Context is important. I don't think "low carb" is defined by a constant value of grams.

Edit: @Umayster asked the same, that's why.

They wanted to test especially for lowering carbs (particularly sugar, I guess because that's the boogeyman) vs. lowering fats. So they kept the other two macros each at around the same values as baseline. And they didn't want to risk lowering insulin secretion in the low fat group, to show Taubes he's wrong.
"Note also that the RF diet did not have a decrease in sugar content compared to baseline (Table 2). This was important since a decrease in sugar content with the RF diet would be expected to decrease insulin secretion despite no change in total carbohydrate content compared to baseline."

In the study, those 140 grams were 29% of the calories. So, toward the "moderate" side.

I know. It was also less than half of the other group and the baseline diet they had beforehand. And they couldn't go much lower without either having different amounts of calorie intake or raising one of the other macros. They could have gone to about 100 g for the low carb group, but then the low fat would have to not get any fat at all.

yarwell

stevencloser wrote: »

Does that mean you burn 100 calories less if you go low carb?

It means that's about what they found in their 6 day reduced carb phase, yes. Can't really call it low carb TBH. In men the TDEE was 139 lower on average but I'm confused where the reduced activity through being in the metabolic chamber fits in (quite possibly not at all, as the reduced fat phase had the same TDEE).

RC had a smaller deficit than RF in men by ~160 cals.