Interesting article about carb cutting vs calories

cartersmom06 wrote: »

cartersmom06 wrote: »

Ok so I reread my post and it seems I did click on the wrong link. Sorry for the confusion. I still dont think I should have been ridiculed though by some posters for making a mistake. Some people on here are very rude and think they Know it all! I was almost going to delete my mfp account for some comments but decided to stay because I love the app, just not some of the people in the community...but I guess that happens with social media. I wont be posting any longer because I dont need the backlash. Its detrimental to my weight loss success and I dont need the negativity in my life.
Anyways THIS is the article i was referring to:
https://www.thestar.com/life/2018/11/20/all-calories-are-not-alike-cutting-carbs-instead-of-calories-keeps-weight-off-study-says.html

For some reason this link doesnt want to work for me. Thats why I have been trying to find it and post it and then I ended up posting the wrong article. Such a mess!! Geesh...could only happen to me!😫

middlehaitch wrote: »

apullum wrote: »

cartersmom06 wrote: »

cartersmom06 wrote: »

Ok so I reread my post and it seems I did click on the wrong link. Sorry for the confusion. I still dont think I should have been ridiculed though by some posters for making a mistake. Some people on here are very rude and think they Know it all! I was almost going to delete my mfp account for some comments but decided to stay because I love the app, just not some of the people in the community...but I guess that happens with social media. I wont be posting any longer because I dont need the backlash. Its detrimental to my weight loss success and I dont need the negativity in my life.
Anyways THIS is the article i was referring to:
https://www.thestar.com/life/2018/11/20/all-calories-are-not-alike-cutting-carbs-instead-of-calories-keeps-weight-off-study-says.html

For some reason this link doesnt want to work for me. Thats why I have been trying to find it and post it and then I ended up posting the wrong article. Such a mess!! Geesh...could only happen to me!😫

This is the same article you originally posted. Are you trying to post a different one?

I don't see people "ridiculing" you. I see people trying to understand and explain the research that you wanted to discuss. For my part, I have a Ph.D.--not in biology, but doctoral training does teach you the basic structure of academic articles in most disciplines, and how to at least get a big picture idea of what they're saying. I also am a university faculty member, so I have access to scholarly articles. I see it as a service to others that I can read the original research and offer some explanation of what the findings seem to mean.

You, and others, are why I stick around on these boards so much.
I have a couple of degrees, but none in the sciences.

For a lot of the studies posted I have to put them aside and take a couple of hours in the evening to trawl through them and make notes. Then I read the comments from folk like you to clarify my interpretation of what I have read.

Thank you all you science folks for your patience in making the complex a little more simple for us non-science types.

Cheers, h.

nvmomketo wrote: »

Back to the OP,

Many long term low carbers have had a similar experience to what Ludwig found. I'm one. I'm also someone who was developing insulin resistance and those people, as has been seen in other studies, do tend to lose a bit easier on a low carb diet. Nothing Earth shattering, but there was an unexpected ease and speed to losing.

In my experience (low carb/keto for 3.5+ yrs) I lost slightly faster than expected at my caloric intake. I also maintain at a higher caloric level than what my age and activity level would predict. I can slowly lose at 2000 kcal a day whereas if that was higher carb, I would be maintaining or very slowly gaining.

This isn't a universal truth for everyone. There are plenty of low carbers who lose exactly as the CICO model would predict. They are often the metabolically healthy. It's just a nice little benefit for some of us who choose to eat low carb for satiety and taste preferences or for health reasons.

I think some might be mixing Ludwig up with Lustig. One is more sensational than the other, IMO.

Stanford researcher Christopher Gardner, who was not involved in the research, told me he thought it was an “elegant study,” with results worth paying attention to. “It shows how in the long run [a low-carb diet] can promote or inhibit the maintenance of that weight loss.”

But Gardner also noted that the findings may not yet be applicable to most people.

In most diet studies, where people aren’t fed every calorie by researchers, the low-carb diet performs about the same as other diets when it comes to weight loss. In other words, when you just ask people to stick to a low-carb diet for weight loss, they lose about the same amount of weight as people following higher-carb diets. This isn’t a knock on the study, but on the fact that researchers don’t yet know how to get people to follow any diet over the long term, unless they’re feeding them.

“If you prove a mechanism works but you can’t get people to do it,” Gardner added, “it won’t help.”

