Cut Calories, Cut Weight, Says a New Study
New York – A new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, confirms what many experts have been saying all along—if you want to lose weight, eat less calories. Period.
But many diet gurus, eager to provide a magic weight loss bullet for people (and reap huge profits), have concocted all sorts of special diets over the years. There are low fat diets and low carb diets. There are high protein diets and low protein diets. There are all veggie diets and all meat diets.
But there’s one “big” problem—despite all of these new diets and weight loss approaches, obesity is a “growing” problem in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 66 percent of adults in America are overweight.
The researchers wanted to find out why these specialty diets weren’t working for people. To that end, they recruited 811 overweight volunteers, between the ages of 30 and 70. Thirty-eight percent of them were men and 62 percent were women. They split the volunteers up into 4 dieting groups. Each group’s diet varied only in the amounts of fat, protein, and carbohydrates in the dietary mix. All of the diets were also low in saturated fats and cholesterol, and high in fiber.
The diets were not based on any of the popular diets, such as Atkins, but on eating plans designed to lower hypertension. Each volunteer was given a calorie goal (based on their weights and weight-loss goals), with none dropping below 1,200 calories a day.
The volunteers followed their group’s dietary guidelines for two years. At the end of six months, all of the dieters had lost an average of 13 pounds, no matter which group they were in. At the end of two years, they had maintained an average weight loss of nine pounds.
Dr. Frank Sacks, lead researcher and professor of cardiovascular disease at Harvard, is encouraged by these results. It shows, he says, that losing weight is not a matter of the particular foods you eat, but of the amount of those foods that you put into your mouth. Moreover, the most important element of a diet, the study suggests, is that you stick with it.
The “Preventing Overweight Using Novel Dietary Strategy (POUNDS) study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Dr. Elizabeth Nable, Director of NHLBI, says that results of this study should encourage people to create their own diets, ones that are pleasant enough for them to stick with forever. Changing your eating habits, rather than “dieting,” experts say, is the only way to permanent weight loss.
I think meat will be the Fundamental Element and ‘BASIC PLATFORM’ for obesity, while the meat companies, one of the SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS, struggle to divert the attention of general public to the calorie issue. Perhaps flour can be compared to fat, and Yeast can be compared to calorie.
In my understanding, the fresh fruits can lead to healthy, peaceful mind and world, improving immune system, in contrast to the meat that will likely lead to aggressive war.
For the record, the healthy agencies and all but media connected the nation-wide salmonella outbreak to the Georgia plant, which was a different strain from the nation-wide one