Diet and Health FAQ

Tagged As: low carb diet nutrition

Question:
When in college, I remember reading about a few cultures who didn't associate sex with pregnancy except for making the observation that virgins didn't get pregnant and got to wondering if the same could be true for obesity. There must be some cultures that never connected getting fat with eating too much. However, I think western culture always saw the connection but they didn't know why some foods made you fatter then others volume per volume ie why the man who ate lots of cream and honey gained more weight then the man who ate metric assloads of green vegetables. One of the first attempts to popularize a weight loss plan was Sir William Banting's Letter on Corpulence written in 1862 by a man who lost weight following a primitive version of a low carb diet. It was bought up in the discussion forum on the Protein Power website that this happened before the calorie theory was invented (before that it was just a unit of heat) and therefore the energy balance theory is wrong. I don't believe that of course. If you want to lose weight then you have to burn more calories then you consume. Banting lost weight because of the hunger reducing effects of carb restriction. So when was the low carb and calorie (actually the kilocalorie) actually applied to food intake and metabolism? Anyone else out there that's put together a meal plan.... where you can't eat anything ?

Answer:
Mebbe, mebbe not. While it is true that if you burn more calories than you take in you will lose weight, there is also persistent evidence that macronutrient balance affects calorie burn. In the Schneider's Children's Hospital study of obese adolescents, the kids on a low carb/high fat diet ate an average of 66% *more* calories than the kids on a low fat/high carb diet, got the same amount of exercise, and lost *twice as much weight*. This corroborates the results of earlier studies by Kekwick and Pawan, and by Frederick Benoit, which showed greater weight loss with low carb, despite eating as many or a greater number of calories with carb content, and even a greater loss than total fasting. However, if all a low carb diet did was normalize my appetite so that I can trust my body's hunger signals, that strikes me as an incredibly valuable thing.