Kevin Hall, an obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health who has studied low-carb diets, pointed out that the researchers used a technique called doubly labeled water to measure calorie burn before and throughout the study. This involves giving study participants a sample of water that contains (or is “labeled with”) forms of the elements deuterium and oxygen-18. Since they’re not normally found in the body, researchers can determine a person’s metabolic rate — how much energy they’re burning each day — by tracking how quickly they’re expelled through urine sampling.

Doubly labeled water is the gold-standard way of measuring energy expenditure in “free-living” subjects, i.e., people who aren’t in a metabolic chamber. But there’s a problem with the way it was used in this paper, Hall said.

When people have just lost weight, or their diets are shifting, doubly labeled water is less reliable. In their original study protocol — or statement of intent before the study was done — the researchers addressed that: They said they would use the measure taken before the run-in weight-loss phase as their baseline. People would be weight stable then, and Hall said, “That’s where doubly labeled water has been validated.”

But the researchers changed that endpoint because of an error, and instead made their baseline the beginning of the diet randomization — a change they disclosed in the study, to their credit.

The change, however, “introduced noise into that measurement,” Hall said. Because people had already lost weight and their diets were changing, doubly labeled water might be a less reliable way to estimate energy expenditure. “And they don’t report in the study what their data would look like if they used the pre-weight loss measurement.”

Hall took the pre-weight loss measurements, which were reported in the study, and ran the numbers himself for a presentation at the recent Obesity Week conference. He found the effect of calorie burn on the low-carb diet would have been much smaller had they used that measure as their baseline: fewer than 100 extra calories per day difference between the low-carb and high-carb diet groups, an effect that may not be statistically significant.

lemurcat2 wrote: »

This is a very interesting and fair discussion of the study: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/11/16/18096633/keto-low-carb-diet

One comment worth noting:

Stanford researcher Christopher Gardner, who was not involved in the research, told me he thought it was an “elegant study,” with results worth paying attention to. “It shows how in the long run [a low-carb diet] can promote or inhibit the maintenance of that weight loss.”

But Gardner also noted that the findings may not yet be applicable to most people.

In most diet studies, where people aren’t fed every calorie by researchers, the low-carb diet performs about the same as other diets when it comes to weight loss. In other words, when you just ask people to stick to a low-carb diet for weight loss, they lose about the same amount of weight as people following higher-carb diets. This isn’t a knock on the study, but on the fact that researchers don’t yet know how to get people to follow any diet over the long term, unless they’re feeding them.

“If you prove a mechanism works but you can’t get people to do it,” Gardner added, “it won’t help.”

And this is a possible problem with the study:

Kevin Hall, an obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health who has studied low-carb diets, pointed out that the researchers used a technique called doubly labeled water to measure calorie burn before and throughout the study. This involves giving study participants a sample of water that contains (or is “labeled with”) forms of the elements deuterium and oxygen-18. Since they’re not normally found in the body, researchers can determine a person’s metabolic rate — how much energy they’re burning each day — by tracking how quickly they’re expelled through urine sampling.

Doubly labeled water is the gold-standard way of measuring energy expenditure in “free-living” subjects, i.e., people who aren’t in a metabolic chamber. But there’s a problem with the way it was used in this paper, Hall said.

When people have just lost weight, or their diets are shifting, doubly labeled water is less reliable. In their original study protocol — or statement of intent before the study was done — the researchers addressed that: They said they would use the measure taken before the run-in weight-loss phase as their baseline. People would be weight stable then, and Hall said, “That’s where doubly labeled water has been validated.”

But the researchers changed that endpoint because of an error, and instead made their baseline the beginning of the diet randomization — a change they disclosed in the study, to their credit.

The change, however, “introduced noise into that measurement,” Hall said. Because people had already lost weight and their diets were changing, doubly labeled water might be a less reliable way to estimate energy expenditure. “And they don’t report in the study what their data would look like if they used the pre-weight loss measurement.”

Hall took the pre-weight loss measurements, which were reported in the study, and ran the numbers himself for a presentation at the recent Obesity Week conference. He found the effect of calorie burn on the low-carb diet would have been much smaller had they used that measure as their baseline: fewer than 100 extra calories per day difference between the low-carb and high-carb diet groups, an effect that may not be statistically significant.