Atkins beats other diet plans in study - Yahoo! News
CHICAGO - The low-carb, high-fat Atkins diet gets high marks in one of the biggest, longest head-to-head studies of popular weight-loss plans, beating the Zone, the Ornish diet and even U.S. guidelines. Even so, critics say the results show how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off.
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Overweight women on the Atkins plan lost more weight over a year than those on the low-carb Zone diet. And they had slightly better blood pressure and cholesterol readings than those on the Zone; the very low-fat, high-carb Ornish diet, and a low-fat, high-carb diet similar to U.S. government guidelines.
Stanford University researcher Christopher Gardner, the lead author, said the study shows that Atkins may be more healthful than critics contend.
But the study isn't a fair comparison because by the end, few women were following any of the diets very strictly, critics argue, although those in the Atkins group came the closest.
[...]
At the end, Atkins women had slightly higher levels of HDL cholesterol, the good kind, and slightly lower blood pressure than those on the other three diets. Gardner said differences in weight loss likely contributed to those results.
Ornish and other naysayers argued that the study doesn't answer a big question about the Atkins diet — whether consistently eating all that fatty food long-term leads to health problems.
CHICAGO - The low-carb, high-fat Atkins diet gets high marks in one of the biggest, longest head-to-head studies of popular weight-loss plans, beating the Zone, the Ornish diet and even U.S. guidelines. Even so, critics say the results show how hard it is to lose weight and keep it off.
ADVERTISEMENT
Overweight women on the Atkins plan lost more weight over a year than those on the low-carb Zone diet. And they had slightly better blood pressure and cholesterol readings than those on the Zone; the very low-fat, high-carb Ornish diet, and a low-fat, high-carb diet similar to U.S. government guidelines.
Stanford University researcher Christopher Gardner, the lead author, said the study shows that Atkins may be more healthful than critics contend.
But the study isn't a fair comparison because by the end, few women were following any of the diets very strictly, critics argue, although those in the Atkins group came the closest.
[...]
At the end, Atkins women had slightly higher levels of HDL cholesterol, the good kind, and slightly lower blood pressure than those on the other three diets. Gardner said differences in weight loss likely contributed to those results.
Ornish and other naysayers argued that the study doesn't answer a big question about the Atkins diet — whether consistently eating all that fatty food long-term leads to health problems.
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