Article in NYT: What Really Makes us Fat

This was in the NYT last Sunday.  It may well answer some questions about why the diet most of us are on post-op (high protein) works so well.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/what-really-makes-us-fat.html

Exerpt:

What was done by Dr. Ludwig’s team has never been done before. First they took obese subjects and effectively semi-starved them until they’d lost 10 to 15 percent of their weight. Such weight-reduced subjects are particularly susceptible to gaining the weight back. Their energy expenditure drops precipitously and they burn fewer calories than people who naturally weigh the same. This means they have to continually fight their hunger just to maintain their weight loss. The belief is that weight loss causes “metabolic adaptations," which make it almost inevitable that the weight will return. Dr. Ludwig’s team then measured how many calories these weight-reduced subjects expended daily, and that’s how many they fed them. But now the subjects were rotated through three very different diets, one month for each. They ate the same amount of calories on all three, equal to what they were expending after their weight loss, but the nutrient composition of the diets was very different.

One diet was low-fat and thus high in carbohydrates. This was the diet we’re all advised to eat: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, lean sources of protein. One diet had a low glycemic index: fewer carbohydrates in total, and those that were included were slow to be digested — from beans, non-starchy vegetables and other minimally processed sources. The third diet was Atkins, which is very low in carbohydrates and high in fat and protein.

The results were remarkable. Put most simply, the fewer carbohydrates consumed, the more energy these weight-reduced people expended. On the very low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, there was virtually no metabolic adaptation to the weight loss. These subjects expended, on average, only 100 fewer calories a day than they did at their full weights. Eight of the 21 subjects expended more than they did at their full weights — the opposite of the predicted metabolic compensation.

 Wow, very nice!  Thanks for sharing this!

That was a good read! thanks for sharing.

I posted this info last week it came across from my MEdScape Nursing email. I was not surprised one bit. Years ago I had an aunt who would cut out all breads, pasta, rice sugars you get the idea from her diet and lost weight like crazy. She would gain some weight around the holidays maybe 10-20 lbs in a few months. Everyone thought she was nuts at the time but she'd eat steak and salad every night, eggs and chicken for breakfast and lunch...tuna. This was in the 60's she was on to our low carb thing.
I also remember there was a diet Stillman Diet I think that was low carb to no carb but expected people to eat very little and of course drink a ton of water.
A firend I have has told me she believes our diets are so carb heavy because of the lobbiest from wheat and corn growers....
All I know is that when I cut out carbs or go very low I lose weight and my appetite decreases.

My father lost a lot of weight on Stillman, so did my father-in-law interestingly enough.

If you read older books on 'slimming' regimins that pre-date the 60's, the first thing they tell you to cut out is bread.

Carbohydrates are relatively cheap to mass-produce, heavily subsidized, and their lobbiests are quite powerful. Food policy is very much about politics.