Do low carb and ketogenic diets have a metabolic advantage for weight loss?
when you don’t eat enough carbohydrates, you force your body to burn more fat. “However, this increase in fat oxidation [burning] It is often misunderstood such as a higher rate of net FM [fat-mass] reduction” in the body, ignoring the fact that, on a ketogenic diet, your fat consumption it also shoots. What happens to overall body fat balance? You cannot empty a bathtub by widening the drain if you turn on the faucet at the same time. Advocates of the low carbohydrate diet had However, there is a theory: the “carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity,” which I discuss in my video. The keto diet theory put to the test.
Proponents of low-carb diets, whether a ketogenic diet or a more relaxed form of carbohydrate restriction, He suggested That lower insulin secretion would lead to less fat storage, so even if you ate more fat, less of it would stick to your body. We would burn more and store less, the perfect combination for losing fat, or so the theory went. It must be recognized that instead of just speculating about it, they decided to put it to the test.
Gary Taubes formed the Nutrition Sciences Initiative (NuSI) to sponsor research to validate the carbohydrate-insulin model. He is the journalist who wrote the controversial 2002 New York Times Magazine article “What if it had all been a big lie?” that he attempted to turn nutritional dogma on its head by arguing for the Atkins diet with its bunless bacon cheeseburgers based on the carbohydrate-insulin model. (Much of Nina Teicholz’s book The big surprise it is simple recycling from Taubes’s earlier work.)
In response, some of the same researchers Taubes cited to support his thesis accused him to twist his words. One said: “The article was incredibly misleading… I was horrified.” Another said: “He took this weird little idea and blew it up, and people believed him… What a mess.” Although it doesn’t matter what people say. The only thing that matters is science.
taubes attracted $40 million in funding committed to its Nutritional Sciences Initiative to show the world that more body fat can be lost on a ketogenic diet. NuSI hired prominent researcher Kevin Hall from the National Institutes of Health to carry out the study. Seventeen overweight or obese men were effectively locked in what is called a metabolic ward for two months to allow researchers complete control over their diets. For the first month, they were put on a typical high-carb diet (50 percent carbs, 35 percent fat, 15 percent protein), then they were switched to a low-carb ketogenic diet (only 5 percent of calories came from carbohydrates and 80 percent from fat) during the second month. Both diets had the same amount of daily calories. So if a calorie is a calorie when it comes to weight loss, there should be no difference in body fat loss with the regular diet versus the ketogenic diet. However, if Taubes was right, if fat calories were less fattening, then body fat loss would be accelerated on a ketogenic diet. Instead, in the same study funded by the Nutrition Science Initiative, researchers found that body fat loss slowed down during the ketogenic diet.
Why do people think the ketogenic diet works if it actually slows down fat loss? Well, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:40 in my videoif you I look Based on bathroom scale readings alone, the ketogenic diet would seem like a resounding success. Participants went from losing less than a pound per week on the regular diet during the first two weeks of the study to losing three and a half pounds within seven days of switching to the ketogenic diet. However, what was happening inside their bodies told a totally different story: their rate of body fat loss dropped by more than half. So most of what they were losing was just water weight. It is assumed that the reason they started burning less fat on a ketogenic diet was because, without the preferred fuel of carbohydrates, their bodies started burning more of their own protein, and that’s exactly what happened. Switching to a ketogenic diet caused them to lose less fat mass and more fat.free mass. In fact, they lost more lean mass. This may help explain why CrossFit practitioners’ leg muscles put With a ketogenic diet it can be reduced by up to 8 percent. The vastus lateralis, the largest quad muscle in the leg, was reduced in thickness by 8 percent on a ketogenic diet.
Yes, the study subjects started. fire more fat on the ketogenic diet, but they also ate so much more fat on the ketogenic diet that they ended up retaining more fat in their bodies, despite lower insulin levels. This is “diametrically opposite” to what ketogenic people foretold, and this is the kind that the Nutrition Science Initiative paid to support their theory. In scientific terms, “the carbohydrate-insulin model failed experimental interrogation.”
In light of this “experimental falsification” of the low-carb theory, the Nutrition Science Initiative effectively collapsed but, according to his tax returns, not before Taubes and his co-founder personally bagged millions of dollars in compensation.
This is the second installment of my seven-part series on ketogenic diets. In case you missed them, check out the other related videos below.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I created a whole website about the Atkins diet, but unfortunately, people continue to fall into the low-carb diet trap. You can find Some of my older videos on low carb diets are listed below.
