A new American health study found that it’s easier to lose weight by cutting fat from your diet than focusing on reducing the carbohydrates intake. It was not easy to reach this conclusion, but scientists hovered over every bite of food, second of exercise and breath the subjects of the research were taking.
It turned out that both controlled diets observed in the study conducted by the National Institutes of Health led to fat loss, because the calorie count was reduced in a similar way, but scientists could notice that going easy on the fat had more surefire effects.
However, experts also noticed that the most efficient diet is the one people can stick to, and this factor matters more than the type of diet they follow. But when it comes to getting rid of the muffin top, they wanted to see if restricting carbs is the best way to go, mostly because this method is known to alter the metabolism.
In theory, it’s easy to see why fewer carbohydrates lead to weight loss; the lesser the intake, the lower the levels of insulin, the one responsible for releasing fat from the body’s stores.
Senior researcher Dr Kevin Hall of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases said that these processes take place with carb reduction causing you to lose fat, but cutting out the fat might have a different outcome.
Therefore, this study suggests that simply lowering your carbohydrates intake could have a reduced impact on weight loss. Conclusions are based on the data collected from monitoring the diet of 19 obese individuals whose daily intake was 2,700 calories.
The subjects were then divided in two groups and asked to try diets that reduced the calories by a third, one that reduced carbohydrates and another one fat. Revealed in the journal Cell Metabolism, the results showed that volunteers on the fat reducing diet lost an average of 80 percent more weight than those focusing on cutting down on carbs.
Because there is no “metabolic” ground to favor a low-carb diet over any other, and because real-life diets are less strictly controlled, Dr Hall encourages people to choose a healthy diet that they can stick to, whether it cuts down on fat or carbohydrates. Ideally, people should make the decision permanently, as those are the most efficient diets.
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